[00:00:01] Luke: Dude, you wrote six books?

[00:00:04] Mark: It's been a busy period.

[00:00:06] Luke: What the hell? Give me the timeline on-- and they're not six light books, by the way, for those listening. They're really complex and heavy topics that you get into in each book. Give me a timeline on book 1 to book 6, where we are now.

[00:00:22] Mark: Book 1 was written in the summer of 2017, but published in 2018, and book 6 was published in November of 2023.

[00:00:33] Luke: Oh, come on, dude. You got to be kidding me. That is just absolute insanity. And I speak as an emerging author who's now in the process of writing my first book. And oh my God, I had no idea what I was biting off now that I'm trying to chew it.

[00:00:51] Mark: Well, I feel like I was trained to do this unknowingly, looking back at my career academically. So I went to Princeton for undergrad where most of the departments require a senior thesis. So I had to write a thesis in college.

[00:01:02] And then professionally, I worked in investment banking and then strategy consulting where I was accustomed to presenting to boards of directors, senior management teams, where I had to take a ton of data in different areas, learn about it, become enough of an expert to explain it to people, and then simplify it for an audience that didn't have a long attention span.

[00:01:22] Luke: That makes perfect sense. And admittedly I haven't made it through your six books yet because you just brought five of them with you today. But from what I gather about your work, it really is a summation or an aggregate of really complex topics that seem to be boiled down in a way that allows you to express your worldview or your view on that particular topic in a way that's understandable and relatable.

[00:01:51] Mark: Part of what's happened every time is that I have my own paradigm shift where I learn about something and it rocks my world. And then I realize that I can't relate to most of the people around me anymore and I want to explain it to them for personal reasons so they can understand me. And then I realize also the implications beyond that. And then it turns into a book, basically, where I just summarize it so that people can have a starting point.

[00:02:11] Luke: Do you already have your next seventh book planned?

[00:02:14] Mark: I don't. I don't know if I'm going to write another one. And it's been this way every time where it will come in in a way that I can't always predict. So a new inspiration just emerges basically. And now I can feel the feeling internally. I can't really describe it, but I know. I'm like, oh, this is probably another book topic. Book 1 I didn't know because I wasn't planning on writing books at that point, but now I can sense it a bit more. So I'm just waiting to see what happens.

[00:02:39] Luke: I have a request, not that my request means anything. But based on some of the other topics that we're going to get into that you've been able to really explore and really turn on their heads, I would love for you to dive into the common law topic and do a deep dive research on that and emerge with a model that we can all understand, as we were talking about before recording. It's so complex, but I think there's so much value in that as a society for people that really desire to become free and not be fighting over political parties that essentially work for the same agenda.

[00:03:20] Mark: You're not the first person to make that request.

[00:03:21] Luke: Oh, cool.

[00:03:22] Mark: I actually don't know much aboard. I know the skeleton of it, but it's not something I've had a chance to dive into yet.

[00:03:29] Luke: Okay. Well, we're going to keep piling those requests on. All right. So your series of books, even though they're on different topics, have one thing in common, and that is the End to Upside Down blank. Okay, so the first one here is the End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life.

[00:03:49] I feel like we could do one 10-hour podcast just on that, but since that's the first one on our stack here, and that's something that's been so meaningful in my life as a sentient being who has the gift of awareness of life, of consciousness, and lived my whole life without knowing that, thinking that the brain was the boss and the be all end all of everything.

[00:04:13] Like my shirt says here, I wore this as an homage to you, don't believe everything you think. Many of us live our entire lives through the dictates of our programming and conditioning and the ideas that come seemingly from the mind and we don't know that there's any different. So maybe lead us off in your view on the role of the mind, the role of the brain, and how it pertains to consciousness.

[00:04:39] Mark: I'll give a short answer to that, and it might be helpful then to go through how I even arrived at that subject matter.

[00:04:44] Luke: Perfect.

[00:04:45] Mark: The short answer is I don't think the brain produces consciousness, but the brain is involved in the way that we experience life, almost like an antenna receiver or a filtering mechanism or a transducer, which has major implications for thinking about, well, if consciousness is not produced by the brain, then where is it coming from. And what's a human being if a human being is processing consciousness from the outside?

[00:05:07] And that was a radical shift for me to even think about, because before I started writing the book in the summer of 2017, it was the summer of 2016 when I was listening to podcasts. And at the time I was agnostic, atheist, materialist. I thought life was fundamentally meaningless and random and that we could try to create meaning, but it was just a rationalization.

[00:05:30] Luke: Wow.

[00:05:31] Mark: I thought that's what science was teaching us.

[00:05:33] Luke: You've come a long way.

[00:05:35] Mark: I was there.

[00:05:36] Luke: Writing books has been good for you, my friend.

[00:05:38] Mark: Yeah. Well, I would say the books are the result of my inner process. They come at the end.

[00:05:44] Luke: What do you think it is about you that creates this search for meaning, this search for objective truth?

[00:05:54] Mark: There's something innate in me that's always asked questions, but then maybe it was the life I was in. So I was in this very mainstream life where I was focused on just achievements and it felt like I was on a treadmill and going for the most prestigious things I could or the most challenging thing.

[00:06:13] So I was a competitive tennis player growing up. I was one of the captains of the tennis team at Princeton, a Division I program, which is very intense in addition to the academics there. And I wanted to get good grades. I wanted to do well in tennis. And then I went to investment banking in New York during the financial crisis.

[00:06:28] And then I went into a firm at Silicon Valley advising tech companies. And there was always the next thing in front of me that I was trying to achieve. And after a certain point, without having a deeper compass for why I was doing any of that, I hit a wall in many ways. So when some things in my personal and professional life didn't go the way I wanted, it was just harder and harder to handle those sorts of things without even knowing, well, what am I even doing here?

[00:06:50] Because we're all just going to die anyway. Why do the wins and losses actually matter? They don't matter. But I'm just going to keep going through life. So I was like a zombie at this point in 2016. And that's when podcasts were becoming a little bit bigger. I think yours started at that.

[00:07:07] Luke: Yeah, that was the year I started. So little did I know at that time that Orange Man being elected to run the United States Corporation would have such far reaching impacts and what a shit show would become from that point on. Which I still don't know if it was, I think, I suspect, the powers that be were always a shit show. It was more opaque then. I don't know, something started to crack open in the matrix of reality in 2016, and that incidentally is when I started my podcast.

[00:07:42] Mark: Right. So maybe something about that period because that's when it started for me.

[00:07:45] Luke: To that point, I think Orange Man did something really great for our society and he completely annihilated trust in the media. He did a lot of things that weren't great, but that was one really cool thing, and it helped open the door for independent media and long form conversations like the ones we're having here, which sounds like it had an impact on you too.

[00:08:07] Mark: Yeah, for sure. And I initially started listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast. A friend of mine forwarded me, I think it was Mark Andreessen or something, and I said, I can't believe this. You can listen to these smart people talk for hours.

[00:08:19] Luke: For free.

[00:08:20] Mark: For free. And there was just so much content. So I started listening to a bunch of Tim Ferriss and then I got into alternative health, and I was thinking about my own life. I'm like, well, maybe I should focus on health more. What can I do to just feel better psychologically? Because I feel pretty lost. And came across some alternative health shows, including Extreme Health Radio.

[00:08:37] Luke: Love that show.

[00:08:39] Mark: Awesome show.

[00:08:39] Luke: That was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to too. I still do. Still in my feed.

[00:08:43] Mark: Yeah, it's great. And so I was listening to episode after episode and I came across it. It was the next one in the queue, so I wasn't seeking this one out. And it was a woman named Laura Powers who talked about how she uses psychic abilities to help clients and working with interdimensional spirits and that sort of thing.

[00:09:01] And she was saying this in a serious way, and I just remember being confused, but then also she sounded genuine. Is she delusional? I don't think she's lying. But then she mentioned at the end of that show that she has her own podcast where she's interviewed other people, and it's called Healing Power.

[00:09:14] So I said, all right, I'm listening to podcasts. I'll check this out. I've got a really long drive from San Francisco to Silicon Valley every day for work, and there's traffic. So I just listened to her episodes, which were pretty short, and it was person after person describing a very similar thing. They weren't connected to each other, and they had this worldview that totally contradicted my own.

[00:09:31] And after a while I was like, wait a second. If there's 1% of truth to this, then I have to rethink my whole existence, and that means that I've been wrong my whole life, and that all the people I know around me, they don't know about this. Could we have missed something this big? Basically.

[00:09:47] And then I started to read books and read scientific papers and realized that there was general validity to this space that one might call spiritual. I don't love that word because it has certain connotations. I would've been triggered by that in 2016. But really, I think the nature of reality is inherently spiritual and science is showing us that.

[00:10:05] And that's the approach that I took. But I started off with various anomalies, so people claiming they can communicate with other worldly beings or people claiming they have telepathic abilities or remote viewing, which is the ability to perceive something with the mind that's far away in space and or time, which sounds insane.

[00:10:22] Luke: Which the military is on record doing.

[00:10:27] Mark: Yeah. Declassified documents from the US government, and the direct quote is, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. Implications are revolutionary. So I was coming across this stuff and got to the point where I just couldn't deny the accumulation of evidence. And it would be like I would take a few steps forward then a few steps back because I would learn about this stuff and realize the implications, and then I'd go to work and I'd have client projects to do, and I'd see the more worldly stuff, and I would forget about it and then say, wait a second. Could we possibly live in this world where there's much more that meets the eye?

[00:11:00] And then I started to tell friends about it, just living in San Francisco, meeting people for brunch or dinners and things like that. And I'd be like, hey, I'm looking into this topic or that topic. And most of the people were really interested in it. They just said, wow, I've never heard of this before. And people would even say to me, Mark, I'm still thinking about the conversation we had a few weeks ago. That's pretty wild, if any of that's true.

[00:11:24] I just wanted to keep researching, and I had this thought in the summer of 2017, which was a year after I began the journey, maybe I should put this into a book. And then I shut it down for a second and then I said, no, I should try to do this. Let's just see what happens. Because there's so much scientific evidence.

[00:11:38] Even though I'm still working in a more normal mainstream field, there's science here. This is not just my own thoughts. So what if I compiled the science just like I do in my day job and apply it to this general area? So that's the genesis of the book.

[00:11:55] Luke: Give us some more nuggets out of this around, I don't know, they're two different ways that people-- and there's a multitude of ways that we experience reality, but to just grossly generalize, you have someone like me that looks at reality in a way that, how do I say it? It's like the material world in my experience is only possible because of the senses that I have to experience it.

[00:12:30] And so when I close my eyes and meditate, for example, the world that we're experiencing here totally disappears and I'm in my own world. Therefore, that's the real world to me, and this world is just made up as a earth school or a playground for my soul to come here and do something.

[00:12:47] So it's like I'm having the experience of being a soul who needs a body and needs the material world in order to complete the curriculum, or at least make progress in the curriculum. Then you have someone else that is experiencing reality in the opposite way, where only all of this is real and what happens when they close their eyes is not real.

[00:13:10] I don't know if I'm articulating that in a way, but to just, again, grossly generalize, what was your perception of reality walking into researching this book, and what was different by the time you were done, and what are some of the things that you unpack in there?

[00:13:27] Mark: The technical term is that I was a materialist or a physicalist, which they basically mean the same thing. And it says that all of reality can be reduced to matter fundamentally, so physical stuff. And it's from matter that everything emerges, initially through a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, in which there were lots of pieces of matter that started interacting randomly. And we call those chemical reactions.

[00:13:50] And after lots of random chemical reactions, we end up with molecules that can replicate themselves, so like DNA. And that leads to the evolution of biological organisms like a human being. And from the human being, there's a brain and consciousness, pops out, which is that sense of being, which even has the capacity to ask the questions you're asking of like, who am I when I close my eyes versus open them? And by the way, that's the mainstream scientific view, materialism. That's the current--

[00:14:17] Luke: Still? Oh my God. Oh man, that's so sad. Anyway, carry on.

[00:14:25] Mark: It was frustrating for me when I got into this because I said, wow, there peer-reviewed papers, which we'll talk about on this, and it's being ignored. And we're operating from a fundamental paradigm. It's often called a meta paradigm. So it's a paradigm that underlies everything else. What is the nature of reality?

[00:14:40] We start there and then we can look at other paradigms. So we've got the meta paradigm in the wrong direction. That's a pretty big deal. So where I landed now, and it's probably not precise because I don't know if we could do that with the human mind to get to a fully precise metaphysics.

[00:14:57] But generally it's about flipping the placement of consciousness. What I just described with materialism places consciousness at the very end. And the implication is that when the human body dies, there's no consciousness, because consciousness requires a brain in a body. This alternative perspective puts consciousness first.

[00:15:16] Max Planck, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. That's generally where I've landed on this. And that's not to dismiss physics or chemistry or biology or neuroscience. It just puts a new context on them.

[00:15:35] Now, if this is true, this alternative perspective, that consciousness is fundamental, then that means the human being, what we call this physical body, is a vessel of consciousness, and consciousness is that which experiences everything within the body and potentially beyond. And I think there's a lot of evidence that there's a beyond. And that's what this book gets into.

[00:15:57] Luke: Is this the book where you cover near-death experiences and whatnot?

[00:16:03] Mark: Yeah, I cover that in probably all the books to some degree, but there's a whole chapter on it. So this book, I try to take the perspective of someone who was like me, who would've been very skeptical. And the approach was if I could find one anomaly that's true, what we might call paranormal, and I don't like that term because it presumes we know what normal is.

[00:16:24] And normal is basically materialism. But anyway, paranormal, if there's one example of a paranormal phenomenon, then materialism has a very difficult time explaining it. Whereas if we flip the paradigm and say consciousness is fundamental, then we can explain it much more easily.

[00:16:39] And I'll give an analogy that was really helpful to me. It comes from Dr. Bernardo Castro, a philosopher, and he promotes what's known as idealism, or it's also known as analytic idealism in his philosophy, which is consciousness is fundamental, basically. That's just the philosophical term.

[00:16:54] He says that we could liken all of reality to an infinite stream of water where water is analogous to consciousness. Each of us is a whirlpool within the stream. So we have this sense of being an individual, but we're fundamentally interconnected, and that's the one of the core paradoxes of this perspective.

[00:17:10]  If you imagine that some of the water from one whirlpool gets into another whirlpool, the analogy there, that's like a telepathic communication. Some of one person's consciousness is getting into another person's. This model would predict that psychic phenomenon would be real. They wouldn't be paranormal. They would just be expected, not anomalies.

[00:17:30]  Also, if you imagine that a whirlpool delocalizes, meaning it stops being in its whirlpool form, the water flows back into the broader stream. It doesn't leave the stream. The analogy there is that when the physical body dies or the brain stops functioning, consciousness doesn't die. It just transitions into a new state. And in fact, it could recycle itself into a new whirlpool, i.e., reincarnation. So all this stuff, survival, bodily death, past lives, it becomes predicted rather than paranormal.

[00:17:59] That was the approach. I said, okay, I'm going to put a lot of evidence in both of those categories, the psychic phenomenon categories, and the survival of bodily death. And let's see if every single one is wrong. So I've got a chapter on each. And I also talk about quantum mechanics, how that supports it. So I give context.

[00:18:18] But the meat of it is chapter on remote viewing, chapter on telepathy, chapter on precognition, which is knowing or sensing the future before it happens, psychokinesis, which is the mind impacting matter without any physical contact, which makes sense if everything's consciousness, then mind would impact the way we perceive this material world.

[00:18:38] And then I also looked at psychic events with animals, and that's the first half. Second is survival of bodily death, so near-death experiences, communications with the deceased, and children who have memories of a previous life.

[00:18:52] Luke: Oh man, there's so many things in there I want to tease apart, first being near-death experiences, which are fascinating to me. The ones that stand out to me-- in fact, I have a book over there, it's called The Big Book of Near-Death Experience. It's incredible. But some of the stories that are most interesting to me is where someone has clinically died, say in the case of an operation, an operating room, and there's a medical attending staff there.

[00:19:26] The person flatlines, is gone for a period of time, and then they come back and are able to explain in great detail what the people in the room were doing while they were dead. And they're like, yeah, I was in the corner of the room and this doctor said to this nurse that, and then he walked over here and he hit the light switch and so on.

[00:19:47] And then they come back and tell the attending staff what happened, and they're all sitting there white as ghosts, presumably, because their explanation of what happened was accurate. That's just one, and there's so many examples. What were some of the things like that that you discovered in your research that are irrefutable?

[00:20:04] I think that's the thing. We're looking for empirical evidence of the unknown world, the unknown realm of reality. And so to me, what's interesting is when those two intersect and you have real-world proof of a world that can't be proven because it's outside of the physical realm. I think that's super interesting.

[00:20:31] Mark: Yeah, these things are difficult to definitively prove because we're often relying on someone else's experience, and the skeptics will say, well, this is just anecdotal. And then my response would be, if you walk into a doctor's office and say, my arm hurts, is that anecdotal?

[00:20:43] We have to listen to anecdotes sometime, but I understand where they're coming from, that we just can't take every one-off instance where someone said they had some crazy event. But with near-death experiences, there are, by some estimates, millions of these examples. And in the modern era, they're more common because of resuscitation technology.

[00:21:00] So whereas someone would've died 100 years ago, now they're coming back, and many of them have these experiences. And by the way, they've been reported throughout history and cultures all over the world. Dr. Gregory Shushan wrote a book on NDEs and indigenous cultures. NDE is short for near-death experience.

[00:21:15] So this is a common phenomenon, but what you pointed to is where I always start. It's called the veridical out of body experience. Veridical means that the perception was verified as accurate when the person's resuscitated. And this is being studied by serious people.

[00:21:28] So I did a podcast series in between these books, between the first and second book, called Where Is My Mind? And it's an eight-episode series. It's still up on Apple, Spotify, all the major players. But I interviewed the people that I wrote about in An End to Upside Down Thinking, so Dr. Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, Jan Holden from the University of North Texas, Dr. Ed Kelly from the University of Virginia. And I asked them about near-death experiences and beyond.

[00:21:51] But what Dr. Greyson from UVA said, he said, we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. It's a problematic phenomenon for materialism, right?

[00:22:05] Luke: It is. Yeah.

[00:22:06] Mark: Why is it functioning better than ever? People say it's realer than real. And then skeptics will argue, well, it's just a hallucination mark. The brain produces all sorts of chemicals. Maybe there's endogenous DMT, endorphins. Maybe there's spikes of certain electrical activity that we don't pick up, and that causes these experiences.

[00:22:22] The problem is when people are perceiving things through their consciousness from a vantage point outside their body, looking down at their body, looking in other rooms, sometimes they have 360-degree vision. There are people who have been blind since birth that are able to see, and they come back and they're blind again.

[00:22:40] But in these vertical cases, they come back and they tell the doctor or family members, whatever, what happened, and they say, yeah, that happened, but that's impossible. You couldn't have known it because we know what your body was doing. So these veridical, out-of-body experiences can be timestamped because they know what the body was doing at the time of the memory.

[00:23:00] There's a book called The Self Does Not Die, which aggregates about 100 of these cases well documented. They're probably more out there, but it's hard to document them like this. If there's one veridical, out of body experience, it's not explainable through any normal means.

[00:23:13] So what Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas told me, she said, these veridical OBEs, out-of-body experiences, they wipe out any physiological explanation of what's happening, meaning brain activity cannot account for it. Even if there's some residual firing in the brain, it doesn't explain why you have a realer than real experience with just a little bit of brain firing from a vantage point outside the body.

[00:23:38] That right there, that's the most compelling point. But then there are other people who say, well, there are similarities between oxygen deprivation or DMT experiences and so forth. And Dr. Greyson, he wrote a book called After. And what he says there is that those explanation might have some similarity to aspects of the near-death experience, but they don't explain the totality.

[00:24:00] And that's really the key because there's so much that happens. We just talked about the out-of-body experience, but there's also often a life review. And this is, depending on the estimates, 20 to 30% of the cases. In the indigenous cultures, they don't find them as much, but the NDEs do involve being judged by a third party, so maybe it's just a different version.

[00:24:19] Dr. Gregory Shushan talks about that. But in largely Western cases, 20 to 30% of people relive their whole life in a short amount of time, and they become the people that they impacted. So in my podcast, I interviewed Dan Brinkley, who's had multiple near-death experiences.

[00:24:36] He relived his whole life. He relived his days in Vietnam in combat where he killed someone and then he would become the person he killed, felt the pain, and then he felt the pain of children of the fathers he'd killed who would no longer have a father. So he felt the indirect effects. He said it was not quite as strong, but he still felt it.

[00:24:55] But because he had multiple near-death experiences, which he wasn't anticipating, he got to see how he had changed his life after his initial experience because he came back and said, wow, all this materialistic stuff is not what matters in the end, in the spiritual realm, because I was there and I lived it. He became a hospice volunteer. So in his later life reviews, in his later NDEs, he got to feel what it was like to be the person dying and how he comforted those people.

[00:25:21] Luke: Wow. . So there's obviously karmic implications in that particular phenomenon. You're seeing karma play out as a film strip.

[00:25:37] Mark: And the way he described it to me-- I interviewed him in probably 2019, but I think what I asked was, did you judge yourself during the life review? And he corrected me. He said, no, it's more observing myself. It was less about judgment, more of just, this is how I acted. Oh, this was silly, but from where I was, that made sense for me to act that way.

[00:25:56] And I've also heard that people develop and understanding for others around them through the life review because they say, that's why they were acting so poorly to me, because this person was in a lot of pain. Now I understand why they act that way.

[00:26:10] Luke: What about people that have near-death experiences and encounter relatives that have left the body that give them messages? Something that you hear sometimes is they were instructed that it's not their time to leave and they're like, ah, I don't really care about my body anymore. I want to come hang out with you guys in heaven or the other realms or whatever. And they're giving instruction like, ah, sorry, buddy, you got to go back into the body. because there's these things you have to work out still and so on.

[00:26:39] Mark: It's very common to encounter deceased relatives, sometimes pets or even spiritual entities that might be called religious entities in other contexts. So it could be a being of light. It could be Jesus, Buddha, things like that.

[00:26:52] Now, the conventional perspective on NDEs, the implication is that we have something that we need to fulfill in this lifetime, so we come back in the body to engage in whatever activities we need to. There's an alternative school of thought that's emerging. I don't know if you've come across this, which is that it's a deception that the deceased relatives are actually shapeshifters, which is a phenomenon that I'm very open to of shapeshifting.

[00:27:18] I talk about that in the Contact book. And you're basically convinced to do something that you wouldn't otherwise want to do. I don't know if that could ever be proven or verified, but I hold that in the back of my mind that you never know. In some cases, maybe that's true, but the overwhelming majority of what I hear, they feel like it was legitimate for what that's worth.

[00:27:37] Luke: That particular school of thought is terrifying to me because it's so difficult to discern truth from falsehood here in this realm. We're going to talk about David Hawkins, I'm sure, but one of the things that he would mention a lot is that it's one of the deficits that we face as a species, our inability to discern truth from falsehood. And that's just talking about here in this plane.

[00:28:06] You let someone into your life. You don't realize they're a bad person. You trust them. You get screwed over, that kind of thing. But in one of David Icke's books, I think it's called The Trap, he talks about this whole reincarnation thing, and I'm like, I wish I never read that book because it's so terrifying.

[00:28:21] And I don't know if he's right or not. A lot of other things he's written about have come to pass, and it's quite prophetic in the way that he's outlined some of the conspiracies of the world. But essentially, in The Trap, he's like, when you believe in reincarnation and you die, there's these shape shifting entities that will encourage you to come toward the light, and you think that you're ascending to the next level or to heaven or whatever, and they're actually just looping you back into another incarnation to harvest your energy and basically enslave you again.

[00:28:50] I was like, God, damn it. It's hard to know the right thing to do here in earth. You're telling me when my spirit leaves my body, there's going to be more tests that I have to work through? Is that the kind of thing that you're speaking to?

[00:29:01] Mark: That's what I'm referring too. I don't love thinking about it either. Now that I know about it, I feel like there's a responsibility to at least mention it. I don't think it's possible to prove or disprove these things. And now I don't know what I'll do because now that becomes the question, what am I going to do when I die and I encounter beings? I've heard someone, I can't remember who said this, his recommendation was to ask the beings to reveal their true identity.

[00:29:25] Luke: Oh, I like that.

[00:29:26] Mark: No matter what, and just see who they are. I've also heard there are different types of light, and perhaps the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I haven't read-- I've read parts of it-- it refers to different types of light, allegedly. So I don't know what to make of it. And it might not be uniform. Maybe it's true in select circumstances for that soul's evolution to have to discern in that way. And for other people it's not that way. Reincarnation could be way weirder and more complex. There's so many possibilities to this.

[00:29:51] Luke: I'm sure it is, but I really almost wish I'd never even heard that idea because I've always felt like I'm making pretty good progress in this lifetime, and I don't know that I'd be that interested in keeping and coming back to this place over and over again.

[00:30:09] I feel like, well, if the name of the game here is awakening and self-realization, and that's why we are gifted with the birth of coming into this dualistic plane of reality where you have abject evil and unconditional pure love on both sides of the scale, and if our job here, which seems to be, is to slowly work our way to love and to truth and to God, and then you get the consolation prize of graduating and not having to come back to this realm and do it all over again and go through all of the traumas and lessons that we go through, it's very disheartening to think you work your ass off spiritually for 80, 90 years and then you leave the body and they're like, psych, we're just looping you back in. You got to do it over again. It's like, oh man, that's really depressing.

[00:30:57] Mark: Well, in the Eastern traditions they talk about escaping the cycle of reincarnation. So it's a similar theme in terms of wanting to advance past things. And you're reminding me of a David Hawkins' story when he was elevating in his consciousness toward levels of enlightenment.

[00:31:09] He was faced with a test that there was a knowingness or some entity that came to him when he felt the pure state of oneness. He was at a very high level. And the entity, he said it was in an instant, just telepathically or something, downloaded a question to him, which was, you have transcended all of your personal karma. All power is yours. Take it.

[00:31:30] And his reaction was, I reject that. I'm everything. Why would I need to have power over others? He calls it the Luciferic temptation. And he said that he felt a spiritual obligation to tell people about it because he said at some point everyone will face it. And it could look different depending on the person.

[00:31:46] Typically, and this is getting more of the second book, An End to Upside Down Living, there are three ways that people can get taken off their path. Money, sex, and power. So for Hawkins, it was a power thing. He claims that when he rejected the temptation, he was shown all of the beings throughout history who also got to that level and had rejected it.

[00:32:05] But also the ones who took the temptation and karmically had to start from the beginning. Because apparently, as we elevate in consciousness, the mistakes become more harmful to the soul. And I think that could be an analogy to what some may face in the near-death experience. This is just speculation because we don't know.

[00:32:20] Let's say some are shapeshifters in some cases. It could be a test of discernment that we all have to just be aware of. Another thing Hawkins often talked about was, he said, it's hard enough to discern in this world where you can see everything. Forget channeling and all that stuff, because how can you know what's coming through these beings.

[00:32:37] He would say, they've been around for eons. They're way more advanced. They can trick you. They could be 99% right about something, and then 1% they'll get you off your path. This is also my Upside Down Living book. I have a chapter on cautions. So I give that Hawkins story about the temptation. I also talk about channeling.

[00:32:52] There's a woman that I quote who was getting a lot of good advice from the being she was channeling, and then they told her she should leave her job. And she wasn't sure about it, but she decided to listen to them, and she said it was a horrible decision. Then she could hear the beings laughing, and they said, you should kill yourself.

[00:33:08] Luke: Whoa. Yeah. I think having grown up spiritually with Hawkins' work being more impactful than any other theology or philosophy, he's just always resonated as the highest truth teacher to me. And as we were talking about before, the one that I can't seem to outgrow or out understand, I'll think, I get the model, and I'm living by those principles and have an understanding.

[00:33:41] I'll take a break from reading his stuff or listening to his lectures and then go back to it. I'll just be like, oh my God, I didn't even get this at all. It's so over my head. And that's encouraging to me. But yeah, I remember him many times talking about that Luciferic temptation. And it's such a great warning, probably much more so for the spiritual aspirant.

[00:34:01] Because you have all these new age ideas and channelers and all these stuff, and not to throw the baby out with the bath water that it's all fallacious, but to his point that you just reiterated, man, we can't even tell what's real and what's good versus evil here, being in a body with the mind and trying to operate on the material plane.

[00:34:27] So it's really maybe arrogant to think we can go into these other dimensions and know what the hell is going on in there. But there was another story that he would tell about he was invited, I think it was in New York City or something, into these meetings of these really highly influential, powerful people.

[00:34:47] He didn't name them, but maybe it was Rothchild or heads of the banking cartels or whatever. And I remember he described these are people that just talk casually about changing an interest rate that means nothing to them but can have massive long-lasting and far-reaching implications into the world economy and things like that.

[00:35:07] Now he was invited into that club, which he didn't name. I don't know if they were Jesuits or Masons or whatever they were, but wisely, he didn't identify them. But you could tell probably due to his psychiatry practice and just his prominence in society that he also faced that temptation and being invited into the good old boys' club, to which he also declined.

[00:35:29] So there were tests on the material plane and also in the spiritual plane that he came back to tell us like, hey, heads up. Look out for these temptations along the way. And to me that probably has a lot to do with something I talk about a lot because it's just fascinating to me, and it's something I'm terrified of experiencing, the fallen guru syndrome, where somebody has real spiritual gifts, insights, knowledge, wisdom, and then the sex or the money or the power gets them.

[00:35:56] And next thing you know, they're a cult leader with a harem that they're exploiting and abusing. And you're going like, wait, but his teachings were great. How did this happen? They didn't learn that lesson.

[00:36:06] Mark: Yeah. So you're reminding me of Ken Wilber's work. This is also stuff from the Living book we're getting into. In that book, basically the implications of what happens when you go down the spiritual path. And Wilber talks about lines of development that are relatively independent of each other.

[00:36:21] And so you could be really advanced in one way, but then not in the others. And the way he summarizes it is waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up. So you could have a guru who's really awakened, who's really had these deep experiences but hasn't done the cleaning up of the trauma work, and then is more susceptible to things.

[00:36:38] Or hasn't done the growing up, which is understanding that evil is real and that we need to mature in various ways. And then the showing up is actually doing the work rather than being passive. So I think a lot of these gurus probably fall into that category, highly awakened in that one line of development, but maybe they're lacking the others.

[00:36:57] Luke: That makes a lot of sense. What about the telepathic realm and also how it pertains to animals, pets, and whatnot?

[00:37:08] Mark: So telepathy is mind to mind communication. And this has been studied in labs all over the place for many, many decades scientifically. So there is a paper in American psychologist, which is the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association. So as mainstream as you can get. It was published in 2018 by Dr. Etzel Cardena from Lund University.

[00:37:34] And it goes through a number of psychic phenomena that have reached statistical credibility that would be accepted in other areas, and telepathy is in that category. Dr. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences puts it in the Six Sigma category, meaning that the odds that the results in experiments are due to chance alone is more than a billion to one.

[00:37:53] Luke: Really? Wow.

[00:37:55] Mark: So I give that preface before I tell you the experiment. There's real credibility behind this before I sound totally insane. But the classic experiment is you have two people separated. Bob is in one room, Jane's in the other. Bob is just put into a relaxed state hanging out in that room. Jane is shown an image of something, and the experimenters say, Jane, I want you to try to mentally send this to Bob.

[00:38:16] And these are not people claiming to have special abilities. Dean Radin, when I interviewed him, he said it's often they're college sophomores. And so Jane does that for a while, and then Bob comes out of his relaxed state, he's shown four images by the experimenters, and they say, Bob, I want you to pick the one that Jane was sending to you. They had no communication. And the person in Bob's room guesses correctly, roughly 32% of the time. Whereas if it were just chance, it would be one out of four, 25%.

[00:38:47] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:38:48] Mark: So we're talking a deviation of, depending on the study, let's say 30 to 32%, 5 to 7% from chance, which statistically tells you there's some effect. Something is getting through. It's not 100% of the time. And to me, that actually gave the study's credibility because if we were 100% telepathic, then we would know everything about everyone's thoughts all the time, and that's not the case.

[00:39:11] Instead, it's more sporadic. You think of someone, then they text you, and you're like, oh, that was just chance. But you do enough of those-- and Dr. Robert Aldrich has looked at that study, which will lead us into the animals, of telephone telepathy. So that's a huge deal. That alone, just stop at the telepathy studies, there's information getting through beyond what chance would predict, this blows up the materialist paradigm about the nature of reality right there.

[00:39:36] Luke: I love it.

[00:39:38] Mark: It's such a huge deal. I'm so used to saying this now, but that, we could just stop. And then we throw in the remote viewing where they've got the declassified documents say it's real. But with regard to animals, one of the issues with all these studies is a lack of funding. Because relative to mainstream science, that's where the funding's going to go. And it's materialist science.

[00:39:56] This stuff is more fringe if you try to teach it. In academia, most of the people who do have tenure already. Other people who want to study it on their way to tenure are told, hey, wait until you get tenure. I know someone who was told to take precognition research off her resume at a mainstream institution because it would hurt her chances at the academic institution, so she left.

[00:40:15] So I'm actually on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences where Dean Radin is the chief scientist, and they've been running studies like this for 50 years. Also, the University of Virginia has a division of perceptual studies at the med school where they study things in this realm near-death experiences, children with past life memories.

[00:40:30] But because of the taboo, it's hard to get quite as much research. It's hard enough to get research on humans, let alone psychic abilities in animals. But there have been some studies, and I've got a chapter in An End to Upside Down Thinking on that. Rupert Shedrake probably has the most well-known studies on dogs or other animals that know when their owners are coming home.

[00:40:52] And there's a video online, anyone can watch where they take the owner miles away from home at a random time in a car that's not hers. So they take away all the things the skeptics would say of like, oh, they know it's the car. They know she goes to work at this time every day. He removes all that stuff, all the potentially confounding variables.

[00:41:10] And then they have a camera on the dog at the home. In the video, when the woman who owns the dog decides that she's going to get into the cab, so she's walking to the cab because she's told now it's time to go home, the dog goes over to the window. So it suggests that the dog picks up on the intent, which relates to a lot of other studies too.

[00:41:32] And what Sheldrake says, he has a book-- I think it's called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and other phenomena related to animals, something like that-- that most pet owners are not surprised by these things because animals just seem to know.

[00:41:45] But to me, the broader implication is that animals are sentient. They just have a different biological structure, so they process consciousness in a different way. But the fact that both humans and animals seem to have these telepathic abilities indicates a commonality.

[00:42:00] Luke: That's wild. I'm going to get a hidden camera, start testing our dog. It's really interesting in the animal realm of this because obviously placebo is ruled out. Another thing that's interesting about animals in this way is in many of the shamanic traditions, animals are so highly revered because they're viewed as being of this world, but also of the spirit world, that there are bridges between the material and spirit.

[00:42:33] And that's such a huge part of ceremonies, rituals, art, and have a different level of reverence where I think in the materialistic, scientific view, we view them as of lesser value because they don't have the intellectual prowess and therefore we're superior to them or something. And there are people around the world that don't view them that way, that view them as peers, maybe even superiors from a certain perspective because of their ability to be tapped into the different realms of reality. That's very interesting.

[00:43:08] Mark: Yeah. Well, look at Egyptian culture.

[00:43:10] Luke: Exactly. Yeah. Amongst most of them, except ours, we think of animals as, like livestock, a commodity, or pets that are subservient. As much as we might love them, we don't look at our dog like, ooh, what do they know that we don't know? You know what I mean?

[00:43:27] Mark: It's almost like every way that we are taught to think about the world is inverted. Almost that way.

[00:43:33] Luke: Yeah. Hence every book you put out is the End to Upside Down blank. And I think that's why I was excited to talk to you. I'm just someone who does my best to think outside of the box and know that you're never going to be able to learn everything there is about the nature of reality, but it's fun trying.

[00:43:50] Mark: Yeah. To me it's about challenging assumptions, presuppositions, asking myself, well, I think this is true. How do I know it's true? How do I really, really know? Where does that belief come from? Well, someone told me it's true. How did they know? Well, they read it in a textbook. What's the textbook say?

[00:44:05] We'll get into this later with regard to medicine in particular, but it's really the same process for everything of going down that rabbit hole of understanding the source of beliefs and realizing that the foundations are often very shaky and seeing there's another way.

[00:44:17] But that takes time and energy. And I could say this from personal experience. I left my job right before everything with COVID. For the first book and podcast I was still working in Silicon Valley and then left so I could give myself space. And this other stuff has started to come in, but it's taken full devotion to this material, and I feel like I'm just scratching the surface.

[00:44:33] So I could imagine for someone who has a very busy life with work and family and kids, it's hard to dive this deep into things, and it's easier to turn on the TV. And this very credentialed person who has a PhD says it's so and everyone else is doing it, it's easy to just go along with it.

[00:44:50] Luke: I think the system in which we live is in many ways set up to keep us on the hamster wheel and to prevent people like you from having the time and energy to ask meaningful questions. You know what I mean?

[00:45:03] It's like if you got a couple of kids and a 9-5, you just come home and eat dinner and numb out with some TV and just recover from the stress of living your life. You're not going to start researching the nature of reality and consciousness and the medical system and the political systems. It's much easier just to outsource presuppositions and preconceived models. And if it's comfortable and makes sense enough, you're just going to go with that.

[00:45:28] I thank God for the Internet and for social media despite its faults. It's waking a lot of people up and getting people to ask questions because we have access to information we wouldn't have had before. But I remember the first, I don't remember which one it was, one of the videos I watched, basically debunking the moon landing and then another one on the Challenger Space Shuttle. And I've talked about this before on the show. The Space Shuttle one is crazy.

[00:45:55] The seven astronauts all magically have twins that are still alive. You start looking at this stuff and it's like, even if you're really skeptical and analytical and a more logically-oriented person, some of this stuff is just irrefutably false. And now it's like even looking at the moon landing footage and the president talking on a landline to the people on the moon, meanwhile, I go through a canyon and my cell phone in 2024 dies.

[00:46:25] It's like, dude, how have we been so gullible to so many massive scams? And those are just events in history. Those are events that obviously have much broader implications, but there's so many things like that that we just take for granted because someone told us that's the way it is.

[00:46:45] Well, if you think about the nature of this realm on earth or the moon landings, there are many people out there, you would go to them and say, hey, did you know the moon landings of we're a hoax? And they're like, what? No, they're not. And you go, how do you know? They go, well, I saw it on TV. That's their defense.

[00:47:02] It's just crazy how impressionable and gullible we are as a species. And thank God for people like you that are going, hey, maybe there's another way to look at this. Let me write some books. Guy like me, talk to some people that write some books and have discussions. It's a really exciting time.

[00:47:21] Mark: I also think part of the issue is within academia itself because the people with the degrees--

[00:47:25] Luke: You think?

[00:47:26] Mark: But they're the way they're trained. They don't have time to second guess these things. Think about doctors, how hard it's to get into med school, and then when you're in med school, all the pressure, and then residency and fellowship. Do you have time to question how did they know that a virus exists and causes disease?

[00:47:40] They're not asking those questions for the most part because there's so much to do. And just to learn the system, to be able to get a job. And same thing with law. And so when the busy person who's got a 9-5 and a bunch of kids turns on the TV, will they say, that's a PhD? That's an MD. I should trust them. They've looked at this for a long time.

[00:47:58] Well, they've been looking at a part of it, but have they looked at the foundations? And that's what I'm starting to appreciate more and more. They're not looking at the foundations very often, and I'm concerned to say the least, because I haven't looked at everything. But there's a pattern here in every discipline that fundamental assumptions are being overlooked and they're being assumed to be true without examining the potential faults.

[00:48:19] Luke: It's like the telephone game. It's like you hear something when you're a kid or the Challenger explosion for example. Somehow they manage to coordinate in the United States that every classroom in the entire country was having a TV wheeled into the room. We were all watching it at the same time.

[00:48:38] So when there's a concerted effort to push forth a falsehood into the awareness of the public, it's much harder to push back on that because then a massive consensus is created. And then if you're someone that goes, but wait a minute, how are six of the seven of them still alive or have identical twins magically, it's like, then you're the kook. Then you're the conspiracy theorist.

[00:49:05] And you're just someone who's just paying a little more attention, asking questions and isn't going along with the consensus that was manufactured for the masses. So yeah, I appreciate that.

[00:49:18] All right, let's move on. So much information. And for those listening. I'm not trying to sell your books. There's so much stuff that you've looked into that I'm interested in. The most logical thing was just to go in order. An End to Upside Down Living, which you've spoken to a bit about here, Reorienting Our Consciousness to Live Better and Save the Human Species give us some of the things that you get into here.

[00:49:45] Mark: I wrote this book right after I gave notice that I'd be leaving my firm in Silicon Valley, which was a tough thing because I'd become a partner. I'd spent 10 years there. I was in a great track, awesome, smart people working with technology and intellectual property. So it was intellectually stimulating in many ways.

[00:50:02] But I felt this pull of, I'm interested in this more metaphysical stuff, trying to understand the nature of reality, and yet I have a great career. But I made the decision to leave. And shortly after I made the decision that I'd be leaving, the idea for this book came in. Because up until then, I wasn't sure if I was going to write anymore.

[00:50:19] To me it was just one book, podcast series. That's enough. The meta paradigm of consciousness, that's a big deal. I'm good. But then I realized, and people had asked me about this too, they'd read the first book, An End to Upside Down Living, and say, well, what does that imply about how I should live life?

[00:50:34] So it's more about spiritual philosophy. There's a lot of David Hawkins in the book. It's partially autobiographical, so I talk more in detail about my personal journey of how I got to the point of even studying these things and talk about approaches to living from a spiritual perspective. So there's a chapter that has 10 of them.

[00:50:52] The first one is non judgmentalism, which is a David Hawkins term, which is that we can discern between things but to judge what actually be a form of arrogance because we can't know from a cosmic perspective what's good and bad. And that doesn't mean that we should ignore evil, but it means that we can actually judge whether or not something should have happened cosmically, because perhaps there was a reason for that apparently negative thing on a bigger scale. So I go into that approach because this is 180 versus how I used to live life.

[00:51:24] Luke: I think that's what's so interesting. You were really a normie, a standard person.

[00:51:29] Mark: Yeah.

[00:51:30] Luke: As some of us refer. I don't want to say you were an NPC. That could be a little insulting. But yeah, I think it's so interesting when someone has everything going for themselves-- great education, obviously a really bright guy, carve out a nice career, next in line, probably meet a nice young lady, have a couple of kids, do your thing, live a happy life-- no problem with that. But find it interesting for people like you where there's something in your soul that's back there nudging you going, wait, there's more. There's more. What is this really about? It's so interesting.

[00:52:02] Mark: I think on the surface I probably seemed really mainstream. And I think in many ways I was. But I always felt like I was having to mold myself to fit into a certain structure of society. And a lot of my friends would always joke around with me that I would think differently. So there was a part of me that was always questioning, but I was so busy trying to get good grades or training for tennis.

[00:52:22] It's hard to have the time to question all this stuff. And then eventually I did. But I do think that probably every soul, which is another way of saying the individuated consciousness, the whirlpool, has certain inclinations, and then it comes out.

[00:52:38] In this book, An End to Upside Down Living, I talk about the dark night of the soul, which is seen in many spiritual awakening journeys. I had mine, which was this sense of being lost and things not going the way that I wanted, even though on the surface everything looked great, around the age of 28 to 30-ish, that time period.

[00:52:55] And the dark night of the soul often propels people to some kind of spiritual awakening or evolution that they wouldn't have otherwise had. And it took the challenges. It had to get that bad for them to actually see and wake up. And it's actually for this reason that I'm skeptical of the reincarnation trap idea, because these dark nights of the soul do seem to have net benefit in the end for that person.

[00:53:20] An extreme example is Anita Moorjani, who was dying of terminal cancer. She was in a coma, had a crazy near-death experience, encountered her deceased father, who she had issues with during her life, and she felt unconditional love for him. And she started to realize that the way the body is is a reflection of one's internal state. And so she recognized issues in her own thinking in the near-death experience state. She was resuscitated, and her tumors disappeared.

[00:53:49] Luke: Empirically proved?

[00:53:50] Mark: They're gone. The doctors were, what's going on here? How did this happen? And now she speaks all over the world. She's written books and talks about this perfectly healthy. So someone who had challenges and overcoming the challenges led to a lot of good. So in that regard, suffering was not for nothing. It was for a lot of benefit. Which leads me to this more evolutionary model of reincarnation.

[00:54:15] Luke: I like that. Yeah. It goes back to the judgmental mind of always having to label experiences in our lives as good or bad, positive or negative. And from our limited perspective in time and space, it's impossible to know what the ultimate outcome of any event in our life is. The dark nights of the soul that some people report having one big pivotal one in their lives, I've had a bunch of them.

[00:54:45] And if you asked me in the middle of one, how's things going? I would say, I want to die. Life is not worth living. But I don't have the courage or selfishness to off myself, so I'm just going to suffer through this. A few years go by. You integrate some of those lessons. I look back and go, man, that was perfect. That's just what I needed. Thank God that bad, bad thing happened.

[00:55:06] One of my favorite quotes is Shakespeare, which is the extent of my knowledge of Shakespeare, but it's pretty much all you need to know, I think, in life. There's no such thing as good or bad. Only thinking makes it. That's it. That's the whole game right there. So in your life, what are practices that you employ to create disbelief and things that the mind churns out? How do you dispel beliefs in a day-to-day experience of being you?

[00:55:44] Mark: I find, and for this book, An End to Upside Down Living, I studied spiritual awakening journeys, both in the modern era, but also historically, and there are many commonalities to the arc, even though the specifics might differ. And it seems, and also from my own experience, that the universe, life consciousness, throws at us the things that we still need to work through and will be more difficult for us to handle psychologically, even if we have a more conscious perspective of negativity and suffering.

[00:56:11] In spite of that knowledge, these few things are still going to get to you because there's something to clear. So when those happen where I'm getting really disturbed by something or having irrational emotions, I try to just take a step back. It's really hard. Take a step back and watch myself and say, this sucks right now, but like you said, Luke, in a few years, I'm going to understand why this is happening and it will have led to something positive.

[00:56:39] So I'm just going to feel the emotions and I'm not going to judge myself. Because part of me says, why are you so immature? You're being so immature. You know how life seems to work. You've studied this. Don't get too sucked into it by your ego or whatever else. David Hawkins talks a lot about unconscious guilt, which is really a form of arrogance and self-importance. It's like I cause so much--

[00:57:02] Luke: Totally.

[00:57:03] Mark: Those are huge emotions for all of us. And we'll get into health. Those are the things that can even manifest as disease. So I think it's about feeling the emotions and then recognizing, okay, this is something that I haven't quite transcended yet. There are other areas where I wouldn't be as bothered, but in these areas I am. So I'm going to let myself be. I'm not going to do anything too crazy or drastic. And eventually I will get through it and I'll understand it more.

[00:57:26] Luke: How did you first discover David Hawkins?

[00:57:31] Mark: Trying to remember This was 2017. I'd heard people talk about Power vs. Force, and at that point I was ordering every book on Amazon that someone would say on a podcast. So I got it and I remember immediately thinking, this guy's at a different level. I need to read everything he's written. And Power vs. Force is probably my least favorite book for all the ones he's written.

[00:57:53] Luke: Me too. And it's his most famous, and it's the most dry. I don't know. It's not real juicy like some of his other writing. At the opposite end of the spectrum, his last book, Letting Go something, something surrender, it's really interesting because in the middle there, he had the eye of the eye and some really dense, non-dual teachings that to this day, I read half a paragraph, and my brain is just smoked. It's like, I'm not there yet.

[00:58:25] But then that one, I feel like, I'm assuming you've read that one, which is a powerful book, but it's almost like on his way out he was like, eh, I'm going to throw the Simpletons a bone and give them my message in a language that's very easy to read and also with teachings that are very practical and applicable, like this is actually what you do. It's not, this is how you can think about the nature of consciousness and reality.

[00:58:49] It's like this is what you do when you're having a hard time and the gift in, as you said, fully experiencing our emotions rather than bypassing them or numbing them out. But I agree. Power vs. Force is the first one I got, and I'm like, ah, there's something here. But it didn't really move the needle until I got into some of his more dense writing. And then on his way out, he was just like, and here's an easy one for you.

[00:59:14] Mark: Yeah.

[00:59:14] Luke: It's just wild.

[00:59:16] Mark: That's the one I recommend to people who aren't as into this space, and I've gotten amazing reviews from people. They're saying, wow, this book changed my life.

[00:59:23] Luke: It's incredible. Just how he goes through the different emotional states and just identifies every nuance of, like you said, guilt, which is a narcissistic, self-obsessed thinking about yourself too much. Not remorse, where you regret something in an earnest and healthy way, but that guilt where you're ruminating on what a bad person you're. And he would say, you're just thinking about yourself, and you're self-obsessed. Just that is a massive teaching.

[00:59:52] Mark: What I'll do is sometimes, I have that book on Audible, Letting Go, I'll just listen if I'm on a flight. Take a half hour to go to a random chapter, listen to it. I have that book, I. It's just the letter I. Reality and Subjectivity is the subtitle. I've read that once and maybe a half, and now I keep it around, and I'll open up a random sometimes and read two paragraphs, like you said.

[01:00:13] Luke: It's a beast.

[01:00:13] Mark: Because there's something there in every sentence, and it's profound.

[01:00:17] Luke: Yeah. So he's someone that you continue to learn from?

[01:00:22] Mark: I do. I would say it's on and off. I'll go through periods where I feel like I really need more Hawkins, and then I'll appreciate things that I didn't get the first time around. And then other times I'll take a time out. Especially as it pertains to more worldly things and current events, that just requires a different kind of energy to get facts straight and see what's going on versus the high-level spiritual context of Hawkins.

[01:00:44] Luke: Right. Yeah. His teachings have really helped me in a concrete way, in a very real, tangible way, not just understand but experience that there really only is one thing, that there's one thing that we just call consciousness, and it's only our perception that creates contrast between this thing and that thing.

[01:01:12] If you just get that, you're going to have a good life, because then everything becomes just more playful and malleable. And I find that I have an easier time taking the world and my personal world less seriously. It's not that you don't feel things or you have concern for your fellow humans or yourself and your life and outcomes, but there's a certain non-attachment that becomes possible when you just realize the whole thing is literally a big game.

[01:01:44] Mark: Yeah. Non-attachment, that's one of the 10 approaches in the book to living. It doesn't mean not caring. It just means not being bound to a particular outcome. And it always can be brought to a fear or a desire, and they're just the inverse of each other really. So a fear is that a desire is not going to happen effectively.

[01:02:07] So when we become bound to something that we really want or something we really don't want to happen, where if this thing happens or not, then I'm not going to be able to live, if we get to that position, that's where the suffering comes in. Versus, I really want this to happen. I really don't want this to happen, but whatever happens is okay, and I'm going to give my best effort.

[01:02:26] It's a very important distinction. Hawkins distinguishes between non-attachment and detachment. Detachment would be, well, I don't really care what happens because we're all one anyway. It's more of a passive attitude. Whereas non-attachment is you're fully engaged, but you understand that the outcome is beyond your control.

[01:02:44] Luke: What's your experience of surrender as a guiding principle?

[01:02:49] Mark: That's another one of the 10 approaches in the book. I think that's the key. And it is also a hybrid of passivity and being active. And the challenge for a human being, I think, is to act in a state of surrender. How do we actually do that? And I give a few things in the book that helped me think about how to act from a place of surrender, and the first is to act from values.

[01:03:19] So integrity, for example, whatever your values are, try to act there. And then also following passions, following intuitions, which is a trial-and-error process, because sometimes we can't always discern what's an intuition versus the ego getting in or something else from the mind.

[01:03:35] And the fourth is from Suzanne Siegel, who's a spiritual author, do the next obvious thing. To me, this is a central part of living from a spiritual lens, because surrender would say, well, the universe is going to happen as it's going to. I can just sit on the couch because I'm surrendered. And I think that's a misunderstanding of the term.

[01:03:56] It's having that attitude, but not actually sitting on the couch. It's the showing up part of Wilber's framework, the waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up. So there's a showing up to life, but the gesture is one of surrender. So David Hawkins would go like this, and I'm holding my hands back for those listening. He said, it's a feminine, the feminine energy of allowing this while also being active at the same time.

[01:04:21] Luke: I think of surrender as not so much inactivity or being complacent, but in taking the action and letting go of the attachment to the result of the action.

[01:04:41] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:41] Luke: You still got to do things. I think the suffering comes from the attachment to what's on the other side of the effort that we put forth. We have a preconceived idea, if I take this job, if I get in this marriage, if I build this house, name the goal or project you have, and then building these constructs of expectations around it that are just setting us up for disappointment.

[01:05:05] Mark: What I've found is that pain comes, and perhaps in a sense, dark nights of the soul relate to this, but pain comes when there's an attachment that has been unexamined. So if I'm super stressed about something, I'm like, where's the attachment here? What do I need to happen or not happen? And where can I surrender more while still being active? It's a helpful exercise. It's hard to do in the moment because in the state of suffering or stress, that can consume everything.

[01:05:37] Luke: The End to Upside Down Liberty: Turning Traditional Political Thinking on Its Head to Break Free from Enslavement. I can't wait to read all these books, dude. Oh, man.

[01:05:48] All right. So where I am with this particular topic of liberty, especially since 2016 and just seeing the emperor naked is that I see many of us in this country and probably around the world, but I'm an American, so I speak for America, is all of this tribalism and fighting for who is going to be our ruler or the ruling class, and very few people stepping back and asking the question, where did we even get the idea that, a, someone has the inherent right to rule over someone else, and what would the world or society look like if no one was ruling over anyone, if we were just self-governed?

[01:06:37] That's the question that's most inspiring to my soul, is thinking about, wow, what if people were just left to their own devices? And that's terrifying, I think, to many people who still trust the state. But I look at the state, historically speaking, as literally the number one cause of unnatural death on record.

[01:06:56] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:57] Luke: That's the facts. Aside from diseases and things like that, but war and oppressive regimes and the downright and outright mass murder of millions upon millions and hundreds of millions of people all under the supposition, and the superstition as Larken Rose, I'm sure you're familiar, would call it, is that we believe that this human being over here is somehow endowed with the right to roll over these people over here inclusive of me and my life.

[01:07:26] What if humans just didn't believe that? What if we believed in ourselves and we're self-governing? Is that even possible? And tell me what you came to as a result of your research and worldview on that.

[01:07:36] Mark: I think we're on the same page. And the context here is I came in-- like I said, I was apolitical prior to 2020.

[01:07:45] Luke: So in other words, you're a right-wing extremist.

[01:07:47] Mark: That's what I'd probably be called now, for sure.

[01:07:50] Luke: If you're not a statist, you're just classified as that, or a conspiracy theorist now.

[01:07:55] Mark: But it's interesting how this evolved for me. So early 2020, right before lockdowns, I wrote An End to Upside Down Living. Then lockdowns happened, and I just left my job. Still in San Francisco at the time, and I had a ton of free time on my hands, and the world was locked down. And then I saw censorship of doctors who were countering the narrative, and they were getting taken off YouTube.

[01:08:15] So then I started looking into the darker topics that I hadn't explored previously. And the reason I got so interested in the political realm was that there were people that I respected and still do respect very highly, who from a spiritual philosophy perspective, totally agree with them. And they were endorsing the lockdowns and the masks and eventually the vaccines and things like that.

[01:08:37] And I'm like, how is it possible to be-- and I think it's really a lines of development thing of the waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up, in hindsight. But I was so perplexed by this because I thought I had a really good framework. And then this threw a wrench into it, everything happening in the world, the bifurcation. Those who promoted freedom and others who wanted "safety" through the authorities and were all about the authorities.

[01:08:59] And then I saw a lot of things happening around the 2020 election, started to pay attention for the first time, and initially was resonating much more with the right and conservatives because they were preaching for freedom when everyone else seemed to be authoritarian. So I said, this makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know exactly where I stand on everything.

[01:09:16] But then I came across the notion of voluntarism or anarchy, anarcho-capitalism, which is essentially what you're talking about. And I said, this is really important. Because we are in a paradigm of statism around the world where there is a political monopoly.

[01:09:35] It's a compulsory monopoly in that you don't, on your own accord, know that you're contracting. And that's a common law question, which I didn't know at the time of writing this book that there's an arguably, depending on how you look at the law, we've contracted to certain things, but it's not an informed consent.

[01:09:55] It's not mutually agreed upon in the way that you would if you were to hire a law firm, for example. That's mutually agreed upon contract. But I started to look at government as a service provider. Larken Rose talks about this in The Most Dangerous Superstition. Also, Murray Rothbard, the Mises Institute, Ludwig von Mises. This school of thought of government is a dangerous entity. It's actually a predator rather than a protector. And there's no amount of predator that's good. So many conservatives would say, let's just have a little bit.

[01:10:23] Luke: Well, this is what drives me crazy, is that we're arguing over all of recorded history on the right type of government, and very few people are asking the question. Maybe the right type is to have none at all. Anyway, carry on.

[01:10:38] Mark: Yes. No, that's where I landed. And that it's another one where I said, wow, could this be? Could we have been this brainwashed? Because from a young age, we go to school. We were taught the government's there to protect us. These are public servants. They serve the people. That's what we always say. And then when I looked at it through the lens of a service provider, I've been in the business world, and I see how it works with service providers and customers.

[01:10:59] The customer voluntarily hires the service provider, and the contract that they write between customer and service provider specifies what the service provider's going to do, what the price is, what the termination clause is, how you could actually get out of the contract, and you have competition between lots of different service providers.

[01:11:18] So this is not to say that the government doesn't provide important services. These are very important things in society, like police force, road servicing, court systems. Those are all things that would be important to any society. The question is, should a political monopoly have control of those things whereas in other areas of society, human beings do them?

[01:11:39] What's the difference between government and a normal service provider? The people in government have special privileges, but it's just human beings. So I go through a chapter in the book of essentially theoretical economics, which many other economists have done, and I aggregated their work of, how could we do all of these government services without government?

[01:11:56] Well, it's human beings getting together, and it's as good, if not better, because you have this competitive marketplace. Now, I want to say one more thing because I know the cognitive dissonance that this topic causes, and it's like, Mark, I can't believe you're saying this. This would be complete chaos. You need someone to watch over the people.

[01:12:14] The logic there is flawed because it says, I don't trust human beings. Therefore, I'm going to take some human beings, a subset of the population of human beings, and put them in power over the other ones.  And I'm going to give the people who I don't trust an ability to elect who that is, and we're going to trust that the elections are done properly, all on the basis of we don't trust people. It actually doesn't make sense logically.

[01:12:44] Luke: That's brilliant. What a great articulation of that particular issue. And taking it a step further, if you look at the results of us following that logic and the model that we've created, going back to what I said earlier, the track record of putting those people in charge and what they've done to humanity throughout history is atrocious. Just like genocide upon genocide.

[01:13:12] It's like, what is happening here? Yet the cognitive dissonance that you mentioned I think is maybe partly rooted in our lack of, not faith so much in other humans, but faith in ourselves to be able to do the right thing and to self-govern. It's almost like I don't trust myself and my ability to take care of myself and provide for myself and my family with equanimity and integrity. Therefore, I need the daddy, mommy state to do it for me.

[01:13:46] And if I don't feel like I can do that, then I look at you and I'm like, well, if I can't do it, he definitely can't do it. So we need to call in mommy and daddy state to regulate Mark, because I don't trust him. But it's really fundamentally, I think, I don't trust myself. I do, but I'm speaking for the general person who's like, we can't imagine living in a world without this boot on our neck because it somehow feels safer. But if you look at the evidence, it's not safer.

[01:14:14] So you brought up the word anarchy, and I don't know a lot about this. The only study I've done on this particular topic is the Larken Rose book, which I think, apart from any spiritually focused books, is, I would say, the most meaningful book I've ever read personally. It just completely changed my entire reality.

[01:14:35] But my whole life, being a punk rock teenager that I was in the '80s, to me, anarchy was just pandemonium and just people running the streets burning everything down, like we saw in 2016, '17, the past few years of just shit on fire and police cars turned over and people just running wild. And I think the anarchy that you speak of is, well, you can define it, but my new interpretation of it is more just the lack of government in general and just the people self-ruling.

[01:15:12] And so then I look at, well, have we ever done that successfully? And you know much more about history than I do, but from my understanding, pre-agricultural revolution and when people started to settle in different geographic locations and grow their own food, then there had to be a police force or an army to protect the livestock and to protect those crops.

[01:15:35] And then you have the city state, and then you have the emergence of governments and militias and things like that because people were staying put. So seems like during that evolution, all of this came to be, but before that, you had hunter-gatherer tribes of 60 or 50 people or whatever, roaming around and moving around to find food and to hunt and gather and all that.

[01:15:59] And it seems like in a group of 50 people, there would be more people who cared about the betterment and the protection of that group than there would be a couple of outliers who were assholes. And so if someone started being an asshole, not the government of that group, but the elders and the majority of those people would say, you know what? You're being a dick. We're ostracizing you. Good luck out there with the lions.

[01:16:22] And that's how you would learn, or you would be punished in some way by the consensus of your little tribe, and that would instruct the other potential assholes in your group to not do that stuff. Because they'd see, oh, that last guy got left behind in the snow, and he's probably dead. Or you didn't get food for a week, or whatever the punishment was.

[01:16:41] But there wasn't an overarching state that was inflicting the punishment or the rules. It was just the consensus of the group. I might have a really fantasy-based version of history, but it seems like that's how it would've went down. Can you speak to pre-government, pre-agriculture, pre-industry to how people self-govern?

[01:17:05] Mark: One of the critiques of voluntarism is that it's unrealistic and that it's never been done successfully. There are some tribes that anarchists point to, and I'll define that in a second. And Ireland, I believe it was in the medieval time, some people would point to them and say they were doing this. They had more of a tribal type of living, decentralized.

[01:17:28] What I talk about in the book is that it's not just about the political theory, but it's also about how an elevated consciousness that would make this work in tandem. First of all, an elevated consciousness to recognize that we don't need to have these rulers and that we can do things on our own, but then also people who have a higher consciousness to have the personal responsibility to act.

[01:17:46] Let me go back to anarchy. Anarchy in a political context is a society without rulers. It's not a society without rules. It's just that the rules are determined on a private contractual basis. So you could have laws within a certain group or tribe or how-- you could create a nation effectively that people would subscribe to voluntarily and say, they're doing a really good job with these traditionally government services. I want to hire them.

[01:18:15] So you can do all of that under voluntarism. The only catch is that it is fully consensual. So you've consented to this. It's informed consent. You've signed a contract and made everything happen. Whereas currently we have a social contract, which I'm still looking for, the social contract that we all signed.

[01:18:33] The Great Reset, which we'll talk about in a bit, in Klaus Schwab's book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, he talks about this new vision for society, and that we need to redo the social contract. I'm like, what are we redoing in the first place? So it's this implied consent in the current status situation versus the explicit consent of an anarchist or volunteer, or anarcho-capitalist type society.

[01:18:57] Luke: I like that definition of anarchy. So are there any other points in history to which we can identify as people being of a state of consciousness that created safe and equitable subcultures or nations?

[01:19:15] Mark: That could get into some speculation about lost civilizations and things like that, and I have questions about how they govern themselves, but this is one of the weak points of lack of historical precedent on a large scale. The way I look about it, and the way I say it in the book is this is about having a north star, something that we should move toward, which is ultimately getting us toward less government rather than more. Whereas we're seeing a lot of the rhetoric talking about more government rather than less.

[01:19:41] So it should at least point us in this direction. And I think something happens, like you said, when you read Larken Rose's book, when I learned about this stuff. For me, Larken Rose was a huge influence. Murray Rothbard was probably other huge one.

[01:19:51] And at the Mises Institute's website, M-I-S-E-S.org, I think, or.com, they have a lot of his books available for free and other thinkers like that, so you can just download them. For a New Liberty in particular had a big impact on me, but there's a lot of other stuff super profound. That there's a consciousness shift that occurs when you learn about this.

[01:20:11] You're like, oh, wait, we don't even need government. And most people on TV, they're arguing about what the role of this political monopoly should be rather than asking about the presupposition, which is that, should it even exist?

[01:20:23] Luke: Exactly. I forgot to mention earlier, we're going to put all the resources, all your books, everything you've talked about at lukestorey.com/markgober, G-O-B-E-R. Yeah, I think that particular topic is one of those things I see as a legitimate path forward, but it requires massive dismantling of a lot of the programming.

[01:20:50] But the thing, like you mentioned earlier in how you started to describe this, it's like the argument against having a society with no rulers is that people aren't trustworthy and they're going to do the wrong thing. And so let's take the people that are also people that have their faults and put them in power.

[01:21:12] So that is a great argument for what is maybe wrong, what's possible. And maybe I have an idealistic perspective on this because for the most part, everyone that I interact with is trustworthy and are just beautiful people. So I have a skewed perspective. If I was to create my own micro nation out of the 50 people that I know, we would do fine. If the roads needed to be fixed, one of us would go out there and fix it. If we needed a school away, we'd make a little school.

[01:21:44] I feel like everything would just coalesce and come together just fine. But I'm also not thinking about the rapist, serial killers, and psychos out there, but we also don't think about the fact that they exist when we put people in office, and you see that we have people ruling over us that are legitimately psychopaths and that have no qualms with giving an order that kills tens of thousands of people in one fell swoop. And then we give them Nobel Peace Prizes, Obama. You know what I mean?

[01:22:16] It's like, dude, what? Why do we feel so disempowered and so weak that we pick such awful human beings to "lead" us and we're just okay with that and we think that we can trust them versus trusting people in our immediate community to do a better job?

[01:22:35] Mark: I want to say two things here. One is that we already exist in anarchy, and I'll explain. And the other is that there's a psychological hurdle here of choosing a less bad option. It's hard for people to think about, and that's what I'm describing. So the first one is, and Murray Rothbard says this, I think he calls it an international anarchy, because we like to think of-- first of all, within our own government, we talk about checks and balances.

[01:22:56] Who's checking the checkers? They're all within government. And who's checking that? Well, arguably we have other states out there, other countries that are checking, but who's above them checking all the nations? So we live in a form of anarchy right now already, and a lot of people ignore that.

[01:23:15] And how's society going? It is functioning, but arguably, there's still a lot of murder. And this leads to the second point and a lot of other erosions of freedom that human beings are imperfect. And until we reach a fully enlightened state of consciousness collectively, there are going to be problems. The question is, what's worse? Doing it under a compulsory political monopoly or doing it in a free society?

[01:23:39] There are going to be problems in both. And what happens is people are so accustomed to statism, which is the status quo, that the flaws, it's like, oh, well, that's just government. That's okay. They're inefficient with our money, with our tax money. That's okay. We go to war. That's what happens. We have to defend ourselves.

[01:23:51] Whereas if you're new to voluntarism, anarchism, and anarcho-capitalism, all basically synonymous, you think of the one thing that you can't imagine in your mind of how it would work, and then you dismiss it. I see this psychological pattern in a lot of paradigm shifts. We get comfortable with the paradigm, and we find one example that we can't think of, and that's really our own lack of creativity. We can't think of a solution for it, and that's enough to dismiss the whole thing.

[01:24:16] Luke: Totally. Right. It's like, well, who's going to fix the bridge when it falls down? Well, the whole thing won't work then.

[01:24:22] Mark: It won't work. It's unrealistic. You're an idealist, Mark.

[01:24:25] Luke: Yeah. And it's like, well, who's fixing it now, and what's the ultimate cost to society for them to do so, and who's determining who's doing the fixing and how much they get paid, and how much money is extorted for me under the guise of doing said bridge repair when it's actually not? When the money that I'm paying into the system is just paying off the money we borrowed from England in 1933, basically.

[01:24:47] So I love this train of thought. And again, I'm a total newbie to this way of thinking, but I think like most of us, I find the atrocities committed by the state to just be intolerable. And the way that we're going about fixing it is just changing masks on the same face every few years and thinking something's going to be different.

[01:25:13] And really, if you look at history in this country, there've been a few great changes. So the abolition of slavery, fucking awesome. Women's right to vote and other human rights, awesome. Gay people being able to get married, awesome. There's a few things in there that have been great, but underneath all of that is the same totalitarian regime, just incrementally tiptoeing its way into absolute control over every aspect of our lives.

[01:25:46] So there's been some good things that have happened, but they're also done under the guise that the government is where our rights come from. I believe that our rights come from the fact that we were born and we are walking and breathing and living here on the planet.

[01:26:01] We have a right because God created us. And I think the role of government has been so skewed that people believe that those rights come from the government when, speaking of the Constitution or the creation of this country, it was more about, well, we have these rights that are God-given and other people are going to infringe upon them, so let's bring in the government to protect those rights for us, which is a better idea to begin with, but I don't know sitting here that we even need that.

[01:26:32] I'll protect my rights by not engaging in contracts that I don't understand, for example, which our whole life in America, we sign all these contracts with the state, and we don't even know we're doing it. And so it's a voluntary system, but we don't know that there's another option. So we volunteer into it, and we think there's no other way.

[01:26:51] Mark: Mm. It is such a big paradigm shift to look at society this way. It's a total inversion of how we're taught to think, that government is actually not the helper that we're told it is. And I just can't emphasize that enough. But then, I think, when this realization comes, then there is more of a desire to ask questions about everything that's happening.

[01:27:14] What's the real incentive? Is it really to serve the people? And that's not to say that every politician is evil. I do think there are good ones who have good intent, but ultimately the intent of the system and the government itself is to preserve itself. That's how it works. And then you end up with all sorts of strange incentives that you wouldn't have in a truly free society.

[01:27:32] For example, let's say a department within the government does a really bad job with something. That could be their excuse to say, we need more money. So what is the incentive? Perform poorly.

[01:27:46] Luke: Right.

[01:27:46] Mark: Versus in a free market, what happens? Your competitor's going to come in if you do a bad job. I'm just going to hire someone else. So performance has a more normal incentive structure versus government. Government seems to invert everything.

[01:28:00] Luke: 100%. All right. I feel like I could go on that track forever. Let's move on. In all these 550 something episodes, I've never had anyone that has a stack of books that we can just go through, so this is super fun.

[01:28:14] An End to Upside Down Contact: UFOs, Aliens, and Spirits—and Why Their Ongoing Interaction with Human Civilization Matters. Oh my God. I feel like you should have just come for six episodes and we just cover each one. But we'll try and get into this.

[01:28:30] Now, that said, me personally, in the paranormal and channeling and UFOs, all this kind of stuff, it's never something that's really interested me, I think because I'm just more concerned about how do I keep my shit together in just day-to-day life, and I just don't need to worry about all of that.

[01:28:49] However, I know that my reality is minimized by my perception, and so I'm sure there are other dimensions and beings and all kinds of things that would be arrogant to believe that we, human beings, are the only advanced civilization here. So what did you discover about the idea of UFOs and aliens and stuff during this book?

[01:29:13] And I'm going to throw in one other Hawkins’ thing. There were very few things that he calibrated, using muscle testing, for those that are unfamiliar. You can look him up, and you learn about it. But there were a couple of things, a few. One of them was he calibrated whether UFOs are real and got a false, to which I'm like, you have to ask that question in a very specific way.

[01:29:35] So it could be false the way we think about 1950s flying saucer movies. Maybe he calibrated that as false, but it didn't ask the question like, are there other living beings that are multidimensional that sometimes cross in this dimension? That's a totally different one. He also did ghosts. Are ghosts real or false? What's your definition of ghost and so on?

[01:29:56] So there were a few things like that. And also the last one is he calibrated George Bush Jr. as 400 or something, which is in integrity. I'm like, how did he possibly come up with that? And his shit about 9/11, he didn't get 9/11 either because he would make fun of 9/11 truthers by saying, oh, steel doesn't melt.

[01:30:17] And that was never the argument. The argument was, does jet fuel burn hot enough to melt steel? And the answer is no, equivocally. Unequivocally no. So anyway, there's a few Hawkins things where I'm like, dude, you didn't ask the question in a way that would give you a more accurate answer. So coming from him, he is like, UFOs, aliens, new age, Atlantis, all this stuff is bullshit, and you're living in fantasy world. So I'm more inclined that way, but still open.

[01:30:48] Mark: Right. Plus, building 7, 9/11, which wasn't even hit by a plane.

[01:30:51] Luke: Thank you.

[01:30:51] Mark: That's a whole other rabbit. But yeah, Hawkins' scale of consciousness, I like it conceptually, but the book, is it called Truth vs. Falsehood?

[01:30:58] Luke: Yes.

[01:30:58] Mark: Where he goes through various areas and he calibrates them on the scale, I don't feel like I know enough about the methodology. I know he feels like he tested it really well, but it's the part of Hawkins' work that I'm least in resonance with personally. So I remember looking at some of that before I published all the books to see where I'm like, well, the evidence is a little bit different than what you're saying here. Let me get to the genesis of this book, first of all.

[01:31:24] When everything happened in 2020, I became very interested in evil and darkness because I felt like it was lacking from this love and light, spiritual bypassy spiritual community that was so good in other ways. How can you miss these other things? There's a desire to say, well, darkness, that's just going to take your vibration down, so don't look at it.

[01:31:41] And I have a very different view on that, which is we need to know it exists, not to be consumed by it. But if we don't know it exists, then we can't navigate around it. And that was top of mind when I wrote the book on liberty. And I have the section on consciousness in the Liberty book because it relates to-- to me, voluntarism actually aligns with natural law, which we can see from the life review of treat other people the way you want to be treated, the golden rule.

[01:32:04] That's actually seems to be built into the fabric of reality. But in that quest, I was very interested in what forces might be influencing our world and our governments. So I only touch on it briefly in the Liberty book, but I felt like there was a need for an expansion, and in large part because I felt like a lot of this was missing from conventional spiritual thinking, and we could be, and I think we are being influenced by this stuff, by non-human intelligences in ways that we don't always see with our eyes.

[01:32:31] Both from a physical standpoint, more conspiratorial, secretive things happening, but also from a metaphysical standpoint of our consciousness is being influenced, and we can't actually see it happening.

[01:32:41] So the reason it's called An End to Upside Down Contact, in addition to everything, has been an end upside down, which I'll give a shout to my publisher, Bill Gladstone, because I wrote my first book and he said, it's great, but this needs to be the title, An End to Upside Down Thinking.

[01:32:56] Luke: Really?

[01:32:57] Mark: Yeah. And so I didn't know--

[01:32:59] Luke: I like though, as a franchise, like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

[01:33:03] Mark: So he did those books.

[01:33:04] Luke: Oh, no way.

[01:33:05] Mark: He was the agent on those books. He passed away recently, sadly, but yeah. He had the foresight. He was very intuitive. So I continued with it. And the reason I think contact is upside down is that we as a mainstream society don't think about it properly, and I talk about six falsehoods.

[01:33:23] One is that contact doesn't even exist, contact with non-human intelligence. And the second is a huge one, which is that contact is just a purely physical thing. There are crafts in the sky, and it's all nuts and bolts, just physical. To me, the physical stuff is a minority. The metaphysical is the key, the consciousness aspect, which we hear a lot about UFOs on the news and congressional hearings. We don't hear as much about the consciousness part. Although a new document just came out a few weeks ago that talks about remote viewing again. But it's referencing the fact that consciousness is relevant to this.

[01:33:56] Luke: And to the Hawkins calibration of are UFOs real, I get the sense that that question was proposed in the realm of physical contact, and is there a metal disc that flies around in the sky that we see as a UFO, but not in the metaphysical, in the energetic entity space? Carry on.

[01:34:20] Mark: No, exactly. And that's where the definitions come in. So the third assumption that I think is false is that all of the beings in non-human contact experiences are exclusively benevolent. And we do hear that sometimes. We can call them in. They're all benevolent. They don't want to hurt us. And I don't think that's true.

[01:34:37] There's a lot of evidence. Some are negative. And the flip side, I don't agree with. Some people say it's all demonic. I don't agree with that. The fifth is that this is just a recent phenomenon. In the last, I don't know how many decades we've heard about UFOs more and more, World War II era, and it's just a recent thing to me. This is ancient. Goes back to the origins of humanity that other beings are talked about in what we traditionally think of as mythology or religious lore.

[01:35:05] If you look at the language that people use today to describe their experiences and then reread those texts, there are a lot of commonalities in what people experience long ago versus today. They're just used different language and different translations. That's a big one because it relates to our origins.

[01:35:21] And the sixth one, I think, is the hardest to prove definitively, but it's perhaps the most important, and I think there's circumstantial evidence. And some might say, well, all this is real, Mark, but it doesn't affect us. It's not influencing society. Whereas I think it is. I think we're in a spiritual war, and understanding how those forces operate is critical. And that's why I wanted to create something that opens the mind to how much exists beyond what our eyes can see.

[01:35:47] And when I say our, I speak about most of us because many people have had experiences and they're profound, and it's very difficult for them to talk about it. But the way I divide the book is non-UFO-related contact and UFO-related contact. Because if you hear the word contact, like the movie Contact, Jodie Foster, we're thinking aliens out there versus someone has a near-death experience. They encounter a being of light. They have a hellish near-death experience sometimes, and they might have demonic figures or something scary in it, deceased relatives.

[01:36:18] This is contact. And they're getting information. That's contact. We see this in shared death experiences too. So shared death experiences don't get enough attention. These are instances where a healthy person co-lives in the dying process with someone who's dying, and it's just like a near-death experience.

[01:36:36] Luke: What? I've never heard of this.

[01:36:39] Mark: Shared death experiences. There's a study in a journal of palliative care. The co-author's name, I believe his last name is Peters. These also blow up the physiological model of near-death experiences because they would say, a dying brain is what causes the NDE. It's just hallucination. These people are not dying. These are healthy people.

[01:37:00] And somehow the dimensions open up. Sometimes they co-live the life review. But again, they're entity encounters in this. Deathbed visions, similar phenomenon. Again, contact. DMT encounters or other psychedelics, contact. So I go through channeling. That's contact. So I actually start the book with those because that's not what you think of first. And I'll pause there and then go into the next segment.

[01:37:28] Luke: Have you ever worked with psychedelics yourself?

[01:37:32] Mark: I've worked with cacao once and one other very mild experience. I've never had an entity encounter. I've never had an experience of unity, oneness. So my research has been hearing from other people who say, yeah, Mark, this did happen, which I wrote about, but I've never experienced it.

[01:37:51] Luke: Well, the interesting thing about those experiences, which aren't for everyone, but for some of us they are sometimes, is some of the research's been done around DMT, for example, where the mechanistic reductionist point of view would be that person takes that drug and then they're meeting these entities and other dimensions and whatnot, and that that's just a hallucination or something that's created by the brain.

[01:38:23] But then there's studies, which I'm sure you're aware of and maybe you covered in the book, where you have a couple of test subjects that have the same exact experience, but they're unrelated. It's like, how is everyone having universal experiences subjectively, if it's just something that's made up by the individual mind in some sort of hallucination.

[01:38:45] And I've heard people talk about experiences wherein, I don't know, there's little elves and this kind of stuff. I've never seen or experienced anything like that, but I have had a couple of instances where, I don't even know how to describe it, I was clearly interfacing with some other intelligent beings, but they didn't appear to have bodies or they weren't little green men.

[01:39:14] So there was contact, and there's no way that I could prove it other than just the things that were shared with me or healing that took place in my consciousness, mind, in my body, where I knew that I was interacting with other, I don't know, interdimensional life forms that were benevolent and were there to be helpful to me.

[01:39:37] And there's literally zero proof that that happened other than my own experience, and then the net result of things that changed in my life as a result of that. But many people have had these kind of contact experiences with psychedelics, which is why I asked you, what did you find in your research in the various forms of contact that you just described?

[01:39:59] Mark: Well, actually, the psychedelics discussion and corroborating experiences relates to the non-UFO contact because the work is most famously made popular by John Mack, who was the head of psychiatry at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winner. So late in his career, he became exposed to the topic of alien abduction.

[01:40:17] He was told about it by Hopkins, who's a famous guy in the UFO space. And Bud told him, apparently, John, you've got to look into this. You're a psychiatrist. You need to see what these people are reporting because it's too real and it's too bizarre. It's happening all over the place. So he started looking at it and concluded people were not making it up.

[01:40:35] He wrote a book called Abduction, published in 1994. This is a clinical book. It's read by a doctor, case studies of his examination of people who claimed they had abduction experiences, and he used hypnosis to help them unlock memories. And there were interesting things with that where certain memories would be clearer when he put them under hypnosis.

[01:40:57] But he was totally convinced. Wrote a second book called Passport to the Cosmos. But what was really fascinating to me is that he then came across Rick Strassman's work, a leading researcher on DMT who ran a study on DMT where he was giving DMT intravenously. And what he found, Strassman found, is that people were having contact experiences all over the place, and in fact, they were having abduction experiences on DMT that corroborated John Mack's research where the people were not on DMT.

[01:41:26] Luke: Wild.

[01:41:28] Mark: So Mack actually endorsed Strassman's book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

[01:41:32] Luke: Really? Wow. That is fantastic. And then what about the phenomenon of physical crafts and things like that? I'm not convinced that the model of the earthly realm that we've been taught is accurate or legitimate, which is inclusive of how we consider us to be floating in space. I don't believe in space in the way that I've been led to believe. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what's out there, but I have a very strong suspicion that the nature of this realm is not what has been described.

[01:42:14] And so when I think about like UFOs, for example, like actual crafts, I don't believe in them or not believe in them, but what makes most sense to me is knowing that our perception only allows for a very small sliver of reality known as visible light. And that it's been scientifically proven that there's a wide spectrum of dimensions that we can't perceive in a normal waking state.

[01:42:40] So it makes sense to me that if there are crafts that are appearing in the sky, they're shifting in and out of dimensions that enable us to see them with the naked eye through the visible light spectrum, a. B, that if what we've been taught about Antarctica is false and that there is some enclosure that keeps all the water in the planet in place, which is repeatable, right here you got a glass of water.

[01:43:10] Water needs a container. It always sinks its own level, etc. That perhaps what we consider to be outer space, like a craft coming in from the stars and Mars and the moon and all that space, that maybe crafts are, a, interdimensional, but maybe one of the dimensions they come from is outside of the bounds that we've been taught on the map of the earth and that they're coming from the outer lands, not so much outer space or space that's outside of what we've been taught is the confines of Earth and where our maps end.

[01:43:44] And you just search flat Earth and Antarctica on TikTok, and your shit will be tripping for months. But that's an interesting idea that maybe there are outer lands that there are other sentient beings living on, and sometimes they cross over and come here. Did you find any evidence to support any of that on any level?

[01:44:05] Mark: I have only recently come across this argument of outer space, meaning an outer territory. So I was not aware of that when I wrote the book. And what I say in the book is it's unclear who the beings are, where they even come from, because there's a whole line of thought that these are time travelers from the future.

[01:44:20] And even using the term them is misleading because it's not a uniform thing. There's so many different species people report. They have an ability to shapeshift. John Mack said this, the aliens appear to be consummate shapeshifters. That's what he's hearing from everyone. Meaning they can change their form. And we hear this in different traditions. Like in the Indian tradition, they have nagas, which are serpents that can transform into humans, I believe. So this is a--

[01:44:41] Luke: Like Hillary Clinton. Going into the David Icke territory there. Sorry, carry on.

[01:44:46] Mark: Yeah, some of that. David Icke references Credo Mutwa, who was head of an African tribe. In their tradition, they talk about the lizard beings, the reptilian beings. So I reference that sort of thing because all over the world, tribes have different-- they all talk about the sky people and the star gods in various indigenous cultures.

[01:45:05] So the craft themselves, who's operating the craft? That's a question. What's their origin? And I think the answer might vary because it might be different types of civilizations. And where they come from, that's a big question. Because number one, they might say, I'm from Pleiades, if they communicate with someone. But how do you know that for sure? How can you validate?

[01:45:24] But they do talk about that. And then also the craft themselves, they do things that are strange. They disappear. They go in 90-degree right angles. So they do things that we can't do with our current technology. Some people speculate that what people see are just advanced military technologies, and it could be the case for some of them.

[01:45:42] Richard Dolan is probably the best UFO historian I've come across. And I referenced his work in the book because he calls out historically some of the sightings that have been very anomalous. So I think something's going on. There's one that's popping in my head right now, the Rendlesham Forest case where there was a craft and then members of the government, might have been military, went out to see it, and there were hieroglyphs on it.

[01:46:07] And one of the men, I think his name is Jim Penniston-- I hope I got that right-- he touches the craft, and then he takes out his notebook-- I think it's the same night-- and starts writing down a bunch of zeros and ones, like he had to get it out. Years later, he was on the set of a documentary, and someone said, turn back to that page.

[01:46:26] He was with a journal, maybe 25 years later or something. Go back to that page. That's binary code. We need to see what that is. So they decoded it and it corresponds with different coordinates on earth, significant coordinates. And I believe some are where pyramids are located. That's a bizarre-- there are cases like this. That book has a lot of weird stuff.

[01:46:51] Luke: That's wild.

[01:46:52] Mark: And I just saw enough of it over and over again. Another one's phantom pregnancies, women who cannot correlate a pregnancy to a sexual encounter, including lesbians. And then the pregnancy goes away after a few months every time.

[01:47:06] And the gynecologists say, well, your body must have just absorbed it. But John Mack's work talks about this too, that in the abduction cases, there's a common theme of hybridization of humans and these other intelligences where they actually take sperm and eggs of humans-- I know this sounds insane-- on the craft. But he's seeing this over and over again.

[01:47:25] And sometimes mothers are reunited with their hybrid children on the craft, and they start to remember that. So you wonder, are people being inseminated and not realize it? Now, what makes us a little more believable is that we have to think about the nature of memory. And what comes up over and over again in these sorts of encounters is missing time, number one, and then just memories that are somehow buried.

[01:47:49] And they can be reactivated. Sometimes they come up spontaneously, and people don't know if they're true, but also hypnosis seems to be able to unlock them. And then even memories that we have can be manipulated by higher beings. They're known as screen memories.

[01:48:02] And the classic case, Mike Clelland talks about this, where people thought they saw an animal. Often it's an owl, could be a deer or something else. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the PCR test, he talks about encountering a glowing raccoon.

[01:48:16] Luke: Really?

[01:48:17] Mark: And then he had missing time. But what happens when people go under hypnosis and they say, I saw this owl on the side of the road, and then a few hours later I was home. It was midnight when I saw the owl, and all of a sudden it was 4:00 AM. I don't know what happened. They go under hypnosis, and the hypnotist says, I want you to try to go up to that owl and touch it.

[01:48:34] And they say, hmm, that's not an owl. That's actually a gray alien. Screen memory. So implanted memories. The point here is that what we remember might not even be the truth. So it's possible that many of us have had contact and/or abduction experiences, but the memories are wiped.

[01:48:51] And this also relates, and I think is corroborated by work on mind control and things like MKUltra, where multiple personalities can be created and one personality isn't even aware of the others. So there are parts of the mind that we might assume to be true of a singular personality where we remember enough. That might be a false assumption where there's more than we actually remember. And if that's true, then contact is critically important because it could be affecting all of us directly in ways we don't understand.

[01:49:19] Luke: Holy shit. That's mind blowing. You just reminded me of something wherein there have been cases reported where someone has a multiple personality, what they would term to be disorder. I don't know if it's necessarily disorder, but someone has multiple personalities, and for example, one of the personalities, their prominent main personality, is allergic to shellfish, and their other personality is not. So it's like, dude, there's so many things here that we will never begin to even understand about the nature of reality. Fascinating stuff. All right, let's carry on here.

[01:50:01] Oh, this is going to be a good one. And then that's great. Your most recent will take us out and we can get into the fallacies of viruses and all that. But this one, An End to the Upside Down Reset, and so The Leftist Vision for Society Under the "Great Reset"-and How It Can Fool Caring People into Supporting Harmful Causes. Oh my God.

[01:50:24] One thing I did notice about your books too is your references are insane. There's a hundred pages of citations here. By the way, for those listening, some of these sounds out there, you didn't just pull it out of your backend. One of the things I've observed in the past few years is the weaponization of empathy and compassion, where you see these authoritarian power structures preying on good people and enlisting them as enforcers of their agenda under the guise of the greater good.

[01:51:06] This idea of collectivism that has a bunch of different names. You can call it socialism, Marxism, communism, etc., but it's basically collectivism. If you take a caring person and basically imprint their psyche with one version of collectivism, you can get them to do the bidding of ultimately an agenda that doesn't serve the collective or the individual. It's so diabolical. I'm excited to hear your perspective on that.

[01:51:34] Mark: Yeah. That's what motivated the book. I was seeing it everywhere, and in the second book, An End to Upside Down Living, one of the 10 approaches to living that I wrote was compassion with discernment. At the time, I didn't realize how important that would be, but now I think it's central because of what you just described.

[01:51:49] The world is being guided by what they think is compassionate, many people, not everyone, but many people are being driven by that, but not discerning the wolf in sheep's clothing. And part of what, if I were to summarize the issue with certain aspects of the spiritual movement, is that there's a subconscious belief that evil is easy to identify. Evil exists, but look, there are mass murderers out there. There are serial killers.

[01:52:11] Look at that person on TV. That person so mean and rude and says racist things. That's obvious and in your face. What they think about less is the fact that you could have someone that seems really, really nice and make something sound good, but it's actually going to lead to evil. It's a more insidious kind.

[01:52:27] And to me that's the Great Reset. And that's where I use this term leftism, which is distinct from liberalism. Leftism is a more extreme version, which we can talk about, but looking at political psychologists, the left in general is driven by compassion. And so things that sound compassionate on the surface, especially if someone's really busy and doesn't have time to look into it, might be more appealing.

[01:52:51] And that leads us to the Great Reset, which was announced a few months after lockdown in 2020. It was Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, and then Prince Charles. John Kerry was talking about it. So some very big names. Time for a great reset. And then Schwab and his colleague, Thierry Malleret, came out with a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. And then there was a sequel. I believe it's called The Great Narrative.

[01:53:13] Luke: I can't believe these guys telegraph what their plan is. It's crazy. And people just ignore it. I mean, except people like you.

[01:53:21] Mark: It's all there. It's in a book, but it's not couched as something nefarious. First of all, the language is obtuse, and that's why I wanted to write a book to summarize in a more concise fashion, what are the areas that they're talking about for society, but it's all about making society better.

[01:53:35] And some of it actually sounds good, and they talk about better health and things like that, which are good, but the veneer of compassion is the danger. So the first half of this book on the Great Reset goes through the psychology of this compassion-focused thinking and psychological biases that can lead people to overlook the truth and then gets into what the Great Reset is.

[01:53:57] And I divided it into six categories. And the Great Reset is a reshaping of society. So this is a sociological examination, and I categorize it in these six areas: culture, politics, economics, environment, i.e., climate, technology, and metaphysics, and show what they say and how it's dangerous. That's what the book is.

[01:54:20] Luke: What is the plan? I've not read Klaus Schwab's book, so I'm prejudging it as diabolical. A, who elected these motherfers to begin with? How did they get any say? When you look at him or Bill Gates or any of these people that are creating policy that affects millions and millions of people and they have no credentials with which to do so and have not been elected and somehow have risen to have such power, that's disconcerting to say the least. But what is the plan of the WEF and the Great Reset?

[01:54:58] Mark: Well, you're right that it's an unelected body, but many people who have been through the Young Global Leaders Program of the World Economic Forum are in governments and corporations all over the world.

[01:55:07] Luke: Right. So like when he said we penetrate the cabinets.

[01:55:09] Mark: He said it.

[01:55:11] Luke: He puts his people in positions of power.

[01:55:12] Mark: So their ethos. That's why it's important. Because some people would say like, Mark, why would you worry about this? This is just a group of powerful people, but these are not the governments. These are not the politicians. But politicians are being clearly influenced by this.

[01:55:26] Basically, the Great Reset is about more government power, consolidating power, getting rid of free markets, and instead having things like what Klaus Schwab calls stakeholder capitalism and ESG, environmental, social, and governance, so ways to actually steer the economy, which is away from a free market, moving us toward, basically a different kind of human.

[01:55:53] So the metaverse and transhumanism, that sort of talk, but it's always couched in a more positive way. And then also the right and the ability of governments and authorities to consolidate power and really weaponize it when there's a perceived emergency, whether it's COVID-19, something medical, or climate.

[01:56:09] And climate's a huge part of the Great Reset, that this is the biggest emergency and that we need to get together so that we can stop this. And that means taking away people's rights, telling them how much they can travel, their CO2 emissions, what they can eat. So it becomes authoritarian.

[01:56:22]  And then the last one is the metaphysics, which to me is the glaring omission of the Great Reset. There's a presumption of materialism in it, even though it's not explicitly stated. Yuval Noah Harari, who's an author and one of the spokesman of the World Economic Forum or an advisor to it, he talks about the notion that there is a spirit or a soul that that's over.

[01:56:43] So there's that undercurrent in many people associated with the World Economic Forum. They're not talking about a spiritual revolution, which from my lens, that's where I started on this journey. If we're going to have a reset, let's learn about consciousness and who and what we are. That's not part of the Great Reset. So ultimately, I see it as steering society in a negative direction in line with the dark side of the spiritual war.

[01:57:06] That's what this is to me. It's the most current iteration. There probably have been other iterations in the past, but all of a sudden we had an emergency that acted as the impetus for, okay, now we can reset and enact all this stuff. That sounds really nice on the surface because, of course, if we just get together and take away some rights, you're going to be protected. And we're seeing how important that is with COVID. It's going to be really important with climate. We're going to be safer if we do this. That's the messaging.

[01:57:29] Luke: And you are an uncaring person if you don't comply. And therefore, if you're a good person, you have to become basically citizen enforcement of your neighbor who's not in compliance. And you're a good person if you get the bad people to comply.

[01:57:47] Mark: Exactly. It's for the common good. For the greater good.

[01:57:49] Luke: Yeah. Whenever you hear it's for the greater good, run. Wow, that's so interesting. Because you hear stuff about these groups, and sometimes it seems like, oh, it's conspiracy theory territory, and are they really going to do anything?

[01:58:03] But then, as we've seen in the past few years, oh, they're doing it. And if they are scare tactics and trauma-based mind control using a supposed virus, which we can get into next, if that doesn't work, it's not like they just hang up their coats and like, ah, we tried. Let's all just go back to living. No, they're already planning the next thing.

[01:58:25] And the climate one is so insidious and evil because any thinking, feeling human cares about the planet in which we live. It's like, well, yeah, the environment, who's against the environment? We are the environment.

[01:58:41] And the weaponization of that one is really terrifying. And how I see that it's just complete and utter bullshit is because, take pollution. I would say I'm against pollution. I don't litter. I try to use all organic stuff and all that. I recycle. But when certain countries that wield a lot of economic power, like China, for example, are completely left out of the critiques of CO2 emissions and stuff, it makes you wonder.

[01:59:15] When wireless technologies that are decimating the bee population, the insect population, birds' ability to navigate. When you're looking up in the sky and you see unnatural clouds in tic-tac toe patterns all day long in every NATO country in the world, and no one's talking about that. Or now we're seeing they're starting to admit to the spraying in the skies, but they're saying it's to protect the environment.

[01:59:40] It's like there are so many holes in that story of what's actually being done to protect the environment versus what's being done to exert more control over the human population it becomes pretty obvious.

[01:59:53] Mark: Right. And it pulls on compassion and also fear that this is an extinction level issue that we need to worry about. But most of those predictions, they're based on models, and models are models. They're not death definitive predictors of the future. We saw the COVID models. They were completely wrong about the death estimates.

[02:00:11] And we've seen historically the climate predictions have been wrong many, many times. And I list a number of them where they said, by this date, this is going to happen. Didn't happen. Great Barrier Reef's going to be done. And then there's an article saying it's flourishing more than ever. Polar bears. The predictions have been wrong over and over.

[02:00:26] And then policies being determined on the basis of these predictions which come from models and they're treated as fact rather than just predictions based on models. And we can barely predict the weather in one location in two weeks.

[02:00:39] Luke: Right. But we're going to tell you what's happening 10 years from now, the sea levels rising and all that. I think the thing that's really disturbing about the fake climate change agenda is that it causes many people who become aware of its fallacy to then just discount the issues involving the environment that we do need to pay attention to.

[02:01:04] So you might have some hardcore right winger that realizes that the official narrative is fake, therefore they don't care about pouring a bunch of Roundup in their creek, in their backyard. You know what I mean? So it's like there are major issues with our ecology that I think now are going to be ignored because the issues that are being emphasized are not actually based in science and legitimate analysis.

[02:01:28] And so it's like some people are just throwing the baby out with the bath water and thinking we have nothing to worry about when there are things we need to be concerned about, but they're not the things we're being told` to be concerned about. Which pisses me off because I love the planet that I live on, and I want to do everything I can to be a steward of the planet. So that to me is just even more evil because it's something that we all innately care about and it's being weaponized against us.

[02:01:56] So speaking of models, all right, we're on number six here. An End to Upside Down Medicine: Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines—And Why Consciousness Is Needed for a New Paradigm of Health. So speaking about models, if you were to tell the average person that the COVID-19 virus, as we know it doesn't exist, they would say, yes, it does. And you'd say, why? Well, because I saw it on TV. What do you mean you saw it? Well, I saw a picture of it.

[02:02:22] It's a computer-generated basically mockup of what they determined this virus to be. And I don't know a lot about the germ theory versus terrain theory, but I have done a couple shows on it with Alec Zeck and Dr. Andrew Kaufman, were two, where we touched on that. We'll put those in the show notes, again, at lukestorey.com/markgober. But what did you discover about the history of virology and the nature of disease as we currently hold it?

[02:02:56] Mark: Well, I wrote this one in 2023, so under a year ago. And prior to that, I'd heard people like Andy Kaufman talk about the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has not been discovered and isolated, and that actually no virus has been. So I'd heard it, but I just never dug into it. It wasn't until Alec Zeck actually, he turned me onto it when I was at a conference with him, Courtney Turner's conference in Tennessee, Rebels for a Cause, last year.

[02:03:22] And then he allowed me to participate in the End of Covid, which is still available at the endofcovid.com. It's a library of, I don't know, a hundred plus hours of stuff related to health and the weaponization of health. So I was speaking, actually not about viruses. I was speaking about the Great Reset and voluntarisms, and political stuff.

[02:03:39] But when the End of Covid came out, because I was a participant, I had access and I started watching the other videos, I said, oh, this is really important. Oh, no, I hope this isn't true.

[02:03:48] Luke: Big old red pill down the gullet.

[02:03:50] Mark: So I said, there's got to be a hole in this. They have to have isolated it. And of course they've isolated a virus. And it led me down the path of looking at the history of infectious diseases more broadly. And that helped me to understand this more and actually become more comfortable with it because historically the word virus was a poison.

[02:04:12] And it wasn't until the 1930s that the electron microscope was invented and wasn't used in more widespread ways for decades after. But prior to that, they couldn't have even seen something as small as a virus is believed to be. Louis Pasteur, when he was working with rabies, he didn't see a rabies virus. He said, well, I can't see it. There must be something there. And in the modern era, we have a very specific definition of a virus.

[02:04:34] It's protein-cased genetic material that gets inside of a host cell, replicates, causes disease in the host, can be transmitted from person to person. Very, very specific. And it wasn't until the 1950s that the "evidence" for that or the rationale became apparent. 1953, Watson and Crick's double helix structure of DNA paper came out.

[02:04:56] So all of a sudden there was this mystery cause of disease previously. There must be a poison that's going from person to person. Now we had genetics. There was a genetic explanation for it, potentially, combined with the discovery of bacteria phages, which happened around the same time. In 1969, Nobel Prize was awarded to work on bacteria phages, and the last sentence of it says, the bacteria phage is a model for how viruses work more broadly.

[02:05:20] So the bacteria phage is an entity that's believed to be a parasite for bacteria exclusively. And pictures of it that you can look up online, they're very similar to what some virus pictures look like.

[02:05:33] Luke: Are any of the virus pictures real pictures, or are they all renderings?

[02:05:37] Mark: Some are renderings, but some are under electron microscopes, but they're from unpurified samples. So it's not known that what's seen under the microscope is actually a virus. And this gets into the methodology's issues. And 1954 is when this started, Enders and People study. Enders won a Nobel Prize for something else later that year.

[02:05:57] So this very prominent guy was writing a paper on virus isolation. And this term isolation is really where the core of the debate lies, because most people think of isolation as the dictionary definition, which means to isolate from other things. So Dr. Tom Cowan uses this analogy. You have a toolbox and a bunch of stuff in it. You want to isolate the hammer. If you want to study it and characterize it, you take it out. You separate it from everything else.

[02:06:20] You'd want to do that theoretically. If there's this disease-causing entity, you'd want to isolate it and then show that it causes disease rather than something else. Because if you don't isolate it from a sample, then there's other stuff there that could be the cause of the results that you see.

[02:06:35] Therefore, this is the real problem. You don't have an independent variable in the study. You don't have an independent variable, then you don't know the effects that you see, where they're coming from. And this gets back to the 1954 study, which I'm just going to summarize at a very high level, but anyone can read the paper, and then subsequent papers follow this.

[02:06:55] This is the gold standard method of virus isolation. They take fluids from a person who's sick. In the 1954 paper was a measles patient. Take fluids from the person, and those fluids might be partially filtered, but it's not just the virus ever. And they're not looking using an electron microscope of that to see just a virus.

[02:07:14] But they take that sample, put it in what's called a cell culture, which is a soup of material that has very toxic stuff in it, antibiotics, monkey kidney cells, a whole bunch of stuff. When they take the filtered fluids from the sick person, put it in the cell culture soup, they find cells break down.

[02:07:32] Therefore, there was a virus. It's called the cytopathic effect, which is the breakdown of cells. There are many problems with this. Number one, if you don't have an isolated virus, maybe the cellular breakdown came from other stuff in the sick person. Because you're dealing with a sick person that probably has all kinds of cellular material in there. Who knows if that's causing cellular breakdown?

[02:07:52] But also you have a cell culture, a soup of material that is toxic on its own. Maybe cells would break down if you didn't add anything from a sick person. These controls are not done typically. Sometimes the studies will talk about a mock infection, but they don't describe what it is.

[02:08:08] So the two major complaints from the no virus camp or the virus skeptics is you don't have studies with an independent variable and you don't have proper controls. There are efforts to do more of these controls. So Stefan Lanka, who's a virologist, ran some studies where he didn't put anything in the cell culture and found cell breakdown.

[02:08:24] And of course, the results can vary depending on how much of a certain antibiotic you have. So we need more of these studies to really test what would cause cells to break down. But he also added yeast RNA to the cell culture soup, and cells broke down. So something that's not viral. Therefore, we need more studies on this. But the traditional method is not actually isolating a virus.

[02:08:45] Now, this gets to your point about what's under the microscope. They're looking at a cell culture. That's not just the virus. It's got other stuff in it. So you might find things that are morphologically, meaning the way they look, is similar, but that's because you have a person with similar symptoms. So maybe their body's having a similar reaction.

[02:09:02] Same thing with the genetic sequencing. If you don't have an isolated sample, what are you sequencing? You're taking a bunch of genetic material that's common to a person with a similar illness, but it might not be viral, and yet they use the term viral. So anytime the term viral is used over and over again, it's known as the reification fallacy.

[02:09:20] It's basically presuming this thing has been established to be true, viral genome, viral morphology. But it's like you haven't even established this. So the origin, the provenance of this, whatever the study is, is not known to be viral in origin. This is the problem with everything. Or even an antiviral drug.

[02:09:40] I get asked about this a bunch because they'll say, well, the drug works. That doesn't mean the mechanism of action is known. So chemotherapy and radiation can work on cancer, but it's not getting to the mechanism of why the cancer is there. So I had two doctors read this book before it was published.

[02:09:56] One was Dr. Andy Kaufman, another's Dr. Mark Bailey from New Zealand, who's written a famous paper that's available online called a Farewell to Virology, if your audience is interested. So we were going back and forth as they were helping me fine tune it. I said, how would you explain antivirals to people? Because they do work.

[02:10:13] And he says they're basically anti-metabolites. So they end up having the effects of helping certain symptoms, but they're not working because they act on a virus that has never been established. So all of these things that we would say, well, it must be because of a virus, there's an alternative explanation.

[02:10:30] And this gets to a broader point that's core to my thinking right now, which I hadn't solidified until recently. We do this in virology and probably every other area of science. We observe things. We then create a model to explain the observations. And that model almost becomes like a law. We assume that model to be true.

[02:10:49] And then when a new observation comes in, we retrofit the observation to fit the model rather than saying, hmm, maybe the model's wrong. And this observation can be explained through other means. Same thing goes with virology. All this stuff, the virus hypothesis, that's one explanation of this intracellular parasite causing all this stuff.

[02:11:09] There are many other explanations for why people get sick. You have a lot of people, let's say in the same place around the same time, similar symptoms. People say you caught something. Well, really, that's in animation we've created in our mind of this microscopic protocol, getting from one person to the next causing symptoms.

[02:11:28] The symptoms we see is because they're breaking down the cells or something. No one's ever seen a live virus, by the way, because an electron microscope works with dead material, not in the host environment of the body, by the way. But they have to slice it up and use resin. They don't see any particle doing all the things a virus is said to do.

[02:11:48] So no one's ever seen it in motion going from person to person, replicating in the cell. They've only seen static images rather than live ones. But going back to my point about observation, we had this hypothesis in the animation in our mind about microscopic particle going from person to person.

[02:12:03] What else could explain why people got sick in the same place around the same time? Was there a similar toxin they were exposed to, or was there similar radiation, EMFs? Were they exposed to a similar psychological trauma? Is there an energetic resonance that relates to consciousness that we don't see that mimics a germ-based contagion?

[02:12:20] The point is there are many possibilities. And in order to figure out which one is correct, you have to test all of them. And actually, with the contagion model, that's a whole other rabbit hole of actually testing contagion properly. You need an isolated virus to do that first to see if that's causing disease.

[02:12:34] But we often, and especially in the medical community, are thinking of the germ paradigm, first and foremost, and then putting all of our money toward that rather than looking at toxicity and these other, what sound like more esoteric explanations. But as I dug into this, every alleged infectious disease, arguably, has a non-germ-based cause potentially, but it just hasn't been studied enough.

[02:12:58] And I want caveat here before I pause. The no virus position does not dispute that bacteria exist. Bacteria are much larger than viruses are alleged to be, and they've been seen before. They've been isolated. There's no question about that. The question from the terrain theory perspective, which is the counter to germ theory, germ theory is the idea that microbes can cause disease on healthy tissue.

[02:13:18] Terrain theory is that that's not true. So bacteria exist, but they're the cleanup crew that emerges in the body when there's too much toxicity in a certain place. They will decompose dead and dying tissue. So you might have an "infection," but it's like the firefighters that were there to put out the fire. They're a byproduct of an underlying toxicity under the terrain model. And then, with regard to the terrain, people would say the viruses don't even exist, or they haven't been shown to exist.

[02:13:52] Luke: Wild. This topic to me is so fascinating and it's a difficult one to get your head around because we've all been so programmed to think a certain way. It's like when I was referring earlier to the fallacy of people going to the moon. If you question that, the rebuttal is often, well, how could everyone be in on it?

[02:14:20] So you're telling me all the astronauts, everyone that works for NASA, everyone that works on all these space programs, every astrophysicist, etc., they're all lying? And the rebuttal to-- the contagion myth is a myth. It's like, well, what about all these brilliant scientists, biologists, virologists, and all these people? They're all in on it?

[02:14:43] And I think that's the wall that we hit up against. And it makes it more difficult to question our assumptions because then we would have to question everyone else who's ever towed the line for that particular method of thinking or perspective. But it becomes more viable, I think, when you think about the compartmentalization of information.

[02:15:08] That if there's a hypothesis or a theory or even an event that isn't real or isn't true, if there's a precedent that's set for it that's robust enough to stick, then an entire model can be created on that that is also fallacious and is supported by a bunch of very well-meaning, very intelligent people that just aren't looking at the suppositions at the beginning, at the nexus of this thought or idea or model.

[02:15:38] And so therefore, it never gets questioned because you're a heretic. How dare you question all these brilliant virologists all over the world? It's like, how do you ever break that paradigm when you have so many well-meaning and highly intelligent people who have spent their entire lives studying something on a false premise?

[02:15:56] Mark: This was a hurdle for me too.

[02:15:59] Luke: Right? It's like, how do you even make a dent in a paradigm when there's so much inertia behind it?

[02:16:06] Mark: What I think is that most people are unaware of this, most professionals, especially doctors, because they're not virologists. They're learning about how to treat symptoms rather than the fundamentals of how all this came about. But even virologists, their gold standard is the 1954 Enders and People study.

[02:16:23] And this actually really helped me. The freedom of information requests that have been submitted, over 200 organizations in 40 countries have replied to Christine Massey and her colleagues, where the freedom of information request was very simple. Show me an isolated virus. And they explain what that means.

[02:16:41] They mean not passing it through a cell culture, all these things. The virus by itself. And the answer is, we don't have any results. Or that's not possible in virology for X, Y, and Z. So you have these government agencies over and over again. They can't produce it. And I'm sitting there thinking, you should have thousands of papers to clearly show.

[02:17:00] And sometimes people will reference, oh, I just found one on the internet. Isolation of this virus. There. It's done. But then look at the methodology. How'd they isolate it? It's using the virology definition of isolation. It's not actually having an independent variable over and over again. So it's much easier probably, I'm just guessing, for those in the field to say, well, this is the gold standard.

[02:17:18] We're going to follow it. It's been established. We've been doing this for decades. And then those who question it, like Stefan Lanka, it's a damaging thing for one's career. You're going up against a huge industry. Think about all the drugs that are created that are antiviral and all the research that's going in to try to find a cure for this virus that hasn't been isolated.

[02:17:37] And we're just talking about COVID primarily. It's all of them have the same issues. And then the danger of it for their career to speak up and say, hmm, actually we're not doing science properly. We're not following the scientific method. You can't prove a negative ever, but I feel confident saying that viruses haven't been established using the scientific method because they don't have independent variables or proper controls.

[02:18:03] I feel like that's a safe statement to make. And freedom of information requests have been filed also on the topic of controls, the topic of whether bacteria cause disease or whether the cleanup crews-- so there are these things that are happening behind the scenes. And when I see government agencies, I can read the request. This is what they asked for. And the government says, we don't have any records, over and over again. That, to me, is powerful.

[02:18:25] Luke: That's shady. I think another hurdle to overcome with understanding this line of thinking is what you mentioned earlier. Well, if it's not this making people sick, if I walk into a room and four people have the flu and then I walk out and now I have those same symptoms, well, what caused that? I think this is where you get into the mind-body connection and no SIBO and placebo and things like women sinking their menstrual cycles. Or if I yawn right now, it's almost guaranteed you and Jarrod are going to yawn.

[02:19:00] There's some cohesion energetically between different species, including humans, that seems to, I don't know, maybe we all kind of start to detox at the same time. Or as you said, there maybe is a toxin like mold in the environment, or we're living under a 5G tower, and so how did we all get sick at the same time?

[02:19:20] There's some other influences that we're unaware of that aren't really being rationally explored because we have this existing paradigm that everyone's comfortable with, and there's trillions and trillions of dollars being made upon it and careers being built and reputations and education centers, and there's this massive infrastructure that is leaning on this house of cards, so no one wants to touch the first card, right?

[02:19:43] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[02:19:45] Luke: But if you look at things, and you mentioned consciousness is needed for a new paradigm in health, what's your perspective of the power of belief, like Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief, spontaneous remissions? You mentioned the woman with cancer that had a spiritual experience of sorts and came back and the tumor's gone. What are your thoughts on what some of the things that could be causing us to get sick in unison with similar symptoms if it's not contagion?

[02:20:15] Mark: I want to preface this by saying there is a logical fallacy that people fall into, myself included, which is what you said. Well, if it's not a virus, then how do you explain it? And if you can't explain it, it must be a virus. That's a fallacy. These are independent exercises. Exercise one is, can we invalidate or prove the viral hypothesis?

[02:20:34] And the problem is people are trying to, and there's no evidence for it. That's step one. Trying to find the replacement, the alternative, that's a separate thing, which depends on who you talk to. Some people say, for the sake of the debate, we should only focus on the viral hypothesis and not even talk about alternatives.

[02:20:50] But in the book, I do talk about a lot of alternatives. I have a chapter that goes through many alleged infectious diseases, polio, Spanish flu, rabies, and just say, this is the conventional thinking. Here are the papers saying they haven't isolated the virus. Here were other things happening. So with regard to polio, believed to be a viral thing, DDT, which is a pesticide, and LED arsenate, there was an increase in pesticide use around the time of spikes in polio cases.

[02:21:16] I'll say "polio" because really we're just talking about symptoms that we've labeled polio. So these symptoms were emerging, but they could be correlated with the use of pesticides that cause similar symptoms. That's just one example. And this thinking should be applied to every area, and from a more conventional perspective, toxicity, EMFs.

[02:21:34] But then the second half of the book gets into consciousness more than metaphysical. And the problem here is that allopathic medicine, because scientific disciplines are materialists, including medicine, they're not thinking about the metaphysical and a near-death experience and a shift in consciousness and/or energy making tumors disappear-- Anita Moorjani.

[02:21:51] Spontaneous remissions, you mentioned. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has an annotated bibliography of just case after case of these spontaneous remissions that are impossible to describe using allopathic assumptions.

[02:22:05] If we get into the realm of psychokinesis, I mentioned that in my first book. There's a whole chapter on this mind-matter interactions. Some of the classic studies on this that are in the category of Six Sigma, more than a billion to one against chance, use random number generators.

[02:22:20] So these are just machines that spit out zeros and ones in a totally random fashion. And if there's no effect on the machine, then it should over time approach 50% ones and 50% zeros, because it's random. What the experimenters have asked people to do, and this has been done by many people, but also at Princeton University, there was a lab run by the former dean of engineering for almost 30 years.

[02:22:42] It shut down in 2007, but they were doing studies like this. And actually, I was on campus and didn't realize that they were doing it. It was so controversial. But they ask people, they'll say, hey, Luke, I want you to try to make this machine produce more ones and zeros using your mind, and people are able to do this.

[02:22:58] They actually find performance changes when people try too hard. So initially people will do well in terms of being able to alter the zeros and ones, and then they start thinking about it, the performance goes down. So there's something about being able to exercise these abilities and being relaxed and being in a state of joy or just non-stressed.

[02:23:16] That's a side note. But the implication here that people are able to alter these machines, which statistically, that's what the results show, it's not 50-50. It's not 90-10. It's a small deviation from 50-50. But again, statistically speaking, there will be more ones than zeros when a lot of people try this.

[02:23:33] And what does that tell you about mind-matter interaction? It's showing the human mind is impacting a physical system without physical contact. Human body's physical. Well, there's a question about what's physical, but that's different issue. It's apparently physical. And so what does that mean for our mindset and health? And if we're in a perpetual state of fear like we were, and the media was pumping so much fear around the everything with COVID, what can that do to the body?

[02:24:01] And then also collectively there was, it's called the Global Consciousness Project, where these random number generator machines were, they still are, all over the world, so all the time they're generating zeros and ones. And the researchers look at the behavior of these machines when there's a major global event. So 9/11, Princess Diana's death, something that has a high emotional charge and would affect a lot of people where their consciousness would be directed in a similar direction in theory. And they find that the machines behave non-randomly around these events.

[02:24:32] Luke: Wow.

[02:24:33] Mark: So it's collective alterations of the physical world. If a lot of people are believing something or thinking something emotionally, we see a shift. Again, it's very small in these studies, but it's happening to some degree. Now, the implications for health, that just blows away conventional thinking.

[02:24:50] Luke: This is reminding me of some experiments that have been done over time where you have a group of people meditate in a city for a set amount of time and then the crime statistics become lower for that particular period of time in which they're meditating.

[02:25:12] I can't cite one, but these are things that I've just read over the years that are not from some hippie in a cave in Sedona, but legit stuff that is categorized in the unexplainable category. It's like a bunch of people setting a level of intention in a certain place and there's empirical evidence in the physical world to support that what they did had an impact on it.

[02:25:34] Mark: It's known as the Maharishi Effect.

[02:25:36] Luke: Oh really?

[02:25:37] Mark: And there's a book called An Antidote to Violence, which came out a few years ago, and it aggregates, I believe, 20 peer-reviewed.

[02:25:42] Luke: There you go. Thank you. See, I need guys like you to remember the stats I'm just like, yeah, I remember thing, and I chalked it as legit and just filed it away, but I couldn't cite it, so thank you.

[02:25:51] Mark: Yeah, people have studied this. So collective consciousness seems to be a real thing. And from the metaphysical framework we talked about before, where consciousness is fundamental, totally makes sense. If you have a lot of whirlpools focused in the same direction, it's going to affect the whole stream.

[02:26:05] Luke: Epic. Man, thank you so much for being the kind of thinker and feeler that you are. I have my hands full with all of your freaking six books. Slow down for a minute so I can catch up on your books. Do you have these on audiobook?

[02:26:19] Mark: Yes, all of them.

[02:26:20] Luke: Yes. Okay, I'll be able to take them in much faster. Man, what a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for making the time to come over here. I'm really glad we got to connect. I think when we were connected, I texted Alec and was like, is this guy cool? He's like, yeah, do it. Do a podcast with him. He's amazing. And now I'm like, oh, I can see why. So I'm so fascinated by your way of thinking.

[02:26:42] I love people like you that think outside the box but are highly intellectual and you can really back up some of the things that you're researching with evidence, which is not really how my mind works. So I love talking to someone like you that can go, yeah, that thing's right here. Boom. Okay. It helps to validate further curiosity and research.

[02:27:05] I want to put in a request-- well, two requests-- for your next books, even though you said you might be done. One is examining law. Law of the air, law of the land, the law of the sea, three broad categories. Because as we were talking about before, a lot to unpack there, and I think it could be hugely impactful for all of our societies around the world to have an understanding of how our rights are impacted by our lack of understanding of the law.

[02:27:35] The other one is something I've been just watching from the sidelines and haven't really gotten into, and this is suppressed history of fairly recent civilizations, Tartaria and all this business, the mud floods where you're seeing-- the world fairs. Have you looked into this stuff at all?

[02:27:53] Mark: Yeah, only a little bit.

[02:27:54] Luke: Yeah. Like the World Fair in Chicago, just these incredible structures, and the official story is like, oh, that was just made of cardboard for one weekend when everyone came out and then it's all gone. These buildings where you see there are levels and floors underneath the street level that were there and are now full of dirt, which was once mud. There seems to be a lot of, I don't know. We're not getting the whole story of the history of Western civilization and technologies that have been suppressed, free energy, all these stuff.

[02:28:28] These old cathedrals that had these ether capturing diodes and cathode and whatever. There's something there. I don't know what it is yet, but it's compelling enough to get my interest despite all the other things I'm interested in. And I think we share that. We're two people that really have a yearning to understand what the truth is, and there's definitely something there. I don't know what it is. So those are my two requests.

[02:28:50] Mark: Cool.

[02:28:51] Luke: Take them.

[02:28:52] Mark: I would love to know the answers to all those things too. At some point, I'm going to have to explore that.

[02:28:55] Luke: Yeah. Have you looked into that kind of hidden history, mud flood, Tartaria stuff?

[02:29:00] Mark: Only a little bit, but not enough to speak credibly on it. That's the more recent stuff. And then there's the older Graham Hancock type work, and then probably even older than that, which relates to the topic of contact too. And I'm curious about how much of it is human, as in this species, versus other intelligences too.

[02:29:16] Luke: Right, right. Me too. Well, keep seeking the truth, my friend. Where can people find your website, social media, and all that? And we'll put that in the show notes.

[02:29:24] Mark: My website, it's markgober.com. M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. All of my books are on Amazon in hard copy, Kindle, and Audible. I read the audibles myself.

[02:29:35] Luke: Wow.

[02:29:35] Mark: All of them, which is a tedious experience but also really good to do a last edit.

[02:29:40] Luke: I like when authors read their own books. That was the thing about a couple of those David Hawkins' audiobooks where a voiceover guy reading it, it's like, lacks the energy.

[02:29:51] Mark: Yeah. Because I know where to add intonation and I know what-- it's just different when someone else reads it. And my podcast series, Where Is My Mind?, is still available. Apple Podcast, Spotify, all the major players.

[02:30:04] Luke: Cool.

[02:30:04] Mark: Thank you so much, Luke, for having me, and thanks for all you do.

[02:30:07] Luke: Epic. Super fun. I can't wait to do it again.

[02:30:09] Mark: For sure.

TLS 561 Mark Gober

[00:00:01] Luke: Dude, you wrote six books?

[00:00:04] Mark: It's been a busy period.

[00:00:06] Luke: What the hell? Give me the timeline on-- and they're not six light books, by the way, for those listening. They're really complex and heavy topics that you get into in each book. Give me a timeline on book 1 to book 6, where we are now.

[00:00:22] Mark: Book 1 was written in the summer of 2017, but published in 2018, and book 6 was published in November of 2023.

[00:00:33] Luke: Oh, come on, dude. You got to be kidding me. That is just absolute insanity. And I speak as an emerging author who's now in the process of writing my first book. And oh my God, I had no idea what I was biting off now that I'm trying to chew it.

[00:00:51] Mark: Well, I feel like I was trained to do this unknowingly, looking back at my career academically. So I went to Princeton for undergrad where most of the departments require a senior thesis. So I had to write a thesis in college.

[00:01:02] And then professionally, I worked in investment banking and then strategy consulting where I was accustomed to presenting to boards of directors, senior management teams, where I had to take a ton of data in different areas, learn about it, become enough of an expert to explain it to people, and then simplify it for an audience that didn't have a long attention span.

[00:01:22] Luke: That makes perfect sense. And admittedly I haven't made it through your six books yet because you just brought five of them with you today. But from what I gather about your work, it really is a summation or an aggregate of really complex topics that seem to be boiled down in a way that allows you to express your worldview or your view on that particular topic in a way that's understandable and relatable.

[00:01:51] Mark: Part of what's happened every time is that I have my own paradigm shift where I learn about something and it rocks my world. And then I realize that I can't relate to most of the people around me anymore and I want to explain it to them for personal reasons so they can understand me. And then I realize also the implications beyond that. And then it turns into a book, basically, where I just summarize it so that people can have a starting point.

[00:02:11] Luke: Do you already have your next seventh book planned?

[00:02:14] Mark: I don't. I don't know if I'm going to write another one. And it's been this way every time where it will come in in a way that I can't always predict. So a new inspiration just emerges basically. And now I can feel the feeling internally. I can't really describe it, but I know. I'm like, oh, this is probably another book topic. Book 1 I didn't know because I wasn't planning on writing books at that point, but now I can sense it a bit more. So I'm just waiting to see what happens.

[00:02:39] Luke: I have a request, not that my request means anything. But based on some of the other topics that we're going to get into that you've been able to really explore and really turn on their heads, I would love for you to dive into the common law topic and do a deep dive research on that and emerge with a model that we can all understand, as we were talking about before recording. It's so complex, but I think there's so much value in that as a society for people that really desire to become free and not be fighting over political parties that essentially work for the same agenda.

[00:03:20] Mark: You're not the first person to make that request.

[00:03:21] Luke: Oh, cool.

[00:03:22] Mark: I actually don't know much aboard. I know the skeleton of it, but it's not something I've had a chance to dive into yet.

[00:03:29] Luke: Okay. Well, we're going to keep piling those requests on. All right. So your series of books, even though they're on different topics, have one thing in common, and that is the End to Upside Down blank. Okay, so the first one here is the End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life.

[00:03:49] I feel like we could do one 10-hour podcast just on that, but since that's the first one on our stack here, and that's something that's been so meaningful in my life as a sentient being who has the gift of awareness of life, of consciousness, and lived my whole life without knowing that, thinking that the brain was the boss and the be all end all of everything.

[00:04:13] Like my shirt says here, I wore this as an homage to you, don't believe everything you think. Many of us live our entire lives through the dictates of our programming and conditioning and the ideas that come seemingly from the mind and we don't know that there's any different. So maybe lead us off in your view on the role of the mind, the role of the brain, and how it pertains to consciousness.

[00:04:39] Mark: I'll give a short answer to that, and it might be helpful then to go through how I even arrived at that subject matter.

[00:04:44] Luke: Perfect.

[00:04:45] Mark: The short answer is I don't think the brain produces consciousness, but the brain is involved in the way that we experience life, almost like an antenna receiver or a filtering mechanism or a transducer, which has major implications for thinking about, well, if consciousness is not produced by the brain, then where is it coming from. And what's a human being if a human being is processing consciousness from the outside?

[00:05:07] And that was a radical shift for me to even think about, because before I started writing the book in the summer of 2017, it was the summer of 2016 when I was listening to podcasts. And at the time I was agnostic, atheist, materialist. I thought life was fundamentally meaningless and random and that we could try to create meaning, but it was just a rationalization.

[00:05:30] Luke: Wow.

[00:05:31] Mark: I thought that's what science was teaching us.

[00:05:33] Luke: You've come a long way.

[00:05:35] Mark: I was there.

[00:05:36] Luke: Writing books has been good for you, my friend.

[00:05:38] Mark: Yeah. Well, I would say the books are the result of my inner process. They come at the end.

[00:05:44] Luke: What do you think it is about you that creates this search for meaning, this search for objective truth?

[00:05:54] Mark: There's something innate in me that's always asked questions, but then maybe it was the life I was in. So I was in this very mainstream life where I was focused on just achievements and it felt like I was on a treadmill and going for the most prestigious things I could or the most challenging thing.

[00:06:13] So I was a competitive tennis player growing up. I was one of the captains of the tennis team at Princeton, a Division I program, which is very intense in addition to the academics there. And I wanted to get good grades. I wanted to do well in tennis. And then I went to investment banking in New York during the financial crisis.

[00:06:28] And then I went into a firm at Silicon Valley advising tech companies. And there was always the next thing in front of me that I was trying to achieve. And after a certain point, without having a deeper compass for why I was doing any of that, I hit a wall in many ways. So when some things in my personal and professional life didn't go the way I wanted, it was just harder and harder to handle those sorts of things without even knowing, well, what am I even doing here?

[00:06:50] Because we're all just going to die anyway. Why do the wins and losses actually matter? They don't matter. But I'm just going to keep going through life. So I was like a zombie at this point in 2016. And that's when podcasts were becoming a little bit bigger. I think yours started at that.

[00:07:07] Luke: Yeah, that was the year I started. So little did I know at that time that Orange Man being elected to run the United States Corporation would have such far reaching impacts and what a shit show would become from that point on. Which I still don't know if it was, I think, I suspect, the powers that be were always a shit show. It was more opaque then. I don't know, something started to crack open in the matrix of reality in 2016, and that incidentally is when I started my podcast.

[00:07:42] Mark: Right. So maybe something about that period because that's when it started for me.

[00:07:45] Luke: To that point, I think Orange Man did something really great for our society and he completely annihilated trust in the media. He did a lot of things that weren't great, but that was one really cool thing, and it helped open the door for independent media and long form conversations like the ones we're having here, which sounds like it had an impact on you too.

[00:08:07] Mark: Yeah, for sure. And I initially started listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast. A friend of mine forwarded me, I think it was Mark Andreessen or something, and I said, I can't believe this. You can listen to these smart people talk for hours.

[00:08:19] Luke: For free.

[00:08:20] Mark: For free. And there was just so much content. So I started listening to a bunch of Tim Ferriss and then I got into alternative health, and I was thinking about my own life. I'm like, well, maybe I should focus on health more. What can I do to just feel better psychologically? Because I feel pretty lost. And came across some alternative health shows, including Extreme Health Radio.

[00:08:37] Luke: Love that show.

[00:08:39] Mark: Awesome show.

[00:08:39] Luke: That was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to too. I still do. Still in my feed.

[00:08:43] Mark: Yeah, it's great. And so I was listening to episode after episode and I came across it. It was the next one in the queue, so I wasn't seeking this one out. And it was a woman named Laura Powers who talked about how she uses psychic abilities to help clients and working with interdimensional spirits and that sort of thing.

[00:09:01] And she was saying this in a serious way, and I just remember being confused, but then also she sounded genuine. Is she delusional? I don't think she's lying. But then she mentioned at the end of that show that she has her own podcast where she's interviewed other people, and it's called Healing Power.

[00:09:14] So I said, all right, I'm listening to podcasts. I'll check this out. I've got a really long drive from San Francisco to Silicon Valley every day for work, and there's traffic. So I just listened to her episodes, which were pretty short, and it was person after person describing a very similar thing. They weren't connected to each other, and they had this worldview that totally contradicted my own.

[00:09:31] And after a while I was like, wait a second. If there's 1% of truth to this, then I have to rethink my whole existence, and that means that I've been wrong my whole life, and that all the people I know around me, they don't know about this. Could we have missed something this big? Basically.

[00:09:47] And then I started to read books and read scientific papers and realized that there was general validity to this space that one might call spiritual. I don't love that word because it has certain connotations. I would've been triggered by that in 2016. But really, I think the nature of reality is inherently spiritual and science is showing us that.

[00:10:05] And that's the approach that I took. But I started off with various anomalies, so people claiming they can communicate with other worldly beings or people claiming they have telepathic abilities or remote viewing, which is the ability to perceive something with the mind that's far away in space and or time, which sounds insane.

[00:10:22] Luke: Which the military is on record doing.

[00:10:27] Mark: Yeah. Declassified documents from the US government, and the direct quote is, remote viewing is a real phenomenon. Implications are revolutionary. So I was coming across this stuff and got to the point where I just couldn't deny the accumulation of evidence. And it would be like I would take a few steps forward then a few steps back because I would learn about this stuff and realize the implications, and then I'd go to work and I'd have client projects to do, and I'd see the more worldly stuff, and I would forget about it and then say, wait a second. Could we possibly live in this world where there's much more that meets the eye?

[00:11:00] And then I started to tell friends about it, just living in San Francisco, meeting people for brunch or dinners and things like that. And I'd be like, hey, I'm looking into this topic or that topic. And most of the people were really interested in it. They just said, wow, I've never heard of this before. And people would even say to me, Mark, I'm still thinking about the conversation we had a few weeks ago. That's pretty wild, if any of that's true.

[00:11:24] I just wanted to keep researching, and I had this thought in the summer of 2017, which was a year after I began the journey, maybe I should put this into a book. And then I shut it down for a second and then I said, no, I should try to do this. Let's just see what happens. Because there's so much scientific evidence.

[00:11:38] Even though I'm still working in a more normal mainstream field, there's science here. This is not just my own thoughts. So what if I compiled the science just like I do in my day job and apply it to this general area? So that's the genesis of the book.

[00:11:55] Luke: Give us some more nuggets out of this around, I don't know, they're two different ways that people-- and there's a multitude of ways that we experience reality, but to just grossly generalize, you have someone like me that looks at reality in a way that, how do I say it? It's like the material world in my experience is only possible because of the senses that I have to experience it.

[00:12:30] And so when I close my eyes and meditate, for example, the world that we're experiencing here totally disappears and I'm in my own world. Therefore, that's the real world to me, and this world is just made up as a earth school or a playground for my soul to come here and do something.

[00:12:47] So it's like I'm having the experience of being a soul who needs a body and needs the material world in order to complete the curriculum, or at least make progress in the curriculum. Then you have someone else that is experiencing reality in the opposite way, where only all of this is real and what happens when they close their eyes is not real.

[00:13:10] I don't know if I'm articulating that in a way, but to just, again, grossly generalize, what was your perception of reality walking into researching this book, and what was different by the time you were done, and what are some of the things that you unpack in there?

[00:13:27] Mark: The technical term is that I was a materialist or a physicalist, which they basically mean the same thing. And it says that all of reality can be reduced to matter fundamentally, so physical stuff. And it's from matter that everything emerges, initially through a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, in which there were lots of pieces of matter that started interacting randomly. And we call those chemical reactions.

[00:13:50] And after lots of random chemical reactions, we end up with molecules that can replicate themselves, so like DNA. And that leads to the evolution of biological organisms like a human being. And from the human being, there's a brain and consciousness, pops out, which is that sense of being, which even has the capacity to ask the questions you're asking of like, who am I when I close my eyes versus open them? And by the way, that's the mainstream scientific view, materialism. That's the current--

[00:14:17] Luke: Still? Oh my God. Oh man, that's so sad. Anyway, carry on.

[00:14:25] Mark: It was frustrating for me when I got into this because I said, wow, there peer-reviewed papers, which we'll talk about on this, and it's being ignored. And we're operating from a fundamental paradigm. It's often called a meta paradigm. So it's a paradigm that underlies everything else. What is the nature of reality?

[00:14:40] We start there and then we can look at other paradigms. So we've got the meta paradigm in the wrong direction. That's a pretty big deal. So where I landed now, and it's probably not precise because I don't know if we could do that with the human mind to get to a fully precise metaphysics.

[00:14:57] But generally it's about flipping the placement of consciousness. What I just described with materialism places consciousness at the very end. And the implication is that when the human body dies, there's no consciousness, because consciousness requires a brain in a body. This alternative perspective puts consciousness first.

[00:15:16] Max Planck, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. That's generally where I've landed on this. And that's not to dismiss physics or chemistry or biology or neuroscience. It just puts a new context on them.

[00:15:35] Now, if this is true, this alternative perspective, that consciousness is fundamental, then that means the human being, what we call this physical body, is a vessel of consciousness, and consciousness is that which experiences everything within the body and potentially beyond. And I think there's a lot of evidence that there's a beyond. And that's what this book gets into.

[00:15:57] Luke: Is this the book where you cover near-death experiences and whatnot?

[00:16:03] Mark: Yeah, I cover that in probably all the books to some degree, but there's a whole chapter on it. So this book, I try to take the perspective of someone who was like me, who would've been very skeptical. And the approach was if I could find one anomaly that's true, what we might call paranormal, and I don't like that term because it presumes we know what normal is.

[00:16:24] And normal is basically materialism. But anyway, paranormal, if there's one example of a paranormal phenomenon, then materialism has a very difficult time explaining it. Whereas if we flip the paradigm and say consciousness is fundamental, then we can explain it much more easily.

[00:16:39] And I'll give an analogy that was really helpful to me. It comes from Dr. Bernardo Castro, a philosopher, and he promotes what's known as idealism, or it's also known as analytic idealism in his philosophy, which is consciousness is fundamental, basically. That's just the philosophical term.

[00:16:54] He says that we could liken all of reality to an infinite stream of water where water is analogous to consciousness. Each of us is a whirlpool within the stream. So we have this sense of being an individual, but we're fundamentally interconnected, and that's the one of the core paradoxes of this perspective.

[00:17:10]  If you imagine that some of the water from one whirlpool gets into another whirlpool, the analogy there, that's like a telepathic communication. Some of one person's consciousness is getting into another person's. This model would predict that psychic phenomenon would be real. They wouldn't be paranormal. They would just be expected, not anomalies.

[00:17:30]  Also, if you imagine that a whirlpool delocalizes, meaning it stops being in its whirlpool form, the water flows back into the broader stream. It doesn't leave the stream. The analogy there is that when the physical body dies or the brain stops functioning, consciousness doesn't die. It just transitions into a new state. And in fact, it could recycle itself into a new whirlpool, i.e., reincarnation. So all this stuff, survival, bodily death, past lives, it becomes predicted rather than paranormal.

[00:17:59] That was the approach. I said, okay, I'm going to put a lot of evidence in both of those categories, the psychic phenomenon categories, and the survival of bodily death. And let's see if every single one is wrong. So I've got a chapter on each. And I also talk about quantum mechanics, how that supports it. So I give context.

[00:18:18] But the meat of it is chapter on remote viewing, chapter on telepathy, chapter on precognition, which is knowing or sensing the future before it happens, psychokinesis, which is the mind impacting matter without any physical contact, which makes sense if everything's consciousness, then mind would impact the way we perceive this material world.

[00:18:38] And then I also looked at psychic events with animals, and that's the first half. Second is survival of bodily death, so near-death experiences, communications with the deceased, and children who have memories of a previous life.

[00:18:52] Luke: Oh man, there's so many things in there I want to tease apart, first being near-death experiences, which are fascinating to me. The ones that stand out to me-- in fact, I have a book over there, it's called The Big Book of Near-Death Experience. It's incredible. But some of the stories that are most interesting to me is where someone has clinically died, say in the case of an operation, an operating room, and there's a medical attending staff there.

[00:19:26] The person flatlines, is gone for a period of time, and then they come back and are able to explain in great detail what the people in the room were doing while they were dead. And they're like, yeah, I was in the corner of the room and this doctor said to this nurse that, and then he walked over here and he hit the light switch and so on.

[00:19:47] And then they come back and tell the attending staff what happened, and they're all sitting there white as ghosts, presumably, because their explanation of what happened was accurate. That's just one, and there's so many examples. What were some of the things like that that you discovered in your research that are irrefutable?

[00:20:04] I think that's the thing. We're looking for empirical evidence of the unknown world, the unknown realm of reality. And so to me, what's interesting is when those two intersect and you have real-world proof of a world that can't be proven because it's outside of the physical realm. I think that's super interesting.

[00:20:31] Mark: Yeah, these things are difficult to definitively prove because we're often relying on someone else's experience, and the skeptics will say, well, this is just anecdotal. And then my response would be, if you walk into a doctor's office and say, my arm hurts, is that anecdotal?

[00:20:43] We have to listen to anecdotes sometime, but I understand where they're coming from, that we just can't take every one-off instance where someone said they had some crazy event. But with near-death experiences, there are, by some estimates, millions of these examples. And in the modern era, they're more common because of resuscitation technology.

[00:21:00] So whereas someone would've died 100 years ago, now they're coming back, and many of them have these experiences. And by the way, they've been reported throughout history and cultures all over the world. Dr. Gregory Shushan wrote a book on NDEs and indigenous cultures. NDE is short for near-death experience.

[00:21:15] So this is a common phenomenon, but what you pointed to is where I always start. It's called the veridical out of body experience. Veridical means that the perception was verified as accurate when the person's resuscitated. And this is being studied by serious people.

[00:21:28] So I did a podcast series in between these books, between the first and second book, called Where Is My Mind? And it's an eight-episode series. It's still up on Apple, Spotify, all the major players. But I interviewed the people that I wrote about in An End to Upside Down Thinking, so Dr. Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia, Jan Holden from the University of North Texas, Dr. Ed Kelly from the University of Virginia. And I asked them about near-death experiences and beyond.

[00:21:51] But what Dr. Greyson from UVA said, he said, we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. It's a problematic phenomenon for materialism, right?

[00:22:05] Luke: It is. Yeah.

[00:22:06] Mark: Why is it functioning better than ever? People say it's realer than real. And then skeptics will argue, well, it's just a hallucination mark. The brain produces all sorts of chemicals. Maybe there's endogenous DMT, endorphins. Maybe there's spikes of certain electrical activity that we don't pick up, and that causes these experiences.

[00:22:22] The problem is when people are perceiving things through their consciousness from a vantage point outside their body, looking down at their body, looking in other rooms, sometimes they have 360-degree vision. There are people who have been blind since birth that are able to see, and they come back and they're blind again.

[00:22:40] But in these vertical cases, they come back and they tell the doctor or family members, whatever, what happened, and they say, yeah, that happened, but that's impossible. You couldn't have known it because we know what your body was doing. So these veridical, out-of-body experiences can be timestamped because they know what the body was doing at the time of the memory.

[00:23:00] There's a book called The Self Does Not Die, which aggregates about 100 of these cases well documented. They're probably more out there, but it's hard to document them like this. If there's one veridical, out of body experience, it's not explainable through any normal means.

[00:23:13] So what Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas told me, she said, these veridical OBEs, out-of-body experiences, they wipe out any physiological explanation of what's happening, meaning brain activity cannot account for it. Even if there's some residual firing in the brain, it doesn't explain why you have a realer than real experience with just a little bit of brain firing from a vantage point outside the body.

[00:23:38] That right there, that's the most compelling point. But then there are other people who say, well, there are similarities between oxygen deprivation or DMT experiences and so forth. And Dr. Greyson, he wrote a book called After. And what he says there is that those explanation might have some similarity to aspects of the near-death experience, but they don't explain the totality.

[00:24:00] And that's really the key because there's so much that happens. We just talked about the out-of-body experience, but there's also often a life review. And this is, depending on the estimates, 20 to 30% of the cases. In the indigenous cultures, they don't find them as much, but the NDEs do involve being judged by a third party, so maybe it's just a different version.

[00:24:19] Dr. Gregory Shushan talks about that. But in largely Western cases, 20 to 30% of people relive their whole life in a short amount of time, and they become the people that they impacted. So in my podcast, I interviewed Dan Brinkley, who's had multiple near-death experiences.

[00:24:36] He relived his whole life. He relived his days in Vietnam in combat where he killed someone and then he would become the person he killed, felt the pain, and then he felt the pain of children of the fathers he'd killed who would no longer have a father. So he felt the indirect effects. He said it was not quite as strong, but he still felt it.

[00:24:55] But because he had multiple near-death experiences, which he wasn't anticipating, he got to see how he had changed his life after his initial experience because he came back and said, wow, all this materialistic stuff is not what matters in the end, in the spiritual realm, because I was there and I lived it. He became a hospice volunteer. So in his later life reviews, in his later NDEs, he got to feel what it was like to be the person dying and how he comforted those people.

[00:25:21] Luke: Wow. . So there's obviously karmic implications in that particular phenomenon. You're seeing karma play out as a film strip.

[00:25:37] Mark: And the way he described it to me-- I interviewed him in probably 2019, but I think what I asked was, did you judge yourself during the life review? And he corrected me. He said, no, it's more observing myself. It was less about judgment, more of just, this is how I acted. Oh, this was silly, but from where I was, that made sense for me to act that way.

[00:25:56] And I've also heard that people develop and understanding for others around them through the life review because they say, that's why they were acting so poorly to me, because this person was in a lot of pain. Now I understand why they act that way.

[00:26:10] Luke: What about people that have near-death experiences and encounter relatives that have left the body that give them messages? Something that you hear sometimes is they were instructed that it's not their time to leave and they're like, ah, I don't really care about my body anymore. I want to come hang out with you guys in heaven or the other realms or whatever. And they're giving instruction like, ah, sorry, buddy, you got to go back into the body. because there's these things you have to work out still and so on.

[00:26:39] Mark: It's very common to encounter deceased relatives, sometimes pets or even spiritual entities that might be called religious entities in other contexts. So it could be a being of light. It could be Jesus, Buddha, things like that.

[00:26:52] Now, the conventional perspective on NDEs, the implication is that we have something that we need to fulfill in this lifetime, so we come back in the body to engage in whatever activities we need to. There's an alternative school of thought that's emerging. I don't know if you've come across this, which is that it's a deception that the deceased relatives are actually shapeshifters, which is a phenomenon that I'm very open to of shapeshifting.

[00:27:18] I talk about that in the Contact book. And you're basically convinced to do something that you wouldn't otherwise want to do. I don't know if that could ever be proven or verified, but I hold that in the back of my mind that you never know. In some cases, maybe that's true, but the overwhelming majority of what I hear, they feel like it was legitimate for what that's worth.

[00:27:37] Luke: That particular school of thought is terrifying to me because it's so difficult to discern truth from falsehood here in this realm. We're going to talk about David Hawkins, I'm sure, but one of the things that he would mention a lot is that it's one of the deficits that we face as a species, our inability to discern truth from falsehood. And that's just talking about here in this plane.

[00:28:06] You let someone into your life. You don't realize they're a bad person. You trust them. You get screwed over, that kind of thing. But in one of David Icke's books, I think it's called The Trap, he talks about this whole reincarnation thing, and I'm like, I wish I never read that book because it's so terrifying.

[00:28:21] And I don't know if he's right or not. A lot of other things he's written about have come to pass, and it's quite prophetic in the way that he's outlined some of the conspiracies of the world. But essentially, in The Trap, he's like, when you believe in reincarnation and you die, there's these shape shifting entities that will encourage you to come toward the light, and you think that you're ascending to the next level or to heaven or whatever, and they're actually just looping you back into another incarnation to harvest your energy and basically enslave you again.

[00:28:50] I was like, God, damn it. It's hard to know the right thing to do here in earth. You're telling me when my spirit leaves my body, there's going to be more tests that I have to work through? Is that the kind of thing that you're speaking to?

[00:29:01] Mark: That's what I'm referring too. I don't love thinking about it either. Now that I know about it, I feel like there's a responsibility to at least mention it. I don't think it's possible to prove or disprove these things. And now I don't know what I'll do because now that becomes the question, what am I going to do when I die and I encounter beings? I've heard someone, I can't remember who said this, his recommendation was to ask the beings to reveal their true identity.

[00:29:25] Luke: Oh, I like that.

[00:29:26] Mark: No matter what, and just see who they are. I've also heard there are different types of light, and perhaps the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I haven't read-- I've read parts of it-- it refers to different types of light, allegedly. So I don't know what to make of it. And it might not be uniform. Maybe it's true in select circumstances for that soul's evolution to have to discern in that way. And for other people it's not that way. Reincarnation could be way weirder and more complex. There's so many possibilities to this.

[00:29:51] Luke: I'm sure it is, but I really almost wish I'd never even heard that idea because I've always felt like I'm making pretty good progress in this lifetime, and I don't know that I'd be that interested in keeping and coming back to this place over and over again.

[00:30:09] I feel like, well, if the name of the game here is awakening and self-realization-- and that's why we are gifted with the birth of coming into this dualistic plane of reality where you have abject evil and unconditional pure love on both sides of the scale, and if our job here, which seems to be, is to slowly work our way to love and to truth and to God, and then you get the consolation prize of graduating and not having to come back to this realm and do it all over again and go through all of the traumas and lessons that we go through. So it's very disheartening to think you work your ass off spiritually for 80, 90 years and then you leave the body and they're like, psych, we're just looping you back in. You got to do it over again. It's like, oh man, that's really depressing.

[00:30:57] Mark: Well, in the Eastern traditions they talk about escaping the cycle of reincarnation. So it's a similar theme in terms of wanting to advance past things. And you're reminding me of a David Hawkins' story when he was elevating in his consciousness toward levels of enlightenment.

[00:31:09] He was faced with a test that there was a knowingness or some entity that came to him when he felt the pure state of oneness. He was at a very high level. And the entity, he said it was in an instant, just telepathically or something, downloaded a question to him, which was, you have transcended all of your personal karma. All power is yours. Take it.

[00:31:30] And his reaction was, I reject that. I'm everything. Why would I need to have power over others? He calls it the Luciferic temptation. And he said that he felt a spiritual obligation to tell people about it because he said at some point everyone will face it. And it could look different depending on the person.

[00:31:46] Typically, and this is getting more of the second book, An End to Upside Down Living, there are three ways that people can get taken off their path. Money, sex, and power. So for Hawkins, it was a power thing. He claims that when he rejected the temptation, he was shown all of the beings throughout history who also got to that level and had rejected it.

[00:32:05] But also the ones who took the temptation and karmically had to start from the beginning. Because apparently, as we elevate in consciousness, the mistakes become more harmful to the soul. And I think that could be an analogy to what some may face in the near-death experience. This is just speculation because we don't know.

[00:32:20] Let's say some are shapeshifters in some cases. It could be a test of discernment that we all have to just be aware of. Another thing Hawkins often talked about was, he said, it's hard enough to discern in this world where you can see everything. Forget channeling and all that stuff, because how can you know what's coming through these beings.

[00:32:37] He would say, they've been around for eons. They're way more advanced. They can trick you. They could be 99% right about something, and then 1% they'll get you off your path. This is also my Upside Down Living book. I have a chapter on cautions. So I give that Hawkins story about the temptation. I also talk about channeling.

[00:32:52] There's a woman that I quote who was getting a lot of good advice from the being she was channeling, and then they told her she should leave her job. And she wasn't sure about it, but she decided to listen to them, and she said it was a horrible decision. Then she could hear the beings laughing, and they said, you should kill yourself.

[00:33:08] Luke: Whoa. Yeah. I think having grown up spiritually with Hawkins' work being more impactful than any other theology or philosophy, he's just always resonated as the highest truth teacher to me. And as we were talking about before, the one that I can't seem to outgrow or out understand, I'll think, I get the model, and I'm living by those principles and have an understanding.

[00:33:41] I'll take a break from reading his stuff or listening to his lectures and then go back to it. I'll just be like, oh my God, I didn't even get this at all. It's so over my head. And that's encouraging to me. But yeah, I remember him many times talking about that Luciferic temptation. And it's such a great warning, probably much more so for the spiritual aspirant.

[00:34:01] Because you have all these new age ideas and channelers and all these stuff, and not to throw the baby out with the bath water that it's all fallacious, but to his point that you just reiterated, man, we can't even tell what's real and what's good versus evil here, being in a body with the mind and trying to operate on the material plane.

[00:34:27] So it's really maybe arrogant to think we can go into these other dimensions and know what the hell is going on in there. But there was another story that he would tell about he was invited, I think it was in New York City or something, into these meetings of these really highly influential, powerful people.

[00:34:47] He didn't name them, but maybe it was Rothchild or heads of the banking cartels or whatever. And I remember he described these are people that just talk casually about changing an interest rate that means nothing to them but can have massive long-lasting and far-reaching implications into the world economy and things like that.

[00:35:07] Now he was invited into that club, which he didn't name. I don't know if they were Jesuits or Masons or whatever they were, but wisely, he didn't identify them. But you could tell probably due to his psychiatry practice and just his prominence in society that he also faced that temptation and being invited into the good old boys' club, to which he also declined.

[00:35:29] So there were tests on the material plane and also in the spiritual plane that he came back to tell us like, hey, heads up. Look out for these temptations along the way. And to me that probably has a lot to do with something I talk about a lot because it's just fascinating to me, and it's something I'm terrified of experiencing, the fallen guru syndrome, where somebody has real spiritual gifts, insights, knowledge, wisdom, and then the sex or the money or the power gets them.

[00:35:56] And next thing you know, they're a cult leader with a harem that they're exploiting and abusing. And you're going like, wait, but his teachings were great. How did this happen? They didn't learn that lesson.

[00:36:06] Mark: Yeah. So you're reminding me of Ken Wilber's work. This is also stuff from the Living book we're getting into. In that book, basically the implications of what happens when you go down the spiritual path. And Wilber talks about lines of development that are relatively independent of each other.

[00:36:21] And so you could be really advanced in one way, but then not in the others. And the way he summarizes it is waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up. So you could have a guru who's really awakened, who's really had these deep experiences but hasn't done the cleaning up of the trauma work, and then is more susceptible to things.

[00:36:38] Or hasn't done the growing up, which is understanding that evil is real and that we need to mature in various ways. And then the showing up is actually doing the work rather than being passive. So I think a lot of these gurus probably fall into that category, highly awakened in that one line of development, but maybe they're lacking the others.

[00:36:57] Luke: That makes a lot of sense. What about the telepathic realm and also how it pertains to animals, pets, and whatnot?

[00:37:08] Mark: So telepathy is mind to mind communication. And this has been studied in labs all over the place for many, many decades scientifically. So there is a paper in American psychologist, which is the official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association. So as mainstream as you can get. It was published in 2018 by Dr. Etzel Cardena from Lund University.

[00:37:34] And it goes through a number of psychic phenomena that have reached statistical credibility that would be accepted in other areas, and telepathy is in that category. Dr. Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences puts it in the Six Sigma category, meaning that the odds that the results in experiments are due to chance alone is more than a billion to one.

[00:37:53] Luke: Really? Wow.

[00:37:55] Mark: So I give that preface before I tell you the experiment. There's real credibility behind this before I sound totally insane. But the classic experiment is you have two people separated. Bob is in one room, Jane's in the other. Bob is just put into a relaxed state hanging out in that room. Jane is shown an image of something, and the experimenters say, Jane, I want you to try to mentally send this to Bob.

[00:38:16] And these are not people claiming to have special abilities. Dean Radin, when I interviewed him, he said it's often they're college sophomores. And so Jane does that for a while, and then Bob comes out of his relaxed state, he's shown four images by the experimenters, and they say, Bob, I want you to pick the one that Jane was sending to you. They had no communication. And the person in Bob's room guesses correctly, roughly 32% of the time. Whereas if it were just chance, it would be one out of four, 25%.

[00:38:47] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:38:48] Mark: So we're talking a deviation of, depending on the study, let's say 30 to 32%, 5 to 7% from chance, which statistically tells you there's some effect. Something is getting through. It's not 100% of the time. And to me, that actually gave the study's credibility because if we were 100% telepathic, then we would know everything about everyone's thoughts all the time, and that's not the case.

[00:39:11] Instead, it's more sporadic. You think of someone, then they text you, and you're like, oh, that was just chance. But you do enough of those-- and Dr. Robert Aldrich has looked at that study, which will lead us into the animals, of telephone telepathy. So that's a huge deal. That alone, just stop at the telepathy studies, there's information getting through beyond what chance would predict, this blows up the materialist paradigm about the nature of reality right there.

[00:39:36] Luke: I love it.

[00:39:38] Mark: It's such a huge deal. I'm so used to saying this now, but that, we could just stop. And then we throw in the remote viewing where they've got the declassified documents say it's real. But with regard to animals, one of the issues with all these studies is a lack of funding. Because relative to mainstream science, that's where the funding's going to go. And it's materialist science.

[00:39:56] This stuff is more fringe if you try to teach it. In academia, most of the people who do have tenure already. Other people who want to study it on their way to tenure are told, hey, wait until you get tenure. I know someone who was told to take precognition research off her resume at a mainstream institution because it would hurt her chances at the academic institution, so she left.

[00:40:15] So I'm actually on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences where Dean Radin is the chief scientist, and they've been running studies like this for 50 years. Also, the University of Virginia has a division of perceptual studies at the med school where they study things in this realm near-death experiences, children with past life memories.

[00:40:30] But because of the taboo, it's hard to get quite as much research. It's hard enough to get research on humans, let alone psychic abilities in animals. But there have been some studies, and I've got a chapter in An End to Upside Down Thinking on that. Rupert Shedrake probably has the most well-known studies on dogs or other animals that know when their owners are coming home.

[00:40:52] And there's a video online, anyone can watch where they take the owner miles away from home at a random time in a car that's not hers. So they take away all the things the skeptics would say of like, oh, they know it's the car. They know she goes to work at this time every day. He removes all that stuff, all the potentially confounding variables.

[00:41:10] And then they have a camera on the dog at the home. In the video, when the woman who owns the dog decides that she's going to get into the cab, so she's walking to the cab because she's told now it's time to go home, the dog goes over to the window. So it suggests that the dog picks up on the intent, which relates to a lot of other studies too.

[00:41:32] And what Sheldrake says, he has a book-- I think it's called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and other phenomena related to animals, something like that-- that most pet owners are not surprised by these things because animals just seem to know.

[00:41:45] But to me, the broader implication is that animals are sentient. They just have a different biological structure, so they process consciousness in a different way. But the fact that both humans and animals seem to have these telepathic abilities indicates a commonality.

[00:42:00] Luke: That's wild. I'm going to get a hidden camera, start testing our dog. It's really interesting in the animal realm of this because obviously placebo is ruled out. Another thing that's interesting about animals in this way is in many of the shamanic traditions, animals are so highly revered because they're viewed as being of this world, but also of the spirit world, that there are bridges between the material and spirit.

[00:42:33] And that's such a huge part of ceremonies, rituals, art, and have a different level of reverence where I think in the materialistic, scientific view, we view them as of lesser value because they don't have the intellectual prowess and therefore we're superior to them or something. And there are people around the world that don't view them that way, that view them as peers, maybe even superiors from a certain perspective because of their ability to be tapped into the different realms of reality. That's very interesting.

[00:43:08] Mark: Yeah. Well, look at Egyptian culture.

[00:43:10] Luke: Exactly. Yeah. Amongst most of them, except ours, we think of animals as, like livestock, a commodity, or pets that are subservient. As much as we might love them, we don't look at our dog like, ooh, what do they know that we don't know? You know what I mean?

[00:43:27] Mark: It's almost like every way that we are taught to think about the world is inverted. Almost that way.

[00:43:33] Luke: Yeah. Hence every book you put out is the End to Upside Down blank. And I think that's why I was excited to talk to you. I'm just someone who does my best to think outside of the box and know that you're never going to be able to learn everything there is about the nature of reality, but it's fun trying.

[00:43:50] Mark: Yeah. To me it's about challenging assumptions, presuppositions, asking myself, well, I think this is true. How do I know it's true? How do I really, really know? Where does that belief come from? Well, someone told me it's true. How did they know? Well, they read it in a textbook. What's the textbook say?

[00:44:05] We'll get into this later with regard to medicine in particular, but it's really the same process for everything of going down that rabbit hole of understanding the source of beliefs and realizing that the foundations are often very shaky and seeing there's another way.

[00:44:17] But that takes time and energy. And I could say this from personal experience. I left my job right before everything with COVID. For the first book and podcast I was still working in Silicon Valley and then left so I could give myself space. And this other stuff has started to come in, but it's taken full devotion to this material, and I feel like I'm just scratching the surface.

[00:44:33] So I could imagine for someone who has a very busy life with work and family and kids, it's hard to dive this deep into things, and it's easier to turn on the TV. And this very credentialed person who has a PhD says it's so and everyone else is doing it, it's easy to just go along with it.

[00:44:50] Luke: I think the system in which we live is in many ways set up to keep us on the hamster wheel and to prevent people like you from having the time and energy to ask meaningful questions. You know what I mean?

[00:45:03] It's like if you got a couple of kids and a 9-5, you just come home and eat dinner and numb out with some TV and just recover from the stress of living your life. You're not going to start researching the nature of reality and consciousness and the medical system and the political systems. It's much easier just to outsource presuppositions and preconceived models. And if it's comfortable and makes sense enough, you're just going to go with that.

[00:45:28] I thank God for the Internet and for social media despite its faults. It's waking a lot of people up and getting people to ask questions because we have access to information we wouldn't have had before. But I remember the first, I don't remember which one it was, one of the videos I watched, basically debunking the moon landing and then another one on the Challenger Space Shuttle. And I've talked about this before on the show. The Space Shuttle one is crazy.

[00:45:55] The seven astronauts all magically have twins that are still alive. You start looking at this stuff and it's like, even if you're really skeptical and analytical and a more logically-oriented person, some of this stuff is just irrefutably false. And now it's like even looking at the moon landing footage and the president talking on a landline to the people on the moon, meanwhile, I go through a canyon and my cell phone in 2024 dies.

[00:46:25] It's like, dude, how have we been so gullible to so many massive scams? And those are just events in history. Those are events that obviously have much broader implications, but there's so many things like that that we just take for granted because someone told us that's the way it is.

[00:46:45] Well, if you think about the nature of this realm on earth or the moon landings, there are many people out there, you would go to them and say, hey, did you know the moon landings of we're a hoax? And they're like, what? No, they're not. And you go, how do you know? They go, well, I saw it on TV. That's their defense.

[00:47:02] It's just crazy how impressionable and gullible we are as a species. And thank God for people like you that are going, hey, maybe there's another way to look at this. Let me write some books. Guy like me, talk to some people that write some books and have discussions. It's a really exciting time.

[00:47:21] Mark: I also think part of the issue is within academia itself because the people with the degrees--

[00:47:25] Luke: You think?

[00:47:26] Mark: But they're the way they're trained. They don't have time to second guess these things. Think about doctors, how hard it's to get into med school, and then when you're in med school, all the pressure, and then residency and fellowship. Do you have time to question how did they know that a virus exists and causes disease?

[00:47:40] They're not asking those questions for the most part because there's so much to do. And just to learn the system, to be able to get a job. And same thing with law. And so when the busy person who's got a 9-5 and a bunch of kids turns on the TV, will they say, that's a PhD? That's an MD. I should trust them. They've looked at this for a long time.

[00:47:58] Well, they've been looking at a part of it, but have they looked at the foundations? And that's what I'm starting to appreciate more and more. They're not looking at the foundations very often, and I'm concerned to say the least, because I haven't looked at everything. But there's a pattern here in every discipline that fundamental assumptions are being overlooked and they're being assumed to be true without examining the potential faults.

[00:48:19] Luke: It's like the telephone game. It's like you hear something when you're a kid or the Challenger explosion for example. Somehow they manage to coordinate in the United States that every classroom in the entire country was having a TV wheeled into the room. We were all watching it at the same time.

[00:48:38] So when there's a concerted effort to push forth a falsehood into the awareness of the public, it's much harder to push back on that because then a massive consensus is created. And then if you're someone that goes, but wait a minute, how are six of the seven of them still alive or have identical twins magically, it's like, then you're the kook. Then you're the conspiracy theorist.

[00:49:05] And you're just someone who's just paying a little more attention, asking questions and isn't going along with the consensus that was manufactured for the masses. So yeah, I appreciate that.

[00:49:18] All right, let's move on. So much information. And for those listening. I'm not trying to sell your books. There's so much stuff that you've looked into that I'm interested in. The most logical thing was just to go in order. An End to Upside Down Living, which you've spoken to a bit about here, Reorienting Our Consciousness to Live Better and Save the Human Species give us some of the things that you get into here.

[00:49:45] Mark: I wrote this book right after I gave notice that I'd be leaving my firm in Silicon Valley, which was a tough thing because I'd become a partner. I'd spent 10 years there. I was in a great track, awesome, smart people working with technology and intellectual property. So it was intellectually stimulating in many ways.

[00:50:02] But I felt this pull of, I'm interested in this more metaphysical stuff, trying to understand the nature of reality, and yet I have a great career. But I made the decision to leave. And shortly after I made the decision that I'd be leaving, the idea for this book came in. Because up until then, I wasn't sure if I was going to write anymore.

[00:50:19] To me it was just one book, podcast series. That's enough. The meta paradigm of consciousness, that's a big deal. I'm good. But then I realized, and people had asked me about this too, they'd read the first book, An End to Upside Down Living, and say, well, what does that imply about how I should live life?

[00:50:34] So it's more about spiritual philosophy. There's a lot of David Hawkins in the book. It's partially autobiographical, so I talk more in detail about my personal journey of how I got to the point of even studying these things and talk about approaches to living from a spiritual perspective. So there's a chapter that has 10 of them.

[00:50:52] The first one is non judgmentalism, which is a David Hawkins term, which is that we can discern between things but to judge what actually be a form of arrogance because we can't know from a cosmic perspective what's good and bad. And that doesn't mean that we should ignore evil, but it means that we can actually judge whether or not something should have happened cosmically, because perhaps there was a reason for that apparently negative thing on a bigger scale. So I go into that approach because this is 180 versus how I used to live life.

[00:51:24] Luke: I think that's what's so interesting. You were really a normie, a standard person.

[00:51:29] Mark: Yeah.

[00:51:30] Luke: As some of us refer. I don't want to say you were an NPC. That could be a little insulting. But yeah, I think it's so interesting when someone has everything going for themselves-- great education, obviously a really bright guy, carve out a nice career, next in line, probably meet a nice young lady, have a couple of kids, do your thing, live a happy life-- no problem with that. But find it interesting for people like you where there's something in your soul that's back there nudging you going, wait, there's more. There's more. What is this really about? It's so interesting.

[00:52:02] Mark: I think on the surface I probably seemed really mainstream. And I think in many ways I was. But I always felt like I was having to mold myself to fit into a certain structure of society. And a lot of my friends would always joke around with me that I would think differently. So there was a part of me that was always questioning, but I was so busy trying to get good grades or training for tennis.

[00:52:22] It's hard to have the time to question all this stuff. And then eventually I did. But I do think that probably every soul, which is another way of saying the individuated consciousness, the whirlpool, has certain inclinations, and then it comes out.

[00:52:38] In this book, An End to Upside Down Living, I talk about the dark night of the soul, which is seen in many spiritual awakening journeys. I had mine, which was this sense of being lost and things not going the way that I wanted, even though on the surface everything looked great, around the age of 28 to 30-ish, that time period.

[00:52:55] And the dark night of the soul often propels people to some kind of spiritual awakening or evolution that they wouldn't have otherwise had. And it took the challenges. It had to get that bad for them to actually see and wake up. And it's actually for this reason that I'm skeptical of the reincarnation trap idea, because these dark nights of the soul do seem to have net benefit in the end for that person.

[00:53:20] An extreme example is Anita Moorjani, who was dying of terminal cancer. She was in a coma, had a crazy near-death experience, encountered her deceased father, who she had issues with during her life, and she felt unconditional love for him. And she started to realize that the way the body is is a reflection of one's internal state. And so she recognized issues in her own thinking in the near-death experience state. She was resuscitated, and her tumors disappeared.

[00:53:49] Luke: Empirically proved?

[00:53:50] Mark: They're gone. The doctors were, what's going on here? How did this happen? And now she speaks all over the world. She's written books and talks about this perfectly healthy. So someone who had challenges and overcoming the challenges led to a lot of good. So in that regard, suffering was not for nothing. It was for a lot of benefit. Which leads me to this more evolutionary model of reincarnation.

[00:54:15] Luke: I like that. Yeah. It goes back to the judgmental mind of always having to label experiences in our lives as good or bad, positive or negative. And from our limited perspective in time and space, it's impossible to know what the ultimate outcome of any event in our life is. The dark nights of the soul that some people report having one big pivotal one in their lives, I've had a bunch of them.

[00:54:45] And if you asked me in the middle of one, how's things going? I would say, I want to die. Life is not worth living. But I don't have the courage or selfishness to off myself, so I'm just going to suffer through this. A few years go by. You integrate some of those lessons. I look back and go, man, that was perfect. That's just what I needed. Thank God that bad, bad thing happened.

[00:55:06] One of my favorite quotes is Shakespeare, which is the extent of my knowledge of Shakespeare, but it's pretty much all you need to know, I think, in life. There's no such thing as good or bad. Only thinking makes it. That's it. That's the whole game right there. So in your life, what are practices that you employ to create disbelief and things that the mind churns out? How do you dispel beliefs in a day-to-day experience of being you?

[00:55:44] Mark: I find, and for this book, An End to Upside Down Living, I studied spiritual awakening journeys, both in the modern era, but also historically, and there are many commonalities to the arc, even though the specifics might differ. And it seems, and also from my own experience, that the universe, life consciousness, throws at us the things that we still need to work through and will be more difficult for us to handle psychologically, even if we have a more conscious perspective of negativity and suffering.

[00:56:11] In spite of that knowledge, these few things are still going to get to you because there's something to clear. So when those happen where I'm getting really disturbed by something or having irrational emotions, I try to just take a step back. It's really hard. Take a step back and watch myself and say, this sucks right now, but like you said, Luke, in a few years, I'm going to understand why this is happening and it will have led to something positive.

[00:56:39] So I'm just going to feel the emotions and I'm not going to judge myself. Because part of me says, why are you so immature? You're being so immature. You know how life seems to work. You've studied this. Don't get too sucked into it by your ego or whatever else. David Hawkins talks a lot about unconscious guilt, which is really a form of arrogance and self-importance. It's like I cause so much--

[00:57:02] Luke: Totally.

[00:57:03] Mark: Those are huge emotions for all of us. And we'll get into health. Those are the things that can even manifest as disease. So I think it's about feeling the emotions and then recognizing, okay, this is something that I haven't quite transcended yet. There are other areas where I wouldn't be as bothered, but in these areas I am. So I'm going to let myself be. I'm not going to do anything too crazy or drastic. And eventually I will get through it and I'll understand it more.

[00:57:26] Luke: How did you first discover David Hawkins?

[00:57:31] Mark: Trying to remember This was 2017. I'd heard people talk about Power vs. Force, and at that point I was ordering every book on Amazon that someone would say on a podcast. So I got it and I remember immediately thinking, this guy's at a different level. I need to read everything he's written. And Power vs. Force is probably my least favorite book for all the ones he's written.

[00:57:53] Luke: Me too. And it's his most famous, and it's the most dry. I don't know. It's not real juicy like some of his other writing. At the opposite end of the spectrum, his last book, Letting Go something, something surrender, it's really interesting because in the middle there, he had the eye of the eye and some really dense, non-dual teachings that to this day, I read half a paragraph, and my brain is just smoked. It's like, I'm not there yet.

[00:58:25] But then that one, I feel like, I'm assuming you've read that one, which is a powerful book, but it's almost like on his way out he was like, eh, I'm going to throw the Simpletons a bone and give them my message in a language that's very easy to read and also with teachings that are very practical and applicable, like this is actually what you do. It's not, this is how you can think about the nature of consciousness and reality.

[00:58:49] It's like this is what you do when you're having a hard time and the gift in, as you said, fully experiencing our emotions rather than bypassing them or numbing them out. But I agree. Power vs. Force is the first one I got, and I'm like, ah, there's something here. But it didn't really move the needle until I got into some of his more dense writing. And then on his way out, he was just like, and here's an easy one for you.

[00:59:14] Mark: Yeah.

[00:59:14] Luke: It's just wild.

[00:59:16] Mark: That's the one I recommend to people who aren't as into this space, and I've gotten amazing reviews from people. They're saying, wow, this book changed my life.

[00:59:23] Luke: It's incredible. Just how he goes through the different emotional states and just identifies every nuance of, like you said, guilt, which is a narcissistic, self-obsessed thinking about yourself too much. Not remorse, where you regret something in an earnest and healthy way, but that guilt where you're ruminating on what a bad person you're. And he would say, you're just thinking about yourself, and you're self-obsessed. Just that is a massive teaching.

[00:59:52] Mark: What I'll do is sometimes, I have that book on Audible, Letting Go, I'll just listen if I'm on a flight. Take a half hour to go to a random chapter, listen to it. I have that book, I. It's just the letter I. Reality and Subjectivity is the subtitle. I've read that once and maybe a half, and now I keep it around, and I'll open up a random sometimes and read two paragraphs, like you said.

[01:00:13] Luke: It's a beast.

[01:00:13] Mark: Because there's something there in every sentence, and it's profound.

[01:00:17] Luke: Yeah. So he's someone that you continue to learn from?

[01:00:22] Mark: I do. I would say it's on and off. I'll go through periods where I feel like I really need more Hawkins, and then I'll appreciate things that I didn't get the first time around. And then other times I'll take a time out. Especially as it pertains to more worldly things and current events, that just requires a different kind of energy to get facts straight and see what's going on versus the high-level spiritual context of Hawkins.

[01:00:44] Luke: Right. Yeah. His teachings have really helped me in a concrete way, in a very real, tangible way, not just understand but experience that there really only is one thing, that there's one thing that we just call consciousness, and it's only our perception that creates contrast between this thing and that thing.

[01:01:12] If you just get that, you're going to have a good life, because then everything becomes just more playful and malleable. And I find that I have an easier time taking the world and my personal world less seriously. It's not that you don't feel things or you have concern for your fellow humans or yourself and your life and outcomes, but there's a certain non-attachment that becomes possible when you just realize the whole thing is literally a big game.

[01:01:44] Mark: Yeah. Non-attachment, that's one of the 10 approaches in the book to living. It doesn't mean not caring. It just means not being bound to a particular outcome. And it always can be brought to a fear or a desire, and they're just the inverse of each other really. So a fear is that a desire is not going to happen effectively.

[01:02:07] So when we become bound to something that we really want or something we really don't want to happen, where if this thing happens or not, then I'm not going to be able to live, if we get to that position, that's where the suffering comes in. Versus, I really want this to happen. I really don't want this to happen, but whatever happens is okay, and I'm going to give my best effort.

[01:02:26] It's a very important distinction. Hawkins distinguishes between non-attachment and detachment. Detachment would be, well, I don't really care what happens because we're all one anyway. It's more of a passive attitude. Whereas non-attachment is you're fully engaged, but you understand that the outcome is beyond your control.

[01:02:44] Luke: What's your experience of surrender as a guiding principle?

[01:02:49] Mark: That's another one of the 10 approaches in the book. I think that's the key. And it is also a hybrid of passivity and being active. And the challenge for a human being, I think, is to act in a state of surrender. How do we actually do that? And I give a few things in the book that helped me think about how to act from a place of surrender, and the first is to act from values.

[01:03:19] So integrity, for example, whatever your values are, try to act there. And then also following passions, following intuitions, which is a trial-and-error process, because sometimes we can't always discern what's an intuition versus the ego getting in or something else from the mind.

[01:03:35] And the fourth is from Suzanne Siegel, who's a spiritual author, do the next obvious thing. To me, this is a central part of living from a spiritual lens, because surrender would say, well, the universe is going to happen as it's going to. I can just sit on the couch because I'm surrendered. And I think that's a misunderstanding of the term.

[01:03:56] It's having that attitude, but not actually sitting on the couch. It's the showing up part of Wilber's framework, the waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up. So there's a showing up to life, but the gesture is one of surrender. So David Hawkins would go like this, and I'm holding my hands back for those listening. He said, it's a feminine, the feminine energy of allowing this while also being active at the same time.

[01:04:21] Luke: I think of surrender as not so much inactivity or being complacent, but in taking the action and letting go of the attachment to the result of the action.

[01:04:41] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:41] Luke: You still got to do things. I think the suffering comes from the attachment to what's on the other side of the effort that we put forth. We have a preconceived idea, if I take this job, if I get in this marriage, if I build this house, name the goal or project you have, and then building these constructs of expectations around it that are just setting us up for disappointment.

[01:05:05] Mark: What I've found is that pain comes, and perhaps in a sense, dark nights of the soul relate to this, but pain comes when there's an attachment that has been unexamined. So if I'm super stressed about something, I'm like, where's the attachment here? What do I need to happen or not happen? And where can I surrender more while still being active? It's a helpful exercise. It's hard to do in the moment because in the state of suffering or stress, that can consume everything.

[01:05:37] Luke: The End to Upside Down Liberty: Turning Traditional Political Thinking on Its Head to Break Free from Enslavement. I can't wait to read all these books, dude. Oh, man.

[01:05:48] All right. So where I am with this particular topic of liberty, especially since 2016 and just seeing the emperor naked is that I see many of us in this country and probably around the world, but I'm an American, so I speak for America, is all of this tribalism and fighting for who is going to be our ruler or the ruling class, and very few people stepping back and asking the question, where did we even get the idea that, a, someone has the inherent right to rule over someone else, and what would the world or society look like if no one was ruling over anyone, if we were just self-governed?

[01:06:37] That's the question that's most inspiring to my soul, is thinking about, wow, what if people were just left to their own devices? And that's terrifying, I think, to many people who still trust the state. But I look at the state, historically speaking, as literally the number one cause of unnatural death on record.

[01:06:56] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:57] Luke: That's the facts. Aside from diseases and things like that, but war and oppressive regimes and the downright and outright mass murder of millions upon millions and hundreds of millions of people all under the supposition, and the superstition as Larken Rose, I'm sure you're familiar, would call it, is that we believe that this human being over here is somehow endowed with the right to roll over these people over here inclusive of me and my life.

[01:07:26] What if humans just didn't believe that? What if we believed in ourselves and we're self-governing? Is that even possible? And tell me what you came to as a result of your research and worldview on that.

[01:07:36] Mark: I think we're on the same page. And the context here is I came in-- like I said, I was apolitical prior to 2020.

[01:07:45] Luke: So in other words, you're a right-wing extremist.

[01:07:47] Mark: That's what I'd probably be called now, for sure.

[01:07:50] Luke: If you're not a statist, you're just classified as that, or a conspiracy theorist now.

[01:07:55] Mark: But it's interesting how this evolved for me. So early 2020, right before lockdowns, I wrote An End to Upside Down Living. Then lockdowns happened, and I just left my job. Still in San Francisco at the time, and I had a ton of free time on my hands, and the world was locked down. And then I saw censorship of doctors who were countering the narrative, and they were getting taken off YouTube.

[01:08:15] So then I started looking into the darker topics that I hadn't explored previously. And the reason I got so interested in the political realm was that there were people that I respected and still do respect very highly, who from a spiritual philosophy perspective, totally agree with them. And they were endorsing the lockdowns and the masks and eventually the vaccines and things like that.

[01:08:37] And I'm like, how is it possible to be-- and I think it's really a lines of development thing of the waking up, cleaning up, growing up, showing up, in hindsight. But I was so perplexed by this because I thought I had a really good framework. And then this threw a wrench into it, everything happening in the world, the bifurcation. Those who promoted freedom and others who wanted "safety" through the authorities and were all about the authorities.

[01:08:59] And then I saw a lot of things happening around the 2020 election, started to pay attention for the first time, and initially was resonating much more with the right and conservatives because they were preaching for freedom when everyone else seemed to be authoritarian. So I said, this makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know exactly where I stand on everything.

[01:09:16] But then I came across the notion of voluntarism or anarchy, anarcho-capitalism, which is essentially what you're talking about. And I said, this is really important. Because we are in a paradigm of statism around the world where there is a political monopoly.

[01:09:35] It's a compulsory monopoly in that you don't, on your own accord, know that you're contracting. And that's a common law question, which I didn't know at the time of writing this book that there's an arguably, depending on how you look at the law, we've contracted to certain things, but it's not an informed consent.

[01:09:55] It's not mutually agreed upon in the way that you would if you were to hire a law firm, for example. That's mutually agreed upon contract. But I started to look at government as a service provider. Larken Rose talks about this in The Most Dangerous Superstition. Also, Murray Rothbard, the Mises Institute, Ludwig von Mises. This school of thought of government is a dangerous entity. It's actually a predator rather than a protector. And there's no amount of predator that's good. So many conservatives would say, let's just have a little bit.

[01:10:23] Luke: Well, this is what drives me crazy, is that we're arguing over all of recorded history on the right type of government, and very few people are asking the question. Maybe the right type is to have none at all. Anyway, carry on.

[01:10:38] Mark: Yes. No, that's where I landed. And that it's another one where I said, wow, could this be? Could we have been this brainwashed? Because from a young age, we go to school. We were taught the government's there to protect us. These are public servants. They serve the people. That's what we always say. And then when I looked at it through the lens of a service provider, I've been in the business world, and I see how it works with service providers and customers.

[01:10:59] The customer voluntarily hires the service provider, and the contract that they write between customer and service provider specifies what the service provider's going to do, what the price is, what the termination clause is, how you could actually get out of the contract, and you have competition between lots of different service providers.

[01:11:18] So this is not to say that the government doesn't provide important services. These are very important things in society, like police force, road servicing, court systems. Those are all things that would be important to any society. The question is, should a political monopoly have control of those things whereas in other areas of society, human beings do them?

[01:11:39] What's the difference between government and a normal service provider? The people in government have special privileges, but it's just human beings. So I go through a chapter in the book of essentially theoretical economics, which many other economists have done, and I aggregated their work of, how could we do all of these government services without government?

[01:11:56] Well, it's human beings getting together, and it's as good, if not better, because you have this competitive marketplace. Now, I want to say one more thing because I know the cognitive dissonance that this topic causes, and it's like, Mark, I can't believe you're saying this. This would be complete chaos. You need someone to watch over the people.

[01:12:14] The logic there is flawed because it says, I don't trust human beings. Therefore, I'm going to take some human beings, a subset of the population of human beings, and put them in power over the other ones.  And I'm going to give the people who I don't trust an ability to elect who that is, and we're going to trust that the elections are done properly, all on the basis of we don't trust people. It actually doesn't make sense logically.

[01:12:44] Luke: That's brilliant. What a great articulation of that particular issue. And taking it a step further, if you look at the results of us following that logic and the model that we've created, going back to what I said earlier, the track record of putting those people in charge and what they've done to humanity throughout history is atrocious. Just like genocide upon genocide.

[01:13:12] It's like, what is happening here? Yet the cognitive dissonance that you mentioned I think is maybe partly rooted in our lack of, not faith so much in other humans, but faith in ourselves to be able to do the right thing and to self-govern. It's almost like I don't trust myself and my ability to take care of myself and provide for myself and my family with equanimity and integrity. Therefore, I need the daddy, mommy state to do it for me.

[01:13:46] And if I don't feel like I can do that, then I look at you and I'm like, well, if I can't do it, he definitely can't do it. So we need to call in mommy and daddy state to regulate Mark, because I don't trust him. But it's really fundamentally, I think, I don't trust myself. I do, but I'm speaking for the general person who's like, we can't imagine living in a world without this boot on our neck because it somehow feels safer. But if you look at the evidence, it's not safer.

[01:14:14] So you brought up the word anarchy, and I don't know a lot about this. The only study I've done on this particular topic is the Larken Rose book, which I think, apart from any spiritually focused books, is, I would say, the most meaningful book I've ever read personally. It just completely changed my entire reality.

[01:14:35] But my whole life, being a punk rock teenager that I was in the '80s, to me, anarchy was just pandemonium and just people running the streets burning everything down, like we saw in 2016, '17, the past few years of just shit on fire and police cars turned over and people just running wild. And I think the anarchy that you speak of is, well, you can define it, but my new interpretation of it is more just the lack of government in general and just the people self-ruling.

[01:15:12] And so then I look at, well, have we ever done that successfully? And you know much more about history than I do, but from my understanding, pre-agricultural revolution and when people started to settle in different geographic locations and grow their own food, then there had to be a police force or an army to protect the livestock and to protect those crops.

[01:15:35] And then you have the city state, and then you have the emergence of governments and militias and things like that because people were staying put. So seems like during that evolution, all of this came to be, but before that, you had hunter-gatherer tribes of 60 or 50 people or whatever, roaming around and moving around to find food and to hunt and gather and all that.

[01:15:59] And it seems like in a group of 50 people, there would be more people who cared about the betterment and the protection of that group than there would be a couple of outliers who were assholes. And so if someone started being an asshole, not the government of that group, but the elders and the majority of those people would say, you know what? You're being a dick. We're ostracizing you. Good luck out there with the lions.

[01:16:22] And that's how you would learn, or you would be punished in some way by the consensus of your little tribe, and that would instruct the other potential assholes in your group to not do that stuff. Because they'd see, oh, that last guy got left behind in the snow, and he's probably dead. Or you didn't get food for a week, or whatever the punishment was.

[01:16:41] But there wasn't an overarching state that was inflicting the punishment or the rules. It was just the consensus of the group. I might have a really fantasy-based version of history, but it seems like that's how it would've went down. Can you speak to pre-government, pre-agriculture, pre-industry to how people self-govern?

[01:17:05] Mark: One of the critiques of voluntarism is that it's unrealistic and that it's never been done successfully. There are some tribes that anarchists point to, and I'll define that in a second. And Ireland, I believe it was in the medieval time, some people would point to them and say they were doing this. They had more of a tribal type of living, decentralized.

[01:17:28] What I talk about in the book is that it's not just about the political theory, but it's also about how an elevated consciousness that would make this work in tandem. First of all, an elevated consciousness to recognize that we don't need to have these rulers and that we can do things on our own, but then also people who have a higher consciousness to have the personal responsibility to act.

[01:17:46] Let me go back to anarchy. Anarchy in a political context is a society without rulers. It's not a society without rules. It's just that the rules are determined on a private contractual basis. So you could have laws within a certain group or tribe or how-- you could create a nation effectively that people would subscribe to voluntarily and say, they're doing a really good job with these traditionally government services. I want to hire them.

[01:18:15] So you can do all of that under voluntarism. The only catch is that it is fully consensual. So you've consented to this. It's informed consent. You've signed a contract and made everything happen. Whereas currently we have a social contract, which I'm still looking for, the social contract that we all signed.

[01:18:33] The Great Reset, which we'll talk about in a bit, in Klaus Schwab's book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, he talks about this new vision for society, and that we need to redo the social contract. I'm like, what are we redoing in the first place? So it's this implied consent in the current status situation versus the explicit consent of an anarchist or volunteer, or anarcho-capitalist type society.

[01:18:57] Luke: I like that definition of anarchy. So are there any other points in history to which we can identify as people being of a state of consciousness that created safe and equitable subcultures or nations?

[01:19:15] Mark: That could get into some speculation about lost civilizations and things like that, and I have questions about how they govern themselves, but this is one of the weak points of lack of historical precedent on a large scale. The way I look about it, and the way I say it in the book is this is about having a north star, something that we should move toward, which is ultimately getting us toward less government rather than more. Whereas we're seeing a lot of the rhetoric talking about more government rather than less.

[01:19:41] So it should at least point us in this direction. And I think something happens, like you said, when you read Larken Rose's book, when I learned about this stuff. For me, Larken Rose was a huge influence. Murray Rothbard was probably other huge one.

[01:19:51] And at the Mises Institute's website, M-I-S-E-S.org, I think, or.com, they have a lot of his books available for free and other thinkers like that, so you can just download them. For a New Liberty in particular had a big impact on me, but there's a lot of other stuff super profound. That there's a consciousness shift that occurs when you learn about this.

[01:20:11] You're like, oh, wait, we don't even need government. And most people on TV, they're arguing about what the role of this political monopoly should be rather than asking about the presupposition, which is that, should it even exist?

[01:20:23] Luke: Exactly. I forgot to mention earlier, we're going to put all the resources, all your books, everything you've talked about at lukestorey.com/markgober, G-O-B-E-R. Yeah, I think that particular topic is one of those things I see as a legitimate path forward, but it requires massive dismantling of a lot of the programming.

[01:20:50] But the thing, like you mentioned earlier in how you started to describe this, it's like the argument against having a society with no rulers is that people aren't trustworthy and they're going to do the wrong thing. And so let's take the people that are also people that have their faults and put them in power.

[01:21:12] So that is a great argument for what is maybe wrong, what's possible. And maybe I have an idealistic perspective on this because for the most part, everyone that I interact with is trustworthy and are just beautiful people. So I have a skewed perspective. If I was to create my own micro nation out of the 50 people that I know, we would do fine. If the roads needed to be fixed, one of us would go out there and fix it. If we needed a school away, we'd make a little school.

[01:21:44] I feel like everything would just coalesce and come together just fine. But I'm also not thinking about the rapist, serial killers, and psychos out there, but we also don't think about the fact that they exist when we put people in office, and you see that we have people ruling over us that are legitimately psychopaths and that have no qualms with giving an order that kills tens of thousands of people in one fell swoop. And then we give them Nobel Peace Prizes, Obama. You know what I mean?

[01:22:16] It's like, dude, what? Why do we feel so disempowered and so weak that we pick such awful human beings to "lead" us and we're just okay with that and we think that we can trust them versus trusting people in our immediate community to do a better job?

[01:22:35] Mark: I want to say two things here. One is that we already exist in anarchy, and I'll explain. And the other is that there's a psychological hurdle here of choosing a less bad option. It's hard for people to think about, and that's what I'm describing. So the first one is, and Murray Rothbard says this, I think he calls it an international anarchy, because we like to think of-- first of all, within our own government, we talk about checks and balances.

[01:22:56] Who's checking the checkers? They're all within government. And who's checking that? Well, arguably we have other states out there, other countries that are checking, but who's above them checking all the nations? So we live in a form of anarchy right now already, and a lot of people ignore that.

[01:23:15] And how's society going? It is functioning, but arguably, there's still a lot of murder. And this leads to the second point and a lot of other erosions of freedom that human beings are imperfect. And until we reach a fully enlightened state of consciousness collectively, there are going to be problems. The question is, what's worse? Doing it under a compulsory political monopoly or doing it in a free society?

[01:23:39] There are going to be problems in both. And what happens is people are so accustomed to statism, which is the status quo, that the flaws, it's like, oh, well, that's just government. That's okay. They're inefficient with our money, with our tax money. That's okay. We go to war. That's what happens. We have to defend ourselves.

[01:23:51] Whereas if you're new to voluntarism, anarchism, and anarcho-capitalism, all basically synonymous, you think of the one thing that you can't imagine in your mind of how it would work, and then you dismiss it. I see this psychological pattern in a lot of paradigm shifts. We get comfortable with the paradigm, and we find one example that we can't think of, and that's really our own lack of creativity. We can't think of a solution for it, and that's enough to dismiss the whole thing.

[01:24:16] Luke: Totally. Right. It's like, well, who's going to fix the bridge when it falls down? Well, the whole thing won't work then.

[01:24:22] Mark: It won't work. It's unrealistic. You're an idealist, Mark.

[01:24:25] Luke: Yeah. And it's like, well, who's fixing it now, and what's the ultimate cost to society for them to do so, and who's determining who's doing the fixing and how much they get paid, and how much money is extorted for me under the guise of doing said bridge repair when it's actually not? When the money that I'm paying into the system is just paying off the money we borrowed from England in 1933, basically.

[01:24:47] So I love this train of thought. And again, I'm a total newbie to this way of thinking, but I think like most of us, I find the atrocities committed by the state to just be intolerable. And the way that we're going about fixing it is just changing masks on the same face every few years and thinking something's going to be different.

[01:25:13] And really, if you look at history in this country, there've been a few great changes. So the abolition of slavery, fucking awesome. Women's right to vote and other human rights, awesome. Gay people being able to get married, awesome. There's a few things in there that have been great, but underneath all of that is the same totalitarian regime, just incrementally tiptoeing its way into absolute control over every aspect of our lives.

[01:25:46] So there's been some good things that have happened, but they're also done under the guise that the government is where our rights come from. I believe that our rights come from the fact that we were born and we are walking and breathing and living here on the planet.

[01:26:01] We have a right because God created us. And I think the role of government has been so skewed that people believe that those rights come from the government when, speaking of the Constitution or the creation of this country, it was more about, well, we have these rights that are God-given and other people are going to infringe upon them, so let's bring in the government to protect those rights for us, which is a better idea to begin with, but I don't know sitting here that we even need that.

[01:26:32] I'll protect my rights by not engaging in contracts that I don't understand, for example, which our whole life in America, we sign all these contracts with the state, and we don't even know we're doing it. And so it's a voluntary system, but we don't know that there's another option. So we volunteer into it, and we think there's no other way.

[01:26:51] Mark: Mm. It is such a big paradigm shift to look at society this way. It's a total inversion of how we're taught to think, that government is actually not the helper that we're told it is. And I just can't emphasize that enough. But then, I think, when this realization comes, then there is more of a desire to ask questions about everything that's happening.

[01:27:14] What's the real incentive? Is it really to serve the people? And that's not to say that every politician is evil. I do think there are good ones who have good intent, but ultimately the intent of the system and the government itself is to preserve itself. That's how it works. And then you end up with all sorts of strange incentives that you wouldn't have in a truly free society.

[01:27:32] For example, let's say a department within the government does a really bad job with something. That could be their excuse to say, we need more money. So what is the incentive? Perform poorly.

[01:27:46] Luke: Right.

[01:27:46] Mark: Versus in a free market, what happens? Your competitor's going to come in if you do a bad job. I'm just going to hire someone else. So performance has a more normal incentive structure versus government. Government seems to invert everything.

[01:28:00] Luke: 100%. All right. I feel like I could go on that track forever. Let's move on. In all these 550 something episodes, I've never had anyone that has a stack of books that we can just go through, so this is super fun.

[01:28:14] An End to Upside Down Contact: UFOs, Aliens, and Spirits—and Why Their Ongoing Interaction with Human Civilization Matters. Oh my God. I feel like you should have just come for six episodes and we just cover each one. But we'll try and get into this.

[01:28:30] Now, that said, me personally, in the paranormal and channeling and UFOs, all this kind of stuff, it's never something that's really interested me, I think because I'm just more concerned about how do I keep my shit together in just day-to-day life, and I just don't need to worry about all of that.

[01:28:49] However, I know that my reality is minimized by my perception, and so I'm sure there are other dimensions and beings and all kinds of things that would be arrogant to believe that we, human beings, are the only advanced civilization here. So what did you discover about the idea of UFOs and aliens and stuff during this book?

[01:29:13] And I'm going to throw in one other Hawkins’ thing. There were very few things that he calibrated, using muscle testing, for those that are unfamiliar. You can look him up, and you learn about it. But there were a couple of things, a few. One of them was he calibrated whether UFOs are real and got a false, to which I'm like, you have to ask that question in a very specific way.

[01:29:35] So it could be false the way we think about 1950s flying saucer movies. Maybe he calibrated that as false, but it didn't ask the question like, are there other living beings that are multidimensional that sometimes cross in this dimension? That's a totally different one. He also did ghosts. Are ghosts real or false? What's your definition of ghost and so on?

[01:29:56] So there were a few things like that. And also the last one is he calibrated George Bush Jr. as 400 or something, which is in integrity. I'm like, how did he possibly come up with that? And his shit about 9/11, he didn't get 9/11 either because he would make fun of 9/11 truthers by saying, oh, steel doesn't melt.

[01:30:17] And that was never the argument. The argument was, does jet fuel burn hot enough to melt steel? And the answer is no, equivocally. Unequivocally no. So anyway, there's a few Hawkins things where I'm like, dude, you didn't ask the question in a way that would give you a more accurate answer. So coming from him, he is like, UFOs, aliens, new age, Atlantis, all this stuff is bullshit, and you're living in fantasy world. So I'm more inclined that way, but still open.

[01:30:48] Mark: Right. Plus, building 7, 9/11, which wasn't even hit by a plane.

[01:30:51] Luke: Thank you.

[01:30:51] Mark: That's a whole other rabbit. But yeah, Hawkins' scale of consciousness, I like it conceptually, but the book, is it called Truth vs. Falsehood?

[01:30:58] Luke: Yes.

[01:30:58] Mark: Where he goes through various areas and he calibrates them on the scale, I don't feel like I know enough about the methodology. I know he feels like he tested it really well, but it's the part of Hawkins' work that I'm least in resonance with personally. So I remember looking at some of that before I published all the books to see where I'm like, well, the evidence is a little bit different than what you're saying here. Let me get to the genesis of this book, first of all.

[01:31:24] When everything happened in 2020, I became very interested in evil and darkness because I felt like it was lacking from this love and light, spiritual bypassy spiritual community that was so good in other ways. How can you miss these other things? There's a desire to say, well, darkness, that's just going to take your vibration down, so don't look at it.

[01:31:41] And I have a very different view on that, which is we need to know it exists, not to be consumed by it. But if we don't know it exists, then we can't navigate around it. And that was top of mind when I wrote the book on liberty. And I have the section on consciousness in the Liberty book because it relates to-- to me, voluntarism actually aligns with natural law, which we can see from the life review of treat other people the way you want to be treated, the golden rule.

[01:32:04] That's actually seems to be built into the fabric of reality. But in that quest, I was very interested in what forces might be influencing our world and our governments. So I only touch on it briefly in the Liberty book, but I felt like there was a need for an expansion, and in large part because I felt like a lot of this was missing from conventional spiritual thinking, and we could be, and I think we are being influenced by this stuff, by non-human intelligences in ways that we don't always see with our eyes.

[01:32:31] Both from a physical standpoint, more conspiratorial, secretive things happening, but also from a metaphysical standpoint of our consciousness is being influenced, and we can't actually see it happening.

[01:32:41] So the reason it's called An End to Upside Down Contact, in addition to everything, has been an end upside down, which I'll give a shout to my publisher, Bill Gladstone, because I wrote my first book and he said, it's great, but this needs to be the title, An End to Upside Down Thinking.

[01:32:56] Luke: Really?

[01:32:57] Mark: Yeah. And so I didn't know--

[01:32:59] Luke: I like though, as a franchise, like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

[01:33:03] Mark: So he did those books.

[01:33:04] Luke: Oh, no way.

[01:33:05] Mark: He was the agent on those books. He passed away recently, sadly, but yeah. He had the foresight. He was very intuitive. So I continued with it. And the reason I think contact is upside down is that we as a mainstream society don't think about it properly, and I talk about six falsehoods.

[01:33:23] One is that contact doesn't even exist, contact with non-human intelligence. And the second is a huge one, which is that contact is just a purely physical thing. There are crafts in the sky, and it's all nuts and bolts, just physical. To me, the physical stuff is a minority. The metaphysical is the key, the consciousness aspect, which we hear a lot about UFOs on the news and congressional hearings. We don't hear as much about the consciousness part. Although a new document just came out a few weeks ago that talks about remote viewing again. But it's referencing the fact that consciousness is relevant to this.

[01:33:56] Luke: And to the Hawkins calibration of are UFOs real, I get the sense that that question was proposed in the realm of physical contact, and is there a metal disc that flies around in the sky that we see as a UFO, but not in the metaphysical, in the energetic entity space? Carry on.

[01:34:20] Mark: No, exactly. And that's where the definitions come in. So the third assumption that I think is false is that all of the beings in non-human contact experiences are exclusively benevolent. And we do hear that sometimes. We can call them in. They're all benevolent. They don't want to hurt us. And I don't think that's true.

[01:34:37] There's a lot of evidence. Some are negative. And the flip side, I don't agree with. Some people say it's all demonic. I don't agree with that. The fifth is that this is just a recent phenomenon. In the last, I don't know how many decades we've heard about UFOs more and more, World War II era, and it's just a recent thing to me. This is ancient. Goes back to the origins of humanity that other beings are talked about in what we traditionally think of as mythology or religious lore.

[01:35:05] If you look at the language that people use today to describe their experiences and then reread those texts, there are a lot of commonalities in what people experience long ago versus today. They're just used different language and different translations. That's a big one because it relates to our origins.

[01:35:21] And the sixth one, I think, is the hardest to prove definitively, but it's perhaps the most important, and I think there's circumstantial evidence. And some might say, well, all this is real, Mark, but it doesn't affect us. It's not influencing society. Whereas I think it is. I think we're in a spiritual war, and understanding how those forces operate is critical. And that's why I wanted to create something that opens the mind to how much exists beyond what our eyes can see.

[01:35:47] And when I say our, I speak about most of us because many people have had experiences and they're profound, and it's very difficult for them to talk about it. But the way I divide the book is non-UFO-related contact and UFO-related contact. Because if you hear the word contact, like the movie Contact, Jodie Foster, we're thinking aliens out there versus someone has a near-death experience. They encounter a being of light. They have a hellish near-death experience sometimes, and they might have demonic figures or something scary in it, deceased relatives.

[01:36:18] This is contact. And they're getting information. That's contact. We see this in shared death experiences too. So shared death experiences don't get enough attention. These are instances where a healthy person co-lives in the dying process with someone who's dying, and it's just like a near-death experience.

[01:36:36] Luke: What? I've never heard of this.

[01:36:39] Mark: Shared death experiences. There's a study in a journal of palliative care. The co-author's name, I believe his last name is Peters. These also blow up the physiological model of near-death experiences because they would say, a dying brain is what causes the NDE. It's just hallucination. These people are not dying. These are healthy people.

[01:37:00] And somehow the dimensions open up. Sometimes they co-live the life review. But again, they're entity encounters in this. Deathbed visions, similar phenomenon. Again, contact. DMT encounters or other psychedelics, contact. So I go through channeling. That's contact. So I actually start the book with those because that's not what you think of first. And I'll pause there and then go into the next segment.

[01:37:28] Luke: Have you ever worked with psychedelics yourself?

[01:37:32] Mark: I've worked with cacao once and one other very mild experience. I've never had an entity encounter. I've never had an experience of unity, oneness. So my research has been hearing from other people who say, yeah, Mark, this did happen, which I wrote about, but I've never experienced it.

[01:37:51] Luke: Well, the interesting thing about those experiences, which aren't for everyone, but for some of us they are sometimes, is some of the research's been done around DMT, for example, where the mechanistic reductionist point of view would be that person takes that drug and then they're meeting these entities and other dimensions and whatnot, and that that's just a hallucination or something that's created by the brain.

[01:38:23] But then there's studies, which I'm sure you're aware of and maybe you covered in the book, where you have a couple of test subjects that have the same exact experience, but they're unrelated. It's like, how is everyone having universal experiences subjectively, if it's just something that's made up by the individual mind in some sort of hallucination.

[01:38:45] And I've heard people talk about experiences wherein, I don't know, there's little elves and this kind of stuff. I've never seen or experienced anything like that, but I have had a couple of instances where, I don't even know how to describe it, I was clearly interfacing with some other intelligent beings, but they didn't appear to have bodies or they weren't little green men.

[01:39:14] So there was contact, and there's no way that I could prove it other than just the things that were shared with me or healing that took place in my consciousness, mind, in my body, where I knew that I was interacting with other, I don't know, interdimensional life forms that were benevolent and were there to be helpful to me.

[01:39:37] And there's literally zero proof that that happened other than my own experience, and then the net result of things that changed in my life as a result of that. But many people have had these kind of contact experiences with psychedelics, which is why I asked you, what did you find in your research in the various forms of contact that you just described?

[01:39:59] Mark: Well, actually, the psychedelics discussion and corroborating experiences relates to the non-UFO contact because the work is most famously made popular by John Mack, who was the head of psychiatry at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winner. So late in his career, he became exposed to the topic of alien abduction.

[01:40:17] He was told about it by Hopkins, who's a famous guy in the UFO space. And Bud told him, apparently, John, you've got to look into this. You're a psychiatrist. You need to see what these people are reporting because it's too real and it's too bizarre. It's happening all over the place. So he started looking at it and concluded people were not making it up.

[01:40:35] He wrote a book called Abduction, published in 1994. This is a clinical book. It's read by a doctor, case studies of his examination of people who claimed they had abduction experiences, and he used hypnosis to help them unlock memories. And there were interesting things with that where certain memories would be clearer when he put them under hypnosis.

[01:40:57] But he was totally convinced. Wrote a second book called Passport to the Cosmos. But what was really fascinating to me is that he then came across Rick Strassman's work, a leading researcher on DMT who ran a study on DMT where he was giving DMT intravenously. And what he found, Strassman found, is that people were having contact experiences all over the place, and in fact, they were having abduction experiences on DMT that corroborated John Mack's research where the people were not on DMT.

[01:41:26] Luke: Wild.

[01:41:28] Mark: So Mack actually endorsed Strassman's book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

[01:41:32] Luke: Really? Wow. That is fantastic. And then what about the phenomenon of physical crafts and things like that? I'm not convinced that the model of the earthly realm that we've been taught is accurate or legitimate, which is inclusive of how we consider us to be floating in space. I don't believe in space in the way that I've been led to believe. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what's out there, but I have a very strong suspicion that the nature of this realm is not what has been described.

[01:42:14] And so when I think about like UFOs, for example, like actual crafts, I don't believe in them or not believe in them, but what makes most sense to me is knowing that our perception only allows for a very small sliver of reality known as visible light. And that it's been scientifically proven that there's a wide spectrum of dimensions that we can't perceive in a normal waking state.

[01:42:40] So it makes sense to me that if there are crafts that are appearing in the sky, they're shifting in and out of dimensions that enable us to see them with the naked eye through the visible light spectrum, a. B, that if what we've been taught about Antarctica is false and that there is some enclosure that keeps all the water in the planet in place, which is repeatable, right here you got a glass of water.

[01:43:10] Water needs a container. It always sinks its own level, etc. That perhaps what we consider to be outer space, like a craft coming in from the stars and Mars and the moon and all that space, that maybe crafts are, a, interdimensional, but maybe one of the dimensions they come from is outside of the bounds that we've been taught on the map of the earth and that they're coming from the outer lands, not so much outer space or space that's outside of what we've been taught is the confines of Earth and where our maps end.

[01:43:44] And you just search flat Earth and Antarctica on TikTok, and your shit will be tripping for months. But that's an interesting idea that maybe there are outer lands that there are other sentient beings living on, and sometimes they cross over and come here. Did you find any evidence to support any of that on any level?

[01:44:05] Mark: I have only recently come across this argument of outer space, meaning an outer territory. So I was not aware of that when I wrote the book. And what I say in the book is it's unclear who the beings are, where they even come from, because there's a whole line of thought that these are time travelers from the future.

[01:44:20] And even using the term them is misleading because it's not a uniform thing. There's so many different species people report. They have an ability to shapeshift. John Mack said this, the aliens appear to be consummate shapeshifters. That's what he's hearing from everyone. Meaning they can change their form. And we hear this in different traditions. Like in the Indian tradition, they have nagas, which are serpents that can transform into humans, I believe. So this is a--

[01:44:41] Luke: Like Hillary Clinton. Going into the David Icke territory there. Sorry, carry on.

[01:44:46] Mark: Yeah, some of that. David Icke references Credo Mutwa, who was head of an African tribe. In their tradition, they talk about the lizard beings, the reptilian beings. So I reference that sort of thing because all over the world, tribes have different-- they all talk about the sky people and the star gods in various indigenous cultures.

[01:45:05] So the craft themselves, who's operating the craft? That's a question. What's their origin? And I think the answer might vary because it might be different types of civilizations. And where they come from, that's a big question. Because number one, they might say, I'm from Pleiades, if they communicate with someone. But how do you know that for sure? How can you validate?

[01:45:24] But they do talk about that. And then also the craft themselves, they do things that are strange. They disappear. They go in 90-degree right angles. So they do things that we can't do with our current technology. Some people speculate that what people see are just advanced military technologies, and it could be the case for some of them.

[01:45:42] Richard Dolan is probably the best UFO historian I've come across. And I referenced his work in the book because he calls out historically some of the sightings that have been very anomalous. So I think something's going on. There's one that's popping in my head right now, the Rendlesham Forest case where there was a craft and then members of the government, might have been military, went out to see it, and there were hieroglyphs on it.

[01:46:07] And one of the men, I think his name is Jim Penniston-- I hope I got that right-- he touches the craft, and then he takes out his notebook-- I think it's the same night-- and starts writing down a bunch of zeros and ones, like he had to get it out. Years later, he was on the set of a documentary, and someone said, turn back to that page.

[01:46:26] He was with a journal, maybe 25 years later or something. Go back to that page. That's binary code. We need to see what that is. So they decoded it and it corresponds with different coordinates on earth, significant coordinates. And I believe some are where pyramids are located. That's a bizarre-- there are cases like this. That book has a lot of weird stuff.

[01:46:51] Luke: That's wild.

[01:46:52] Mark: And I just saw enough of it over and over again. Another one's phantom pregnancies, women who cannot correlate a pregnancy to a sexual encounter, including lesbians. And then the pregnancy goes away after a few months every time.

[01:47:06] And the gynecologists say, well, your body must have just absorbed it. But John Mack's work talks about this too, that in the abduction cases, there's a common theme of hybridization of humans and these other intelligences where they actually take sperm and eggs of humans-- I know this sounds insane-- on the craft. But he's seeing this over and over again.

[01:47:25] And sometimes mothers are reunited with their hybrid children on the craft, and they start to remember that. So you wonder, are people being inseminated and not realize it? Now, what makes us a little more believable is that we have to think about the nature of memory. And what comes up over and over again in these sorts of encounters is missing time, number one, and then just memories that are somehow buried.

[01:47:49] And they can be reactivated. Sometimes they come up spontaneously, and people don't know if they're true, but also hypnosis seems to be able to unlock them. And then even memories that we have can be manipulated by higher beings. They're known as screen memories.

[01:48:02] And the classic case, Mike Clelland talks about this, where people thought they saw an animal. Often it's an owl, could be a deer or something else. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the PCR test, he talks about encountering a glowing raccoon.

[01:48:16] Luke: Really?

[01:48:17] Mark: And then he had missing time. But what happens when people go under hypnosis and they say, I saw this owl on the side of the road, and then a few hours later I was home. It was midnight when I saw the owl, and all of a sudden it was 4:00 AM. I don't know what happened. They go under hypnosis, and the hypnotist says, I want you to try to go up to that owl and touch it.

[01:48:34] And they say, hmm, that's not an owl. That's actually a gray alien. Screen memory. So implanted memories. The point here is that what we remember might not even be the truth. So it's possible that many of us have had contact and/or abduction experiences, but the memories are wiped.

[01:48:51] And this also relates, and I think is corroborated by work on mind control and things like MKUltra, where multiple personalities can be created and one personality isn't even aware of the others. So there are parts of the mind that we might assume to be true of a singular personality where we remember enough. That might be a false assumption where there's more than we actually remember. And if that's true, then contact is critically important because it could be affecting all of us directly in ways we don't understand.

[01:49:19] Luke: Holy shit. That's mind blowing. You just reminded me of something wherein there have been cases reported where someone has a multiple personality, what they would term to be disorder. I don't know if it's necessarily disorder, but someone has multiple personalities, and for example, one of the personalities, their prominent main personality, is allergic to shellfish, and their other personality is not. So it's like, dude, there's so many things here that we will never begin to even understand about the nature of reality. Fascinating stuff. All right, let's carry on here.

[01:50:01] Oh, this is going to be a good one. And then that's great. Your most recent will take us out and we can get into the fallacies of viruses and all that. But this one, An End to the Upside Down Reset, and so The Leftist Vision for Society Under the "Great Reset"-and How It Can Fool Caring People into Supporting Harmful Causes. Oh my God.

[01:50:24] One thing I did notice about your books too is your references are insane. There's a hundred pages of citations here. By the way, for those listening, some of these sounds out there, you didn't just pull it out of your backend. One of the things I've observed in the past few years is the weaponization of empathy and compassion, where you see these authoritarian power structures preying on good people and enlisting them as enforcers of their agenda under the guise of the greater good.

[01:51:06] This idea of collectivism that has a bunch of different names. You can call it socialism, Marxism, communism, etc., but it's basically collectivism. If you take a caring person and basically imprint their psyche with one version of collectivism, you can get them to do the bidding of ultimately an agenda that doesn't serve the collective or the individual. It's so diabolical. I'm excited to hear your perspective on that.

[01:51:34] Mark: Yeah. That's what motivated the book. I was seeing it everywhere, and in the second book, An End to Upside Down Living, one of the 10 approaches to living that I wrote was compassion with discernment. At the time, I didn't realize how important that would be, but now I think it's central because of what you just described.

[01:51:49] The world is being guided by what they think is compassionate, many people, not everyone, but many people are being driven by that, but not discerning the wolf in sheep's clothing. And part of what, if I were to summarize the issue with certain aspects of the spiritual movement, is that there's a subconscious belief that evil is easy to identify. Evil exists, but look, there are mass murderers out there. There are serial killers.

[01:52:11] Look at that person on TV. That person so mean and rude and says racist things. That's obvious and in your face. What they think about less is the fact that you could have someone that seems really, really nice and make something sound good, but it's actually going to lead to evil. It's a more insidious kind.

[01:52:27] And to me that's the Great Reset. And that's where I use this term leftism, which is distinct from liberalism. Leftism is a more extreme version, which we can talk about, but looking at political psychologists, the left in general is driven by compassion. And so things that sound compassionate on the surface, especially if someone's really busy and doesn't have time to look into it, might be more appealing.

[01:52:51] And that leads us to the Great Reset, which was announced a few months after lockdown in 2020. It was Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, and then Prince Charles. John Kerry was talking about it. So some very big names. Time for a great reset. And then Schwab and his colleague, Thierry Malleret, came out with a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. And then there was a sequel. I believe it's called The Great Narrative.

[01:53:13] Luke: I can't believe these guys telegraph what their plan is. It's crazy. And people just ignore it. I mean, except people like you.

[01:53:21] Mark: It's all there. It's in a book, but it's not couched as something nefarious. First of all, the language is obtuse, and that's why I wanted to write a book to summarize in a more concise fashion, what are the areas that they're talking about for society, but it's all about making society better.

[01:53:35] And some of it actually sounds good, and they talk about better health and things like that, which are good, but the veneer of compassion is the danger. So the first half of this book on the Great Reset goes through the psychology of this compassion-focused thinking and psychological biases that can lead people to overlook the truth and then gets into what the Great Reset is.

[01:53:57] And I divided it into six categories. And the Great Reset is a reshaping of society. So this is a sociological examination, and I categorize it in these six areas: culture, politics, economics, environment, i.e., climate, technology, and metaphysics, and show what they say and how it's dangerous. That's what the book is.

[01:54:20] Luke: What is the plan? I've not read Klaus Schwab's book, so I'm prejudging it as diabolical. A, who elected these motherfers to begin with? How did they get any say? When you look at him or Bill Gates or any of these people that are creating policy that affects millions and millions of people and they have no credentials with which to do so and have not been elected and somehow have risen to have such power, that's disconcerting to say the least. But what is the plan of the WEF and the Great Reset?

[01:54:58] Mark: Well, you're right that it's an unelected body, but many people who have been through the Young Global Leaders Program of the World Economic Forum are in governments and corporations all over the world.

[01:55:07] Luke: Right. So like when he said we penetrate the cabinets.

[01:55:09] Mark: He said it.

[01:55:11] Luke: He puts his people in positions of power.

[01:55:12] Mark: So their ethos. That's why it's important. Because some people would say like, Mark, why would you worry about this? This is just a group of powerful people, but these are not the governments. These are not the politicians. But politicians are being clearly influenced by this.

[01:55:26] Basically, the Great Reset is about more government power, consolidating power, getting rid of free markets, and instead having things like what Klaus Schwab calls stakeholder capitalism and ESG, environmental, social, and governance, so ways to actually steer the economy, which is away from a free market, moving us toward, basically a different kind of human.

[01:55:53] So the metaverse and transhumanism, that sort of talk, but it's always couched in a more positive way. And then also the right and the ability of governments and authorities to consolidate power and really weaponize it when there's a perceived emergency, whether it's COVID-19, something medical, or climate.

[01:56:09] And climate's a huge part of the Great Reset, that this is the biggest emergency and that we need to get together so that we can stop this. And that means taking away people's rights, telling them how much they can travel, their CO2 emissions, what they can eat. So it becomes authoritarian.

[01:56:22]  And then the last one is the metaphysics, which to me is the glaring omission of the Great Reset. There's a presumption of materialism in it, even though it's not explicitly stated. Yuval Noah Harari, who's an author and one of the spokesman of the World Economic Forum or an advisor to it, he talks about the notion that there is a spirit or a soul that that's over.

[01:56:43] So there's that undercurrent in many people associated with the World Economic Forum. They're not talking about a spiritual revolution, which from my lens, that's where I started on this journey. If we're going to have a reset, let's learn about consciousness and who and what we are. That's not part of the Great Reset. So ultimately, I see it as steering society in a negative direction in line with the dark side of the spiritual war.

[01:57:06] That's what this is to me. It's the most current iteration. There probably have been other iterations in the past, but all of a sudden we had an emergency that acted as the impetus for, okay, now we can reset and enact all this stuff. That sounds really nice on the surface because, of course, if we just get together and take away some rights, you're going to be protected. And we're seeing how important that is with COVID. It's going to be really important with climate. We're going to be safer if we do this. That's the messaging.

[01:57:29] Luke: And you are an uncaring person if you don't comply. And therefore, if you're a good person, you have to become basically citizen enforcement of your neighbor who's not in compliance. And you're a good person if you get the bad people to comply.

[01:57:47] Mark: Exactly. It's for the common good. For the greater good.

[01:57:49] Luke: Yeah. Whenever you hear it's for the greater good, run. Wow, that's so interesting. Because you hear stuff about these groups, and sometimes it seems like, oh, it's conspiracy theory territory, and are they really going to do anything?

[01:58:03] But then, as we've seen in the past few years, oh, they're doing it. And if they are scare tactics and trauma-based mind control using a supposed virus, which we can get into next, if that doesn't work, it's not like they just hang up their coats and like, ah, we tried. Let's all just go back to living. No, they're already planning the next thing.

[01:58:25] And the climate one is so insidious and evil because any thinking, feeling human cares about the planet in which we live. It's like, well, yeah, the environment, who's against the environment? We are the environment.

[01:58:41] And the weaponization of that one is really terrifying. And how I see that it's just complete and utter bullshit is because, take pollution. I would say I'm against pollution. I don't litter. I try to use all organic stuff and all that. I recycle. But when certain countries that wield a lot of economic power, like China, for example, are completely left out of the critiques of CO2 emissions and stuff, it makes you wonder.

[01:59:15] When wireless technologies that are decimating the bee population, the insect population, birds' ability to navigate. When you're looking up in the sky and you see unnatural clouds in tic-tac toe patterns all day long in every NATO country in the world, and no one's talking about that. Or now we're seeing they're starting to admit to the spraying in the skies, but they're saying it's to protect the environment.

[01:59:40] It's like there are so many holes in that story of what's actually being done to protect the environment versus what's being done to exert more control over the human population it becomes pretty obvious.

[01:59:53] Mark: Right. And it pulls on compassion and also fear that this is an extinction level issue that we need to worry about. But most of those predictions, they're based on models, and models are models. They're not death definitive predictors of the future. We saw the COVID models. They were completely wrong about the death estimates.

[02:00:11] And we've seen historically the climate predictions have been wrong many, many times. And I list a number of them where they said, by this date, this is going to happen. Didn't happen. Great Barrier Reef's going to be done. And then there's an article saying it's flourishing more than ever. Polar bears. The predictions have been wrong over and over.

[02:00:26] And then policies being determined on the basis of these predictions which come from models and they're treated as fact rather than just predictions based on models. And we can barely predict the weather in one location in two weeks.

[02:00:39] Luke: Right. But we're going to tell you what's happening 10 years from now, the sea levels rising and all that. I think the thing that's really disturbing about the fake climate change agenda is that it causes many people who become aware of its fallacy to then just discount the issues involving the environment that we do need to pay attention to.

[02:01:04] So you might have some hardcore right winger that realizes that the official narrative is fake, therefore they don't care about pouring a bunch of Roundup in their creek, in their backyard. You know what I mean? So it's like there are major issues with our ecology that I think now are going to be ignored because the issues that are being emphasized are not actually based in science and legitimate analysis.

[02:01:28] And so it's like some people are just throwing the baby out with the bath water and thinking we have nothing to worry about when there are things we need to be concerned about, but they're not the things we're being told` to be concerned about. Which pisses me off because I love the planet that I live on, and I want to do everything I can to be a steward of the planet. So that to me is just even more evil because it's something that we all innately care about and it's being weaponized against us.

[02:01:56] So speaking of models, all right, we're on number six here. An End to Upside Down Medicine: Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines—And Why Consciousness Is Needed for a New Paradigm of Health. So speaking about models, if you were to tell the average person that the COVID-19 virus, as we know it doesn't exist, they would say, yes, it does. And you'd say, why? Well, because I saw it on TV. What do you mean you saw it? Well, I saw a picture of it.

[02:02:22] It's a computer-generated basically mockup of what they determined this virus to be. And I don't know a lot about the germ theory versus terrain theory, but I have done a couple shows on it with Alec Zeck and Dr. Andrew Kaufman, were two, where we touched on that. We'll put those in the show notes, again, at lukestorey.com/markgober. But what did you discover about the history of virology and the nature of disease as we currently hold it?

[02:02:56] Mark: Well, I wrote this one in 2023, so under a year ago. And prior to that, I'd heard people like Andy Kaufman talk about the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has not been discovered and isolated, and that actually no virus has been. So I'd heard it, but I just never dug into it. It wasn't until Alec Zeck actually, he turned me onto it when I was at a conference with him, Courtney Turner's conference in Tennessee, Rebels for a Cause, last year.

[02:03:22] And then he allowed me to participate in the End of Covid, which is still available at the endofcovid.com. It's a library of, I don't know, a hundred plus hours of stuff related to health and the weaponization of health. So I was speaking, actually not about viruses. I was speaking about the Great Reset and voluntarisms, and political stuff.

[02:03:39] But when the End of Covid came out, because I was a participant, I had access and I started watching the other videos, I said, oh, this is really important. Oh, no, I hope this isn't true.

[02:03:48] Luke: Big old red pill down the gullet.

[02:03:50] Mark: So I said, there's got to be a hole in this. They have to have isolated it. And of course they've isolated a virus. And it led me down the path of looking at the history of infectious diseases more broadly. And that helped me to understand this more and actually become more comfortable with it because historically the word virus was a poison.

[02:04:12] And it wasn't until the 1930s that the electron microscope was invented and wasn't used in more widespread ways for decades after. But prior to that, they couldn't have even seen something as small as a virus is believed to be. Louis Pasteur, when he was working with rabies, he didn't see a rabies virus. He said, well, I can't see it. There must be something there. And in the modern era, we have a very specific definition of a virus.

[02:04:34] It's protein-cased genetic material that gets inside of a host cell, replicates, causes disease in the host, can be transmitted from person to person. Very, very specific. And it wasn't until the 1950s that the "evidence" for that or the rationale became apparent. 1953, Watson and Crick's double helix structure of DNA paper came out.

[02:04:56] So all of a sudden there was this mystery cause of disease previously. There must be a poison that's going from person to person. Now we had genetics. There was a genetic explanation for it, potentially, combined with the discovery of bacteria phages, which happened around the same time. In 1969, Nobel Prize was awarded to work on bacteria phages, and the last sentence of it says, the bacteria phage is a model for how viruses work more broadly.

[02:05:20] So the bacteria phage is an entity that's believed to be a parasite for bacteria exclusively. And pictures of it that you can look up online, they're very similar to what some virus pictures look like.

[02:05:33] Luke: Are any of the virus pictures real pictures, or are they all renderings?

[02:05:37] Mark: Some are renderings, but some are under electron microscopes, but they're from unpurified samples. So it's not known that what's seen under the microscope is actually a virus. And this gets into the methodology's issues. And 1954 is when this started, Enders and People study. Enders won a Nobel Prize for something else later that year.

[02:05:57] So this very prominent guy was writing a paper on virus isolation. And this term isolation is really where the core of the debate lies, because most people think of isolation as the dictionary definition, which means to isolate from other things. So Dr. Tom Cowan uses this analogy. You have a toolbox and a bunch of stuff in it. You want to isolate the hammer. If you want to study it and characterize it, you take it out. You separate it from everything else.

[02:06:20] You'd want to do that theoretically. If there's this disease-causing entity, you'd want to isolate it and then show that it causes disease rather than something else. Because if you don't isolate it from a sample, then there's other stuff there that could be the cause of the results that you see.

[02:06:35] Therefore, this is the real problem. You don't have an independent variable in the study. You don't have an independent variable, then you don't know the effects that you see, where they're coming from. And this gets back to the 1954 study, which I'm just going to summarize at a very high level, but anyone can read the paper, and then subsequent papers follow this.

[02:06:55] This is the gold standard method of virus isolation. They take fluids from a person who's sick. In the 1954 paper was a measles patient. Take fluids from the person, and those fluids might be partially filtered, but it's not just the virus ever. And they're not looking using an electron microscope of that to see just a virus.

[02:07:14] But they take that sample, put it in what's called a cell culture, which is a soup of material that has very toxic stuff in it, antibiotics, monkey kidney cells, a whole bunch of stuff. When they take the filtered fluids from the sick person, put it in the cell culture soup, they find cells break down.

[02:07:32] Therefore, there was a virus. It's called the cytopathic effect, which is the breakdown of cells. There are many problems with this. Number one, if you don't have an isolated virus, maybe the cellular breakdown came from other stuff in the sick person. Because you're dealing with a sick person that probably has all kinds of cellular material in there. Who knows if that's causing cellular breakdown?

[02:07:52] But also you have a cell culture, a soup of material that is toxic on its own. Maybe cells would break down if you didn't add anything from a sick person. These controls are not done typically. Sometimes the studies will talk about a mock infection, but they don't describe what it is.

[02:08:08] So the two major complaints from the no virus camp or the virus skeptics is you don't have studies with an independent variable and you don't have proper controls. There are efforts to do more of these controls. So Stefan Lanka, who's a virologist, ran some studies where he didn't put anything in the cell culture and found cell breakdown.

[02:08:24] And of course, the results can vary depending on how much of a certain antibiotic you have. So we need more of these studies to really test what would cause cells to break down. But he also added yeast RNA to the cell culture soup, and cells broke down. So something that's not viral. Therefore, we need more studies on this. But the traditional method is not actually isolating a virus.

[02:08:45] Now, this gets to your point about what's under the microscope. They're looking at a cell culture. That's not just the virus. It's got other stuff in it. So you might find things that are morphologically, meaning the way they look, is similar, but that's because you have a person with similar symptoms. So maybe their body's having a similar reaction.

[02:09:02] Same thing with the genetic sequencing. If you don't have an isolated sample, what are you sequencing? You're taking a bunch of genetic material that's common to a person with a similar illness, but it might not be viral, and yet they use the term viral. So anytime the term viral is used over and over again, it's known as the reification fallacy.

[02:09:20] It's basically presuming this thing has been established to be true, viral genome, viral morphology. But it's like you haven't even established this. So the origin, the provenance of this, whatever the study is, is not known to be viral in origin. This is the problem with everything. Or even an antiviral drug.

[02:09:40] I get asked about this a bunch because they'll say, well, the drug works. That doesn't mean the mechanism of action is known. So chemotherapy and radiation can work on cancer, but it's not getting to the mechanism of why the cancer is there. So I had two doctors read this book before it was published.

[02:09:56] One was Dr. Andy Kaufman, another's Dr. Mark Bailey from New Zealand, who's written a famous paper that's available online called a Farewell to Virology, if your audience is interested. So we were going back and forth as they were helping me fine tune it. I said, how would you explain antivirals to people? Because they do work.

[02:10:13] And he says they're basically anti-metabolites. So they end up having the effects of helping certain symptoms, but they're not working because they act on a virus that has never been established. So all of these things that we would say, well, it must be because of a virus, there's an alternative explanation.

[02:10:30] And this gets to a broader point that's core to my thinking right now, which I hadn't solidified until recently. We do this in virology and probably every other area of science. We observe things. We then create a model to explain the observations. And that model almost becomes like a law. We assume that model to be true.

[02:10:49] And then when a new observation comes in, we retrofit the observation to fit the model rather than saying, hmm, maybe the model's wrong. And this observation can be explained through other means. Same thing goes with virology. All this stuff, the virus hypothesis, that's one explanation of this intracellular parasite causing all this stuff.

[02:11:09] There are many other explanations for why people get sick. You have a lot of people, let's say in the same place around the same time, similar symptoms. People say you caught something. Well, really, that's in animation we've created in our mind of this microscopic protocol, getting from one person to the next causing symptoms.

[02:11:28] The symptoms we see is because they're breaking down the cells or something. No one's ever seen a live virus, by the way, because an electron microscope works with dead material, not in the host environment of the body, by the way. But they have to slice it up and use resin. They don't see any particle doing all the things a virus is said to do.

[02:11:48] So no one's ever seen it in motion going from person to person, replicating in the cell. They've only seen static images rather than live ones. But going back to my point about observation, we had this hypothesis in the animation in our mind about microscopic particle going from person to person.

[02:12:03] What else could explain why people got sick in the same place around the same time? Was there a similar toxin they were exposed to, or was there similar radiation, EMFs? Were they exposed to a similar psychological trauma? Is there an energetic resonance that relates to consciousness that we don't see that mimics a germ-based contagion?

[02:12:20] The point is there are many possibilities. And in order to figure out which one is correct, you have to test all of them. And actually, with the contagion model, that's a whole other rabbit hole of actually testing contagion properly. You need an isolated virus to do that first to see if that's causing disease.

[02:12:34] But we often, and especially in the medical community, are thinking of the germ paradigm, first and foremost, and then putting all of our money toward that rather than looking at toxicity and these other, what sound like more esoteric explanations. But as I dug into this, every alleged infectious disease, arguably, has a non-germ-based cause potentially, but it just hasn't been studied enough.

[02:12:58] And I want caveat here before I pause. The no virus position does not dispute that bacteria exist. Bacteria are much larger than viruses are alleged to be, and they've been seen before. They've been isolated. There's no question about that. The question from the terrain theory perspective, which is the counter to germ theory, germ theory is the idea that microbes can cause disease on healthy tissue.

[02:13:18] Terrain theory is that that's not true. So bacteria exist, but they're the cleanup crew that emerges in the body when there's too much toxicity in a certain place. They will decompose dead and dying tissue. So you might have an "infection," but it's like the firefighters that were there to put out the fire. They're a byproduct of an underlying toxicity under the terrain model. And then, with regard to the terrain, people would say the viruses don't even exist, or they haven't been shown to exist.

[02:13:52] Luke: Wild. This topic to me is so fascinating and it's a difficult one to get your head around because we've all been so programmed to think a certain way. It's like when I was referring earlier to the fallacy of people going to the moon. If you question that, the rebuttal is often, well, how could everyone be in on it?

[02:14:20] So you're telling me all the astronauts, everyone that works for NASA, everyone that works on all these space programs, every astrophysicist, etc., they're all lying? And the rebuttal to-- the contagion myth is a myth. It's like, well, what about all these brilliant scientists, biologists, virologists, and all these people? They're all in on it?

[02:14:43] And I think that's the wall that we hit up against. And it makes it more difficult to question our assumptions because then we would have to question everyone else who's ever towed the line for that particular method of thinking or perspective. But it becomes more viable, I think, when you think about the compartmentalization of information.

[02:15:08] That if there's a hypothesis or a theory or even an event that isn't real or isn't true, if there's a precedent that's set for it that's robust enough to stick, then an entire model can be created on that that is also fallacious and is supported by a bunch of very well-meaning, very intelligent people that just aren't looking at the suppositions at the beginning, at the nexus of this thought or idea or model.

[02:15:38] And so therefore, it never gets questioned because you're a heretic. How dare you question all these brilliant virologists all over the world? It's like, how do you ever break that paradigm when you have so many well-meaning and highly intelligent people who have spent their entire lives studying something on a false premise?

[02:15:56] Mark: This was a hurdle for me too.

[02:15:59] Luke: Right? It's like, how do you even make a dent in a paradigm when there's so much inertia behind it?

[02:16:06] Mark: What I think is that most people are unaware of this, most professionals, especially doctors, because they're not virologists. They're learning about how to treat symptoms rather than the fundamentals of how all this came about. But even virologists, their gold standard is the 1954 Enders and People study.

[02:16:23] And this actually really helped me. The freedom of information requests that have been submitted, over 200 organizations in 40 countries have replied to Christine Massey and her colleagues, where the freedom of information request was very simple. Show me an isolated virus. And they explain what that means.

[02:16:41] They mean not passing it through a cell culture, all these things. The virus by itself. And the answer is, we don't have any results. Or that's not possible in virology for X, Y, and Z. So you have these government agencies over and over again. They can't produce it. And I'm sitting there thinking, you should have thousands of papers to clearly show.

[02:17:00] And sometimes people will reference, oh, I just found one on the internet. Isolation of this virus. There. It's done. But then look at the methodology. How'd they isolate it? It's using the virology definition of isolation. It's not actually having an independent variable over and over again. So it's much easier probably, I'm just guessing, for those in the field to say, well, this is the gold standard.

[02:17:18] We're going to follow it. It's been established. We've been doing this for decades. And then those who question it, like Stefan Lanka, it's a damaging thing for one's career. You're going up against a huge industry. Think about all the drugs that are created that are antiviral and all the research that's going in to try to find a cure for this virus that hasn't been isolated.

[02:17:37] And we're just talking about COVID primarily. It's all of them have the same issues. And then the danger of it for their career to speak up and say, hmm, actually we're not doing science properly. We're not following the scientific method. You can't prove a negative ever, but I feel confident saying that viruses haven't been established using the scientific method because they don't have independent variables or proper controls.

[02:18:03] I feel like that's a safe statement to make. And freedom of information requests have been filed also on the topic of controls, the topic of whether bacteria cause disease or whether the cleanup crews-- so there are these things that are happening behind the scenes. And when I see government agencies, I can read the request. This is what they asked for. And the government says, we don't have any records, over and over again. That, to me, is powerful.

[02:18:25] Luke: That's shady. I think another hurdle to overcome with understanding this line of thinking is what you mentioned earlier. Well, if it's not this making people sick, if I walk into a room and four people have the flu and then I walk out and now I have those same symptoms, well, what caused that? I think this is where you get into the mind-body connection and no SIBO and placebo and things like women sinking their menstrual cycles. Or if I yawn right now, it's almost guaranteed you and Jarrod are going to yawn.

[02:19:00] There's some cohesion energetically between different species, including humans, that seems to, I don't know, maybe we all kind of start to detox at the same time. Or as you said, there maybe is a toxin like mold in the environment, or we're living under a 5G tower, and so how did we all get sick at the same time?

[02:19:20] There's some other influences that we're unaware of that aren't really being rationally explored because we have this existing paradigm that everyone's comfortable with, and there's trillions and trillions of dollars being made upon it and careers being built and reputations and education centers, and there's this massive infrastructure that is leaning on this house of cards, so no one wants to touch the first card, right?

[02:19:43] Mark: Mm-hmm.

[02:19:45] Luke: But if you look at things, and you mentioned consciousness is needed for a new paradigm in health, what's your perspective of the power of belief, like Bruce Lipton, Biology of Belief, spontaneous remissions? You mentioned the woman with cancer that had a spiritual experience of sorts and came back and the tumor's gone. What are your thoughts on what some of the things that could be causing us to get sick in unison with similar symptoms if it's not contagion?

[02:20:15] Mark: I want to preface this by saying there is a logical fallacy that people fall into, myself included, which is what you said. Well, if it's not a virus, then how do you explain it? And if you can't explain it, it must be a virus. That's a fallacy. These are independent exercises. Exercise one is, can we invalidate or prove the viral hypothesis?

[02:20:34] And the problem is people are trying to, and there's no evidence for it. That's step one. Trying to find the replacement, the alternative, that's a separate thing, which depends on who you talk to. Some people say, for the sake of the debate, we should only focus on the viral hypothesis and not even talk about alternatives.

[02:20:50] But in the book, I do talk about a lot of alternatives. I have a chapter that goes through many alleged infectious diseases, polio, Spanish flu, rabies, and just say, this is the conventional thinking. Here are the papers saying they haven't isolated the virus. Here were other things happening. So with regard to polio, believed to be a viral thing, DDT, which is a pesticide, and LED arsenate, there was an increase in pesticide use around the time of spikes in polio cases.

[02:21:16] I'll say "polio" because really we're just talking about symptoms that we've labeled polio. So these symptoms were emerging, but they could be correlated with the use of pesticides that cause similar symptoms. That's just one example. And this thinking should be applied to every area, and from a more conventional perspective, toxicity, EMFs.

[02:21:34] But then the second half of the book gets into consciousness more than metaphysical. And the problem here is that allopathic medicine, because scientific disciplines are materialists, including medicine, they're not thinking about the metaphysical and a near-death experience and a shift in consciousness and/or energy making tumors disappear-- Anita Moorjani.

[02:21:51] Spontaneous remissions, you mentioned. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has an annotated bibliography of just case after case of these spontaneous remissions that are impossible to describe using allopathic assumptions.

[02:22:05] If we get into the realm of psychokinesis, I mentioned that in my first book. There's a whole chapter on this mind-matter interactions. Some of the classic studies on this that are in the category of Six Sigma, more than a billion to one against chance, use random number generators.

[02:22:20] So these are just machines that spit out zeros and ones in a totally random fashion. And if there's no effect on the machine, then it should over time approach 50% ones and 50% zeros, because it's random. What the experimenters have asked people to do, and this has been done by many people, but also at Princeton University, there was a lab run by the former dean of engineering for almost 30 years.

[02:22:42] It shut down in 2007, but they were doing studies like this. And actually, I was on campus and didn't realize that they were doing it. It was so controversial. But they ask people, they'll say, hey, Luke, I want you to try to make this machine produce more ones and zeros using your mind, and people are able to do this.

[02:22:58] They actually find performance changes when people try too hard. So initially people will do well in terms of being able to alter the zeros and ones, and then they start thinking about it, the performance goes down. So there's something about being able to exercise these abilities and being relaxed and being in a state of joy or just non-stressed.

[02:23:16] That's a side note. But the implication here that people are able to alter these machines, which statistically, that's what the results show, it's not 50-50. It's not 90-10. It's a small deviation from 50-50. But again, statistically speaking, there will be more ones than zeros when a lot of people try this.

[02:23:33] And what does that tell you about mind-matter interaction? It's showing the human mind is impacting a physical system without physical contact. Human body's physical. Well, there's a question about what's physical, but that's different issue. It's apparently physical. And so what does that mean for our mindset and health? And if we're in a perpetual state of fear like we were, and the media was pumping so much fear around the everything with COVID, what can that do to the body?

[02:24:01] And then also collectively there was, it's called the Global Consciousness Project, where these random number generator machines were, they still are, all over the world, so all the time they're generating zeros and ones. And the researchers look at the behavior of these machines when there's a major global event. So 9/11, Princess Diana's death, something that has a high emotional charge and would affect a lot of people where their consciousness would be directed in a similar direction in theory. And they find that the machines behave non-randomly around these events.

[02:24:32] Luke: Wow.

[02:24:33] Mark: So it's collective alterations of the physical world. If a lot of people are believing something or thinking something emotionally, we see a shift. Again, it's very small in these studies, but it's happening to some degree. Now, the implications for health, that just blows away conventional thinking.

[02:24:50] Luke: This is reminding me of some experiments that have been done over time where you have a group of people meditate in a city for a set amount of time and then the crime statistics become lower for that particular period of time in which they're meditating.

[02:25:12] I can't cite one, but these are things that I've just read over the years that are not from some hippie in a cave in Sedona, but legit stuff that is categorized in the unexplainable category. It's like a bunch of people setting a level of intention in a certain place and there's empirical evidence in the physical world to support that what they did had an impact on it.

[02:25:34] Mark: It's known as the Maharishi Effect.

[02:25:36] Luke: Oh really?

[02:25:37] Mark: And there's a book called An Antidote to Violence, which came out a few years ago, and it aggregates, I believe, 20 peer-reviewed.

[02:25:42] Luke: There you go. Thank you. See, I need guys like you to remember the stats I'm just like, yeah, I remember thing, and I chalked it as legit and just filed it away, but I couldn't cite it, so thank you.

[02:25:51] Mark: Yeah, people have studied this. So collective consciousness seems to be a real thing. And from the metaphysical framework we talked about before, where consciousness is fundamental, totally makes sense. If you have a lot of whirlpools focused in the same direction, it's going to affect the whole stream.

[02:26:05] Luke: Epic. Man, thank you so much for being the kind of thinker and feeler that you are. I have my hands full with all of your freaking six books. Slow down for a minute so I can catch up on your books. Do you have these on audiobook?

[02:26:19] Mark: Yes, all of them.

[02:26:20] Luke: Yes. Okay, I'll be able to take them in much faster. Man, what a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for making the time to come over here. I'm really glad we got to connect. I think when we were connected, I texted Alec and was like, is this guy cool? He's like, yeah, do it. Do a podcast with him. He's amazing. And now I'm like, oh, I can see why. So I'm so fascinated by your way of thinking.

[02:26:42] I love people like you that think outside the box but are highly intellectual and you can really back up some of the things that you're researching with evidence, which is not really how my mind works. So I love talking to someone like you that can go, yeah, that thing's right here. Boom. Okay. It helps to validate further curiosity and research.

[02:27:05] I want to put in a request-- well, two requests-- for your next books, even though you said you might be done. One is examining law. Law of the air, law of the land, the law of the sea, three broad categories. Because as we were talking about before, a lot to unpack there, and I think it could be hugely impactful for all of our societies around the world to have an understanding of how our rights are impacted by our lack of understanding of the law.

[02:27:35] The other one is something I've been just watching from the sidelines and haven't really gotten into, and this is suppressed history of fairly recent civilizations, Tartaria and all this business, the mud floods where you're seeing-- the world fairs. Have you looked into this stuff at all?

[02:27:53] Mark: Yeah, only a little bit.

[02:27:54] Luke: Yeah. Like the World Fair in Chicago, just these incredible structures, and the official story is like, oh, that was just made of cardboard for one weekend when everyone came out and then it's all gone. These buildings where you see there are levels and floors underneath the street level that were there and are now full of dirt, which was once mud. There seems to be a lot of, I don't know. We're not getting the whole story of the history of Western civilization and technologies that have been suppressed, free energy, all these stuff.

[02:28:28] These old cathedrals that had these ether capturing diodes and cathode and whatever. There's something there. I don't know what it is yet, but it's compelling enough to get my interest despite all the other things I'm interested in. And I think we share that. We're two people that really have a yearning to understand what the truth is, and there's definitely something there. I don't know what it is. So those are my two requests.

[02:28:50] Mark: Cool.

[02:28:51] Luke: Take them.

[02:28:52] Mark: I would love to know the answers to all those things too. At some point, I'm going to have to explore that.

[02:28:55] Luke: Yeah. Have you looked into that kind of hidden history, mud flood, Tartaria stuff?

[02:29:00] Mark: Only a little bit, but not enough to speak credibly on it. That's the more recent stuff. And then there's the older Graham Hancock type work, and then probably even older than that, which relates to the topic of contact too. And I'm curious about how much of it is human, as in this species, versus other intelligences too.

[02:29:16] Luke: Right, right. Me too. Well, keep seeking the truth, my friend. Where can people find your website, social media, and all that? And we'll put that in the show notes.

[02:29:24] Mark: My website, it's markgober.com. M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. All of my books are on Amazon in hard copy, Kindle, and Audible. I read the audibles myself.

[02:29:35] Luke: Wow.

[02:29:35] Mark: All of them, which is a tedious experience but also really good to do a last edit.

[02:29:40] Luke: I like when authors read their own books. That was the thing about a couple of those David Hawkins' audiobooks where a voiceover guy reading it, it's like, lacks the energy.

[02:29:51] Mark: Yeah. Because I know where to add intonation and I know what-- it's just different when someone else reads it. And my podcast series, Where Is My Mind?, is still available. Apple Podcast, Spotify, all the major players.

[02:30:04] Luke: Cool.

[02:30:04] Mark: Thank you so much, Luke, for having me, and thanks for all you do.

[02:30:07] Luke: Epic. Super fun. I can't wait to do it again.

[02:30:09] Mark: For sure.