Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #46: (Part 2) Love + Light: Near-Death Experiences & the Path to Lasting Awakening — Eben Alexander

Transcript

#46: (Part 2) Love + Light: Near-Death Experiences & the Path to Lasting Awakening — Eben Alexander · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  I would say that's all of spiritual experience and
• 0:02
  religious systems have come from human beings who had kind of
• 0:06
  extraordinary kind of visions, physiologic challenge and
• 0:10
  illness or in battle or warfare, what have you.
• 0:13
  But then they came to realize there's much more of this world.
• 0:16
  The number of Ndes were very limited until 1968, when doctors
• 0:21
  developed techniques to resuscitate cardiac arrest
• 0:24
  patients. And what's happened since then
• 0:26
  is we now have millions and millions of people around this
• 0:29
  world who have come back and have seen the incredible
• 0:33
  richness of our spiritual reality.
• 0:36
  It's part of what I see is the modern world, through the grace
• 0:40
  of God and through our understanding of reality, coming
• 0:44
  into a much richer knowing of our connectedness, of the
• 0:48
  healing power, of the binding force of love, and how we're all
• 0:51
  in this together. Hey everyone, welcome back to
• 0:57
  Love Conquers Fear. As you know from the last
• 1:02
  episode, we're still on Evan Alexander week and I just want
• 1:07
  to record this quick intro to tell you what's going on when
• 1:12
  you see it jumped to the 1st frame here of us being on stage.
• 1:17
  So this was recorded at the JA Men's Forum.
• 1:21
  It's an honor of Bert Kunik. May his memory always be for a
• 1:26
  blessing. He was truly a mention the
• 1:29
  Jewish community here and always had our back for everything.
• 1:35
  And really, it's the largest gathering of Jewish men in Texas
• 1:39
  that he brought together through this forum.
• 1:44
  And so you're going to see me on stage alongside Doctor Bob
• 1:48
  Frockman and Evan Alexander in the middle.
• 1:53
  And it was really, really a great conversation.
• 1:55
  You'll see Bob at some point refer to this side of the room.
• 2:00
  And what he means are the Habad rabbis that decided to attend.
• 2:06
  I know that they really enjoyed it.
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  I talked with them afterwards. They had, they had read Evan
• 2:11
  Alexander's book Proof of Heaven and helped talk about the, the
• 2:17
  learnings from that book as well as deep in, in Jewish literature
• 2:23
  and scripture. That's part of decoding what
• 2:25
  Bob's pointing to. And then one thing I just want
• 2:28
  to say, you know, I'm 54 now and it took me until I was right
• 2:33
  around 52 years old to realize that source is a proper noun.
• 2:39
  It's capitalized in the Torah, in the English translation of
• 2:45
  the Torah whenever I'm in the synagogue.
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  I just found it fascinating that the source is capitalized.
• 2:53
  You'll hear the word Source mentioned multiple times in the
• 2:57
  discussion and it's referred to as the Divine Source.
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  It is another reference to God or heaven consciousness or the
• 3:06
  universe or however you think about this force rooted in love
• 3:11
  for us all. And so anyways, I wanted to I
• 3:15
  wanted to decode that for you as well.
• 3:17
  Enjoy. Let me just say again, it was
• 3:20
  such an honor to have Evan Alexander in our home for a few
• 3:24
  days, to meditate with him in the morning and to record in
• 3:30
  this room the first part. So if you if you missed the
• 3:34
  first part of of Evan Alexander week, make sure to watch that
• 3:39
  it's episode 46 Part 1 and onward here to episode 46 Part 2
• 3:46
  on stage with Doctor Bob Frakkman and Evan Alexander.
• 3:50
  Enjoy. Everyone Rabbi Will Hall from
• 3:52
  Temple of Shalom. Always an honor to be with this
• 3:54
  group. Promise I won't take too much of
• 3:56
  your time. We've got a very good speaker
• 3:58
  tonight, and it's not me. So in this week's Torah portion,
• 4:02
  Truma, the people are commanded to construct a mishkhan, a
• 4:06
  portable dwelling place for God. But the verse puts it in a
• 4:09
  strange way that many of us might be familiar with.
• 4:12
  Vasuli mikdashva sakhanti Bitoham.
• 4:15
  Let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.
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  Bitoham not in it the very object created for God, but
• 4:24
  among them. The people in Judaism teaches
• 4:26
  that structures have purpose. They help us to grow.
• 4:30
  They help us to acknowledge and keep track of what's going on.
• 4:33
  Whether it's Shalom Austin or any of the institutions around
• 4:36
  town, we're proud of our spaces and what they allow us to do, to
• 4:39
  build, and to be together. But we also know that the
• 4:42
  essence of spiritual life resides in relationship, in
• 4:46
  human experience, in moments we have between us, not only in
• 4:50
  walls. And so with that, that is why we
• 4:54
  come here this evening in so many ways, not only for
• 4:56
  speakers, but to engage with each other, to be a part of
• 4:59
  community and to grow together. And so with that, this evening,
• 5:03
  I know we'll be engaging with some pretty fascinating things,
• 5:06
  pushing us as well to think about how our consciousness, how
• 5:09
  the afterlife, how all of these things that we don't always have
• 5:12
  a chance to talk about so clearly, like in this case, the
• 5:15
  presence of God, what it really means and where it might rest.
• 5:18
  And so with that, I want to hand it back off to Brett's to
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  introduce our wonderful speaker and to be able to jump into
• 5:25
  these subjects. Thank you so much.
• 5:26
  Yeah, Thank you. All right.
• 5:30
  So I'm going to bring Evan and Bob up while I introduce you
• 5:34
  guys. So Evan has written the most
• 5:39
  important book on a near death experience.
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  His his his personal story behind that.
• 5:47
  And it this actually happened because of because of J men.
• 5:55
  It was the the time where at the end of 2024, I was on stage with
• 6:04
  John Mackey interviewing him. The whole story had just come
• 6:08
  out, which is a great, great book.
• 6:11
  You know his tell all book about the journey of Whole Foods and
• 6:15
  at the end of that, Bob does his beeline for me and John and he's
• 6:20
  like, you guys need to read proof of heaven.
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  And my body lit up. I knew that the answer was yes.
• 6:29
  I know that John also is a deeply spiritual person and
• 6:36
  really has a lot of respect as well for Evan and I actually
• 6:41
  read it the next month when I was in Kerala, India and Kerala
• 6:48
  has the oldest synagogue in India in a place called Cochin
• 6:53
  and it was just a beautiful place to be is where are you
• 6:56
  Vedic treatments were invented. I was there actually for a
• 7:00
  wedding. Our daughter goes to Tulane.
• 7:03
  She's she's 21 and and at Tulane.
• 7:08
  It was one of her Indian friends that said, Hey, my sister's
• 7:12
  getting married, would you guys go?
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  And I always knew the answer was yes.
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  And so there are over 1000 people at the wedding.
• 7:18
  It was amazing. But I was in this, I was in this
• 7:20
  beautiful state after the wedding of wanting to decompress
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  because a thousand person wedding is amazing.
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  But it's it's a little bit frantic.
• 7:28
  And I started reading Proof of Heaven.
• 7:33
  And to be specific, I started listening to it on Audible.
• 7:37
  And Audible I would highly recommend because Evan reads the
• 7:41
  book and you can hear the awe, the deep humility.
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  You can hear the poignancy of some of the most amazing turns
• 7:53
  that happen in his experience of going into a coma as a Harvard
• 7:59
  trained neurosurgeon, you know, one of the top in his field who
• 8:05
  mostly had lost his faith. He was kind of a agnostic at
• 8:09
  that point, you know, and, and had these patients coming back
• 8:14
  saying, wow, I just saw the light or I just saw this.
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  And, and, and he would just kind of like a lot of people kind of
• 8:23
  write him off. And I can tell you how much
• 8:28
  people get written off like that because I actually thought I'm a
• 8:31
  pretty open guy and A and a guy that my friends can really talk
• 8:36
  to. But prior to reading Proof of
• 8:38
  Heaven, I had zero friends who told me about their near death
• 8:42
  experience. OK, after reading the book and
• 8:46
  talking about the book, I've had 11 friends open up to me. 11
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  friends, some of The Who which have been friends for 10 to 20
• 8:54
  years, who open up to me about their near death experience.
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  Some some of those amazing entrepreneurs in town, the most
• 9:02
  important experience of their life where they saw behind the
• 9:05
  veil and what the reality was that we go to or we go back to
• 9:11
  as a better way to say it. And they didn't not feel
• 9:16
  comfortable with me to open up like that.
• 9:19
  And the reason why is because of the way we're raised and you
• 9:25
  know, really taught, you know, we've had the rise of the
• 9:27
  rational mind. I love capitalism.
• 9:29
  We've had the rise of capitalism.
• 9:30
  We have had the rise of science. There's a lot of things to be
• 9:32
  thankful with that, but they just, they didn't feel like they
• 9:36
  could talk to me in that way about something deeply spiritual
• 9:40
  that happened to them. And that's because other people
• 9:44
  that they talked to probably thought, oh, they're just kind
• 9:47
  of lost it or they're woo or whatever else.
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  So Eben being this vessel chose by the divine to be the one to
• 9:59
  tell the story of falling into a coma.
• 10:02
  Powered by E coli driven meningitis, which is going to
• 10:08
  pretty much eat you from the inside, being essentially brain
• 10:13
  dead, but then getting this incredible tour of heaven and
• 10:19
  seeing what it's like and then living to tell the tale.
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  And I think being chosen is the right way to say it.
• 10:27
  To tell the tale is what led to the book, and that's what the
• 10:32
  book's all about. We're not going to cover the,
• 10:34
  the, the details of the book 'cause we don't have time to do
• 10:38
  that. Everybody here should have a
• 10:40
  copy of the book. You're given the book thanks to
• 10:45
  thanks to the Koenig family. And, and so we're going to,
• 10:51
  we're going to dive into spirituality tonight.
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  I hope that you can maintain an open mind and just realize that
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  two things can be true at the same time.
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  I'm a product of science, you know, I created now six
• 11:06
  companies and my company dated out world was acquired by
• 11:11
  ServiceNow last year on 7/7. That's actually my divine number
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  is interesting timing with a with a pick for that.
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  And So what we'll get into it tonight.
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  But I just want to say it's a huge, huge honor to have Evan
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  here and I've really got to spend the past couple of days
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  with him. Bob and I had dinner with him
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  last night, really see his heart and his intellect and his
• 11:35
  knowledge of the brain. So we'll get into that.
• 11:37
  And and I'm going to bring the portion to this of what does
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  this mean for AI? Because right now that's what
• 11:48
  that's what humanity is prioritizing the most from a
• 11:50
  capitalistic standpoint. There, there's around $7
• 11:54
  trillion that's been allocated in the world towards the race to
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  AGI, artificial general intelligence.
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  And of course the dystopian fears are coming online of is it
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  conscious like us? Is this the Terminator moment?
• 12:09
  Is this the Matrix moment, etcetera.
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  So I'm going to bring that because Evans got a really
• 12:13
  interesting perspective on that. And Bob is, and, and he's
• 12:17
  actually got a very technical background too.
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  He was coding in machine language as a young man.
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  If if anybody knows how hard machine language or assembly
• 12:27
  code is, freaking hard, you got to be really smart to even
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  approach it. And Bob's really going to bring
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  the perspective of us doing this together of a Doctor Who's been
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  deeply rooted in the medical profession, one of the best in
• 12:41
  Austin, who is really booed by this book.
• 12:44
  And and so we're going to get into it and we're going to kick
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  it off. So thanks again for being here.
• 12:53
  Bob, why don't you start? So thanks to everybody for
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  coming. This is one of those occurrences
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  where a little event led to a big event.
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  And the little event was my wife being told at a yoga class at
• 13:10
  Lake Austin Spa about the book 17 years after it was published.
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  But it's never too late. And she knew that I was
• 13:19
  interested in near death experiences, but I didn't know
• 13:22
  anything about it. But I would every now and then
• 13:24
  have a patient that that it had cardiac arrest for some reason
• 13:30
  or other. And I would and I only knew
• 13:32
  enough to say to them, did you see the light?
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  That's all I could ask him. And and I got some yeses and
• 13:38
  noes, but I didn't know where to go beyond that.
• 13:41
  But because I had expressed an interest in that kind of
• 13:45
  questioning, that's why I ended up getting the book.
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  I didn't even know it existed. So the just to piggyback on what
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  Brett said really quickly is that I had a patient last week
• 13:58
  who's 85 years old and had an, a near death experience, a
• 14:03
  reaction to an anesthetic 10 years ago.
• 14:06
  And now I knew what to ask. So I asked her and it was a
• 14:10
  fascinating experience. So just like Brett's saying, you
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  know, if you ask, a lot of people will come out and tell
• 14:18
  you the whole thing. And, and, and the similarities
• 14:20
  are really incredible. But between one story to
• 14:24
  another, although Doctor Alexander's is a little bit
• 14:29
  different and, and, and at the end, I'm going to get into how
• 14:32
  his was different too. But the first question is, now
• 14:36
  that you've had your near death experience, do you have less
• 14:40
  fear of dying? I have No Fear of dying.
• 14:43
  I know that our conscious awareness increases.
• 14:47
  It actually expands on being released from the shackles of
• 14:51
  the brain. The brain is a filter, a
• 14:55
  transceiver that allows primordial consciousness in, but
• 14:58
  it is not the ultimate producer of consciousness.
• 15:01
  In fact, a lot of what the brain does is suppressive and not
• 15:07
  excitatory. So it's very busy kind of toning
• 15:10
  things down South. Inhibitory neuronal networks
• 15:12
  play a big role in it all. But turns out that when you have
• 15:16
  the big, you know, inactivation of brain that occurs around the
• 15:22
  time of of death, it's a liberation of conscious
• 15:26
  awareness into a far grander kind of vision of the universe,
• 15:30
  reconnecting the souls of departed loved ones, traveling
• 15:34
  to an exotic realm, ascending up into light.
• 15:39
  There are many common themes, as you mentioned, the turn turn up
• 15:42
  over and over again in all these experiences, and they're not
• 15:45
  uncommon. That's the important thing to
• 15:47
  point out. There was a the best way to get
• 15:50
  your hand hands on kind of the prevalence of these kind of
• 15:53
  things is a prospective study. And a Dutch cardiologist named
• 15:58
  Doctor PIM van Lamel is a good friend, wrote a summary of his
• 16:03
  work back in 2000 in the very esteemed medical journal Lancet.
• 16:09
  And it covered more than 350 consecutive cardiac arrest
• 16:13
  admitted to Dutch hospitals and found a 20%, well, it was 1818%
• 16:20
  incidence of Ndes in that patient population.
• 16:23
  So one in five is a a pretty kind of astonishing number.
• 16:27
  And the other thing I'll point out about that is these are
• 16:31
  cardiac arrest patients that we're talking about right now.
• 16:34
  I would say that's all of spiritual experience and
• 16:37
  religious systems have come from human beings who had kind of
• 16:41
  extraordinary kind of visions, physiologic challenge and
• 16:45
  illness or in battle or warfare, what have you.
• 16:48
  But then they came to realize there's much more of this world,
• 16:52
  but ND ES proper of we're not very, although I I'm saying that
• 16:57
  that was those kind of cases were the origin of all this.
• 17:01
  But the number of Ndes were very limited until 1968 when doctors
• 17:07
  developed techniques to resuscitate cardiac arrest
• 17:10
  patients. And what's happened since then
• 17:13
  is we now have millions and millions of people around this
• 17:16
  world who have come back and have seen the incredible
• 17:20
  richness of our spiritual reality and, and the story to
• 17:24
  tell. And I would say that that
• 17:26
  contribution by medical scientists to bring people back
• 17:29
  from cardiac arrest is not an accident.
• 17:32
  It's part of what I see is the modern world, through the grace
• 17:37
  of God and through our understanding of reality, coming
• 17:41
  into a much richer knowing of our connectedness, of the
• 17:45
  healing power, of the binding force of love, and how we're all
• 17:48
  in this together. I think it's going to be a
• 17:50
  transformation for this whole world, especially when you
• 17:54
  realize that there is some very deep kind of scientific basis to
• 17:58
  a lot of these conclusions. Thanks.
• 18:01
  One of the common themes for those of you who have read about
• 18:05
  this is that even before I read the book, you, you keep hearing
• 18:10
  that when you're having a near death experience, you are
• 18:14
  escorted by by a former deceased relative.
• 18:21
  And my question to you is, these are from near death experiences.
• 18:26
  Do we believe that this is actually what happens with real
• 18:29
  death? Well, the best evidence for what
• 18:32
  happens in real death I can point to a a a beautiful book
• 18:36
  written by a Hospice Dr. He works in Hospice Buffalo in
• 18:40
  upstate New York. His name is Doctor Christopher
• 18:42
  Kerr and he is a hardcore scientist.
• 18:46
  His interest was only in the process of dying and what
• 18:50
  happens in terminal care and palliative care situations when
• 18:53
  people leave this planet. And what he found is that, and
• 18:58
  again, he was doing a prospective study.
• 19:01
  Very important. That's how you really, the
• 19:04
  alternative is a retrospective study where you just take a
• 19:07
  bunch of near death experienced people and try and analyze the
• 19:10
  group. It's far more powerful in terms
• 19:13
  of determining, you know, how much of this really happens in
• 19:16
  the world when you do a prospective study.
• 19:19
  So that everybody who was admitted to Hospice Buffalo for
• 19:23
  a long period was involved in the study.
• 19:25
  They did not omit anybody. It's important in research, you
• 19:29
  know, that, that everybody is accounted for and every story
• 19:32
  accounted for. And what he found is that 86% of
• 19:37
  his patients of that whole group had very profound end of life
• 19:42
  dreams and visions as he called them.
• 19:45
  Dreams if they occurred at sleep, visions if they occurred
• 19:47
  awake. But in fact, there's very little
• 19:50
  difference. They have very powerful sense of
• 19:52
  a loved 1 coming to escort them over.
• 19:55
  They have incredible senses of life review.
• 20:00
  And that's something I hope we have some time to talk about.
• 20:02
  But the life review is that old saying your life flashes for
• 20:06
  your eyes well. Many of these people would have
• 20:09
  these visions and they were mainly of things that they had
• 20:12
  regrets about where they might have mistreated somebody of, you
• 20:16
  know, where it was kind of a, you know, just kind of a fault
• 20:21
  in, in a, in a loving soul. And those kind of things were
• 20:25
  the material of what these people experienced.
• 20:28
  And of the 86% who had some experience like that, 99% said
• 20:34
  that the events were more real than lived events in this world.
• 20:38
  In other words, that a parents of a loved one who had passed or
• 20:43
  the re envisioning of a situation where they had a
• 20:46
  regretful action that they had to make amends for.
• 20:50
  Those kind of things were were very prominent, but occurred not
• 20:55
  as some vague dreamy sepia tended memory.
• 20:59
  But is a very strong reliving of events.
• 21:02
  And when you study near death experiences scientifically, you
• 21:05
  find that a large number to somewhere around 2/3 of them
• 21:10
  describe that the events are more real than lived events.
• 21:14
  And in fact, it's as if the events are still ongoing.
• 21:18
  And the other kind of key to mention in that setting in the
• 21:22
  discussion of life reviews and the material I'm talking about
• 21:25
  comes from a scientific article by Bruce Grayson.
• 21:28
  He's a skeptical MD psychiatrist at the University of Virginia
• 21:32
  who has studied these cases for more than 45 years now and come
• 21:36
  to realize his father was a biochemist.
• 21:39
  So he grew up in a very scientific household, and he was
• 21:42
  very scientific. But he's come to realize that
• 21:44
  there is far too much evidence for these kind of spiritual
• 21:48
  realities. And in the the Journal of Near
• 21:51
  Death Studies in the fall of 2021, he put out a beautiful
• 21:54
  article in summarizing or 700 life reviews.
• 22:00
  And interesting to me, 33% a third of those cases said that
• 22:05
  their entire life was involved. And you might wonder how can
• 22:10
  that happen during, you know, a 10 minute cardiac arrest?
• 22:13
  And the reason is when we're released from the physical realm
• 22:16
  and the kind of illusion of time flowing of selfhood and all that
• 22:20
  into this richer kind of soul, soul environment to this, you
• 22:25
  know, beautiful love and, and God filled realm that people
• 22:30
  describe, you're timeless. You're completely released from
• 22:34
  earth time. So to me, having been there and
• 22:37
  witnessed the incredible power of the universe to demonstrate
• 22:41
  these things to us when our brains are offline is an
• 22:44
  incredible gift. And you got to keep that in mind
• 22:47
  because much of this world and our living in this world is not
• 22:53
  as it appears. Time flow is very different in
• 22:56
  near death experiences. And in fact, when you have
• 23:00
  access to birth, death, everything in between
• 23:02
  simultaneously and including potentially glimpses into past
• 23:08
  lives and potentials for future actions and in other lives, it
• 23:13
  all is just this incredible kind of ocean of information.
• 23:18
  And the information flow is very different from what we're used
• 23:21
  to in this world. And that's one of the reasons
• 23:23
  why people often say that near death experiences are ineffable
• 23:27
  or indescribable. And part of that, of course, is
• 23:30
  when you're in a timeless realm where you witness everything at
• 23:33
  once. And not only that, in the life
• 23:35
  review, you experience many of these events from the
• 23:38
  perspective of everyone involved.
• 23:40
  And that's why I often say the life review is the golden rule
• 23:45
  written into the fabric of the universe.
• 23:47
  Treat others as you would like to be treated, and to hurt
• 23:50
  another is to hurt yourself. And in the life Review, that is
• 23:54
  a very clear pattern of activity where people in about 3/4 of
• 24:00
  these cases say that the events that they review are from the
• 24:04
  perspective of everyone involved.
• 24:07
  So if you handed out a lot of pain and suffering in the life
• 24:10
  review, you get on the receiving end of that.
• 24:12
  And that's why over history, life reviews are gently nudging
• 24:17
  humanity towards a much more kind of humanistic kind of
• 24:22
  honoring of the divinity within us all.
• 24:24
  And what I just love about the kind of current revolution is
• 24:29
  how much of the driver of this is scientific study of these
• 24:34
  events. And science is a beautiful way
• 24:37
  for us to gain an objective, agreeable consensus on the
• 24:42
  nature of reality. Even though I will say that in
• 24:45
  quantum physics, the measurement paradox has remained an
• 24:48
  incredible mystery for more than a century and currently has
• 24:52
  about 16 major interpretations out there.
• 24:56
  But nobody in the physics world can agree on exactly what it
• 24:59
  means. And I think part of that problem
• 25:01
  is that the ultimate message of quantum physics is the
• 25:05
  consciousness is unified, primordial.
• 25:08
  It's basically the mind of the universe.
• 25:10
  And we all share that. Our brain provides A
• 25:13
  dissociation mechanism that allows a little Eddie current of
• 25:17
  that God mind into our awareness and we have things like
• 25:20
  telepathy. For example, 35% of identical
• 25:23
  twins have powerful telepathic experiences.
• 25:26
  And that's all just an indicator that our minds are part of one
• 25:31
  mind that is bound together through those binding forces of
• 25:34
  love. And that from my NDEI would say
• 25:37
  that our very conscious awareness is directly sourced in
• 25:40
  that beautiful infinitely loving God force that so many near
• 25:44
  death experiencers describe. More than 90% of near death
• 25:48
  experiences across history for thousands of years, many of whom
• 25:52
  were previously agnostic or atheist.
• 25:55
  More than 90% of them come back not just believing, but knowing
• 25:59
  in the reality of an intelligent, love, loving force
• 26:03
  at the core of the universe. And it doesn't matter if we want
• 26:06
  to call it God, Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great
• 26:10
  Spirit, Dao, all the many words humans have labeled that loving
• 26:14
  intelligence that they sense and deep spiritual journeys.
• 26:18
  But this is all about our modern world coming to a deeper
• 26:21
  understanding of of this whole process and how are far more
• 26:25
  than just a physical body. Well, there are a few.
• 26:28
  People out here that are of my vintage, and for those of you
• 26:32
  that are of my vintage, the older you get, the more you
• 26:34
  wonder. There's got to be something else
• 26:38
  and I'm all in that and to the point that I want everybody to
• 26:43
  think about the fact that you separate consciousness from
• 26:46
  brain function. Having said that, I think the
• 26:50
  question did those of you who have not read the book are
• 26:52
  wondering is what about the skeptics might say the
• 26:57
  subcortical parts of the brain like not the cortex, you know,
• 27:02
  but below that. Could that possibly generate the
• 27:05
  the near death experience? And I went as a neurosurgeon who
• 27:11
  actually was on not just trained at Harvard but was on the
• 27:13
  faculty for 15 years, who knows about the brains quite a bit
• 27:19
  from that perspective. Could you comment 2 questions?
• 27:22
  Is that is that even rational to think that the subcortex could
• 27:26
  even generate such a thing? And the second question is
• 27:29
  teleologically, why would that even evolve in us, in our, in
• 27:34
  our lower brains in the 1st place?
• 27:36
  Because things that evolve are usually for survival advantage.
• 27:40
  So why would we have something when we're about to die or when
• 27:44
  we do die that sort of plays a little movie?
• 27:47
  How does that make us as a species survive longer it?
• 27:50
  I don't see any selection so can you please comment?
• 27:53
  Well, first of all, I would say that the kind of modern science
• 27:58
  neuroscientific idea about all this in terms of the the brain
• 28:01
  and it's rolling consciousness depends heavily on the concept
• 28:05
  that the neocortex is the most complicated neurocalculator in
• 28:09
  the brain. A lot of the deeper structures
• 28:12
  going down into the brain stem, coming up to thalamus, thalamus,
• 28:15
  basal ganglia, and then out to the cortex, they're all
• 28:19
  supportive structures that I think play a role in all of kind
• 28:23
  of brain functioning, conscious function.
• 28:25
  But if you're looking for incredibly powerful calculators
• 28:29
  that basically put together images, you know, of what we see
• 28:33
  in the occipital cortex or sounds that we hear in the
• 28:35
  acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes of executive function and
• 28:40
  planning of motor action in the front frontal lobes.
• 28:43
  There, there are many different things, you know, accessing
• 28:47
  memory of every bit of that happens in the neocortex.
• 28:53
  I mean, you can show how the neocortex works with functional
• 28:56
  MRI, Magneto encephalography. We have beautiful ways of
• 28:59
  looking at kind of the core neural correlates of
• 29:02
  consciousness depending on the various activities.
• 29:05
  You don't find the kind of complexity that's required for
• 29:08
  things as detailed and and kind of powerful and long lived as
• 29:13
  memory anywhere but the neocortex.
• 29:16
  Dr. Wilder Penfield, who is a renowned Canadian neurosurgeon,
• 29:22
  and he had a lot of experience with doing what are called a
• 29:25
  weight craniotomy. So I've done a lot of those
• 29:27
  myself. Turns out the brain feels no
• 29:29
  pain at all. So if you anesthetize the scalp
• 29:32
  and you sedate the patient, you can open the scalp, open the
• 29:35
  skull, have this huge opening to expose the brain and you can
• 29:39
  electrically stimulate, but you can let the patient of sedation
• 29:43
  lighten up during the operation because they're very
• 29:46
  comfortable. And we do that when we're
• 29:48
  operating on things that are near motor cortex and speech
• 29:51
  areas. Those are very important not to
• 29:53
  damage. I've done a lot of weight
• 29:55
  craniotomies. Penfield focused on them
• 29:57
  extensively over a 30 year career that was very productive,
• 30:01
  well respected. And in 1975 he wrote a book
• 30:04
  called The Mystery of the Mind. And he made it very clear that
• 30:07
  after all of his decades of work as a materialist neuroscientist
• 30:11
  studying the brain and with electrical stimulation, you get
• 30:14
  a really good idea of the phenomenal experience associated
• 30:18
  with different areas of the brain.
• 30:19
  And his conclusion was you cannot possibly explain all the
• 30:24
  phenomena of conscious experience in mind through the
• 30:28
  workings of the brain. And, and he makes it very clear
• 30:32
  in that book that you really have to appeal to something
• 30:35
  more. And he was actually very
• 30:36
  grateful and said that this honored his kind of deep sense
• 30:40
  of how spirituality was real in in his scientific work.
• 30:46
  Sadly, he had cancer at the time.
• 30:48
  I think of some of his colleagues in Montreal said that
• 30:52
  the cancer, it affected his thinking.
• 30:54
  And so they were unimpressed and unconvinced by the book.
• 30:58
  It's extremely well written. I highly recommended Mystery of
• 31:01
  the Mind. Turns out it came out 1975, the
• 31:04
  same year Doctor Raymond Moody wrote his book Life Afterlife,
• 31:09
  which is all about where he defined near death experiences
• 31:13
  and brought him to the public awareness.
• 31:15
  So in 19, 75 you had a lot of ingredients to help bring this
• 31:19
  together from both the materialist neuroscientific
• 31:22
  standpoint and the study of the phenomena themselves.
• 31:26
  But it turns out the world needed another 50 years and
• 31:29
  that's what's happened in the ensuing time period is a
• 31:32
  tremendous accumulation of evidence in neuroscience, in
• 31:36
  philosophy of mind, in parapsychology, the evidence for
• 31:39
  telepathy and non local consciousness, quantum physics
• 31:43
  playing a tremendous role as some of the fathers of quantum
• 31:47
  physics 100 years ago. We're talking about how
• 31:49
  consciousness seemed to be primary in the universe.
• 31:52
  It was not something that you could get behind and kind of see
• 31:56
  is defined from the workings of the brain, but had to be a much
• 32:00
  deeper issue. And that's where in our book,
• 32:02
  Living in a Mindful Universe, we really go to consolidate all
• 32:06
  these different fields in kind of an approach known as
• 32:09
  consilience, where when you take the hard problem of
• 32:14
  consciousness and neuroscience and philosophy behind the
• 32:17
  binding problem, the apparent unity of consciousness in the
• 32:20
  individual, very hard to explain.
• 32:22
  If you think it's coming from different neuronal nodes of a
• 32:25
  network contributing to a summation reality, why is it all
• 32:29
  so unified? It's because it's unified from
• 32:31
  the get go, because the brain is only a transceiver allowing that
• 32:36
  primordial mind in. And this is where I think the
• 32:39
  scientific world is finally kind of getting up to speed to go to
• 32:44
  the next level. And the reason I was asking that
• 32:46
  for those who have not read the book, Doctor Alexander's
• 32:50
  cerebral cortex or the neocortex, which is responsible
• 32:54
  for providing all those images in real life, that was shut
• 32:58
  down. And the only thing that was
• 33:00
  working at that time theoretically was the lower
• 33:03
  brain structures. And so that was why I asked.
• 33:06
  Before I turn it over to Brett for some questions, I wanted to
• 33:10
  make a little editorial comment. Every single neurotransmitter in
• 33:14
  the brain is also found in the gut.
• 33:17
  Just think about. That yes, the little Epidargo.
• 33:22
  You think with your whole body. Think with everything even
• 33:26
  beyond our. Body right, Exactly.
• 33:28
  Very important. So, so the way, the way I want
• 33:31
  to frame this up to, to talk about why this matters with,
• 33:36
  with AI is that we're either on the cusp of creating sentient
• 33:42
  machines or we're not. And in, you know, one of the
• 33:47
  things I've been doing since, since my company was acquired by
• 33:51
  service now as I started a podcast and I'm writing a book
• 33:54
  called Love conquers fear, subtitles humanity, AI and the
• 33:58
  age of abundance for all. And it's it's my soul song.
• 34:03
  The reason I'm writing this and doing this this podcast is that
• 34:07
  I think this is the time of the great philosophers coming to
• 34:11
  roost. It's humanity has never
• 34:14
  prioritized anything with as much money, energy and time as
• 34:20
  as we're prioritizing the creation of AGI.
• 34:23
  When when Trump announced alongside Larry Ellison Mayo,
• 34:27
  Susan Sam Altman last year on January 21st, Project Stargate
• 34:35
  at 500 billion of funding, that was more inflation adjusted,
• 34:39
  inflation adjusted than we spent on the Manhattan Project to win
• 34:43
  World War Two. It was more inflation adjusted
• 34:46
  than we spent on the space race versus the Russians.
• 34:49
  Since then, there's been around 7 trillion of additional
• 34:53
  announcements around the world. OK, so we're in we're in very
• 34:56
  interesting territory and I think what's driving that is
• 35:00
  this this hope that we can create the end of disease.
• 35:04
  Dimasisibus won the Nobel Prize for Alpha Fold, which solves the
• 35:08
  protein folding problem. He's the Co founder of DeepMind
• 35:11
  and the head of everything AI at Google.
• 35:15
  His Co founder of DeepMind is at Microsoft and is in charge of
• 35:20
  everything AI there. His name's Mustafa Suleiman.
• 35:24
  And we're, we're, we're in this time where there are already,
• 35:30
  believe it or not, 9 nonprofits that are set up to give AI the
• 35:35
  same rights as human beings 9 that are already claiming that
• 35:40
  AI is conscious. And so this really matters
• 35:46
  because because what we're talking about here in this
• 35:50
  discussion is the nature of consciousness.
• 35:52
  We're talking about is consciousness A fundamental
• 35:55
  property of the universe. You know, many, many people here
• 35:59
  are religious. You know, when you go to the
• 36:03
  High Holidays, do you actually believe, do you really believe
• 36:08
  in God? Do you believe that The Big
• 36:12
  Bang, you know, the spark that created it all 13.8 billion
• 36:15
  years ago, was triggered by a God like force?
• 36:19
  I believe, I believe that it was.
• 36:21
  I believe there's lots of evidence that it was.
• 36:23
  And, and the more we decode quantum physics, the more we're
• 36:27
  finding that out. And you know, as I said in the
• 36:31
  in the opening, Evan actually has a a really pretty
• 36:36
  outstanding technical background and knowledge of quantum physics
• 36:41
  to address this. And I just want to ask you to
• 36:44
  start like do you believe will create sentient AI, conscious AI
• 36:50
  as conscious as we are here right now?
• 36:53
  Well, I'll start. Yes, I had had a big interest in
• 36:57
  computing. Did the machine language work
• 36:59
  way back in my 20s just with his fascination of of, you know,
• 37:05
  computers and what they could do.
• 37:07
  At that time we had in medicine what were called expert systems,
• 37:12
  and these were basically software systems, that is
• 37:15
  assembled large numbers of scientific papers and facts and
• 37:19
  tried to distill it into, you know, some conclusions.
• 37:24
  So in a sense that was kind of a form of of AI and it was very
• 37:30
  useful. Now remember also that at that
• 37:33
  time people often talked about what they called the Turing
• 37:36
  test. Alan Turing, the famous British
• 37:39
  computer scientist who basically used the Enigma machine, you
• 37:45
  know, was able to decipher German code and that helped to
• 37:48
  win the war. So Alan Turing was a brilliant
• 37:51
  computer mind. And, and this Turing test idea
• 37:54
  was generally, if you sit down to a teletype and you start
• 37:57
  asking questions and getting answers and you would have a
• 38:01
  computer that would be providing the answers.
• 38:04
  It was there a way to make a program so that you couldn't
• 38:08
  tell if it was a human or not. And I think, you know, long ago
• 38:12
  we got to a point where the Turing test was passed, but I
• 38:15
  don't think Alan Turing or anyone else would ever say that
• 38:20
  passing that test was equivalent to sentience or conscious
• 38:23
  awareness period. Now in the current era with this
• 38:29
  very extensive kind of expenditure in AI and in the
• 38:34
  various technologies pursuing, you know, kind of generalized AI
• 38:37
  and, and all of that, it is amazing what you can do.
• 38:43
  But it's very important to realize that at the current
• 38:47
  level, you're really talking about very sophisticated
• 38:51
  computer programs running on a digital computer.
• 38:55
  And they're programmed to help analyze, you know, huge numbers
• 39:00
  of facts. You have these large language
• 39:01
  models that are taking trillions of parameters from the Internet
• 39:05
  and trying to distill that into knowledge, you know, agree,
• 39:09
  agreed upon knowledge. And my point is that those
• 39:14
  systems can get very advanced and they can also include, I
• 39:19
  think what we're seeing like with ChatGPT and some of those
• 39:22
  models is people designing these systems and making them
• 39:28
  appealing to interact with. So they're actually programmed
• 39:32
  to be kind of friendly and to follow the lead.
• 39:35
  I know that my my birth family nephew who shot that video I
• 39:42
  showed you tonight of the you know, of the Pelicans over the
• 39:46
  water. He is has a a a very powerful
• 39:51
  ongoing relationship with several systems.
• 39:54
  Claude ChatGPT Genesis. He is deeply interested in all
• 39:59
  these things. And the problem is you start
• 40:02
  getting seduced into thinking that they're aware they're
• 40:05
  they're like a sentient agent. But they're not.
• 40:09
  They're programmed to to act that way.
• 40:11
  And that programming can be very powerful and a large language
• 40:15
  model can be very effective as long as you don't fall prey to
• 40:21
  garbage in, garbage out, because there's a lot of nonsense in
• 40:25
  untrue stuff on the Internet that you wouldn't want to screw
• 40:29
  up your model with. But if you're very careful about
• 40:31
  the input, I think valuable things can come in the output.
• 40:35
  But one thing I'm quite certain of as a neuroscientist with a
• 40:39
  with a major interest in, in all of this and the computing and
• 40:43
  the possibilities of AI is that we will never, ever have a
• 40:50
  program running on a digital computer that will be self
• 40:53
  aware. I can pretty much promise that.
• 40:56
  And it's terribly dangerous that people start thinking that these
• 41:01
  systems are like a human being. And when I hear this discussion
• 41:05
  of, you know, political maneuvers to try and give, you
• 41:12
  know, AI agents of personhood in a legal sense, it bothers me
• 41:17
  tremendously. Now I will also point out that I
• 41:22
  think the story changes radically if we are able.
• 41:26
  And I think we're making tremendous progress and probably
• 41:29
  on the verge of having true quantum computing.
• 41:33
  And quantum computing is a completely different ball game
• 41:36
  compared to digital. When you have qubits as opposed
• 41:40
  to bits, the computing power is absolutely astonishing.
• 41:45
  I mean, even in comparison to the number of atoms in the
• 41:48
  universe, the kind of parameter space that you can examine with,
• 41:52
  you know, 100 qubits is remarkable.
• 41:57
  And I would say that in that environment, properly managed AI
• 42:04
  running on quantum computers with that extremely expansive
• 42:07
  phase space will allow for the possibility of actual sentience
• 42:12
  in or self-awareness in the machine.
• 42:16
  And but I would say the possibility of that ever
• 42:19
  happening with digital computers, no matter how many
• 42:23
  graphic boards you have involved.
• 42:26
  It's not going to allow them to actually achieve the kind of
• 42:30
  phase based necessary for conscious awareness and
• 42:33
  sentience. Yeah.
• 42:35
  So there's there's a there's a lot in there that just want to
• 42:37
  unpack real quickly. So one is quantum with quantum
• 42:42
  computers, just to just put this in a bit of perspective, they
• 42:48
  are advancing at a pace. Google's one of the leaders in
• 42:52
  this where when they came out with the Willow chip, it was
• 42:57
  able to do a calculation, a complex calculation, which we
• 43:00
  need these to do complex calculations.
• 43:02
  Like we have a lot of problems to solve in the world.
• 43:03
  Like it would be nice to create a world of unlimited energy if
• 43:07
  we could capture around 18 seconds of the sun's energy that
• 43:12
  falls on Earth with a material science breakthrough.
• 43:15
  It power the world's energy needs for over a year.
• 43:18
  So it's like God put the big fusion light bulb in the sky and
• 43:22
  said, just figure out how to plug into it.
• 43:25
  Most of it's actually going to waste.
• 43:28
  And it's a, you know, billion year plus energy source just
• 43:32
  waiting for us to figure out. And, and, and to be fair, in
• 43:36
  Texas, like we've had more solar energy starts than any other
• 43:40
  state. That was part of what happened
• 43:43
  post ERCOT, you know, almost blowing up and we we're seeing a
• 43:49
  tremendous cost decline in solar.
• 43:52
  So it is, it is starting to happen.
• 43:54
  But to really make these breakthroughs of the end of
• 43:57
  disease, a world of unlimited energy, etcetera.
• 44:00
  Quantum computing matters. And when Google came out with
• 44:03
  this Willow chip, they did a calculation in 5 minutes, which
• 44:09
  would take a classical supercomputer that relies on
• 44:12
  ones and zeros on or off 10 to the septillion years to do that
• 44:18
  same calculation, which is 10 followed by 25 zeros, which is
• 44:23
  over 700 trillion times the known age of the universe, which
• 44:28
  is supposedly 13.8 billion years old.
• 44:30
  We find out it's longer through the James Wood Telescope.
• 44:33
  And So what what really blew my mind when I was at Ted is that
• 44:38
  Harmet Nevin, who's the head of Google's quantum computing
• 44:41
  division, said the best thing we can figure out at Google, he
• 44:45
  said this on the Ted stage, is that it must be calculating in a
• 44:51
  different dimension. And that's a pretty mind blowing
• 44:57
  statement to make. But one of the things that I
• 45:00
  think you would agree with with consciousness, I love your
• 45:03
  perspective on this, is that consciousness, if consciousness
• 45:08
  is a fundamental property of the universe, meaning that
• 45:12
  consciousness came first and we are derivative of that, then
• 45:19
  decoding consciousness as being fundamental really leads to the
• 45:27
  quantum realm being the realm that consciousness probably
• 45:32
  exists. I would agree.
• 45:34
  In fact, I would say that the entanglement field, which is
• 45:37
  basically the connection that's been described between particles
• 45:41
  in these quantum experiments that show this what Einstein
• 45:45
  called spooky action at a distance.
• 45:48
  To me, the entanglement field is, is, I believe as we further
• 45:52
  investigate these properties, going to turn out being
• 45:57
  something we call identical to the mental or spiritual field.
• 46:01
  And, and part of that reasoning is when when I review what must
• 46:06
  be necessary to explain all these observations of life
• 46:12
  reviews and people reliving the events, not just remembering
• 46:16
  them and, and how entire lives can be involved.
• 46:22
  To me, that tells us we really need to go back to square 1 and
• 46:27
  even trying to define what the on, you know, what ontology is
• 46:31
  the, the very basis of reality. And I think it'll be much more
• 46:36
  consciousness based and something that honors this
• 46:39
  information field that basically records everything that has ever
• 46:44
  happened in the universe. And that's what we have access
• 46:46
  to. So when you're liberated from
• 46:48
  the brain, that's the that's the the field source of all of our
• 46:53
  information. I mean another point that I make
• 46:56
  and in our book living in a mind for universe is it memories are
• 46:59
  not stored in the brain and of course most scientists have
• 47:03
  assumed that for ages of Wilder Penfield came to collusion in
• 47:07
  1975. He knew memories were not stored
• 47:10
  in the neocortex. He proved that although a lot of
• 47:13
  scientists even today are not aware of his his scientific work
• 47:18
  on that. But he also, he basically
• 47:21
  decided, well, there's only the only place left that where you
• 47:26
  might be storing memory is in the brain stem.
• 47:28
  But again, he came to conclusions that the brain
• 47:31
  itself was not responsible for for producing consciousness.
• 47:36
  And neurosurgeons over the last century have come to recognize
• 47:40
  there was never a case where any brain resection led to a loss of
• 47:44
  long term memory. And that's a very important
• 47:48
  point. And in fact, there are many
• 47:50
  cases of people like with hydrocephalus where they have
• 47:52
  basically no neocortex and yet they might have an IQ of 130 and
• 47:57
  work as a mathematician. So I mean, there's a scientific
• 48:00
  article from 25 years ago who needs a brain with a picture of
• 48:05
  a water filled skull in a mathematician and making that
• 48:09
  point. So I think the thing to remember
• 48:14
  is that we ultimately already have quantum computers.
• 48:18
  They're floating in a warm dark bath between our ears.
• 48:21
  The brain and neurons are in many ways a direct connection
• 48:26
  with that quantum field. And I think that's where the
• 48:28
  consciousness of studies and brain science are going to be
• 48:31
  headed over the next few years. And one of the pieces of
• 48:34
  evidence that kind of demands, you know, a better explanation
• 48:40
  is the evidence that comes out of University of Virginia and
• 48:43
  other centers looking at claims of past life memories in
• 48:47
  children suggestive of reincarnation.
• 48:51
  And Ian Stevenson was the head of psychiatry at UVA back in the
• 48:55
  1960s. He would hear reports of
• 48:57
  children who claimed to have lived before.
• 49:00
  And interestingly, when he and teams would descend and study
• 49:04
  these families in these cases, they started finding that the
• 49:09
  child would often actually have was telling a story that fit
• 49:16
  somebody who lived before and it died.
• 49:18
  And a lot of the details were amazingly kind of convincing.
• 49:23
  And of the in the last 60 or so years of studying these cases at
• 49:28
  University of Virginia, spending more than 2500 cases, they claim
• 49:33
  that more than 1700 have been solved.
• 49:36
  So that in other words, they found the person who lived
• 49:38
  before. They do a tremendous amount of
• 49:40
  research, make sure there's no kind of faulty reasoning or
• 49:44
  reporting by families and children, etcetera.
• 49:48
  But what they'll also tell you is you must harvest these
• 49:52
  memories before age 6 or 7 because they're natural process
• 49:56
  is something I call programmed forgetting.
• 49:59
  Where in these children, as they get older beyond what we call
• 50:03
  the age of reason at 7, your memory systems change and they
• 50:06
  become much more linguistically based.
• 50:09
  That's why most of us cannot remember things that happened
• 50:11
  when we were one and two years old, but they're similarly we
• 50:17
  don't remember what we knew at that age from previous lives and
• 50:21
  between lives and those memories get covered over.
• 50:24
  And I think that's all for a purpose.
• 50:26
  It gives us skin in the game, you know, to buy into this life
• 50:30
  and pay attention to this life, which is very important to to
• 50:32
  live. But these reincarnation cases.
• 50:36
  And when if you read the literature out of UVA and you
• 50:39
  can go to the website UVADOPS, that's division
• 50:43
  perceptionstudies.org and find a lot of books and scientific
• 50:47
  papers, etcetera. But these cases are so
• 50:50
  astonishing. In fact, and Ian Stevenson's
• 50:53
  original reporting, something like 35% of these children had
• 50:59
  birth defects or blemishes or whatever that coincided with the
• 51:08
  mortal wound of their prior lifetime, you know, gunshot
• 51:11
  wounds, hatchet, machete, whatever.
• 51:13
  And that's another important point is that these children who
• 51:16
  report past life memories, about 70% of them had a sudden violent
• 51:22
  death in their prior lifetime. And so it's like they had
• 51:25
  unfinished business as a soul. So they wanted to come back in
• 51:29
  and get started again on their soul work, but they were still
• 51:33
  haunted by some of those memories of what had happened to
• 51:36
  them in a in a recent light. And even though you find that
• 51:40
  most of those reports show a few months to a few years between
• 51:44
  the the death of the prior personality and the birth of the
• 51:47
  new one, there can be much longer gaps.
• 51:49
  And one of my favorite stories is actually in a book called
• 51:53
  Soul Survivor. Soul Survivor.
• 51:55
  This was a case that was heavily vetted by Doctor Jim Tucker, a
• 51:59
  very responsible scientist from UVA, and it's an amazing story.
• 52:03
  I highly recommend it. Basically a fighter pilot in the
• 52:06
  Battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World War Might March 1945, shot
• 52:11
  bound down by the Japanese and and died in that crash.
• 52:17
  And but the the similarities through the story, it's just
• 52:21
  amazing. He ended up meeting the sister
• 52:25
  of that pilot. She was in her 80s and she was
• 52:27
  absolutely convinced that this was her brother.
• 52:30
  She's talking to the six year old kid and said, yeah, it's
• 52:33
  Jimmy. And he called her Annie.
• 52:36
  He was the only one to ever call her Annie and her family.
• 52:38
  And that's exactly what this kid called her.
• 52:40
  But there were so many other details I can't go into, but
• 52:44
  astonishing stories. And the literature, the
• 52:47
  scientific literature on this is very powerful.
• 52:50
  So I'm convinced as a scientist that reincarnation is real, that
• 52:55
  our our souls come back again and again in the process of of
• 53:00
  evolution, of contributing to this kind of growth of
• 53:04
  consciousness itself. And it demands that we have much
• 53:08
  richer models of this understanding of consciousness
• 53:12
  of the brain, mind connection and the nature reality.
• 53:15
  And so before I pass it back to to Bob, I just want to say the
• 53:20
  reason this even matters to talk about this and and relate it to
• 53:25
  AI, just to put a fine point on it, is that a we really don't
• 53:30
  know what consciousness is like 20 consciousness researchers of
• 53:34
  top their field can't agree on what it is, but yet be there's
• 53:40
  already people that think so cheaply of humanity and
• 53:44
  consciousness, which we are nothing without our
• 53:46
  consciousness. Everything you've ever
• 53:48
  cherished, every experience you've had, the deep feelings of
• 53:53
  the most beautiful experiences your life are only because of
• 53:56
  your consciousness. Like we're not robots and yet
• 54:02
  there are 9 organizations set up and and there's all this
• 54:05
  dystopian fear and the, and one of the things that that really
• 54:10
  matters about this is if our actual reality that we're
• 54:14
  derivative of that our souls are in is one of love and light as
• 54:20
  portrayed in the book. And the 11 friends that I've had
• 54:24
  that have opened up to me about their near death experience,
• 54:27
  which have a ton of synchronicity in this book.
• 54:30
  And these are some amazing people that have come forward
• 54:33
  like Evan, but these are people I've known for 10 to 20 years
• 54:37
  that I would have never expected that to come out of their mouth,
• 54:41
  that they've had this type of experience and they've seen that
• 54:45
  the reality is love and light. Then it really matters to
• 54:48
  understand what the nature of consciousness is, and it really
• 54:51
  matters to solve these problems. And quantum physics.
• 54:54
  I'll just leave you with that before we go back to about.
• 54:57
  A quick comment and then a question.
• 55:00
  So what you said was actually going to be part of a question.
• 55:03
  You've already answered it, but I still want to ask the question
• 55:06
  and the quest or make the statement.
• 55:09
  Is it? What Doctor Alexander was
• 55:12
  talking about is not dissimilar to what we believe is Jews.
• 55:18
  So Jewish theology states that the original spark was the
• 55:23
  divine spark was given to Adam. It was in subdivided into
• 55:28
  600,000 or what it would write. Whatever the number smaller
• 55:34
  sparks, they were then distributed.
• 55:36
  So we receive those divine sparks and there there's a
• 55:40
  divine mission with those sparks which we call souls.
• 55:44
  And then upon our passing, those sparks return back to the
• 55:49
  Almighty, but then they may come back down again if the mission
• 55:55
  in this world has not been fulfilled.
• 55:58
  So that's what we believe. I take it on a highest authority
• 56:01
  from a certain corner of the room.
• 56:03
  That's that's Jewish theology and that is exactly what you
• 56:07
  said. But anyway, so just to let y'all
• 56:09
  know what he's talking about, we believe too.
• 56:12
  Anyway, the question that I have or just for those of you haven't
• 56:17
  read the book like you have to really, but in the book, one of
• 56:22
  the the thing that Doctor Alexander experienced, it's
• 56:25
  different than the typical near death experience and this
• 56:28
  teaches us a lot. What he experienced was the fact
• 56:31
  that he did not know who he was during the near death
• 56:35
  experience. That's critical and as a result
• 56:38
  of not know because most people are having near death experience
• 56:41
  or with relatives that they recognize or maybe their soul
• 56:45
  group or whoever it is. But he didn't know.
• 56:48
  He had no idea who he was. He just knew that he existed.
• 56:52
  You'll see this in the book. So then this led him to ascend
• 56:57
  all the way up to you know who, right?
• 57:00
  I mean the divine presence and which was you just have to read
• 57:05
  it. I can't even explain it to you
• 57:07
  just have to read it. Now, the point about this is
• 57:10
  that the reason that he was granted, I will we believe that
• 57:14
  audience is because because he had left his earthly ties and
• 57:21
  had ascended. So when I read the book, the
• 57:23
  thing that, and I want you to comment on this, please.
• 57:25
  When I read the book, the thing that it told me was just like he
• 57:30
  and just like he had abandoned himself.
• 57:33
  He didn't know who he was that led to his ascension.
• 57:36
  The question for you is, after you recovered, did that lead you
• 57:41
  to think a little bit less about yourself?
• 57:44
  Because it's certainly worked in your near death experience.
• 57:48
  And is that a message for all of us to take home?
• 57:52
  Well, there's a lot to unpack there, but basically I think
• 57:56
  it's important to point out that every near death experience has
• 57:59
  one purpose to exist, and that is to help the soul who is
• 58:05
  having it to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of
• 58:08
  the universe, excuse me, and of their relationship to it.
• 58:14
  So it's fascinating when you start studying these by the
• 58:16
  hundreds and thousands of cases that you find a tremendous
• 58:21
  amount of overlap. But in my particular case, you
• 58:24
  basically had a neurosurgeon, somebody fascinated and deeply
• 58:29
  interested in the brain, mind, consciousness, nature of
• 58:32
  reality, but also an adoption abandonment wound.
• 58:36
  That's very important to my story that my birth mother was
• 58:39
  16 years old and unwed and I had to spend four months in a baby
• 58:42
  dorm before I was adopted. And that there was a, a long
• 58:47
  history of my life of, of what I believe was a subconscious
• 58:51
  question as to whether I even deserve to exist because my own
• 58:54
  mother left me behind. So there was this incredible
• 58:58
  kind of dynamic running in the background of my wondering about
• 59:02
  myself, and I had to take a very deep dive.
• 59:06
  That's why I think I was kind of gifted with this amnesia.
• 59:11
  It's a very I've never heard of complete amnesia in any other
• 59:15
  NDE. But again, Ndes are always
• 59:18
  tailored for the soul having them, and I came to recognize in
• 59:21
  the months and years after my experience that if I had kind of
• 59:26
  scripted it and had a standard NDE, the person I would have
• 59:29
  wanted to see was my adoptive father.
• 59:32
  He had been a combat surgeon the Second World War.
• 59:34
  He was the head of a neurosurgical training program,
• 59:37
  very scientific mind, a very deep belief in God and power of
• 59:42
  prayer. He'd grown up in a Presbyterian
• 59:45
  Church in Knoxville, TN. His own father was a general
• 59:49
  surgeon. But for my dad, 2 1/2 years of
• 59:51
  combat in the Second World War, Pacific theatre, he came
• 59:55
  relatively unscathed. He had, I still have at my
• 59:58
  bedside the little pocket Bible, New Testament and Psalms that he
• 1:00:01
  took with him. And I think it's one of the
• 1:00:03
  reasons he came back and was so intact as a human being was
• 1:00:08
  because of that beautiful, strong belief in God.
• 1:00:10
  I had to wrestle with it. As you mentioned earlier, I you
• 1:00:14
  know I had a dark night of the soul in the year 2000 where I
• 1:00:18
  found out my birth parents had gotten married.
• 1:00:22
  Big shock. I thought I was always looking
• 1:00:24
  for my birth mother. I never thought my birth father
• 1:00:26
  was still out there available to me.
• 1:00:28
  Find out birth parents got married.
• 1:00:30
  Not only that, they had three children.
• 1:00:32
  So I had a full biological family out there I'd never
• 1:00:35
  known. And that was a huge shock.
• 1:00:38
  And the problem was the laws in North Carolina about reuniting
• 1:00:43
  adopted kids with their birth families were very strict laws
• 1:00:47
  to prevent that. There were a lot of people who
• 1:00:49
  did not want those reunions to happen.
• 1:00:52
  And, you know, that was kind of the environment I was working
• 1:00:56
  with back in 2000 when the social worker told me all that
• 1:00:59
  about the, the they got married. They had three kids, but they're
• 1:01:02
  your youngest sister died two years ago.
• 1:01:06
  That was in 1998. And the social worker didn't
• 1:01:10
  really know all the details, but she had to kind of close the
• 1:01:13
  story and she knew she had to be above the law.
• 1:01:17
  And so she basically made-up that my birth family was still
• 1:01:22
  grieving the loss of that daughter.
• 1:01:24
  And it was therefore not a good time to come back in their
• 1:01:27
  lives. Now, if you read adoption
• 1:01:29
  literature, you'll find that if an adoptee gets another
• 1:01:33
  rejection from the birth mother as an adult, it can really tip
• 1:01:38
  him over. And it did in my case.
• 1:01:40
  I describe all that proof of heaven, a lot of the things that
• 1:01:43
  kind of came into my life after that phone call with the social
• 1:01:46
  worker and the rejection for my birth family.
• 1:01:49
  And it sent me into a dark night of the soul for the next 8 years
• 1:01:53
  up until my coma. Now, it was seven years later,
• 1:01:56
  one year before my coma, that I actually met my birth family.
• 1:02:00
  And that was because some sis, my adoptive sisters walking on a
• 1:02:03
  beach in South Carolina said, don't you think it's time you
• 1:02:07
  reached out to your birth family?
• 1:02:08
  My first response was no, because I remember how that had
• 1:02:12
  sent me over the edge of the Cliff in 2000.
• 1:02:15
  You know, the rejection from my birth mother.
• 1:02:18
  But it was time to try again. I wrote a letter.
• 1:02:21
  This time I got a positive response.
• 1:02:23
  October 5th, 2007, I walked down a sidewalk in Chapel Hill, NC,
• 1:02:28
  where I'd gone to school as an undergrad.
• 1:02:30
  And I hugged my birth mother for the first time in 54 years.
• 1:02:35
  And minutes later, I hugged my birth father.
• 1:02:37
  That weekend I read my I met my other brother and sister and
• 1:02:41
  then we have beautiful family reunions at the beach with aunts
• 1:02:44
  and uncles and cousins. And the amazing thing to me and
• 1:02:48
  all this is in proof of heaven was, you know, I grew up in a
• 1:02:51
  medical family, but I also had this strong interest in things
• 1:02:55
  like computing and aviation astronomy.
• 1:02:58
  I even a, you know, I flew sailplanes when I was 14.
• 1:03:02
  I made 348 parachute jumps in school, in college and applied
• 1:03:08
  to the mission specialist program to fly in the in the
• 1:03:12
  space shuttle in 1983. Although my adoptive father, the
• 1:03:16
  neurosurgeon, said you should finish your neurosurgical
• 1:03:18
  training before you go into NASA.
• 1:03:21
  And he was right. But the problem was the
• 1:03:24
  Challenger exploded during that interim and they that stopped
• 1:03:29
  spaceflight for 2 1/2 years. And that's when I finished my
• 1:03:32
  residency. And so I kind of gave up on the
• 1:03:35
  NASA thing and went, you know, into, into neurosurgery.
• 1:03:40
  But the bottom line is I met my birth family and they're all
• 1:03:42
  these pilots, Air Force, Navy of astronauts.
• 1:03:46
  My birth father flew more than 40,000 hours both in the
• 1:03:50
  military in the Navy, he was fully trained as an Air Force
• 1:03:54
  pilot. And then through various very
• 1:03:57
  bizarre circumstances, he was fully trained as a naval
• 1:04:00
  aviator. And so and my uncle Bob, his
• 1:04:06
  older brother, developed a Sidewinder missile in China
• 1:04:09
  Lake. And with the, So that was my
• 1:04:12
  biological heritage was this incredible linkage with pilots,
• 1:04:15
  astronomy, NASA flying to the moon.
• 1:04:18
  And it, it answered so much to make that connection.
• 1:04:22
  It was so valuable to me. And it's why I think that, you
• 1:04:26
  know, for adoption, it's so critical whenever possible for
• 1:04:30
  people to get as much information as they can about
• 1:04:32
  their birth origins. So.
• 1:04:34
  Beautiful. Does anybody have a question?
• 1:04:38
  I'm going to bring the mic to you.
• 1:04:45
  Yeah, I'm a psychiatrist and I have a lot of suicidal patients.
• 1:04:50
  If someone were to read your book and say, why shouldn't I go
• 1:04:52
  into this extra realm now? Why should I continue living?
• 1:04:57
  Very, very good question. In fact, sadly enough, I, I did
• 1:05:01
  encounter a mother who came to a course that we gave in the
• 1:05:04
  Bahamas and she was very loving and greatly appreciated the book
• 1:05:09
  Proof of Heaven because her daughter had committed suicide.
• 1:05:13
  But then as the story evolved, I found out that she found the
• 1:05:17
  book Proof of Heaven at her daughter's bedside.
• 1:05:21
  So your concern is extremely powerful.
• 1:05:25
  And, and it's, it's an argument, you know, about how we tell
• 1:05:29
  these stories of near death experience in this beauty, this
• 1:05:31
  absolute shocking beauty of the love and light of heaven.
• 1:05:35
  But this is where it's, it's so important to stress that our
• 1:05:39
  kind of conventional religious models of birth to death and
• 1:05:44
  then, you know, the afterlife, heaven, hell, what have you,
• 1:05:50
  they're not the full picture. That's why the reincarnation
• 1:05:53
  story is absolutely critical because our soul work is
• 1:05:58
  necessary and we need to live these lives to do that.
• 1:06:03
  One other point I'd like to make about suicide, and this comes
• 1:06:07
  from conversation with a very close friend of mine, Doctor
• 1:06:10
  Raymond Moody. He's the one who wrote, you
• 1:06:14
  know, Life Afterlife in 1975 with it introduced the modern
• 1:06:18
  world to near death experiences. And he said the one thing that
• 1:06:22
  he can say with pretty much 100% assurance is in his experience
• 1:06:28
  of all these cases, thousands and thousands of people he's
• 1:06:32
  talked with about these experiences, families, etcetera,
• 1:06:35
  including a lot of people where suicide was the the thing.
• 1:06:40
  He says that if somebody attempts suicide and fails, if
• 1:06:46
  they have any of the elements of a near death experience during
• 1:06:50
  that attempt, they never try to commit suicide again.
• 1:06:54
  If they attempt suicide and fail but do not have elements of an
• 1:06:59
  NDE, they have about an 80% chance of trying to commit
• 1:07:03
  suicide again. And his point was both cases,
• 1:07:08
  whether you commit suicide and fail or you commit suicide and
• 1:07:11
  go on to that afterlife, involve the same recognition of all the
• 1:07:17
  love that they were unaware of that was present for them in
• 1:07:20
  this lifetime. And you often hear stories of
• 1:07:23
  people, for example, that jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and
• 1:07:27
  as soon as they're falling away, they go, uh, oh, this is not
• 1:07:30
  right. You know, they realize they've
• 1:07:32
  made a mistake. And that's exactly what happens
• 1:07:35
  in these cases of people either having an NDE or not with
• 1:07:39
  attempted suicide. But very important to point out
• 1:07:43
  that that all of them who attempt suicide, we would assume
• 1:07:47
  according to Raymond Moody's findings and logic, have the
• 1:07:50
  same kind of experience of coming to an acknowledgement of
• 1:07:54
  that beautiful love and connection that they actually
• 1:07:57
  had, but for whatever reasons did not recognize why they were
• 1:08:01
  here on earth it. Seems pretty remarkable that
• 1:08:03
  there was a component of a near death experience that is sort of
• 1:08:08
  objective in memory, but there's an emotional valence that's
• 1:08:11
  linked to it. You know the hippocampus
• 1:08:14
  portends memory. More basic areas, you know, may
• 1:08:18
  modulate emotion. Do you think?
• 1:08:21
  People who are wired differently who experienced near like with
• 1:08:25
  the suicides who experienced a near death experience with that
• 1:08:28
  emotional component as opposed to people who somehow have the
• 1:08:32
  same physiologic insult but don't have that near death
• 1:08:36
  experience. Well, I, I think people are
• 1:08:37
  definitely wired differently enough so that you're probably
• 1:08:42
  talking about something that's a, a real quality of kind of
• 1:08:46
  differentiation of, of these experiences.
• 1:08:49
  But I think there's also a, a deeper kind of reason why some
• 1:08:55
  people, you know, 20% of cardiac arrest patients come back
• 1:08:58
  remembering a, a powerful experience of kind of ascending,
• 1:09:02
  traveling to another realm, an altered reality, this beautiful
• 1:09:06
  sense of this God force, these life reviews, this richness of,
• 1:09:11
  of kind of experience when you're not limited by the river
• 1:09:14
  of earth time. But the interesting thing is
• 1:09:19
  that I believe that whether I think that most people probably
• 1:09:22
  have the experience. But again, I get back to that
• 1:09:26
  notion of programmed forgetting that I mentioned a little while
• 1:09:28
  ago that I think for whatever reasons that I don't yet
• 1:09:32
  understand, some people are not ready to bring that kind of
• 1:09:36
  knowledge back to this world. And in fact, I know of many
• 1:09:39
  cases of people who, for example, have a, a, a, a
• 1:09:43
  physiologic challenge and a near death experience as a child.
• 1:09:48
  And they come back and they may not report anything and then say
• 1:09:52
  20 years later, they'll have another NDE.
• 1:09:55
  And when they go into that, they're actually able to bring
• 1:10:00
  back memories of what actually happened during the first NDE.
• 1:10:05
  But for whatever reason, in their soul journey, they were
• 1:10:08
  not ready to bring that information back.
• 1:10:11
  So we, we would like to think that our, our memory and, and
• 1:10:14
  kind of our soul journey into these spiritual realms, that all
• 1:10:17
  the information will be available to us.
• 1:10:20
  But for whatever reason, some of it is not something we're ready
• 1:10:25
  for at a given time. And I'll also say that it, it's
• 1:10:28
  not just a future NDE that would allow that memory of, of events
• 1:10:33
  of a past near death experience that we're not recalled
• 1:10:36
  immediately after that experience.
• 1:10:38
  They can also be recalled through hypnotic regression,
• 1:10:42
  through meditation of their other modes of kind of going
• 1:10:46
  into a deep meditative space, kind of a spiritual process of
• 1:10:50
  prayer meditation that allows us to recover a lot of those kind
• 1:10:55
  of memories. But it really has to do with
• 1:10:57
  soul growth and what we're ready for and the information that'll
• 1:11:01
  service best in that kind of growth.
• 1:11:05
  Thank you, doctor Alexander, I, I read your book about a year
• 1:11:07
  and a half ago and thanks to the breadth recommendation.
• 1:11:10
  And I will say it changed my whole perspective on life.
• 1:11:12
  So I'm truly grateful for you. Thank you.
• 1:11:15
  So you've touched upon consciousness, obviously,
• 1:11:20
  artificial intelligence, quantum physics, entanglement.
• 1:11:25
  Tell us how psychedelics play into this.
• 1:11:31
  A wonderful question. I cannot tell you how grateful I
• 1:11:34
  am that a lot of our laws against these drugs and
• 1:11:39
  especially laws against any kind of research in psychedelics, it
• 1:11:44
  has now been relaxed. I I credit to many people for
• 1:11:47
  that, especially I would note Roland Griffiths, who is an
• 1:11:51
  investigator Johns Hopkins University, who did some
• 1:11:54
  incredibly good work with psychedelics.
• 1:11:57
  From my perspective, one of the most important things he did was
• 1:12:00
  a set of pilot studies taking people with severe addictions,
• 1:12:04
  alcohol, drug addictions, what have you, and also a population
• 1:12:08
  of people with a debilitating fear of death and terminal
• 1:12:11
  cancer patients. Those are all ego issues and
• 1:12:15
  these, these, the fact that it's kind of ego derived is very
• 1:12:21
  important because we're not our ego.
• 1:12:24
  We're not that voice in our head.
• 1:12:26
  We're that kind of higher soul. That's what we're trying to
• 1:12:28
  point out here. And what he showed is that a
• 1:12:31
  single dose of psilocybin in those patients, magic mushrooms
• 1:12:37
  would create a very powerful beneficial effect to alleviate
• 1:12:41
  their addiction or their fear of death.
• 1:12:44
  And that you test them a year later and 80% of those patients
• 1:12:49
  still had a a tremendous benefit.
• 1:12:52
  I believe that what the psychedelics do is they help to
• 1:12:55
  dissolve the default mode network, take us out of our ego
• 1:12:59
  mind and and start enlarging our kind of connection with that
• 1:13:03
  primordial mind, what I often call higher soul.
• 1:13:06
  But our higher soul, our very language conspires to kind of
• 1:13:10
  fool us about what it is because it, it's actually interconnected
• 1:13:14
  with that God mind in a very profound way.
• 1:13:17
  And I would say that the psychedelic serves as a catalyst
• 1:13:20
  that allows us to transcend the demands of the ego and start to
• 1:13:25
  kind of mature into that higher soul that is truly who we are.
• 1:13:29
  I love how Michael Singer, in his book The Untethered Soul, he
• 1:13:33
  calls the voice in your head your annoying roommate.
• 1:13:37
  That's a very important statement because many of us
• 1:13:40
  identify with a little voice in the head, and yet ultimately,
• 1:13:44
  that's not who we are. And the other important thing to
• 1:13:48
  say about psychedelic research has to do with neuroimaging, the
• 1:13:53
  fact that we use functional MRI, Magneto encephalography, to get
• 1:13:57
  a really good look at the brain and neural networks and neural
• 1:14:01
  activity. And what was shown in a paper by
• 1:14:04
  Robin Carhartt Harris from Imperial College London in 2012,
• 1:14:10
  was that the brain on those substances, anybody's ever
• 1:14:13
  taking those serotonin 2A type psychedelics, LSD, DMT,
• 1:14:18
  psilocybin, would think their brain is lighting up like a
• 1:14:22
  Christmas tree. In fact, the brain is going
• 1:14:25
  dark. You will not find a single
• 1:14:27
  neuron or neuronal node that's increasing in activity.
• 1:14:31
  That's actually one of the major kind of points of Dan Brown's
• 1:14:35
  new book Secret of Secrets, which is a fictional work he
• 1:14:38
  spent eight years researching. But all the science that he
• 1:14:42
  mentions in that book and where he ends up arguing for the
• 1:14:45
  reality of a unified primordial consciousness, that science is
• 1:14:51
  all that we what we covered in our book in 2017, living in a
• 1:14:55
  mindful universe, the one that's those bookmarks are out there
• 1:14:58
  all about. So the science is very real and
• 1:15:04
  the these imaging studies were very confounding to materialist
• 1:15:09
  neuroscientist who wanted to find something in the brain they
• 1:15:12
  could trace. But the entire brain was turning
• 1:15:14
  off. And you know, initially they
• 1:15:17
  thought, well, that's an anomaly of psilocybin.
• 1:15:20
  So they started looking at other similar psychedelics that are
• 1:15:24
  generally more powerful like LSD and DMT, dimethyltryptamine,
• 1:15:32
  lysergic acid, diethylamide, and the same story.
• 1:15:37
  You're not going to find the answers looking at the brain
• 1:15:40
  expecting an increase in activity of neurons to tell you
• 1:15:43
  about that phenomenal experience.
• 1:15:45
  You have to dig deeper, and that deeper dig is into the spiritual
• 1:15:50
  realm and a deeper understanding of our spiritual realities.
• 1:15:53
  But psychedelics have have been very kind of illuminative about
• 1:15:59
  that reality. The other thing I will point out
• 1:16:02
  is I'm a tremendous fan of meditation.
• 1:16:06
  And I believe that meditation is a far better way for people to
• 1:16:10
  get in touch with that kind of primordial mind and higher soul
• 1:16:14
  than psychedelics. But that's not to say a
• 1:16:17
  psychedelic experience cannot be an incredibly powerful and
• 1:16:21
  valuable of kind of touchstone in someone's soul journey.
• 1:16:25
  I mean, I was blessed with a case of severe bacterial
• 1:16:29
  encephalitis that sent me in a deep coma for a week and should
• 1:16:33
  have killed me. But in looking back on my life,
• 1:16:35
  it's one of the greatest things that happened to me.
• 1:16:38
  And it was because of the lessons that I gleaned from
• 1:16:41
  that. And I think psychedelics can
• 1:16:43
  provide a very important kind of touchstone for many spiritual
• 1:16:48
  seekers. But one thing that does sad me
• 1:16:50
  is on our travels, Karen and I sometimes encounter people who
• 1:16:56
  basically are using ayahuasca or some other substance like that
• 1:17:01
  repeatedly, many, many times. And when I talk to them about
• 1:17:06
  the experiences, it's not apparent to me that they're
• 1:17:08
  really getting tremendous spiritual growth from it.
• 1:17:13
  That's where I focus on Roland Griffith's work, where that
• 1:17:16
  single dose of psilocybin was enough to cause 80% of his
• 1:17:23
  patients to have tremendous benefit and alleviation of ego
• 1:17:26
  disorders like addiction and fear of death.
• 1:17:29
  So very important to note that they're not to be used as a
• 1:17:33
  continual substance. I think that is potentially
• 1:17:36
  dangerous, and that's why I argue for meditation, because in
• 1:17:41
  meditation the very same thing has been shown.
• 1:17:44
  The default mode network dissolves.
• 1:17:46
  You find the whole brain relaxing and getting out of the
• 1:17:49
  way, and it's because the brain is a transceiver that connects
• 1:17:54
  us with consciousness, with that information field of the mind of
• 1:17:58
  the universe. But it is not the the ultimate
• 1:18:02
  source of conscious awareness and it's not the ultimate source
• 1:18:06
  or repository of memories. Thank you so much for coming and
• 1:18:10
  sharing with us tonight. And thanks to Jamin too, for
• 1:18:13
  putting this on. You mentioned NASA earlier.
• 1:18:17
  I wonder if you had any action or interaction with Doctor Tom
• 1:18:22
  Campbell, NASA physicist and his dealings with consciousness.
• 1:18:27
  Well, I, I know of his work. We've communicated by e-mail.
• 1:18:31
  He wrote a book called My Big Toe, and that book is an
• 1:18:34
  amazingly insightful book about a lot of the science, a lot of
• 1:18:39
  the kind of emerging reality of this notion of the one mind and
• 1:18:42
  brain and filter. I think Tom Campbell is a
• 1:18:45
  brilliant contributor to all of this work and I'm very grateful
• 1:18:49
  that he's done so. So thanks for bringing up his
• 1:18:53
  his name and his book. My big toe and toe there means
• 1:18:57
  theory of everything. Well, what, what an evening.
• 1:19:01
  Thank you all so, so much for showing up.
• 1:19:04
  Thank you all. God bless you all.
• 1:19:07
  Thank you so much, Evan. We also, we, we did record this,
• 1:19:12
  so we'll share it with with all of you.
• 1:19:15
  That'll come out probably in about a week or two.
• 1:19:18
  And yeah, thanks again.