Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #250 Mark Gober

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Mark Gober is another outstanding author. We’ve been on a roll lately and this episode is right on par. Mark has written “An End to Upside Down Living”, “An End to Upside Down Thinking” and most recently, “An End to Upside Down Liberty”. One of the most valuable things I felt from the episode is that while my path and many paths down this rabbit hole have been inspired and spurred on by psychedelics, Mark’s wasn’t. He has an incredible perspective and we dive into how he got to where he is now. We’re definitely going to run this one back so stay tuned yall!  Connect with Mark:   Website: markgober.com   Instagram: @markgober_author  Facebook: Mark Gober - Author  Twitter: @markgoberauthor  Podcast: Where Is My Mind - Spotify - Apple   Show Notes:   The Tony Robbins Podcast: COVID-19 FACTS FROM THE FRONTLINE Spotify Apple "American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road" - Nick Bilton  Sponsors:   Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! BIOptimizers Go check out P3OM if you get as gassy as me and the Kingsbu clan do. This is my go to probiotic. Get 10% off by going to P3OM.com/KINGSBU and entering code  “KINGSBU10” at checkout. Super Speciosa is the absolute best Kratom I’ve worked with head over to getsuperleaf.com/kkp and punch in “KKP” at checkout for 20% off everything in store! Connect with Kyle:   Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Zion Node: https://getzion.com/ > Enter PubKey  >PubKey: YXykqSCaSTZNMy2pZI2o6RNIN0YDtHgvarhy18dFOU25_asVcBSiu691v4zM6bkLDHtzQB2PJC4AJA7BF19HVWUi7fmQ   Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. Oh, man. This is, uh, I don't like, I don't like, how do I put it this, how do I put it this way? I don't like, we've had some fire fucking podcasts lately. Nick Corbishley absolutely blew my mind. I've had a lot of people reach out to me about that podcast. You've got to read the book or listen to it on Audible. It is absolutely incredible. And I tried to extract as much as humanly possible in the hour with him. But there's just details that you simply can't get in an hour that he dives into in the book. And it's a hard pill to swallow, but I think it's one of the most important conversations anyone could be having right now. Yeah, just a fucking phenomenal guest who I love and I can't wait to continue the conversation with. Today's show is with another incredible author who, you know, without comparing, easily one of my favorite guests that I've ever had. And most certainly this year, he is an author who wrote The End to Upside-Down Thinking, another book called The

End to Upside-Down Living, and then most recently, An End to Upside-Down Liberty, which is easily one of the most important books that I've ever read. It's for sure. It's number one on my list for 2022. And I know that I read a lot of books. So even though we're only a few, four months into 2022, I've probably read more books than most people do in a couple of years at this point in this year. And this is a big one. It is an absolute big one. It's the first that I've ever read of its kind, where it critically looks at government and the way we police ourselves, control systems, and then mirrors that with a spiritual understanding that is on par with any of the greats that I've ever read. Adyashanti, Eckhart Tolle, I mean, the who's who, Ram Dass, if you put them on a list and

extracted the ultimate knowing and spiritual teachings from these masters, Mark Goldberg's got it. I mean, he describes it just perfectly well. He's an incredible author. But then he shows you how that applies to government, how that applies to the way that we look after each other and ourselves. And I've never seen that done appropriately. I've never seen, I mean, people, you know, I don't know, like there's a, the, you could say the political left is new agey or scientific and atheist and the political right is Christian. Like any of these things, it's like, yeah,

those are broad strokes. Nobody in my understanding has ever really married these two in a way that not only makes sense, but actually shows through quadrants. You know, he does a little graph in his book. And for the Audible listeners, Audible is fantastic. He also reads his own book and he's incredible. He's got a great voice. He breaks down what this graph is.

And I had him, this is one of the most, arguably one of the most important concepts to visualize towards the end of this podcast. We break that down for people, but there is so much that just blew my mind in this book. That was, you know, ways that I had thought before. And, you know, it comes out on the podcast where there's some libertarian viewpoints and I bring up the Silk Road 2.0. There's an excellent book we'll link to in the show notes called American Kingpin,

also phenomenal audible listen. That is on the guy who became the Dread Pirate Roberts from the Silk Road 2.0 and how he was diehard libertarian. He started the Silk Road 2.0. For people that don't know, it was a place to buy drugs and anything you want on the deep, deep dark web.

There we go. Deep, deep. I'm thinking deep state. On the dark web via cryptocurrency and things like that. And it started with him having really profound mushroom journeys and wanting to be able to share that with the world and not get in trouble for it. And he set up a pretty cool system for payment so vendors could sell. They'd have ratings. And if they didn't pony up and deliver the goods, then that money would be kind of like

held in an escrow and it could be returned to the purchaser. Really novel, technologically advanced things at the time. But where he went wrong is he lived and died on the libertarian ideals that basically the market determined. So when he had employees saying, people are asking, can we sell black market kidneys? And he's like, if the market determines it, then yes, they can sell black market kidneys. So now they've got black market organs for sale. And it just continues until by the end of this thing, the FBI is after him, the CIA, the IRS, all these people are coming after him. They're selling, you could purchase a hitman if you wanted to kill somebody you could purchase

any drug on the planet so not just you know psilocybin and some of the more esoteric and plant medicine like you could buy meth you could buy heroin you could buy fentanyl i mean shit that kills people and destroys people's lives all available because the market says so um as i mentioned black market organs and then all the way to like grenades and and like weird malware where you can steal people's identity you know you load a program on your computer hang out in a coffee shop or an airport and anybody that walks by you without it uh protected gets their shit stolen like they're literally like you could see the pitfall after pitfall after pitfall of where the ism of libertarianism, where that fails.

And what's beautiful, and I bring this up in the podcast, is that the graph explains how you work with that and move beyond it through spirituality and through the knowing of what we are and the nature of consciousness itself. And really, that is broken down so well from Mark in terms of how we were raised. Like, yeah, you might have been raised in a church, but how you were raised in school with separation of church and state was that the Big Bang started. Everything was a random and paper-thin sliver of a chance that existence happened. And it's a paper-thin sliver of a chance that we happened and it's a paper thin sliver of a chance that we're in the Goldilocks zone. And through random bumping into each other and chemical interactions, bodies were made, things evolved, and then from the brain, consciousness emerged. That's what most of us were brought up believing in school and academia. And unfortunately,

that's where a great deal of academia still lives. But there's ample evidence of the contrary, and one of the things that I really appreciate about Mark, because people know I beat the plant medicine bandwagon, is that all of his transcendent states of awareness have not occurred from plant medicine, at least in the book. He speaks about many of the pathways that lead us there without touching on plant medicine.

So it was just a fantastic bridge, I think, not only for my listeners, but for me to understand that that is not only possible. Of course, we know that, but his path into the deep dive and really understanding the fundamental nature of consciousness of the non-dual nature of consciousness is incredible. His mentors are incredible. I geek out when he dives into, you know, who his first Vipassanas were with and different people that have helped him along the way. So I love you big time, Mark. I will have you back on the podcast. What I'm going to do too for Mark

is I'm going to email, intro him to many of the homies, Paul Cech, Aubrey Marcus, just as many awesome, Dr. Nathan Reilly, who turned me on to his book in the firsties, Paul Cech, Aubrey Marcus, just as many awesome, Dr. Nathan Reilly, who turned me on to his book in the first place. Any and everybody, I just want to hear him on podcasts more and more and more. Just an incredible dude. And I also want to backlog his first two books,

which I haven't read because if they're anything like an end to Upside Down Liberty, then they are life-changing books. It's a life-changing book. All right, there are many ways you can support this podcast. First and foremost, share it with your friends. That's the easiest thing to do. You just say, yo, dude, you got to check this one out. Paymo. You send them a link on Spotify or if they're Apple to Apple, you just send the podcast app link, all that good stuff.

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GetSuperLeaf.com slash KKP. And without further ado, Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Kyle. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. I typically have a similar arc to each show where I like to get people's background. What was life like growing up? What brought you to be the person that you are today? And it's great too, because I really have an authentic interest in this because of the fact that what turned me on to you was your most recent book, An End to Upside Down Liberty, which I think is absolutely phenomenal.

We're going to deep dive that. But you've got quite a bit of work that started before this that I want to deep dive into as well. And I don't really have, I don't have much there. So I'd love to get to know what was your life like growing up? What got you, I mean, obviously you're quite accomplished academically and your views, definitely they stand right in line with my thinking, but not in line with many people that come from such a background as yourself. So tell me what makes you you today.

Sure. So let me take you back. For my undergrad, I went to Princeton and I was on the tennis team there, division one program. I was one of the captains my senior year. So that's my background. I was traditional, academically focused, focused on sports. And I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do after school. And many of my classmates went into investment banking, management consulting, like traditional business paths.

And since I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I figured, why don't I try investment banking? And I was fortunate or I don't know, it wasn't too much fun. But I was fortunate at the time because I really wanted to get one of those jobs to get a job at a large investment bank in New York. But I started in the summer of 2008. That's when I graduated, right before the financial crisis hit. And I was there from 2008 to 2010.

So really brutal. I mean, barely slept, working nonstop. It's a tough job to begin with, but I was in a group that was responsible for advising financial companies. So my clients were companies like banks and insurance companies and asset managers, all the companies that were having struggles during that period. And add to the situation that I was at one of the banks that was having trouble too.

So it was an extra stressful period. I certainly wasn't thinking about writing books or the topic of consciousness, which I got into much later. And in 2010, decided to leave investment banking. I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do long-term, but I figured for my early career, it was a good platform. And I ended up joining a firm next where I spent 10 years, first in the Boston office, and then I moved out to Silicon Valley where I spent most of my time and doing somewhat similar work advising companies, but more on the tech side. So with their inventions and intellectual property. So still very much a traditional business kind of thinker. And in 2016, that's when things shifted for me. And it even started

a few years before that. And I talk about this more in my second book, An End to Upside-Down Living, where I kind of hit a wall in many ways. The fundamental issue, as I look back at it now, was that I thought life had no meaning. I thought that's what I learned in school and everything I learned about science said that we live in a random, meaningless universe. So I could try to make up meaning while I'm alive, but in the end, it doesn't matter because we're all going to be dead anyway. So when I would have a big success or a big failure, that was the kind of thinking that was in the back of my mind. I didn't know how to make sense of the world. And I thought, well, tough, Mark. That's just the way it is. That's what science teaches us. And I'm not going to rationalize things. So it's hard to be such an accomplishment-focused person like I was. I was

looking at each achievement that was in front of me when you don't have meaning behind it. So in the 2014-2015 era, there were some business deals that didn't go my way, some things in my personal life with dating that didn't go the way that I wanted, and I didn't have any meaning in my life. So I was not in a great place, even though if you were looking from the outside, you'd say, you're doing really well, you've achieved these things that you wanted to achieve. I felt like I was in a meaningless place. So I was in that lost state for a little while. And in 2016, I was listening to podcasts. I wasn't looking for anything new in particular with regard to what I ended up writing about. But I stumbled across alternative health shows and also business shows. So I was listening to one called Extreme Health Radio in August of 2016. And I heard a woman who was interviewed. This was not a show that I was seeking out. It just happened to be the next one on. And she talked about psychic

abilities and that she communicated with non-physical beings. And she worked with clients doing this. And she spoke about it in a very nonchalant way. I'm like, what's going on here? I've never heard someone speak quite like this before. And it wasn't like it changed my life at that moment. But the woman's name is Laura Powers. And she mentioned that she has her own podcast called Healing Powers during that interview. And I said, okay, that's interesting. Why don't I just listen to another podcast? I have a long drive. I used to live in San Francisco and drove down to Silicon Valley, lots of traffic. So I turned on her podcast. And it was a lot of people that were talking about very similar kind of

thing. Non-physical entities, the survival of consciousness after the body dies, the reality of psychic abilities, the interconnectedness of everything, and more fundamentally, the idea that life has meaning. So a few months into this, I was listening to her podcast and that led me to reading lots of books and scientific papers and other podcasts. And I realized I had to rethink everything. And it was a totally disorienting period in the fall of 2016 because I was just coming out of this phase where I was really lost in life. And now my worldview was turned upside down, quite literally. And all I wanted to do was research. So I was just researching nonstop, mostly on my own because my friends from my business world and from college were not thinking this way. So at first, I didn't want to talk about what I was researching. But eventually, they used to think life was not fully meaningful

or at least they hadn't considered those topics. And I was finding that when I had these discussions, many people said their own lives were shifting in certain ways. So fast forward to summer of 2017, I had been spending all this time researching. I said, I'm gonna put this down into a book. And I took the 4th of July weekend that year,

which was a long weekend. And I said, I'm just going to write as much of this as I can. And I wanted to focus on this topic of consciousness and all the evidence for psychic abilities, for the survival of consciousness after bodily death. So things like children with past life memories, near-death experiences, telepathy, et cetera. Put all the evidence into a book. And fast forward another year, it was published in 2018. In 2019, I produced a podcast series where I interviewed many of the scientists on this topic. At the end of 2019, I had just finished my podcast. It's called Where Is My Mind? And the first book had come out. and I was still pulled in this direction of

wanting to research more and wanted to spend all my energy in this area. So after spending 10 years at the firm and moving from associate to eventually a partner at the firm, I decided to leave, not knowing what would be next. I just said I needed to give myself the space to do other things because I was so passionate about this other area. And I was in a great spot professionally. If you were looking back years ago, I would have said, wow, Mark, you really made it. You're in a good spot for your future. But my priorities shifted dramatically. So right before the pandemic, I went on a bunch of meditation retreats when I was transitioning out of my firm, wrote my second book, An End to Upside-Down Living, and then getting to the new book, An End to Upside-Down Living, and then getting to the new

book, An End to Upside-Down Liberty, started to look at current events very closely as the pandemic was unfolding. And that led to the latest book, An End to Upside-Down Liberty, which was published in the fall of 2021. And that's brilliant. I'm still trying to fathom the hook that pulled you into your understanding of consciousness, being a lady talking about psychic abilities on a podcast. Like, I mean, we all, if you know it, you know it, you know, but it's funny. For me, I had a mom that was into kind of new age ideas and things like that. And, you know, she'd lend me the occasional Deepak Chopra book and I'd be like, yeah, all right. You know, it never really grabbed me

per se. I mean, I like the understanding of like Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth, his understanding of kind of reframing our psychology around mind, I found very useful and practical. And then later, as I kind of dipped more into a spiritual understanding, that started to develop, you know, new meaning for me in different ways. But it wasn't until plant medicines where I viscerally felt and knew the teachings in a different way. And it was like, holy shit, consciousness is everywhere. Everything is alive. Whatever soul thing that I have animating me right now, it's in the trees.

It's in the clouds. It's in literally, it is the substrate of all things. And that just blew me away. It's like an unforgettable moment that's so visceral. It speaks to the direct experience of such things. It's really cool and fascinating to me that you were, were grabbed and pulled in this direction so strongly from an indirect experience. You know, when did you, was it the meditation retreats and things like that when you really started to have, um, your own direct experience of, and I'm not speaking about, you know, run-ins with other entities and things like that. I don't know if that's ever happened with you, but, um but just a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of consciousness and really what you speak

to. Yeah, that's a great question because in my research and also in talking to lots of people, their shift typically happens as a result of direct experiences. And for me, it did start off much more of like in an intellectual way and it's continued that way, but I've started to have experiences of my own. And when I think back to that 2016 period, even though I was learning a lot and starting to read scientific papers and so on, I started to have synchronicities that really blew me away, where things would repeat in my life, where when I looked at them with my intellectual mind, the probability of those things happening was so low, and they kept happening over and over again. I mean, it was to the point where I was writing

them down every day. So there was something mystical happening that was, it was subtle. It wasn't like what you were describing with the psychedelic experience. I haven't had one of those massive types of experiences like that, but I was having those subtle synchronicities. And then you raised a good point when you talked about meditation. I did start having changes starting in 2020 when I went on those retreats. So what I did was in early 2020, when I gave my firm notice that I was going to be transitioning out over the next few months, I didn't want to just leave day one. I wanted to make it a smooth transition. I went on some retreats, which I hadn't had an opportunity to do before because I was always working in client services work. You're on call all the time. So I went on three retreats. One was an Ayurvedic retreat in New Mexico. So it's called Panchakarma,

where it's dietary, energetic. It was amazing. Then I had a week off. And then I went on a nearly week-long silent meditation retreat with a woman named Mukti, who is the wife of Adyashanti, who is a very well-known teacher. Oh, he's incredible. Yeah, in my Dark Night of the Soul, I read his book and I had to put it down because it was too correct. It was fucking frying me. And only after the fact, like months after the fact,

could I actually chew on that? But that, that in my opinion, um, is one of the greatest books ever written when it, especially when it comes to that, like the full ego dissolve, people talk about that. It is not a pretty experience. It is not a, uh, you know, it's not like I increased manifestation powers and somehow, you know, have the ability to control nature. It's fucked up. And I almost didn't make it through it. His book really kept that together. He's a brilliant, brilliant teacher. So that's phenomenal that you were with his partner. Yeah. Well, I was with his partner. She's amazing as well. Then I took a week off. And that's when I wrote my second book, right after the retreat. And then the following week, I went on a retreat

with Adyashanti for nearly a week as well, silent meditation. So that was a very intense period, which I had never done anything like that before. And I started to experience physical energy. And this was within the first few days of the retreat with Mukti, where in my face, in my head, I was feeling things physically. And at first, I didn't know what it was. And then I felt this thing pounding in the middle of my forehead. I'm like, what is that? And the retreat was held at a Buddhist retreat center, even though the retreat itself was non-denominational. But there are all these statues with people with a dot at their third eye. And I said, oh my goodness, that's what's happening. My third eye is actually pounding. I've read about this before, but I'm feeling it. And since then, I feel energy all the time. I've been meditating a ton.

And it's something I can't deny. As I'm speaking right now, this is something that didn't exist before. And it's difficult to describe with words, but it's like you know there's a connection happening with this energy. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I think about Terrence McKenna in his funny Terrence, classical Terrence voice saying that language can't describe the experience. It can't hold it. Our language is not enough to encapsulate what happens in plant medicines or any transcendent experience for that matter. And I used to think hocus pocus about meditation really for a long time in comparison to my journeys with plant medicines.

And it was only until probably the last year and a half or two years that I started working with Emily Fletcher, who runs a 6,000-year-old Vedic meditation practice, mantra meditation, where I'm entered states there that I never would have thought I could achieve sober. Just mind-blowing states of consciousness where a full dissolve to the center of unconditional love, where it's just reverberating through every cell in my body, the ultimate high, no come down, literally no drug can touch it on earth. I went to Arizona State and I've used everything on the table, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and nothing touches those experiences. And that to me is, it's not the point of it, but it's a damn nice side effect of dropping

in regularly. It's certainly something that keeps me coming back. Yeah. And as you were talking, Kyle, you reminded me of two experiences that I had, which I think are worth mentioning related to this topic. One was right after the retreat with Mukti and another was six months before. I went on a Kriya yoga retreat, which wasn't as intense, but it was like breathing and meditation exercises, but I guess it was enough to stimulate things for me. And that was just a short weekend retreat, that other one that I had done. And I guess it was like an ego dissolution in hindsight when I look at it, but it was a short period when I was in a meditation following both of these retreats where I felt an energy overcome my body that was so intensely positive. I guess blissful is the

word, or I would say love is the closest word that I can use with the English language that describes it, but it was beyond that. And it was so overwhelming that I thought I was going to die. And especially the one after the Mukti retreat, I literally had this thought. It happened in a split second that I was going to disappear if I didn't stop this from happening. And I thought to myself, well, if I disappear, then there are going to be people like friends and family who will be upset about that. So I shouldn't disappear. And that was a split second. But incredibly intense. Another one of those things where it's undeniable that something otherworldly was going on. And I think that it was an attempt at some kind of an ego death,

that my body was resisting. There was a terror that overcame me. That's a beautiful way to describe it. I think I've had ego dissolve moments on some of the, the, I don't want to compare them, but I would say some of the heavier guns of that space, 5MAO DMT, the Sonoran Desert Toad certainly has those capabilities. And in those moments where it's just a dissolve and it's not quite gone away, there's for me less, it's easier to surrender and there's less grabbing or terror. But I've had moments like that where I've thought like, if I don't stop this, if I continue to surrender and allow this, there's a point of no return where I will zap myself out of existence.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly felt that way. And in hindsight and having read Adyashanti's book, it made me really understand that was the last stretch of the ego grasping with everything it could to hold on to its life. And understanding that too gave me a little bit more compassion for myself for all parts of the self, right? Like, oh, okay, that's cool. I get it. I get it. You want to stick around, you know? Yeah. Certainly, you know, a harrowing experience for sure.

Yes. One of my favorite spiritual teachers, in addition to Adyashanti, his name's Dr. David Hawkins. He talks about the final run, which is describing what you're talking about this this last Letting go before the ego can fully dissolve and many people do describe Having a terror because it is a letting go in a sense that many of us never have before But once that period is transcended according to people that have done it. It's there's like a new level of consciousness that's achieved Yeah, I love I Hawkins' work. Letting Go is a phenomenal book. He's got a few that I love.

Power Versus Force, one of my favorites. I think Wayne Dyer spoke about that one. He doesn't call it like the structure stages of consciousness like Ken Wilber, but he does have a consciousness map. And in that, if you believe God is outside yourself and if anger is your primary emotion, then God is a vengeful God, right? And he kind of maps this all the way through. And then, you know, as you raise your vibrational frequency to love and compassion, you have different versions of God that you experience. But what was always curious to me up until that

point in the last year and a half was that when you reach the stage of enlightenment, and this isn't me saying, here I am, I'm fucking enlightened. Like, it's not it at all. But God simply is, is the final stage. And I was like, wait, God isn't love. God isn't, you know, there's not compassion. Like, I don't get it. I didn't understand that God simply is. And Paul Cech really helped me out with that because at the ultimate stage of God, the reason the Tao cannot be spoken is because anything you'd speak about God, the equal and opposite is true. of duality itself, having subject-object relationship in order to even think about something puts it in that phase.

But the Tao that cannot be spoken is the ultimate heart of what we're speaking to. And that just is. There is nothing past that, nothing beyond it, and nothing to describe about it because any description, the equal and opposite is true.

And that's a mindfuck in and of itself. There's a lot of paradox diving deep like that. So, you know, I could, I could rabbit hole so much with you on, on, on consciousness and all that. And that's, it's absolutely phenomenal. And just hearing, you know, who you've been fortunate enough to have as your teachers makes a lot of sense. Because when I get to the end of this book, I was like, this dude knows. There's not many people that understand consciousness in this way from the non-dual perspective. I mean, they exist for sure. The way you explain it is very simple and beautiful and straight to the point. And I really appreciate that.

Of course, that has to happen from direct experience. You said you're really watching 2020 onward from a critical eye. And it actually surprised me that not more people from finance looked at things that way, or at least were openly critical about it, understanding 2008 in hindsight. You watch Inside Job with Matt Damon as the narrator or the big short, or you read any of the books that have come out since then to really understand how that giant sweep of wealth from the middle class to the 1% or whatever you want to call that, the elites, just how that went down and less of that being accidental. And I don't know where your opinion lies on that, but it just made me think, wouldn't there be more people who really understood that, kind of watching what our government

does, how it responds to things on a global level? I mean, that just seems like it would just make my, at the very least, it would raise my attention to any decisions being made going forward with that level of scale. What really was the impetus for you, like really, you know, wanting to pay attention to all this stuff? Was it something right from the get-go or was it where, you know, the more that went on, the more you were like, no, I'm smelling something fishy here? Well, I was in a position where I had an opportunity to really dive into what was happening because I had just left my job and we were in lockdown. I was living in San Francisco, so I wasn't really doing much. And I like to research anyway. So I had an opportunity to look at things that seemed weird to me. doctor, an ER doctor, I think, from Northern California who gave a press conference saying

basically that COVID was not what the mainstream media was saying, something to that effect. And it was taken off of YouTube. It was pretty benign. He was just explaining his observations. And so I was continuing to see things like that and then started to listen to people who had a more conspiratorial angle. I think in hindsight, what was my openness to it? Because I know a lot of people who are from the finance world, who I would say are really smart intellectually, who do not see what's happening and will reject a lot of the things that I'm saying

and that it's too conspiratorial and so forth. So they just don't see it or there's a block somehow. In my professional career in my mid-20s, there were some business deals that I worked on where I saw corruption. So in the field of intellectual property, these are inventors that are coming up with things that are by definition novel and non-obvious

relative to what's been done before. And that can be threatening to the interests in the industry, especially if you're a smaller company going up against bigger players. There's an incentive for the bigger ones to squash the small guys. So I saw things like that and the tactics that can be used with the media

and the court systems and so forth. So I was primed with that. And then when I started to research consciousness, especially for my first book in End Upside Down Thinking, I saw the way in which the alternative consciousness researchers were treated, the ones that were doing studies, scientific studies on psychic abilities and so forth. Even though they were doing studies that were scientifically rigorous, the media was smashing them. If you go on Wikipedia, some of them are called pseudoscientists. The mainstream- You bring up, sorry to jump in, but you bring up Rupert Sheldrake, who I absolutely loved on Joe Rogan's. I've since read a couple of his books. Just fantastic. His work could not be more important for the studying of consciousness and the field that we're all playing in. It's incredibly important. And to see, you mentioned the pseudoscience remarks on Wikipedia, TEDx taking down his talk,

they banned his talk. It was just like, that makes you scratch your head, right? Right. Exactly. So I saw that in the consciousness space with Rupert Sheldrake and others, and I interviewed them for my podcast. So I got to hear from them what it was like in addition to reading about it. And then I just saw the same pattern repeating when COVID started. And the more I researched, the more I realized there was this whole other area that I just hadn't seen before in understanding the true history of this country and of geopolitics. And if you're actually in search of the truth, which is what my MO really has been, is I want to understand what's going on here because the way I used to look at life was

completely wrong. So I want to understand why we exist so that I can figure out how to live. And that has led me down these rabbit holes to uncover the structure of the world that we live in. That's powerful. Yeah. A lot's going through my mind right now, but I was camping with my son and maybe our second camping trip. He's young. He's still six years old right now at the time of this podcast. And so he was four when we were camping and it was our second time camping. And I didn't have cell phone reception, but I'm hearing all the rumblings of people that we're camping with. And I kind of just thought, if it's a big deal, they'll kick us out of the park, maybe.

I don't know. We'll see. And sure enough, we got kicked out of the park. They shut down all the state parks. They told everybody to go home, to stay at home. And, you know, we got refunded 20 bucks. And I was like, this is curious. And I had already, you know, been podcasting and listening to podcasts and had a

number of friends send me a great podcast that Tony Robbins had done during his COVID series. I think he only did three episodes. I think it was the second one. I'll link to that in the show notes if people haven't heard it. But he had six, because he's Tony Robbins, he had six of the best MDs in the world that were prominent, not just really good at their job, but the who's who. Two of them, I think, were from Stanford, two from the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic. They had the senator from Minnesota. And universally, all six of these guys said, masks don't work because of the micron size. They're designed for bacteria. They're not designed for viruses. And that was a unanimous thing That was no big deal. I didn't think much of it.

I thought, well, better to be safe than sorry, if this does turn out to be the buponic plague. And, you know, they had stated so much more and I started following these guys after the fact, and they had the same thing happen. You know, there was the headline read, Silicon Valley's biggest think tank at Stanford taken off of YouTube. And what they had done is a review on Santa Clara County. This is where I was born and raised in the southern peninsula there in Cupertino and Sunnyvale. And their data showed like this is not what we expected it to be. It's far less of a threat than we've imagined. And we should be thinking of different

ways to go about preventing the spread of this and how to treat it. And that got taken off YouTube. And I was like, how do you take down active doctors at Stanford right now? I don't understand how that gets to come off. And then really that was the red flag. And of course, there were people like David Icke on Brian Rose's podcast and different people that allowed me to take a peek into deeper, larger, potentially ongoing things that had led us to here. And as he stated, he's been talking about this for 30 years and not everything. I don't agree with everything the guy says, but there's been a lot, unfortunately, he's

been correct about. What really got, I mean, obviously, you break this down, which is phenomenal. When you break down government in section one is how does government threaten liberty? It's brilliant because you give so many great examples. You talk about the Tuskegee experiment. You talk about the CIA's open, and I don't know how they, if it was Freedom of Information Act, but they've done, they've run mind control experiments for many years and likely still are. You break that stuff down. What really got you into, have you always been a libertarian?

Like what got you into thinking of, I know the first time I'd heard of this, but the term volunteerism. I came into this in the 2020 era, researching COVID, then starting to look at politics without having a background in politics myself or without having political leanings because I just never cared about it. So if you had asked me at the start of the pandemic, where do you stand politically? I wouldn't have even had an answer for you. I would have said, well, I'm focused on consciousness and I used to do a lot in business and that's my focus. So I came in with a pretty clean slate. I mean, in hindsight, maybe I was more, I've always been more libertarian. I don't really know. But when I started to break it down and look at political philosophies and why we have government and the way in which government is inherently oppressive to individual liberties and to our private property, it became very clear to me what a more ideal structure would be also combining the consciousness research I had done, which was so focused on the importance of treating other people well and respecting other people. That is very much

in alignment with libertarian principles. And in particular, as you mentioned, the term voluntarism, in which all of our interactions and exchanges in such a society would be fully and explicitly voluntary. Yeah, but let's dive into that a little bit further. I really like how you lay it out. But one of the things you mentioned when you talk about the state is the fact that everything just happens. There's no agreement. There are no agreements or contracts on what is the state's role?

What are we asking for? What are we receiving?? What are we receiving? How much are we paying into that? Obviously, taxation without representation is theft. So there's things like that. But break down really what that looks like. Because I think a lot of people, I was speaking to my dad about this before I had him read your book, and those are the first questions that came up for him.

So I'm imagining the listeners right now who haven't read it are wondering questions about that. Yes. Well, structurally, before I go into taxation and things like that, there's a flaw in the way we do government, at least the thinking behind it. So if you look back at the early political philosophers like Hobbes and people like that, they talked about the need for a Leviathan state to manage society. Because if we didn't have that, there would be complete chaos. Because people are inherently warlike and irresponsible and stupid, effectively. So therefore, we need to have a governing structure. If you think about the logic behind that, though, if you assume that people are this way, you have this kind of negative view of humanity, the structure of government says, we're going to take a subset of those people who are irresponsible

and stupid and warlike, a subset, and we're going to take them and put them in a position of power over the rest of the people. So you didn't trust them in the first place, but somehow you trust them when you put a little subset into power. And then the rationale as well, we're going to elect those people, so it's okay. But if you assume that we're irresponsible and stupid, then how are we going to be responsible enough magically to elect the right people into power to rule us? So from the start, there's a problem with the way that we just put people in power if we have certain assumptions about human nature. But getting to what you were talking about in terms of having a contract with the state and things like that, a simple way to think about it, as I've talked to many people about this subject, is if I need a plumber, I could go out and hire a plumber for that service.

So if a person has a need for a good or service in society, you usually go out and hire that thing or you go buy that thing. With government, it doesn't work that way. Government provides many services that are super important, roads, courts, police, military. But those services are effectively imposed upon you when you live in a certain jurisdiction. And it's not like the typical relationship you have with the service provider. So when I worked in business, we had clients and there was a contract between us and the client, and there were certain obligations that we had. And if we didn't fulfill those obligations,

there were certain penalties and then you could terminate the contract if we didn't do well, for example. Those are the sorts of things that are typical in a client services contract. We have this government that's arguably one of the, if not the most important service provider in all of society, where we don't have that structure in place. We have really implied consent. And the problem with implied consent rather than explicit consent is that this structure can force you to do things that you didn't explicitly agree to. And that becomes problematic at a certain point when if someone with malevolent intent

gets into power, they can force people to do things they don't want. And then in the worst case scenario, you have full slavery or genocide. And that's really how I look at things as the biggest concern. How do we fight against that if we look at human history where those things have happened way more than we'd like? Yeah. And very recent history too. I think one of the things that helps me grasp this is kind of how Jung breaks down the shadow. Anything that's in your shadow is inherently outside of your purview. And that may speak to some of the cognitive dissonance people have around this, which you clearly outline greatly in the book. But if it's in our shadow, we can't see it, more or less.

But we can easily see it outside ourselves, right? We can notice the speck in my brother's eye as opposed to the log in my own much easier. If you rewind the clock, just 80 years ago, we have World War II. And we have not, from a biology standpoint, evolved since then. We're the same species. So just to know that this type of behavior can happen and has happened really recently in our history. It's much more recent than people think because you grow up, you say, oh, hey, I've got corded phones. And we watched, you know, telephones change and kids grow up with iPads. And they're

like, yeah, iPads are normal. Whatever the thing is, that's normal because you're born into it. But it was really recently when we've had massive atrocities and massive genocides and that's gone on and gone on and gone on on repeat. Speak to the cognitive dissonance and mass hypnosis and things of that nature that could be leading people to just not see what's plainly in front of them. Yeah, well, the more I research and think about our civilization, the more I come to the conclusion that we are a brainwashed and hypnotized society, that we grow up in a world that has a certain structure

and we assume that's the way things should be and we're taught things in school and we hear things in the media. And unless you're proactive to look outside of the system of information that we're presented with, it's very hard to break out of that hypnosis. And part of the hypnosis is that we live in a government structure where you pay taxes. And unlike a typical service provider where you voluntarily pay for a service, you pay the government, regardless of

its performance, it's going to get paid and it can do essentially whatever it wants with that money. And that's just how it is. And actually, you're virtuous for doing that, for living in that kind of a system, which to me is totally an inversion of the way things actually are. It really is a type of a Stockholm syndrome where I think we've come to respect our abusers, so to speak, and actually have an attachment to them. And because there is such a mind control and a hypnosis and an effective brainwashing, it's difficult to confront information that goes against what we've been taught because it requires basically a crushing of an old worldview. I think I was more open to looking at alternative governance structures because my worldview was blown completely open starting in 2016.

And every day, I feel like I'm letting go of some old belief system. So I happen to be very open to doing that. But I know how difficult that was and how disorienting it was. I had to recalibrate my whole life and I still am. And I can understand why people wouldn't want to do that. You're reminding me of a friend of mine who is, again, a conventional thinker, doctor. And when I first started talking to him about what I was researching regarding consciousness and life after death and things like that in 2016, 2017, his response was, like, Mark, you're probably right. There is a lot of evidence that you're pointing to,

but I don't want to rock the boat. My life is pretty good the way it is, and I don't want to go down this path. And he actually had the same reaction when I started talking to him about politics in my latest book. So I think there is a bit of that, of people like the status quo, and to think about these other topics is so earth shattering and uncomfortable that they just don't want to go there. That's a brilliant point. I have a close family member who I'm not going to put on blast by name, but, um, you know, the, I asked, you know, with regard to all of the information that I had sent the person and, and, and, um, the family member having read all that and listened to my podcast over the last two years, I asked why, you know, why at this point, would you still say yes to being in a part of a statewide experiment. And not in those words, but just

kindly. And she just said that she wanted to be able to dance. She wanted to be able to go back to whatever normal is. She wanted her life back. And being in California, obviously there's much greater restrictions out West than where I live now in Texas. And it truly is, there are major differences between those. And I could see how there would be a desire for that. There would be a desire, just make it go away, just make it go back to normal. I'll do what's necessary. And not even getting into the tribalism around politics or the virtue signaling around, I'm doing this for grandma, that kind of stuff. But just wanting it back to normal for herself really landed for me. And I wasn't upset about the decision. Obviously, I think when we look to many of these topics on a consciousness level,

I think of the fact that I want you to have the right to do whatever you want with your body. And in turn, I ask that you give me that in return, right? That's all I ask in return. You can choose to do what you want and I don't need to be right, but I ask that simply in return for myself. And that's something that's been able to help me navigate because there's been many people, whether they are blood related or not, who have not just a hard time looking at our cognitive dissonance, but almost like a... I've heard the same thing around plant medicines. Like, hey, man,

my life's great. I don't need to shake things up. I don't need to dig up skeletons out of the closet. Everything's going great right now. I'm on a good streak and I don't want to rock the boat. So that really does land for me as something that maybe even could be more than Stockholm syndrome. Like, yeah, you know, I don't trust the government, but I'm going to do this anyways, just because, you know, I want things to go back to normal. Yeah. Well, for me, it all starts with a worldview of why do we exist and what is the intention of our lives? And actually my second book, An End Upside Down Living, I start with that question. What is the overall intention of our lives? And actually my second book, An End Upside Down Living, I start with that question.

What is the overall intention of your life? And the book seeks to answer that question. Because when we have an answer to that question, then that informs all of our decisions about bodily autonomy, what we put in our bodies, what we prioritize, and which activities in our life are more important than others. So for me, I look at my life as part of a much longer continuum that extended before this life and extends after this life. And therefore, I want to do things that are in service of my own evolution long-term

and in the service of the collective evolution. And that's where my compass is pointed. And therefore, certain things just don't matter as much to me that I'm willing to give up because in that broader context, they're insignificant. So depending on who you talk to, they're going to have a different compass, a different intention for why they live. And for them, maybe certain events in their life that might seem more insignificant to me are very significant to them.

And then therefore, that's going to influence their decisions. Yeah, that's a, that's a brilliant way of looking at it. And I, I'm not sure that many people are thinking along the lines of the, the long-term trajectory of infinity, you know, the, the eternal growth, eternal, the, the infinite spiral staircase of consciousness, you know, is, is not, um, it's not mainstream yet per se. Let's talk, let's talk about, uh, some of the alternatives to traditional government. And you speak to the non-aggression private property rights and, and, and truly free markets. Talk about what that looks like because, um, have you read, there's a book called the American Kingpin. Have you heard of it? I have heard of it.

I have not read it. It's fantastic. It is basically the story, and I forget the guy's actual name, but the Dread Pirate Roberts, who was anonymously the creator and admin for the Silk Road 2.0. And brilliant guy. I think he also went to Princeton, grew up in Austin, Texas, where I live now, and then moved to the Bay Area and bounced around San Francisco and different parts. What he was trying to do initially, it started with like, look, I want to grow

psilocybin mushrooms and I want to have a place to sell it without worrying about getting in trouble for that. He he had had his own run with psychedelics and that really opened him up. And he wanted to be able to share that with the world, which is a pretty common trip report for a lot of people that get into that. They want to be able to give that back. And it's not to say that everyone who does plant medicines becomes a dealer, but they want to give access to people. And that's where he started with. And then over time, he let the market decide. And so he would run up against things where his employees would tell him like, hey, people

want to be able to sell black market kidneys on the Silk Road 2.0. And he'd say, well, if the market decides that, then the answer is yes. And they'd start selling black market organs. And then it happened again with hitmen and bombs and identity theft, malware, and shit like that. And it always leaned towards that, right? He lived and died on the argument of libertarianism and allowing the market to decide where it went. And you could see how by the end of it, when he's got Al Capone, he's got the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, everyone's coming after this guy and they finally get him. But what Silk Road 2.0 had turned into based on concrete idealism with libertarian views that basically led it really astray from where it started at. It was just a completely different place where

anything you wanted, you could get. Well, the way I think about it is that it's, as I talk about in the book, it's not just this extreme libertarian perspective known as voluntarism, but it's that combined with the spiritual perspective. Because with the spiritual perspective, that will inform the types of relationships that you even want to engage in in the first place. And you think about things like your karma and how you're treating people. So you might be more hesitant to engage in activities that could eventually harm people, even if someone in the marketplace does want it. So that's an element that I add to it because I think on its own, without that spiritual component, there could be many problems, of course.

But getting to the actual principles of voluntarism without the spiritual aspect, really what it comes down to is private property. And the way I think about it now is either you believe that people have rights to their private property or you don't believe that. And there's no middle ground to me. There's just kind of an extent of the erosion or invasion of private property or you believe in private property rights.

So what is private property? It's essentially anything that you own. So your body and then anything material that you have obtained through non-fraudulent means. So something could be gifted to you, you could buy it, so forth. And the idea in voluntarism is that you have a right to your property. No one else has a right to your property unless you explicitly give it to them. So the non-aggression principle is that no one has a right to initiate aggression against you, your body, or your other property. And you have a right to self-defense if someone initiates aggression against you and your

property. And that's the simple principle. And aggression could be physical violence, fraud, extortion, and so forth. It's a very simple principle. And aggression could be physical violence, fraud, extortion, and so forth. It's a very simple principle. And there are some great thinkers that I drew upon to get to this point. The Mises Institute, which is based on the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. It's in Auburn, Alabama. I was actually there a few weeks ago at their annual Austrian Economics Research Conference speaking. They have this kind of a mentality. Walter Block as well, where if you look at the implications economically and societally of

the non-aggression principle, then by definition, we can't have a government force that we haven't explicitly agreed to because the government inherently is initiating aggression against people's private property. Yeah, that's fantastic. And you touched on it briefly before diving into the nitty-gritty of really what voluntarism includes. But you have this graph in the book where you do break down these four quadrants. Break that down for people so they can get it in their mind's eye. Because I think this is truly one of the most brilliant aspects, not only of your book entirely, you're combining government and politics with the true essence of consciousness and spirit. But talk about how these quadrants land. And

obviously that is the difference between that and diehard libertarianism or things that we may have seen come and go like Silk Road 2.0. Yeah. This is really the crux of the book, Kyle. And before I sat down to write it, I knew this is where I wanted to lead to because this is it. And I call it a metaphysical political philosophy rather than just a straight up political philosophy. And that is something I wasn't seeing in my research. Most people were talking about,

well, I'm conservative, I'm a liberal, I'm a libertarian. There's a spectrum essentially on the extent to which they think the state should have an ability to intrude upon private property. And to me, any intrusion against private property is the state, known as statism. So that belief is one end of the spectrum. If you want to have a vertical axis, let's say, statism, this belief in government that can invade private property, that's on the bottom. And on the top is voluntarism, where there is no state that can do that. All interactions are voluntary.

And people might fall in different places on that spectrum depending on their beliefs in private property rights. But that's the political part of the spectrum. What I did was I added a horizontal axis. And the horizontal axis is the metaphysical. So on the far left side of that, you have straight up scientific materialism. Some call it physicalism, this idea that all there is is matter. We are just made of matter. Consciousness, which is our sense of experiencing life, comes from our body and more specifically from our brain, which is made of matter. So when the body dies, there's no consciousness. Life is random and fundamentally meaningless. That's the scientific paradigm in today's world. That's how I used to believe.

It's a very atheistic and non-spiritual perspective. So that's on the far left of this horizontal axis. On the far right is where I land now. I call it the one mind based off of the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Erwin Schrodinger. He said, in truth, there is only one mind. That's how I look at things. We're part of one interconnected consciousness.

To use an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher, he says that it's like we are whirlpools within an infinite stream of water where water represents consciousness. So we have the sense of being an individual, but we're fundamentally interconnected. That's on the far right of the spectrum. And the term I use is non-duality. The idea that there is only one consciousness, not two. So to recap, there's two axes. There's the vertical, on the bottom is statism, on the top is voluntarism, and the horizontal, on the far left is physicalism, and the far right is non-duality. And that leaves you with four quadrants.

Each one is a metaphysical political philosophy. And what I argue is that we need to move as a society toward the top right, toward what I call non-dual voluntarism. So it's a state, a political structure that respects private property and where people in the society subscribe to a spiritual worldview where there's interconnectedness. the one mind is that one of the greatest, I don't know if you'd call it a mistake, but one of the biggest issues that humanity runs up against is the fact that we believe in a separate world. We believe in something that we are not connected to God. I mean, that's in most religions that God is separate and judging, at least in the West, but that there's a lack of interconnectivity. You speak to the physicalism and the idea of random chemical reactions leading to the birth of a universe and then through

evolution, the creation of a brain, which then brings in consciousness. That really is what we're taught in school, more or less. And I think that through direct experience, we can snap that in half and grab it for ourselves. And there's many ways to go about that, not just the use of plant medicines. Obviously, that was not your path, but meditation, breath work, and many other things can get us there, even fasting. And I'm still leaving a ton off the table when it comes to that. I think of these things, they're critical points. What do you think will move the needle for people to transfer where they're at from scientism into a more unified look at what consciousness is and what then will help them, or maybe it's the same thing that will help them move from statism into voluntarism. I think about this a lot.

And where I land on it is that the best we can do is transform ourselves individually and try to help others who are receptive. But it's impossible to force people who are not ready or who don't want to go there. And it might actually be against their interests because maybe there's something for them to learn spiritually by being resistant. So the way I look at things is that I want to do as much as I can to elevate myself spiritually, to transcend the ego and so forth. And like you said, there are many ways of doing that. In the book, I lay out four different categories of pathways. One is the pathway of knowledge. The other is a pathway of selfless service. Another is a devotional pathway,

and another is energetic. And to me, those four kind of encompass all the different spiritual practices that people could think about doing. So for someone like me, that's what I'm focused on personally. And then I think about, well, how can I help others as I'm elevating myself? So for me so far, it's been writing books, doing a podcast, doing interviews, getting the information out, and trying to educate people who are really busy in their lives and want a snapshot, want something really quick to understand. And maybe that can be like the seed for them, like a little opening that can lead to greater things. And I think if we all have an intention

that's in that general direction of wanting to improve ourselves individually and having an orientation of service towards others, it'll probably lead us in a good direction societally. I don't know how many people or what percentage of the population we'd need to get to see real changes, but it might not need to be 100%.

Yeah, I think Sadhguru and a number of other people that have talked about, you know, in Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth, in his beginning, he talks about the flowering of human consciousness and how, you know, the right conditions needed to be there for all of the flowers to come about after the first ones kind of popped up and died quickly. And if you look at the ascended masters, if they did take bodily form and come through here, whether that be Buddha, Christ, or any of them for that matter, they were likely those early flowers that had popped up before their time. But now, hopefully, what we're heading

towards is the flowering of human consciousness. And it may not be a lot. I think 2% to 10% has been ballparked by some of the more prominent thinkers and spiritual people that are alive and walking today. And I hope that's accurate because it doesn't look like it's going to be a clean sweep anytime soon with changing people's minds. And as you mentioned, Ram Dass speaks to really operating – when you operate at the soul level, you no longer need people to change because they have their – whatever their soul's lessons are, this go-around is why they're here. And that may not be enlightenment, and they may not be transcending the ego. It may not be being a compassionate and kind and considerate person. And I think that's a tough pill to swallow for some people, but it also, you know, in that lies the seed of, of understanding. And it makes it easier to let go of the need to be right in many ways, because we can see like, Oh, okay, they're on their path. And, and,

and we all ultimately choose that for ourselves. But I just wonder, you know, you know, similar thinking, you know, what is that number look like in terms of getting people to, to really raise up and with all the talk of existential crisis and things of that nature, you know, where, where does it, what's it going to take to not go down in a ball of fire? Yeah. Well, I wonder if it's, if it's a number of people or also a, like the extent to which individuals have a transformation. And David Hawkins talked about this a lot where one person who was enlightened would counterbalance the negativity of many, many people. So maybe it's not the

quantity, but it's the quality of the awakenings of the people that are on this path. But I also want to add a wrinkle to this that I'm still confused by when we talk about a collective awakening and moving toward a freer society and a more spiritual one, which is that the spiritual community, and that's where, for my first two books in my podcast up until this new book came out, that was my audience primarily. And a lot of those people are incredibly resistant to what I've written about and the things I'm saying with regard to government. They tend to cling on to the need for the structure to invade private property. And they're very resistant to the notion of conspiracy, which to me is mind-blowing because looking at history for

five minutes shows that conspiracy is part of everything. And it doesn't even take much research in the modern world to see that there's a lot of really dark stuff. So the broader, the way I would describe it now is I think there's a resistance in part of the spiritual community to looking at darkness. And to me, it's a form of spiritual bypass, which I hear a lot about in the personal development world of let's say I have this trauma or the shadow element in my own life that I don't want to look at because it's uncomfortable.

To avoid that is known as spiritual bypass. So I'd heard that a lot in the spiritual sense, but now I think there's a spiritual bypass in a collective manner where there's darkness on a planetary level that's been going on for who knows how long. And it's really, really dark, and it's more evil than people want to consider because it's unpleasant. And it's like, well, I just want to focus on love and light. I'm going to ignore that dark stuff. And to me, it leads to a naivete that is incredibly dangerous because it can leave us susceptible to deceptive forces. So it's like an awakening in multiple vectors. And at the end of the book, I talk about this notion of waking up, cleaning up, and growing

up. It comes from the philosopher Ken Wilber. This idea that the awakening is multifaceted, that you could be very spiritually awakened in certain ways, but maybe you haven't cleaned up your darkness, and maybe you haven't matured or grown up in certain ways. And I'm really seeing that unfold today in society. There's multiple vectors in which people are having awakenings. Absolutely. I'm so happy that you brought that up and we can finish with that to keep it on an hour. I really want to introduce you to a lot of my friends in the podcast game.

I want the whole world to know who you are and to have, you know, just for me as a fan to continue to listen to these conversations with yourself. Where can people find you? And, you know, we'll link to all this stuff in the show notes and with permission, I'd love to introduce you to some other good podcasts. Well, first, Kyle, I want to thank you for that generous offer.

I'd love to talk to your friends. And thank you for having me and for your support. And I also want to thank you for what you're doing and the information you're spreading to help people improve their lives. I mean, it's critical to have these messages put out there. And I can tell you're devoted to it. In terms of, yeah, I really do appreciate appreciate because I know how hard it can be to take that leap. And you just seem to be all in. So I appreciate that. In terms of what places you can find me,

my website is a good place to start. It's markgober.com. M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. My podcast is called Where Is My Mind? And it's a good intro to a lot of these concepts. I worked with a podcast production company that usually works on sports shows. So the goal was to make it really catchy and to bring the ideas across for people who are really busy. So it's an eight-episode series where it includes clips with all of the scientists and other people that I interviewed. So in one episode, you might hear from 10 different people. And my three books, which are available in hard copies, Kindle, and Audible.

The first one's called An End to Upside-Down Thinking, and that's all the evidence suggesting that the brain does not produce consciousness. My second book, An End to Upside-Down Living, is about ways of living life with the spiritual perspective. Ultimately, it's the awakening journey, including my own, but also having studied many other people's journeys, I talk about what I found. And my third book, An End to Upside-Down Liberty, which is on this concept of non-dual voluntarism. Well, I've loved having you on, brother. I hope to do it again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you. you