Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Zubin Damania on Nondualism, Fasting, Consciousness, Podcasting, and Self-fulfilling beliefs

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/X6qeFzrmRqU Zubin interviews Curt, interviewing Zubin. Sponsors: https://brilliant.org/TOE for 20% off. http://algo.com for supply chain AI. Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything LINKS MENTIONED: ZdoggMD (Zubin's channel): https://www.youtube.com/user/ZDoggMD TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:02 Similarities between ZdoggMD and Theories of Everything 00:09:34 Uncertainty and the present moment 00:13:11 Self deception and lies 00:22:59 The nature of reality and ancient texts (Bible, Vedas, etc.) 00:28:06 Curt's problems with sleeping 00:39:11 Free will and too much chatter in the brain 00:47:54 Nonduality (who's experiencing the experiences?) 00:54:24 Belief isn't just a "thought" 01:02:34 Limits of language 01:08:22 Limits of science 01:10:50 Science 2.0 (abhijgnosis) 01:23:05 Placebo and self-fulfilling beliefs being as primary as consciousness 01:28:07 Atheism and Sam Harris 01:34:20 What's fundamental, in nondualism? 01:37:14 Nondualism is nihilism 01:51:41 The public's mistrust of "science" is warranted 02:00:57 As podcasters, should we delete comments that decelerate conversations? 02:05:38 When certain topics / viewpoints become demonitized, suspicion is raised 02:12:10 Fasting and difficulty sleeping 02:15:46 Zubin and Curt exchange podcasting foibles 02:24:17 Rationality doesn't motivate you, and perhaps shouldn't. 02:32:20 Admonishments against being "left" or "right" 02:44:40 Live audience questions answered by Zubin on meditation and nondualism * * * Just wrapped (April 2021) a documentary called Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to watch it.

Alright, hello to all listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now. Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business.

Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over 170 countries, your business has global potential. And their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award-winning service and has the internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash theories. Zubin Damania is an American physician,

an assistant professor, a comedian, and was the practicing hospitalist at Stanford University School of Medicine for 10 years. He also runs ZDoggMD, which is a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring similar themes to this channel. So if you like these podcasts, there's a great chance that you'll like his.

So check out the link in the description. The main point of convergence between us is consciousness. It's because of this that Zubin interviewed me live on his channel, but the conversation was so engrossing despite my lassitude initially that I'm placing it here for those of you interested in non-dualism, meditation, even fasting. For those new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, as well as the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of the universe, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us. If you're interested in getting

acquainted with this channel, there's a top 10 list of carefully curated videos in the description. It includes podcasts with Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman, Ian McGilchrist, Josje Bak, and Carl Fristen Moore, of course. Links are in the description again. If you'd like to hear more conversations like this, for example, soon I'll be speaking to Leo Gura and even Daniel Schmattenberger, then please do consider going to patreon.com slash kurtjaimungle and supporting. It may sound silly, but literally every dollar helps tremendously, and it's wonderful. Sometimes I receive letters saying, hey, Kurt, this is just so that you don't have to work so hard. And perhaps you can spend more time with your wife, because often I seclude my wife to a room while I'm recording. And I'm often

thinking about work so much that it intrudes on our private time, where I'm not as present as I could be. that drives smart ROI, headed by a bright individual by the name of Amjad Hussain, who has been a huge supporter of this podcast from its early days. The second sponsor is Brilliant. Brilliant illuminates the soul of mathematics, science, and engineering with bite-sized interactive learning experiences. Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world, elevating math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery.

More on them later. Thank you and enjoy. This meeting is being recorded. And anything off limits in what we talk about? I'd say we just shoot the shit. Were you okay with thumbnail and title and everything? I'm fine with it all, man. I'm fine with it all.

And then I'll just give you the footage and you can do whatever you like with it. Put it out or not. If you think it sucks, whatever you think makes sense. Yeah. And are you going to leave this live stream up once it's done? Yeah. Yeah. And that way you have the kind of raw thing that's shitty.

And then we have the really fancy produced version of either one of us puts out. Yeah. And again, just you just said. And the way I was thinking is like we're talking to each other. Exactly. This is just conversation. No one's interviewing the other. I'm all.

Exactly. We can talk about this. I'm a horrible interviewee. Trust me. Hey, believe me. So am I. So it'll be a conversation. Let me do one thing here.

So what I was thinking for the live and you can tell me what your aesthetic is. By the way, I watched your whole fucking documentary, the two-hour one. Oh, man. Holy shit. Hats off to you. It's experimental. Oh, fuck yeah. It's off the rails.

Thanks. It's really fucking intense and crazy and awesome. And you said one thing. Well, we should save it for the show. Yeah, sure. and awesome. And you said one thing. Well, we should save it for the show.

Yeah, sure. So what I was thinking is I'll set it to speaker mode so that whoever's talking gets full screen just because the 69 side-by-side is a little jankety for the live, I think. At some point, I can put a side-by-side just to mix it up, but I don't know. What do you think? Just be in the moment. It's fine.

Leave it as the – I think it's called the speaker view. Yeah, speaker view. Yeah, that's perfect. That way it'll just go back and forth between us for the live, and then obviously you can do anything we like for the replay. All right, so we have all of this. We're recording. So you're recording your audio as well?

Oh yeah, it's all on the same track. It's embedded in the video track, but I can always break it out. But you can break it out as well. I'll just share it by Dropbox with you. Great. Now let me think if there's anything else. Okay, now, so the only other tricky thing, I do this all myself, so it gets a little.

So we're going live to YouTube and Facebook. I've got it all teed up, and I'm going to share it on Locals as well. So let me do a few clicks here, and then we'll just go live. What do you think? Yes, go ahead. I'm going to let you introduce yourself if that's okay, because that'll just be the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, so we're going to do publish. All right, theories of everything live and then we're going to do oh viewers are waiting look at that uh let's do how do i make this work i gotta go to caster i gotta turn on this That's how we simulcast is using a company called Caster. The cheap solution to simulcast. There we go. So we're connecting to Facebook Live. Perfect. Let me make sure Facebook Live is where it is.

All right. And then I'm going to go live in a couple clicks here. So here we go. YouTube. Facebook. And let's see how this works, guys. Give it a second and we'll see if we're live. It looks like we is on Facebook and YouTube. Give me a second here.

Guys, welcome to the show. It's the ZDogg and Kurt show today. Kurt Jeimengal, welcome, brother. thank you so much for having me on man i'm extremely glad to be here dude this is a conversation i've been so excited to have so from parts of my audience that don't know who kurt is uh i watch his videos on youtube because he interviews the kind of people that I deeply care about hearing from. And he goes so deep. I'm talking like the Donald Hoffman's Bernardo Kastrup's talking to Rupert Spira, which was a ridiculous like three or four hour conversation. And I watched all of it and was just like this the whole time.

Kurt is a documentary filmmaker and just a can you tell me a little bit about yourself, brother? Yeah, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost with a background in math and physics. And I've always been interested in what are called theories of everything, which is a somewhat technical physics term, though it's now in common parlance. And it usually in the physical sciences means a unification of gravity with the standard model,

as well as an explanation for other phenomenons, such as what is going on inside of a black hole, which you think would be answered by a quantum theory of gravity, but not necessarily what is the beginning of the universe. There's differences as to what a theory of everything constitutes. Doesn't matter. You get the overview. As for what I do with the channel is I explore those because I've always been interested in theories of everything. And luckily I have some mathematical and physics background so I can do so with a certain level of depth.

And I like to question as deep as I possibly can the guests that I speak to. So some of them have been... They range from theoretical physicists to people who are espousers of the idea that consciousness is primary i explore theoretical physics free will consciousness and god my god okay that sounds like woo but it depends on what the definition is that's the channel. Do you guys see why I love him? Like, like in a, like want to marry him kind of way. So this, these are exactly the same things I'm interested in. And what's, what's interesting Kurt is like, you know, I didn't have the physics and math background that you have. Um, and I'm

certainly not a documentary filmmaker and, uh, but, oh, damn it. Hold on. Let me turn off that noise. Uh, and I i'm also if don't be put off but the fact that i'm staring down at the laptop occasionally off at you and at the camera because i'm looking at people's comments too i'm impressed that you're you've set up your camera such that the ice the eyeline is aligned with the with me so it looks like you're looking at me whereas me i'm pointed downward. It's one of those things that I've had to work on for a long time trying to figure it out. What's weird is it's actually off-putting to people on Zoom who are used to Zoom culture, where it's kind of like, hey, Kurt, how's it going? Yeah, things are good, right? And then suddenly you're

getting this weird amounts of eye contact with a background that isn't a fake green screen Zoom background. And people are just, they're a little unnerved. Actually, this is something I wanted to ask you about, because we can talk about the theories of everything stuff, which is important, this idea of, is there a unifying structure and conceptual framework that we can understand everything with, or is it an infinite regress and that kind of thing? But, but, you know, even before that, what's interesting is, you know, in this, since the pandemic started, this medium that we use has just exponentially blown up. Is that,

did you see your channel really getting more engagement post pandemic? It was started post pandemic. So it was started during the pandemic we're not posted but yes there's a huge craving for discussions that are about the fundamental nature of reality and perhaps that's because people are philosophically destabilized they're in a mentally insecure place and i know i am lubricus lubricus ground with regard to belief at least for me it's variable in a straddle and so people are perhaps looking for certainty and that's why they come to these channels although if you're looking for any answers i i assure you i have virtually none in the answer to almost any question that zubin poses to me will be met with a a dubious i don't know like i'm dubious, I don't know, like I'm dubious about my own dubiousness even.

That dubiousness about our own dubiousness is this kind of meta-awareness or it's the fundamental belief about belief that everything needs to be kind of questioned. Even our dearest held deepest and most hidden beliefs actually, I think, to drill into them and go, okay, but what if this was not true? And actually what's present now in my experience in what I can actually detect now that supports or refutes this belief? Even it may be a simple belief like, you know, this piece of ZDoggMD signs the crap out of it merchandise, which I would feel like I'm shilling, but we don't sell it anymore, is separate from from me in some ways a separate object in space and time that space and time are real and these kind of things and actually the more you start to examine those beliefs and

actually use the immediate experience the sensory experience of this moment as a guide you really start to destabilize some of those beliefs that and and bringing it back to what you were talking about with the pandemic i found the same thing i think people are really fundamentally shook by the fact that society is nothing as nothing as stable as they thought it was that we're actually in an incredibly fragile interconnected world that it just you know a blockage in the Suez Canal ripples out and causes my inability to wipe my ass with toilet paper, which apparently is a near and dear need for the Western person, so much so that they hoard it when the pandemic starts. So this destabilization,

I think, has forced some degree of introspection that's been a long time coming. Have you found the same thing in your extensive pandemic travels online? there's also some... it's also inspirational in a sense because it means that your loving nature to the degree that you express it and your truth-telling ability, or at least I would say it's more important to not lie. Peterson has this rule about tell the truth or at least not lie. I would flip that and say don't lie instead of telling the truth because it's extremely easy to delude yourself into thinking what you're doing is truth-telling when actually you're trying to win an intellectual battle or show how truth-telling you are by saying to someone a mean comment. Well, either way, that your loving nature can spread

far beyond you in the same way that something malicious can spread to you. So it's a twin of both inspiration and horror. This idea of not lying is something that I find really interesting. And of course, Sam Harris wrote his book called Lying about exactly this idea that there are this, there's a group of people that are radical truth tellers. You know, they, they just will not, they'll focus on not lying. And what you mentioned about this idea of love, this idea of a way of doing that compassionately, I think is key because it's very easy to say, okay, you know, we use white lies to grease social situations, to not hurt somebody's feelings and so on. And, and I think not telling all the truth is a very different sort of moral equivalent to telling, say, telling an active lie to cover up something

that is true. And actually in your documentary, which I wanna shout out early on because it's so crazy and experimental and awesome that people who are into this should check it out. And I put a link in the description. It's Better Left Unsaid. I believe you even said, you had a quote where you said, you ask people for advice when you know the answer, right? But the answer is too painful to actually accept.

So you ask someone for advice that they'll hopefully tell you something different or a white lie or something, right? Right, I think that's Emily Zhang, although I could be mispronouncing the name. I think you're right, yeah. She had this quote that the only reason you ask for advice is because you know the answer

and you don't want to accept it. So for example, some people will go to other people for relationship advice, hoping that what they're hearing is, you should stay with that person when you know deep down you shouldn't. What's your take on self-deception? Because I think that we, I think one of the, you know, you actually ended the documentary with a beautiful quote, which I won't give away

but i think one of the fundamental problems of our time if we're going to emerge new systems that are going to transform say let's even just stick with my specialty health care if we're going to transform healthcare we better transform ourselves first which means the self-deception, the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, the hidden beliefs that we hold about ourselves. For example, if we hold the belief, I'm a good person, right? Now, it seems on the surface like a wonderful belief, but when something, when we do something or think something, you know, the thought arises something that isn't nice, or we accidentally or purposefully do something that's clearly not in the best interest of someone else. And that dissonance then generates a kind of tension that causes a weird kind of dysfunction that actually projects outwards.

And I think our systems of human, you know, our human systems are actually epiphenomenon of our internal states. And until we can turn that lens inward, we're never going to solve these external problems. We're just going to continue to dysfunction outwardly. Have you thought quite a bit about this? extreme self-flagellation and self-mortification even, to say that anytime you think you're doing, at least for me, anytime I think I'm a good person, I find via examination that what I was doing was cowardice, masquerading as something good, maliciousness or rancor.

So I'm extremely hesitant to say that anything I'm doing is good. I'm just trying to minimize the bad, or at least I'm trying to try to minimize the bad. Yeah, I think that really involves examining belief. Who am I? Yeah, I think that really involves examining belief. Who am I? You know, even that even that is a series of nested beliefs that we hold and are conditioned from very young ages and are influenced by everything around us and our genetics. Right. I'm not a big blank slate kind of guy. I think a lot of who we are is passed on genetically and otherwise. And then there's a component of environment. But really, I'm with Pinker a little bit, Steven Pinker, on this idea that we really are handed this kind of, you know, I'm gonna use a loaded term, this karma, not in a religious sense,

but in the causes and conditions that led to us. And to some extent, there is a radical self-acceptance that comes when you realize that you are as you are and cannot be other which means just that knowledge may allow you a kind of freedom and flexibility to be better than you were but it it involves actually accepting who you are instead of constantly putting up obfuscation and and from it. And as a public person, and you are too, and your rise has been meteoric. When I watch your stuff,

and actually this is something I should say quick early on. When I saw your interview with Hoffman and Castro, now these are a couple of my, like the people that I've interviewed. And I watched those interviews and I was like, God damn, like this guy's like a kid. He's vastly smarter, incredibly handsome, and is asking these tremendously nuanced questions and had these guys attention and the audience attention for like three hours of conversation.

And my immediate response was rage, unworthiness, jealousy, anger. Like all that just bubbles up. I'm like, God, I want to – this guy needs to fail, right? But the cool – I was proud of myself. That warms my heart. That's the malicious part of me. The part of me that is more meta-aware now from eight years of being on a path of meditation and that kind of thing was like, oh, look at that. What's going on there?

Like what part of your ego is really – has a sense of unworthiness or the sense of like you're never good enough and so on and so forth? And by examining that, like my next act was to send you an email and go, dude, you're awesome. I love what you're doing. And that connected us. And you had sent me an email prior to because you had just reached out spontaneously. And it's very weird that you have to you have to have some degree of self-awareness to allow things to happen that I think are beneficial for all. But that requires the work you have to actually put in the work. I don't think we're born that way. There are very few that are born that way. I certainly wasn't. I am a complete asshole at baseline, complete asshole. I share your animosity for those who succeed in a domain that you think you should be succeeding at a greater level than the person who is. I've come to the, and I haven't come to it, but I'm coming to this idea of, well, love thy enemy. And there are some people, especially in the self-development scene, because I used to be a part of that, that I despise. But I think that the reason I despise them

is because I'm jealous. And so it took almost everything out of me, everything from me to click the like button on someone that I hated. And I did that as a test for myself. And there's this calm that comes, at least over myself, after I... I tell this story plenty so some people ask me how are you supposed to

solve this whole extreme left extreme right divide and someone was interviewing me on the radio recently yesterday or or so i believe he said he wanted me to say what because he's against the extreme left and he wanted and to say what, because he's against the extreme left, and he wanted, and usually the people who are adamantly against the extreme left identify with being a part of the right, or even extreme right, and he wanted me to say that what we need to do is fight back. And I'm for standing up for oneself and saying what one believes. I think that's noble and extremely difficult. But I don't advocate for any fighting. I advocate for extending an arm of love to one's enemy in the same way that there's the story of Jesus. And I'm not saying this as a Christian. I'm not Christian. I'm saying this as the teller of a

story that if you truly thought about it, it would bring you to tears. When Jesus was being taken away by people who he knew, at least according to the story, were going to torture him, kill him, Peter, who was his friend, cut off the ear of the soldier who was taking him away, and Jesus said no, and took the ear and healed his enemy. And like, that kind of love, man,

to be shouted at and still say, and not in a condescending way, because it can easily be condescending. I love you despite you hate me. No, but mean it and heal your enemy. I think that's, despite knowing what they're doing to you, I think that's the path forward.

And obviously, someone can say, well, then we'll just be taken over by brutal dictators, the bullies. I don't think that's true. I think that these tit-for-tat models don't take into account inspiration. The story of Jesus is inspirational, so these separate agents who can interact with one another with different strategies, such as tit-for-tat or tit-for-tat with forgiveness, I'm sure you've heard of these models, the people who are listening. I don't think they take into account inspiration, how one agent, if one agent

identifies with themselves, then they die. But if one identifies with what's good, then one lives, because the good lives on through you, through your example and through influencing others. So I'm not claiming that I live by that, but I'm coming to that realization more and more, trying, or at least trying to try to embody it. more and more trying, or at least trying to try to embody it. I try to end every show we do with, I love you guys, and we're out, and mean it. Like, actually mean it. Like, I love everybody as they are myself, which gets to, you know, one of those interesting philosophical and ontological questions of what is the nature of reality. If are we one substance? Is there one

mind? And you talked to Kastrup and Hoffman and Spira about it. And I'm just curious where, having talked to all these guys and physicists and having this mathematical and physicist background, you know, in your documentary, you were very, physicist background, you know, in your documentary, you were very, it was really remarkable to watch because, and again, for some people, they're just gonna be like, I don't, what the hell? And for others, you know, like myself, I was just like, oh, I've never actually connected the dots in the way that he's connecting it. And by the end, you know, I watched the long director's cut, it's two hours. You said, what's the minimum amount of information necessary to extract the information and the meaning from the message? And I thought that was a fascinating

experiment because, you know, two, four, six, eight, like how much do you need to get the rest of the pattern? And your point was, well, maybe when we look at something like the Bible and we think, oh, you know, this whole thing could be reduced to the Ten Commandments or, you know, a couple of things. Or the Golden Rule, which is something I despise. I mean, I despise people saying that that's what connects all religions and that's all we need. And I can talk about that after, but continue. Let's definitely follow that because that's great, the Golden Rule. So, yeah, and there's this idea, but then you say, but is that really true? Because this was written, first of all, in a time and a context that's different from where we are now. Could the meaning have only emerged from a length that's roughly the length of the Bible,

say, and we're just not really savvy to that. And maybe something was lost in the translations and so on. And then you tied it back, maybe that's why this documentary is two hours long. And it kind of tied the whole thing into a tapestry. And I don't know if you did that intentionally or not, but maybe you want to talk about that and then bring it back to Golden Rule and your concern with that. Okay, let's talk about the, I would also talk about the length of the Bible, or the ancient text in general, and I'd say that not only is the length of the Bible maybe not protracted as much people, as plenty of people think, but it's necessary and also not sufficient. they're, not apparently, they're something called the Protestants who were driven by sola scriptoris, meaning by scripture alone. I don't know if I buy that because plenty of our values and, well, our values are also embodied. Now I referenced this in the documentary,

there are four forms of knowing, at least four forms. Propositional, that is, I'm speaking right now. If you were to simply read it, that's propositional. Procedural, I'm gesticulating. So there's at least a modicum of body language, though the research says that it's 70%, and I don't understand how they get that number. But, because how do you quantify what the message is?

And so, okay, there's that. Then there's participatory. And then forgive my lassitude. It's been quite a grueling week for me. Yeah, you've not slept, right? I haven't slept well for a few days. And I've been on this string of podcasts. This is the fourth one for today.

And after this, I'm not looking forward to this ending. I actually wanted to speak with you for like three hours if I can. But after this, Zubin, I am going to just feel like a junkie that just put heroin in my body and just dissolve in a sea of bliss for hopefully a week or two weeks because I need a break. Okay, we can talk about that after getting to the four forms of knowing there's participatory, procedural, perspectival, and propositional. It's not clear to me that religion is propositional per se. And I know the new atheists like to pick apart texts and literally interpret it. And there's a word, there's a great

word to, if you don't know, it's called subreption. It means an inference drawn from a deliberate misrepresentation. And so what they're doing is when they disprove the Bible, they're using sub-reptions. And I don't think that's true. Firstly, I don't think the Bible's meant to be interpreted literally. I also have a problem with the word literal interpretation, because you can't have a literal interpretation. Literal means uninterpreted, so it's almost as if you're saying uninterpreted interpretation. And then third, it's not clear that all of what a religion is, is in the text. So I'm not a fan of sola scriptoris per se.

Sola scriptora, I think it is. Yeah. Well, I want to go back to your sleep. Yes. Yeah. How's that going? Why so bad? And because you're desperate for some rest. And I think a lot of people in healthcare in particular suffer this syndrome. What's been going on? What's driving you? And how's your sleeping and all of that?

I find it difficult to shut my mind off. I find it difficult to shut my mind off. I have tried meditation for years, but not consistently. I don't find it helps. I also find that people who, you probably see this, people in the non-dual community, people who are Eastern, people who are Western, they think that their view is the correct one, and they try to blanketly apply it to everyone. I don't know if meditation is for everyone, and I wonder if part of my self-torture is by trying

to impose meditation on me when I'm at this stage not meant for meditation. It could be that. It could be I'm not meditating correctly. But either way, meditation doesn't help. Medication can help, but I'm not going to take benzodiazepines. Though melatonin works a scintilla. CBD seems to work a bit. Either way, what keeps me up is generally if I have an interview for the next few days, I'm playing over scenarios and I'm trying to understand the theory of the person that I'm interviewing. That's one of the... I was speaking with a prominent YouTuber. I'll tell you off air who that is, Zubin. He was asking me, he's like, hey, Kurt, I have more subscribers than you, but you have more views. How is it that you do so? And then I said, it's extreme luck, which it is, like 95% luck, man. And then also an extreme amount of work.

And the work is because I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to comprehend these theories. The whole point of the podcast is not, I don't care too much about conversing with people. I care about understanding the landscape of theories of everything, explicating them and perhaps even advancing our own. And I say our own because the theories of everything. Explicating them and perhaps even advancing our own, and I say our own because the theories of everything.

YouTube is almost like a community, and I would like myself to be a vessel rather than the prominent person of it. In fact, I think there are some YouTube channels that have had a name that's tangential to what they do and then their name attached. So let's say I'm going to pick on some people, but please of your, these two YouTubers, I love you. Okay. So there's artificial intelligence with Lex Friedman. And then there was modern wisdom with Chris Williamson. And then what

they do is they remove the prior and then just, they omit that and keep their name. I am toying with doing the opposite because I don't want this to be about me. So maybe eventually it'll be theories of everything. Obviously there's some of me that's doing a bit of branding by keeping my name in the channel. But at some point I'd like to truncate that. Either way, the whole point of the channel is to explore theories of everything. So I'm deeply ensconcing myself in these theories. And it takes... They're not trivial. Not trivial in the least.

In fact, try reading three pages of what Chris Langan has written. That took me a day to get through three pages. And that gets quicker, obviously, as you get familiar with the terminology. But I'm trying to understand these. And so I was talking to someone who's a prominent YouTuber and he was saying, hey, Kurt, your channel has less subscribers,

but more views. How? I said, it's like luck and then work. Extreme amount of work. And then he got offended at the extreme amount of work aspect. He said, well, my work doesn't drain me. I just listen to them. I listen to guests on podcasts. I go for, I do it while I meditate or while I'm doing the dishes.

In fact, it invigorates me. And it was as if he was offended that I said that the work that I do drains me. And I do think what I'm doing right now, the way that I'm doing it is unhealthy, obviously, because I'm barely able to articulate a sentence here. But I don't see, right now, I don't see another way around this, given the goal of deeply trying to understand these theories of everything. So that affects my sleep at times. everything. So that affects my sleep at times. Luckily, Zubin, after this, man, I just, I'm going, I'm going to rest for like, I'm going to hibernate for a little while.

Man, I, I, how old are you, Kurt? Can I ask? Yeah, sure. How old do I look? And you're not going to offend me. Oh man, you look like you're in your twenties, dude. No, I'm 32. Really? Well, dude, so you're still 32 to me is, is, is very young. Uh, and when I was your age, my mind was so overactive and, and I, I was like you very diligent and very, uh, wrapped in the intellectual aspects, the thinking process and the making the connections. And if I closed my eyes, a million thoughts and a million connections. And with that came,

with that kind of capacity comes high anxiety. So sleep was not there. It just didn't happen. And that sort of phenotype of person, I kind of see it in you when I see your interviews because I can tell, I think most of the audience can tell that you've put a shit ton of work into these guests. Like the fact that you can talk for, you know, three or four hours to somebody who's esoteric to begin with, right, is pretty remarkable. There's no answer for that right away. The answer starts to emerge as you become more. Absolutely. I agree.

Yeah. If I were to tell you, bro, you just need to realize that you're just pure consciousness, man, and these thoughts are just going across the sky like clouds and you can watch them. man. And these thoughts are just going across the sky like clouds and you can watch them. Good luck with that. Try that. Just try that. At this stage, we are identified with the thought stream and the thought stream is everything. And in a way that's awesome because that's how we, like the guy who was offended by the amount of diligence, you'd really want to introspect and go, who was offended by the amount of diligence, you'd really want to introspect and go, hey, why is that? Is he threatened by someone who can work hard and is talented? Or is he more really convinced that his way is the only way? I'll tell you, when you tell me that, I go, ah, that's why it's this combination of things, why your stuff is so good. I have at this age, I'm 48. So it took me, I don't know how many decades

to release. How old are you? Sorry. I'm 48. So it took me however many decades to release this fixation that I had on hyper diligence as a way to get by. And, but I needed it. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't have the tool set that I have to do what I do. And now what I do is I try to drop into flow and see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There's some part of the audience that loves that. There's some part of the audience that really wants a more structured sort of thing, but I can't be anything but what I am in this moment now it used to be i would try not to be i try to be whatever anyone wanted which was very it was very ego dystonic it felt very wrong but yet you get the dopamine burst from whatever validation that came from doing that so

it really took a lot of time for me to find that way and i'm not saying that's your path, but I think that I'm very sympathetic to what you're going through. It's very hard, very, very hard. Your documentary, by the way, for people who have not seen it, it really speaks to who you are. There's so many gems in there of kind of getting at who Kurt is right now that it it's, it's absolutely a fascinating thing to watch. And, and when you talk about your parents, I thought that was fascinating because I resonated with one of the things he said, and I don't know if you said this consciously or as just part of who you are, you said, you know, I really, the idea that I, they may not be around to kind of see what I've accomplished and that kind of thing. I'm like, that's, that's an immigrant thing, man.

Like for me, like this idea that so much of my life I lived, what am I going to do to show my parents that I'm worthy of being a kid of theirs? And then at some point, something snaps. I think maybe you do actually accomplish enough or you let it go. But then suddenly it's like, how can I show you I'm just doing as little as possible and just trying to be me? Because I think that's ultimately what we all, you know, what I was looking for. But yeah. I could have changed my headphones and I want to hear you through this stream of consciousness. Just give me a second, all right?

Yeah, of course. So while you're doing that, I'm going to look at some comments here. Boy, there's a lot of comments. Too much at one time. Try separating the now to what can wait, says Ann Cairns. So that's always, that's good advice for anyone. It's very hard for an autonomic mind

because we're not really, we see, so here's one of the things that I thought of, you know, when I was hearing you talk about this. There is, for me, when that happens, oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Can you hear me now though, or no? Now you can hear me. Yeah. All right. We're going to find out. Cause I don't want to talk. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can hear you crystal clear. I don't know. Okay. I don't know if anyone has, can help me with this tech problem. Anytime I use OBS, which is recording right now, there's distortion placed on the head on the Bluetooth headphones. Don't know why that is. Okay. Continue.

Yeah. I use OBS for streaming live, but not in this case, cause I'm, I'm using a caster, but I found that OBS is very quirky since it's open source. There's some weird stuff in there that people may know the answer to you. Okay. So, so one thing you said when you talked about this thought storm that you have at night that prevents you from sleeping, I actually think of that as a storm of thought for many people, myself as one of these, we hold ourselves accountable for having the thought storm and it wraps a series of meta beliefs around what's actually happening. So thoughts are coming. And then we go, these thoughts shouldn't be coming so fast. I should be sleeping right now.

Why can't I turn the thoughts off? Why am I having these thoughts? I'm somehow a bad person or I'm not good enough or whatever. And that adds another layer because as you probably know from talking to so many people that you've talked to, we don't author our thoughts.

In fact, any level of investigation can kind of reveal pretty quickly that these thoughts arise. They may be from causes and conditions, but we're not the author of them. In other words, we cannot control what we think because even trying to do that actually causes more thoughts to ripple in the pond of consciousness. That doesn't mean we can't frame our response to the thoughts or how we kind of interpret our thought storm, but we certainly can't control the actual thoughts that arise. And that illusion of control, which again relates to free will and all that, which is a whole nother thing, but that illusion- We're going to talk about that. Yeah, we should definitely talk about that. That illusion of control creates a kind of suffering.

It's kind of a meta-suffering on top of the suffering of identifying with the thoughts. So it's very hard to tease those things out. It's only recently that I've been able to watch my mind enough with a lot of help from different resources to go, oh, look what's happening. This is a thought storm. You know, okay, okay. I'm not's happening. This is a thought storm, you know? Okay. Okay. Don't, don't, I'm not going to judge myself for the thought storm. And what's weird is the thought storm then kind of runs its course. So now when I wake up at 3 AM with this feeling of like pressure in the chest, this unknown source of anxiety, right? That clearly has some cause

and condition that I can't pinpoint. And then the thought storm launches. Oh my God, why am I anxious? What's why am I so anxious? Oh, I have an interview today. Oh man, what am I going to do in this interview? And then the thoughts start secreting like the sponge of the mind squeezes and it just secretes these thoughts. I'm able to actually at some point get a meta aware metacognition and go, Oh, look at this. Look what's happening. Okay. Okay. When you say you're able to do that, how are you able to do that without exercising free will? So this is where I find free will is a fascinating, fascinating thing. So, you know, we know the arguments against free will.

We know arguments for determinism, that everything is just causes and conditions and we're just along for the ride. and we're just along for the ride. But actually, I'm increasingly wondering whether how we direct our attention is not one of the only things within some degree of will. Now, Hoffman, with his conscious agent theory, actually feels that each agent within the complex instantiation that we are has its own de novo uh uh free will but it's

constrained by the free will decisions of other agents within the matrix and therefore true likes free will at this instantiation isn't really true it's constrained but yet novelty still enters the universe in the form of decisions at each level. And so I think free will is, I don't think there is no free will. I think free will is not what we think it is. I think it is, and I'm not a compatibilist or something like Dennett. I just don't think it's what we think it is. So there's something that happens and you could even say this, well, even that's not free will when I'm recognizing the thought storm and I'm deciding to do this thing. It's more that this neuronal storm, this complex series of happenings that is me, suddenly because of previous causes and conditions, I read a text, I studied some Buddhism, I read Sam Harris's book on free will, I studied Angelo DiLullo's book on awakening, and now there's enough juice there to emerge a decision to go, a decision that's mine to go, oh, this is a thought storm.

I should sit back and watch it and then let it dissipate. So it's very complex. And I think even claiming to understand it would be just pure foolishness. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble the more the wobble the more nicks cuts scrapes a bad shave isn't a blade problem it's an extension problem henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the international space station and the mars rover now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving

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school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. So in what you just articulated, it's more about that we don't have free will. It's that our decisions are based upon the prior conditions

and these are also not within our control. I would say this. I'm actually kind of partial to the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, that everything happens because of causes and conditions that aren't simple. It's not just, I lift up the cup, therefore this happens. It's more like the entire web is connected in ways that even the superest supercomputer could never predict yet. And that then, you know, unified vibration of stuff happening affects what thought arises next

have you heard of wolfram's concept of computational irreducibility i haven't okay so what it is it's wolfram thinks that this is the origin of free will computational irreducibility means that a system is you can't predict the outcome of a system without running the system. And because we're embedded within the system that we're running, you can't predict your own actions unless you simply run them. Almost like, a simple example is fluid dynamics. It's difficult to know where a certain particle is going to end up unless you just simulate it. You can't derive it. Right, okay, well then he would say that that's the origin of free will.

It sounds similar to what you're saying. Okay, I love that, and I'll tell you why. And I'll tell you why, because I think there's, I don't know if it's fMRI data or what, but human minds simulate out what they're going to do. And in fact, I think Sam Harris has talked about this. If I go, I want to pick up this cup, my mind has already done a projection. This is what it looks like. And it lights up motor sections of the brain that would normally be involved in actually picking up that cup. So in a way, our mind is like a future predictor, but that act of prediction feels to the consciousness that we are like a free will decision. It's almost like,

you know, and these studies have been cited, you know, you've made a decision like up to six seconds on fMRI before you're aware the decision's been made. But that doesn't mean that some aspect of your mind system hasn't, in a free will sense, de novo made a decision that you're just not aware of at this level of consciousness where we are. And that's why, you know, we have all these unconscious processes that in themselves may well be conscious at their level in a way we are not able to experience without brain damage, drugs, whatever that put us at that level. Um, so free will becomes this intensely complex thing to even think about. And one thing I want, I want to say is if you've ever had a meditative experience and it's not really meditative, it's more a non-dual experience. And what I mean by that is, and I can actually try to put myself in this headspace even now where, and there's a beautiful old piece of wisdom writing,

a Buddhist Sutta called the Bahiya Sutta that points this out. And it goes like this. Train yourself this way, is what this wise sage is telling to somebody who's trying to learn to be enlightened. And he says, train yourself in this way. In the seen, there will merely be what is

seen. In the heard, there will merely be what is heard. In the thought, there will merely be the thought. And so on through the six senses, which the sixth is mind. And the idea there is, notice what isn't there is a you, an I, a perceiver. When they say in the scene, there will merely be what is seen, it means that there is just seeing. So this cup is just this self-knowing, self-illuminating happening. Now, when you drop into that state, the self cannot be found. There's no I having the experience. Experience is experiencing. Appearance is appearances. And that feels like a kind of sense of agency that is very different than what we classically call free will because there's nobody making the decisions that things are happening. Things are just happening to no one. But there's a sense of an isness where everything is just OK.

It's very hard to put into words. In fact, I don't think you can put it into words. So this is not saying that there is no self. This is saying that the thoughts that you traditionally identify with yourself are not you, something like that? Or is this a statement for the dissolution of the idea of self at all?

So it's even beyond that. It's that there's no experiencer. So do you know how Rupert Spiro will talk about step back as be the awareness, the sense of I am, the consciousness is what we are, is one of his teachings, right? There's a step beyond that, which is even consciousness as a subject, as an experiencer, disappears. And then even the idea of self, it's nowhere to be found.

There's no you there. And it's very hard to put into words but what that feels like is things happening and that includes sound sight hearing smell taste and thoughts so thoughts materialize and they're they just are what they are so everything is just appearing but there's no subject and it's not even that the idea disappears it's that even the con there's nothing there it's just stuff happening and the way that feels is infinite okayness infinite freedom and no suffering and the reason there's no suffering is who's the subject of suffering so even if a painful sensation arises, it's just experienced in and of itself as exactly

what was happening in its right place to no one. Which again, it sounds crazy when you try to put it into language, which by its nature is a dualizing subject-object construction. When you say that it feels okay, who's it feeling okay to? Why is there no experiencer there? You could say it this way, and again, even this is not doing it justice, and people who've had this experience are going to be laughing at me going, this asshole's trying to explain this in words, and you can't. I understand. I mean, I can see it. Yeah, it's very tough.

You can think of it this way. Pain is just a self-illuminating process. In other words, it's a vibrating field of experience that just is in and of itself without the need for a subject. So it's truly non-dual, meaning not two. There's no subject and object. There's just this.

So if we were to just stare at this object, attention in a way, the beam of attention that feels like it's coming from a subject to an object, that evaporates and the object just radiates its own being in a way that feels more real than anything that you could experience as an experiencer. And the thing is to come from that state and then try to describe it is absolutely not possible.

All you can do is point with words to evoke that natural state in people. But even that, you have to be really good at that. Like Rupert's very good at that. There are people that can point very directly. Muji on YouTube is very, very good at that like rupert's very good at that there are people that can point very directly muji on youtube is very very good at pointing very directly um adyashanti might be good at pointing very directly and and when you experience it and people experience it in flow state oh my i i disappeared and things were just happening it was this just beautiful flow and all they come back and go i I want that again. Because when you experience it, you have this weird intuition. And again, who is this you? Language will fail us. There's an intuition that

this is what everybody's been talking about and seeking throughout all time when we look at any spiritual or wisdom pursuit. And I've only had sort of unstable short-term glimpses of this. And when I've come back, I've been like, oh, the ego immediately reasserts itself and goes, oh, I'm the guy that had that experience that was dope. I'm going to tell stories about it, right? It's really interesting. But in the moment, you're just like, it's just pure wonder, personless, just, oh. And then you come back and the mind comes and tells a story about it because it has to. There's nothing else it can do.

It has no words for it. You made an argument as to why we shouldn't experience pain when we're in that state. You used the word vibration. I don't recall what the exact statement was, but why can we not use that same argument to say that even the feeling of bliss when you're in that state is an illusion and there's no bliss either? So I would put it this way. All that is in that state is what is. So the raw experience, the unfiltered reality of what's happening at that moment, and whether it's a sensory experience like the sensation of pain, we call it pain because we apply this conceptual label to that experience we say pain which has a charge of valence of negative and then a response of avoidance or projecting a thought into the future when will this pain go away or a memory oh this feels like that time i had you know

appendicitis or whatever without all that overlay it's just this sensation happening in now to no one. And that's the other thing is time is not even, there's no conceptualization of time. So it's just all happening as a kind of a wave right now. Now, that can sound disconcerting. And actually, anyone who's done psychedelics at any point may have had experiences like this and then come back to sobriety and said, oh man, I was just tripping balls. But what you may have touched into is the timeless nature of raw experience without the conceptual overlay. And what that feels like to a mind when it comes back is, oh, I was tripping balls,

right? But in reality, it's really one of the most natural, it's probably the natural state prior to mind imposing itself, in my opinion, because I can only speak from my own experience. Well, you can't speak for your own experience if there's no you. So when you say that, that's just a linguistic device. It's a linguistic device, exactly. And by the way kurt so people the the non-dual people do these linguistic gymnastics around trying to not use the word i and all that that's dumb i think language is designed for a wii space right so you have to use language to try to

describe something undescribable and all you can do is point in the direction only you can kind of have the experience the and by you even that right you see where the language fails pretty quickly are you of the belief that what lies at the immaterial fundamental level is something like a non-dual vellum, just this one sheet, and it's undifferentiated? It's so hard to make metaphysical, ontological claims about the nature of reality without invoking belief. Because you said it there, belief. Is it your belief? And belief is another thought. It's another conceptual label on experience. I would say this. I've been, so from an intellectual side, I've been uncompelled by the materialist paradigm. Yeah, that that and feel free to interrupt me.

Yeah, I was gonna say, you mentioned that belief is a conceptual thought. I don't buy that. I don't think that that's the case. I think that we think it is. And I think that's part of the problem. Because, for example, if you say, I believe that I'm in a, I believe this stove is not hot. But then you say, well, put your hand on it, then. It's red. And then you're like, no, no, I'm not going to. I would say you believe with your body. Your actions belie your beliefs. So what you say with your mouth doesn't match your actions, and your actions are your true test of belief. if it's embodied then your beliefs aren't simply concepts aren't simply abstractions so the unconscious response of the body and remember i actually wonder whether the body itself is not just part of a continuum of consciousness with its own belief conditioning and maybe you may be right

that it's not a thought-based conceptual thing as much as it is an overlay on experience because let's think of it this way i don't believe okay let's take the belief out of it putting my hand on that hot stove right i'm gonna do it now, right? Okay. My belief from conditioning, from experience, and from what the body is autonomically telling me that's been conditioned into my unconscious, into my reflex patterns, right? Is this is bad. This hurts. Must stop. Not good. Okay. There's the belief component of it. If I didn't have those reflexes and I'm experiencing unfiltered reality, I would just experience the vibrating temperature field

of that experience, which the mind would then say, this is terrible, you need to stop now, you're dying. And you would then smell the burning flesh, which would be a pure sensory experience. So in other words, there's a conceptualization that the mind does to raw data from the sense field that's necessary. And it's so fundamental to us being human

that you're saying, well, I think it's more fundamental than that is not wrong. I just think there's one level even beyond more fundamental than that. And that's just the raw unfiltered reality that just is. Now, we couldn't function, I think, just experiencing unfiltered reality like that all the time. We wouldn't be able to get across the street, which is why I think these structures of consciousness evolve. I understand that one can get to a place where one feels like there is no pain.

But to me, that's a different claim than saying that there is no pain. That's the claim that I've gotten to a place where I experience no pain, where traditionally pain would be felt, like these Buddhist monks who can light themselves on fire, that to me seems like, well, what I'm about to say is contradictory, but that to me seems like an adaptive strategy rather than an ontological claim. Like one can, it's like a tool. Meditation may even be a tool rather than, and we're mixing up the tool with a claim about reality. I don't know.

I'm just saying that I'm unconvinced in each direction. Now, let me ask you a question about this. When... Given that the mind is self-deceptive, and we know this, and experience is fallible, or at least the inference is drawn from experiences, are fallible, then why would one make the claim

that just because I can get to a state where I feel like the self is an illusion, that the self is an illusion, given that the self seems to be the most pernicious illusion, and yet we've dispensed with it, how do you know that that itself is not an illusion? Right, so this gets to the question of how deep do you have to go before you can convince yourself that something isn't illusory?

And I think neuroscientists, I think, could say, well, there's no seat of the self, even neurophysiologically. There's no little homunculus in the mind where it's the thing that's the point where, you know, you're sitting behind your mind. You can look at default mode network and go, okay, a lot of our discursive thought about self, our ideas of self and our inward ruminations kind of originated in the default mode network, which itself is not a point. It's a diffuse kind of body of things. And there are aspects of that even. I actually think that, and again, so some of this comes from experiencing these states. And the question is, what truth can you pull out of that? And when you talk about even meditation as a tool, like you're lighting yourself on fire, I think there is a component of, there are meditative practices and jhanas and things like that where you can actually, you get very good at ignoring sensory stimulation to where it doesn't distract you. And that's very different than allowing yourself to experience the raw experience of being on fire and doing nothing about it. experience of being on fire and doing nothing about it. So again, without having gone through that, it's very hard to investigate because the way you would have to, there's no way to

investigate these easily without doing it introspectively because it refers to interstates. But then how much can you extrapolate out? And I think Harris struggles with this. So he'll always put the disclaimer, well, you know, I'm making no claims about the nature of the universe. I'm just saying this, whereas Deepak Chopra takes the opposite tact and says, well, because I've experienced this in meditation, it must be true of the whole universe, right? And I think both of those are very extreme statements. I think what you have to do is you have to kind of, again, approach it scientifically and say, okay, so what would a materialist paradigm say about the nature of self? Is the self a real thing? Well, I think even materialists will say, well, so what would a materialist paradigm say about the nature of self?

Is the self a real thing? Well, I think even materialists will say, well, no, it's probably a construction that's made by neurochemical processes in the brain that themselves are not conscious. So how is that any more real than saying, yeah, the self is actually a mind construct made up of thought, belief, and it's a very tight web of

thought going to thought going to thought that's conditioned from birth that's all made of consciousness and it can be seen through it can actually relax it never goes away really it can relax and get out of the way of raw experience um i'm not sure there's a big distinction there i i I'm not sure there's a big distinction there, which is why I'm increasingly convinced that when people talk about awakening, say, spiritual awakening, really a big piece of that, I think, is the dropping away off the false sense that I am this, to go to the next level of I am this,

which is consciousness itself. And then even that collapses into... What, I am nothing? Just this. So just this happening. And this is where you can't even open your mouth about it because there's no you to to and i think that look look kurt like if this were easy to talk about it'd be one of those things we'd all be pretty awake because we just in school we'd be like okay so here's the thing

right do these three things yourself drops away you see truth as it is if only if only and yeah yeah okay i'm unsure i know that there's the claim of of what one cannot speak of specifically one must be silent that's wittgenstein's and it's also true that it could be that our level of language is not sophisticated enough so for example go back 10 000 Well, that's not enough for grunts, but let's go back to caveman era when there were grunts. Obviously, they lacked a level of language that would allow them to understand what a microphone is, for example, or what any sufficiently complex, almost anything in this place. They wouldn't be able to understand it in the same way we do because they don't have the language for it. So there's a relationship between language and thought. And when people say that, well, we can't speak of it. I say we can't

speak of it now. I'm not saying that. I don't think that necessarily, I don't see the reason why language would necessarily be incapable of expressing the thoughts that one gets to in these meditative spaces. Either way, it doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. Actually, I think that's an important point that you bring up. Because everything that you just talked about is coming at this state from a position of mind. So in other words, from the position of the linguistic mind, which as you say,

this is important, cognition and language are not two, talk about non-dual, they're directly related. And in your documentary, I think you interviewed a dude who was talking about that actually quite directly. I'm forgetting his name now, but this idea that, so this is what I proposed to you, Kurt. You may be right. Like, I can't disprove what you're saying, but I can only say this from the experience of that state, I can say pretty firmly coming back and then using language. I said, I, it's not a words thing. And, and the only way you will be able to understand that argument is by experiencing the state,

which again is, it's actually not difficult to get to, but you have to be pointed in a way and open in a way. And you have to almost surrender the resistance of all our conditioning, which that's what makes it hard. And I struggle with it. I struggle with it i struggle and and the problem is when you come back to the standard mind state from that more open surrendered and your mind starts to tell stories immediately about how you're not worthy to ever get that back so i completely understand at some

point if you just read the dictionary, it only refers to other words. So in a sense, almost every concept needs what's extra linguistic. Because you can't talk about what's bumpy, let's say, by reading the dictionary. You have to point to what's bumpy, experience it, attach the label of bumpiness. So maybe because these states are so rare for the majority of people, attaching a name is extremely difficult, if not impossible. I don't know if it's impossible, but I understand that it's difficult. You know what's interesting, again, in your documentary, going back to this, because I think, see, this is important.

How do we, we started off talking about how are we going to, how's the world going to emerge better systems if we don't actually understand ourselves well? You know, your theories of everything are crucial, but they have to include the internal universe of human experience, I think. That's my opinion. And the question is, how do we develop ways to point to these truths from people who've had those, are operating from that position? So they're operating from that present moment sort of experience. And I've met a couple people who do that, and just talking to them can evoke the state. And I interviewed one of them, Angelo DeLulo, who's an anesthesiologist.

He had an awakening in 97. Since then he's further 97, 97. So he's my age. He's 48. This is crazy. Talk about jealousy, dude. Talk about jealousy. I was like, screw you, buddy. So the re but the reason he had an awakening is he suffered. He was suffering so much internally with all the just angst and existential dread. At 97 he was suffering? In 1997. Oh, 1997. Sorry, not at the age of 97.

Sorry. No, no, no. He's my age. But it was back in 97. And he had this experience where the self dissolved. He was pure emptiness, like the substratum that the universe appears from from nothing uh the idea of buddhist emptiness doesn't even even kind of touch what he had experienced he told me and and this this then he never spoke of to anyone because

he found he couldn't say a word about it and it took him 20 years of further work including going through medical school becoming an anesthesiologist like experiencing everything in the human condition reasserting his suffering and everything to be able to better understand how to point to it and even then he said it's really really difficult but just being around him can invoke those states at least it does in many people who've talked to him, including myself, because I had him in my studio for two days straight. And I tell you, I was walking around like I was on LSD for a good three days afterwards.

And even my family was like, wow, you're a different person. It's a real thing. And so how would we begin to use language or the tools that we have to try to emerge that? And I don't have the answers for that, but I think it's something we ought to be looking into. With your cup, it says science the heck out of this or something like that. Do you mind showing it to the camera once more?

It's science the crap out of it. Right, right, right, right. Okay. Do you believe that? The reason why I say that is because what you've just described has almost nothing to do with science. In fact, it seems anti-science to go to one's experience, the subjective rather than the objective. So what's the deal with that cup? And how can that, when was that cup made? Was that before this three-day spa with this person?

three-day spa with this person nope it's yes and science is absolutely the study of the external third person or internal singular physical physical icon world and again to put it in in buddhist language the causes and conditions the dependent origination what what are the rules of that why does why does the manifest world behave the way it does and science and when i'm a deep adherent of this as a physician and as someone who advocates science-based medicine and so on but that is a yes and. So even transrational thought, it's not thought, this experience of like, well, okay, so what's the substratum then that even encompasses science? And that's what I'm pointing out with what I'm saying. But science is still absolutely valid at that relative level of existence, which is what matters to most humans because like us even being able to talk is understandings of quantum mechanics and understandings of electronics and Wi-Fi and all

that. So, and medicine, so this is where it gets the intersection with medicine. Medicine has gone a long way using the reductionist scientific method. Reductionist meaning, and that's a very charged word. I don't really like it. It's more saying okay we're it's a materialist paradigm there are receptors and gates and molecules dna and so on and if we understand that we'll be able to do anything in medicine and i actually disagree because i think what we're seeing there is what hoffman calls our interface and at the we can get narrow and narrower in terms of the pixel density of the interface. But at some point, we cannot get down underneath it to the transistors and electron gates that are actually running the desktop. So that's where the understanding of awareness, consciousness, and introspection is the next science, for lack of a better term. Man, I'm so glad you talked about this.

Zubin, something I've been thinking about for quite some time is what is – and I don't like to say this, and I talked about this at the, I was speaking to previously, what is science 2.0? In essence, theories of everything is, the project is, it's teetering on the edge of that question. Think about science 400 years ago. It's not the same science now. It wasn't even called science. And then so science developed. So then you can wonder, well, where is it headed? And then by what criteria does one include this into science versus not science?

I call it abijnasis, which is a mouthful. But it's a merging of nasis, which is knowledge in the Western sense, and then abijna, which is knowledge in the eastern sense. Now, I'm not even sure if that's correct. Maybe there's a trichotomy rather than a duality. But either way, this whole investigation as to what is the next science, and you just mentioned, well, science is so-and-so, but I also think science is an investigation not of reality, but of objective reality as it's currently defined, because you require intersubjective agreement, so agreement between plenty of people. And right now, you've had experiences that I have, I can only glimpse at a scintilla of understanding. So we don't have intersubjective agreement with

this, but it is still part of reality. Your experience is part of reality. That's not captured in science. So that's why I was saying it depends on what you call science with your cup, if whether or not you want to follow it. Additionally, you mentioned as a physician, and I think any science outside of the hard sciences like math and physics are in the realm of ethics because you have to apply it in the world of action. So you have to say, is this intervention worth it? And over there there you have a value judgment science would just say if then statement so if you give this person this will happen if this if this if this if this you then have to select between them which is it's a moral hierarchy it's an ethic and i don't see that as incorporated into science per se so

please let me hear your thoughts on that man i, I love this is the kind of shit like, I just love because it's what I call you call it science 2.0. Right? I hate it. I hate I mean, I say I hate calling I call it abeach abeach gnosis, which is like, that's better. That's kind of that's kind of awesome. Yeah, I geek out and call it like health 3.0, which is this idea that it's the science is there, we're evidence empowered, but then you have this relationship with a patient that has these currently intangible because we don't have intersubjective ways

to measure these things easily. You have that relationship and that hope streams and fears of the patient that if you know it and you form a therapeutic alliance, which emerges some state that we don't understand that we call the mind-body connection, because we're basically monkeys flapping our meat holes. We don't know how to-

What do you mean when you say therapeutic alliance? What do you mean? Explain that, please. So a therapeutic alliance, alliance everybody a lot of people have had this experience where look i'm having this suffering i'm having this issue i'm having this mental thing i'm having a physical thing whatever it is i think they're all the same thing honestly when i find someone a healthcare professional who sits with me feels connected to my suffering understands what i'm trying to say, witnesses my suffering.

It almost doesn't matter what else they do. That alliance that we formed, this intersubjective we space emerges a kind of healing for lack of a, you know, it's a very woo woo new age way to talk about. And anyone who's practiced medicine knows this to be true. Anyone who's been a patient and has experienced it, they may not know it

because they may still have this expectation. Well, but he also gave me an aspirin or gave me an antibiotic and I got better or maybe they gave me an antidepressant. What they will not, and this is why if you read reviews of docs online, what they do doesn't matter. It's how they did it. Dr. Justin Marchegiani That's fascinating. It has to do with also complaints.

Doctors who people dislike get complained against at a far disproportionate rate than doctors that they do like that gave them mistreatments. Absolutely. And this is interesting because doctors who get those complaints, and again, I'm deeply connected in the healthcare community, right? There's like 3 million people who follow across platforms and most of them are healthcare professionals and I get messages. like 3 million people who follow across platforms, and most of them are healthcare professionals, and I get messages. They are wounded deeply when they get a complaint that says,

hey, I don't like the way this guy treated me or the way that they behaved or the way their staff was, because they'll say, I did all the scientific stuff. I'm more evidence-based than the doctor that they wrote a good review for. I'm doing things. I'm trying not to harm the patient, so on. They have these expectations. They want antibiotics for a cold.

They want narcotics for pain. I know that's harmful and so they were mad at me. But what's missed there, and that's normal, that's defensive sort of posturing. What's missed there is that, well, so what failed in the therapeutic alliance that we're not able to let ourselves see because it's hurtful to us because we realize,

oh, there's something about me here that is actually – and why are they defensive in the first place? Because they know underlying it is this kind of unworthiness that many of us have as type A's. So it is a dynamic. Is that something taught? What I mean is in school, do they teach you how to be personable or amiable? They give you lip service to the bedside manner and the patient relationship. And they do this kind of thing. But they've not figured out how to teach it.

The way that we learn it is by example from whoever our attending physicians are. So what I would try to do is try to emulate doctors that I knew were really good at that. And so here's an, but, but if you have bad mentors or bad examples, which is rampant because we just recapitulate our, our own training. Um, and a lot of the older doctors are injured by their training. Like the training used to be just absolutely even more brutal than it is now. But even they're injured by it. Injured meaning psychically injured by it. So it used to be very common. You would just be in the hospital for 36 hours or longer,

working the whole time, constantly shamed by your situation. I see, I see. Yeah, so they then recapitulate this cycle. And so you watch it. And then of course it bleeds into patient care because you've been trained to be a psychopath. And now you're asked to be compassionate or empathetic, right, which I don't conflate, by the way,

compassion and empathy, which we can talk about. They're quite different. And actually one is harmful, one is actually beneficial. But so we're not really trained it. We watch doctors doing it. Now, one thing I remember seeing, for example, is Dr. Norm Risk, who was the head of ICU when I was there training at Stanford as a resident. He would tell patients in the ICU, sickest of the sick, patients that we all knew, like us residents were like, why are we still ventilating this patient on tons of agents to keep their blood pressure up, giving them all these antibiotics, millions of dollars of care?

Patients unconscious, never going to make it. Family is not clear that this is the end. And why are we doing this? This is a kind of injury to us because we're forced to be complicit in a torture because nobody is going to openly say what's absolutely true, which is we're not helping this patient. So what Norm Risk would do is he would call a family meeting with all of us. We'd sit there with the family. He would hold the hand of the person he was talking to as the authority figure with the gray hair. And he would say, you know, there comes a point where we are doing things to your husband instead of for your husband. And I think we are past that point now. And he would then engage in, you know, whatever anger or denial or bargaining or anything that came out. And by would then engage in, you know, whatever anger or denial or bargaining or

anything that came out. And by watching that, by absorbing that, you model, you imprint on that like a little duckling. And when you talk to patients, that same sort of language emerges. So that's a lot of how the apprenticeship of medicine training works. Now, you can imagine, though, if you don't have a norm risk and you have Bobby McBobby from the community who's been injured by their own training and is burned out, they're going to model that to you. And honestly, by the end of my full academic career as a hospital doc, I was modeling bad behavior to residents because I was pretty burned out. So, you know, it took stepping away to regain the connection to actual compassion because empathy wasn't working because empathy will kind of burn you out. Because empathy is feeling someone

else. Yeah. So let's be very precise. So affective empathy is feeling someone else's suffering as your own. So taking that suffering and really inhabiting it and then acting from the feeling of suffering, not so much for love of the patient, but acting for relief of that suffering. Oh, I know what it's like to, you know, withdraw from narcotics. Maybe the best thing to do is just give them a little bit of morphine to calm them down, because man, I've been through that myself. You're watching this channel because you're interested in theoretical physics, consciousness, and the ostensible connection between the two. What's required to follow some of these arguments is facility with mathematics as well as discernment of the underlying physical laws, and you may think

that this is beyond you, but that's false. Brilliant provides pellucid explanations of abstruse phenomena such as quantum computing, general relativity, and even group theory. When you hear that the standard model is based on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3, that's group theory, for example. Now this isn't just for neophytes either. For example, I have a degree in math and physics and I still found some of the intuitions given in these lessons to vastly aid my penetration into these subjects. For example, electricity and magnetism. Sign up today at brilliant.org slash toe, that is T-O-E, for free. You'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Try four of the lessons at least. Don't stop before four.

And I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you comprehend subjects you previously had trouble grokking. Links are in the description. I have a quick question about morphine while we're on this. I know we're on a great thread. Morphine apparently doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. Is that correct? Yeah, I actually don't know the answer to that. I don't know the answer to that. Okay. Well, as far as I know, heroin does, and the heroin becomes morphine in the brain. And that's one of the reasons heroin is more potent than morphine. I don't know if this is true. So most of them are processed in the liver to turn into morphine compounds that are then active. Okay. Well, something I was wondering is why is

it that morphine feels good when it seems to give you a slight high if it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier? Is that simply because of the connection between mind and body? Well, okay. So first I'd have to confirm that that's true, that it doesn't have a central effect, because I think it does. I know it has direct central spinal effect. There are opioid mu receptors throughout the nervous system. I don't know.

It could be just because I haven't looked at this in a long time. throughout the nervous system. Now, I don't know, it could be just because I haven't looked at this in a long time, but the euphoric sense, which isn't, it's actually different for different types of opioids and partially it's how they're metabolized

and a pain specialist should be able to speak to this more cogently. But we found patients would request specific narcotics because they provided a euphoria, like say Demerol, Dilaudid, had much more euphoria than just IV morphine or heaven forbid, you know, codeine, which, you know, I think 10 or 20% of Caucasians don't even process correctly, so they don't get any experience from it. Sorry, you're saying you don't want to give

people codeine? No, no, no. People don't want it because it doesn't give you that euphoria. And so we always knew like patients will request a certain hierarchy of narcotics. In fact, they will even tell you I'm someone who's dependent on narcotics. And we can use this from addiction. They may come to the emergency department with a complaint and say, okay, I'm allergic to morphine. I'm allergic to codeine. I'm allergic to all these aspirin and Tylenol derivatives. The only thing that helps me starts with a D. I don't remember the name, D, D, D. And you're like, Demerol? Yeah, that's it.

Or Dilaudid? Oh yeah. So there's definitely a hierarchy of narcotics. So they all have slightly different experiences. Now, some of that is expectation. So we talked about mind-body. Some of that is expectation. One interesting thing is the placebo effect, which nobody really understands. There's a guy at Harvard who studies it and some others that study it. But it's been getting stronger over time,

over the decades. Now, why is that? Is it because people, especially Americans, expect our medicines to work more than they did in the old days. And it's gotten so bad, Kurt, that now apparently if you redid the same studies that showed that certain antidepressant SSRIs actually work, they would no longer work against placebo because the placebo has gotten so powerful. So it tells you again, like how much of this is mind, the WeSpace,

the Therapeutic Alliance, all of that, that emerges health 3.0, where you have the science component of the stuff that you can reduce to the objective. And then there's the internal experience, not just of I internal, but of we, the inner subjective experience, which is, again, it's an internal state externalized between two people. And we use language as a way to bridge it, because there's no way to know your internal state externalized between two people and we use language as a way to bridge it. Because there's no way to know your internal state unless you tell me, which is why it's so uncomfortable to describe a non-dual experience because the words just fail. And then you're just like, you think I'm crazy. That's what it feels like sometimes.

Remember how I mentioned that I think theories of everything, free will, consciousness, and God are intimately tied. I also think that the placebo effect and self-fulfilling prophecies are in there somewhere. I may be writing a book on the placebo effect because there's, well, it's just the more you think about it, the more it boggles the mind. As for the antidepressant not performing as well, why would that be the case unless the antidepressant is harming you? Because wouldn't the antidepressant be raised at the same level as placebo? Yeah, so sorry. I should be very specific. If you did that trial exactly back then using the level of placebo that is now – the efficacy of placebo now, it would fail. But what would probably happen now is

both would rise. And the question is, would the, uh, active ingredient rise more than placebo and still be statistically significant? We don't know. Cause I don't think the trial has been done, but it is quite interesting. And you're onto something with that. And, and by the way, tying that back into what your whole, you know, this, you know, gnosis that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Daniel Schmachtenberger, who I think you know, and I were talking and he shared a piece of writing that he wrote. He looks at it this way. He calls it the dance of the Tao with the 10,000 things. And that's a very poetic way of saying the absolute, which was whatever is fundamental reality,

whether it's emptiness or awareness or whatever you wanna call it, dances with manifestation, which is the stuff we can measure and quantify and use our typical science on in an intimate and inseparable way that's beautiful and complex. When I think of human organisms, I think of what Federico Faggin, who I've had on my show, talks about.

He's like someone who's funded some of Don Hoffman's work. He is a physicist, Italian guy, who invented or co-invented, co-developed the first commercial microprocessor with Intel in the 70s and since has worked on AI and stuff. And he wrote a book

about this. He feels that humans are these quantum classical hybrid systems where when he uses quantum, he's talking about this indeterminate space where free will may emerge from nothing. And that may be another for this kind of substance of reality. And then it manifests in this very classical deterministic way in the form of the body and the body like a human cell is a quantum classical hybrid. So you have this really kind of indeterminate free will generating complexity of isness. And then you have the mechanistic stuff we can measure and quantify, and they're not two. So I think that's an interesting way to look at that. Wait, you said they're not two? Not two, meaning they're not separate. They're intertwined. At the human level or in reality? So in other words, the way he describes it as a metaphor is the human body is like the interface in a virtual reality.

The user of the virtual reality is in the quantum realm and is pure free will decision making awareness. And then it interfaces with this realm in an absolutely seamless way where you would never know that this is an avatar. But it and again, but again, it's all made out of awareness. Ultimately is his posit. It's all still one substance, but it just appears in this way. And mechanistically, it functions like this, where the avatar and our decision making. And another way to think about this is when you're in a flow state or you're in an authentic conversation, like we're having a pretty authentic conversation right now, where is any of this coming from, the discussion we're having, the words that we're speaking?

It comes from emptiness. It comes from something that we can't point back, from darkness really. And Federico's argument is that it comes from the free will decisions that are in that realm rather than here. Now, who knows, right? It's a typical thing to test. This is why when people say free will exists or free will doesn't exist, I'm always skeptical because it's absolutely not obvious. There are reasons to believe it in both directions. And then you mentioned also Sam Harris is someone that makes no ontological claims. But he also said that free will doesn't exist.

That's an ontological claim. And he also said that God doesn't exist, which is an ontological claim. Of course, you have to define God. Yeah, I find Sam is an interesting character. So he, just as my own journey, you know, I was a pretty hardcore science-based atheist reductionist. Anything I'm saying now, I would have struck myself as insane and probably that I'd been smoking something and not a good idea. Isn't that fascinating, huh? Isn't it? And, uh, and that would have been, that would have been eight years ago that I would have told you that

now what's interesting about Sam is he was my gateway drug to spirituality. So I read his atheist works, you know, uh, letters to a Christian nation. And Christian nation, and I forget what the other one was, and was enamored with the new atheists and these guys. And I'm like, these guys are speaking truth, man. Religion is bullshit and all that. Then I read Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. And I was like, wait, Sam is yearning deeply for the same mythos, the same fundamental sense of isness, meaning, purpose, whatever it is that everyone who's religious is.

He's just found a different angle on it. And that's when I started meditating and exploring that path. But he made it okay to do that. Now I listen to him and I'm like, oh man, he's pretty stubborn about a lot of stuff. You're right. He makes ontological claims about free will and God and so on. And, and, you know, I heard his conversation with Rupert Spira, which was kind of painful to listen to because they were just going at it. Like, is materialism real or is it all consciousness? And how can you say that? And so

on. And I'm like, you know, you've got Rupert here. Probably it's a good idea to talk about, you know, non-dual experience, but, But it was a good conversation because you could really dig into it. And he asked one, Sam asked one question of Rupert that I thought was fascinating. Which was? And that was, what happens under anesthesia? Have you ever had general anesthesia? And I have. And my experience of general anesthesia was this. Countdown from 10, 10, 9, 8. detail was this. Countdown from 10, 10, 9, 8. Where am I? I'm here, awake in post-op recovery. There was an absolute slice of reality removed, and it didn't have the sense of continuity that you have when you go to sleep. So when you sleep, there's still a sense that, oh, how'd you sleep? Pretty good. How'd you know that? Because there's like a sense of being that occurs when you're asleep. Maybe it's not

just dreaming, I think even in deep sleep. But this was different. This was like, lights out, lights on. And it made me question, well, maybe consciousness is purely a brain-based material thing, because if you give it certain chemicals, it's gone in a way that i felt like i was annihilated like that must be what death is like complete non-being and so sam posed the question to rupert and they got derailed before rupert could answer um because the you know you and i can tease this out intellectually well is it just that memory formation is gone and therefore you can't remember anything about it? And so therefore you're still aware at some level, but you're not forming memories. And many have posited this, including those who have experiences of anesthesia awareness where they remember being cut on and so on.

Can I answer what I think Rupert may say? Sure. Did you experience non-experience? Yeah, that's exactly what he might say. So just because you didn't feel a level of continuity, you still experienced. You were only experiencing what you experienced. And at that level, there's continuity between experience. I think you nailed it i think and what's

interesting though so my mind told a story after the fact of what that experience was it constructed a reality to fit you know because i'd never experienced that i was like what this is crazy and um and and so after the fact it was like like, well, maybe consciousness turned off, or maybe I wasn't forming memories, and maybe, and it stuck with me. I was like, oh, that was the one experience I had of propofol, just you're out. By the way, the-

Were you in an affable mood afterward? What's that? Were you affable afterward? Were you congenial? So this, here's something interesting that I found out after the fact. So propofol tends to do that. People wake up, they don't remember, and they're really amorous with the nurses and, you know, like, hey, baby.

You know, and the thing is, my surgery was a penis reduction surgery. So it's something that most men, you know, dream of, and I just had to do it out of necessity. So the thing was, I had the sense, looking at the nurse afterwards, that I'd been yapping. And I didn't ask her, but I sensed that was the case. Now, if that were true, then any experience I had afterwards of discontinuity has no relevance to reality because I was awake and talking. And a lot of people who've had propofol will say the same thing. They'll have absolutely no memory of that. It's an amnestic.

So memory's gone. thing. They'll have absolutely no memory of that. It's an amnestic. So you just, memory's gone. So actually rethinking about this, because I hadn't thought about it, you know, you've prompted me to think about this, which you seem to freaking do in your interviews. So many of your guests go, you know, I've never thought of it this way. I've actually never thought of it this way until Kurt said something that prompted me. That's one of your true gifts, man. So think about it now again. I'm like, Hmm, probably my assessment of it is not correct. But that was something that Sam had challenged Rupert on. And then they'd kind of gone off the rails a little bit after that. I remember being under anesthesia. I remember

waking up and just telling the person next to his wisdom teeth, telling the person next to me, it's great, you're gonna be fine. I just reassuring this this person but i don't think i was funny i think that was it and then i just remember being wobbly toward the car okay getting back to non-dualism i have some questions for you if you don't mind yeah is the claim that is that what's fundamental what's indispensable primitive and so on this this realm of undifferentiatedness. Now, I can't claim to be expert or stable in this, Now, I can't claim to be expert or stable in this, but try to imagine, and this is not imaginable, but you can kind of glance at it. Imagine that there's nothing, but that even nothing is not the right descriptor because

that implies that there is a thing that you're comparing it to. It's almost just a pure potentiality, a pure... Okay, okay. Well, if it's potential to me, that means that there's a pluralistic notion. It's not non-dual, because there's multiple within a potential. You could be many. But how do I say this? But how do I say this? That potentiality by its nature arises phenomena that are in themselves made of nothing. It's almost like, you know, Rupert's analogy of the film projector putting light on a screen. If the screen was this empty potential, you know, the light dances on it,

but it's not substantial in itself. It's a manifestation that this thing just does. It's like a primitive urge to just manifest and even what i'm saying sounds crazy but that's what it kind of feels like when you glance on that and there are those who've really gone deep into that experience uh my friend angelo would describe it as it's the experience of everything happening like a foaming gel, like phenomenon are just happening, color, shape, sounds, even to call it nothing is saying too much. That's interesting. To call it nothing is saying too much.

He's saying to call it nothing, and he'll say this. He goes, you call it nothing, and you're already doing it a disservice. It's not that. It foams this reality that is entirely empty of substance, and that then foams into the same no thing that it came from. And that's happening every iota of the now. And that's reality. And he says one other thing that he says at the very end of this sort of journey is that the one thing you realize that's very destabilizing to people when you tell it to them is there's no way that things actually are. And even that statement makes no

sense to the rational mind. But he says that is the truth. It's just happening by itself. And even that is like, and now I'm trying to describe how he would describe it, and I can't. And it's really fascinating. And you wonder if he's in any way barking up the right tree, that the true nature of reality could be even more wonderful. And I said, well, isn't that nihilism? Isn't that complete emptiness? My next point. It sounds like a pretext to nihilism.

Right? It sounds like, well, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. And actually, as the human mind reads it in his book on the stages of awakening, he says, listen, guys, don't read this if you're easily triggered because this is going to trigger some feelings for you. And all I'm going to tell you is it's OK. The punchline is everything's better than OK. It's beyond OK. And you're like, what the hell do you mean by that? And you read it and you just want to throw the book in the trash. You're like, I'm sorry. The punchline is everything's nothing and it's coming into nothing and there's no way things are. What the hell? That sounds like the worst kind of nihilism. coming into nothing and there's no way things are what the hell that sounds like the worst kind of nihilism it defeats any human impulse to even be compassionate like why and what he will say is

trust me when you experience it um you will you will know that it is beyond okay it is actually the best news you could ever imagine and he says says, you can't describe that in words. It's just everything happens perfectly as it should. And that means that even suffering, even the experience of suffering is exactly in its right place at its right time. And there's no you to fret about it, but it doesn't mean you don't feel it intensely and that you can't experience life in the relative

in a profound way that you can't experience life in the relative in a profound way that you can bear the kind of suffering that you would never have bared feeling you're this. And again, that sounds crazy, he says, until you experience it. What I'm wondering is, you just mentioned, while we're talking about nihilism, why isn't, where in that is the statement that promulgating infinite suffering or, or a large amount of suffering wrong? So why, why can I not run amok and murder and rape and pillage and so on? Yeah, it's all nothing. It's all okay. It's all nothing. It's all okay. Where's the moral compass? Where's the directive? When we had God, we could say there's a judgment here. There's a morality that's set out in the Ten Commandments and so on, thou shalt not. Where's the morality in an emptiness that manifests reality only in the present moment with no future or past and no self? What's to keep you from running amok?

Or what's to say that you shouldn't? What's to say that you shouldn't? Well, here is what they would say. And again, take it with what you will. When you've had that experience or you act from that space, there is no desire to do anything to another manifestation of this because you're doing it. It's all one thing. So what's even the point of hurting someone? And I had one person who's wide awake, who had this experience to an extreme realization who I've spoken with, to the point where just talking to him will put you in a state. And he was the one who pointed me to that Sutta that says, in the scene will be merely what is seen. And when he did that with me, I had the experience. That was the guy who was 24 when he had that experience? Different guy. So this is a guy who's an electrician who had an awakening in recovery for alcohol, you know, in his early thirties, family,

and had a profound awakening and since has further realized, you know, further stabilized his realization and, and was pointed to me by another person. And, and, uh, what he says is, cause I asked him this exactly this, I said, well, what you're describing to me now, cause he'll just talk. He will try to point for, you know, an hour straight and I'll sit on the phone just being pointed to, trying not to intellectualize too much, but you can't help it. So I say, well, what's to stop you from being a complete asshole? Because it sounds to me that you still have two daughters that you deeply love and a wife that you deeply love and you continue to do your job as an electrician and yet you're telling me the nature of reality is this and by the way he points to exactly the same thing that

angelo pointed to and so what's the deal and he goes he goes bro i just got to tell you when you experience this you have no like i will not step on an ant if i can avoid it i will not harm anything i will go out of my way. I hate cockroaches. I now pick them up with a thing and throw them outside because hurting another thing, it feels like I'm hurting myself. And I couldn't comprehend that.

Even intellectually, I still, if there's no self, who are you hurting? But he said, it's just that way. Now that then you have to juxtapose with people who apparently have had quite profound awakenings who behave in reprehensible ways you know um the andrew cohen's and certain zen masters and so on who've you know sexually taken advantage of their students and have never done the work on themselves they've like spiritually bypassed all their own baggage, and that baggage still comes

out unconsciously or consciously, and they behave in what we would classify as reprehensible ways. So I don't know the answer. Okay. So I understand if you were to experience that, you'd get to a place where you would no longer act in a manner that promulgates suffering. But what's to say that those who are currently promulgating suffering are wrong to do so? Yeah, they aren't from this viewpoint. They're just... Right. So this is nihilism then, no? So again, I guess it depends on how you're talking about nihilism, but the idea that you would be compelled not to generate suffering. So what you exude in the world would be something that actually reduces suffering.

But you could look at suffering, and what Angelo describes to me is he says when he sees suffering, he feels it intensely and purely but without self. He feels it, and there is an urge arises to do something about it. You don't want to tolerate suffering. And he told me the story actually about, I can't repeat the story, but it was about standing up for somebody in a very difficult situation where he had to intervene. And this is as a fully awake person.

So it's interesting. And again, not being in that state, I can't speak from that state, but the sense I get is it's interesting. And again, not being in that state, I can't speak from that state, but the sense I get is it is okay. Now, one thing I want to clarify that I said about these gurus who go around, um, yeah, I think this is a very important thing that Angela pointed out to me. And I think it's true from my own limited experience, the, the ego mind, in other words, our mind, our structures of conditioning and so on, it does not take waking up to this lightly. It doesn't take it sitting down. Even after

awakenings, people then have to contend with strong unconscious feelings, what Jung would call the shadow and all of this, those arise. And in fact, they're felt, you can't avoid them now because the mechanisms of thought projection to get out of feeling difficult emotions and repressed memory and so on, that becomes untenable. It becomes uncomfortable for you. So you have to face this. But sometimes, and more often than not, the ego reasserts itself and co-ops the story of awakening to, I am the awakened one who now is the guru, who now has power, who now unconsciously

is getting validation from the students, who now is gonna fulfill some of these unconscious desires for worthiness by having sex with a student or whatever it is. So I think that's true. And Angela's pointed out to me, he said, even some of the biggest teachers that you see on YouTube,

they have signs of This kind of ego thing everybody does because that's just we're so conditioned as humans It's it's very difficult to transcend it entirely and still live in the relative world. So You know, he says, you know, even when you start spiritual pursuits the ego sitting there in a hammock sipping a mojito going Oh, you want to do spirituality? I got you. I've been doing this for thousands of years i'll even help you and it kind of co-ops the story and i i'm actually guilty of that too even telling the story from a position of ego feels a little creepy right what would he say what was this person's name again angelo delulo i've done a few shows with mike and link you up with him sure angelo what would angelo in order to stop a larger amount

of suffering commit himself to a smaller amount of suffering so for example you hit the child in order to stop them from jumping down a stairwell or you execute someone if they said, as soon as I'm out of this prison, even within the prison, I'm going to harm and torture and maim. So is he for? What would he do in that situation? Or just let's imagine a fight is about to break out and the only way, the only way to stop this person as far as he can conceive, the only way is to knock this person on their head, creating a minor amount of suffering in order to save a larger amount, what would he do? So I can't speak to what he would do. I can only give an example of what he has done and told me. And that was in the process of standing up for this person who was much lower in a medical hierarchy. He had to tell some very difficult and painful truths to another person in standing up.

And that caused intense unpleasantness in the now moment that it was happening. And that's how it was described to me. And so in a way it generated suffering then and there for the object. I don't know if it generated suffering for Angelo. I can't speak to that, but it was clear that it did,

but the longer term consequence was a relief of suffering and a changing of behavior and so on. So it's really tough to say what he would do, but I think that that's kind of how I think about it. And again, I think our humanness, our ego mind interposes. And I want to read one comment here in the thread on Facebook. Laura Ann Hartman says, spiritual bypasses are toxic.

Familiar with that term, Kurt? Spiritual bypass? Okay, so this is what that means. And it points to this. Spiritual bypass is where you wake up spiritually. In other words, you're like, oh, everything's one. We're all consciousness or whatever. There's no self.

And I'm here now. There's only the now. But you never, you use that to bypass all the baggage that you've been carrying around, all your neuroses and unconscious issues and psychological baggage. And so you feel like you're very awake, but in reality, you're acting in the world

and people will tell you, you're kind of a bigger asshole than you ever were since you had this enlightenment experience. Some people call that Zen stink. It's another term for it. You walk around like you're this thing. That's a real phenomenon, I think, is people want to escape their pain by bypassing ever addressing it. Now, Angelo in his book that he talked about on the show called Awake, It's Your Turn. It's like a self-published thing. It's on Amazon. He has a whole chapter on like,

no, you've got to go then and dive into your emotional state and feel what you're repressing and look at thought, understand how thought works and it creates a sense of identity. Looking at the structures of self as they create themselves is the only way to understand how your mind's actually working and then be liberated from the suffering component. And one thing I'll say is one thing that I have gotten the capacity to do through practicing this is when I'm in a state of extreme suffering, which happens, I will simply – something in my mind triggers to remember, oh, look what's happening and just watch your mind for a second.

And I'll go, all right, all right, all right. Oh man, okay. Feeling this here, thoughts racing, you know, wanna cry, just really stressed. And then just take a breath and feel the presence, just the present moment. And man, dude, it's like someone took 360 joules of electricity and defibrillated your suffering right there.

It doesn't mean it goes away, but it resets from a framework where within just a few minutes, it's dissipated enough that you're no longer suffering like that. And I would have thought I was crazy if I'd heard myself say what I just said, even like, you know, five years ago, but it's absolutely in our power. So the question is, whatever the ontologic metaphysics behind it is, there may be even simple tools here that are practicable. And it's not straight meditation, right? Because you said something that I thought was fucking spot on early in our conversation. Man, meditation does not work for me. It may work for others, but it doesn't work for me for this kind of thought storming thing.

I agree. Like this idea that, oh, suddenly you're going to focus on your breath. When the thoughts are coming, maybe those should just trigger the more meta-awareness of, hey, this is thought storming. That's not a breath-based Vipassana meditation. It's a different type of mindfulness, but it's not what we would classically call meditation, although some would argue it's a type of meditation. Who are some of these people I should speak to? Angelo is one of them. If you talk to Angelo, you'd have a great conversation.

It would be a way better conversation than I've ever had with him because you're so good at that. So Angelo DeLulo, honestly, there are people that are more in the Rupert Spira spectrum on YouTube that I don't think you would add a lot to the conversation, talking with them beyond what you did with Rupert. But if you talk to Angelo, you'd get a totally different angle, like a totally different angle on this. And I think I would pay to see it, honestly. Someone keeps calling me the nerd that sits at the front of the class who asks questions. It's the best. You're my hero, dude. I've been trying to formulate you, because it's very rare that I'll watch somebody on YouTube and be simultaneously furious that I can't do that. And at the same time, just like jaw drops in awe.

And there's something in your being, something in how you – your mix of intellectualization, which is crucial to getting at understanding, and openness. Like beginner's mind. getting at understanding and openness, like beginner's mind. You know, with Rupert, he was forced to talk about non-duality in ways that I don't think he's probably ever had to do it, which is great, especially for a teacher where you're in these patterns of like, let me explain it the way I know it's supposed to be explained. And then along comes Kurt and he's like, bitch, I don't, here's, what about this? explain and then along comes kurt and he's like bitch i don't here's what about this and and rupert's just like uh okay let me think about that or not think about that let me make myself present and have this stuff arise it was awesome to watch man this is really really really compelling

i think it comes from personal humiliation i've been humiliated by these like you mentioned you used to be a staunch atheist materialist for let's say 15 years at least so same with me I'm not saying that I'm not that but I'm sorry I'm not that but I'm not the opposite and right there's so many experiences in my life where I thought for sure this is the case. And then it's not. And it's come to the point where now the more I trust my own instincts, the more I see. Actually, I have questions every single and everywhere. So here's an example that's near and dear to you with regard to the whole issue of societal mistrust of science. I understand it. I see that, like I understand it on one level. There's some amount of following that has to occur

because not everyone can do their own research. So some, and society is based on trust. But then at the same time, for some tenets, bruided by the institutions, let's say, and I'm not using, I'm not, that's not square quotes, I'm just quoting. Okay, institutions that, like, for example, masks were good, or masks were bad, then masks were good, and so on, that they raised my eyebrow when they before wouldn't. I was a wholehearted truster of whatever the scientific quote-unquote community says. community says. And now I just, I want to look at the research. And I understand that I don't want people to take away from this a justification for their own mistrust, because that's, I see the same happening on the one end that's saying, no, trust whatever Fauci is saying, or whatever whoever is saying. I know that's a hot topic right now. On the one end, you have people who are with a limpid characteristic adhering to that. But then at the other end, you have people who are with a limpid characteristic adhering to that.

But then at the other end, you have people who are completely anti-vaccine, saying that they're anti-trust of science. But then if a scientific article came out saying, oh, it turns out that the COVID vaccines were horrible, you'd see the anti-vaxxers jump on that and say, yes, you see? But I thought you mistrusted science. Why don't you mistrust that as well? Like you should be doubting everywhere. So for me, I'm doubting everywhere. And even my brother, who is a professor of statistics, technically of finance, statistical finance, he said it would take him a week to go through any meta-analysis because it's not trivial at all, even for a professor of statistics. That's another reason why I try to do as much research as I can

because I want to understand. So when someone makes a claim like vaccines are good or vaccines are bad, and by the way, Zubin, there's so many... Oh, okay. You're getting me a bit excited now, man. I like where you're going brother intrude into my sleep but something i dislike is it's not just it's the labeling of people who mistrust science

as they see them as just trump supporters irrational trump supporters and because one side hates trump so much and trump has been attached to anti-science, then they view anyone who is critical of whatever epilogue is given by the institutions, quote-unquote, as Trump supporters who are racists and bigots and anti-intellectual. And people who are intellectual, one of their worst fears is not being irrational, it's being seen as being irrational. So they want to be on the side of what's intellectual. And I think there's so much hidden motivation behind people to believe what they believe that it takes so much self-investigation.

You think that you believe in vaccines or anti-vaccines because you're on the side of the truth. you believe in vaccines or anti-vaccines because you're on the side of the truth. But you peel away and you realize there's something more dark underneath. Man, what you just unleashed is the Pandora's box. That's kind of the central premise of our platform during the pandemic, which is you do have to question everything. You do. At the same time, it's balancing with relying on expertise that you don't have to parse data that you can't parse because either you don't have the time because it's impossible to do it all, or you don't have the expertise. And then filtering

through the lens of the authorities have gotten a lot of shit wrong. There's a huge profit motive. A lot of our regulatory agencies are captured by the same entities they're supposed to regulate, witness the Alzheimer's drug Adahelm and the nonsense there that would bankrupt the US economy, the US Medicare, if we actually approved it and they approved it, despite two studies showing it really doesn't work. This kind of questioning, it's what I call on our show the alt-middle. So it's this new stance. And it's something that we've made t-shirts with because we're idiots. So the alt-middle is a radical position that you inhabit that says, okay, forget about politics and all that. This is about opening your mind to different ideas

without judging people who hold opposing ideas as evil. So in other words, hearing everything, seeing everything as maybe having some truth, but being partial, and then assuming good intent and having discourse. Well, heaven forbid that there's nothing in social media that rewards that Well, heaven forbid. There's nothing in social media that rewards that with the exception of what I found paying subscriber platforms like Locals, Facebook, YouTube where people pay $5 a month to congregate and have these discussions. Speaking of, man, that was perfectly timed. Someone just gave $10. Look at that. As soon as you said that.

Andrew Dunbar says, I dozed off shortly after ZDogg introduced the guest. I woke up about 10 minutes ago with no clue what was going on and thought, yes, yes, this is what happens when a society legalizes marijuana. I don't know if you're talking about you, Andrew, having smoked a little too much or us, either way. So back to this alt-middle idea. And thank you for the support,rew the the you can create environments you can model environments where the pursuit of knowledge understanding being civil to each other that sort of thing actually actually is the default so i i was recently on the rebel wisdom podcast with david fuller and we talked about this, trying to find sense. One of your big concerns is how do

you make sense? How do you make sense when the epistemic commons, like our common knowledge sources are gone? There's no more Walter Cronkite. There's no more single source of truth. It's now a bunch of fragments, each with their own ideology that it's all about signaling. Like you said, oh, as an intellectual, I don't even want to be perceived as anti-intellectual. Half the shit I told you on this thing, I would never have said three years ago because I would have been vilified by like a David Gorski or someone as full of woo, anti-scientific. I know exactly how I feel. You know what I'm talking about? So I think this is a fundamental question, and I do think it's going to emerge. I think we have to those on the leading

edge of it, which is like our audience, like your audience, my audience, they think like this. So let's encourage it. I've gotten to the point now where I never used to like censor comments on my on my threads. But what I'm finding is when people behave in ways that are that are anti alt middle, so they're throwing ad hominems, they're being very overtly politically idiotic. It's like, oh, you're a Trump supporter because of this, or you're a radical leftist because of this. That's why I loved your documentary, by the way, because you dive into that shit in a deep way, which was beautiful. Thank you. I've started going in now and deleting, blocking the people who make those comments because what they're there to do is to signal to their tribe. They not there to advance conversation and then what i noticed is so then you get all kinds

of complaints oh you're you're stifling free speech it's not free speech this is the community i'm trying to create you can come here and we're this is our value is alt middle so if you behave in that way you can disagree with me in fact i want you to but i want you to do it in a way that assumes i'm not i'm not acting in bad faith and you're not acting in bad faith. And we're coming to a discourse and it changes the dynamics. And people go to the video and they see the comments are much more constructive, even if they disagree, then these stupid bald pharma shill, I'm going to tell you, you're paid off by Pfizer. I wish bro. You know, I have the, I'm still on your, I'm still early Zoobin then

because my, I'm of the mind, I don't delete a single comment. Some people think I do, but YouTube's algorithm actually filters out quite a few. It does, yeah. And people think I'm actively deleting. I'm not.

So my disincentive system is I read each comment. I heart them. But if they're negative toward the guest, I don't heart them and so they can be negative toward me they can be negative toward the guesses guests theories but not ad hominins at the guest and then that's the only time i don't heart them and i but i don't delete i actually like what you're doing you have to do that that's only because the guest is like

to do that. That's only because the guest is like the guest. This is I they're in my home right there. So I'm not going to have invite them in and have them insulted. People have said terrible sign. Totally. I'm with you. So that's how I used to be. I would only block people who were being absolutely vicious to my guest because it is it's like

someone comes a guest in my home and someone comes and throws feces at them. It's like, no, that's not OK. They're in my home and someone comes and throws feces at them, it's like, no, that's not okay. They're in my house. But now what I've decided is if I'm trying to model behavior of how we should have discourse, why should my community be showing the opposite of that behavior? Now, again, that's not for everyone. And actually, David Fuller and I talked about this on a discussion on Zoom. It's like, what do you do with this? Because you don't want to stifle conversation. But at the same time, you almost want to encourage like, hey, I want you to disagree in the comments, but do it in a way that's civil.

And then the comments fill up with people that disagree. That's great. Instead of bald pharma clown, which, hey, I love that stuff because it juices YouTube's algorithms. Because when YouTube sees controversy, it serves it out. But is that good for like building an alt-middle mindset? No. I don't like snarky comments either. Or people who ask questions,

but they are asking it from an antagonistic point of view where they just want to, well, technically it's called trolling or make baits. I have a discord and so there's moderation there, but not by me because I cannot take part in the moderation. I don't want to censor because I don't, I know you mentioned the term good faith and good intentions. I actually, I'm on the opposite end. I don't care if someone has bad intentions. The reason is that I have bad intentions. And the more I examine my good intentions, the more I realize that they're bad. So I don't care if someone has bad intentions. The reason is that I have bad intentions. And the more I examine my good intentions, the more I realize that they're bad. So I don't care if someone has bad intentions. I

also don't care if someone's biased. The reason is that for someone to be biased, sometimes they can get to an argument, a place that you have to be motivated in order to get there. And they can tell you, they can come up with a truth that you would have never found because you're not going to expend the energy because you're not tied to that particular philosophy or whatever it may be so i actually don't mind speaking to someone who's biased because they will have the most strengthened art the most strengthened arguments for their position because they're so what they're so devoted to it oh i agree a thousand percent we're all biased so the question is you can be biased and

come and make these really intense arguments. I want that. What I don't want is just straight ad hominem or like you said, the kind of trolling grandstanding, like, you know, if I have a guest and they're just making these comments that are vicious and there's just no, now I used to just let it all go because also I didn't have the capacity, right? So it's just, but my assistant helps me now and we have these sort of rules of how to do it but because facebook got to the point where my audience was asking me to moderate comments because it was just full of just the worst conspiracy stuff just discounting anything i said based on i'm paid off by some pharma thing which by the way that's all public information i I'm a physician. The Sunshine Act forces any pharma company

to disclose what they pay unless they're behaving illegally, right? And so I have to say, well, yeah, I did a couple of talks talking about Health 3.0 to pharmaceutical M&A people, the medical affairs people who do the research and there it is on the site. So how am I in Pfizer's pocket?

I really want, so the key thing is like you know with vaccines it's so hard to know because you can get a really smart person online who maybe even be a bra just like gert von den bush give what sounds like a very compelling argument for why we're really harming people and and you and i maybe maybe even talked about this uh saying this here's here's the reasons I think this is a terrible idea. We shouldn't be doing mass vaccination during a pandemic. Here are the reasons why.

We're going to generate mutant strains that are resistant to the vaccines, but that the immune memory is going to prevent us from being able to fix that, even with boosters and so on. So it sounds very compelling. You dig into it and you see, OK, there's some flaws here in the thinking. Actually some of the science isn't quite right. And oh, he's actually got his own thing that he's trying to develop that has to do with natural killer cells.

So Zubin, I'm like, so on your level, not with respect to disbelieving Gert or discounting him in any way, but with regard to hearing the opposition, what I want with my channel, I wanted to get you or someone else who's an expert in virology to speak with Geert or someone else and hammer it out. But what I don't like, and going back to the mistrust of science, is that these large agencies, and this is not a right issue. It's not conservative. In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about this in the 70s or 80s with manufacturing consent. The fact that I may be demonetized for talking about the potential dangers of vaccines or having a debate on it, that's where my eyebrow is raised. Why are you squelching the opposition? They've made everything worse by doing that.

That's insane. You have tech oligopolies, right, by doing that. That's insane. You have tech oligopolies making decisions on who can speak. That's insane. What we should do. Now, here's the problem, though. So how do you make sense in a world like this? And this is something David and I talked about, David Fuller. Because even my argument to you, like, well, I don't want to do a thing with Gert von den Busch because, first of all, I'm not a virologist. We need a virologist. Second of all, there's this idea of false equivalence whereby highlighting a platform that you firmly think is wrong and harmful potentially, you're giving it more credence. Now, I think that argument is no longer valid in this world. It's no longer valid

because they have a platform. It's called YouTube. They can go and say whatever they like. Your job as a scientist or whatever is to try to promote what you think is correct and the discourse that leads to that. So we ought to have virologists going and talking to the bigger people that are promulgating these ideas, the Malones and Von Den Busch and Pierre Corey on ivermectin and these kind of things. Go and have the conversation. And honestly, I would do it. I don't have a problem with it. The thing is, I actually don't feel worthy to do it. No, I completely understand. I'm a communicator. I need somebody who studies this for a living to go and say, let's go in-depth by depth because I'll be manipulated. A Pierre Corey would have no

problem. Actually, not him because I think I could do it with him. I just, I've talked about this publicly before about ivermectin and why I think we need the trials before we can say anything about it. But that all being said, you need somebody who can really dig in. Now the problem is the big virologists are biased in their own way.

So they're like, you know, part of the mainstream scientific community. They see this as just an annoyance or a nuisance. They don't realize that these folks are influencing a lot of people to not get vaccinated. So if you think the vaccines are safe and effective, then it's kind of on you to go and communicate it. Now, Paul Offit is a big vaccine guy, mainstream guy, come on my show a few times, very rational guy, but he is biased towards vaccines. Obviously, this is what he does. He's a pediatrician, and he's co-invented the rotavirus vaccine that's you know saved countless lives around the world but he does see it through that lens um he's written a book on why

scientists are terrible communicators so what can happen is a not very good scientist who has enough of the lingo who's a good communicator can convince the world of something that's a really a fringe idea with equal weight or bigger weight than the mainstream that are terrible communicators because they're in the lab all day and they're a little bit on the spectrum and they're you know they're who they are and you know paul in his book actually wrote a lot of stories about how he would go on these press things and just make a fool of himself because he just first of all i think scientists overestimate it's like part of the dunning-kruger kind of uh curve where it's not that you you know so little that you don't know what you don't know. That's like very low understanding. You know a lot, but then the cognitive error there is you assume everyone

else knows at least as much as you do. And you operate from that assumption and it comes off either as condescending or just blind to the fact that people need basic education on this stuff. So it's very complicated. And I struggle with my own role in this because when I do a show, you can see I've got nice equipment. It's all very polished. Too beautiful. Talk about fury. You look great, brother.

Yours is authentic. Only guys compliment. great, brother. You know, yours is authentic. Only guys compliment. Dude, dude. But the thing is, it's so polished, you shouldn't trust me. You may instinctively not trust me. Like I'm looking right at the camera. I'm making eye contact with the audience. I'm speaking without a script.

That's a little concerning, like to people. Some people find that very off-putting because it doesn't have the, like if I were just with my phone, I'm like, guys, let me just tell you what's going on. And I do that too. I usually do those in lives. Those will often engage a lot more because people's trust mechanism fires

when they feel like they're on a FaceTime with someone instead of this very produced thing. So I struggle with that in terms of my own show. It's just, I'm a nerd and I like shit to look good and I look like shit at baseline so having a nice camera and lighting by the way I gotta say this about your your documentary a better better left unsaid your suit that you wore in that it was tailored like oh wow it was I Thanks. It was. Guess what? It was not tailored.

It was off the rack. Dude, it's like a. Yeah, that was a coincidence. I mean, I'm not gay, but if I were, I'd be like. Me too. Me in that suit. Yeah. Yeah.

Is it all right? I'm going to quickly mute. Turn off my mic. Sorry. Mute. Turn off this for about 10 seconds and tell my wife that we're just wrapping up so that she knows. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I want to respect your time too. I'll read some comments while you're doing that. Tim Davis says, I wake up almost every night at 3 a.m., did an experiment with glucose monitor, noticed my glucose levels were crashing at every time, every night. Diet at the right time resolved it. Now it's only occasional.

So Tim was talking about like his waking up in the middle of the night of anxiety was due to a physiological cause. Another, sorry, is it okay if I tell you a bit about my sleep quickly? Yeah, please do. So I've been fasting for the past, I'm 74 hours or so into a fast. And when I fast, I tend to not be able to sleep. I also find that my heart races faster. Even if I'm not thinking of an anxious thought at all, my heart just seems to beat.

I don't know if that's correlated with the fasting or if that's different. Is it a pure water fast that you're doing? Well, sometimes, yeah, I have coffee. You have coffee, okay. But you're not getting electrolytes, you're not getting anything else. You're not getting anything else. Okay.

So to some extent, the sleep deprivation may just simply be a hormonal hunger thing. It could also be that the sense of palpitations, the heart kind of racing that you have, it can sometimes be because your potassium is a little out of whack because just- Evan Brand Slash that with Gatorade? Like a zero Gatorade? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Well, Gatorade, yeah, Gatorade without any. And again, I'm not an expert in water fasting. So someone like Peter Attia, who's a friend of mine would be a good person to talk to. The, the idea that there's a lot of things in, you know, in a 72

hour, let me see. So, you know, three days of that, you know, human body's pretty resilient. You can do that, but there will be these. Well, I'm about to eat, man. After this, I told you I'm going to go into bliss. I am going to eat every... I know that I shouldn't do that after a long fast, but that's how I operate. Dude, that's how we evolved. It's like nothing happens. I'm wondering, is this good for me or is this bad for me?

Going through somewhat like intermittent fasting, like drastic fast, overeat, drastic fast. I imagine that... Sorry. No, go ahead. I imagine that that's plenty of what our ancestors did, thoughat, drastic fast. I imagine that, sorry. No, go ahead, go ahead. I imagine that that's plenty of what our ancestors did, though not all the time, but for plenty of the time, because you would kill the gorge.

Assuming you don't have an eating disorder that is gonna be exacerbated by this, right, which is always a caveat, fasting is like, it can be wonderful for people. I think it's not anti-physiologic at all. I think there's plenty of at least reasonable level evidence that it's not harmful and it may be helpful for some people. I myself do one meal a day as my sort of feeding window thing. And that's the only way at 48 I keep from becoming morbidly obese because I love food so much.

I am the exact same way. One meal a day, almost every single day, because I cannot help my, I am avaricious. I'm voracious. I'm rapacious. You're using some big words that I don't understand. And I'm going to take that as a personal insult. All right. But I will say this, I'm a fat ass. If left to my own devices, I will, you're exactly. And by the way, when in your, in your, in your documentary, when you showed your mom's cooking, I was like, oh God, I'm honored. My parents are Parsi from Pune, India. And my mom, same thing, I could eat that all day and be like 500 pounds. So your sleep and your fasting, they do interact.

And some of it is the fact, how often do you do the fasts? Once a week I'll fast for 48 hours. This one is 72 hours, but once a week about 48 hours. And then eat one meal a day. So anyone who's like, oh you fast and your brain gets foggy, I mean you started out foggy because you were tired and you've done a bunch of podcasts, but then man, once you woke up it was like, oh shit. So whatever ketones you're burning now are effective.

You energize me, man. You energize me. You take all the credit belongs to you, trust me, because I've been speaking to a couple people today and you should have seen me just in a torpor with- Dude, sometimes- Mental and spiritual apathy. Sometimes when I have an in-person guest

and I'm not feeling it, it's like I'm in a different world. Like my mind is somewhere else and I'm like, okay, back to this. Happens rarely, but it's really horrible. It feels terrible. Well, you've taken your time out for me. And then it's as if I'm not giving you your best. I also, well, I also wonder, see, this is what I mean when I say constantly question myself, because how much of my fasting is also self-sabotage. So one, because I'm vain and I

want to keep thin. Two, because I'm filled with gallosity and I want to eat. Three, because it's okay that I fail because I'm fasting. And so therefore, therefore, if I'm not up to par, I have an excuse. So that's not consciously there. But if I examine myself, I can imagine that that lurks just thinly veiled underneath. Brother, it's like we're cut from the same cloth, man. So the reason I never prep for interviews very much is partially so I have plausible deniability when it sucks. I'm like, is partially so I have plausible deniability when it sucks. I'm like, well, you know, I just winged it. I, you know, I didn't really do anything.

So yeah, I mean, next time if I did something, it would have kicked ass. The mind, and a lot of it's unconscious. You can bring it into consciousness. You shine a light on it. But, you know, I got to say, and now the only thing I'd say is maybe research a little bit on your electrolyte situation. Is there something you can do within that fast?

I'll try that. Yeah. Especially potassium and sodium are often wasted early on in a fast as you switch from burning carbs to burning fat and go into ketosis. There's a diuretic effect where you do lose a lot of that. So a lot of times people talk about the keto flu when you're first going into ketosis. This idea that people feel really kind of crummy may be partially due to that aspect of it. Like Atiya and others have recommended broths with high sodium and potassium. You can take, you know, potassium supplements. I don't know if that's necessary for this. You'd really have to kind of dig into it a bit because I'm not an expert in it, but those are just off the top of my head. And then, man, I'm looking forward to your meal, dude. I know what it's like eating after a fast is like, oh, it's orgasmic. Yeah.

Someone mentioned THC. I'm wondering about dabbling in some of that. That also helps me sleep. THC helps tremendously, but apparently THC, while it reduces the sleep lag, like the time it takes to get to sleep, it disrupts your sleep cycle. But CBD doesn't contribute to sleep lag, but it helps your sleep cycle. Yeah, that I've heard exactly that. And I've experienced that with THC that you go to sleep fine, and then you wake up with this, you know, kind of dysphoric sense in the middle of the night a few times at least i do in my no for me for me i wake up in a bed of mirthful overjoyed

jubilance like oh my gosh this feels so great because i wake up so rested and even in the middle of the night if i wake up i'm like these are the best sheets they feel like they've been just washed and it's the queen's sheets isn't it fascinating how our perception is so malleable you know hey one thing kind of just to tie it in i i i'm by the way just stop me whenever you need to go because i know you're going i'm enjoying this man i just to let me tell my wife once more. I just want her to know. And let me get up.

Don't get me in trouble, bro. Or blame it on me. You know, let me read a comment real quick while we're doing this. I wake up with the munchies, says Jamie Vance. There it is. Lizette Paris is a supporter, says, oh, I feel like Indian food right now. Right. So do I.

We're getting Korean food tonight after the show. I'm going with my family. We're going to go to Foster City and get some dope Korean food. On Facebook, Samantha Espionage says, I'm very open-minded and will listen to the beliefs of others, even if they contradict my own. I take both into consideration. And if the opposing belief seems more logical than my own,

then I'm not afraid to allow myself to adopt them. So that's what you consciously think, Samantha, that you're already ahead of most people. I would advise you to even look unconsciously and go, what part of me is resisting this? What part of me is triggered by this? What part of me won't let go or the malleability of my own beliefs? And it may be that you've already done that, right? Which is wonderful, but many of us haven't. My unconscious is very resistant to a lot of things and I have to bring that resistance into conscious awareness, shine a light on it. They say like sunlight's the best disinfectant.

It's the same with consciousness. Making something that's automatic, something that's now aware is a huge asset. So what were we talking about, brother? We were talking about perception, Hoffman. So the one interesting insight I've had that may not be an insight so i rarely ever uh uh use thc anymore when i was younger it was a different subject but now you know occasionally i'll do it as an experiment into into consciousness like what what does this do yeah i'm not a fan of recreation drug use recreational drug use it has to be for

a particular purpose like insight into the reality or to help you sleep or whatever. Therapeutic. Therapeutic, yeah. Some kind of investigational purpose now, right? When I was young, it was recreational and that was not a good idea. with that is, you know, if Hoffman talks about our perceptual interface, his interface theory, which is we have a species-specific way of seeing the social network of consciousness around us, and it's evolved to allow us to reproduce. It's fitness payoffs. It's not seeing truth. Well, what drugs do, like THC, like LSD, whatever, is they take that evolved interface and they shift it.

So LSD may really just blow it out energetically. It's what you're saying that what we see on LSD may be partially what reality is truly like or a distorted version. No. No, what I would argue is Hoffman's argument, which is reality is simply consciousness interacting with itself. And we see it in a constructed way that benefits us as a species to reproduce. So we construct it in a way that allows us to get food and have mates. Now, what the drugs do is they don't, you don't see more reality or whatever. What you do is you see that same reality, the objective reality, which is this conscious agent network happening, manifesting, but you see it with a different interface.

You might see it with an interface that would be evolutionarily advantageous if X, Y, and Z. So what I find with THC, this is what I think is fascinating. You'll talk to those people, right? And there's a lot of variation in our own interfaces. People with synesthesia who hear sounds or see sounds, things like that. Or Hoffman gives the example of the chef who whenever he tastes mint, he feels in his hand a cool column of glass. Those are mutations in our interface. They're changes in our interface that at some point may become evolutionary advantageous. And we select for them. So what,

what, what I think is with THC, there are those people who are like, bro, I just am so anxious at baseline. I can't sleep at baseline. I'm a total asshole. Like Joe Rogan will say this. I'm a complete asshole at baseline. I smoke some weed and I'm just a different person. I'm better. I'm calmer. I sleep better. I could do this all day, every day and still function perfectly. What I suspect with them is their baseline interface is slightly shifted towards the more paranoid, a little more sensitive, a little more anxious, a little more insomnia, a little more thoughts racing. You give them THC, it shifts it back to what you and I would call normal or whoever, whoever's in that normal state. For me, as someone who's a little anxious,

whatever, what that shift does is it makes me more paranoid, more sensitive, more enjoyable of sensory stimulus. So food, touch, sound is unbelievable. But with that comes a sensitivity to thought and a self-referential aspect that makes me very unhappy. Like I see myself from outside as this horrible, just evil, nasty thing. And it's crippling. So it's a shift in our perception, a little frame shift. And the dose tells you how far you shift. And the kind tells you what you shift into. So if it's like LSD or if it's THC. That's my theory. Now, again, how do I prove it?

Can't. Yeah. Yeah. What have we not touched on? Was there something we were supposed to? There's a universe of things that we'll just have to do a follow-up. Yeah. We definitely will.

You know, we were going to medicine and all that that's a whole another conversation we talked about a lot of things okay i have one question i wrote yeah okay someone said i heard him talk on trigonometry recently which i don't think is true were you on trigonometry perhaps they know actually i wasn't i saw that comment yeah i don't think so perhaps they meant rebel wisdom okay excellent he spoke of the problem of changing his opinion based on new information. It is old. Okay. Now see, we talked about grandstanding before. I think there's rational. It's almost like virtue signaling. There's rational signaling. I don't believe people when they say I changed my mind based on new information. The reason why is that it's extremely hard to change your mind. And not only that, but would you change your mind based on any

new information? Are you saying that you have no other value system embedded? So for example, if the world told you through some truth mechanism that you should kill your wife or kill your dog, are you telling me that you're going to override your beliefs to follow what's rational? Is rationality the god? Why should you follow that if it leads you to destruction? So I saw that and I thought about, I don't believe people, and I saw this Veritasium video once, not to pick on Veritasium, but Veritasium was in a university crowd holding the camera to himself and someone was saying, how is it that you change your mind when you are presented with new beliefs? And he's like, well, you know, these beliefs, you just, you get new information, you update them, you just

slot it in, even though you don't like, and I'm like, you're so pretentious, man. Firstly, you don't think like that. Secondly, it's not that easy. Thirdly, maybe you shouldn't, because, well, you don't know where rationality alone will lead you. Rationality is a, it's like an arrow with no direction you have to direct it and that direction process isn't exactly rational it's like pre-rational those were my thoughts and i wanted to know what you thought about that dude so how big of a jonathan height uh understanding do you do you have not much not much other than big five and political belief that's it right right right right right talking about the big five and political belief, that's it. Right, right, right, right, right.

Talking about the big five, the moral palette, fairness versus cheating, authority versus subversion, et cetera. So his other big analogy, which I think speaks exactly what you're saying, is this. So, and I keep this here because I wanna be reminded of it. The elephant and the rider.

I'm surprised not a monkey on the elephant. Right? That would be better. It's just someone, one of my supporters sent me this. And so I use it as an example. So thank you. Patricia, I think sent me this. So the elephant is our primitive emotional mind, what Daniel Kahneman would call system one. So it works on heuristics, emotion, feeling, intuition. Is that fast? Instant fast, yes. It's the fast system, exactly. So it happens, we share it with a lot of animals.

It's highly conservative, evolutionarily, ancient brain. And it works to make these snap judgments. It holds our deepest sort of biases and beliefs. It's partially genetic, it's partially conditioned sort of biases and beliefs it's partially genetic it's partially conditioned but it is what it is and it's the thing when i say oh we've made a decision you know six seconds before we're aware of it often that's our elephant just making that decision unconsciously and feeding it up to this guy who is the writer of the elephant that's our neocortex so rational thought math moral reasoning persuasion verbally uh those kind of things the the the writer seems to be something

reasonably unique to higher mammals um in that you know and probably self-referential thought occurs in that it's slower it's more deliberate it takes more atp to to make it happen um and the theory was oh we we evolved the writer to control the elephant so that you know we are our rational thought overrides emotion but look at the size differential like who's really in charge so height argues that the data actually shows that he's reviewed that the L the the writer is not the president in this little Consortium it's the elephants press secretary have you heard you know go Chris Master and its Emissary a little bit and I saw that you'd interviewed him that was the next thing on my list to watch so I'm sure he kind of talks about this too right right right same thing all these roads converge because i think they're they're pointing

at some truth and the idea is that it's a press secretary because the elephant emotionally belief wise has already decided it then needs this writer to persuade others in the tribe that we're right because our life depends on it hunting rights rights, breeding rights, food rights in a tribe of a hundred people. Yeah. So evolutionarily this writer evolved as a persuasive tool. Well, now you weaponize that through social media where everyone's got their elephant. They now have a like button to say my elephant agrees and a comment field to go, here's what my writer thinks of that, a dislike button to say, or an angry button to say my elephant disagrees and a comment field to go, here's what my writer thinks of that. A dislike button to say or an angry button to say, my elephant disagrees. And a comment field to attack. And none of it goes to how do I change my mind in the face of new data, right?

So when I say I've changed my mind, like for masks, elephant response on masks early on was, I'm a doctor. This is bullshit. Like having the public wear a diaper on their face is dumb. It's not gonna do anything because people don't use it correctly. They're gonna touch their face. At that time, I thought this was also phonetically transmitted, meaning a lot on surfaces

and been disproven. So I was telling people in videos, listen, I think wearing a mask outside as a public person, unless it's an N95 or a surgical grade mask, is a dumb idea. And I don't want you doing those things because you're gonna hurt my tribe, which is the frontline healthcare professionals who don't have enough PPE and they're seeing this, right?

And community spread isn't as high yet. Well, when that shifted for me was having some guests on the show like Monica Gandhi, who said, listen, even off camera, she was telling me, listen, we don't have data that shows that masks work. That's a problem. We don't. We have certain suggestions that it reduces the inoculum of the virus so that even a dumb diaper on your face is going to reduce the sheer number of viral

particles. So you may then turn a ICU case into a asymptomatic case because there's some data to suggest that viral inoculum especially in other diseases matters for severity of illness and so then i said okay this is different now so now anything on your face might reduce you down to an asymptomatic case and so then i said listen guys i think probably i don't believe in math mandates because my libertarian elephant is like probably not a good idea but maybe we should say that this is not a bad thing. And if it keeps us, bends the curve so that my colleagues in the hospital can survive this

and we do okay, then maybe that's a good thing. So that was an example of changing even publicly what I was saying. The other thing that I changed, and this was pure bias in the beginning too, that I had to recognize, I had a bias like you said in the beginning towards the authorities.

Like wait, CDC is saying this is not a big deal. WHO is not calling this a pandemic. The Chinese government scientists are saying, OK, we like what they're doing here. They caught this early. So I did a video where it's like, guys, this is what could happen. I don't think it is because the Chinese have got this under control. It's the stupidest. It's still available. I don't delete videos. It's out there in the beginning of the pandemic, like January. I'm like, stop freaking out. Here's what's happening. This could get bad. These are the things we need to worry about this way. And they did a great job. Oh my God, did that video not age well. So I leave those comments like, rip me a new one,

man. I'm an idiot. And then I have to go back and say, here's why I changed. Now I'm very distrustful of anything until I'm convinced by talking to enough people that I'm connected to or reading the data that it's something different. But it still hurts. It still hurts our belief structure. Like if it violates, like if you told me tomorrow, man, this vaccine that I've been talking about publicly is harming people, making them infertile, doing all this other stuff. But here now we have data, it's incontrovertible

or as close to incontrovertible as it is. I would want to die. Like it would feel so horrible because my belief structure is no, actually, I've looked at this data. I've used all my tools of belief and science on it. And I'm very convinced that this is safe. Something crazy has happened.

Okay, the first thing I do is got to do a video and say, I was wrong about this. And that's going to hurt. Like, it's going to be the worst. But you have to accept that level of pain. But I think you're right. I think it's very easy to virtue signal. I changed my mind. Look at me. I'm a a better human and really not be changing your mind at all

in fact if anything your fundamental belief is i go wherever the popular wisdom is or whatever will get me views and you haven't changed that belief at all so by changing this belief you're just going with that flow and that's something you have to be very aware of it's it's it's tough and that's something you have to be very aware of it's it's it's tough that's it's the reason why i'm so i'm not a great interviewee despite the fact that we've been speaking for quite some time because i don't have any any staunch to beliefs at least not that i'm conscious of as soon as i put up a proposition i can see its flaws and i also guide myself or try to by this, I think it's Arthur Kane who said, only the shallowest of minds can believe that in great controversy, one side is mere folly. So when it comes to anti-lockdown or anti-masks, if there's a large enough amount of

people saying it, I want to hear what is your best argument. And perhaps you're not, perhaps what you're saying is false, but the meaning behind it is correct and you're not articulate enough to put it forward. So for example, I find it strange that the, I find it, COVID is such an anomaly, man, for many reasons. I find it strange that it's the right that's anti-lockdown, when the left should be about liberties. And I also find it strange that the left is for universally pro-abortion, and the right is anti-abortion, when the, it doesn't seem to map on exactly. And the reason why is, think of Jainism. Jainism is about, like you mentioned, I don't even want to kill a cockroach. I bring that outside.

Jainists, who you would think of as the most hippie-like, left-leaning people, are complete anti-abortion because it's also life. And so then it's being pro-abortion on the left? Or is it that your team somehow decided this through some other process and you're identifying with the team? And that's why it's such a dangerous game to say, I am left or I am right. What are the odds that the 35 tenants of the right and the 45 of the left or whatever it may be are ones that you align with? You are you's it's a difficult game to attach yourself to a team you man see this okay you said you're not a good interviewee forget about partially not a good interviewer but no no no no so forget about that what my in my uh producer logan was telling me before the show

because he watched a bunch of your stuff and he's like hey don't interview kurt have a conversation because he's tremendous he's just absolutely tremendous asking these questions and it'll generate conversation i'm like that was my plan because watching your stuff is saying because you know what actually being a good interviewee is boring as because it means that again you have a lot to say but not a lot of questions not a lot of openness etc sometimes i find them a better interviewee than an interviewer because i've been thinking about this stuff so much that i want to just tell you all about it and then the idea is well where am i open to these ideas now diving into something you said this is the centerpiece of what i call this alt middle thinking

in my tribe of people we have a lot of conservatives a lot of libertarians a lot of liberals a couple marxists not a lot of very far right people, but people that are very libertarian. And they all – we talk about it in terms of Jonathan Haidt's like moral taste buds. So when you think about abortion, et cetera – by the way, remind me to tell you if we have time about the video I did about abortion that, boy, you can see how that triggers the tribal behavior of in-group, out-group. So long story short, you have these taste buds, liberty versus oppression that you value, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, care versus harm. So in other words, care versus self-explanatory.

And the sixth one actually is, because there's a little subtlety there, is sanctity versus degradation. This is from Jonathan Haidt? Jonathan Haidt. In his book, The Righteous Mind, he lays these out, why good people disagree on politics and religion. And what's interesting is each of these issues can be filtered through your moral palette that you're often born with like you have these certain values so liberty versus oppression so it turns out liberals tend to really emphasize they all have all six but they emphasize two which is fairness versus cheating and care versus or you know or you know care yeah care versus harm so And that makes sense because then you go,

okay, they don't like rich people taking advantage of stuff. They want to take care of poor people. These are the values they project, social justice, et cetera. Conservatives actually have those, but then they really value loyalty versus betrayal. Look how the Republicans tend to be quite unified. Even when Trump does some crazy stuff, they're like, yeah, but he's our guy, right?

And then you have liberty versus oppression. Well, yeah, so it's a more libertarian value. And sanctity versus degradation. It turns out liberals and conservatives parse this quite differently. So a conservative will look at sanctity versus degradation in terms of religion versus atheism, or in terms of abortion, the sanctity of life versus the despoilment of that through abortion.

The liberal would take that same moral palette and go sanctity of my body, my choice versus a state invading that sanctity with a vaccine or with me not allowing to do what I want with my unborn fetus. So they can all kind of parse issues through this. Now you then weaponize that through tribal behavior. So the left has this ideological checklist, what Jordan Peterson calls ideological possession. So I just, I don't even know how I feel

about some of these things, but my tribe votes this way. And the right has a similar kind of set of doctrines. So when you ask the question, I don't understand why the right does this and that. Some of that is ideological possession. Some of that is they do tend to value these moral powers. There's something inveterate. Something. Yeah, exactly. And then there was a, oh, so the abortion piece that I did. So I did like one of those direct to camera things. It was when Alabama's state legislature was, you know, intervening in abortion in some way that a lot of physicians were saying, you know, this is a bunch of men can't legislate medicine. This is a medical procedure. Let doctors do this, do this, um, decision-making

with, with patients. So I did a video where I said, Hey, I agree with that. Like this is a medical procedure. This is how it's done. It should be the right of women to make the choice with their doctor and with whatever religious belief they have, et cetera. It shouldn't be a legislator doing this in my opinion. And this is the thing, but let me tell you a story about why I understand why people would be very opposed to abortion on a deep moral level. When I was a fourth year medical student or third year medical student, I was compelled to witness second, late second trimester abortions at San Francisco General Hospital. And what I saw was fetus parts being removed and this and that.

And I gave this very emotional story about what it was like. So did that feel like murder to me at the time? Absolutely. Could I understand why people would feel this is a sanctity versus degradation kind of violation? Absolutely. Until we understand that, you're never gonna have a dialogue because you're gonna think someone else is trying to oppress you. It's a power dynamic instead of a moral dynamic. We have different moral intuitions about this.

Let's talk about it. And so I got a ton of messages from people saying, that's the most cogent I've ever heard. That's how I feel as a doctor who performs abortions. But then I got hate from a lot of abortion doctors and a lot of very lefty lefters who were like, you're basically normalizing violence against abortion clinics by giving any nuance. Right, right, right, I know.

And I was like, I felt attacked by this tribe of healthcare professionals. I was Right, right, right. I know. And I was like, I felt attacked by this tribe of healthcare professionals. I was like, oh my God. But I didn't remove it. In fact, I did another video where I talked about it more. But man, it's rough, right? The moral palette. They want,

they dislike the other side so intensely that with your nuance, there's a part of your argument that can be used on the side that they dislike. And so they want to discount the argument entirely. Yeah. Yeah. False equivalence again, rears its ugly head. Man, Kurt, are you pooped or what, bro? I'm looking forward to being that and going to sleep at some point and eating. So let's wrap it up. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, man. Dude, this was a real joy, man.

Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. I wasn't expecting to go on for more than an hour and it's been almost three. I'm so sorry. I know you're starving and you're tired. I wanted to hear what you have to say. Tell your wife I'm deeply sorry and that my wife hates me just as much because I do the same thing.

So at least we have that kind of true equivalency. Do the same thing as what is going on overextended? Yeah. Come home. We have plans, and I'm like, but just a couple more minutes. I'm doing a show or whatever it is. So it is what it is. Brother, it's just a joy.

Hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future. If you feel inclined, just let me know and we'll make it happen. We've never done a live format like this with Zoom. Oh, great. I'm honored to be the first. Oh, man, it's really awesome to have you. You're the perfect guest for this. Not a guest, it's a conversation. So thank you. Thank you. And I, and we'll connect very soon. And to everybody who's watching, thanks again to Kurt, check out his stuff. So his podcast, his show on YouTube is called Theories of Everything. I've put links in. His documentary is called Better Left Unsaid and it's a ride. It is a ride. Is the director's cut available publicly? On betterleftunsaidfilm.com exclusively.

So if you get it from iTunes or Google or Vudu, firstly, much of the money or some of the money goes toward them. Whereas from the website, most if not all the money go toward the filmmakers. There's some split between different places, but you also on the website get access to the director's cut i believe for free if you just buy the regular version and you don't get access

to the director's cut find my email it's online somewhere and email me and i'll send you the link just send me that's awesome and you funded this thing with kickstarter indiegogo stuff type of that sort of thing yeah that's great and it's personal money. It's really well done, you guys. So if you want to dive into the craziness that's going on in society in a way that's so unique, watch the director's cut. Really, watch the director's cut if you're into this because it goes really deep. It's brilliant. So thank you so much, guys.

And until next time, I'm going to figure out how to stop this. Kurt, you can sign off. You are the bomb. I also to just make a quick amendment it's when i said personal money my brother invested heavily into the film so i just want to make sure that that said i don't want to misrepresent so thank you family family and you are identical as far as i'm concerned that's how i see it so thanks for making the clarification but's awesome. It's really wonderful to have support, right? There's a deep gratitude that arises from that. Like my supporters on Facebook and stuff that pay for all this equipment on YouTube and locals.

They're the best. They got some great equipment, man. Okay, man, I gotta get going. Thank you. I'll sign off and you can speak to the audience if you like. I'll wrap it up, Kurt. Thank you. Guys, for the recording,

is it all right if I just talk to you quickly about that? You'll send me it to Dropbox. I will send you a Dropbox version of this very long file that we'll export over the next two hours. And then I'll send you a link. And then you can put it together however you like. Great. Thank you. I love it, brother. Thanks. Have a great one, man. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you, man. Likewise. one, man. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you, man. Likewise. Guys, that was intense. We've been talking for almost three hours. That's crazy. Wow. So, you know, we started out kind of slow and got in the groove as he's been really sleep deprived and doing podcast after podcast. Let's take a few comments right now, just because I want to wrap up with your voice,

because I think that's important. And we didn't get enough of that in the thing because we were so into ourselves. Thank you, Anne, for your support on YouTube and Andrew Dunbar. Actually, Andrew Dunbar says, the sanctity versus degradation dichotomy also applies to how some on the right view gun rights.

Totally true. Sanctity versus degradation in gun rights, liberty versus oppression in gun rights. I, you know, If you don't understand how someone who holds opposing views sees the world morally, you don't understand them at all. And you're gonna vilify them because you're gonna see them through your own moral matrix, which is not how they see the world.

And you need to understand that our moral matrix allows us to do what we perceive is good in the world. We need to understand that our moral matrix allows us to do what we perceive is good in the world. We filter it through that. So everybody, most people are trying to be good, which is why you can assume good intent. It used to be, I would get very triggered by people with different political views and I would assume them they were just bad because I was using my moral matrix, my moral taste buds as the litmus test or the filter. Now I get excited to hear opposing views because I want to know what the moral matrix is it's coming from and honor it. You go, oh God, you're trying to be good. And this is how you see being good. Okay. I can't be mad at you.

I disagree for these reasons, but let's have a conversation. What do we agree on morally? What do we agree on? We want to see in the world, right? And then you can start from a consensus, morally, what do we agree on we want to see in the world, right? And then you can start from a consensus, sort of common humanity politics instead of this identity where we're all separate fighting each other as tribes. That's really what a lot of identity politics that used to be a great thing in the civil rights movement has devolved into this, our group existential battle against everybody else that's a power struggle trying to oppress us. Well, what if we just assume good intent and try our best instead of vilifying other people because of the way they're born, right? Born white or born Asian or born whatever. Like, forget that, dude. That's horseshit. That's the definition of discrimination. June Black says, I felt so bad for him being so

tired at the beginning. Glad he came around. Yeah, dude. I really, hang on a second. I just, there we go. I'm still recording. That's good. I felt really bad for him. And I felt like what, you know, we were scheduled to do this. And I was like, am I torturing this guy? Because, you know, we didn't even know what we were going to talk about. We had no agenda. We connected via email and I was worried that it was just going to go off the rails real fast. And it didn't. It went on the rails, which was off the rails. So it was a lot of fun for me. Yeah, it was intense, right, Jonna? George Shepard, my fulcrum is different from so-and-so's fulcrum. That's a good way to look at it.

Like, right? Where's your fulcrum? That's great. Ashley Stewart, I feel the exact same way. I never learn from people who think exactly like I do. You can't. It's just a kind of group thing. Jamie Vance, how do you break through to people

who allow their moral compass to dictate a conversation? I struggle greatly with helping people see that everything is true but partial. So that idea of alt-middle, that everything's true but partial, is a kind of moral assertion. It's a kind of meta-belief about belief. So I think accepting that person as they are is one thing. This is how they're showing up. It's the best they can do at this point. as they are is one thing. This is how they're showing up. It's the best they can do at this point.

And then gently, this is very hard, gently nudging through conversation some ideas that might open them up a little to, first of all, maximizing whatever level they're at in terms of their thinking, and then opening them to whatever that adjacent level is. And I see it happen again and again. I see it.

It's not impossible. It's not that we change our minds. It's that adjacent level is. And I see it happen again and again. I see it, it's not impossible. It's not that we change our minds, it's that our minds grow. They transcend and include what came before to use Ken Wilber's language. You know, it's a beautiful thing. Oh, how kind of you, theories of everything, Kurt Jemigal commented. Thank you, Zubin, can't hear you, but typing to say thank you. Kurt, you're of you, theories of everything, Kurt Jaimungal commented. Thank you, Zubin, can't hear you,

but typing to say thank you. Kurt, you're the best, man. What's Kurt's full name? Kurt Jaimungal. And it's in the description for the video, Dorothy Morrison. Afterwards, you can see it there. J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.

He's awesome, really. Like, I love people who think like that and who are self-reflective and very, very intellectual, but able to also relax into a kind of beyond intellectualism. It's really key. Sophia on YouTube says, the ego has a lot of power, always reasserting through and into survival mechanisms.

So Sophie, let's think about ego for a second. I don't know why I'm still talking. I've been talking for three hours and I got to be somewhere, but I'm into this now. It's a kind of a flow state. Oh, my neck's going to hurt tomorrow. We tend, so in spiritual circles in particular, in meditation circles and those kinds of circles that look at this stuff, the ego tends to be objectified as something that's there.

It's like this entity that we need to fight or we need to overcome or that's doing these bad things to us or so on. And I think when you approach it from that angle, I'm not saying you're doing this, I'm speaking just expositing on this. When we approach ego from that angle, we turn it into an object,

what's the only thing that can turn other things into objects? Ego. So my friend Angelo says, "'When you go to war with the ego, "'it's the ego going to war with itself.'" It's a very subtle, it's a pattern of conditioned thoughts, beliefs, and perceptual distortions that are just happening, just like everything else is just happening.

It's just happening. And what happens is it binds attention so that we think this is it. And the ego knows us better than we know ourselves. It's had millions of years to evolve with us. It knows our deepest, darkest thoughts and knows how to manipulate us. Now, again, I'm objectifying it, but let's just say that pattern of energy is really good at tricking attention

into following thoughts about self and so on, creating the sense of self, this person behind my eyes that's seeing objects around me as separate instead of just everything as one thing, as Kurt called it, one vellum, one substrata, one thing, one reality. By the way, Jody Jacobs on Facebook says, I stayed the full three hours because I love this conversation. Thank you both. Jody, that makes me so, oh, I just love that.

I love that. That really warms me up, my ego. But even beyond ego, there's something like, there's something in our authentic bits, right? That when you connect with another person, like we connected during this conversation, you and I and Kurt and all that, it's just the sense of just elevation,

like, ooh, that's beautiful. That's humanity at its most connected, right? Even if we don't agree on everything. Yeah, Josette, check out his movie. So his movie's crazy. It's like real experimental and weird and it doesn't seem like it's all gonna come together. And then at the end, it's kind of like, what?

So you gotta check it out. It's some crazy shit. All right, now I probably should go because I can hear this box trying to record and it's probably running out of space. Hold on. Yeah, it's crazy. It's still actually recording.

I don't know. I didn't know it had that much space on that card. Cogito, ergo, ego. That's right, George Shepard. I think, therefore, I am ego. Ego itself is a friend. It's a pattern of energy that's kept us alive. Its goal is to protect us from a seeming external world.

It understands that we're separate and it says, okay, as a separate thing, this is how we stay safe. It doesn't know better. It can't know better. It's not a thing. This pattern of energy, we should honor it. We should thank it. We should be grateful for it,

but we should recognize it for what it is. We should recognize when it's trying to co-opt and turn everything into a story. You know, the story of the one who woke up, the story of the one who meditates, the story of the one who's embarking on a spiritual journey, whatever it is. So anyways,

June Black, it was three hours. Didn't seem like it. Man, I can't believe you guys are with us this long. Ashley, same thing. You guys are crazy. I do need to hydrate, Sandra. Thank you. I'm tired.

Samantha, man, you guys are great. You guys are the core audience because there was like, you know, about a hundred and some on each platform the whole time. You guys are really the core, hardcore devotees. And I'm so grateful for you. All right, I gotta stop doing this. It's an affectation, but I love it. When I went to Thailand when I was younger,

this was, it was a very Buddhist society and everybody would just do this. And I got in the habit of that. And it's a kind of a, I see you as me and a gratitude thing at the same time. It's really lovely. All right. I'd rather do it than shake hands, honestly.

All right, I love you guys. Now I gotta figure out how to end this. I'm gonna say bye to YouTube first. So bye-bye YouTube till next time. And then I gotta figure out Facebook. I think the way I'll do that is I'll fade to black and then I'll end when it ends. All right, guys. you