 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about looking for a hero. The final part of the secret is that you deserve to feel miserable. Look at you, it's a robotic, so vain. Any bit of culture you have is ruined by self-importance and egotism. There is no doubt you all are in need of a hero. Someone brave enough to confront me and control me, but this will not come to pass. I am the villain you're stuck with besides what hero would want to save you. And finding it very, very close to home, like in the mirror. And it's in many ways anti-human, anti-life. It's just like, ah, humans or whatever, we should just enhance ourselves and forget about it. So I have this very skeptical conspiratorial lens of what's happening in the world. I think we need to be very careful about some of the things that might sound benevolent and maybe some of the people involved have a benevolent intent. But who knows, what could that do to our soul? It is love and light, but we've got to be tough and that's something I don't see as much in the spiritual world. That first clip was from the very excellent Malthy Buddha. And the second is from today's returning guest, Mark Gober, who came to talk about E.T. and wound up talking about a lot of other stuff as well. Stick around. I think this is a great conversation with a truly, truly great and important thinker. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sikaris, and today we welcome back Mark Gober to Skeptico. Mark, if you're at all familiar with this show, especially in the last couple of years, you will definitely remember the interviews that we've had with him. The first was a few years ago, Bach, he wrote this really amazing book and end to upside down thinking, dispelling the myth that the brain produces consciousness. And the implications for everyday life, or we should say really the implications for the sci-op that wants to tell you that that da isn't a da and that you should really take that seriously. But Mark does an awesome job, awesome job of breaking that down. He's also written several other books in this upside down series, but his latest really caught my attention. And even though we did an interview with him not too long ago, this is, I mean, this guy is really such a next level thinker. And it's just always fantastic to talk to him. But here's the latest one. Check this out because this is, this is challenging. And end to upside down contact, UFO, aliens and spirits, and why they're ongoing interaction with human civilization matters. Wow. I mean, that is really powerful stuff. Mark, welcome. Thanks for coming back on. Well, thank you for having me, Alex. You know, I was just teeing up chatting with you for just a second, and I was saying, you know, my big question when I get to this topic, and I always think about this, I never articulate it is, are we flying too close to the sun here? And I think all your books risk doing that. But I always wonder when we talk about this stuff, like, I don't have like a big huge profile or anything like that. But I am genuinely concerned when I talk about this stuff because, and we'll talk about that. But I prefer to kind of dispense with the bullshit and get right down to the nitty gritty is like, this is like a central question to our society, our culture, the manipulation of our society, our culture throughout time. And does there reach a point when, you know, even though you look around and you say, gee, other people are talking about this, for people who are successful and have made it inside the game like you have and I have, I know this is like a huge question to start off with, but it is the question, do you wonder, do you worry, am I flying too close to the sun? You obviously don't think you are because you published this book, but what do you think? Yeah, well, it's a great question, Alex. It's something I think about a lot because my quest, since I started this six years ago, had my personal, the beginning of my personal transformation has been to get to the truth because I realized that whatever I thought about life was completely wrong and it's been a quest since then and it's ongoing. So that's been my compass is to try to get to the truth. And I get pulled in these directions and I just kind of can't stop it. So I do try to be mindful of doing it in a diplomatic way as much as possible and just presenting facts because the things that I'm presenting are all publicly available and I try to draw some lines between things and try to help connect the dots, but I'm presenting things that are already out there. And I've made the decision repeatedly that it's worth doing it because I think as a society we are so far away from the truth. I mean, myself included, I don't feel like I understand it. It's just mind blowing that we're all going through life with these big central questions about our existence. Who are we? Why are we here? Who do we coexist with? How does it all work? We don't know the answers to those questions. So to me, that's what matters in life. I mean, there are other things that go along with it, but I haven't been able to pull away from that. So I've just decided to go with it. Well, that's great. And you know what I think you do really well and you've done it again here is you kind of bounce back and forth between that big picture stuff that you just talked about and the practical implications for how you're going to go about living your life on a day-to-day basis. And I think that's terrific. And I think that's what separates this whole field that we're in here, this podcasting talking about this. It separates the infotainment stuff from the genuine quest for the truth. You know, I started so long ago, I felt like I was flying under the radar to just be able to talk to the people I wanted to talk to. Infotainment was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted to be able to talk to these people and the game has really changed now to the extent where it's all about, you know, entertaining people, which we have to do to a certain extent to have any kind of voice at all. But what I really admire about you is what you just summed up right there. I really feel that I'm talking to someone who's trying to figure this stuff out for his own personal betterment to like, what is this all about? Not just to entertain somebody. That's been my goal. I want to figure it out for myself because I'm really curious. And then I get this urge to share it with people. And that's how the books come about. I mean, I didn't know I was going to write a first book and then people were asking me, what are you going to write next? And I said, I have no idea. I would say that right now. I go with what's next, what feels right. But it is like you say, I want to understand the truth because if we don't know the truth, how can we really know how to live and to prioritize things in our life? Well, speak to that for a minute. I know that before we dive into the whole alien thing, and I got a million million, you know, we can go in a million directions there. But that's a really important point to start with is this, how do you understand that? How do you understand your personal view of why the truth is important, how to pursue the truth, what that means on your own spiritual journey, on your own moral. If people are uncomfortable with spiritual on your own kind of moral ethical journey. Well, I think about this all the time, every day. So it's evolving. But my sense is that we exist to evolve our consciousness. So we're evolving not at the bodily level so much as we are the spiritual level, the aspect of us that inhabits the body, if you want to call it a soul, the part of us that extends past this body, that seems to have perhaps an infinite life. And we are going through a reincarnation cycle. There's lots of evidence from the University of Virginia over 2,500 cases of children with past life memories. And if you combine that with the evidence of the life review and near-death experiences where people relive their lives at a time when their brain is either barely functioning or completely off, they become the people that they impacted in their life, they get to feel those feelings. So if you put those together, it teaches us that we're perhaps evolving through our lifetimes. So morally, you always talk about this, Alex. The moral imperative. I think there's something built into the nature of reality itself. And Dr. Bruce Grayson at UVA has found in talking to near-death experienced survivors that this is natural law. It's beyond morality. This notion of a life review and what some would call the golden rule of wanting to treat people well because we're interconnected. So that is part of what guides my compass is wanting to treat people well. And that can manifest in many ways. I think getting to the truth helps with that cause because when people are more awakened, they will align in that direction and might not be as susceptible to some of the traps our society places on us. And one of the things I wonder more and more is, I don't have an answer to this, are there things in society that push us in a direction where we make decisions that are not in our best interest, even though we might have a good intention and we're manipulated. So I've more and more in that mindset, you've been in that mindset for a while and trying to uncover that because that hopefully could, if we uncover it and get to the truth, then there might be less suffering or less unnecessary suffering. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to just stick to the spiritual because I'd love to. We could talk about it all day. But to me that is the essence of the deep spirituality that this quest for truth brings because as you pointed out just a minute ago and you keep circling back to it because it's central to the whole thing is how could there be any goodness, any realness? If it isn't fundamentally true, I mean, if it's not fundamentally true, then it can't be fundamentally good. It's got to be tainted. So to constantly be searching for what is true is the same as searching for what is good. I don't want to get too philosophical, but they're almost indistinguishable and I think this deception part of it, I don't think it has to be something that we are angry about or we're out. Go get our AK-47s about. It's just another part of the truth, of the reality that we have to understand. Does that conform to how you've seen it? Yeah, and what you're describing in a way is this dichotomy of good evil that many talk about. And another way of describing good evil in the way that I look at life is that it's just a mechanism of evolution. It enables us to learn things so we can get really angry about stuff that's evil and to a certain extent that makes sense, but at a higher level there is learning to be had from it. That doesn't mean we ignore the manipulation or the evil, it just means we put it in the proper context that this is part of reality and it's important to acknowledge it rather than put our heads in the sand, which is one of the phenomena that I've been witnessing a lot of that really concerns me, especially in the spiritual community. Let's just look at love and light, which is part of the story, but you're going to miss a lot of the potential manipulation if you're not attuned to how deception works. Okay, so with that we've been bouncing around the topic long enough because all the points that you're making are brought forward in a new way, in a challenging way for a ton of people in this book and end to upside down contact, UFOs, aliens and spirits and why they're ongoing I mean, every one of these words because ongoing, how long has it been ongoing? How do we know it's been ongoing? Is it, you know, and what does ongoing mean? Ongoing means they didn't even if we put a date on it like, oh, 1947 Oh, no, it's back for them that, oh, Bruce Fenton recently on, oh, it's 780,000 years ago. So if you go back, how far do you go back? And so anyways, and then interaction, I'm just taking the title of the book, you know, we could break down every, what does interaction mean? I can't stumble through this whole thing. We'll just have to have you tee it up. The finish the title with their, why their ongoing interaction with human civilization matters. Okay, Mark, again, I just get excited and I start rambling. Break down the title for us. What does all that mean to you? Well, Alex, I really appreciate that you focused on the word so closely because that's what I do when I'm writing the books, especially the title. Each word is very meaningful and I go back and forth with things. So I landed with that as the subtitle and so the series of books, which of course at the beginning I didn't know was going to be a series. It's all about things being upside down, meaning that the way that we look at X, Y, and Z is off is off base. And I had come across the topic of UFOs and other intelligences that exists seemingly in the universe in my past research. But and even when we last talked, which wasn't that long ago, I didn't know I was going to be writing this book. I wasn't planning on it. But I was, for whatever reason, I got pulled down this rabbit hole. I knew I knew pieces of it, but not some of the details that I talk about in the book. But I realized this notion of contact broadly is really important. And when I say contact, people usually talk about UFOs. There's an correlation there that people usually associate. And that's part of it is that UFOs, whatever these crafts are, that's a big piece of the puzzle that there might be a non-human intelligence involved. But maybe it's not just UFOs. I mean, in near-death experiences people encounter deceased relatives, beings of light, spiritual beings and lots of other things. So that's when I talk about contact and UFOs, aliens and spirits. I'm talking about all types of contact with other intelligent beings which suggests that humans are not at the top of the food chain. Which is, to people on your show and in your audience is probably not such a big deal to think that way. But that's a paradigm shifting idea for those who haven't thought about it, because there's this implicit sense that human beings are the top of the intelligence food chain. What if we're not? So that's what I get into in the book. And this notion of their ongoing interaction with human civilization and why it matters. The word ongoing implies that this is happening now and has been happening for a very, very long time. How long I don't know, but it seems like it's very, very far back. And that's one of the things I examine in the book is the evidence for not just UFO or non-human contact since the 1940s, because we've had a lot of cases since then, but way before that, way back to ancient times and who knows maybe even earlier. And it seems to be happening now and probably will be going through the future. And in terms of why it matters I mean, if there are other intelligent beings, and we should get into this, how intelligent they might be. It might be incomprehensible how intelligent these beings are. It means everything. How can we examine anything that's happening in the world without thinking in the back of our minds while there are these other intelligences who might be interacting with us in ways that we can't ordinarily perceive with our eyes. And before I pause, I want to give an analogy that I mentioned in the introduction to the book and I mentioned it in one of my other books as well because it relates to spirituality in general. The notion that we are, we have a limitation in terms of what we can perceive naturally. And the analogy I give from the novella Flatland where people are living in a two-dimensional world, like a flat piece of paper. Now if you imagine for a second that a sphere intersects with this two-dimensional world, a three-dimensional object intersecting with the two-dimensional world, the people in the two-dimensional world will perceive a circle because they're only in two-dimensional land. All they can see is that circle. They don't see the full sphere. And what I wonder more and more is if we're like the people living in Flatland who can't even perceive these multi-dimensional realities, we get a sliver of it. But so much more is happening and actually potentially interacting with our world that we can't perceive. So great. And before I kind of jump in there and take us in too many directions, you know, because I'm like rapidly jotting down notes as you're talking about this. But here might be a more interesting way to kind of approach this. Mark, as you kind of go forward with this book and you bring it out to people. And then you're kind of joining this public discourse that's going on, which is all over the place. I mean, this discourse on the UFO community and even people who are being sucked into the UFO community and never thought they would be part of that community, but now it's so much a part of the standard dialogue. What are the conversations that you are being drawn into right now that you think relate most to your book and the issues that you're raising in the book? What are two or three of them? I mean, I can spot some of them from what you just said, but I want to know what comes to mind for you. Sure. Well, one is what we're seeing in the public discourse these days with hearings about UFOs. It's becoming a more mainstream topic, even relative to a year or two ago. This is something that everyone's acknowledging that there's something going on and we might not know it. Maybe the government knows things that they're not telling us. That's what I think. But I'm saying the mainstream thinking now is there's something happening. So that's one area that seems to overlap with just general thinking in the world. I can't let you off even on that one. So you put one on the table. Okay. What's what's Mark Gover think about that? How do you look at that from this expanded view that you have now this conspiratorial view you have and this expanded view of extended consciousness? I mean, I juxtapose that to the hearings and I come up with one view, but I want to hear what your view is. I don't trust anything we're being told. That's my view. But it's in the public discourse whereas it wasn't as much as of a few years ago. So people are talking about the topic. Are they talking about it accurately? Maybe a tiny sliver? The fact that these crafts exist and they can do things that our modern technology can't do or maybe secret programs can do. They're acknowledging that, but I think much is being left out. The really important stuff is being left out. Yeah. And if I could just add on that point and I want you to tee up the other one so we don't just spend all the time here because we could. But they've done a very effective job of changing the narrative immediately. I mean, we can start with, you know, we got a name names like Lou Elizondo. It's a counterintelligence guy. I mean, why is a counterintelligence guy being the one to tell you about UFOs? It's fake from the beginning. It's Richard Doty 2.0. It's strawberry ice cream. It's the, you know, Richard Doty famous Paul Benowitz, unbelievable mind control of someone who just a flag waving American who spots UFOs on an Air Force base and in service to his country says, hey, don't you know what's going on? And boom, who shows up counterintelligence and they start playing these mind games on them. How would we see how would we understand the current round of what's going on as anything different from them from that? And if we wanted to, then what I'd say for Lou Elizondo is the first question is how is this different? Are you going to at least come clean that you were to engage in this kind of massive misinformation disinformation that's provable? And then, you know, that would have to be the starting point for anything you're going to say now. And, you know, I interviewed Colonel John Alexander a few years ago and I don't know that I trust or believe, you know, a lot of his stuff too because again, he's an intelligence guy, but at least on the Doty thing, he comes out and says he should be in prison. He should be in prison for what he admitted to. We don't have to prove it. He acknowledges that he went and did all this stuff to Benowitz. What he gives as an explanation for why he did it is a pre-disclosure explanation because that's the other things that play here, like with the hearings is we have to realize that everything before you know, 2018-2017 was before disclosure. So it was the official position was none of this stuff is real. So any kind of cuckification. Oh, that guy's just kooky. That guy's crazy. Was totally supported by that whole apparatus. But after that after it comes out in the New York Times then it's no longer that. So I've laid a lot on the table there, but not really. It's all in this same thing of like, not only why why would we trust them, but it's like, isn't the burden of proof on them to show that this isn't a completely rigged misinformation game. Yeah. Well, especially looking at the history of UFO disclosure. I mean, looking at Project Blue Book and just the history of deception and a lack of honesty. They're not, they have not been forthright historically. So why should we expect they're telling the full truth now? And when you put that in the context of everything that's been happening with COVID and all that other stuff, consistently we're being told things as true and they're turning out not to be so true. Repeatedly. So the burden of proof is on the authorities constantly in my view. And that's how I look at it and probably why I've been so motivated to dig in for myself because I feel like the so-called authority figures that we're supposed to trust repeatedly are not telling the truth or they're withholding the truth. And in order to get to it ourselves, I don't think we can just trust what the media tells us. Okay. So we have that. That's a great point. What are some other ways that you feel like this book is intersecting with the public discourse on this topic right now? Well, to me the other thing that comes up is what some would call a spiritual war between good and evil. And on the surface if you just look at what's happening in the world, the temptation might not be to think about supernatural forces. We see individuals on TV making policy that we may or may not agree with. Sometimes we find out that they're not telling the truth or that they were, it's very confident about things that they end up being wrong about. But what I continue to ask given what I now believe about extended consciousness and if you think about the brain as an apparatus that actually receives information or also could be perceived as a filtering mechanism meaning there's things that are blocked out but things that can get through then you might wonder how are people being influenced sometimes consciously, sometimes not consciously to work for forces of what you might call good or evil. And in order to answer that question in my view we have to get to the metaphysical good evil which is one of the things I try to get to in the book is that yes, there are multiple dimensions and yes, there are intelligences out there but some of them appear to be very benevolent and some are completely evil and to me that can't be completely disconnected from what's happening in the world. I don't know the exact connection but there's got to be something there and as we talked about in my last interview I tend to be very concerned about the erosion of liberties and moving toward a transhumanistic Orwellian world. Where's that coming from? And at the same time we're not there yet. We're not fully enslaved. We do have lots of freedoms relative to where we could be. So if it were fully evil we probably would already be in this enslaved state there has to be a balancing act too and that makes me really curious about what our role is in that and what I conclude in the book is that there's only so much we can control in the external world but what we can control is ourselves and what we decide to tap into individually that we're going to try to tap into what we call good and try to discern so we're not manipulated and I'll just pause there. No, don't pause there. Keep going. We got to know how you arrive at that kind of metaphysical understanding of good and evil as it relates to this topic. It is the, like you said, it is the fundamental question. How are you breaking down the data? And how is the way that you're breaking down the data how is it different from the way you see other people breaking down the data and because this is directly relevant to the conversation, right? Is it a blob of consciousness kind of thing? Is it do-it-thou-wilt kind of thing? Is it, you know, ET is good? Does it save the planet? Is it, you know, this is the discourse. So the fact that you're tackling this again, that's what I'm saying. This is so unique. It shouldn't be so unique, but it's tremendous that you're doing this. How do you break it down? How do you make the case either way in the book? Why do you come down the way you do? Yeah, there's so many directions I want to go here. Let me preface what I'm about to say with the fact, again, that our perception is limited and I want to talk about also the idea that our perception can be skewed by these intelligences. So something you've talked about in your show and I talk about in my books, because we have to start with this and we talk about good and evil. Things like screen memories and shape-shifting. So a screen memory. You had Mike Clelland on your show a few years ago. He's famous for his work with owls, where owls seem to appear at UFO encounter sites and then a person might go under hypnosis to try to uncover what happened during missing time that might be associated with it. So the person saw an owl and then a few hours go by and they don't know what happened during that time. This happens in UFO encounters very often. The time seems to be missing. There's a memory gap and they go under hypnosis to try to see what happened during that missing time and hypnotherapists might try to guide them and say, well, can you describe the owl that you're seeing? And the person will say wait a second, this isn't an owl. This is a gray alien. Okay, and it's known as a screen memory, meaning the thing that the person consciously remembered is not what is uncovered when the memory is more fully unlocked. And this ties into what many people have reported and even John Mack, the former head of psychiatry at Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner has reported in the people that he studied who claimed they had abductions that these alien beings could shape shift. That they could appear one way and then appear another way. And many people have anecdotally reported this. I mean, I can't show you the scientific statistical data on this, but it's reported repeatedly. Now if we accept that to be true then with regard to good and evil, we have to also be wary of the trickster beings who could manifest one way, but maybe they're not that way. So as in the quest to look at good and evil, we have to be very discerning and I don't have a great answer for that because these beings seem to be so much more intelligent than we are. If they had the ability to manipulate our memory to create missing time to appear one way to us, and I'll give some other anecdotes for my book again. Again, these are anecdotes, but it's come up multiple times where there's a sexual encounter with a woman and what appears to be a man. And then the woman realizes that that apparent man is some sort of an alien being but seems to be able to shape shift in a way that manifests as what the woman would consider to be attractive. This also happened with a man I mentioned in my book, Matthew Roberts, an ex-Navy guy who had an experience where the being was sort of like a dream-like state but not fully a dream. The being was sort of switching its face and then landed on his ex-girlfriend during a sexual encounter. So I give that preface to say we don't know what we're dealing with all the time. We're dealing with extremely advanced stuff and I'll let you respond to that before I go on. Well, I guess I'd do it a couple of ways. You were so tuned into like such an important issue because I almost feel like I want you to come around the curve to the other side of it because what you've laid on the table is really great and that's that we have to have this level of discernment because we already have evidence of mental slash consciousness, whatever that means manipulation at this level far beyond what we know. But I guess I will babble on for a minute because this is like seems like an interesting point that I don't hear a lot of people talking about but you just laid it right out. I look at like Sir Han, Sir Han and anyone who's looked at kind of the old conspiracy stuff understands you know Sir Han, Sir Han is the guy who shot Robert Kennedy, right, assassinated and he's a Manchurian candidate. It's just clear today. It couldn't be clear that he's a Manchurian candidate and there's even evidence people have done the work that you can kind of pinpoint the time when he was pulled into the MK Ultra program and the reason we know that is like they found more bullets in the kitchen where Kennedy was shot were in the gun and number two, their eyewitness is there including you know like the old football player, Rosie Greer who grabbed his arm right after the first shot. All this stuff Manchurian candidate, Manchurian candidate. Where a lot of people don't go with that is if that was the state of the art technology of our intelligence agencies our alphabet soup intelligence agencies 60 years ago then where are we at and I put that on the table because as you're doing so okay now let's extend that to ET whatever that means who we understand intuitively by all this stuff and by reports is more advanced on that continuum of mental manipulation consciousness manipulation we have it all over the place like you're saying screen memories and my go to on that is always it related to the ones you mentioned in the book but you know Ray Hernandez his wife is having this incredible kind of traumatic encounter and he walks halfway down the stairs and then he turns around he says oh that's nothing the voice inside his head his own voice says oh that's nothing that's silly go back upstairs and go to bed and he does right so that's like classic to me but that's repeated over and over again or you look at you know I won't go on and on because you already made the point we're making the same point but what do you think about that in terms of to what extent have we advanced our technology since we seem to be imitating or we seem to be in this technology exchange with these advanced civilizations that pops up all over the place but I don't hear a lot of people talking about the technology exchange as it has to do with consciousness manipulation what that what might that mean and then back to the bigger question that you're raising is how do we then still apply this level of discernment that you're looking for and I'm looking for and I'll just end with saying I think you're spot on 100% that we still can it is still very possible it is the essence of who we are to always to be able to discern if we apply the right internal processes to ourselves so what do you think about some of those issues yeah well I think about mind control generally one at the level of secret programs that have been declassified but they're probably other secret programs that we don't know about and I say all this stuff as someone who's not an insider like I don't have any government experience I'm just I'm guessing and there's probably a lot I don't know I should just clarify that but we know what was going on with MK Ultra in terms of being able to manipulate people and dissociate the personality that's key is to create multiple personalities where the personalities are essentially hidden from each other and when you could switch one personality on it would have certain traits that had been programmed into it so you could have someone that is a secret killer but then it's other personalities is a normal person so given that that technology exists again it's very difficult to know what's going on in the world because you could have someone who has had a mind control has been under going mind control really not due to their own consent and one of these programs gets switched on and we don't know how advanced that is so I think about it from that lens of what individuals are being programmed and maybe that could relate to ET maybe they're tapping into dark forces I don't know but so there's this individual level and then the other level is collective mind control and when I think of that it's like what's been going on with COVID how can they use mass media and fear in particular to get people into this state where maybe they're having a mini dissociation because it's often called trauma based mind control and I think about that a lot because it's the next trauma after the next on the news and what's that doing to put people in a fear based state and then making them more susceptible to whatever the messages are it's almost like a hypnotic form of mind control so that's what I think about in response to your question Alex okay but Mark at the end of the day you come down on the side of good as being kind of the meta why how do you how do you get there with all that other stuff that's going on well it's an inference it's an inference based on I guess two things one is my own internal state because that's the only thing I truly know and I know what my emotions are like and when I get pulled into a dark state versus a light state and I just have this intuition that the light state the love state is the one that we're headed towards and that intuition seems to be validated by looking at the people that have had spiritually transformative experiences so look at the near-death experience people say it's ineffable I can't use words describe it but it's unconditional love people say that in certain meditation experiences certain psychedelics I had a glimpse of that that I talk about in my second book and end to upside down living and I've been asked about it only a little glimpse during meditation where I felt this sensation I don't really know how to explain it but it was beyond love it was just this total bliss out so given all of that I think that we are that's the high level is good but there's something in between that's getting in the way very clearly and this leads me into what I was trying to get at before before I got into screen memories and all that of where I think I'm talking about things that I don't see as much elsewhere but I see you talking about it a lot which is what evil actually is how dark it is and you've gotten into some of the ritual abuse topics on your show that's something that I've looked at and talked about in the book it's a level of evil that most people cannot relate to because most people are in my view are pretty good I mean everyone has the dark and light within them but some of this stuff the violation of other beings is incomprehensible and it's a paradigm shift to learn about that stuff and what I find is that people don't want to go there which is understandable because it's so disturbing but it's also very problematic because then one spectrum of good evil is really off base and I see it happening all the time where you might see people in the public who they appear to be very mean or something and that's evil and like yeah sure that's not good that we could say that's bad but on the spectrum of what real evil is it's nowhere close and when you know that that level of evil exists it opens up the possibility of all sorts of nefarious things which start to make the world make a lot more sense and it becomes very conspiratorial but you can't get there unless you know that this level of evil does exist so for me because I've known about some of this stuff for a few years and I mentioned it very briefly in the Liberty Book the one that came right before this I do it more extensively in this book but I always try to play this balance of wanting to express that these things exist but not turning people away and I'll say one last thing before I pause and some of the feedback I've gotten about this book I want to skip certain parts which is interesting for me because I go into the details of what this evil means and one of the conflicts I had in publishing it was am I letting them off the hook too much am I not exposing enough I was concerned about that I wanted to give the essence but not turn people away and in some cases they even had to skip only small parts of the book it's not a major part but it's central to examining the world and thinking about good and evil metaphysically again, this to me is one of these central issues that is fully in the discourse right now and you're so brave, I can't think of any other word to say it to bring it to the surface like this because it's funny how it is hidden beneath things whether it's either the space brothers thing and I was just listening to an interview with a very excellent Ryan Bledsoe I feel like he's trying to be totally out there but at the same time however you talk about this it just becomes contradictory in terms of the space brothers they're here to save the planet they're here to protect us but I'm not going to talk about shape-shifting reptilian aliens that are raping people, I'm not going to talk about the lost pregnancies, I'm not going to talk about the deception and I just had an interview with Dr. Bob Davis who was part of the free survey at Ray Hernandez and they did a survey kind of mirroring the near death experience survey work that Jeff Long did which I think is incredibly important but when Bob Davis and I were talking one of the things that came up is I kind of pushed him as like hey let's say you're right and it's 80% positive what the hell does that mean anyway if there is this other benevolent part out there that is really really bad or what we'd call evil until we kind of the statistics don't really matter what matters is what you're grappling with in a really important way is what is the nature then of this structure of consciousness like I'll kind of pound it on the same issue but it is the central issue it's good ET versus bad ET yeah well one of the things I highlight in the book when I talk about the free study and I should commend those who did the free study because it's one of the few examples where we have many many cases of contact UFO contact but beyond so for me as a researcher I don't like to focus everything on one anecdote and that was a great way to say look there's 3000 plus cases here they do tend to focus on the positive cases but what I highlight in the book is yeah it's a small percentage but they do say they're malevolent beings some of them and you don't need a lot of malevolence to create big damage so I mean this is also something I talk about in the liberty book where and if I'm getting off topic let me know but I think this is also central where you could have just a small number of people with really horrible intent and if people around that evil don't see it then they can be easily manipulated and thinking they're doing something that's good and just following orders and not being able to comprehend that there could be deception behind it so it's critical that yeah there could be a lot of benevolent beings and they're there seem to be if you just look at the many many cases people have had positive experiences but there are some negative ones too and we have to think about what that means in terms of what they could try to enact and I'm now thinking about this you know the theories about alien abductions it relates to what you've been talking about what our abductions are they good for us are they bad for us and you had some great interviews several years ago that I went back and listened to with the Mary Rodwell David Jacobs debate on this so Mary Rodwell and also John Mack to an extent viewed abductions and I assume your listeners know about this but an abduction is when a person is taken apparently aboard a craft and they have all sorts of procedures done on them this is typically against their will although some people argue that at a soul level they agreed to it but it doesn't appear to be voluntary at the time and sperm and eggs are taken there seems to be a hybridization program that people talk about where the alien beings are creating a species that's part alien part human it sounds insane but even John Mack from Harvard was talking about this and like crazy implications but the question is what is this good for humanity or bad for humanity so in one of John Mack's books he says that you know he gathers from talking to lots of abductties that this is part of an evolutionary insurance program where if things really go haywire on the planet and they need to repopulate then they're going to have a species that's hybrid and some people have also talked about seeding other planets with this hybrid species that the advanced beings are doing so that's one side of it that's more benevolent sometimes people come back with miracle healings and sometimes they have spiritual awakenings as a result of this stuff and I should mention the work of Kenneth Ring who studied near death experiences University of Connecticut he wrote a book called the omega project in 1992 where he compared near death experiences to UFO encounters and he found that there were many commonalities even though the experiences themselves were different there was an element of trauma to both of them in a near death experience you almost die and with the UFO encounter in an abduction you're you know operated on and so forth but typically people became more spiritual and not more religious but more spiritual is what he found following these experiences in Kundalini awakenings so these are very positive things in terms of awakening the planet because if a person has such a shift their whole life changes and that's what Dr. Grayson finds at UVA as a psychiatrist their priorities change when they have these spiritual awakenings so that's the positive side of all this Dr. David Jacobs from Temple University and also Bud Hopkins another UFO researcher was sort of on the side have a different take on these experiences which even John Mack would acknowledge there was a lot of trauma that can come from this and if people didn't properly integrate the trauma he acknowledged they could have a really hard time with this this could be bad for their psyche but where Jacobs and to an extent Bud Hopkins go is that this is this is a dark agenda they're not creating hybrids to help humanity but this is about planetary takeover that's what David Jacobs talks about in his book Walking Among Us written in 2015 now what I often think about is David Jacobs wrote that book in 2015 John Mack passed away in 2004 so I wonder what he'd think now because David Jacobs has said that what he's hearing from abductees is that their story is changing over time it has shifted where the abductees are starting to and I will preface this by saying it sounds insane they're telling him that they're training the hybrid beings to be more human because since they don't live here they don't really know how to interact and he gets into some crazy sounding details transcripts of what these abductees are saying teaching human alien hybrids the very basics about how to be a human and to live on this planet he actually calls them hubrids the advanced hybrids and the goal he says based on what people have told him is to create a hybrid that is indistinguishable from human beings on the surface but they have some kind of an enhanced mental capacity an ability to use mind control and telepathy and they tend to have a lack of empathy which could be considered on the on the spectrum of psychopathy like a psychopath and so he sees this in totally a malevolent way that they're here to take over now I don't know where I fall on this because it could be that some of all of them are true to some extent you could have different species that have different agendas you could have different beings within different species that have different agendas just like on our planet we see a big spectrum we have psychopaths and we have saints so it's very difficult I notice a tendency for people to try to make this a monolithic phenomenon that it's just one thing they with a capital T I think it's diverse and so I'll pause there yeah and I appreciate you pausing but don't feel like you have to because I mean you're on a roll and it's going to be dense no matter how we do it so let it fly don't worry about that of course it's going to be level 3 that's the only way we can talk about this I mean we could take any one of the points that you just made and dissect them for like an hour I again the one thing I'm always coming back to in the back of my mind is this central most important thing about this book upside down contact and that is how do you then process this go through the discernment process that you're going to going through and try and figure out how you live your life you know do you just kind of give up and say well I don't have any control forget it whatever the my alien overlords want I guess I'll just wait and see or do what they'll wilt you know let's be very crony and about it just hey none of this has any meaning anyway it's all being run by some other you know we're in some kind of illusions some kind of simulation just do what you want for own gain and I would even take like that kind of speculation it break it down into this one point that you made again we could break it down 50,000 different ways but the whole thing a psychopath and psychopathy is so interesting the way that it's worked into our culture because a lot of people would take the proven aspects that you document in the book upside down contact and you would say only a psychopath would do that and they would therefore conclude that these can only be understood as malevolent beings and someone else would do exactly what you did and say well it kind of depends I don't want to put words in your mouth maybe you didn't do this but it kind of depends on perspective I mean is like in our whole you know kind of post-pandemic world that we live in the whole thing is globalization is globalization good or bad is one world government good or bad is the idea of 147 tribes running around with hatchets chopping each other up and some of them even have nuclear bombs that can destroy the world and you look at our history of how close we've come to actually doing that you know which is which is worse you know what's worse I'm not saying I buy that at all but I'm saying that argument can be made outside of in my opinion the psychopathy kind of argument you don't have to be psychopathic to say hey that's a better kind of thing on the other hand we can look at true psychopathy and you know the snakes in suits and how someone with just kind of almost normal negative intent you know because like the kind of intent that we see like the serial killers and the John Wayne Casey we can't really wrap our head around that other than in some kind of metaphysical kind of thing but we won't even go there because it kind of bunnies the waters but just in terms of greedy mf's that just want more and more and just have an insatiable appetite for power and money and control much more relatable you've been around those people in your professional life you know that you can still go to lunch with them and have a good time with them and hang out on the weekend with them and have a beer they're not like impossible people to deal with they're just stuck in that way and that so there is this more nuanced view that we have to have of what psychopathy means in our world and also in just in terms of from a practical standpoint because I so appreciate that you again have this practical business as well as kind of legal frontline soldier kind of mentality that understands this that it is complicated and it is a get things done kind of world and that takes different people and in some cases you would tend to move towards the psychopathic person as somebody who is can't be very focused on getting things done so as you look at the spectrum this is a difficult question but and I think you've partially answered it with multiple species multiple agendas multiple agendas within multiple species you know kind of thing but how do you overlay that then on upside down contact this idea of motivation and maybe even psychopathy or you know ill intent kind of thing yeah well I agree with a lot of what you said what if we look at the far end of the psychopathic spectrum I mean I'm thinking things like ritual abuse where there is an attempt to invoke dark beings through the torture of another human or other living being and actually trying to you had an interview with Tom Zinser talked about this to actually build an attachment through the dissociation of the personality to summon dark beings to me that as far as what I've come across nothing is more psychopathic than that the desire to totally violate someone and metaphysically I don't know well I have lots of questions about what that means is there an attempt to extract the positive energy from human beings for their own benefit and it's a purely selfish energy that's kind of where I come out if we're on the far end of the spectrum where it's purely selfish and there's no hiding it but then we can move in the middle of the spectrum where it's like well I'm going to do this thing it might harm some people but it's for the greater good and I'm ultimately being compassionate like this utilitarian perspective which might have aspects of psychopathy because it lacks empathy in certain areas so you could have people in the world who really think they're doing good with their policies because they're thinking in a purely collectivistic way this is something I talk about in the Liberty book because I get really concerned especially with the spiritual community going overly collectivistic we're all one yeah that's true except that we're all individuals within the oneness in the minute you ignore the individual that gives permission to say well the individual doesn't matter and the worst crimes you could think of in history is when governments go fully collectivistic whether it's fascist or communist the individual doesn't matter at all so somewhere within there there's the desire to do good but there's a manipulation it becomes psychopathic and then from there I think you move into the quote-unquote good spectrum of you know whether it's just a normally good person or someone who's fully saintly and I also want to touch on what you asked about living life practically and how to deal with all this there's a story that I constantly come back to when I was after I wrote my first book and I'm upside down thinking I was looking a lot at like how to live life if you accept post materialism basically consciousness doesn't come from the brain and I got into a lot of the non-dual teachings and the spiritual teachers and there's a lot of good stuff in there one of the teachers I often talk about is Dr. David Hawkins who was a top psychiatrist who became very spiritual and allegedly reached very high states of consciousness and one of the stories he often told was that when he was elevating and reaching these states of enlightenment there was a phase when it felt like it was just him and then there was this it seems like a being he calls it a knowingness a voice that came to him and said look you've transcended all of your personal karma all power is yours take it and what he said in a split second because this just came to him he said wait a second if I am everything why should I take this power over others and then he said he transcended and went to the next level now I don't know if the story is true but I love the moral of the story he claims he was shown the beings that did not take the temptation and those that did take it and he said the ones that did take the temptation had a horrible karmic fall because at that level the consequences apparently are worse if you make a bad decision so the point here is that these forces seem to try to get us in our weak spots that's a theme that seems to be coming up everywhere they can manifest as the really dark explicitly psychopathic where it can be this just take the power over everyone and I wrote about this in my book an end upside down living when I cautioned about spiritual teachers because there's lots of examples of the fallen guru that takes the temptation and it's usually money sex or power Mariana Kaplan talks about that because she's analyzed these gurus where it gets you in some way so this goes back to your question about the spectrum of you could be really good but these forces might come in and try to tempt you in a certain way and it gets to where initially I wanted to go with all this about how I think about living I do think it's about the evolution of our consciousness but part of that is like the protection of our consciousness the protection of our soul which starts to get into a lot of what the spiritual traditions have talked about but I feel that way more and more because it seems like these forces are intruding upon us especially if we look at what's happening with COVID and the jab and all this stuff where it's like it's impeding on your life and you're either going to go along with it or you're going to set boundaries and that's an important part of living as well as just trying to achieve unconditional love they both go together you mentioned Ken Ring and you mentioned in the book and the near-death experience and stuff the deception like that's why I was so intrigued with why people didn't talk about Lou Elizondo as if it's a real kind of thing when it's clear that it isn't so back to the Ken Ring before I digress too much and you might remember this and I don't remember if it was in the book or not but so Ken Ring is looking at the parallels between near-death experience and abduction experience while a lot of things are the same and it gets this group of people that have had this really positive thing and they say wow the space brothers are here to save the planet and as a matter of fact if we don't get our ass in gear the planet's going to be destroyed in 1988 1988 and independently they kind of several of them come to the same thing and lo and behold there's this woman in England and she isn't even associated with Ken Ring she has you know 1988 becomes the date hey man that date comes and goes and where is it and there's like a million examples of this but people are so susceptible to like it ties into so many things you're saying and then I'll just let you riff on it however you want but we got to be as much as we want to believe that they're here to save the planet and help our environment discernment I'm not sure that really stands up to a careful scrutiny yeah yeah all good points I mean my view and approach to all this is to present all sides of the evidence because I really don't know I mean I know based on my own personal experience which is super limited because I haven't encountered these beings at least as far as I can remember I haven't because you never know what was been blocked out of our memory and I do come across this positive space brothers theme repeatedly that they are going to save us and don't worry because they're going to take care of everything and when I hear that I get really concerned when it's like don't worry you don't need to do anything that mentality and I actually end the book and end to upside down contact with that theme of yeah there could be positive beings and maybe they're going to come and maybe more advanced beings are incarnating on the planet like people are saying but that doesn't take the onus off of us as individuals I think it starts with the individual and it's a collection of individuals who are elevating that's going to do it the minute we offload it to someone else I think we get into big trouble yeah and I take it even one step further and let's break it down to another level of logic and reason and you know that's where you come at this stuff from you are a smart guy and you're not afraid of applying your intelligence to this thing and it comes through in the book you know where you're kind of reasoning this thing through it's like question number one with on ET in everyone's mind is you're being deceptive by not disclosing right if whatever you say then come forth you obviously are in charge you have power go ahead you want to riff on that for a minute no go ahead I agree with you yeah yeah so no tell me what tell me what you think about that because again it's like such an obvious dull point but it's which is kind of what your books are about is like dah you know upside down thinking it's like they're in control they could they could land on the cliche is land on the White House lawn they could do that at any time right and they're right why aren't they not doing that and that is in of itself a form of deception so that automatically should bring about some skepticism so I agree with you and it it reminds me of what a lot of spiritual teachings talk about when they talk about these other realms they just say be very wary because they can these are beings that can manipulate you they can appear one way and they're not actually that way so many of them say like avoid psychics avoid channeling and all that because there are potential dangers I think there are maybe good beings too but how can we discern some of this stuff if there's so much more advanced we might it might have a difficult time sometimes although like you say there are hints and we have to learn those hints like when they start getting into grandiosity you know I always think about Robert Hastings when I do this and he's somebody you mentioned in the book but just for folks who don't know terrific guy and I had an email exchange with him I was trying to get him for an interview and he's not in good health to do interviews at this point but he has done the most complete review of UFOs in nukes that's his thing and you've seen him on a bunch of TV shows and stuff like that and he's interviewed over a hundred hundred and fifty of these kind of senior military personnel who were at these Air Force bases and other bases or flyers and stuff like that that were protecting the nukes and there's this interaction between UFOs and nukes and I don't want to bury the lead here he says 20 years ago I thought that this was like the UFO giving us a warning shot across the bow hey guys come on step up to the plate be better human beings protect the planet come on we can roll in this together and he said it's shifted and I'm paraphrasing but now he says I've kind of come to understand it as it's kind of in our mutual interest that you don't do what you're doing and that just so struck me to the core particularly in this kind of level three conversation we're having that's not necessarily malevolent that isn't necessarily bad but it might be a level of reality that back to the very beginning of this discussion until we're willing to and able to explore that that truth that potential truth it totally it switches everything we don't have a chance of even pretending we can understand it if we're not even willing to balance those two because they take us into completely different places right yes so two things I want to say and I remember what I was going to say before because it's related to this on the topic of UFOs and nukes and I should just say that book is unbelievable it's like I don't know 500 pages long the amount of detail he has from interviewing over 150 people at these facilities it's hard to read that and I think something's going on and it's one of those things I mean I spent so much time reading since I especially since I left my job there's so much information in books and people are busy with their lives I can understand it but the information is there and this is one of those incredible resources but what I came across in my research not directly connected to what Hastings said is Philip Corso's son and so Philip Corso for those who are not familiar with him he wrote a book called the day after Roswell published in 1997 and he allegedly there's a lot of controversy over whether or not this is true he was involved in research and development using the technology collected after the Roswell crash in 1947 and allegedly a lot of that technology shows up all over the world in stuff that we use because they recovered at the at the crash site so he wrote this book talking all about it he even saw a great alien that he describes in the book and other lots of other crazy details he passed away but his son is still alive and is talking about it so in his son's interview within the last few years he talks about what his father told him about Edward Teller the father of the atomic bomb and what Teller told his father was that the alien beings became much more interested in Earth following those detonations because the detonations somehow impact other dimensions which impacts these beings so they have been showing up more often since the World War II era out of their own interest maybe it's mutually beneficial too but they're going to protect themselves because it's actually harmful for those dimensions to be altered now I don't know if it's true but it ties into what you're saying it's an important consideration that they might want to help us but it's helping themselves too and then another topic the one that I was going to mention earlier is a notion that I've heard a lot with regard to the allegations of the Galactic Federation which I don't know I mean I can't prove it I have no experience with it but I hear it talked about a lot and the Farsight Institute you interviewed Dr. Courtney Brown from Emory University who runs a separate remote viewing group that looks at historical events and also current events using remote viewers to try to figure out what's going on and one of the comments he made in a recent interview about the Galactic Federation which he claims has come up in lots of different remote viewing sessions is that the beings are benevolent but they don't want to intervene because it's our karma to learn for ourselves I don't know so if you apply that to the UFOs and nukes is it maybe sometimes they're intervening on it to try to help out and give us a warning like Hastings initially thought but in other cases they're letting us learn on our own I just toss it out there as one of these other theories that benevolence but it's like not a fully interventionist benevolence if that's true yeah I got three points I want to make sure I hit them all and apologies to anyone who can't follow this conversation too bad the first is did you happen to catch my interview my multiple interviews first Fenton yes so again I'm not like driving a stake in the ground and saying that's totally true or anything like that but the reason I think it's like super important what he's bringing forward because is that one I love the way he's approached it and trying to tie science to it to at least add some credibility to what he's saying but the really important thing is he's flipping the script with the date so he's saying okay 180,000 years ago the terrarium the experiment the zoo begins with them coming down and starting a genetic engineering program on humans but what is also said as part of that is hey man it sounds so modern day like hey there's one group over there and they're pretty good and they want to do stuff but ooh there's this bad group underground oh and then they blow up the ships and then let's come back and we'll blow up them and you know I mean this is like Star Wars and it's 780,000 years ago so I think like one of the places that takes me as it relates directly to your book is consciousness evolution question mark you know are we how fast are we evolving but then even more importantly I would totally agree with you forget about that this is a drama this is a play that's playing out it's the personal the very personal close your eyes and look at that spot between your eyes and you are in another dimension right now so you don't even have to speculate about all this other stuff it's internal to you and that's all you have to worry about kind of thing but I want to hit all these points I don't know if I should go through them one by one and pause on each one or team all up okay I'll team up the importance there is oh the other thing I was going to add is I did an interview and actually Gordon White a long time ago I did an interview with John Brandenburg for Skeptico and there is even more I guess concrete if you want physical evidence he's a astrophysicist no he's not an astrophysicist but he's a physicist and he's detected a nuclear explosion signature from Mars from what he estimates to be 250,000 years ago and he goes look I've looked at this every way possible this is my thing I know how to do this you know he's kind of very distinguished mainstream career and he says this doesn't fit background radiation it doesn't fit anything else these isotopes only fit one thing that we know about and that's nuclear bombs and here they are and we can date them back to 250,500,000 Mars kind of thing so I just thought that was interesting as it relates to Bruce Fenton 780,000 years ago and again in the spirit of what you're doing you just got to throw that out there and say okay what would if that was true then how would that change how we think about and for example I think about the good bad thing to me it suggests that we are playing out this drama that's been played out forever and will continue to be played out forever and our true soul journey is outside of this space time and outside of the space time that the aliens are really we're all in this drama you know it's like when I talked to Whitley Striever a long time ago and I remember you know he's got all over the place I love him but I said you know how close are is this other his answer was immediate he goes oh they're right they're right here they're right at the tip of our nose and he was saying that not just from a physical standpoint obviously but from a consciousness you know how far above are they you know he's no no they're right right in our soup you know like does ET have an NDE kind of thing so that's point one hold on to that the other point that you mentioned I think is so so interesting I don't hear it talked about enough is like there's all this controversy like oh my god he's such a scam that's fake and look I you know debunked it here and there what's never factored in in my opinion is a before disclosure after disclosure perspective if you go look at the debunking and you put it in now our after disclosure lens it looks crazy the debunking looks crazy because it's like oh you know well there wouldn't be any advanced technology there wouldn't be no we don't know there is advanced technology we know there's the tic-tac we know there's this we know they lied for all those years it's proven you and there's never a retrenching of the debunking you know of the debunking of saying oh you know this idea that we had space junk and we were you're bringing it to different companies that were already and the other thing I hear is like hey you know I can show you the path for integrated circuits or lasers and stuff like that well of course if you're going to distribute the technology wouldn't just give it to some Joe Schmo over here is working on something completely different you'd give it to somebody who's already you know halfway down the path so that's point number two is I don't think we do a good job of debunking the debunkers in a after disclosure kind of world but the third one you can comment on those first two or not but that's last one I really really want you to comment on because I think it in so many ways is at the heart and soul of this book upside down contact and that is do you think we are at some kind of crossover point and I've always been resistant to that idea but like when we talk about like you were talking about not only we were talking about Hastings but when we're talking about the abduction thing and the process and the program and all the rest that stuff and you look at where we're at from a genetic standpoint and of course that ties into the pandemic you know and then what I was interviewing best back to Bruce Fenton you know independent of anything else he says yeah you know they had to take a jab in order to come to genetically modify themselves in order to visit different planets and they weren't able to do that you're like oh my god you know are we reaching some point that is that crossover point in terms of genetics where we're going to be able to genetically modify and turn into grades or whatever are we also reaching that point in terms of technology and AI a lot of people are thinking about and then what does that mean relative to how you're understanding the core heart issues of upside down contact okay I'll start with the first one and if I left something out just let me know so this is regarding Bruce Fenton's work and I mentioned him briefly in the book and he's doing fascinating work and this notion of ancient contact and this has been happened this happened before what came up as you were talking Alex is the notion that we are very new in our current iteration of society to DNA we have this junk DNA which is the majority we don't even know what it is so I feel like there's a lot to be discovered there about our true origins and what we are and it probably does tie into Bruce's work and I looked a lot at the ancient mythologies ancient texts from different religious traditions I mean some of this you never know what's disinformation and what's real I mean you always have to be skeptical of that but very often they were having supernatural experiences with beings that seem to be very advanced and if you correlate the language to what they were saying and say well this sounds a lot like what people are describing today they just use different language like the book of Ezekiel people often talk about he talks about creatures and fiery chariots in the sky I mean who knows but there are lots of cases like that and the ancient aspect of this is just so critical I don't feel like I fully understand it also in the Hindu tradition in the Vedas they talk about Vimanas these flying saucers essentially that were everywhere so that's on point one point two with regard to Corso I mean I looked at a lot of what you were describing Alex when I was reading his book and evaluating the debunkers and I think it was Dr. Michael Sala who wrote a counter to the debunkers it's I think a free PDF he had online and I was thinking along the same lines as you it's like these debunkers their arguments aren't super strong given what we know now I mean I don't know what happened to him but also listening to his son talk he's available he has a lot of conviction and apparently his family has had to go through a lot like CIA showing up at his house I mean paraphrasing and he asked the question in one of his interviews why would they do that if there was nothing there and apparently on his deathbed his father Philip Corso said I wish I hadn't written this book because of all the all the flak his family had to take so that's significant I mean I don't know what happened your third question about are we at an inflection point basically and I like you have had a resistance to this because basically at every point in time people think they're at the inflection point I do think there are differences here because we're at a different point technologically although if you talk to people who believe in Atlantis and things like that they'll say well they were advanced like we are but let's say this iteration of humanity we have a level of technology now where advanced surveillance is completely possible like the craziest conspiracy theories people were talking about decades ago they're not far away where yeah you just need to use this microchip or you just got to take whatever we tell you and then you can live in our world and by the way it's mRNA I mean things like that it makes you concerned given the rest of the context on its own it sounds crazy but if you see that these beings are involved in genetic modification and some of them seem to have negative intent I think a lot about what's happening in the world and whether there is some kind of dark agenda or maybe a gen does I don't know if it's monolithic or maybe it's monolithic at some level of consciousness but it manifests as like mafia families but there is a movement toward people being less free and also less human this transhumanist idea that we should just be something else or merge with machines as if what we have is efficient there's this movement away from the natural I continue to see and it's in many ways anti-human anti-life it's just like ah humans or whatever we should just enhance ourselves and forget about it and it's taking away from some of the core spiritual essence so when I look at this in the context of everything I've learned it's incredibly nefarious and you see little hints of it showing up in different parts of society but when you look at it from this lens I think it's super evil what's happening so I have this very skeptical spiritual lens of what's happening in the world I think we need to be very careful about some of the things that might sound benevolent and maybe some of the people involved have a benevolent intent but who knows what could that do to our soul and I don't know the answer to this but could there be something that keeps the soul from evolving as much because we take away from our innate experience those are the kinds of questions that I have what kind of answers do you have and then I'll tell you my answers what do you think but I think we have to be very wary of all this stuff and like I said earlier protect the soul, we have to defend ourselves and I do see that as a spiritual duty some people would say Mark you're being selfish and individualistic I see this a lot and there's divide in the spiritual world about it but I think the individual is a vehicle through which the spirituality manifests the one mind some would call it this universal love is manifesting through a set of individuals so we're both the collective and the individual and you have to protect yourself so that you can be of service I talk a lot about this in my second book like I asked the question what is the overall intention of your life in that book and I try to get to the answer for myself and I give a long answer in the end but the first sentence of it is paraphrasing myself is that we are here to try to perfect ourselves as much as we can so that we can be pure vessels for this greater intelligence to be of service and that means we have to look out at the very skeptical of the things happening around us and not just take what the expert says because that person's on TV and sounds really nice we really have to question every narrative and to me if the last two plus years haven't proven that what else will I mean every narrative has I don't need to tell you about that but we should be questioning what they're pushing on us when they say this is in your best interest we need to ask ourselves first is this in my best interest and I notice some people just kind of want to go along and it takes a lot of energy to do what I'm describing and it takes a lot of thought but to me it's essential So how does that manifest in terms of personal practices in your life and I want to tag it with spiritual practices because I want it to be broader than that just how do you do that? Well I'd say I would divide it into two categories one is probably traditional spiritual practice so I do meditate and do breathing exercises and stuff like that and the general one which is just learning I want to learn as much as I can because then I know how to navigate better when I have more information and that's a practice in the yoga tradition they call it yana yoga the pathway of knowledge and wisdom but that's a practice to me I totally can relate to that I think that's awesome if you will what does that learning mean to you because I could just speak to myself I can do learning and get in a rut on my learning too is that I'm not broadly looking at developing myself spiritual the great spiritual traditions the great spiritual masters that have come before can and I know you're totally into this but can provide great learning but at the same time current events your book can be all your books collectively your people email you and talk to you can be truly transformative for people who haven't been open to this information didn't even know about it or weren't open to it before and you bring a different thing on it so how do you decide how to learn it's a great question and it's evolved for me in these last six years and even before that professionally it's a trial and error process that's the way I describe it the path is trial and error and it's like you touch the stove and you realize when it's hot and I start to pick up those patterns of what rabbit holes not to go down I like to look at everything first even things that I don't think are true I want to know why someone believes it because usually they have a real conviction if it's not totally disinformation some people believe things that aren't true and I want to know why where did their error occur because I want to find that for myself it's a skeptical process but also an open-minded one where I want to take everything in and I try not so I've also been looking into the psychology of reasoning a lot recently I studied psychology and undergrad but I'm trying to understand the world that we're living in and how smart people can be fooled by things and there's this psychological phenomenon known as motivated reasoning where if you don't want to believe it potentially proves your point you'll stop there and say I'm good I don't need to go any further it's happening everywhere but it's being aware of those cognitive biases that we have because we all have them they're kind of innate into our built into our biology and it's likely for our survival as a biological organism to have these shortcuts but they can lead to biases that get us away from the truth so it's a constant questioning process and I mean Journey has taken me on so many different paths like at one point I was I wanted to know all about this really dark evil stuff which is taxing to learn about that it's not fun to do it but there was this point where I'm like I just have to know what's going on here and it's like you cringing reading pages and then I got to a point where I just didn't need to learn the details anymore so it's knowing when to pull back and say I know enough here maybe sometimes I'll revisit this in the future but at a certain point you pull back from certain topics like this 80-20 rule in 90-10 you've got the essence of it and you don't need to go as far into it and there are other areas where I need to learn more and then I mean I look for things that seem to have practical value to my own path and at some points that's learning the spiritual enlightenment path if you want to call it Ken Wilbur the philosopher has this phrase that I like to refer to a lot he calls it waking up cleaning up and growing up that there are multiple lines of development that we have and they're relatively independent of each other so waking up is yeah I want to achieve the oneness but you could have this enlightened teacher who hasn't done the growing up or the cleaning up and they turn into some kind of a fascist we've seen that happen a lot so I try to hit these different areas in my own growth and especially over the last two plus years when COVID hit because I should add this I was never interested in politics at all before 2020 zero interest the only time I had some interest is when it related to patent law because I was involved in that space professionally I couldn't have even told you if it was right or left that cared about stuff I just cared about that specific thing and then I realized well I need to learn about this you can't be ignorant about these topics so I've had to dive into that in order to learn how to navigate but also if I'm putting information out there to people I'm trying to express the truth as much as I can and there's a real obligation in that to present the truth and not to lead people astray so the reason I've written multiple books and did a podcast series is that I do something and I realized I was missing something I'm like I'm incomplete I gotta let people know if they're reading my stuff and then it turned into something else so there's a sense of a duty to try to present the truth as much as possible so for my journey it leads me into those other areas too that's really awesome Mark I am so appreciative for you sharing all that and you know just to recap some of the things that I took out of that that were particularly insightful is this kind of ability to move from the telescope to the microscope and to do it fluidly and with purpose of this kind of metapurpose of wait there isn't me in there like your first book upside down thinking that voice inside my head is real and it is directing me it seems to be directing me from my life experience I can't deny that and that's kind of the meta you know the meta-knowledge that that's what's going on and then to you used the term earlier and I forget where it was but kind of cleaning the process or you know the mechanism this tool that we have of our soul inside our body and our discernment thing we have to keep that tuned up which is the other part of what you're saying with your meditation work spiritual work it's like hey if I don't have that together then I'm not going to be able to go and refine it in these other ways I think that's just really terrific and the way that you put it I thought was really helpful and I think it will help people understand where you're coming from in these books because it is a reoccurring theme in your books wouldn't you say Yes and I mean I'm directing this myself as I go in the journey like I'm able to speak more clearly about things that have happened in the past because I have the hindsight view but as I was going through it I might not have had the same clarity and I'm sure the same will be true in the future so one thing I would add to it this notion of tuning up the individual I think like physical exercise is an important part of that too and diet like keeping the physical vessel tuned is really important and in my second book and end upside down living is about four of the yogic paths which I've kind of combined into what works for me and I say that the spiritual path is basically these four areas one is the wisdom knowledge path the other is the service path the other is the devotion and the other fourth one is energy which can be physical exercise meditation those sorts of things so knowledge wisdom selfless service devotion and energy I try to hit those four at all points as much as I can awesome so finally as we wrap things up that is so inspiring and so positive so fundamentally uplifting relate that if you will to this book which can be challenging like you said people skip over I'm sure people will be skipping over maybe the whole book like I don't want to go there but the book and into upside down contact UFOs aliens and spirits and why they're ongoing interaction with human civilization matters so overlay if you will because it really is the whole thing we've been talking about how you can do both how you can manage both this is one of the challenges in the spiritual path I'm appreciating more and more which is paradox the ability to hold contradictory or seemingly contradictory ideas together in tandem at the same time and acknowledge that they both have truth to them and they're not mutually exclusive so I say that and I'm harping on it because there's a lot of darkness that exists and there's a lot of good stuff that exists too to me comes back to the beginning of our conversation that it's important to be aware of this stuff not to get too pulled emotionally into the darkness but to know about it almost in an unemotional way at times that can be helpful because the emotions can skew our logic to acknowledge that it's there so that we can steer our lives and hopefully our society in a positive direction but I don't think we can do that unless we acknowledge that these truths exist so back to your very first question about it my concern about writing a book like this and really all the books I don't think there's a choice I don't think there's a choice in this we're gonna have to get to the truth otherwise we'll be stuck in a manipulative loop and to me what's what's the alternative to the truth with that context I totally agree and you know finally kind of from a silver linings playbook kind of perspective you know look what's look what's happened to us for all I and I'll turn this into a question but I'll start with myself the great reset for me has been unbelievably horrific in terms of what it reveals but in a way I already knew what it revealed so it just kind of confirmed it for me but there was a silver lining to it too I'm outside so much more I'm outside all the time because it's like that's where I want to be I want to be outside I want to be living I'm in nature I'm closer to explicitly close closer to my family and my kids not in a way that bugs them too much I hope but just in a way of like why am I sweating about the little stuff the great reset is my great reset it's my personal research I'm not gonna let them own that reset and I think I've spoken with many other people who do see it the same way and it is that path that hero's journey that you're talking about it's walking up to the edge of the abyss and looking in and not falling in and looking in and saying I will be stronger I will be better because I must and what do you think about your great reset well I've certainly had one and I left my firm I gave notice to my business partners in December of 2019 and phased out of the firm over the first few months of 2020 so I had this intuition that I needed to leave my job after I become partner spent 10 years working my way up I was in a great situation great people the smartest in the industry and what they do I mean ideal if you look at it from my old world view but I decided I was going to leave and I wasn't sure what was going to be next it wasn't like I was going to a competitor I just said I need to pursue this other stuff I didn't even have a second book in mind at the time and then I went on I went on an Ayurvedic retreat in New Mexico I went on two silent meditation retreats for about a week each little under week each one with Adya Shanti and another with his wife Mukti so three retreats in five weeks in early 2020 which was a form of a reset for me because I couldn't sit still for 15 minutes before that so that got me into meditation for about a year after that I was meditating for on average probably five hours a day just sitting feeling this whatever energy coming through learning a lot to but also just sitting and it felt like a bleaching that's the best way to describe it if you imagine rough waters the waters became a little more still and so that that was a big reset for me but it was also reset in terms of a new paradigm shift like I said I wasn't interested in politics or any of the worldly stuff at all before and even when I got into spiritual stuff I was metaphysical in the reach enlightenment which all is very important too but then I realized I got to understand what's going on in the world and that was a reset understanding the extent of evil some of which I saw professionally I saw some systemic horrible stuff which aligns with what's happening in the world corruption that most people would say no that's not possible no it's possible there's such corruption not every person but that phenomenon exists I started to see it on this bigger level and it's brought me down my own path which has been incredibly enriching as much as there's been bad stuff in the world that's caused a lot of trauma and death and sickness for sure that's happened and mental issues for me it's been very enriching I will say the hardest part of it for me has been the fact that our society is so divided in terms of the way people view reality and that makes it practically difficult to interact with some people when you're literally looking at a different world for me that was a little bit easier with the metaphysics because you could have a different view on consciousness and still talk about what's happening in the world now you can't especially once your eyes are open to the conspiratorial lens you're in a different reality and it's difficult to relate to people in the same way people that I like in many ways and I'm mentioning this because I hope your listeners can relate it's a tough time in that regard and that's challenging but probably for some kind of enrichment as well to see what other people are in their journey have compassion for them I'm sure there's stuff I don't know about right now that in a few years I'll say Mark wow you didn't see it but at the same time not getting sucked in because of that not getting sucked into the dark energy and not conforming just because other people around you are so one thing I want to say Alex before I forget it because this is important because I have a slightly different view on spirituality than I used to and I alluded to this before about protecting our soul more just in my thinking about like this idea of a spiritual warrior having that kind of a mindset and this relates to my you know I used to be a competitive tennis player so that's how I used to be there's something in that competitive mindset that can be applied to this it's it is love and light but we've got to be tough in this especially when you're dealing with forces that are they infringe upon our lives they don't just exist independently these darker forces so we have to be tough we can't be weak and that's something I don't see as much in the spiritual world that's awesome I totally love that and you know the other thing you kind of touched on is this kind of go along to get along kind of stuff and that's what you're talking about and what I'm talking about as part of the great reset no we don't need to go along to get along we just had a we just had like two-year play drama of where that what that leads to you know and it doesn't mean we have to be out with torches and pitchforks and you know string up everyone we see I love the way you put it it's just internal toughness and it also is in a way that you're talking about you know the great reset in terms of people they're saying you know there's this more divide well you know the positive spin on that is you were probably wasting your time with people who were kind of stuck in a rut anyway and a stuck on stupid rut and it wasn't really going to go anywhere so now you have a chance to say okay I can I don't have to waste my time over there I'll find these people that I really can help lift me forward not just with inspiration but also with knowledge and that's what your books are doing it gets to this topic of alignment and we're like being forced to be aligned now there's really no choice you're living in one world with the other and that can be very rewarding when you're in full alignment and that's what happened with me professionally and I'm going to say this because I would bet some of your audience members are in the spot too where you're doesn't feel fully authentic and it's emotionally taxing that's what it came to for me where I was working on clients and it's serious client work where you have to be totally focused and I'm managing teams and working on bringing in new clients all this trying to do all the stuff and then I'm interested in the evolution of consciousness and reading these other topics on the side it got to a point where I couldn't energetically do both it was too much it caused an internal anxiety and when I released that and I gave the notice that I'd be leaving the firm shortly after that I said oh there's a second book here it was like there was an energetic block to what wanted to come in so I mentioned that because I don't want to say that we should just drop everything in our lives I mean for me it was three years of being in my job after being exposed to this but there's something about taking a leap at a certain point when it makes sense being rational about it but finding that full alignment it's critical. Okay Mark what's next here's a guy who said he didn't even think he had a second book after he wrote his first one but one how was this book going what's the reception but like so far and then where are you taking this project. Well I haven't heard from all that many people I mean surprisingly I just don't hear from that many people in general every now and then I do I have heard from people that they enjoy it and some people enjoy it but they don't want to look at the dark stuff as much but they're happy they know about it so that I appreciate that but I'm trying to get the word out about the books for sure mostly because I think the information and there's really important I would have written them otherwise I'm writing them because I think there's it's a way to concentrate information so you don't have to spend all the time that I spent it's in one place to learn how people are thinking about these topics so I'm trying to get the word out more and in terms of what's next I am I'm just constantly researching and I don't know what the next project is going to be I find myself most interested in things happening in the world these days like great reset etc watching the news very closely I have a telegram channel because my Instagram channel is Shadowban it's called Mark Gober official where I just share news articles it's not with commentary just stuff I'm interested in I share it because depending on the news you look at you have a very different view of the world and I'm just so curious about what's happening and where it's going to go and what kinds of mental shifts we're going to need to have to break through the deception where that leads I don't know but that's what I'm interested in right now well fantastic I think you're having an impact I hear from people somewhat regularly that are influenced or pay attention to what you're doing and what you're saying and I think it's we're also at a time where we have to be really mindful about how we measure impact and how we measure you know purpose that we're having because one we don't know we have no idea what the numbers are I mean they're totally manipulating the numbers that's clear that's just a given and then number two this point about the separation it's like you know you can't compete with some of this stuff that's out there that people are drawn to and it's like I don't know I mean it's just it's crazy kind of you know I mean my kids like you know the Paul brothers and you know the boxing all that kind of stuff it's like okay that's great you know that's fine it's like millions and millions of views or even you know Joe which I've experienced but it's like I don't know you get one point I think you're having an impact more of an impact than you might realize and how would you know anyway you know you wouldn't you wouldn't know if you are not and I wish I should add there's so many people that have had an impact on me that probably don't know that I listen they're nervous I mean you're one of them you know but you never know when you put content out there and I say that for people who don't have podcasts and don't write books you don't know the impact you have on your daily in your daily living and I'll end on this because it's super important I think about all the time in the life review what people constantly say is the little things are the big things that's what you end up evaluating in your life review so the story I tell in in one of my books is from Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas of a person who had a life review where the person remembered not being nice to the cashier and then felt how that interaction impacted every other person in line afterwards because it was an unpleasant interaction so the little things are the big things and everything we do in life right on that is so awesome and whenever I hear those stories they're so inspirational to me and at the same time just devastating to me because I realize how much growth I have to do you know and and that's the beautiful thing about that is it comes back full circle because the very positive part of that is I can change that I can fix that I can decide to be better I won't even say today I can decide to be better for the next five minutes you know because and that feels like real spirituality to me and as opposed to contact experiences where the angel is that it just it doesn't feel as real as just exactly what you just said just being a little bit better person for the next five minutes yep and then I will add one more last thing because there's the paradox of this is the over emphasis on compassion to the extent of not recognizing where one is not being compassionate and I see that so much in the world today where we're going to focus on this one issue to be compassionate in this one circumstance but we're going to forget about how that's not being compassionate and empathetic to everyone else there's this blinding that can happen with where there's two sides of it so I agree with you and then let's just be mindful at the same time my brother my brother we could we could talk for hours it's such an important topic and end to upside down contact Mark Gober's been our guest thanks again Mark thank you again Alex and thanks for all the work that you're doing thanks again to Mark Gober for joining me today on Skeptico the one question I'd have to tee up from this interview is understand there's some undeniable reality to the good ET bad ET thing how do we then understand ET as it relates to evil it's a big question but we certainly teed up a lot and she'll for answers in this interview so let me hear your thoughts I'd love forget to jump on over to the Skeptico forum but if you don't do that let your voice be heard otherwise that's going to do it for this one until next time take care bye for now