 Today, we welcome Mark Gover to Skeptico. Mark is a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist and strategist, turned author. He has a terrific book, End to Upside Down Thinking, which is certainly right up our alley here on Skeptico. Mark, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Alex. So I met you through my friend Rick Archer, who I can never give enough praise to for his very excellent show, Boot at the Gas Pump, which I think has really set the tone for so many of these questions about consciousness and transcending that consciousness, which your book is precursor to. I mean, you have to at least be able to address the topics you're talking about in terms of materialism and scientific materialism particular, but I thought Rick did a great job. And then I was super excited in this interview to kind of extend that and see where we might take that beyond that. So awesome. Sounds good. So I like playing this little game that I call Skeptico Jeopardy. And I particularly like it in this case, because as I mentioned, so many of the topics you've covered in your book, we've covered a million times on Skeptico, a million times with a million guests. And a lot of the sane people you've talked to as well. So really, I think the cool thing about that is it's an opportunity to kind of move past that and dig into some of the deeper questions in terms of the implications of an end to upside down thinking beyond the proof. But before we get there, you do have an interesting background. And I'm sure people would love to hear more about that. So tell folks a little bit about this. You're a super smart guy, a Princeton guy, and then also this outstanding tennis player. I mean, Silicon Valley, you kind of got it all, the whole package. Why do you want to throw it all away and pursue the spiritual path? Well, this was not planned. This is all actually pretty new for me. After I graduated from Princeton, I worked in investment banking in New York during the financial crisis. So that was 08 to 2010. I wasn't thinking about consciousness then at all. I left Wall Street and joined my current firm. It's called Sherpa Technology Group. Now based in Silicon Valley, I'm a partner at the firm. And we advise companies on business strategy and intellectual property matters. So when innovation is involved and patents in particular, we help companies with strategy and helping them transact assets. That's what I do by day. And it was in about August of 2016, when I first started hearing podcasts that exposed me to topics related to consciousness that I had never heard about before in any serious way. And at first I wasn't, it didn't like change my life or anything. But I started to hear enough independent accounts that a light bulb kind of went off where I said, wait a second, if these people are all not lying, and if they're all not delusional, then I need to reconsider things. And the more I looked, the more I realized that my paradigm was completely wrong. And that was really the paradigm of materialism. And it was because I hadn't been exposed to any of the evidence that I was now seeing. So after being exposed to new evidence, I had to rethink the paradigm. And it was a pretty disorienting period for me in 2016. I think I'm still recovering from that of just a completely new worldview. And I was basically obsessed with learning. And I think I still am. So I spent a full year just researching as much as I could, listening to podcasts, listening to your podcast, and many others and reading books and reading scientific papers. And it was at the end of that year, the summer of 2017, where I said, why don't I just put this on paper and into a book? And I said, I don't want to do that. That's going to be too much. And I don't want to put my name out there. So I kind of went back and forth in my head for a few weeks. And then a few buddies actually kind of pushed me over the edge and said, hey, why don't you try to do it? This was in June 2017. And I said, okay, I'm going to take the 4th of July weekend, which that year was a long weekend, and just kind of pull in investment banking style, work all night as much as I can for a few days and ended up finishing a significant portion of the manuscript that weekend. So over the period of July 2017, I ended up finishing a first draft of the manuscript. And now here we are in 2019. That's awesome. So you're balancing these two worlds. I incorrectly said venture capital, but investment banking, figure Silicon Valley and you're doing IP stuff. It's all venture stuff anyway. But you know, there's interesting things there that we can get into later. I mean, that's kind of my background, kind of my world, not the investment banking part, but more the entrepreneur, high tech part, you know, all kind of crossover. I think it's an interesting background because I think it grounds us in a way that other people can't get past in terms of the other side of materialism, which is connected. But I'm pulling a lot of different threads. Let's forget all that. Let's play Skeptico Jeopardy. Mark, I want you to pick our first topic and I'm going to read for people. In case they're not watching this on YouTube, I have up on the Skeptico Jeopardy board. Mind equals brain. Shut up and calculate. Level one, two, three. Wizards and saints. How? Where is my mind? Observer, believers, silos. Mark, what pick you? Talk choices. I'm going to go with mind equals brain. First one, top left. Okay. Good pick. Stick with the basics. So here's, I guess, one of the questions that your book makes the case that mind is more than brain. What do you think is your strongest evidence from the book? The listeners of the show are going to know the whole case. But let me point out, you make an outstanding job of it in the book in terms of laying everything out. And for people who are listening to this show, one of the reasons you're going to want to pick up this book is this might be the best book to hand to somebody who is kind of a normie in the regular world and is really wondering whether they can step past this mind equals brain stuff. Because you really lay out the evidence in a very, very compelling way. What do you think is your strongest piece of evidence that you go to for people right from the beginning? Well, thank you for saying that, Alex. I did write it for a person who might not be familiar with these topics. So I'm glad that you felt that way as well. In terms of the strongest evidence, to me, it's actually not one piece of evidence. It's the fact that there is so much in independent areas. The fact that we have sci phenomena like telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, remote viewing, and survival phenomena like near-death experiences, children with past life memories, mediumship, and after-death communications. When you put it all together, combined with many of the arguments that people like Dr. Bernardo Castro make, which is kind of a philosophical argument that we could never verify the existence of anything outside of consciousness. So a more skeptical perspective is actually one which starts with consciousness as the foundation. When you put it together, that to me makes a strong case. But within those categories, I think there are maybe two that I would give you that I think are the strongest that I would probably start with, actually three. Number one, the fact the US government ran a program for more than 20 years and spent over $20 million on remote viewing and had successes. I think that is really important, and that tends to strike people when I tell them that if they're new to this. But a recent paper that came out in 2018 by Dr. Etzel Cardenia, an American psychologist, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association. It's a meta-analysis of many side phenomena. After decades of controversy, American psychologists published this article. That, to me, is really significant. Third is vertical out-of-body experiences in the near-death experience phenomenon where a person has cardiac arrest, for example, and we know from cardiac arrest studies that blood stops flowing to the brain. Sometimes people report being outside their body and they report things that those who are not in near-death experience state verifies being accurate. Sam Parnia had a study in 2014 in Resuscitation Journal, which documents one particularly striking case of that. And it's very difficult to explain unless there is a functioning consciousness outside of a functioning brain because there isn't a functioning brain. Great. Well said. Let's go back to the board. I know your audience is very familiar. So that was the super quick version. No, great. That's great. Great stuff. Great stuff. So where should we go next? How about how? Let's go to how. This is the question I think that I get from people, whether they are able to articulate it or whether you just see it brewing in the back of their mind is, how can this be? I'm sure you run into this a ton in your world. A lot of successful people. I'm there. I made everything. I'm in New York. I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm successful. My career is going well. My family is going well. I would know about this if it was true. You know, when you talk about your story, Mark, I love the way you talk it so matter of fact, but you have to realize at this point that that is rare. It is rare that people confront evidence that contradicts their belief and then they go, well, gee, I guess I have to get to the bottom of it or I have to change my beliefs. Most people don't go there. Most people are stuck in the how can this be mode? At least that's my experience. What do you think? And then how do people get over this? I think it's always important to remember how little we know. Throughout history, we've seen people develop almost an arrogance thinking that they know more than they do. We have example after example of this. We can talk about germ theory, for example. The notion that microscopic bacteria or viruses could make you sick or kill you, that was a ludicrous idea at one point. And then with the advent of the microscope, now it's common knowledge. Galileo versus the church, we've seen paradigms shift. So I think this is just part of the human condition. But it's also pretty inconvenient to shift one's paradigm. And I can say that from personal experience. It was not easy. It took a lot of effort. And it really rattled me. And it's not everyone would necessarily want to go through that. So actually having gone through the experience myself, I can understand why it would be difficult for people to make the shift. And actually it's been interesting for me to watch those close to my circle friends and family, because not all of them dove in as much as I did, but they've been taking things in piecemeal. And I've seen their transformation happen in a much slower manner. And that might be what's happening throughout society is you get a piece of data and then you kind of forget about it. It's like, oh, wow, the US government ran this program. And there are declassified documents that say it's real. That's interesting. And then you go about your job. And then you kind of there's this back and forth that I was doing at a really rapid pace, but maybe other people are doing it more slowly. So it might just account for a shift that will take a long time. Yeah, I think what you say really has truth there that I've experienced. And one thing I've always said is that in some ways, I think people are smarter than they sometimes appear. Some ways are a lot dumber than they sometimes appear. But in some ways, they're smarter in that a lot of times people run across this information, and they've really run the traps in their mind. And they've said, you know, this really collapses everything that I'm about. It changes my religion. It's probably going to change my relationship with some of the people I'm closest to. No, don't go there. And they put on a front like and they give some kind of lame excuse, but they're kind of thought through that they don't need to touch this stuff. Have you experienced that in other people at all? Or what do you think? Yeah, a close friend of mine, Dr, I talked about some of the evidence with them. This was a few years ago and he said, Mark, I have a feeling you're probably right, but my life's pretty good. And I don't want to go there. I said, okay, I respect that my personal view is that if we don't align with reality, reality will come around to rock us at some point. So my perspective is let me learn as much I can about reality and align with it and see what happens right on, right on, right on. Okay, let's see what we got next. Now, let me take us someplace. I get to pick next. Where is my mind? Mark, what if I wanted to find a podcast out there? I needed another podcast. Are there any podcasts that have interviewed all these people that I've listed on the screen here? Many, many impressive. Dean Raiden, Bruce Grayson, Steven Schwartz, I have Brian Josephson, Jim Tucker, on and on and on, Evan Alexander. I can't go through the list if you're watching it online. You can see. Well, I would refer people to Skeptico and boot at the gas pump for sure. And there's also a new one, which is called where is my mind? It is my podcast where I've interviewed many people that I speak about in my book, many of the researchers that have been on this show and others. And the show actually has two formats to it. One is the raw interview, just like the conversation that we're having here. And those will be available on my website. But the main event is something that was inspired by my buddy from high school, who I reached out to around the time that my book was launched. And I was thinking about doing a podcast. He works in the sports TV industry, the only guy I know in media. I said, I'm thinking about doing a podcast. We started talking about it more. And he said, Mark, don't just put out interviews. Let's try to make this really mainstream. Trust me. And I was like chomping at the bit to get the interviews out a few years ago. But he said, let's do something like serial or this American life where it's like an eight episode series, almost like what you would get on Netflix, but audio where you're narrating a season, but you use clips from the interviews that you've conducted to back your points up. And even more than that, this show is a conversation between me and my friend, the producer, Matt. And he's kind of playing the layperson who isn't familiar with these topics, almost a skeptic. And we're having a conversation. And then we use clips from, Oh, well, here's more on telepathy with Dr. Dean Raiden and a clip played. So that's what's standing. Can't wait to hear that. I'm glad I I'm glad I asked because I think somebody has to do that. Somebody has to add the production value to this to bring people along. So great. Really looking forward to that. So the podcast is called Where is My Mind? It's available on all major podcast players now with the trailer. And as of August 8th, 2019 episodes will be released. Great. Okay. Where should we go next? Now, we've picked off some of the easy ones that might get a little bit harder after this. Wizards and Saints. Wizards and Saints, it is. So we just talked about the things that challenge people. And I think one of the things that is challenging about this, and it always has been really, we just kind of kept it under the rug a little bit, is that if we accept this extended consciousness, well, first we have to accept consciousness, which is what your book is all about. But then if we start getting into extended consciousness, we do have a sense that there may be some other entities out there in that realm and realms that we don't necessarily want to engage with or even want to try and understand how we would engage with. Demons, ghosts, fairies, angels, ET, spirits. Do people have concerns? Do they come to you after reading the book or before reading the book with concerns that they're opening themselves up to maybe some things that they fear are out there and they don't want to mess around with? I think this is a really important topic because once we accept the reality of these extended realms, there I think can be a tendency to become glamorized by it. And to see things that seem miraculous or to see someone channeling an entity that is clearly not the physical body and say, wow, there must be something there and almost kind of worship whatever is said. And I think there's a danger of the unseen because we don't know what we're getting. And this is I think a multi-dimensional universe, something that's probably beyond all comprehension. So when we're dealing with entities that are reported throughout history, but also many people in modern day, some of whom I've interviewed on my show, whereas my mind, who channel themselves, beings come through them, I think we have to be as discerning as we can be about the information that's coming through. And I'll give an example from Dr. David Hawkins, who's some, I love his books. He's famous for his scale of consciousness using kinesiology. And I'm not as familiar with the methodology there, but I'm very interested in his perspectives on enlightened states of consciousness that he apparently achieved. And what he always says about this topic is, he says, it's not that it's not real. These extended realms and these types of entities, there are different names for them. It's not that it's not real, but just don't go there because it's too difficult to discern what's good and what's not. And I think it's a caution that we should all have. It's interesting to explore, but we should just be wary because we don't always know what we're getting. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure how that fits with the first part of what you said, which is that we have to understand reality the best we can or reality will smack us in the face. You know, Dean Raiden, Dr. Dean Raiden, I and someone, both you and I respect a lot recently had him on the show. He's now very much into researching spirits. At the same time, he's somebody who says up until a year ago, that wasn't even in my awareness in terms of understanding what spirits might be. And I just wonder how we get there if we don't take on the challenge of trying to understand the mapping of that territory, which is the extended realms. And can we really just sit back and say, I mean, isn't it just as troubling or problematic to say, don't go there as it is to say, oh, grab your Ouija board and jump in? I mean, it's almost like they're saying the same thing in two different ways. Like, I know what that I know what that extended reality is. And here's what you should do. Don't go there. I know what that extended reality is. And here's what you should do. Go channel the demon. I think you're totally right. And there's a middle ground. But I'm raising the kind of the cautionary point because there can be a tendency to dive in. And we should just be mindful of what's there. But I'm super interested in it too. Interviewing Helene Wabe from the Institute of Noetic Sciences was one of my favorite interviews. She studies people who channel and they talk, they bring forth entities from many different realms. And the messages that come through have consistency. And so that is interesting that independent people are bringing through messages that are very similar. So I think short answer is, yeah, I'm super interested. We should be discerning, but I think we should be exploring it. Awesome. I'm tempted to follow up there. I'm like you, man. I love the scientific method even though it's been consistently misapplied. I think we have to go back to it. What patterns are emerging that you see that you find most interesting there in that mapping of the extended realms? It's interesting. I was just looking back through the transcript of my interview with Helene Wabe who studies channels. And we were talking about that exact topic. What she reports in speaking to many different channels is that the message is usually about an evolution of consciousness that we are kind of moving through collectively on this planet, but also as part of something much bigger on a universal scale as in intelligence that's beyond this planet, whether it's other dimensions or other planets. That's what seems to be coming through. And that we are on a path towards evolution. This is actually reminding me of my conversation with Paul Selig who channels himself. And when we spoke he channels live. If your listeners aren't familiar with him, he has plenty of videos on YouTube, a very unique way of channeling where he hears the information and then kind of mumbles it and then repeats it. I asked him in the interview who these guides that were coming through, these beings, what their incentive was. Why is it that they care about helping us to evolve? Because that's what the message was coming through consistently. And they said, we're doing it out of selfishness or something along those lines because there's an interconnectedness and therefore your progress is our progress. And that to me is fascinating. Awesome, Mark. Awesome stuff. Love it. Okay. Where do we go next? Shut up, Calculate. Great. One of my favorites. So let me ask you this as a Silicon Valley investment banker guy. Can't you make the case that this side stepping of the philosophical implications of consciousness has helped clear the path for technology development? I mean, maybe this in the grand scheme of things isn't a bad way to keep the trains running on time. And if that's too much shorthand for people, let me just backtrack a little bit. This is stuff that you know is part and parcel of your book, but you do a nice job in the book of talking about the turn of the 20th century physicist Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, all the rest of them, and they're saying, hey, we're doing the best we can with this quantum physics stuff, but we've bumped up against this thing called consciousness. And that seems to be the primary driver. That seems to be fundamental. That seems to be the source, not matter. And then the next step is, and it's always attributed to Richard Feynman, although I'm not sure that's where the quote really originates, but it's the idea of, well, shut up and calculate. We have some useful models that have fallen out of this understanding of quantum physics that might allow us to develop all this wonderful technology. And isn't that really a better way to spend our time and let's engineer that and see what we get. So you understand what I'm talking about. I just want to make sure our audience does. What do you think? Isn't there some advantage to just bypassing the philosophical implications and just building stuff? To me, this is really a question about creativity and the nature of creativity. And I see this a lot because of the field that I work in in Silicon Valley, where we see innovations, especially with a patent. If you get a patent, that means you've done something that is both novel and non-obvious relative to whatever's been done in the past known as the prior art. So how does an idea emerge that is novel and non-obvious? Sometimes that occurs in a non-linear way, where you have an idea. That is not a shut up and calculate methodology. However, the implementation of the creativity that comes in can be through calculation and logic. So I think there's this combination of non-linear creativity that we can't fully explain always, and the logic of calculation and programming. So the creativity might be the instigator, and then the implementation comes with what we are seeing a lot in Silicon Valley. So I think by side stepping the implications, we might have been shutting down some of the creativity, and that might not have been such a good thing. I understand where you're going with that. Only the one challenge I have with that is that, in particular, I remember in your dialogue with Rick Archer on boot at the gas pump, you guys talked about, it gets a little bit kind of love and light. Oh, isn't this going to be great? Once everybody gets on board with extended consciousness, mind equals more than brain, aren't things going to be better? And I don't know. I mean, if Niels Bohr and Trodinger had their way, would we have an iPhone? Would we have an internet? You could make the argument that we wouldn't. I mean, that isn't the direction. That wasn't their passion after realizing that consciousness is somehow fundamental. I mean, they're like Thomas Edison and Gary Schwartz today. They're looking at a soul phone, right? Thomas Edison famously, one of his lifelong failures, but something he was interested in, is technology that will allow us to connect with the deceased. Gary Schwartz, someone you've interviewed at the University of Arizona, is still interested in that. That's a different kind of, maybe that's a different spin on the shut up and calculate thing. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that? I really don't know, because we don't know what kind of information would be obtained if there were more kind of alignments with consciousness that maybe it would have steered us in those directions too, with people who have that passion or those unique skill sets to be able to shut up and calculate. So I think it's a great point you raised. I just don't know. It's hard to know what would have happened. Yeah, that's fair enough. It's actually an excellent point on your part. So, okay, Mark, what's next? What have we not done yet? How about level one, level two, level three? Nice. That's what I wanted to do too. So you've written an awesome book that, if I would have had a few years ago, would have trimmed yours off of my skeptical journey, saved me a bunch of interview time. It's so well put together. It's so well organized and documented. But one of the things I guess I stumbled into, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is that there's this level one, two, three thing, what I call, is that follow the data. Your book, your journey, my journey is the first part of that, which is what are the best scientists say? What are the best minds say? Where are the anomalies and how are they best resolved? And I come to the same conclusion that you do, is that it points towards a new understanding of consciousness that has been completely missed by science as we know it. But at some point, I kind of came to the realization that there's a conspiratorial aspect of that kind of cooked right into the cake. And that is, like you mentioned, remote viewing was one of your first go-to topics in terms of evidence that you found most compelling for mind not equal brain. Well, and I always credit my friend Gordon White for being the first one to wake me up to this. But if you look at that research, and you look at all the other stuff that was going on at Stanford Research Institute and how put off, and they were way past materialism. And these are two of the brightest scientists in the world. And they weren't alone. There was a significant group within the government, the hidden college, if you will, that understood that this materialism and this limited view of consciousness was nowhere close to anything that was real, and was useful for building these things, but wasn't true to the ultimate reality. So that's the level two discussion is, so what's really going on with those guys who know better than to kind of pitch this materialism? And then maybe we can get to level three, which we already have touched on, which is, I think, the real payoff at the end of the day. If you sort through that and say, okay, there's one group that knows more than everybody else. Well, what's really the game? And then I think you have to ask, how does this fit into the larger question of how I should live my life? Is there a good and bad? Is there a moral imperative and all those other things? But take me through your understanding of this level one, level two, level three thing. I'm really glad you framed it this way. And it's sort of how I was thinking about the book, is that the book would hopefully serve as a gateway for people to open the door to the really, really interesting questions, which I know you've been exploring a lot, and I personally explore them too. But without level one, without understanding that it's not mind equals brain, these other topics don't make sense. So one would potentially just be closed off to them entirely. And I think that's what we have right now. A lot of really smart people who are not looking at those topics, because they're still in mind equals brain. So why go to levels two and three? So I think that's the critical step is kind of dispelling that myth. And I think there's substantial evidence for that. Level two and three, those are ones I still think about all the time. Level two, conspiracies are there? Why is it that this information isn't as well known in a society where there is so much access to information? I mean, I've heard ideas that there are kind of forces that are trying to suppress the information. I honestly don't know as much about that. I've kind of heard that as a theory. What I've heard more about is kind of suppression based almost on ego of people not wanting to be wrong. And this actually came up in some of my interviews with scientists who would talk to a mainstream scientist who would say, well, if what you're doing is right, meaning these extended consciousness realms, if that's right, then everything that I've done in my career would be wrong. And that is, I guess, difficult for some people to take. I totally agree with you on one hand. And I think your assessment of the situation or your telling of those stories is important because I think people can relate to that. And if you can't, you know, just imagine your entire career being shattered right in front of your eyes. I mean, most of us would be a little bit resistant to that, even though we think science should play by some different set of rules. And it doesn't because they're just people. And in the slide that I brought up earlier in the house slide, I always remember interviewing Dr. Henry Bauer from Virginia Tech, who has written a couple of really fantastic books, trying to understand why science is so broken in this way and can't get past itself. And I do have to return to the conspiracy for a minute, because I think even what you're saying is part of the conspiracy. And I know people hate that word, but there's no other way to describe it. I mean, we've built a system that props up this kind of third grade fallacy ridiculousness that consciousness is an illusion. And you can, and I've played it on this show before, go listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is talk about propped up, propped up as one of the leading scientific figures in the United States or the world or however you want to say it. And you'll hear him say, I think what we're going to find, you may find consciousness, there's really nothing there. This is an insane absurd idea that doesn't pass a high schooler. Certainly, I said third grade, but certainly a high school's understanding of philosophy. You mentioned Bernardo Castro. We had a good chuckle on the show when we talked about that. How this idea is perpetuated and held up is hard to understand without understanding conspiracy. But then if you go like I did and you investigate the pushback that comes in waves whenever anyone seriously challenges it, it's hard to just chalk it up as just, oh, two guys out there arguing. Take Evan Alexander, who you referenced in the book, the wave of criticism that this Harvard neurosurgeon got when he came out and said, hey, I almost died and I had a near death experience and here's what happened. There was an organized systematic pushback on that that I don't think can be explained without acknowledging that there is a group, whatever that group is, that is opposed to these ideas going forward. And the only conclusion I can come to is that if you want to run the world, then maybe the system that they have in place, the limited thinking materialism, which scientific materialism, which extends into personal materialism, go buy stuff, go be happy with the things that you have, that someone has decided is a better way to run the world than what you're proposing. So I want to kind of dive back into that conspiracy thing and see if that might not make sense to you as a possible motivation for why we're stuck with such a just silly paradigm. I'm certainly open to it. I just don't, I haven't studied the mechanics behind that enough, but I've seen data points that would fit with it, some of which you describe where there's kind of, there seems to be a suppression, thinking back to conversations I've had with scientists who say they'll submit an article to a scientific journal and the journal will reject the article, not because of the methodology, but because what's being studied is impossible. And that's just a complete stonewalling. Okay, great. Tell you what, let's leave it at that. Okay, Mark, where do we go from here? Believers. You know, the number one pushback that I get when I take this, you're more than your brain thing. And I guess this would be a valid pushback for you again, because I'm referencing the excellent interview that you did with Rick on boot at the gas pump. And you've done many interviews. You've been very generous with your time in promoting this book. And as we all know, there's not like this huge financial incentive like you're going to sell millions and millions of these kind of books. I mean, it just doesn't work that way. So your motivations can only be of the highest kind. I can, I just have to assume that they are, you'll be commended for that. But here's the pushback I get. People say, yada, yada, yada, mind equals brain, the vast majority of people, 90% believe that there's some kind of higher power. Therefore, they already reject the idea of mind equals brain. Has that really made the world any better, safer? You're kind of painting this Pollyanna future of when people realize the greater consciousness. Go tell the folks in Iran that just picking on Iran because they're in the news. Go tell all the radical Muslim countries that we'd love to hate who are very, they don't believe mind equals brain. So there's, or pick on fundy Christians or pick on any fundy religious group you want. They're not mind equal brain. Are they making the world better? And if not, then aren't you just peddling another version of your religion, your picture of how everyone should be? I think it's a great point, a great question. It brings me back, I think, to our level one, level two, level three discussion. To me, the mind equals brain, the spelling that myth is almost step one. But getting to the topics that you've become very interested in and that I'm interested in is, what does it all mean? What are the other realms? How should we live? That part, I think, is maybe less well explored. So the post mind equals brain paradigm, after we get to a kind of extended consciousness realm paradigm, then we have to understand reality to another level and to understand what it all means and what the system is. And I think it's when we get there that we might advance. So I agree with you that just flipping the paradigm on its own will not do it. It has to be more than that. Excellent, Mark. Great stuff. And actually, I want to mention something that's come up a lot in my recent studies and comes up with my podcast on this topic. A phenomenon reported in the near-death experience called the Life Review, which is reported very often. I spoke with a man named Daniel Brinkley, who's famous for having had multiple near-death experiences. What's unique about his experience is that he had a life review each time, which is not always reported and he has had four life reviews. And this is where a person claims to have experienced his or her whole life in a flash, where the events are experienced through the eyes of the people affected. So let's say in the case of Daniel Brinkley, he was in Vietnam. He told me he killed many people and that he was vicious in combat. So during his life review each time, he relived the deaths of the people that he killed through their eyes. And not only that, he felt the indirect effects. He felt the effects of the child who no longer had a father because he had killed the father. So it's details like that, whether these things are part of the fabric of the universe that could shift one's perspective very drastically. But to even explore the life review wouldn't make sense until we accept extended consciousness realms. Awesome. Totally agree. There's really nothing I could add to that. So I'm going to move on. Okay, let me, there's only a couple left so I might have challenged you to remember all the ones we've talked about. Let's talk about the observer. And we've been talking around this for a while and the last point you made about the life review I think leads us right into that. If I'm not a biological robot in a meaningless universe, if I'm more than mind equals brain, then what am I? And am I the observer of my experience? Am I what Eckert Tolle says? What Michael Singer Untethered Soul says? What my buddy Jeffrey Martin who's gone and studied in a social science, Harvard social science kind of way, the most awakened people that he could find. Am I the observer of my experience? Is that where level one leads me? I think it leads in that direction for sure and it's something I still ponder all the time. It's the nature of identity really. What is it that I am? Am I my body or am I that which experiences the body? And if that, the latter is the case then does that mean I am not physical? Then what is it that I am? And it becomes a very introspective, subjective experience. I think where I come out on it is that we are that my identity is not marked but I am that which experiences Mark. And that's challenging. That's been challenging for thousands of years while people have contemplated it. And one of the challenging parts of it that doesn't get talked about a lot is that there are pitfalls associated with that. Following that path is not an easy path. Even if we look at the NDE science, you look at Dr. PMH Atwater who I think you've referenced in the book. Not sure. Don't believe I did. So her research looked at the problems that folks have in integrating in the near death experience. Higher divorce rate way higher than normal. Higher suicide rate way higher than normal which is surprising. If you jump over and look at Dr. Jeffrey Martin who I just referenced and talked about who's studied this scientifically in terms of this awakening, this realization that I am the observer, that I am consciousness. Again it's difficult to integrate in. Amotivational is one of the things that falls out. Why am I going to kind of do all the doing that I do if I am the one observing? It's not that I don't do anything but it's like I can't get quite as excited about the things that other people are excited about and that leads to problems in relationships. Again this higher divorce rate, this higher ability to relate to other people. So I think this is something that is super duper important and isn't being fully addressed and it's another one of those things that I think people are running the traps in their head and they're saying I'm not sure I want to be the yogi on the mountain. Even if that is reality I'm not sure I want that reality. And the flip side of that is as we've talked about do you really want a non-reality? So what about the pitfalls with I am the observer of my experience? Yeah these are things I think about all the time too. It's ultimately what how should we be living? I think that's where we fundamentally get because that informs the decisions we'd make about what to do about our identity if we are not our bodies. And at least to me my hypothesis at the moment is that the fact that we are in a body indicates that we probably should be doing something here and not just escaping the world completely otherwise we wouldn't be here. That's just kind of the logic that I see in my own mind. So we have to balance it. We're in a body yet we are not a body. We're experiencing the body. And then it moves to well then what do we do here? What is the best use of our time here? I don't know the answer to that exactly yet but going back to the research on on channeling and what we get from many people who have been to extended realms there seems to be a theme around the evolution of consciousness around evolving our own consciousness which is significant because we're connected and helping to evolve the collective. So that seems to be achievable through being together in physical forms and not necessarily escaping the world. That's kind of where my head is now and it could change. I love that Mark. I beautifully said I think and I really appreciate the way that you're struggling with that and at the same time trying to find a coherent path because you don't have the certainty no one could have the certainty because I think one of the things that falls out of this work or this understanding is that we're on the wrong end of the telescope to have any kind of certainty we're just the small little part of some larger smear of consciousness again I love this that's a Gordon White book but you know we're this smear of consciousness that's put into this time space dimension that we can understand and comprehend but as soon as we understand it's much larger than that then we have to kind of throw up our hands and say okay everything I have to say is provisional and I want to circle back to something else you said because a little quote that I kind of use a lot and is meaningful to me is from Amma the hugging saint if people are familiar with her this Indian woman who is incredible and is one of these great beings we have to believe who has somehow ascended along this spiritual consciousness path in a way that we look at and say there's something there that is to be studied and understood but the quote of hers is Amma is someone who works tirelessly 18 20 hours a day helping the poor out there in India with a shovel digging latrines you know leading women's groups in you know all these amazing ways and then having these meetings where she's constantly hugging people hugging people 18 hours a day and one of her devotees goes up to Amma and says Amma you know you work so hard for this world and yet you tell us to look beyond this world and she's reported to have said world what world and you're chuckling because you get it it's like if Amma can keep those two complete contradictions going in her head then maybe that's what we have to do as well in order to make any sense of this well we see kind of the opposite end of the spectrum with someone like Ramana Maharshi a famous enlightened sage from India who said that the world as we see it doesn't even exist and he spent his life kind of in isolation people would come see him and he was a master but he wasn't as integrated in the world so the question is how can we have that mindset which i think is probably accurate just technically but still be in the world and that's maybe the human struggle is to try to balance the two to be in the physical but also have our our understanding beyond what we can perceive with our senses we're going back to the bible of this world in this world but not of it right that is from the bible isn't i don't know i'm not a good biblical scholar okay there's one more i think that we haven't covered and that's silos so let's bring that up and the question for me and this is kind of a very very skeptical kind of question and that is what are we responsible for knowing i really really have enjoyed the discussion we've had so far because everywhere i push you're willing to go there and i'm consistently surprised at the people who are not willing to go there even people on the edge supposedly Dr. Jeffrey Karpel is a genius and he's fantastic and jeff has blazed new ground and is really an innovator but i always remember the interview that i had with him and i think the subject came up with non-human intelligence which to me is like fundamental you know you got to look at non-human intelligence if you're going to look at consciousness because it keeps popping up and you can't just bury these anomalies and say well you know but that's what he says he says hey look you know as a responsible intellect intellectual you know you don't talk about things you know about and i always see that as the other way around hey you are responsible for knowing everything that is in your domain and if you're in the conscious domain you better have an opinion about et you better have an opinion about non-human intelligence it's like the other day you know this guy in uh he wrote this academic fine guy wonderful guy but he's written this this big book on and he's a philosophy professor in in england big book on the evolution of consciousness and my first thing is you know i i do a search in your book for near-death experience there's nothing there i do in a search in your book for um parapsychology there's nothing there so this is just a rant but let's pull you into this discussion i feel like we have these silos of knowledge still even in this kind of little tribe that we've created who's interested in consciousness and an extended consciousness people aren't willing to go there they're if you bring up conspiracy oh no don't go there if you bring up uh non-human intelligence oh don't go there if you bring up channeling no don't go there i don't know that i i think that inhibits our ability to get to that level three do you have any thoughts on that well i think the two of us are in a unique position because we're not academics so we might have just more openness because we're not used to the restrictions imposed in an academic setting and there might be more risk for an academic or someone who's been in that setting to go outside of what their their little silo my personal perspective seems to be similar to yours which is i will go everywhere because if it's occurring i want to understand why it's occurring whether it's real or not why if someone's talking about something consistently what's the reason for that is it a delusion or is it not is there some truth to it so i'm always willing to explore everything and i think it's part of my just deep quest to understand reality like we talked about at the beginning because the more we can align with reality i think the more the probably the better off we are and i'm just a curious person so my perspective is one at least for me is to go everywhere but to be discerning i think that's really important not just to take everything in as fact and that's why i mentioned that point earlier and also to acknowledge what we don't know so for example with regard to conspiracies it's something that i've seen pop up i haven't researched the details behind the mechanics of it i'm open to that possibility but i really can't speak to the details because i haven't researched it so i think it's it's just being clear on where our limitations are mark you're awesome at this game i don't know but you would be the all-time champ right now alex trebek would have you up in the hall of fame so uh you you've successfully run the gauntlet of skeptical jeopardy let's talk about what else is going on this book where you're going with that what else is happening with that and then you've already told us about this exciting new podcast what else is going on for mark gober where do you go with this stuff i ask myself that every day i still i don't exactly know where it's going to go that's how the journey started for me it was all just out of curiosity and passion so i try to follow the passion where it leads at the moment i'm in the final editing stages of the podcast so that's kind of consuming a lot of what i'm doing but i'm always researching i'm still listening to podcasts and reading books and very interested in these extended realms the experiences reported by people who have reached elevated elevated states of consciousness the messages coming in through channeling forms of beings that are coming through and have been reported as where people have an interaction or have channeled so i'm interested in in many topics i also recently joined the board of the institute of noetic sciences i love the work that they're doing you mentioned dean raiden he's a chief scientist there but they're one of the few places in the world that it has a concerted effort towards studying topics like this so i give them a ton of credit and also the university of virginia their division of perceptual studies give them a ton of credit because they're in an academic institution studying these topics too but i think my work at ions that's going to keep me pretty busy because i i love what they're doing and i want to help in any way i can awesome mark are you into the consciousness hack thing do you try and hack your consciousness i heard you mentioned that you don't have a quote unquote spiritual practice i got to probe that a little bit what does that mean to you or what is not having that mean to you and any any consciousness hacks either technology consciousness hacks or i do ice baths on a regular basis to remind me that i am not my body i do all sorts of hacks uh yogi hacks how about you i've tried a lot of different things meditation techniques binaural beats flotation tanks i think i highly recommend that if your listeners have flotation tanks near you they're sensory deprivation so i think it's for me at least i like turning off the lights and having no music and you're basically just floating so it's an anti-gravity environment you're not taking in sensory input so it's a way for you to calm your mind i think pretty easily even if you're thinking you're still not taking in sensory input so i found that it's a really good way to get creative insights before going into the tank i might have a question and then i'll come out of the tank with more clarity sometimes memories pop in um so it's kind of some people say it's meditation on steroids where are you on the spirit guide kind of thing or do you have any personal experiences with direct contact with spirit entities that are somehow influencing you in any way great question i know many people who have direct experiences i haven't had like a visual encounter or anything like that um so i haven't i haven't had a direct experience like that at all because the reason i push is because i'm very dense i guess you would say i haven't had any uh you know firework kind of experiences even though i've done yoga for 35 years and meditating to all that stuff but when i look back i've had a ton of smaller experiences and some a little bit more than smaller experiences that kind of nudge me further along the path so not enough where i could go out there and you know proclaim you know i'm channeling or anything like that but i guess i'm pushing because i think anyone who takes the path i think very quickly has something that is a little bit non-ordinary do you have any thoughts on i think my life over the last three years is pretty non-ordinary i can just look at what's happened and i can't really explain it how that will happen so quickly it's it's pretty mind-blowing to look at the details of it but i haven't had like the the encounter with an interdimensional being that some people will will report where it's a visual auditory experience i haven't had anything like that but maybe we have to wonder the subtle nudges that we get when we have an idea to do something or all of a sudden i said maybe i should write a book when i never had planned on something like that i wrote the book very quickly i don't i love the way you put that man which is like hey isn't this non-ordinary enough and i think you're right that's a that's a i'm a world what world it's like look at my life you know read into it what you will uh mark it's just been awesome awesome awesome getting to know you and getting to know you in this little way that is so cool that i can call up somebody who i so admire their work and have this kind of dialogue best of luck in the future tell us anything else we're tell us where people should go to stay in touch with you or to reach out to you or follow up on what you're doing my website which is just my name markgober.com has more information on me in my book my podcast again the name of the podcast is where is my mind and i think hopefully that will open the minds of many people who are not as familiar with these topics and for those who are familiar with it it's a new way to hear a lot of voices you've heard before so i'm excited about those projects and Alex i want to thank you for all the work that you do you're cited in my book both Skeptico and your book your work has been influential in my journey so you you really i mean that's the the age of content today it's it's so easy for people to learn information and you never know who's going to hear an interview so i want to just commend you on what you're doing oh thanks mark that's very nice you to say we'll tell you what we'll uh we'll have to reconnect and i'm definitely looking forward to listening to this podcast and we'll we'll have to update people on how that goes so very good thanks again for joining me mark and take care that was fun i enjoyed it thank you so thanks for watching this video and if it wasn't really a video but just an audio start as a video i apologize but there's more videos out there as well but please check out the skeptico website you can see it here we cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality a lot of shows up there over 350 of them are so all free all available for download so do check it out