The Telepathy Tapes - S2E24: The Inventor of the Microprocessor Questions Reality | Talk Tracks

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

This week’s guest, Federico Faggin, helped invent the microprocessor - the technology that powers the modern world. By every measure, he had achieved success. And yet he felt something was missing.After a spontaneous and profound experience of consciousness, Federico began questioning everything he thought he knew about the nature of reality. What followed was a decades-long investigation into one of the biggest mysteries in science: not how the brain creates consciousness, but whether consciousness comes first.In this episode, Federico shares his theory that we are not our bodies, but fields of consciousness having a human experience. He explores the role of free will, the limitations of neuroscience, and why quantum physics may be pointing us toward something far deeper.We also dive into his encounters with non-speaking individuals with cerebral palsy who appear to communicate telepathically, and what their experiences might reveal about the true nature of connection.Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call—subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.supercast.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the talk tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like sci abilities. If you haven't yet listened to the telepathy tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy

explanation today, but won't for long. Today's incredible guests helped build the foundation of the modern digital world. Ferreiko Pagin is a physicist and inventor who developed the first microprocessor, technology that powers nearly every device we use today. By all measures, he had everything he'd ever wanted, success, recognition, wealth, achievement, but he still felt like something was missing from his life. After powerful and unexpected experience, Federico began to question everything he thought he knew

with the benefit of an extremely technical, scientific mind. And this ultimately led him down a quest to understand consciousness, and what he shares in this episode is pretty riveting. Beyond his incredible theory around reality and what it is, he had an enriching encounter with telepathic non-speaking students in Italy before the telepathy tapes ever came out. So Federico, that was my attempt at introducing you. How would you introduce yourself?

I'm Federico Fajin. I am a physicist. I'm an inventor. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm now a student of consciousness, free will, and the nature of reality. I was born and raised in Italy. So I was, you know, raised in the Catholic religion and in Catholic religion. When your body dies, you know, there's something else that survives you.

So I grew up with that ethics and that kind of ideas. And then I studied physics and a little by little I kind of moved away from any religious beliefs and I believed that I was the body and when the body would die, there will be the end of it. So I kind of was resigned to that. In 68, I developed the Silicon Gate, MOS Silicon Gate technology that for the first time allowed to make dynamic memories, microprocessor. in other words, was the basic technology to make all the pieces that you would need to make a computer in a little chip of silicon. One process for all of those different parts didn't exist before.

So it was five times faster. He had much lower leakage, 500 times less leakage. And you could put twice as many transistors. Then I joined Intel and I designed the first microprocessor, which required a couple of other inventions of my own. in order to do it, but there has this history. So I know you led the design and developed the first microprocessor, which changed computing technology forever. And I'm curious when your life's work really pivoted, right,

from being a very materialist science tech-driven perspective to one that was more focused on consciousness. It was until when I was in my mid-40s, that I realized that I had achieved everything that should make me happen, but I wasn't. That time I was also studying neuroscience. neuroscience was studying biology because I was working in neural networks and I was interested in understanding how biological neural networks worked. And it was then that I asked myself the question,

but what about consciousness? I mean, the books of neuroscience, they don't talk about consciousness, but I know because I'm conscious. So where is consciousness coming from? Nobody talks about that. And I asked some of the experts in neuroscience and they, oh, conscious, don't worry about it. You know, it's something that happens in the brain, so we'll figure it out. We don't know what it is yet, but we'll figure it out. Well, neuroscientists have not figured it out yet, so this was more than 40 years ago

when I raised that question. In the meantime, I realized that not being happy, despite having reached everything that should have made me happy, and I realized that I did not understand how the world works, because consciousness seemed to be so fundamental, and nobody talks about in science,

So I really wanted to understand. And it was in this climate of wanting or really desiring to know that I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness. So can you tell us about the transformative experience that you had that changed your perspective on consciousness? So after years of trying to understand what's going on in my life, one night I was old vacation at Tahoe skiing over the holidays. And one night I woke up at around midnight. I was thirsty, got a glass of water. I went back to bed. And as I was trying to fall back asleep,

all of a sudden from my chest, a incredible energy comes out. Almost like it was making noise, but it wasn't making noise, but it was so physical, physical energy. It was love, love that I've never felt before in my life. It was like, you know,

10,000 times, 100,000 times the love that I've ever felt. And it was directed out of me and my consciousness was in this energy. So I was love coming out on me, you know, what's going on here. What was going on in your life? I mean, were you on a psychedelic or had you just meditated or was it just totally random? No, no, no, no.

This was a spontaneous awakening that told me that I'm not what I thought I was. Wow. So then this energy, you know, almost like a blow, blows away, you know, kind of expands. And it's now this white light scintillating that is love. is everywhere, and my consciousness is in this energy. So now I'm looking at myself in this energy. Of course, I'm not the body. I'm this energy, because my consciousness is both in my body and also in this energy. Now, this energy also is love mixed with joy and peace. In peace, I've never felt in my life before. I was always thinking about what I was going to do. I was never where I was.

And peace was, wow, I'm that. That's what I am that thing. And then a thought comes, wow, but this is the energy of which everything is made. So I was recognized in this energy that feels like love, peace, and joy was actually this stuff, the substance, whatever you want to call it, of which the entire universe is made. Oh, I love that. So love and peace and joy felt like. the fabric of the universe in that moment.

Right. It's interesting because we've heard that from a lot of near-death experiences as well when they touch into whatever this realm in between places seems to be, or at least the consciousness realm between spaces. So can you imagine that something like that changed my life because all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't separate from the rest of the world. My idea of myself was I was a body and when the body dies, there is nothing left to me. Now this experience is telling me that I'm not the body.

So clearly when I die, I'm going to become what I just experienced. So, you know, it was a, there was a sense of, first of all, having found finally a sense of who I am, I am that, right? A lot of my anxiety and the fact that I wasn't happy about myself that was coming from not knowing what I am, what I'm here to do, what's going on, why I'm not happy about my life and so on. All of that changed, and I started studying consciousness and I worked for about 20 years very deeply about trying to understand what is it, you know, how can physics as a scientist, how can you explain it? I realized after 20 years of work that you cannot explain consciousness. You have to start with consciousness. Conscious is something fundamental. If you don't start there, and you think the conscious can emerge from matter which is not conscious

or from some other thing that is not conscious, you don't get there from here, right? So it's impossible. You have to start with consciousness, and I leave everything that I'm doing. I'm going to dedicate myself to studying this thing and seeing how physics and spirituality emerge, because this was a spiritual experience.

A spiritual experience is an experience where you feel the connection with the totality of what exists, with one, with everything. So that experience had such a force in it, that drove me to spend the rest of my life in this direction. What direction exactly? And what did you start doing? In 2011, I started a foundation with my money in order to study scientifically consciousness.

And in the last few years, I've come to a theory that explains what consciousness is. And if you start with consciousness, you explain why physics has to start with quantum physics and not with classical physics. So the aspects of quantum physics that physicists have not understood, which are the superposition of the states, for example, which are connected with the entanglement, which is only something happens, only quantum physics and the collapse of the way function, those things no one has ever understood why they are supposed to exist can be explained with the fact that the conscious experience as exactly those properties that must reflect.

in the physical reality, in those physical property, which are actually mathematical properties. You know, quantum physics, everybody tells you, but don't understand it. It works. We can make predictions of what we can measure in space and time, but we don't understand how it works. What Federico is saying is something you've heard

in various forms on the show before. The reason quantum physics feels so confusing is because we're looking at it backwards, right? Instead of consciousness emerging from the brain, he believes that consciousness comes first. It's more fundamental. than the brain itself. Quince makes beautiful everyday pieces using premium materials like 100% European linen,

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The fabric feels substantial, but still easy to wear. And they definitely do not cost anywhere near what you'd expect for this grade of high-quality linen. Refresh your spring wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com slash tapes for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash tapes for free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash tapes. You know, science cannot explain why consciousness has to exist. There is, you know, you cannot get consciousness out of a matter that is not conscious.

You cannot get more from less. So you have to start with more, and then you can get less from more, but not the other way around. So that's why I came up with this theory. We can explain, for example, that the state of the quantum fields have the same properties of our conscious experience. They are private. The quantum state cannot be copied. If it can be known at all, it can be known by the field itself.

What's fascinating is that quantum physics from this point of view is actually describing that deeper layer of reality, maybe, like, like base consciousness instead of the physical world. That's the same for us. What I feel, I cannot give it to you. I cannot give it to anybody. I'm the only one to know my inner feelings. Now, I can translate my inner feelings with symbols,

but those symbols are not the feelings. They are simply symbols to tell you what I'm feeling. The actual experience itself is the quality, the sensations and feelings that you have within yourself. That corresponds to the quantum state of a field, the meaning of the experience can be put into symbols with which I communicate my experience to you. But you will not be able to understand my experience unless you have had a similar experience. What Federico is referencing here is something real in physics called the no cloning theorem,

which says that a quantum state can't be perfectly copied. He suggests that because quantum states are in a sense private, they might be similar to our inner experience, which can never be fully duplicated by another person. For example, if I taste a exotic fruit that tastes very different or any other fruit that I've ever had, if I explain it to you with words, the taste that I had, you will not be able to reconstruct within you that taste. It's just that you read the words, they make sense, but they don't mean much to you. Right. I give you a little piece of that fruit,

and soot after you say, ooh, what a good description you gave. This is exactly the way, you know, the way it feels too. Yeah. There you go. So symbols that I use, the words that I use were meaningless

before you had the experience, this theory actually connects the spiritual aspect of reality with what physics has been saying for the first time. For the first time, we have a way to understand that when to physics,

is crazy, so of speak, because it doesn't talk about the physical reality. It talks about the inner reality. They have no meaning because they're telling you that you have a collapse of the way function, nobody knows what it is. Well, the collapse of the way function is actually a decision of free will of the field which is conscious. It's conscious because its state is known by the field and that state is private, exactly like our experiences.

What role does the brain play then? If consciousness is not produced by the brain, how would you explain the brain's function? Okay, so our body then is actually an instrument that the field that we are uses to have an experience in this physical reality. So look at the brain like a computer is more than a classical computer, but it is essentially a computer that is used to transform information in this reality, that we don't know what this reality actually is, because we experience only the information that the sensory system of the body takes in and transforms into other symbols, and those symbols that are transformed,

those are the symbols that our conscious field interprets and converts into an experience of the body. Just imagine the body like an avatar in a computer, right? You control the avatar, the avatar does what it does. Well, what you see, you think that it is what the avatar is seeing. No, what you see is how you transform what the computer is telling you about the avatar. And the avatar is not feeling anything. Where do you fall on things like simulation theory or reincarnation?

Do you think those are accurate? So there is reincarnation in my theory. I'm living one or many lives in this reality, but I am not the body. I am the feel that controls the body. So in other lives, I had different bodies, even different personalities. So for me, before the awakening experience, I was that small portion of myself that identify with the body, thought to be the body, and therefore only what the body was observing, I was experiencing.

Now I can experience beyond what the body observes. And so telepity begins now to connect with our capacities of the field. they go beyond what the body can do. That's why science is said telepathy cannot exist because there is nothing that we can measure that could explain that you could have a connection with another human being. But the connection is between the fields.

Our experience is in the field. It's not in the body, you see. Okay. So essentially, you've shifted your identity away from seeing yourself as a body and now you see yourself as something larger that's using a body. Exactly.

This would mean, of course, that consciousness is, not confined to the brain and can exist beyond it, opening the door for things like telepathy. So I guess in your words, what is telepathy? So for me, telepathy is the ability the fields have to communicate with themselves without necessarily the body. For example, think about the out-of-body experiences or the near-death experiences. When a person communicates with people that are already dead in an other environment in which they find themselves. Obviously, it's not the body or the brain,

which is not even working, communicating. You know, they're communicating somehow, but it's not in the body. The entity, which is now communicating with, you know, friends that were they are dead in this other reality, in which they are communicating, they communicate telepathically. In fact, they don't use words.

They understand each other naturally because this communication is, field to feel. Telepathy is really a property that we all have to some level, to some extent, even when we don't think that it is telepathy. For example, when people have love for each other and they communicate with love, they can understand each other at a much deeper level than when they communicate just with symbols. Because love is what actually allows the state of the field to go.

go into resonance with each other. It's like a force that allows resonance between the quantum fields of the entities that are communicating and resonance means that the same meaning is in both entities. That's why they understand each other much more deeply.

In other words, symbols can only convey so much meaning, but science doesn't consider love part of physics. They consider love something that happens, you know, in the brain or what I've knew, but it's not our promise, so to speak. So a lot of what you're saying actually echoes what many of the non-speakers from season one have said about love and interconnectedness and the body. And many of them don't even feel like they have a body due to their apraxia, which is a mind-body disconnect. So they go to great lengths to be able to move their bodies or direct their bodies if they even can on their own, which often takes a great deal of support and co-regulation and often help.

So what many have said is that telepathic communication is baseline and it's just an easier choice for them. It's not, you know, some mystical, magical ability. It's part and parcel of being here. It's just more accessible to them because they're less reliant on their body and therefore language. Federico describes a group of individuals he spent time with in Italy who have cerebral palsy, which is a neurological disorder that affects movement, muscle tone, and even speech. Some of the individuals he met in Italy have learned to communicate through letterboards, which is a gross motor skill and easier to do if you can't form speech, which is a fine motor skill.

If you listen to season one, this is very similar to what non-speakers with apraxia described. Federico, what was it about these individuals with cerebral palsy that suggested there was something more going on than meets the eye? And when did all of this happen? So this happened, let me see, probably about three, four years ago. I was told that there are these people with cerebral palsy that seem to communicate without speak. So how can they communicate with each other? And so I was curious and I went to take a look.

Two of them were particularly developed. And they started telling me things about myself that they couldn't possibly know. How could they know something about my life with the name of my wife's and my children and things? So that sort of what's going on here? And of course, the people around me didn't know either. So there was no way to know. Oh, wow. Okay.

So they just knew things about your life that nobody in the room could have known, right? How long were you there? Spend about a day with them. And there were several of them. They were gathered in this place where the foundation that helps them. They do some very special massage because they are spastical. The muscles are tight and, you know, to help them out, which it does. But there were two women.

They had developed this ability to. communicate, they became readers. And so we also then I could ask questions and they will respond. Federico is referencing communication partners here who worked at the foundation who taught some of the individuals with three rule palsy to spell to communicate. So when Federico asked questions, the women were there as a support or co-regulator to help them in their responses. Through these questions, I would understand that they could communicate things that they should know. There is no way to know, nor was there either knowing things. of that sort. Wow. So I asked questions and so on, and basically what came out is that they,

they actually communicate with each other. In fact, they meet like in a square, so to speak, not a physical square, but many of them meet and interact in this square. And so I started thinking what's going on here. This is fascinating. So non-speakers from season one report meeting together in a non-physical space where they can communicate via telepathy and share ideas and encouragement but they call it the hill. Yes. And what's even more fascinating is that I've talked to people all over the world,

much like yourself, who say it's sometimes called something different. Yeah, they talk about being in this vast reality and communicating with each other, not just one to one, but also with others. For example, one kid would say, oh, Andrew here wants to say something. Andrew, of course, didn't say anything

because it doesn't even speak. You know, he's not even in the room. So they go get Andrew, and Andrew says, yeah, I want to speak and, you know what I mean? Yeah. So how is that possible? Or how is that possible that one of the kids tells me that he met my mother and my mother called me with the name she was calling me when I was a kid?

Nobody knows, which is eco. And it used the word eco. I would come on. I mean, how is that possible? Did the teachers know that they were telepathic? Well, they found out because speaking to the reader, Or the communication and regulation partner. They were able to understand what was going on.

And also myself, speaking with them, they were telling me something about my family that they would have no way to know. This is a private thing that I don't want to reveal here. But how could they possibly know? And when that issue was resolved the next time that I talked to, one of them, it says, that issue is being resolved, right? And you had no way to know. How did he know?

Yeah, amazing. Now I remember, that's why they connected to me. One of them said, I want to talk to Fajin. Okay, we hold back up really quick. So they were asking for you by your name, like your last name? Yes. They didn't even know who Fajin was, and so they found out, and they contacted me, and that's how I got involved. So how did this impact or maybe change your working theory about consciousness?

You know, that was a nice way to try to see if my theory could explain something like that. And indeed it does because what happens is these people are not completely embodied because the ego, see, the ego in the first year of life is that portion of the satiety, the saity is the field, which is conscious that wants to have an experience in this reality. So just to pause here, Federico is saying that psyche or the consciousness or soul wants to have a human experience and that part of the soul ends up here in the physical world. A portion of it ends up identifying with the body, just like we do when we play a video game. So again, in this framework, the version of walking around in a body isn't the whole story.

It's just a fraction of something much bigger, like a greater consciousness. Consciousness is much vaster than the one that controls the avatar. But while they're playing the game, they are captivated by their game. They are like hypnotized and believe to be the character that they are playing. So the same is for us. So how is it different for these individuals with cerebral palsy or praxea like the non-speakers we talk about in season one of the telephtapes? Since they cannot identify with the body, they are both in this reality and in the other reality. That's how you can explain it.

It makes a lot of sense, right? It's like playing a game where you never leave this reality. You never identify with the body. And so you are both in that reality a little bit and in this. It makes sense to me to imagine it like a VR headset. Like when you put on a headset and feel totally immersed in that experience, it can feel like you're really there. But if your headset was cracked or a little loose, you could see out of the size of it. It would feel harder to be fully integrated into that virtual experience.

So in the reality where they are and the vast reality, the vast reality where each of us is a field. The field is much vaster. It doesn't even exist in space and time, in existing a deeper reality. And it controls the body. The body operates in the space and time. The space and time would be like a display of a computer where we share the same reality. Also, once you agree that consciousness and free will comes first and there are properties of fields, not the properties of the body. If you think that there are properties of the body, you can never explain this stuff.

It's impossible. Yeah. It's fascinating. And from your research or point of view, you know, why even have a physical experience? In the other reality, there are no bodies that can act on each other. It just would be like, you know, a light that goes through each other. They don't hit. You cannot act in that reality.

Yeah. You can act with a body in this reality. So action is an essential aspect of learning, and it can only be done through a body that can interact physically with another body. That's why we're here. We are here to do things that we could not do in that other reality. For example, the experience that I'm having in this reality is actually storing some memory. There is a memory of our experience.

Since we had many lives, we can go back and re-experience through that memory. We experience what we have experience in prior lives. Just like in a computer, if you go back to some older program, you can run those programs. And they are in the present. the actual experience of conscious as exists in the present, the important aspect of my experience is actually written in matter. We are here to know ourselves in this sort of top-level view of this new way of looking at the natural reality.

And to know itself, one must be conscious. So what Federico is suggesting is that who we really are, exists beyond space and time in what he calls a field. And that field is using the body to operate in this physical world. But this physical world serves a purpose. It's where we can act and interact and learn in ways that aren't possible in that deeper non-physical reality. I forgot which non-speaker spelled this to me along the journey, but at some point said the physical journey is so important because you can do things here,

like feel the sun on your skin and the wind touching you. And I remember just thinking how true that is. Like there's such primal parts of being human, like smelling a campfire, right? Or like cuddling under a blanket, cuddling with a person that are so meaningful that you need a body to do and to enjoy. And according to Federico's theory, those experiences don't disappear. They're stored somewhere beyond the body, contributing to a larger sense of memory or awareness that extends beyond a single lifetime. How do the fields, the quantum fields emanate from the universe? because physics also starts with a unified field,

but the unified field of physics is not found yet, because the unified field of physics is the union of quantum physics and general relativity, and that union has not happened yet. They're still struggling to figure out how to create a unified field. Everybody understands that it has to be a unified field. I start from a unified field,

but that unified field does not matter for space and time, The unified field is more basic than what we call matter of space and time. Matters space and time are emerging properties of something which is deeper. It's not in space and time and so on. So if you start there, then one self-reflect and creates fields. So in a self-reflection, it creates fields. And then and so on. So those fields also are parts whole of what.

In other words, one must be holographic. In order to know itself, the part must contain the whole. Yeah. Even if we have 30 trillion cells in our body, every cell contains the essence of the whole, which is the DNA, the genome. The genome of every cell in my body is the same genome of the original cell. Look at that. That is exactly the same organization that our body, which is a, you know, a fragom,

of the totality of what is one, the totality of what exists. So even the body, in order to be able to be a reflection of one in this physical reality, must be made in that image. Yeah. And one question we get a lot from listeners is if the consciousness is fundamental, the question of how important is Earth, where we are, like, if it gets sucked through a black hole or Earth is destroyed, what happens to us? Like, if our universe gets, our sun will eventually go away, obviously.

Like, what will happen to consciousness or does it not matter? Like, how important is the physical space? In this theory, consciousness and free will, the fields, are more fundamental than anything. So we are fields. We continue to exist independent of the physical reality is a construct. What we see out there is only what hits our sensory system. and our instruments which are also made of the same stuff of which we're made. But if a reality is beyond the stuff of which we're made and which our instruments are made,

well, then what we see is only a portion of what is. You see? In other words, consciousness comes first. And then can you tell me a little bit about the books that you've written? I have two books that are in English and three books in Italian. The first is an autobiography is called Silicon, and the subtitle is from the invention of the microprocessor to the new science of consciousness.

So it goes through my life and explains why I'm interested in this area, and also it gives the first summary view of my theory. Actually, before this theory was completed, but sufficiently coherent that it makes a lot of sense and it's not contradictory to what I'm saying now. The second book is called Irreducible. He came out a year and a half ago in English. The third book is beyond invisible.

The subtitle is where science and spirituality merge. And the last book is a conversation. So it's easier, in a sense, it's less of a treatise like Irreducible. And it goes deeper and broader than the second book. Federico, what a life you've lived. It's been so insightful to. talk to you. So thank you for your time and your experience and just sharing it with our listeners. Thank you. That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks. But new episodes will be released every

Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together are reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Catherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy, technical directing audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole, opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W. And original logo and cover art by Ben Condora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.