Mark Gober An End to the Upside Down

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 1:38) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth Podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. What's up, guys? Welcome back to Here for the Truth Podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti. I've got my co-host Yerasimos in the house. And today, Mark Gobert joins us for a very vast conversation on a number of topics, including his hero's journey, individualism versus collectivism, social theory, economic theory, aliens, the paranormal, Klaus Schwab, the Great Reset, and so much more. This is a very high-level conversation, the kind of ones that we love to have here. So without any further ado, here is Mark. Thanks for being here. Please enjoy. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Here for the Truth Podcast. We have Mark Gobert in the house with us here today. He is a Princeton graduate, a former partner at a Silicon Valley tech strategy firm, and previously worked as an investment banking analyst in New York. He's also an award-winning author of five books since 2018, which span the topics of consciousness, spiritual awakening, political and economic theory, the UFO phenomenon, and the Great Reset. Mark, thanks for being here for the truth. Thank you, guys, for having me. Nah, man, it's our absolute pleasure. We love diving into these conversations. One way we kick this one off, particularly with new guests, as I'm sure our audience has heard me say a thousand times now, we want to dive into a little bit of your personal history, some of your major rites of passage, and just the major, I guess, catalyzing, transformational, pivotal moments in your life that, I guess, alchemized your path. [Speaker 1] (1:38 - 11:00) Yeah. Well, my path has been an unexpected one. I'll start by saying that. I never anticipated that I'd be writing about the topics that you just mentioned, Joel, or that I would be speaking publicly in any capacity. This stuff was not on my radar. I had a very mainstream outlook growing up outside of Baltimore, Maryland. I was very focused on grades. I was a competitive tennis player. I was very social. I was focused on stuff that I was trying to achieve constantly. Then when I went to Princeton, it was very similar. I really wanted to do well in school. I was one of the captains of the tennis team there. It's a division one program. That kept me really busy and then had tried to have an active social life there too. Again, just busy, under a lot of stress, was definitely probably not healthy psychologically to have that much stress and so many expectations that I put on myself. That's the way I was. I didn't really have a compass at that point, other than what's the next thing that I think I need to be achieving for whatever reason. I didn't have a metaphysical sense of purpose. As I learned more and more about science and what I thought our society was teaching us, I thought that anything spiritual was superstitious. I rejected anything along the lines of life after death. I rejected the idea that life has fundamental meaning beyond what we make it out to be. I didn't think the fabric of reality had any meaning to it. I thought it was all just random. I didn't know what I wanted to do after college. Like many of my classmates, the two popular tracks back when I graduated in 2008 were finance and specifically investment banking and the other strategy consulting. Tech wasn't quite as big then. I remember there were a few people that were applying to Facebook and Google, which was much newer back then. Then there were people who were more professional, wanted to be doctors and stuff. There was a big segment that wanted to go into business. I said, why don't I just try that because I'm not sure what I want to do later in life. It's probably a good platform, so it can't hurt. I ended up getting a job in investment banking, which I thought I was lucky to get at the time because this was in 2007 I was applying and the markets were already starting to go down. I ended up joining in the summer of 2008. That was a rough time to be there in an industry that is already, it's a tough industry. It's voluntary. You're an at-will employee. It's not like slavery, but it's really tough. The expectations are you're on call all the time, weekends or not weekends. Pulling all-nighters, that's just how it goes. When I first started, if I left before 2 AM, left the office before 2 AM, that was a good day for me because that means I've gotten at least a few hours of sleep. You do that on repeat for months straight without a day off during the financial crisis. I was there at a time, I was in the group that advised other financial institutions. I was at a bank called UBS, one of the big global banks. Other banks in the industry needed advisory or they needed funds and they needed someone to help them with capital raising or if they were going to do mergers and acquisitions, they would hire other advisors. Within UBS, there is a group called the financial institutions group that all the other banks have too that compete for that business, that try to help other financial institutions and to be their advisor. That meant that my clients were the very companies that were having problems that you would hear about in the news that were going under and they needed emergency financing or something. We were either advising them as part of contracted deals or we were trying to pitch them to try to win over the business relative to the other banks that were pitching. That meant that I was on call all the time and I was working not only at a distressed bank, but with distressed clients that had needs that were immediate. It was like a fire drill constantly. I ended up leaving the firm in 2010 because I knew I didn't want to do it long-term. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do in life. I ended up joining a firm that was somewhat similar, but somewhat different. The similarities is that the firm focused on mergers and acquisitions. When companies were transacting, my firm would advise on that, but the company also focused on just general strategy. Whereas when I was in New York, it wasn't as strategic. It was more transactional. This firm that I joined first in the Boston office and then most of my time was spent in Silicon Valley focused on intellectual property. Companies that had technology, basically in any industry you can imagine, because every industry has technology to some degree, and they were figuring out how to protect that technology through intellectual property, how to transact with other businesses. For me, it was much better than what I did in New York because it was more intellectually stimulating. I got to learn about the law, technology, actually diving in with the inventors of stuff they invented, and then also the business strategy component to it. I was on the partner track basically in Silicon Valley, trying to work my way up and really engaged in the client stuff, but I was still in this tunnel vision, like on a treadmill. I think you can only go for so long doing that. I think every human probably hits a wall at some point. For me, that wall became, let's say, 2014-ish. Of 27, 28, 29, in that range, things became more challenging. I wasn't as able to withstand the ups and downs. There were some business deals I worked on that didn't go the way that I wanted. Actually, in the field of intellectual property, everyone knows about the Great Recession of 2008, but there was a Great Recession of intellectual property where the laws changed, there were new restrictions put in place. If you're a patent owner, you would have basically less ability to go after people who were stealing your technology. That meant the patents themselves in the marketplace were less valuable. You'd have a lower chance of winning in court. That affected things that I was working on, and it was totally out of my control. It was like this perfect storm of, now there were business challenges, and then I had the sense of not having purpose in life. Then just things in my personal life also weren't going the way that I wanted. I felt totally lost at this point. This is now maybe to 2016. Felt like a zombie, like, what am I even doing here? What should I do next? Is it my career? How can you even answer those questions if you don't have a compass for life, if you think life's meaningless? That's where I was. I actually went through that math in my head of, well, life is meaningless, and we're all going to die anyway. If there are ups and downs, why does it really matter? Then I would just go in a circle with that because it's an endless loop. At that point, I started listening to podcasts. I remember getting an email from a buddy in 2016. I think it was Tim Ferriss interviewing Mark Andreessen. I was like, oh, wow, you can listen to smart people talk. Podcasting was new at the time, and I hadn't listened to podcasts before. I listened to that podcast, and I started to listen to other shows. Then I heard people talk about psychedelics. I was like, I don't feel comfortable taking psychedelics, but I'm really interested that they're getting over their anxiety or they're developing a new feeling on life. Then I started to listen to alternative health podcasts. I did some sensory deprivation float tanks. I did Wim Hof breathing. Still totally lost, but I was going down that road of exploring various things. Then I came across a podcast called Extreme Health Radio. I listened to a bunch of their shows on just alternative health stuff. Then the next podcast up in the queue, this was August of 2016. I believe the podcast itself had been recorded in January. It wasn't I sought this one out, but it was a woman who talked about psychic abilities that she had and communicating with beings in other dimensions and spirits and stuff like that. They talked for a while, and the woman was talking in a very serious manner, like she wasn't making it up. I was thinking in my mind, is this woman delusional? Did something really happen to her? I can't figure it out. At the end of that episode, the woman's name is Laura Powers. She said, well, I have my own podcast called Healing Powers. I've interviewed a lot of other people that have similar experiences. I said, okay, well, I'm listening to podcasts. I have a long drive from San Francisco where I live to Silicon Valley, lots of traffic. I said, okay, I'll give this one a shot. My life was not changed in that moment, but I was just intrigued enough to want to explore something new. Then I was listening to episode after episode of people that had independent experiences that were very similar. They talked about a view of reality that totally contradicted my, I would call it now a materialistic view, that everything is just material. Life is random and meaningless. We're basically biological robots. They were all contradicting that. These were not people who were connected to each other. It was either through science or their personal experiences. I was trying to reconcile this because as the evidence was building up person after person, I'm like, okay, is there a common delusion here or is there a reality to it? Because if there's reality, then I have to rethink a lot of things. Then I started to read books and then read scientific papers. I recognized that there was this entire body of stuff that I had not been exposed to and that if there was a hint of truth to it, then I had to rethink my whole life. That's really what kickstarted this journey. A year later, this was summer of 2017 after I started, I was researching obsessively at this point. [Speaker 2] (11:00 - 11:04) Were these people in this podcast talking about paranormal experiences? [Speaker 1] (11:04 - 13:22) Yeah, paranormal experiences or astrology, communications with the deceased, their intuition, their psychic abilities, life after death, a wide variety of things, but it was this realm of stuff that was completely outside of my thinking and also outside of my network. At first, I didn't know who to talk to about this stuff. I didn't know that there was a huge community of people around the world that they wouldn't even think twice about this stuff. To me, this was radical. I didn't talk to many people about it at first. Then I started to tell friends about the scientific evidence I was coming across that validated the anecdotes. When I became more comfortable explaining what that science was, a lot of friends said, wow, this is very serious stuff. They would tell me that they were thinking about our conversations long after we had the conversations. Then they would still go back to their normal life, whereas I wanted to keep diving into it. I got to the point where I had this, if you think about a cup, filling it with water. I was overflowing with information. I said, I got to write about this. Think back to where I was. I was not yet a partner at the firm. I became a partner in 2018. It was 2017. I was on this very traditional track. Then I had this parallel life of trying to explore the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, what happens when we die. It became hard to split my energy. I said, okay, I've got to write about this. I know many other people have written about it, but I'm going to combine a lot of different topics. Near-death experiences, children with past life memories, telepathy, savant syndrome, all these things that are sort of related, but they're actually interconnected when you think about consciousness. I'm going to put them in one place. Maybe because I have a business background, there will be people who will read my book and at least look at the first two pages, because they relate to my background and there would be value to that. That was my rationale. I said, okay, I'm going to do this, even though I never thought about writing a book before. I was able to do that while I was working. I did it very quickly. I turned into an investment banker again and said, it was July 4th weekend of 2017. All my friends were out partying long weekend. I was like, no, I'm not leaving my apartment until this book is done. My body started shutting down. It would be, I don't know, one or two in the morning. I would have to go to bed, which I was upset about because I wanted to finish it. I finished a big chunk of the book over that long weekend. Then I knew what I had to do to finish it. Over the next few weekends in between work, the book was there. [Speaker 3] (13:24 - 13:28) Did you have any history with writing before this or was just like, no, I'm just going to be a writer? [Speaker 1] (13:28 - 21:11) In hindsight, I sort of do have a history with writing. It's not something I enjoyed doing growing up, but at Princeton, one of the requirements for most of the majors is to write a thesis as a senior. There's also many theses. They're called junior papers as a junior. I was forced to write a lot then. In business, I had written and co-written some articles as it relates to intellectual property that were published internationally. These were not books. These were shorter pieces. Also, in the work I did in Silicon Valley, we did a lot of work with law firms and litigation. Even though I wasn't writing legal briefs, I was spending a lot of time looking at how arguments are constructed and then synthesizing information and presenting it to boards and presenting it to my clients and things like that. I had maybe a lot of the skills that I've now used for writing I was developing, but I didn't have this tendency to want to write stuff. Something hit me really for the first time I said, okay, I know how to make this argument. I'm going to write it. The book was published the next year, 2018. Then in 2019, I decided to do a podcast series with a buddy from Maryland. Growing up, he works in the media industry and said, look, we can make this into the topics you've written about. Let's make this more mainstream, not just like a science book the way you've written it. He works in the sports podcast industry and said, look, there's stuff we can do to reach more people because it's important stuff. I interviewed 50 people. Then we took clips of those interviews and put it into an eight-episode narrative series where I'm having a conversation with my buddy, the podcast producer. He's playing the person who's newer to the stuff. I'm playing the person who is newer, but also have spent a little time and have written a book about it. Then I say, oh, well, I talked to Dr. Dean Radin from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. This is what he said about statistical evidence for telepathy. Then there's a clip. Then we have the full interviews as well. That was my big project in 2019 outside of the office. Then the podcast was called Where Is My Mind? It's still out there on the major podcast players. That took me to the end of 2019. I had this first book out and then upside down thinking the podcast series, Where Is My Mind? Still really interested in all this metaphysical stuff. I felt like I just scratched the surface. I was at my firm in a really good spot. I mean, in a very secure position, but my energy and my interests were totally split at this point. I was struggling with it more and more of like, can I turn off this more philosophical part of me and go into client meetings and deal with the more mundane stuff? Can I continue to do that? I was feeling physical tension from doing that and having to switch back and forth. I got to this point where I said, I need to leave this job, unfortunately. This is a great position to be in. I've got to leave. I don't know what I'm going to do next. I had a conversation with my business partners at the end of 2019. The timing, in hindsight, is very fascinating because I didn't know what was going to happen consciously in terms of what happened with the world. I made the decision to leave the firm at the end of 2019. I didn't leave immediately. I worked part-time to transition out of the client work I was doing, but I was not fully working anymore for the first few months of 2020. By the end of, I don't know, maybe March 2020, I was fully out. Right when I left the firm or was working part-time, I said, okay, I've got to do some retreats because I haven't been able to do that before. I was always on call. I scheduled three retreats in five weeks. I went on a Pancha Karma. It's an Ayurvedic retreat in New Mexico, the Ayurvedic Institute, Dr. Lod. I felt amazing after that. I took a week off, then did an extended silent meditation retreat with a woman named Mukti. She's Adyashanti's wife. That was very intense. Then I took a week off. In that week, I wrote my second book, at least the first draft of it, called Nen to Upside-Down Living. Then I went on a nearly week-long silent meditation retreat with Adyashanti. The book was then I went through the editing process. The second book is more about spiritual awakening, so implications of that science that I had talked about before. How do you think about living life? How do you set a compass, which I hadn't had previously? That's what I wrote about. Then there I was, spring of 2020, the book's basically done, the second book. I'm out of a job. I'm in San Francisco where the lockdowns were insane. I was watching what was happening. At this point, I had zero interest in politics beyond the impact that politics had on patent legislation. I followed that because that was related to my work. I was apolitical. I didn't even know what the parties represented. It was embarrassing how little I knew. I just didn't care. Then I was watching what was happening in the world. With the lockdowns and the censorship of doctors who had opinions that contradicted the mainstream narrative, I started looking at it and was like, I've got to figure this out because this is an area that I haven't really touched on in this metaphysical consciousness work. Within the spiritual world of people that maybe supported what I did with my first two books, there was a huge divergence of opinions where some people were totally in with the narrative. If you don't wear your mask, you're a murderer. You're not compassionate. Then the people saying you're crazy to wear a mask, don't even touch the jab. There were these two camps. I was very quickly and very clearly coming out toward the pro-freedom side of it and was trying to understand what was going on philosophically that could cause people that have similar metaphysics to have differing views about politics and differing views around the world. Just generally, how there are distinct paradigms where you could agree with someone on four things, but then disagree on five things. I was trying to figure all that out and then understand the political landscape for the first time. What's left versus right? Why is the media so dominated by one thing? What is Trump? What's going on with the election? I was following that stuff closely. I had an opportunity to do so because I was totally free. I was meditating five to 10 hours a day also after coming out of these retreats. I was having energy experiences and stuff. Then in 2021, so this is a year plus into my newer exploration of the political sociocultural landscape, I wrote a book called Nend to Upside Down Liberty, which examines governments, economics. Why do we have government? Should we have it? It looks at the fundamentals of that as it relates to metaphysics. Then continued researching. I wrote a book called Nend to Upside Down Contact, which is looking at whether or not humans are alone. Are there other intelligences? Are they impacting our world? Are they impacting our political structures? It's all actually related, even though they might sound like they're distinct. This is the UFO phenomenon and other things. Then the most recent book I wrote is called Nend to Upside Down Reset, which is on the World Economic Forum's vision for all of us. That ties together a lot of the things I'd written about into a sociological movement. Not just the political and the economic, it's all of it together with consciousness. I would say where I am now is I'm still trying to figure all this stuff out. I'm still very perplexed by things and how divided we seem to be becoming. As more information comes out somehow, I feel like we're more divided and people are becoming more polarized. Maybe more people are starting to open their minds to things, but I do think there are irreconcilable differences. I don't understand the psychology behind that quite yet. Generally, I continue to try to figure out what are we really doing here? What is the world that we exist in? What is the history that led it to be this way? Therefore, how should we be living our lives? [Speaker 3] (21:25 - 21:42) I think various people have thought I'm crazy along the way, but for different reasons. [Speaker 1] (21:43 - 23:32) When I left my job, there were definitely people who thought I was crazy. When I wrote the first book about consciousness and the brain and the paranormal and life after death, I had a lot of support from people, but then I had some people who were like, dude, you're crazy. I'm your friend. Don't do this. That was the advice I got from some people. Even after showing them peer-reviewed papers, which is what they were asking for, they would somehow do this mental gymnastics of, well, then the science is invalid because the results are not what I think they should be. Or if it were true, then it would be in the media and we'd be taught this in school, this crazy stuff, typical stuff. I was accustomed to that. I heard it from certain people. That's around consciousness. Then I've gotten into this political stuff. Some of the people that were totally on board, rah, rah, Mark, thank you for doing this, are like, what are you doing, Mark? You're supporting the wrong side. There's a lot of that too. I'm not even sure who's really supportive of my work anymore. It's really confusing to me. I don't know where people are. I'm really like you guys here for the truth. I'm very curious to know the truth about reality because I do think there is some truth and I want to try to figure out what it is. The problem is when you ask certain questions, I've learned everyone has different tolerances for things that they're willing to ask about or things that they're willing to even entertain. The analogy I've started to use, I had this visual in my mind of the game Guess Who, where you ask a question and then you put down the faces that don't match and then you're left with a few. It's like when I put stuff out there, I'm left with a few faces that can still hang with me that are still willing to go there and then I see the faces that go down. I get a lot of information by putting out information in a wide variety of areas. I would say the Venn diagram of people who are supportive of all the things I'm doing is shrinking. The overlap area of the Venn diagram, it's definitely shrinking, friends and family and otherwise. [Speaker 2] (23:32 - 23:38) What are some of the questions that you find the most divisive or people are least tolerable of? [Speaker 1] (23:41 - 24:27) My knee-jerk reaction a few years ago would have been the nature of reality. Essentially, atheism or agnosticism versus something spiritual. I would have said that is the strongest one and I'm not sure about that. I think the political stuff could be stronger, whether it's opinions about Trump, opinions of do you believe the New York Times or not? Do you listen to an article from Fox News? Those sorts of triggers seem to actually have more of people are hanging on to those maybe even more than the metaphysical in some ways. I do think the UFO thing is also pretty polarizing because even within the truth or world, there's lots of different opinions on that. All of them have trigger points. [Speaker 2] (24:28 - 24:28) It's crazy. [Speaker 1] (24:28 - 24:46) One more thing, Joel, is the health stuff. That's a big one. Vaccines, some people will not entertain. They won't ask questions about the idea that the pharmaceutical industry might not have our best interests at heart. That's too far for some people. [Speaker 2] (24:49 - 25:03) You mentioned earlier, you went on this mission to try to figure out how some people can agree on so many things yet disagree on so many others. This polarization just continues. I'm just wondering where you got in that exploration. [Speaker 1] (25:06 - 28:01) I go back to the work of Ken Wilber. He talks about lines of development as it relates to an individual's evolution. We can apply this to the collective evolution too. He says that there are these independent areas, relatively independent areas on which people evolve. The key is that they're relatively independent. You could be very evolved in one area and then not as evolved in another. He's got a bunch of these lines of development. The summary that I like, he calls it waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up. Let's say waking up is someone has a spiritual awakening. Let's say it's spontaneous. All of a sudden, they feel the oneness. This is all over the place, whether it's through psychedelics or meditation or a near-death experience. There's a common awakening experience that people have. They might be like, I'm enlightened. At some level, they are enlightened on that waking up scale because they are experiencing a level of reality from that vantage point that maybe other people don't. Then there is cleaning up. That's relating to one's own trauma or one's own darkness that needs to be processed. You can be totally awakened and then not want to deal with your trauma. Then that comes back to bite you in some way. We've seen lots of fallen gurus that end up sleeping with students or stealing money. Money, sex, and power are the three things that end up corrupting people on the awakening journey. The cleaning up thing, it's not necessarily the case that you're awakened and then also that you've done the cleaning up. Then there's the growing up, which I think relates to a lot of the worldly stuff, at least in my opinion, of accepting reality as it is, acknowledging that evil exists, that there are people that get together that don't have other people's best intentions in mind, and that they might actually, dare I use the word, conspire, even though all of human history is filled with conspiracy. That actually happens sometimes. It doesn't mean that every conspiracy is real, but sometimes people do evil and they want to do evil. That's a psychological mindset that not everyone can relate to. I think growing up also involves understanding the psychology of evil, and at the most extreme level, understanding the psychology of psychopathy, that psychopaths are real. Not everyone is a psychopath, but it's a real phenomenon. These are people who lack empathy. They actually thrive off of the suffering of others and of getting power from others. That is part of growing up and accepting reality for what it is. Along with that is also taking personal responsibility rather than offloading it to the experts and just assuming that someone else is going to take care of things. Then there's a showing up, which to me is basically passivity of saying, okay, yeah, I'm awakened, I've cleaned up and I've grown up, but I'm just going to sit back. I think the showing up aspect is acknowledging that we can't be passive in a world in which there are adversarial things happening, something that is actually going toward goodness and actually attacking it. Passivity doesn't work. Maybe that's the way I think about it, Joel, is that these different lines, and there are probably more than those four, and people develop in different ways on different lines. [Speaker 2] (28:02 - 28:46) I absolutely love that framework. I feel like you're speaking to my own path in many ways. I think many people who find themselves on this awakening, quote, unquote, journey, go through these different phases for sure. It also fits, I guess, within the framework of parts. We're a constellation of parts psychologically, and there's some parts that are just more developed than others in certain arenas. Often, we think we can summate one person by one belief system of theirs, but it's simply impossible. We're all individuals beyond anything else. Then the question begs, is polarity natural? Polarization is natural to a degree, right? [Speaker 1] (28:47 - 30:22) Yeah, that's a very deep point you raised. Let me take a few steps back. The worldview that I've espoused in all of my books, but especially starting with the first one in Upside Down Thinking, is the idea that our consciousness, so our capacity for experiencing our awareness, is not something that comes from the physical body, doesn't come from the brain, but rather the brain and the body are processors or antennas for a broader consciousness. It's like we're, to use an analogy from Dr. Bernardo Castro, we are whirlpools within a stream of consciousness. We're both individuals, and we're a collective at the same time. The and is the key. I see a lot of distorted belief systems that come from a metaphysics that I actually agree with, that at some level of reality, we're interconnected. You could say we're one at that level, but we live in duality as well. We are individuals, and we have these parts, and there is polarity in the world. Then there's this extreme non-dualism that denies the fundamental basics that is so obvious to all of us, which is that each of us is separate, and we have separate thoughts and separate minds within the context of interconnectivity. This is a critical point, because now it gets applied to political theory, where someone say, oh yeah, we're all interconnected, so you shouldn't be able to own anything. We should all own it. We should all be collectivists, because we're all one. To me, this misses the nuance. Probably like that point you raised, Joel, about polarity, that might be the driving force behind what's made me want to continue writing, because the non-dualism on its own is just part of the picture. When you get into the nuance of duality, that helps to explain the world much better. [Speaker 2] (30:23 - 30:49) Yeah. Speaking of polarizing topics, individualism versus collectivism, particularly in the spiritual arena, is a huge one for sure. How does one balance objective reality telling us that dualism is the fact versus the subjective non-dualism and embodying that in one's life, if you find that necessary to a degree? [Speaker 1] (30:51 - 31:31) I think that is the human challenge or the spiritual challenge, in a nutshell, of having the understanding of all of that which exists beyond what our eyes can see and beyond what our memories can access right now, acknowledging that that's all there, while also acknowledging the reality of everyday experience and doing both. I'm increasingly thinking that the most quote-unquote enlightened, which is a very charged word, the most enlightened state is to somehow embody the broader oneness within the duality, to actually hold that paradox in a fully contained manner. [Speaker 2] (31:31 - 31:57) Yeah. To me, the great paradox is that the number one beneficial thing that anyone can do for the collective is to leave the collective, is to extract themselves from crowd consciousness, to rise above the herd, so to speak. Then as Carl Jung says, that person becomes a beacon for the collective to actually grow. It's quite anti-collectivistic in nature, in my opinion. [Speaker 1] (31:58 - 32:08) Also, the collective, by definition, is made of individuals. It's incorrect to ignore individuals. You would not have a collective without them. [Speaker 2] (32:09 - 32:16) Yeah. True. Do you have any thoughts on this conversation Mark and I are having? [Speaker 3] (32:17 - 33:02) Well, I love it. I'm in alignment. Even one of my teachers who I trained with, who was a psychologist, he talked about enlightenment as being able to dance between opposites. I think too many people get lost in one side, and they repress the other side, and they don't know how to integrate, and become more whole, and dance, and have this capacity to hold space, and stand between the tension of opposites, and move through life. I dig everything that you're saying. You're definitely speaking our language, for sure. I agree with what Joel said. You have to individuate first and foremost, and know who you are on the deepest levels, and know what your gift is, and give it in the world. That ultimately serves the whole, as opposed to like, well, let's just not focus on that. Let's bypass the individual, and then go to what's best for the whole. [Speaker 2] (33:03 - 33:39) Yeah, that's right. Ultimately, anyone can only sincerely give from the overflow. What we see around us is so many people just trying to give from this hyper-altruistic place of empty cups. You're my brother. You're my sister. We're all the same. Have it all. The world, come at me. Even though we know there's malevolent forces out there, it's like, just take me. No, we need boundaries as well. We need to raise our self-esteem. We need to raise our self-worth. We need to know who we are on the deepest levels. We need to solidify that strength within us. Then it's like, okay, how can I assist you? But from a place of the overflow, from a place of that's genuinely, I want to help you now. [Speaker 1] (33:40 - 34:01) On an airplane, we are advised to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first, and then help other people. An analogy that I've used in my books is that we are part of a cosmic puzzle, and each of us is a unique puzzle piece. Our task of enlightenment, if we want to use that term, is to embody that piece to the fullest. That means being your individual self so that you can be the proper node within the collective. [Speaker 2] (34:03 - 34:07) Yeah, 100% man. Just straight three guys that agree right now. [Speaker 1] (34:08 - 35:00) Well, I want to say one more thing, because this is getting weaponized all over the place. It might sound obvious to us because we all agree on this, but I've had some pretty mind-blowing conversations about extreme collectivism and how that we need more of it and less individuality, and that you shouldn't be able to own property because that's selfish. The problem with that is if you don't own it, that means everyone owns it. That means you're owned if you don't have any boundaries. I'm starting to call it in my own mind, applied spirituality. How do you apply non-dual principles to a dualistic world? There's a wide variety of opinions on this. It's essential because you have people arguing for extreme collectivism, and we've seen what that has done historically. Look at every communistic or even fascistic regime throughout history. It's all about, well, we can do these things to individuals because it's for the greater good. The individual doesn't matter. [Speaker 2] (35:02 - 35:16) Sorry, bro. I was going to say collectivism weaponizes our natural human inclinations to be benevolent, to be compassionate, to be kind, but it takes it to this extreme where it's actually contradictory to our own nature. Every single time it comes around. [Speaker 3] (35:16 - 35:49) You were going to say something too? Well, I was just going to say, I'm curious if you find this when you're engaging in dialogue with people that people confuse the word collective and collectivism. They think they're the same thing where it's like, well, no, collectivism is this system of understanding a philosophy where it's like, well, no, let's sacrifice individual for the greater good, but people often like when you bring up the term collectivism, they'll talk about like, yeah, but no, the collective, it's important. We're all part of a collective. And I feel like they missed the point or they don't have the understanding. So I'm curious if you ever come across that as you're speaking about these subjects. [Speaker 1] (35:50 - 36:46) I definitely have. There are differences in definition. That's part of it. And then, as you were saying, Joel, there's this weaponization of people's good nature that gets brought into this too, especially people that tend to have a spiritual orientation. I've noticed as a generality, they want to be compassionate because they understand that that is part of the fabric of reality. And I totally agree with them. And therefore, they try to think of their own actions as being compassionate and they'll look at the compassionate angle of it. So they'll see the compassionate aspects of collectivism of, oh, look, these are all the people we're helping through this, whatever initiative. And then they will selectively ignore the ways in which those policies are not compassionate to other people, because it's almost too painful to acknowledge for a compassionate person to acknowledge not being compassionate. And this stuff, to your point, Yerasimos, is that I feel like a lot of people who haven't thought about it the way that three of us have, just haven't done the exercise in their mind. [Speaker 2] (36:46 - 36:46) That's right. [Speaker 1] (36:46 - 36:49) They haven't gone through it. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (36:49 - 36:55) And the thing is, they haven't exercised the proper mental faculties to discern what these things actually mean and what these concepts mean in reality. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (36:55 - 36:56) Yes. Exactly. [Speaker 3] (36:56 - 37:12) Yeah. And back to what you were saying before, if people don't acknowledge that there's evil in the world or they're psychopaths, I mean, psychopaths, what they ultimately do is they co-opt their virtue and use it against you. Right. And so if you don't have that awareness, you're walking through the world blind to a certain degree. [Speaker 2] (37:12 - 37:16) And that's because they've disowned their own capacity to be psychopathic. All right. [Speaker 3] (37:17 - 37:30) Or do something dark or evil and project it onto everyone else. And they don't realize the capacity that exists within them, whether or not they're actually like, they don't have any empathy or not. That's another story. But still, just repression causes you to project externally. [Speaker 1] (37:31 - 37:35) Yeah. It's a symptom of spiritual bypass on an individual and collective level. [Speaker 2] (37:35 - 37:44) Yeah. Let me ask you this question. Is it compassionate to keep someone comfortable enough so that they never take responsibility for their own life? [Speaker 1] (37:46 - 38:32) Right. I don't think it is. No. But the person that we're speaking about, this theoretical person who does exist in reality, would say, well, look at all the things, look how comfortable this person is. They would only look at that part of it and then not look at the evil, actually, even in my view, metaphysical evil, because I think this is my inference, at least, that we are here to evolve at some level, like we're trying to get to higher levels of consciousness beyond where we are now. And part of that involves the process of learning. And learning means that you have duality and there's going to be times of displeasure and actually suffering that can happen. So that's another reason why I'm pro-freedom, is that it allows people to make mistakes on their own rather than a third party imposing their view of what is a mistake or not. And then the person can learn on his or her own. [Speaker 2] (38:33 - 38:46) Yeah. And ultimately, that's the role of, that's how the government preys upon us, right? It gives us convenience, gives us comfort, withdraws responsibility from us. So then we become passive in the face of malevolence. [Speaker 1] (38:47 - 39:57) And this is a recipe for tyranny, what you're describing, Joel. But it also just, that level of thinking that you're talking about requires people taking a bird's eye view of what are the mass implications of certain policies and where could it head in the future. And I find that there is this unwillingness in certain people to acknowledge that tyranny takes time to develop, basically. They don't believe it, maybe, until there are concentration camps. Until then, it's conspiracy theory. Because people are free. Look, we can have this conversation. Look how free you are. Yes. And do we have the same freedoms we had three years ago? Do we have the same freedoms that Americans had in 1800, for example? I mean, so it's a very different story when you look at it from that higher perspective. And also, when you've looked at history to see how these regimes work, it's a slow build. It's like the frog boiling in a pot of water analogy that we have to be aware of. So we have to preempt it. And it's so damaging to call critical thinking conspiracy theory. That still exists somehow, that way of thinking. [Speaker 3] (39:58 - 39:59) So dismissive. [Speaker 1] (39:59 - 40:00) So dismissive. [Speaker 3] (40:00 - 40:19) When you think about it, it's like, you have no capacity to hold space for an opinion that's different than yours. And then you just throw this label on a person. And then it's like, yep, good. I don't have to engage. I don't need to take personal responsibility, even for this interaction of being even holding the discomfort of challenging someone or being challenged for my views. [Speaker 1] (40:20 - 40:39) And even more than that, they would then say, you guys are evil or even promoting these ideas because it's dangerous for someone to hear it. They don't have the free will to accept or reject an idea on their own. You are promoting dangerous ideas and therefore you're promoting violence, something like that. I mean, that's to me, it's some kind of very warped psychology. [Speaker 3] (40:40 - 40:51) Have you gone into G. Edward Griffin's work and like his whole interview with Yuri Bezmenov and just showcasing how this process, like you said before, takes time. It happens over a generation or two. [Speaker 1] (40:52 - 41:34) Ideological subversion. And there is an element of the education system that's part of this where certain belief systems are ingrained. Cognitive dissonance is a real thing where people will have a discomfort when confronted with evidence that contradicts their worldview. So there is this notion of human psychology that rejects paradigm shifts. And part of it, I can say this from my own experience, is that it's incredibly disorienting to have to shift the worldview and you have to want to go there. And I often quote one of my buddies when I was first studying consciousness and I was telling him about evidence that there's more to life than meets the eye. He basically said, you're probably right about this, but I'm not going to dive into it because my life is good the way it is and I don't want to rock the boat. [Speaker 2] (41:37 - 42:03) True. Yeah. So from the hermetic perspective that, you know, as within, so without, as above, so below, our inner realities manifest externally, et cetera, how would you describe the government in psychological parlance? And you might not be able to answer this question, but it's something I've been contemplating myself. Like how does, what's our inner psychology that gives rise to the government? [Speaker 1] (42:04 - 42:46) Yeah, well, some people would say it's a manifestation of Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale where we learn to enjoy our abusers. So maybe at some level, the human race has been abused for such a long time that it views its abuser as a savior. So that's maybe one element of it. And then the other one that comes to mind is the notion of personal responsibility and victimhood and wanting to be taken care of rather than taking responsibility for one's own. Having a government that's supposed to take care of people is the manifestation of that for sure. And the fact that people would not only, they don't even, they don't like to question government and then they get upset when other people question the government. They're protecting this view of, well, someone else should take responsibility. [Speaker 2] (42:47 - 43:02) Yeah. So it's kind of like the inner critic, right? You're asking us. It's like, I need to be here. You're not good enough. You need me. Don't think beyond what I can provide for you, et cetera, et cetera. It's the inner tyrant, so to speak. [Speaker 3] (43:03 - 43:15) Yeah. It's on some level, it can be if you don't have a conscious relationship to it and understanding that that voice within very often is trying to protect you. I mean, again, it's pretty nuanced, but I get what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (43:16 - 43:27) The inner tyrant, that's a good one because I am also learning that not everyone appreciates freedom. To them, that's actually not a virtue and they want to control other people. So they, of course, they love government. [Speaker 3] (43:29 - 44:29) Yeah. Well, again, most people tend to want to control others when they don't know themselves and they have lack of control within themselves. And so it's like that they can't sit with the vulnerability of not knowing, of uncertainty, of who am I? Is there meaning in this world? What's going on? And it's like, well, I need to have some sense of control. And so like, let's just put that into my external relationships. Right. So again, as a person that hasn't expanded consciousness, that dives deep into these areas, that knows themselves, is in touch with the light, is in touch with the dark, they're more likely to be more free flowing in understanding, compassionate. And that's the thing. The more you know yourself, the more you ultimately have compassion because you can see in another person, oh yeah, I know that part of me. I know that part I understand what that person's going through. Where if you're limited and you're so rigid in your consciousness, you don't really have that ability beyond this false virtue sense of like, oh, this is the type of person I need to let everyone know I'm this kind of person. But are you really that kind of person? [Speaker 2] (44:31 - 45:17) Hey, everyone, just a brief pause with a message from our sponsors. Us, we're our sponsors. And in particular, our membership community, Friends of the Truth. We've just added three new calls to the schedule. So that's six calls a month that you get for less than a dollar a day. If you sign up on a yearly membership or just over a dollar a day on a monthly membership, this is crazy, incredible value. If you're into this podcast, if you want to connect with us on a deeper level and meet a tribe of like-minded individuals on the path of unlocking their highest potential and becoming who they were born to be in an awesome community setting, check out Friends of the Truth at friendsofthetruth.co. Now offering six calls a month on various topics. So please enjoy the rest of this episode. [Speaker 1] (45:18 - 45:53) Well, one manifestation of that is, quote unquote, democracy, supporting democracy. So think about what democracy is. It is the majority getting to be tyrants over the minority. One of my favorite political philosophers is Murray Rothbard. And he says, if 70% of people decide to murder the other 30%, it's not voluntary suicide on behalf of the 30%. So democracy is a form of tyranny. But people get to say, oh, well, it's not a monarchy. So look, we're so compassionate. So it's almost like this. Someone still wants to be controlling, but then they can preserve their view of being compassionate at the same time. [Speaker 3] (45:54 - 46:02) People uphold democracy as like the greatest thing ever created. But then you explain it in this way and it's like, nah, it's not a rule to a certain extreme. [Speaker 2] (46:03 - 46:14) That word has been conditioned to be like the apex and monument of humanity within all of our psyches for the longest time. We have democracy. Humanity has been saved. [Speaker 1] (46:15 - 46:41) Yeah. The distinction I like to make is compulsory democracy versus a voluntary democracy. We have a compulsory democracy, which is just tyranny. Voluntary is, let's say the three of us get together, we start a business, and we say, this is how we're going to govern. Two versus one gets to do it. Then we've all agreed to it. We've all ceded our rights voluntarily. That's different. Compulsory democracy is that's just tyranny. That's where it's the majority. Even if the majority is unintelligent, they get to rule you. [Speaker 2] (46:42 - 46:43) Which is what's happening. [Speaker 3] (46:44 - 46:52) Can you talk a little bit about just the difference between leftism and liberalism and what you've noticed has shifted over the last, let's say, couple of decades? [Speaker 1] (46:53 - 48:53) This is something I get into in the newest book, An End to the Upside-Down Reset, leftism versus liberalism. They're distinct things. Liberal traditionally has meant freedom of speech, not judging people on the basis of their skin color, maybe not wanting fully free market, but certainly not wanting communism or socialism. Leftism is an extreme version of all those things that has become completely illiberal. Left is, we need to censor people's speech because they're saying things that I subjectively deem to be hateful. Therefore, they should not be able to speak freely. I'm going to protect people by being so virtuous. I don't like free speech, essentially. They're pro-censorship. That's totally illiberal. A leftist might say, well, I care so much about anti-racism that we should have segregated dormitories and separate graduations for people based on their skin color because I'm so compassionate for people. Actually, if you think about the definition of racism, which is like doing things or judging people on the basis of something as superficial as their skin color, well, actually, their anti-racism is a form of racism. It's this extreme compassion to the point where it becomes illiberal and tyrannical. The reason that this distinction is so important is that I've found a lot of people who would call themselves liberal and actually are not left. I think they're being blindsided because they think the people on the left are on their team and don't realize that they're becoming totally tyrannical. Jordan Peterson has made this comment. I quote him in my book where he says, look, as a society, we've gotten really good at seeing the markers for when things go too far on the right. We can point to World War II. We can say, look, this is when it went too far. There was this kind of racism. Look, all these people died, but we don't have that for when things go too far on the left. There's basically no limit to how, if you want to use the term woke to describe this extreme leftist activists, there's no boundary for it. It's like, well, they're just being more and more compassionate. And then they use mental gymnastics to explain how it's somehow liberal. [Speaker 2] (48:55 - 49:04) Yeah. Yeah. In principle, they disregard that fascism and communism ultimately are both branches of collectivism. [Speaker 1] (49:07 - 49:29) Exactly. But they haven't thought about that. That's why I was like, I've got to write this book because I'm not even sure. Usually when I write a book, the people I most want to read it will never read it. That's one of my biggest frustrations in life, I realized. But maybe a few of them will, because once you see it, I think if one is intellectually honest, then it's like you look at the world a little bit differently, look at the news a little differently. [Speaker 3] (49:30 - 49:46) Yeah. And like you said, change happens over time. So even you're writing a book and you want everybody to read it, but it's like, no, the people that are supposed to read it are going to read it. And then that's going to shift their consciousness. And then that's going to impact their little sphere of influence. And this is how change ultimately does occur. [Speaker 1] (49:47 - 50:19) It's a good exercise for me in my own spiritual personal development of letting go of expectations. What's a success? Because I put so much effort into all this stuff and I'm used to seeing success metrics. That's how my life has been. And now it's like you say, Erasmus, I can't judge. And the same thing goes with a podcast or anything that we do in life. We don't know the effects and the dominoes effect that we're going to have and how long it might take. So I always have to just let go of whatever those expectations are and just say, look, I'm going to do the best I can. That's where I can control things. And then what happens beyond that, beyond me. [Speaker 3] (50:20 - 51:40) Yeah. And again, you compared to like when you were feeling completely lost or you had all this tension, you're like, well, right now I'm doing the things, I'm exploring the things that I love and I'm writing these books and I'm connecting with these people that I feel aligned with. And I go to sleep and I actually can sleep and feel rested. And it's like, I don't know where my path's taking me, but you know what? Deep down inside, I feel good about what I'm doing. And then from there, it's like, this is where miracles happen. This is where magic happens in life is like, again, going back to the individual, going back to like, this is who I am. This is my path. This is my purpose in the world. Let me do that. Let me live that as fully as I can. Of course, I'm learning as I go. And then that's when opportunities present themselves. That's when amazing things occur. That's what I found in my life. You know, when I said no to like a path that I thought was put out there for me and I went on a more alternative path, you know, 10 years ago, if you told me I'd be sitting here right now talking to the two of you, I'd be like, you're tripping. You know, but then it's like one thing leads to the next thing. It's like you follow that inner compass. You follow that thing within whatever that is, that voice, people will call it your higher self intuition. And you just, you just keep doing that. And life is a windy road, you know, but we get raised to be like, no, it's a straight line. This is what you do. You do these certain things. You stay within what's accepted by the majority. You know, you go to college, you get the job post-college, you do this and you do that. And for many people, that's just not fulfilling. [Speaker 1] (51:43 - 52:38) Reaching to the choir here, you're asking. Yes, that's been my journey. And it's actually a good reminder for me of where I am right now, because I still, I've left my job. I haven't found a new job. I've written a bunch of books, but that's not like a financial career as like an esoteric author. And I have to always remind myself of how this path has gone since 2016. Things have unfolded as I surrender more. And that doesn't mean full passivity. It means being active when the opportunity comes, but it also means not trying to control everything and following what feels right. And like you said, Yerasimos, I think this is the key is saying no to the paths that aren't right and really setting those boundaries. That's really, it's an, it's a constant exercise because I think as in this society, we are conditioned not to set boundaries or that it's like somehow mean to do that. But it's, there are ways to do it in a compassionate way without being mean, but setting the boundaries and not doing things that are, that could be damaging to ourselves. That's compassionate to ourselves. [Speaker 3] (52:38 - 53:13) It's self-esteem. It's taking ownership for who you are. And, you know, Joel and I talk about this all the time on like the personal heroes journey is like, a lot of people don't know what to do, but start with what you don't want to do. Start there. You know, say like, this doesn't work for me. This job doesn't work for me. This relationship doesn't work with me. And then see what happens. And of course life's going to be uncomfortable. You know, that's, that's part of it. That's how you, you build resilience. That's how you really know yourself. If you're just bubble wrapped, you know, it's like, you're just going back to the womb, which is what leftism to some degree is. It's like this regression back to the womb, take care of me. You know, I don't want to have responsibility. I want everything handled. [Speaker 2] (53:13 - 53:34) Yeah, that's right. And, but like that, that, that discomfort is the beacon, you know, that, that uncomfortability is the guiding post. In my opinion, that's where, that's where our work lies. That's what we need to venture. That's what we're being called to venture, you know? So those anxieties, those guilt, those frustrations, those, you know, that's, that's what I'm interested in exploring because that's, what's going to make me broader at the end of the day. [Speaker 1] (53:35 - 53:50) Yeah. Whenever those things come up, whether it's a pang of anxiety or some kind of a, what you would call a negative emotion or what feels negative. That's where you should double click. That's what I find. It's like, okay, something's up. Something's up. I got to figure out what this is. [Speaker 3] (53:50 - 53:51) Yeah. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (53:51 - 53:51) A hundred percent. [Speaker 3] (53:52 - 53:57) Who was it? We did, we did a live teaching and that's in our membership of Keen Money on Soren Kierkegaard. [Speaker 2] (53:57 - 54:01) Soren Kierkegaard discusses anxiety as the path to greatness. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (54:01 - 54:56) Yeah. Like using anxiety as this like, um, catalyst towards going after life in a certain way. So, uh, yeah, it's really important. He discusses it as the catalyst for freedom, right? That's where our freedom lies ultimately. Yeah. And this is where you get into like addictions and you get into people who self soothe all the time. It's like, they don't want to feel this thing that we're talking about right now. They don't want to feel the pain of their reality. And so they're going to like drink, smoke, weed, you know, excessively scroll, watch porn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Insert whatever self-soothing mechanism there is. Okay. You know, and I get it. People are doing what they do. They're doing the best they can that they know at that time, especially based on like the state of the nervous system. I mean, we could have a whole conversation on that, but ultimately it's like, Hey, do I, pain is a motivator for change. We talk about this all the time. And if you don't allow yourself to feel the pain, then you're not going to know what the next steps are. You're not going to know what the next step is. [Speaker 1] (54:57 - 55:35) And so, you know, it's like, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. You're reminding me of a book that I'm rereading one of my favorites. It's called letting go the pathway of surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. And he describes exactly what you're talking about. You're asking most of the way that we end up purifying ourselves to getting to a happier, better state is by going in to those emotions where there is a discomfort and actually letting it fully express itself so that the emotion can run out rather than sitting there infestering. And that's why spiritual bypass can be so dangerous. So when those pangs of discomfort come up, that's the time that we go in and try to really explore it, let it come out, and then it can be cleared so that we can be in a more pure and happier state. [Speaker 2] (55:36 - 55:37) Yeah. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (55:37 - 55:37) I hear you, man. [Speaker 2] (55:41 - 55:48) Okay. So on a hierarchical level, do you think that there is a negative alien agenda pulling the governmental strings? [Speaker 1] (55:50 - 59:00) Yeah. We're going there. It's a very complicated issue. I'm glad you brought it up because right now we're seeing congressional hearings and there's so many reactions. It's really interesting to watch people. And one knee-jerk reaction, which I don't agree with is it's all a PSYOP. It's all a PSYOP. It's all blue beam, meaning the aliens are going to come and they're going to use that to enforce a one world government. And I don't know what's going on. So there might be a hint of truth to that. But to me, it misses the bigger picture, which is that we are not alone. And that's my fourth book, An End to Upside-Down Contact. There's so much evidence that human beings are not the only intelligence. And I don't think it's just restricted to the physical. I think there's a non-physical component to this multidimensional element. And I do think there are multiple types of species. So when we're talking about agendas, I only speculate on this in the book because it's really hard to know. I do think there are negative and positive agendas in the same way we have that and perhaps the negative agendas we see on this planet, like maybe even the Great Reset, is being influenced by forces that we don't always see with our eyes. That's my current hypothesis of how I see the world, that there are negative factions of other intelligences that we don't always see with our eyes that are influencing our worlds and influencing governments. Sometimes maybe on a conscious level through, let's say, black magic or satanic rituals, where people actually try to invoke this stuff by doing horrific things to people, but they're able to invoke dark beings through that. That's on a conscious level of a brain negativity because they want power. And then I think it can happen on an unconscious level too. So if we view the brain as like a receiver transmitter of consciousness, that's a very rough analogy. And there's a book on this called The Science of Channeling written by Helene Wabe, who's the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. She talks about the science behind this phenomenon where people are actually bringing in other energies that are not native to their body. And sometimes they speak in cadences that are not really theirs. They use words that are not theirs. Some entities speaking through them. And she talks about how their science suggests that this is not just a psychological disorder and that they're actually bringing something in. Sometimes you can do that on a conscious level of like, okay, I'm going to go into this meditative state and I'm going to let the being come in and then this being is going to transmit something. But is that happening all the time without our knowledge? Well, we're subtly being influenced where a creative idea comes in or an emotion comes in. We can't really identify where that is. And I wonder, and this is why the internal work is so important potentially, that we might be tapping into the positive or negative agendas depending on our state of consciousness unconsciously. So if we get into a super evolved state where we're in a state of positivity, we've done the inner work, we're not spiritual bypassing, we might be able to tap into the more positive stuff and the negative stuff can't get into our consciousness as much. Whereas there might be other people like perhaps where I was heading in my life, I don't know, where I was on this track of life is meaningless, was not aware of this other stuff where maybe I would be more drawn toward ideas that are darker. And so to me, whether or not there are these darker light agendas, I think it goes back to the individual work. And the more individuals that can do the work, the more we'll be able to withstand any agenda. [Speaker 2] (59:03 - 59:30) I mean, we've had, I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Tom Wontorek, we've had him on the podcast before. One you should definitely look into if you haven't. He's probably since 2000s, the key guys speaking about the alien agenda and particularly its influence in most of what we see unfold on a governmental level. But I always love to ask the question, like in your own research, what is the objective proof of aliens that we do have? [Speaker 1] (59:32 - 1:04:25) The way I divide it up in my book in End Upside Down Contact is contact that is not related to UFOs and contact that is related to UFOs. So I think there's evidence on both. With regard to non-UFO contact, let's take the near-death experience as an example. This has been studied extensively. The University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies has studied this. So very credible people have looked at this phenomenon where people are in a state of physiological trauma. Let's say cardiac arrest is one case where there is little or no brain functioning. Blood stops flowing to the brain, a person is clinically dead, and yet some people have an elaborate experience of their consciousness where they experience life to be realer than real. Sometimes they are hovering over their body, outside the room even, and they come back when they're resuscitated and they're able to tell a doctor or family members things that they saw or heard at this point when they should have been clinically dead. So when I interviewed for my podcast, Where's My Mind, Dr. Bruce Grayson from UVA, he said, we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. And the way that I have interpreted this and have written about is consciousness is not tied to the body, and the near-death experience is showing us an example when consciousness is actually liberated from the body. The brain is like getting in the way of our experience, get the brain out of the way, and the broader consciousness emerges. So that goes into your question, Joel, of maybe when people have these experiences and they encounter beings, because this is often talked about, they encounter deceased relatives sometimes, they encounter what they'll say is a being of light, they encounter figures that are associated with various religions. I don't know what these beings are, but they're encountering beings, which to me is, okay, maybe this is not a hallucination, because if they're giving factual information about what they saw, that's not hallucinatory. So maybe these visions they're having of other beings, maybe we're not alone. Another example is psychedelics. So Rick Strassman's studies on DMT, dimethyltryptamine, from the University of New Mexico, where he was injecting people with this hardcore psychedelic that's produced by the body naturally, but usually it's broken down, so we're not tripping all the time. But if you inject it in someone's body, or if you do ayahuasca, where you combine the chemicals, the psychedelic lasts in the body longer. So what happens when Strassman was giving people DMT? They were coming back saying they encountered beings over and over again. He actually shut down the study because he had ethical questions about, should he be exposing people to these beings? And in some cases, they were talking about things very similar to what's described in the quote-unquote alien abduction phenomenon, where the beings were operating on them. There were different species of beings. And this was fascinating to me, because before I even knew about that part of Strassman's work, I knew about his DMT experiments, but I didn't know about this element that people were encountering beings. And I had been studying the work of John Mack, former head of psychiatry at Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner. At the end of his career, he was told, hey, you should look at these people who claim that they were abducted by aliens. As a psychiatrist, take a look, there's some compelling cases. What did he end up concluding? These people are not psychotic. That's what he concluded. He wrote two books about it. One's called Abduction, published in 1994. The other is called Passport to the Cosmos, published in 1999, where he, as a scientist doctor, goes through this stuff meticulously and talks about the experiences people had. They were on an operating table, sperm and eggs were taken. They were part of a hybridization program. As crazy as that sounds, I mean, this is a Harvard guy talking about this. People were shown their hybrid baby aboard the craft. This stuff that Mack was seeing from people that were coming to him independently, in Strassman's work, you see something very similar. And these were not people, Strassman said this. He was like, look, I didn't know about the alien abduction phenomenon, but now I've got to look at it. And a lot of the subjects in his experiments, they weren't familiar with these beings too. So you get these like independent corroborations. Is it as good as one appearing right in front of me? It's not that level of evidence, but when you hear enough stories over and over again, and then combine it with the historical element, which is a whole separate conversation you could talk about for hours, looking at ancient mythology, looking at the Bible, especially the Old Testament, all these stories, quote, unquote, they might use different vocabulary to describe what many people are experiencing right now with regard to contact. Ezekiel's vision is a very good example, where if you read that as maybe an alien encounter or a multidimensional experience where he was, there was this chariot and these were creatures. Well, maybe he was encountering beings. So I think not only is it real, but I think this is essential to our human existence, which is what I find so interesting about whether or not, oh, this is all just a psyop. Maybe it's not fully a psyopic. Sure, the government can steer the narrative in whatever way it wants, but acknowledging that we're not alone and that there are beings who might be involved, that's essential to our whole history. [Speaker 2] (1:04:26 - 1:04:41) Yeah. And you think that this is definitely beyond what might fit within being explainable by psychology or the unconscious, even like our ancestral unconscious, whatever it might be. [Speaker 1] (1:04:43 - 1:06:12) Yeah, I can't say for sure, and I've never personally experienced any of this myself, but if you had to ask me a yes or no question, you can have to pick one, Mark. I would say this is not just hallucinatory. It's not just a product of our psychology because there seem to be too many cases of this. And then there are some examples of physical evidence. I have a chapter on this in my book, and John Mack said this, John Mack from Harvard. He said, the physical evidence seems to be just enough where people who are inclined to believe it are going to say this is enough, but the skeptics, it's never going to be enough for them because it's not quite compelling enough. So a few examples. One is the phenomenon known as phantom pregnancy syndrome, where women cannot correlate a pregnancy with a sexual encounter, and then the baby disappears. And John Mack says they'll go to the gynecologist and they don't have a good explanation for it, and they try to say that the baby was absorbed or something. But let's say the more esoteric explanation is that this is part of a hybridization program, and the hybrid baby was taken. So there was an artificial insemination, the baby was taken, and this is occurring outside of the person's conscious memory, which is something that happens all the time. The phenomenon is known as missing time. But I quote some women in my book. One is a lesbian, and she had a pregnancy, and her girlfriend was jealous and was like, wait, are you cheating on me with a guy? And she hadn't, and she had a phantom pregnancy, then it disappeared. So this caused problems in her relationship. And then this other woman who was saying, look, I was very careful about things with regard to sexuality, and I had a pregnancy that had nothing to do with a sexual relationship. So you're asking this, you want to say something? [Speaker 3] (1:06:12 - 1:06:26) Well, I was just going to say, so they take a pregnancy test, and they say they're pregnant, and then how many months in, would they notice? Would there be a little bit of a bump in their belly? I'm just curious how this process goes. [Speaker 1] (1:06:26 - 1:06:36) Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I think they had a bump in the belly, or they had symptoms of it. I believe it's around four months or something typically when it's taken within that period in the phantom pregnancy. So that's one example. [Speaker 3] (1:06:37 - 1:06:45) Another is- Joel's a product of alien abduction. He's a hybrid baby. That's come down to educate us and provide inspiration. [Speaker 2] (1:06:45 - 1:06:50) I thought you agreed that you don't disclose my personal life on the podcast, bro, but we'll talk about it later, I guess. [Speaker 1] (1:06:50 - 1:08:06) Yeah, I don't doubt it. But so implants, that's another one where things have actually been extracted surgically. There's a book called The Aliens and the Scalpel, where the surgeon who extracted the stuff talks about the analysis he did on these various things that he took from people's bodies and the anomalies associated with their material. So that's pretty interesting. There's a book called Hair of the Alien by Bill Chalker, where he goes through a story of a man who had this weird experience where he remembered these two weird looking women at his bed, but doesn't remember all of it. And there was a hair left over, and he saved the hair. And years later, he was talking to researchers about it, and they decided to do a forensic DNA analysis on the hair. And it had these very strange properties when they did the DNA analysis, that it's a splicing of things that would require some kind of intelligence that would suggest that the DNA shouldn't be the way it was. So there were some weird anomalies with that. There are these stories that come up where there's a lot of work that's been done, which to me helped push me over the edge because I find the other stuff compelling. But again, someone who's not inclined to believe this, it's easy to just brush aside and say, oh, well, not important enough. [Speaker 2] (1:08:08 - 1:08:21) Fascinating. So we're seeing all these congressional hearings now. Do you think this is a genuine slow leak attempt at disclosing into mass consciousness? Or is it as simplistic as they're distracting us from something else? [Speaker 1] (1:08:22 - 1:09:33) Yeah, I really don't know. And to me, I'm not as shaken by the hearings because it's like a drop in the bucket relative to all the other evidence that's been out there for a long time. But what is different is that it's happening on a public scale, where let's say like a year ago, I wrote a book that came out on aliens and UFOs. And that was kind of crazy. And now it's still kind of crazy. But then you've got a guy talking about non-biological pilots on the UFO craft at a congressional hearing. So now, okay. Now, Joel, your question is deeper, which is like, why is it coming out now? I mean, I'm asking myself that too. Because our history of governmental involvement, even going back to Project Blue Book, where UFO sightings were tracked. So the government's been looking at this, and some of it's been declassified. The government's history is not one of honesty ever with regard to this phenomenon. So I have a hard time believing that 100% of what they're telling us is for our benefit. And that doesn't mean it's false. But it might mean that it's being steered in a very particular way, or it's being leaked out in a certain way, maybe to protect their past dishonesty. And maybe if it's leaked out over time, people will have time to settle with it. But then another part of me thinks, no one really cares. [Speaker 2] (1:09:34 - 1:09:38) People are still going back... The disclosure's here. Disclosure's been here. [Speaker 1] (1:09:39 - 1:09:46) No one cares. They still have to pay the bills, and they've got family and job. And it's like, so I don't know what it's even going to do. [Speaker 2] (1:09:47 - 1:10:01) Yeah. And then the question I think is if there is this negative alien agenda, super powerful beings influencing everything, how much influence do they have in their own disclosure? How much influence do they have over what we're witnessing on the global level? [Speaker 1] (1:10:02 - 1:11:04) I mean, you would think they would have some degree of influence, especially if they're powerful and more technologically advanced. I mean, then people have varying opinions on things like natural law, if there are laws against direct intervention in certain cases, where even if they're benevolent, then they have to let us do it on our own, or they can only give us hints. So one of the reasons I felt comfortable writing that book on contact is that after looking at so many different researchers, I don't feel like anyone has it down. It is so complicated and multidimensional and beyond linearity that no one's got it. I think people have pieces of it. And the analogy I use in my book is Flatland, the novella where people are living on a two-dimensional flat piece of paper. And if you imagine that a sphere intersects with that flat piece of paper, the people in the two-dimensional world are only going to see a circle. They're only going to see the intersection point of the sphere. They're not going to see the whole thing because they literally can't. And I feel like that's us. We're getting these hints of the phenomenon and bits and pieces of it, and we're getting the circle, maybe. And even if we nail the circle 100%, we're not going to know the full sphere. [Speaker 2] (1:11:09 - 1:11:12) I love the vastness of this conversation we've had today. [Speaker 3] (1:11:13 - 1:11:28) I know. I'm thinking, what are we going to title this? I know we were like, oh, we're going to get into the great reset in your recent book. And then of course, we just love to flow where the conversation goes because I just love your mind, man. I feel like we're aligned in so many ways. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think. [Speaker 2] (1:11:28 - 1:11:43) Well, I want to ask the question that Erasmus brought up before off-air, which is like, who is Klaus Schwab? How did he actually come into? Let's go into it. I didn't know this guy existed until like five years ago. He all of a sudden appeared on this. [Speaker 1] (1:11:45 - 1:16:23) I had heard about the World Economic Forum when I was in Silicon Valley. I knew people that went to the Davos event. I heard about it for a while. So my old opinion of it, I didn't have much of an opinion other than this is a very prestigious thing to go to. So if you got to go, that's like, wow, you're really making it in the world. You're up there with the movers and shakers. And it wasn't until 2020. And the great reset was announced in June of 2020. So this was just a few months after lockdown hit. Time for a great reset. This was Klaus Schwab, the executive director of the World Economic Forum alongside then Prince Charles. And then you had Al Gore, John Kerry talking about great resets. So this was all over the place. They wanted to use COVID as an opportunity to enact their ideals. Now, your question about Klaus Schwab, it's actually something I don't dive into too much in the book because I wanted to stick to what the agenda is. I didn't want to go too much into the personal stuff and be accusatory. And part of my reasoning for that is, and this is based on my own, a lot of people that I know, is that I don't think everyone involved in evil things intends to be evil. I think there are people who genuinely think they're doing good. We see this a lot with, I mean, everything, but like a lot of climate stuff right now where it's being totally weaponized to try to take away freedoms, but it's the compassion. We need to protect biodiversity and we need to save our future generations. So I do think there are people who are bought into it and they're involved in these circles. So there's that aspect of it where there might be people who are well-meaning. I do think they're a psychopath for sure also. And they might be weaponizing these other people who are more compassionate and they're not discerning it. And then you've got people who are blackmailed, they're threatened, they're bribed, or even mind-controlled. So they're not even fully, I'm talking MK Ultra stuff, where they've been dissociated and they've got a sub-personality that can be controlled. Who knows with all these people. So I've stayed away from trying to point and say like Klaus Schwab is this, that. I mean, people have pointed to his history with Henry Kissinger. So he certainly comes from a lineage of way of thinking about things. But I don't know what it is with him exactly, like where he falls in that spectrum of possibilities. I don't agree with his ideas at all. I think they're tyrannical, even though they come across, like the book he wrote alongside his colleague, Thierry Mallaret, it's called COVID-19, The Great Reset, published in 2020. For those who think it's a conspiracy, COVID-19, The Great Reset is a book that explains The Great Reset. And also there's a sequel called The Great Narrative. So it's all out there. It is not positioned as a tyrannical movement. It is positioned as, look, we had this great tragedy of COVID. Now we can rebuild the world in such a compassionate way. Let's be more compassionate. Let's all get together. That's the kind of tone of this stuff. So are they just that misguided? Or is this someone who's actually tyrannical and wants to control everybody? Or I mean, there's this tyrannical compassion too. It's kind of a hybrid of, I am so compassionate that I will be tyrannical and I'm going to acknowledge that I'm tyrannical, but I'm doing it because it is ultimately for the greater good. So I'm justified in doing it. It's like a husband who beats his wife. It's like, I do it because I love you. Well, we have to save the planet. Come on. And we need equity. That's how it goes. I mean, talk about equity and climate as existential issues. And equity, I want to go into this quickly. Equity means equal outcomes. So what if someone performs better than someone else? Equity would say that's bad. So you guys, let's say run a marathon and do great in the marathon. The equity person comes along and says, you beat these people by a few, I don't know, by 30 minutes. Next time you run, we're going to put a hundred pound weights on your back and make you run. Now we've got equity. We're going to have equal outcomes. It's evil, actually. You can end up doing horrible things to people to make people have equal outcomes. So this is the kind of language that they're talking about. Same thing with like justice. I mean, sure, justice is a nice thing. Fairness. These are all nice sounding things, but what's the endpoint of that? Is it even defined? I mean, you could just always say things are unfair or they're unjust as long as you want to enact something tyrannical or to perpetuate a victimhood mentality. So that's what I talk about in the book of like all these things that they're saying. First of all, I use their words. They say these things. This is what they're promoting. And then look at the potential dark side of it and not just really the potential in a theoretical way. We've seen this happen historically and it's happening in front of our eyes. So to me, we're already in the great reset. It's a matter of whether or not we go along with it to the end of 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World, whether we get to that level. [Speaker 3] (1:16:25 - 1:16:35) What is the World Economic Forum? People hear that, the acronym, the WF, they hear all the time. It's like, what exactly is it? [Speaker 1] (1:16:35 - 1:18:26) They describe themselves as an organization focused on public-private partnership. Basically, they're involved in everything. And Klaus Schwab has even said on camera, we penetrate the cabinets, meaning that people with their ideology are in governments all over the world. And there's a young global leaders program. That's not to say that everyone who has ever been associated with the program is fully on board with Klaus Schwab, but I mean it in the sense that they've been exposed to a certain ideology. So they might be biased in a certain way. And if that's involved in governments all over the world, then that means this unelected body has the tentacles to be able to influence everything. And why is that important? Well, we saw with COVID, when the world can be shut down in unison, like immediately, you know, we've got an issue when there's like too much centralized power. So they have that ability. And people have been, like you can actually search on the World Economic Forum's website, some of the people that have been involved in their program, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, who's actually not listed on the website anymore, but Klaus Schwab said it in one of his videos. So I don't know if they list everyone that's been involved, but there are a lot of powerful people that are in governments that have been part of the young global leaders program. So they penetrate the cabinets. That's more on the public sector government side. Then you go to their website and look at their corporate partners. And it's every industry. It's the biggest companies. Again, it doesn't mean that every single one of those companies is all in with the WEF, but it means that there's this relationship there. So if there's an ideology that's being promoted, i.e. the great reset that is being branded and marketed as a good thing, then we've got governments and corporations that can enact those ideals. Exciting. What's the product? One example, ESG, environmental, social governance. That's a classic example of this. [Speaker 3] (1:18:27 - 1:18:27) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:18:27 - 1:22:03) Can you talk about that a little bit more? Sure. Yeah. This is another one where I know some people aren't happy with me, because ESG, environmental, social and governance, it's marketed as this very benevolent thing that as businesses, we need to be focused on saving the environment. We need better social policies, better governance policies. And there is part of me, like the spiritual part that says, and I've been in the world of finance and Silicon Valley and stuff. There's real issues. There's a hint of truth to this, that it's beneficial to try to encourage better, more collectivistic thinking in the business world, in addition to the individualistic thinking, but to think less about purely greedy stuff. So that's true. I'm with there. But how is it being implemented? ESG, who gets to define what those things mean? Who gets to define what's environmental? What's social? What's governance? Well, how does it happen? Klaus Schwab describes it. It is books, especially the second one, The Great Narrative. He talks about the ability to set standards of what those things are and then use the governments to impose those standards on the people. And his rationale is, well, it's an implied consent that the people elected those leaders, and therefore it's okay to do that. But what about the people who are being ruled by someone that they didn't elect because they didn't vote for that person? That's a separate story. So you have non-elected bodies influencing governments to then enact this stuff within businesses. That ultimately, in my view, leads to a social credit system for businesses, where you have to follow this rubric of whatever we say is the correct thing environmentally, whatever we say socially. And if you don't do that, then maybe you can't get a loan. Maybe we're not going to invest in you. So you end up in a system that perpetuates those who follow along with this arbitrary system. And it's related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that are their vision for the world as well. So it all seems to be interrelated with these organizations. And I want to add on that part of the S in ESG seems to be DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Lots of acronyms here, where we're going to impose, we need companies to be using DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Again, sounds really good. Aspects of it I like. But it's like, what is diversity? Does that mean literally just choosing people because this person has this skin color, we're going to choose that person? So we have to quote-unquote diversity. Does it mean ideological diversity? No, usually it's not. Usually it's just based on skin color or something. So you end up being actually racist in the process of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Equity, we talked about how that's not a good thing. Equal outcomes means you can do horrible things in order to equalize downward. And you actually end up being unfair. So F.A. Hayek, who's a Nobel prize winner in economics, he talked about equality and the fact that human beings are diverse and unique. By definition, we are all unique. We are not the same physically. Maybe at some level we are, but at this physical level, we're not. And because we are unequal, in order to make people equal, you have to treat them unequally. So you end up in this paradox of hypocrisy. So that's diversity, equity, and inclusion. To me, it's exclusion. We're going to include people based on whatever superficial thing these people say we need to include. We need this many of a certain gender, of a sexual orientation, of a certain skin color, whatever superficial things they want because they decided it. And then we're going to exclude the ones that don't meet those criteria. So I think DEI is highly problematic, and it is marketed and endorsed by a lot of people who I know who mean well. So that's the S thing. And governance is kind of related to DEI, too. Yeah, go ahead. [Speaker 3] (1:22:04 - 1:22:20) No, I was just saying, can you talk about the financial side of this, too? People also hear about these two companies, Vanguard and BlackRock, and what role they have and how, if a company doesn't, I guess, honor what you said, DEI, they're impacted by that. Can you just touch on that a little bit? [Speaker 1] (1:22:20 - 1:23:41) Right. So these are huge asset managers that invest in companies. So if they're going to invest in companies on the basis of the, quote-unquote, ESG score, again, this is subjective. Who gets to define what's a good ESG score? There was a lot of social media posting about the fact that a tobacco company had a higher ESG score than Tesla. And Tesla is supposed to be this virtuous electric vehicle company, and then tobacco companies got a higher ESG score. And then in my book, I talked about the country of Sri Lanka had the highest ESG score, and then they almost toppled the government for many reasons. But one of them is that they stopped using a certain type of fertilizer, so they destroyed the economy. So you end up with these paradoxes where you have a high ESG score, but it's not actually doing the compassionate thing that you thought it was going to do. But by creating these scores, you can end up making it harder for some companies to survive because they're not meeting the criteria of the powers that be. And when you have financial interests that are only going to fund the ones that meet the rubric, it makes it more difficult for those separate companies. So you've seen people like Vivek Ramaswamy, who's now running for president. He wrote a book called Woke Inc., which goes into ESG in detail. I cover it a bit in my book, but he has a whole book about it called Woke Inc. He set up a separate asset management fund. I actually don't know how it's doing, but it's supposed to be like the anti-ESG asset manager. So that's going to fund companies that are not just based on those arbitrary metrics. [Speaker 2] (1:23:42 - 1:24:33) Interesting. Are you familiar with Ayn Rand at all? Yeah. It's just funny. She detailed all this that we're seeing unfold perfectly in many books, in particular Atlas Shrugged. But she says the three metrics that your society is going downhill fast is that the men who produce need permission from the men who produce nothing. Money flows to people dealing not in goods, but in favors. And men get richer by graft and pull than by work. That's exactly what comes to mind when I think about the World Economic Forum and these ridiculous policies and metrics. Just these bureaucrats just high on their own bullshit, just trying to put in, I guess, compliances that prevent them from having to actually do anything and just sucking the life force and energy out of everyone else. [Speaker 1] (1:24:35 - 1:25:28) Yeah. The way I've described it is it's an elitist and anti-human vision. So elitist in that it's a few people, a relatively small group of people compared to the overall population, who believe that they have the right and perhaps the responsibility to impose their view on others. And it's anti-human in that it views humans as parasitic to the planet. That, wow, if we just didn't have as many people, it'd be so much easier to control this stuff. We wouldn't have to worry as much about pandemics or the climate issue. It's not about human flourishing, to use terminology from Alex Epstein, who wrote Fossil Future. Human flourishing is a distinct kind of way of looking at things, of how can we help people thrive in their lives. That's not the tone that I get from reading their stuff. It's more about we have all these dangers. We need to limit human. We need to limit human impact. And of course, there's always hints of truth to it. But where that limitation of human impact ultimately goes is something tyrannical. [Speaker 2] (1:25:29 - 1:25:54) Yeah, but true incentive to maintain and to grow and to build and to make things better comes from private ownership. It comes from private property. It comes from having skin in the game. It doesn't come from, oh, no one has a hand in the matter. No one owns anything. This is all public. No one's incentivized to want to maintain or care or be sincere about what they do in that setting. [Speaker 1] (1:25:55 - 1:27:16) Yeah, I totally agree. That's one of the arguments I actually make in my book, An End Upside Down Liberty, against government, which is that government is always collecting taxes. It can print money whenever it wants. Whereas another type of service provider in the world, because governments just provide services and it's compulsory. If you have a voluntary service provider, like a plumber or a lawyer, you end up signing a contract often. And in that contract, you specify what the price is, what happens if the service provider doesn't do a good job, you can terminate the contract. And what happens? That's a free market exchange of consenting adults, to use Murray Rothbard's terminology, consenting adults interacting. And if people do a bad job, then consenting adults are going to find someone that does a better job. So there's this financial incentive to perform. Governments don't have that same incentive. And there's a whole Austrian school of economics that I've spent a lot of time writing about. And I've actually spoken at the Mises Institute, M-I-S-E-S, in Alabama, where they even talked about the idea that government has a perverse incentive. Where if you don't do well in a certain department, so let's say students are getting poor grades or they don't do well in standardized tests. The incentive is, well, we can ask for more money from the government. We need to improve our test scores. So if you do worse, then you can actually demand more money. You end up with the perverse inverted incentive. [Speaker 2] (1:27:17 - 1:27:29) Yeah. I mean, people on a mass level, I believe, have been programmed to receive based on their level of need as opposed to the level of ability. And there's this whole process of inversion that flows through as a result of that. [Speaker 1] (1:27:31 - 1:29:01) And the Great Reset is, to me, the ultimate inversion in all these areas. It is a comprehensive inversion of everything. And I divided up my book into six segments of societal change. They don't do this in their books. But to me, it was just a way to synthesize it and try to simplify it for people. But one is culture. And this is all the equity stuff and justice, equality. There's the political, which is big government. The economic, which is they want more regulation. They want this ESG stuff. They don't want pure capitalism. Klaus Schwab talks about stakeholder capitalism. That's not true capitalism. That's not free market. It's controlled. Then there's a technological element of it, which is the transhumanism, metaverse stuff. There's the climate stuff, which is weaponizing people's interest in the environment to ultimately control, just like we saw with COVID. And then there's the metaphysical, which is they're not talking about a spiritual awakening. To me, that's the big omission. It's more along the lines of what Yuval Noah Harari says, which is the idea that there is a solar spirit, that's over. And even though they don't say that explicitly, the fact that they omit a spiritual revolution to me is a huge red flag. So you end up in this, to me, this dystopian, totalitarian state. What's their vision? It's this atheistic, non-spiritual world where the government's controlling everything. And there's a surveillance system with the technology. You don't have a free market and everything's got to be fully equal. Like the story Harrison Bergeron, you end up with these horrific dystopian visions where if anyone is different than anyone else, that's a problem for some reason. [Speaker 2] (1:29:01 - 1:29:42) Yeah. It's funny, man. There's no doubt, come to the place where we have the awareness that this is a problem, that this exists. But you don't have to play the game. You don't have to play into this game. It's not an overarching thing where everyone has to buy into it. The way that, in my opinion, that we actually move forward is withdrawing your power from this game, from this system that obviously wants the worst for you. Just finding ways to move on without it. Sure, it's going to take a certain number of people are just unconsciously following along. But for those who are aware of this, withdraw yourself from the game altogether to any degree that you can. [Speaker 1] (1:29:43 - 1:31:01) Yeah. I mean, I've contemplated this, what's the way out? And I think there are two categories. One is that, and I think this is much less likely, that people within the system who are super ethical and have high integrity are able to dissolve the system from within. I personally think the system's too corrupt, but I know people are trying. That's one path. The other is more like what you're describing, Joel, of just withdrawing and having almost like a parallel society. And it's feeling more and more like we're going to need that because people now are living in different realities. There's the reality of this conversation or things like it, even if not everyone agrees with everything we've said. It's the more pro-freedom version generally. And then there's the version that believes the New York Times is the Bible. That's just the best way to describe it. That everything that they say is the view of the world, the way the world actually is, they're incompatible visions. So how can we live under the same governments where certain things are being imposed on people that don't find the vision to be ethical? I mean, I was just seeing headlines about incandescent light bulbs being banned. I mean, when they start controlling the things that you can have in your home, like benign things that you can have in your home, now it's really adversarial where, I mean, things are being imposed on your lifestyle. I don't know how that's going to play out, but it's getting more serious. [Speaker 3] (1:31:02 - 1:31:17) I live in California. And so there's definitely a lot of that. I've tried to order certain things online. They're like, yeah, no, we can't deliver it to your zip code. Whether it's incandescent lights or like a gas powered lawn and garden equipment, it's pretty wild. [Speaker 1] (1:31:18 - 1:31:19) Do they know what's best for you? [Speaker 2] (1:31:19 - 1:31:48) Yeah. I'll tell you what, I moved from Australia to Mexico in February and there's none of that at all. For being here now for four or five months, globalism ain't going to take hold here for a long time, man. And it's like we can get so caught up in just our boxes of the primarily Western world, being America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, et cetera. But there's still parts of the world where this just isn't a thing. It's not even a thing, which is interesting. [Speaker 1] (1:31:49 - 1:32:20) Right. And to me, that speaks to the indoctrination because I was in it. I was in the system. I know what the system teaches. And you get people who are very intelligent in certain ways and well-meaning who are totally bought into it because that's what they've been surrounded with. So it's almost like being a fish in water and not realizing you're water until you step out. And then not only that, but the one in water looks at the person out of water as if he or she is evil. It's not just a passive thing. It's like, no, actually, wow, you're on the wrong side of history. [Speaker 3] (1:32:21 - 1:33:19) And again, if that person were to question any part of the water that they're swimming in, it's a threat to their livelihood. It's a threat to their identity. It's a threat to their reality. And going back to what we said earlier, do you have the capacity, the psycho-emotional fortitude to even go there, to even contemplate these things like, oh, everything I was doing, everything I was learning, I don't know if it's aligned with who I really am. And then like you said, you felt lost. You're put through the washing machine of life. You're like, fuck, I got to change it all. And then relationships fade away and people think you're crazy and you got to go through that process. I mean, it is a huge step on the hero's journey. So most people don't have it. It's why there's limited whistleblowers. It's why not everyone is a whistleblower, because what does it take to be a doctor to go, you know what? Everything I learned in medical school, much of it is redundant and useless. [Speaker 1] (1:33:21 - 1:33:31) Let me add to that also. People might have to accept that those that they thought were the good guys on the public stage are actually the bad guys. And that's really hard for people. [Speaker 2] (1:33:33 - 1:33:42) Especially when they've been public about it and they've planted stakes in the ground and there's self-image attached to that. That's death and rebirth right there. [Speaker 1] (1:33:42 - 1:34:00) And I can understand it as someone who's put stuff out publicly that I hope I'm right about things. I try to caveat as much as I can, but I don't want to mislead people. And there is a human tendency to defend a position. So whenever that happens, I'm like, okay, why do I believe this position? I have to go back to the first principles. [Speaker 3] (1:34:01 - 1:34:31) Yeah. But again, the humility, this is where I like that word being humble is like the humility that we don't know everything. And so you can state your point and how you deliver your point is one way. And then go, listen, take this information, do with it with what you want, do your own research. And there's also the possibility I could be wrong. That's different than like, I have the truth. I know the answers. You're wrong. You're evil. There's just a different way of communication that I think people don't have that level of nuance and discernment. [Speaker 2] (1:34:32 - 1:35:01) Yeah, totally. Mark, bro, this has been an awesome conversation with you the past 90 odd minutes. We really appreciate you being here and being able to have this kind of level of dialogue of the conversations we want to have on this platform for sure. I just want to ask you in brief, what's next for you? What's your goal? What are you trying to, what's the ideal for you in terms of where you move in your personal life and bringing these personal interests and these books into something that can, I guess, really sustain you and propel you as well? [Speaker 1] (1:35:02 - 1:37:12) I ask myself that every day. I have not figured it out yet. But I really extricated myself from almost everything in my previous life. It's like a rebirth in many ways where maybe I'm in the cocoon before I figure out what's next exactly. Because I've had to get out of my old way of thinking and let go of my old assumptions and things like that. But I am on two nonprofit boards. One is called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It was founded by Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut, and studies consciousness. So things like energy, healing, telepathy, channeling, all that stuff from a scientific perspective. So controlled studies. That stuff is important to me because it shifted my perspective back in 2016. And I think there's a scientific paradigm shift that's needed in academia because they dismiss a lot of the stuff. So I'm involved with that. And I'm also involved with an organization called the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment, which is literally under construction outside of Asheville, North Carolina in the mountains. And it's going to be a beautiful retreat center where various teachers will come, where you can do a personal retreat and maybe conferences and things. So it'll be a gathering place in a very remote area. So I think a lot of good can come from that. But beyond that, as a board member, it's not the day to day. So I don't know exactly what's next. I still find myself drawn to a lot of the questions that you guys were asking me. Those are the questions that I'm trying to figure out myself. What are these agendas? Who are the non-human intelligences? What should we be doing in our lives based on who we are? What exactly are we? I'm really trying to figure that out. And I'm also trying to figure out what are the paradigms that I'm still holding on to that are incorrect and I don't realize it. And that's why my books are all about upside down, because I end up having my own paradigm shift of realizing something's upside down. And then I write about it. And I know there must be other ones that I still have. And I wonder if they're really important ones, things that I'm missing. And because of that, I end up spending a lot of my time researching. So it's been seven years basically of so much research, just listening to podcasts, reading books, trying to think this stuff through. And that's a long way of saying I really don't know where it's going to take me. [Speaker 2] (1:37:12 - 1:37:27) Cool, man. Well, bro, writing five books is a huge accomplishment, man. Incredibly prolific to be able to convert that knowledge into something that's useful for someone else. And just keep doing your thing, man. What else can I say? [Speaker 3] (1:37:27 - 1:38:04) Just much respect too, man, because you embody that saying from inspiration to execution. You get inspired and then it's like, okay, I'm writing a book. And there's so many people that go, oh yeah, I had this idea, or I'm going to do this thing one day. And then they never do. And so you are an embodiment of that, man, in your own awakening process and being interested in these subjects and going full on and then going, well, I'm not just going to hoard this knowledge. I'm going to compile it in a way that is meaningful to me. And then I'm going to share that to the world. So man, just a lot of respect to you for that, man. For sure. For sure. [Speaker 2] (1:38:04 - 1:38:07) And just for anyone listening, how can they best support you right now? [Speaker 1] (1:38:08 - 1:38:46) Well, if you're interested in learning more, my website has my basic info and it's just my name, markgober.com, M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. If you are interested in my books, they are all on Amazon and into Upside Down Thinking and into Upside Down Living and Upside Down Liberty and Upside Down Contact and into the Upside Down Reset, which Yerasimos is holding up. They are all available in hard copy, Kindle and audible editions. All the audibles, I read myself in the studio. So you hear my voice for a lot of hours. And my podcast series is called Where Is My Mind? You can get that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, all the major players. [Speaker 2] (1:38:47 - 1:40:07) Awesome, man. Guys, thanks for listening. Thanks for being here for the truth. We'll see you next time. They're the conversations I like to have, man. That's what we're about, here for the truth. Absolutely. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Just in closing, I want to highlight again, you know, if you want to really connect with us and connect with a community of like-minded values who are on the same page and who really are on the path of unlocking their innate gifts and their highest potential, then check out our membership community, Friends of the Truth. It is incredible value. And now we're doing six calls a month that you can join in on, including a Germany medicine study group, nervous system tune-up, an evolutionary astrology weather update on top of our existing calls of a guest expert Q&A, a live presentation, and a community hangout. I don't know what else I can say about this thing other than, you know, we've just tried to provide as much value as possible and give people the opportunity to really connect, get deep, have personal growth, build community, get educated, you know, in just an awesome, freaking awesome space. So thanks for listening. Thanks for the time. If you want to get deeper, check out friendsofthetruth.co or go to hereforthetruth.com and press the membership button.