Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #48: The Psychedelic Eucharist: Wisdom and Mysteries from Ancient Traditions — Brian C. Muraresku

Transcript

#48: The Psychedelic Eucharist: Wisdom and Mysteries from Ancient Traditions — Brian C. Muraresku · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  I often say that I don't think our spiritual maturity has
• 0:02
  caught up with our technological maturity the way social media
• 0:05
  affected an entire generation over the past 10-15 years.
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  Were we responsible about deploying that technology around
• 0:11
  the world or responsible about our food systems?
• 0:13
  Does capitalism serve everybody? And the AI question, our
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  trajectory is release the technology first, clean up the
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  mess second. AI raises very philosophical
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  questions about the nature of our creation, you know, which
• 0:24
  doesn't strictly involve engineers or technologists.
• 0:27
  There are lots of stories, lots of ways of thinking, thinking
• 0:30
  about why our creation comes about and the difference between
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  art, religion and technology. Some would argue there isn't
• 0:35
  much of A boundary between them, and that we should be having
• 0:38
  further enriched discussions about ways to approach what
• 0:41
  could be the greatest or the most dangerous object of human
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  creation in the history of our species.
• 0:50
  Welcome back everybody to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
• 0:54
  I am here in DCI, come up every year, very proudly support APAC,
• 0:59
  show all about the America and Israel partnership.
• 1:03
  And I've been doing that for over a decade.
• 1:05
  And for those of you that don't know anything about it, you do
• 1:09
  know from listening this podcast at all.
• 1:11
  I'm all about unity and I'm very independently minded and I will
• 1:17
  tell you that APAC is 50% Republican and 50% Democrat, and
• 1:23
  it's pretty amazing. They actually had a a bent one
• 1:26
  year where you could go two different tracks.
• 1:29
  You could go the Kevin McCarthy track when he just got sworn in
• 1:33
  in the House, or you could go the Hakeem Jeffries track.
• 1:36
  And the split was actually 51% Hakeem Jeffries and 49% Kevin
• 1:42
  McCarthy, even though that was Kevin McCarthy's first ever
• 1:46
  speech as the the new speaker of the House.
• 1:50
  So I love that, you know, I really think that Americans have
• 1:53
  much more in common than the media algorithms and social
• 1:58
  media algorithms would make us think that are trying to
• 2:00
  constantly hijack our amygdala and get us to bring out our most
• 2:04
  base fears. You know, we've lived with
• 2:06
  scarcity on this planet for a long time.
• 2:09
  Homo sapiens have been around 300,000 years.
• 2:12
  We're derivative of hominids who've been around for 4,000,000
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  years and for our 300,000 years of evolutionary time for 99.9%
• 2:21
  of that time we did not even have electricity.
• 2:24
  OK, So .1% we've, we've had electricity and that doesn't
• 2:28
  mean that every country on earth has electricity today in any
• 2:33
  type of stable way. As I've talked about on this
• 2:35
  podcast with the country of Chad and my experience with the Uber
• 2:40
  driver there who is amazing. You know their, their GDP per
• 2:44
  person is around $660. We have $86,000 per person here
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  in America. And this project is my soul
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  song. And if we create abundance for
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  people and Chad, which I absolutely think is possible
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  with this acceleration we're in with AI, quantum computing,
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  robotics, brain computer interfaces, then think about
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  what the rest of the world is going to be like.
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  You know, if Chad has clean water, stable electricity, you
• 3:14
  know, solar everywhere, healthcare, you know, ubiquitous
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  healthcare, you know, plentiful food.
• 3:20
  And we can do that. You know, it's going to take
• 3:22
  team humanity to do that. But anyways, this is my annual
• 3:26
  recent ring into the world of politics and support and unity.
• 3:32
  I will tell you that I almost never read the news.
• 3:36
  He stays. I much prefer to read books on
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  spirituality, on the nature of consciousness, on AI, and on
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  quantum physics, as I've talked about many times on this
• 3:50
  podcast. But there's my annual deep dive
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  in it and I'm happy to be in town and I am so excited.
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  Speaking of books that as of this recording, you will see
• 4:01
  this podcast a little bit later tomorrow on February 24th is
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  when Michael Pollan's new book comes out, which is titled A
• 4:10
  World Appears and it's a deep dive into the nature of
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  consciousness. I think it's going to have a lot
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  of similarities to Annika Harris's book that I read last
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  year. She's married to Sam Harris.
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  Her book is called Lights On and she actually concludes in that
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  book that she must admit at the end and you can hear the
• 4:31
  reservation in her voice a bit. The consciousness is
• 4:35
  fundamental, but it's it's a fun kind of journey in her talking
• 4:40
  to Carla Ravelli and many other people I've talked to or talked
• 4:44
  about on this podcast for her to decide what she believes about
• 4:50
  the nature of consciousness. And today we're going to have a
• 4:53
  real deep dive into that because what the nature of a reality is
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  really matters over this next 10 to 15 years as humanity
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  hopefully ascends and you know that metaphorical or mystical or
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  both merger of heaven and earth occurs and we have abundance for
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  all on this planet. And with that, I am with a local
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  here who is a friend and I'm really honored to be with him.
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  He has an amazing book called The Immortality Key.
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  And thank you so much, Brian Rescue, for being here.
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  Thanks for coming into town, man.
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  Welcome back. Yeah, Give giving you much love
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  today. I really appreciate.
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  You know we're about to have this pretty epic snowstorm here.
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  That's right, man. We're on the precipice right
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  now. Yet another.
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  We've had one already, which kept me indoors for the past
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  month. And just as the snow is melting,
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  we're getting another belt right now.
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  Well, it's, it's a good metaphor, right, for humanity
• 5:52
  right now because there's, there's, there's a lot of
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  dystopian fear about AI about, you know, what's going to come
• 6:00
  with, with job loss and everything else.
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  And you know, you and I have become friends thanks to Jason
• 6:08
  Carp, who was on episode 3 of this podcast, an amazing
• 6:12
  episode. We really dove deep on that, on,
• 6:16
  you know, really the, the toxins that we're constantly ingesting
• 6:19
  from the food companies keeping us chemically addicted.
• 6:22
  And then the pharmaceutical companies come along with the
• 6:25
  answer. But there was just a lot of
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  heart on that episode. And he, I know he's changed your
• 6:30
  life, you know, through, through diet and exercise.
• 6:33
  And, and he certainly changed my life too.
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  He's he's one of my best friends.
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  And last last week we were doing meditations together and I had
• 6:44
  Evan Alexander in town. So this episode with you follows
• 6:48
  Evan Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven.
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  Not not too shabby. Yeah, yeah.
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  So yes, I wanted to just start out with a first of all, I think
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  your book is really fantastic. I, I, I know it's been wildly
• 7:01
  popular and you know, it has this and, and I love the fact
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  that you read it too, but has this tone of me envisioning you
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  like Indiana Jones, you know, the professor version.
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  That's, that's, that's coming through really meticulously
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  combing through all of this research to essentially decode
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  that the ancient, you know, Mystics, the, the, the beginning
• 7:26
  of religion started with a psychedelic catalyst.
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  And as you know, I'm, I'm very pro psychedelic.
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  I've had multiple journeys myself in my book coming out
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  love conquers fear with the subtitle humanity, AI and the
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  age of abundance for all. I'm actually quoting from one of
• 7:48
  my journeys as well. And it's really the love
• 7:50
  conquers fear journey that was flowing through me in terms of
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  what humanity needs to do to make it.
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  And I can tell you when I was in that state, I did not know what
• 8:02
  I was saying, but I had some mindfulness to know that
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  whatever it was, I was going to enjoy reading it.
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  And the way I normally talk using the word arm, there were
• 8:14
  no arms. It was just one solid
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  transmission. And so it was important to to
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  share that message with with humanity.
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  But maybe we just start out with, I know you've covered this
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  a lot and people can read this a lot in terms of your background
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  and multiple podcasts you've been on.
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  But what was it that made you have this type of drive to
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  actually go on such a long journey to really try to decode,
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  I would say the nature of how religion started.
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  But in a way, it feels to me like you were trying to decode
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  the nature of our reality. That's exactly what I was trying
• 8:57
  to do. Yeah, it has.
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  I mean, so the books been out for a while now and it feels
• 9:01
  like, you know, like a stepchild.
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  And in some cases, like it's, it's a snapshot in time of the
• 9:06
  things I was interested in. And it's changed so much since
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  then. And so, you know, as time goes
• 9:12
  by, you always come back to first principles.
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  So I mean, to this day, I mean, I think it's, it's known out
• 9:17
  there, but I still haven't tried psychedelics.
• 9:19
  Yeah. And so, you know, I've tried to
• 9:21
  come up with answers to that question over the past, like
• 9:23
  several years. And I'll give, you know, I'll
• 9:25
  give pieces here and there. And, you know, together it makes
• 9:28
  up the puzzle of, you know, why this journey started.
• 9:31
  But I think, I mean, I always come back to the way the book
• 9:34
  starts, which is this notion of death, right, right.
• 9:37
  About about dying before you die.
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  And it starts with that famous Greek phrase you can find at
• 9:42
  Mount Athos at Saint Paul's Monastery about on Pythonies,
• 9:45
  spring Pythonies, denta Pythonies, old Don Pythonies in
• 9:49
  modern Greek means if you die before you die, you won't die
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  when you die. And although you know that I, I
• 9:56
  capture that phrase from the Orthodox Christian tradition.
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  I mean, that's something you can find across the world's
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  religions. And I, I go into that in some
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  depth in the intro to the book. It's, it's amazing introduction
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  and and that that is why it's called the immortality key.
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  That's that's what I mean, yeah. And and and for, you know,
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  fortunately that sometimes does come up in conversation.
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  That's what the book is actually about, dying before dying.
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  And so, but, but I think people remain mystified because I I've
• 10:23
  never really fully explained. I mean, you asked like, what's
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  the, the impetus? I mean, so the the truth of it.
• 10:29
  And I gave a Ted talk about this, which may not actually air
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  because I went over time, I did AI did a Ted X last year and I
• 10:38
  flubbed the time. So I think I broke the rules.
• 10:40
  I broke the Ted rules. Yeah, fair, fair enough.
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  And so but in that in that. It does air.
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  I don't think it will. Which is, which is.
• 10:47
  Kind of. There's a Ted outtakes.com site.
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  Maybe it'll be an outtake, maybe it's in the cutting room floor
• 10:54
  somewhere, but you know, it may never see the light, which is I
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  think it's kind of appropriate and kind of ironic and also kind
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  of sublime because I went into great personal detail about a
• 11:03
  near death experience I had when I was a young boy.
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  And that's that's at least part of the true answer for why I
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  went on on this journey. Can we go into that?
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  And we, we can, yeah, we can talk about the the highlights
• 11:16
  for sure, yeah. It's OK because I mean, the,
• 11:18
  the, the reason I think that's important is prior to 2025, I
• 11:24
  had zero friends open up to me about their near death
• 11:28
  experiences. Zero.
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  Wow, I've not had 11. Some of these people have been
• 11:34
  friends for 10 to 20 years. And I just had Evan Alexander on
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  right, who wrote the most famous book on on a first hand account
• 11:43
  of his near death experience. And I think that it's, it's it's
• 11:47
  really important because when you see behind the veil, whether
• 11:52
  it's a near death experience or psychedelics or meditation or
• 11:56
  just a spontaneous siritual awakening.
• 11:58
  I had a woman on episode 31, Pariah Beam, who's amazing,
• 12:03
  really amazing friend. And she had a spontaneous
• 12:05
  spiritual awakening. Not no psychedelics.
• 12:08
  She actually went to Burning Man.
• 12:09
  She said she was the only one that didn't do psychedelics
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  there. You know, I know the.
• 12:12
  Feeling, by the way. Right, right.
• 12:14
  Which which I totally respect and you know, but yeah, I mean,
• 12:19
  if you're comfortable, I'd love to go into that.
• 12:21
  Sure, and it also colors my thoughts on existence and
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  psychedelics and altered states of awareness because it was it
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  wasn't even spontaneous. It was, it was, it was
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  accidental and I was five years old.
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  And so it's the kind of thing you're not expecting when you're
• 12:36
  5 years old, But it's it's a long story.
• 12:38
  The short version is I'm outside on my front lawn playing with my
• 12:42
  brothers on a beautiful spring day.
• 12:45
  And a neighbor had come by with with a Golf Club.
• 12:48
  Our next door neighbor, two older boys who I guess were like
• 12:51
  were in high school at the time and they're swinging around A9
• 12:55
  Iron Golf Club and my older brother takes an interest and
• 12:58
  asks if he can swing it around. And because we didn't grow up in
• 13:01
  a golf family, I don't know. Where this is going?
• 13:03
  You know, my head is starting to hurt just thinking about it.
• 13:08
  Mine I can show you. Mine still hurts to this day,
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  which is another story. So my older brother who's two
• 13:13
  years, 2 1/2 years older than me, I'm five, I guess he's
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  seven. He picks it up and I'm, I'm
• 13:19
  standing too close. And so I'm standing so close
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  that it's, it's not as bad as you think.
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  He doesn't catch me on the 4th swing.
• 13:26
  He catches me on the backswing. And so that the, that, that, you
• 13:29
  know, that three-dimensional blunt edge of the 9 iron gets me
• 13:34
  right in the, in the forehead, right here, right here.
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  And my skull, you know, explodes and blood is gushing like a,
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  like a river. And I, I go immediately into
• 13:45
  shock because I don't feel any pain.
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  In fact, I mean, I can like I can see the, the scene in front
• 13:50
  of me, like I'm looking at you, but I can see the scene and I
• 13:53
  can see myself standing there in those shoes.
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  It's, it's that vivid, which means it's pretty traumatic I
• 13:57
  guess because the memory is crystal clear.
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  I have no pain. Like I know I'm in a body and I
• 14:03
  know it should be hurting, but I feel 0 pain.
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  But what I do see are the faces of the people surrounding me.
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  And there it's just it's a horror show.
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  It's grotesque. Like they don't want to be
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  seeing what's what's happening. And so that that's when I start
• 14:15
  to get scared because they're scared.
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  And a woman, a mother neighbor comes by and her face is the
• 14:21
  worst. And she's an adult.
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  And so I take her face seriously.
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  And so I look at her and I say, am I going to die like this is?
• 14:27
  I didn't know much about anything, but I knew that her
• 14:29
  face was not good. And then it gets worse because
• 14:32
  she didn't answer me. All right.
• 14:33
  Her mouth just stays a gape. I'm like, am I going to die?
• 14:36
  And there's no answer from her, like, oh, this is probably not
• 14:38
  good. This is this is probably not
• 14:40
  good. So that that was my answer.
• 14:42
  And then my mother comes out and she's hysterical and she brought
• 14:45
  and she runs back in, comes back with all these kitchen towels
• 14:48
  trying to stanch the bleeding. And it's it's, it's not working.
• 14:51
  And then miraculously, a neighbor, I'm still not sure to
• 14:54
  this day or how it happens, but a neighbor pulls up in a car
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  right in front of us and he offers a ride to the hospital.
• 15:00
  And so it gets a little blurry at this point that the
• 15:02
  sequencing I remember very clearly.
• 15:04
  We hop in the car and then the hospital is not too far away,
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  but on the way there. And I can.
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  So this is where it gets weird. So it's, I've never been to this
• 15:12
  hospital consciously, but I can see my mind's eye the route to
• 15:15
  the hospital. And we're stopped at a red light
• 15:18
  and I'm laying in the front seat on my mother's lap.
• 15:20
  I don't think anyone's wearing seatbelts.
• 15:21
  It's the it's the 80s and I'm, I'm bleeding out essentially.
• 15:26
  And I remember asking her what I refer to as the dumbest question
• 15:28
  of my life. And I say, I say, mom, why are
• 15:31
  you crying? Because at that moment, I didn't
• 15:34
  understand why my mother was upset because part of me was a 5
• 15:38
  year old boy who was potentially dying in her arms.
• 15:41
  And another part of me did not care, didn't really know where I
• 15:46
  was and wasn't emotionally attached to this little boy who
• 15:51
  was dying out. And so it's like classic
• 15:53
  depersonalization and dissociation.
• 15:55
  I I had it. And then, you know, get to the
• 15:58
  hospital and that's when just my attachment to my body, it's kind
• 16:03
  of like just toggling back and forth.
• 16:07
  I play guitar in my spare time. A little toggle switch on the
• 16:10
  guitar. It felt, it felt like that at
• 16:11
  your house. Yeah.
• 16:12
  Yeah, exactly. You saw the guitar.
• 16:14
  So it's like, it's like a toggling between treble and
• 16:16
  bass. I just, you know, sometimes I
• 16:18
  was there, sometimes I was not. And then there were moments
• 16:21
  where I could see myself from outside the body and then
• 16:24
  eventually went into emergency surgery and I was too young for
• 16:28
  like a metal plate. So like to this day, I have an,
• 16:30
  a giant opening in, in my skull and an aperture.
• 16:34
  So there's nothing between my brain and, and the cosmos.
• 16:37
  And so, and that, that's what started it.
• 16:38
  But like, in some senses, like there were some of the elements
• 16:42
  you hear about in the NDE literature and in other senses,
• 16:44
  I don't know if I was too young or my memory was affected.
• 16:47
  But you know, I just, I remember walking away with the sense that
• 16:51
  you are more than your physical body.
• 16:53
  Like whatever I'd experienced for those five years was part of
• 16:56
  reality and part of what I was. But I guess the sense of self
• 17:01
  began to change. And then I come back and ever
• 17:03
  since then, you know, there's this sense that I'm sitting
• 17:07
  here. And I can also envision myself
• 17:09
  sitting where you are, looking at me, you know, which is kind
• 17:11
  of schizophrenic. But that you have that ability
• 17:14
  right now. Yeah, yeah.
• 17:16
  To, to, I mean, because that really is I, I've heard that
• 17:20
  from people that have had near death experiences that, you
• 17:23
  know, that's the sole view, right?
• 17:25
  Is the, you know, that's, that's the, that's kind of the way to
• 17:28
  be with consciousness being fundamental.
• 17:31
  And, and during, during one psychedelic journey, I had this
• 17:36
  experience where I was seeing my body and it said to me, and it
• 17:40
  was just a 10 second part of like a 3 1/2 four hour journey.
• 17:44
  And it said, my soul said to me, you're just poisoning yourself.
• 17:49
  You've transcended the need for this talking about alcohol and
• 17:54
  you have an important mission and it's time to move on.
• 17:56
  And it was 10 seconds and, and it was so transcendent, right?
• 18:01
  Because seeing it and I wasn't expecting that.
• 18:04
  I've never been an alcoholic, but I was always honest.
• 18:08
  As I write in my book. I was always honest with
• 18:11
  doctors, never lied about how many cocktails I had a week.
• 18:13
  It was like 5 to 6 a week. You know, I've been ACEO since I
• 18:16
  was 24 years old. I'm 54 now and you know it.
• 18:21
  I was, it was just a social activity.
• 18:24
  But if I'm really honest, you know how I feel now versus how I
• 18:28
  felt then. I never have bad mornings.
• 18:31
  You know, I know that feeling, by the way.
• 18:33
  Yeah, I wrote a whole book about beer and wine.
• 18:35
  You. Know.
• 18:37
  Immortality, I mean, if you want to talk about immortality, the
• 18:39
  first half is about beer, second-half is about wine.
• 18:42
  And it's it's no coincidence that as I was writing that book,
• 18:45
  more love affair with beer than wine, the first half of the
• 18:48
  book. But my nightly beer, as my wife
• 18:50
  will attest like it. That was my, that was my, that
• 18:54
  was my moment. I mean, for many, many years
• 18:56
  when the girls were little and then one day during COVID, there
• 18:59
  was sort of like a voice in the head that said, OK, that's,
• 19:02
  that's an I got sick when I got COVID, just wasn't feeling well.
• 19:05
  So I had to, you know, just watch my diet and stop drinking
• 19:08
  anyway for a couple weeks. And then a couple weeks became a
• 19:10
  couple months became a couple years.
• 19:12
  And I haven't had a bad morning since.
• 19:15
  I know exactly what you're talking about.
• 19:16
  Yeah, You know, I don't want to give it the power to say that
• 19:19
  I'll never touch it. You know, I'm Jewish.
• 19:20
  I'll, I'll have it for maybe Passover, like like 1 drink and
• 19:26
  we're reading the Seder or whatever.
• 19:28
  But but I, I, it doesn't have any attack.
• 19:32
  I've never been alcoholic, doesn't have any hold on me.
• 19:36
  And you know it. It's because like flying up here
• 19:39
  on the plane, I was telling, I was telling one of my friends.
• 19:42
  This is the first time she had heard it and she's like, I don't
• 19:45
  care if I'm a shriveled up prune.
• 19:47
  I'm still going to have my gin and tonic, right?
• 19:49
  Then I'm like, hey, I'm totally cool with that.
• 19:52
  Sorry for bringing it up. But but she, she's a very sweet
• 19:54
  person. But you know, it is, I mean,
• 19:57
  it's funny because like, you know, I'm also vegetarian and
• 19:59
  so, so I've been a vegetarian for for 16 years.
• 20:03
  Wow, some kind of I'm kind of like this.
• 20:07
  You know, it maybe, maybe it makes me socially awkward, but
• 20:09
  you know, I went, I went over the taboo.
• 20:12
  I, I got over the taboo of all of that a long time ago.
• 20:16
  Vegetarianism was the first one because it's just socially
• 20:20
  easier to say, sure, I drank what I want, I eat whatever I
• 20:23
  want. It's kind of like a, it creates
• 20:27
  a, you're like more open, like people like, oh, I can hang out
• 20:30
  with that person. It's easier.
• 20:31
  But, but, but I'm not judgmental about anybody else doing it.
• 20:35
  You know, it's it's like to each their own.
• 20:37
  You don't seem like a judgmental guy.
• 20:39
  For what it's worth, no. No, no, I really.
• 20:41
  Yeah, I I've got a lot of love in my heart thanks to my mom
• 20:45
  starting at age 7, who bought me my first computer, learned how
• 20:48
  to program with me, let me do that unconditionally, and turned
• 20:51
  out to be a good career. So far so good, man.
• 20:54
  So far, so far so good. This is great.
• 20:55
  We're having a real conversation.
• 20:57
  Yeah, we are, yeah. This is wonderful.
• 20:58
  Man, this is the way I love to do it.
• 21:01
  So, so with, with your near death experience, I mean you got
• 21:04
  to see essentially you got to see from the soul view yourself.
• 21:10
  I mean, do you view that as the soul or do you do you view that
• 21:13
  more as consciousness as fundamental or how do you how do
• 21:15
  you look at that? That's a great question.
• 21:17
  Well, I mean it did, but it did inform like a lot of my studies
• 21:20
  later on. So like as I didn't know what to
• 21:22
  do with that as a 5 year old and to be clear, I still don't know
• 21:25
  what the soul is. And we we should talk about that
• 21:28
  because that's what psychedelic means.
• 21:30
  Right, By the way, none of us do.
• 21:31
  Yeah. Well, I think, I think that's
• 21:32
  that's very honest. We're, we're no, it's just,
• 21:35
  we're here. And what I perceive as, you
• 21:39
  know, this Earth school, whether you read, you know, the seat of
• 21:41
  the Soul by Gary Zuko or Evan Alexander talks about that that
• 21:46
  same way or Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, that we're here
• 21:52
  to grow our, our soul lifetime to lifetime.
• 21:56
  I very much believe in reincarnation and you know,
• 22:00
  religion I view as kind of grasping to that root of love,
• 22:07
  connectedness. And then there's dogma that was
• 22:11
  kind of scaffolded on top of it. But the spiritual root, you
• 22:14
  know, I've, I've done a deep dive actually even since last
• 22:17
  seen you. You know, I've read the Dauda
• 22:19
  Ching now, I've read the Bhagavad Gita.
• 22:21
  I've dug into all types of ancient spiritual text.
• 22:24
  And they all sink in that way that, you know, our actual
• 22:29
  reality is rooted in love. And the reason it was so
• 22:32
  important to have this interview with you is that the nature of a
• 22:38
  reality really matters for envisioning how humanity is
• 22:43
  going to unite to make it to the age of abundance for all.
• 22:46
  And you know, I'm at two things can be true at the same time.
• 22:50
  You know, quantum physics and science can be true, as well as
• 22:55
  the grasping we were doing through ancient spirituality
• 22:58
  and, you know, psychedelic catalyst.
• 23:00
  But the most, I think the most transcendent experience I've
• 23:04
  heard of that people can have is actually a near death
• 23:07
  experience, because that's just completely this pure experience
• 23:12
  of seeing what's beyond the veil.
• 23:15
  It definitely felt like the as you were talking, the word that
• 23:17
  came to me was an invitation. You know, it let it left more
• 23:20
  questions than answers to this day, many decades later, it felt
• 23:25
  like an invitation into self inquiry.
• 23:28
  And all the traditions that you mentioned were traditions that,
• 23:30
  you know, came onto my radar at some point.
• 23:32
  And starting with the, I think the Greco Roman tradition,
• 23:35
  though, because I was forced to learn Latin and Greek in in high
• 23:37
  school and discovered that Plato said the same thing that you
• 23:40
  just said about base reality, that this is this is not the
• 23:43
  thing. Whatever this is, is not the
• 23:45
  thing. Identical, near identical to
• 23:48
  several Eastern traditions. He also talks about
• 23:52
  reincarnation famously and in several dialogues and near death
• 23:56
  experience in the in the myth of error.
• 23:58
  And so then I followed Plato's thinking into the Neoplatonic
• 24:02
  tradition with Platinus is one of my favorite philosophers.
• 24:06
  The any ads is one of my favorite works, which I'll I'll
• 24:09
  sit and read the the the lobe translation by a fire on a cold
• 24:12
  winter night like I have the past couple weeks.
• 24:14
  And they talk about the same thing.
• 24:15
  They talk about the same thing is that this is not base reality
• 24:18
  and what would it mean to encounter the self.
• 24:19
  And so having had even like a tiny glimpse of that fact that,
• 24:24
  you know, materialism couldn't fully explain the actual
• 24:28
  experiences I'd I'd had on this planet, sort of opened me up to
• 24:31
  this, this idea that the spiritual traditions Congress
• 24:35
  around, which is that the nature of the true self is something
• 24:40
  that does not sit inside the physical skull.
• 24:43
  And so, and then that begins, you know, a longer trajectory
• 24:47
  of, of searching out these wisdom traditions.
• 24:50
  You know one one thing, you may not know this.
• 24:53
  I actually may know this, but have you met a lot of other
• 24:57
  people who've had near death experiences?
• 24:58
  I've met, yeah, a handful. So one thing I've noticed that's
• 25:01
  in common with them is they traditionally don't really touch
• 25:04
  psychedelics. No, because, because they, yeah,
• 25:07
  because they've had, they've had this transcendent experience.
• 25:12
  Like, like one of them told me he, he tried it and he said it
• 25:17
  was, it was very amazing in terms of if he had never had a
• 25:23
  near death experience like it was, it was, it was a weighted
• 25:26
  glimpse behind the veil. But he said it, it paled in
• 25:29
  comparison to an actual near death experience.
• 25:31
  And I'm not, I'm not like wishing for a near death
• 25:33
  experience here. I'm just saying that I think
• 25:37
  that that experience is so transcendent that it really has
• 25:40
  an impact on one's lifetime. Every single friend who's told
• 25:45
  me about it, it changed the course of their life.
• 25:48
  And I think the cool thing about it for you is that, you know,
• 25:54
  it, it, it, it planted that seed that changed the course of your
• 25:58
  life because because I mean, you were, you're pretty unusual.
• 26:01
  You know, it's, it's, it's funny to read about how, you know,
• 26:04
  you're really studying Greek and Latin and then brown, you know,
• 26:07
  picked you up and you could continue do it.
• 26:09
  And then you're like, wait, what is this going to go career wise?
• 26:12
  Right. Maybe I don't know what I'm
• 26:14
  going to be doing. And and look, here you are with
• 26:18
  one of the most famous books on on decoding the early nature of
• 26:23
  religion. Turned out to be like, I mean, I
• 26:26
  didn't know what how to make a living with ancient languages.
• 26:29
  That's why I I famously sold out, went to law school and
• 26:32
  worked on Wall Street thinking that was going to be.
• 26:35
  Seems like that was pretty miserable.
• 26:36
  I would never tell my daughters that today.
• 26:38
  It's so funny how much has changed in in in just 20 years.
• 26:41
  It turns out it wasn't a terrible decision to waste my
• 26:44
  college years studying the repository of the world's wisdom
• 26:48
  traditions, often in the original language.
• 26:50
  And so like after I picked up Sanskrit at Brown and also study
• 26:53
  classical Arabic. I remember that you're like
• 26:56
  going back to the source code. To the ad Fontes was the I
• 26:59
  mentioned in the book as the, the, the Clarion call, the
• 27:02
  Renaissance. And I go back to the source, go
• 27:04
  back to the fountain ad Fontes go back to the source of things.
• 27:07
  And it is different. I mean, it is just very, very
• 27:10
  different, you know, and growing up Catholic, it's very different
• 27:12
  to read the New Testament in Greek versus English.
• 27:15
  And I'll sometimes say, like when in, you know, Christianity
• 27:19
  or the course of Western civilization, like when did it
• 27:22
  become OK not to learn our sacred languages?
• 27:25
  Like, I don't know too many Jewish folks who don't have some
• 27:28
  passing knowledge of, of Hebrew, Hebrew, right?
• 27:31
  I don't have many Muslim friends who haven't at least partially
• 27:34
  encountered, Yeah, Quranic Arabic.
• 27:37
  And yet for Christians, the world's biggest religion, like,
• 27:40
  how many of us actually learn ancient Greek, which was the
• 27:43
  sacred language in which the New Testament was composed, right?
• 27:47
  And so to read it in that language, which was not the
• 27:50
  native language of Jesus, but it was the language that was chosen
• 27:54
  to represent that time period and transmit it through the
• 27:57
  generations. Like it's very different to read
• 27:59
  things in Greek and also to like compare that Greek against the
• 28:03
  the cousin Greek I was studying, which all these Pagan
• 28:06
  philosophers and these are like the same same language, same
• 28:10
  culture, same people, 2 wildly different views of reality.
• 28:13
  Maybe not actually, maybe there was some continuity from these,
• 28:16
  you know, godless satanic Pagan philosophers who were
• 28:20
  monotheists, by the way, into the new monotheism that grew up
• 28:24
  in the in the ashes of the of the Roman Empire.
• 28:27
  And so, yeah, engaging with those texts became like my
• 28:30
  meditation on the nature of base reality.
• 28:33
  But like throughout all of it, it was the these questions about
• 28:37
  like the nature of identity and always again, that invitation
• 28:41
  that there's, there's something more or something.
• 28:43
  And time and again I kept finding correspondences.
• 28:45
  With you know, your, your study, do you feel like, do you, do you
• 28:50
  know the book the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield?
• 28:54
  So I'm, I'm, I'm a huge fan of that book.
• 28:58
  And, you know, after I read that book, I started to see more and
• 29:01
  more synchronicities. I started to just be become more
• 29:04
  aware of them. And sometimes it's really funny,
• 29:07
  like the divine can really hit you over the head sometimes,
• 29:10
  sometimes it's comical. Sometimes it's really like, wow,
• 29:13
  like right in front of you. But I'm just curious if you view
• 29:17
  it as there was a reason that experience happened to you and
• 29:23
  that there was this grand plan for your life that kind of was
• 29:27
  beyond, you know, your kind of physical understanding.
• 29:33
  You know, that, that basically the vine was, you know, you were
• 29:36
  a vessel to, to, to bring this message to the world and, and
• 29:40
  to, and to spend that much time, you know, learning Greek,
• 29:43
  learning Latin, like studying, you know, being the Indiana
• 29:47
  Jones professor, you know, going in like, you know, the, one of
• 29:51
  the best parts of the book for me was, you know, you sitting in
• 29:55
  the Vatican, like getting access to, I can't even believe you got
• 29:59
  access to these texts, right. I mean, I kept on thinking like,
• 30:03
  there's going to be a part where you look up your shoulder,
• 30:05
  someone's like, what are you doing?
• 30:08
  Do you do you feel like that? No, I should say that the answer
• 30:11
  is no, I don't feel. I don't feel like that.
• 30:13
  Yeah, like it's, I mean, it would be nice to feel, you know,
• 30:16
  self important. It'd be nice to think that
• 30:18
  there's, there's a script. It'd be nice to think that there
• 30:21
  there's an author, which is what Joseph Campbell famously said.
• 30:24
  You know, when you look back over the yeah, over the, the
• 30:26
  sequence of your life, it's, it's as if it's a, it reads like
• 30:29
  a finely scripted novel, you know, and that the people that
• 30:33
  you meet along the way become the effective agents in changing
• 30:36
  the course and direction of your life.
• 30:38
  And isn't it wonderful to see how you become in yourself an
• 30:42
  effective agent in the direction of of others lives too?
• 30:45
  Like I'd like to think there's a plan.
• 30:47
  You know, it doesn't feel like that most of the time.
• 30:51
  And there's a great, you know, spiritual tradition about the
• 30:54
  great forgetting. You know, the, and the Greeks
• 30:56
  talk about this as to every, the tradition I've encountered that
• 31:00
  upon death, whatever that means and whatever the soul is,
• 31:03
  there's this notion of going through the river forgetfulness.
• 31:06
  Lethy in Greek is Lethy, the river.
• 31:09
  And it's funny in Greek, the word truth is Alethea, which is
• 31:12
  that means the unforgetting. So, so coming to truth, coming
• 31:16
  to true awareness, both of the self and the nature of reality
• 31:19
  is actually getting past that veil of forgetfulness.
• 31:22
  I mentioned it only only to say like I, I, you know, we're all
• 31:25
  forgetting. And so it's, you know, I, I wish
• 31:28
  I knew the plan. I wish I knew why I'm here.
• 31:30
  It feels like I'm here to be a father and a husband, and that's
• 31:34
  where I feel you know, most, most.
• 31:36
  I know you're super. Dedicated on that, yeah, I'm.
• 31:38
  Not going to start crying on a Sunday morning, but that's,
• 31:41
  that's, that's where I feel that's where I feel home.
• 31:44
  And so I follow that. I follow that, that intuition.
• 31:47
  And I often feel like I'm not the pilot of whatever this this
• 31:52
  journey is about, but that it's a great mystery.
• 31:54
  And maybe I don't want to know what's what's happening tomorrow
• 31:57
  or 1020 years from now, if we're so lucky.
• 32:00
  And also, I have friends recently who've passed away who
• 32:03
  are close to my age, and it's happening more and more, which
• 32:08
  is pretty sobering, like in your 40s, because it didn't happen
• 32:11
  that much in your 20s and 30s. Yeah.
• 32:13
  And as that begins to happen, then you really start to think
• 32:16
  what this is all about because you can avoid it for most of
• 32:19
  your life. And now I'm at that age where I
• 32:21
  can't really avoid it any longer.
• 32:23
  And so I wish I I wish I could read the script to figure out,
• 32:25
  you know, what's gonna happen. Yeah.
• 32:27
  Next week. And why are we here?
• 32:28
  I didn't mean that people get access to the script.
• 32:32
  I mean I I can tell you through journeys that I know I'm doing
• 32:35
  exactly what I'm supposed to be doing now.
• 32:37
  I am doing what my soul wants me to do.
• 32:41
  That I was incarnated for the purpose of creating a better
• 32:46
  world through technology. I've seen that directly.
• 32:49
  And I'm at the meta thematic of my career right now during this
• 32:53
  point in humanities evolution where it is more possible than
• 32:59
  ever for us to create abundance for everyone on the planet.
• 33:02
  And this is my soul song. This is why I'm doing it.
• 33:05
  What, you know, what the arc of it is, I have no idea.
• 33:09
  But I know I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.
• 33:12
  And you know, Steve Jobs in his famous commencement speech at
• 33:16
  Stanford, said the dots connect in reverse, right?
• 33:19
  And that's, that's the I can see, I can see the, the lineage
• 33:23
  of that. But it has been through
• 33:25
  Psychedelic Catalyst where I've had that direct communion with
• 33:29
  my soul knowing that this is what I'm supposed to do.
• 33:32
  And that's why it gives me so much energy to do it and, you
• 33:37
  know, really flow with, with the incredible entrepreneurs and
• 33:40
  investors and scientists, you know, I've had on and, you know,
• 33:44
  authors. So I would, I would just suggest
• 33:49
  to you that I think, I think it, it has happened for a reason.
• 33:53
  And that you were chosen as this vessel because because what you
• 33:57
  did was not easy by any stretch. I mean, the book gives you the
• 34:03
  gravity of that of like how much work and it didn't seem in any
• 34:08
  part of the book, like you looked at any part of that is
• 34:11
  tedium. It was like a a real
• 34:13
  exploration. I'm sure there were some boring
• 34:15
  parts or whatever, some frustrating parts of like
• 34:17
  getting access or am I ever going to get access?
• 34:19
  But but you know what, what were some of the most exciting parts
• 34:25
  for you? Was it the last chapter or where
• 34:27
  you're like in the Vatican? You're like, I can't believe
• 34:29
  I've got access. To that that that felt pretty
• 34:31
  cool. Yeah.
• 34:32
  I mean, just to, just to scene set the, the hypothesis of the
• 34:36
  book is that at, at, at some point in the ancient past that
• 34:41
  our, our ancient ancestors had availed themselves of some sort
• 34:44
  of psychedelic technology in, And, and this is often perceived
• 34:49
  as, you know, like traditional society, intellectual property
• 34:55
  or something that belongs in the exotic East or something that's
• 34:57
  just not us meaning like Western materialists.
• 35:00
  And so my research was basically into the hypothesis from the
• 35:04
  1970s in the road to Elusis, where they talk about this
• 35:09
  potential psychedelic brew that was imbibed by these ancient
• 35:11
  initiates. And, you know, if that was the
• 35:13
  case in ancient Greece, think, you know, like 500 BC, was that
• 35:17
  also passed on to the, you know, the Christianizing world under
• 35:20
  the Roman Empire a few centuries later.
• 35:23
  And so, but there wasn't any hard evidence to, you know, suss
• 35:26
  it out one way or the other at the time back in the, you know,
• 35:29
  2018-2019. And so I went on this long
• 35:31
  journey looking for evidence, you know, both like botanical
• 35:34
  forensic evidence and also textual evidence and found my
• 35:37
  way into the secret archives of the Vatican where they had
• 35:41
  these, these old manuscripts from the 16th century talking
• 35:46
  about witches, Italian witches who are brewing up all these
• 35:49
  strange concoctions. And I was, I had a, there was a
• 35:53
  vellum bound manuscript, I mean, this thick literally right that
• 35:57
  I was able to get access to after a long application process
• 36:00
  and referral from a friend in the archives who introduced me.
• 36:04
  I didn't know this thing existed even and and and right there in
• 36:07
  in handwriting where where this the this these trial records
• 36:12
  talking about the this one woman in particular, Lucrezia, who was
• 36:16
  like brewing up this weird kind of like potion wine mixed with
• 36:22
  various herbs and this weird like lizard.
• 36:26
  Little bit of lizard thrown in. The lizard ointment, which it
• 36:28
  sounds random, but then, you know, earlier the chapter before
• 36:32
  I talked about this, this discovery near Pompeii from
• 36:36
  almost 2000 years ago, just after the eruption of Mount
• 36:39
  Vesuvius, where they found similar, you know, containers
• 36:41
  with things like lizards and toads and frogs mixed in with
• 36:44
  this wine and things like cannabis and opium.
• 36:47
  And so, I mean, it sounds like a weird detail, but when I saw a
• 36:50
  lizard written in this ancient Tuscan dialect in this
• 36:53
  manuscript inside the inside the archives at the Vatican, that
• 36:56
  was like, that was sort of a cinematic moment where I'm like,
• 36:59
  Oh, there's, there really is evidence that some of this
• 37:01
  tradition from the ancient world and this pharmacopaeic knowledge
• 37:04
  like made its way through the centuries, through the dark
• 37:06
  ages, right into what would become like folk medicine and,
• 37:11
  and, and wise women from akapia. And so it was kind of, you know,
• 37:15
  it was, it was a pretty rad moment.
• 37:18
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's incredible.
• 37:19
  And, and, you know, 11 huge ARC of the book is just how how much
• 37:25
  of that wisdom we lost to the ages, because, you know, there
• 37:31
  there is, there is this dogma that's been built around
• 37:36
  religion in terms of we're going to tell you what to think about
• 37:41
  the nature of reality as opposed to you having a direct communion
• 37:46
  with it. And, and, and, you know, it's a
• 37:50
  control mechanism. And it's not that I don't, you
• 37:54
  know, like religion or whatever else, like I'm, I'm, you know,
• 37:57
  happy to be Jewish, but I do see a tremendous amount of
• 38:03
  synchronicities now between the early spiritual traditions.
• 38:07
  And I'm glad that I've gone on this journey to go in and say,
• 38:11
  Oh my gosh, there's so much of the Bhagavad Gita in the Torah.
• 38:15
  There's so much of the Delta Ching in the Torah, you know,
• 38:18
  and on and on and on. I mean the Quran, I mean the the
• 38:20
  science fiction novella. You know, I, I just gave you the
• 38:23
  lattice which I want to give it to you in person.
• 38:26
  Check it out man. This is an intent to decode our
• 38:31
  reality through science fiction and unite humanity.
• 38:36
  And so the protagonist is this quantum physicist, Dr. Alexander
• 38:40
  Bliss, who he resists doing any type of psychedelics.
• 38:46
  He's never had a near death experience or anything else.
• 38:49
  But it's the year 2030. And his other quantum physicist
• 38:53
  friends, you know, keep on telling him, hey, you should
• 38:56
  just try. It'll help you kind of break the
• 38:58
  logjam. And so he tries it out and he
• 39:01
  expects nothing but neurochemical tricks.
• 39:03
  He's like, whatever. And instead he sees the
• 39:06
  unification of all things, which is in that that it's rooted in
• 39:10
  love. And he's like, OK, that was
• 39:13
  interesting. So he does it again and he sees
• 39:17
  it again. Now he's got reproducibility and
• 39:20
  he has this audacious idea. And by by that year, you know,
• 39:23
  with the acceleration we're in, we're basically in a, in a, in a
• 39:27
  moment where quantum computing has become stable, where the
• 39:32
  amount of storage is just off the charts high.
• 39:35
  And so there's a quantum computer in there that's
• 39:38
  actually being built in Japan right now.
• 39:39
  A lot of people don't know it's a real quantum computer and it's
• 39:43
  called Fugenex. And basically he hooks up
• 39:48
  psychonauts to brain computer interfaces.
• 39:51
  Ancient, well, not ancient, but but a spiritual leaders like the
• 39:54
  Dalai Lama, deep meditators. People have had different
• 39:59
  experiences with consciousness. Any any uploads all the data
• 40:03
  because we've hit a resolution where you can actually see
• 40:06
  what's going on inside of someone's brain, including with
• 40:08
  their memories. To this quantum computer to look
• 40:12
  for the unification and finds the lattice, which is his term
• 40:16
  for how our reality is is connected to essentially
• 40:24
  consciousness being fundamental. Although he doesn't, he, he
• 40:27
  calls it the lattice instead and rooted deeply in love.
• 40:30
  And what it does is it gives humanity the scientific proof of
• 40:35
  our spiritual reality and unifies the 2 so that humanity
• 40:40
  ascends. And as we start to work together
• 40:43
  and religions adapt. And it's funny because the
• 40:46
  atheist in the book, they still hold on to there's no God, but
• 40:50
  they admit there's some grand intelligence of the universe,
• 40:53
  which is a little bit of a fun poke at Joe Dispenza that I
• 40:56
  don't mean it. There's a in a mean way because
• 40:58
  I think, I think, I think he's really great.
• 41:01
  But it's this, it's this fun poke because a lot of people
• 41:03
  will never use the word God. And I understand why it's, it's,
• 41:07
  it's a loaded term. I use it because for me in my
• 41:10
  journeys, that is the word I use.
• 41:12
  And in the journey state you're, you know, very disassociated
• 41:16
  state, you know, you're, you're really getting messages from
• 41:19
  your soul. But as humanity unites, it
• 41:23
  covers years 2030 through 2085. It's really wild.
• 41:27
  And we find out throughout the universe that love had to
• 41:30
  conquer fear when species got to a certain level of advancement.
• 41:35
  Because part of like the UAP stuff for me is if UA PS are
• 41:41
  here, which I've never had any experience with that personally.
• 41:45
  But if UA PS are here, then that means they've either conquered
• 41:48
  faster and light speed travel or interdimensional travel, which
• 41:51
  means that they would have faster and lightspeed weapons or
• 41:55
  interdimensional weapons that would have probably destroyed
• 41:59
  themselves had they not allowed love to conquer fear, right?
• 42:03
  And so anyways, it goes through and and, and you find that this
• 42:06
  is actually God's big plan for all species to get them to this
• 42:12
  point where they have to make that fateful choice.
• 42:15
  And in my opinion, we're in that time right now for your in my
• 42:19
  lifetime, like it's this lifetime where where humanity
• 42:25
  has to essentially conquer our fear and get over this kind of 0
• 42:33
  sum mindset and look at the divinity within us all that
• 42:37
  we're 99.9% the same genetically so that we can create abundance
• 42:43
  for everyone on the planet. And one one way I'd like to
• 42:46
  frame this. I'm sure you know the answer to
• 42:49
  this, but you know, the the biggest threat we have today is
• 42:53
  that we actually have all these nuclear weapons on Earth.
• 42:56
  Like they're real weapons, they're not fake weapons, right?
• 42:59
  And there's around 13,000 today. And do you know the answer for
• 43:04
  how many of those it would take percentage wise to destroy
• 43:09
  pretty much all of humanity and send the the world into nuclear
• 43:12
  Holocaust for a decade? That's got to be single digits.
• 43:14
  Right. Yeah.
• 43:14
  What's your guess, 4%? It's 2%.
• 43:17
  There we go. OK, so at 50 times the amount,
• 43:21
  China's making a ton right now. We're making more.
• 43:25
  If we were aliens, you know what we're looking at this, we'd be
• 43:28
  like, we'd study it and be like, OK, what does humanity call
• 43:32
  that? You know what?
• 43:33
  Do you know what we call this? It's a DoD term.
• 43:37
  It's mutually destruction. What's acronym for that?
• 43:40
  It's MAD. It's a mad world.
• 43:43
  Right. So, so, so basically encoded in
• 43:47
  this, this, this fear based practice that we have is the
• 43:53
  insanity of the amygdala and what we need to transcend and
• 43:59
  AI, quantum computing, robotics is an accelerant for that, that
• 44:04
  will force us to make that fateful choice.
• 44:08
  You know, this is a very crude example.
• 44:12
  And I want to be really clear, obviously, that that what
• 44:15
  happened was really sad in this. But you know, this country was
• 44:20
  initially in part bootstrapped on slavery.
• 44:22
  Sure, you know, with, with capitalism.
• 44:24
  And the only way that could be rationalized is to treat people
• 44:28
  as subhuman, you know, and, and there's a lot of examples of
• 44:32
  that around the world even today where people are treated as less
• 44:36
  than human to have all types of horrible practices done to them.
• 44:43
  Although we've, we, we have a, a great moral arc overall and
• 44:49
  we're living in the best time. We won't want to live 100 years
• 44:51
  ago, 200 years ago versus today. But once industrial revolution
• 44:57
  and machines came along like that practice of, of even having
• 45:02
  slaves, it was unmasked for exactly what it was, which was
• 45:05
  cruel, inhumane, like horrible. And it just became obsolete.
• 45:10
  And so, so my, my thesis here is that AI, quantum computing,
• 45:16
  robotics is going to create so much abundance with the
• 45:21
  asterisks of if we don't destroy ourselves and 95% certain we
• 45:25
  want and that we'll make it, that it'll force us to make that
• 45:31
  choice. Like when we can see abundance
• 45:32
  on the horizon, the end of disease, you know, dimasis of
• 45:35
  this one, the Nobel Prize for alpha fold, you know, which
• 45:39
  decodes protein folding that will be able to, you know, when
• 45:44
  we decode energy like 18 seconds of the sun's rays that hit the
• 45:48
  earth. And if we could capture that
• 45:49
  would provide around a year of energy for the whole world.
• 45:52
  It'd be nice to be a Type 1 civilization for once.
• 45:54
  Yeah, we're not quite there yet. Right.
• 45:56
  But but I think, I think that this is the moment.
• 45:58
  I think it's the next 10 to 15 years.
• 46:00
  I'm just kind of curious what you think about them.
• 46:04
  I mean, we're definitely in weird times.
• 46:07
  I don't disagree with that. I wonder what happens in 2085.
• 46:09
  Why does it stop at 2085? What happens then?
• 46:12
  Well, it it you can, you can read it, it gets it gets pretty
• 46:16
  wild. This is good.
• 46:17
  I don't actually. No spoilers, no spoilers.
• 46:18
  We. Actually get to the point where
• 46:20
  we can create universes like we start to work with these aliens
• 46:24
  called the Sailors. And now we're talking.
• 46:26
  And, and so, you know, the, the reason it ends in 2085 is that's
• 46:31
  when Doctor Alexander Bliss passes away.
• 46:33
  He decides not to live forever. Like we're at a point where we
• 46:38
  pretty much cured disease or, you know, we've cured disease
• 46:42
  and we've cured death. But he decides he wants to live
• 46:45
  out a natural life and and it's interesting because as he's
• 46:51
  passing away like he there, there's all these decoding of
• 46:55
  what he sees about the mini layers our reality.
• 46:58
  And by 2085, we still don't understand the full nature of
• 47:03
  God. And I don't know if we'll ever
• 47:06
  understand that because because whatever was the catalyst that
• 47:09
  led to The Big Bang, etcetera. I and you know, this intelligent
• 47:15
  design is so far beyond, I think our comprehension, even with,
• 47:20
  you know, quantum physics and, you know, decoding.
• 47:24
  I had, I had a guest on Peter Wang, who leads a Unicorn and in
• 47:28
  Austin, he's very rooted in quantum physics and science and
• 47:32
  really amazing AI pioneer. And I was joking with Peter,
• 47:37
  kind of partially serious. I was like, you know, we maybe
• 47:40
  figured out 2 to 3% of what can be known about science in terms
• 47:44
  of our reality. He's like, Brett, you're way too
• 47:46
  optimistic. We found out less than 1%,
• 47:48
  right? So, oh, man.
• 47:50
  So I don't think, I don't think the the the chase of human
• 47:54
  curiosity ever ends. I like what you write here.
• 47:56
  I just this is a a random random quote.
• 47:58
  Can I read a quote? This is I just I was flipping
• 48:01
  through. This is not it's not scripted.
• 48:03
  If love is the root of creation, then to create is the most
• 48:06
  loving act we can attempt. Yet Remember Alexander, creators
• 48:10
  feel responsibility for what they birth.
• 48:13
  That's right before we birth a universe with the thalers and
• 48:17
  then the that universe that we birth as it's a bubble, The
• 48:21
  bubble theory of universes. We we, we, you know, you know
• 48:26
  how time is an illusion and the order of time by Carlo Robelli.
• 48:30
  We get to a point that the part part of that book you'll like
• 48:33
  the most if you turn it to the very Backpage.
• 48:36
  One of the neat things if if you see unity and discovery of the
• 48:40
  last one of the unique things is if you quote from ancient
• 48:43
  scripture, we've already found the lattice.
• 48:46
  It's just we need to scientifically prove that it
• 48:48
  exist. So part of what Doctor Alexander
• 48:52
  Bliss talks about as he's passing away is we've, we've,
• 48:55
  we've already, we've already found this, but we need to prove
• 48:59
  it to ourselves. The Dow is a great net, though
• 49:01
  of course nothing slips through it.
• 49:03
  It's hidden but ever present, the source of all things.
• 49:06
  Yeah, Indra's net is in there. You know, the Quran is quoted.
• 49:11
  You know, Kabbalah, the Zohar is quoted, but we've we've that
• 49:16
  that's one of the most beautiful things, I think is that we've
• 49:19
  already found the answer. It's just accepting the answer
• 49:23
  is, I think hard because we're in the world of form and, and
• 49:28
  the rise of science, which thank goodness for the rise of
• 49:32
  science. I'm rooted in science.
• 49:33
  Definitely a product of it. It, it, it gets, you know, it
• 49:39
  doesn't have to be this dogmatic trade off where it's like, OK,
• 49:44
  there is nothing beyond what we can prove scientifically because
• 49:50
  that's been shattered over and over again.
• 49:52
  I mean, you know, Galileo got famously excommunicated from the
• 49:55
  church, you know, for following up on Copernicus.
• 50:00
  And he was just a little bit more ornery than Copernicus in
• 50:04
  terms of not being controlled. And they're like, you're on.
• 50:07
  So I'm, I'm, I'm just, you know, you're, you're one of the, the,
• 50:10
  the most religious kind of text scholars.
• 50:13
  I could ask on this, but as you've if you've dove in, did
• 50:17
  you find that like a lot of unity in the text?
• 50:20
  Yeah, and you have them at the back there too, though.
• 50:23
  Yeah, but it shows up. But I'm like way less well read
• 50:26
  than you on this I. Don't think so.
• 50:27
  Not not not from what I'm reading.
• 50:29
  Well, there's a lot of. I haven't spent, I haven't
• 50:31
  spent, spent, spent nearly as long.
• 50:33
  And you're one of the smartest people I notice.
• 50:35
  Come on, man. No, there's, there's a, there's
• 50:37
  a lot of correspondence. I but I would say that this
• 50:40
  notion of responsibility that if you truly love your creation,
• 50:43
  you know, you are responsible for what you birth.
• 50:46
  I don't, I don't think we're, we're there yet.
• 50:48
  I think that's, that's one of the big concerns we should have
• 50:51
  over the next couple generations.
• 50:54
  Like, if you look at the technology we've birthed to
• 50:56
  date, I often say that I don't think like our, our, our
• 50:59
  spiritual maturity has caught up with our technological maturity.
• 51:03
  I mean, just like the way social media affected an entire
• 51:07
  generation over the past 10-15 years, you know, where my wife
• 51:10
  and I have to have like very strict policies around our
• 51:15
  daughters even being allowed on. So like, and it's playing out in
• 51:18
  the court system now, which is interesting.
• 51:20
  So were we responsible about deploying that technology around
• 51:24
  the world? Are responsible about our food
• 51:26
  systems, you know, does capitalism serve everybody?
• 51:29
  And the AI question, you know, it's you raise an interesting
• 51:33
  point. Like, I don't think, I mean,
• 51:35
  despite the wisdom you find across the world's traditions, I
• 51:38
  think the one thing they all agree on is this sense of, you
• 51:40
  know, moral and ethical responsibility that we're here
• 51:44
  for a reason, right? And, you know, there's the
• 51:47
  famous rabbinical story about, you know, can you describe the
• 51:51
  Torah while standing on one leg, Right?
• 51:53
  And the response is just just don't do to anyone what you
• 51:56
  haven't, you know, you don't want done to yourself, right?
• 51:58
  Right. The golden rule essentially,
• 52:00
  right, Right. So Karen Armstrong I've had
• 52:02
  chats with has written, you know beautifully about this, about
• 52:06
  how that the golden rule you really do find at the center of
• 52:08
  all these traditions, which means, but so why do you treat
• 52:11
  others as yourself? Is it because it's the nice
• 52:13
  thing to do, it's the ethical thing to do?
• 52:15
  Or because caught in this net together that there really is
• 52:17
  the sense of of oneness, right, right.
• 52:19
  That you are not that different from me, right.
• 52:22
  And I think that's the the golden rule stands out at me as
• 52:27
  a thing that can help us potentially like bridge this
• 52:31
  this divide into a potential future of abundance.
• 52:34
  But I think we have to take, you know, high stock of what this
• 52:37
  machine is. We're building this global
• 52:39
  experiment in AI, which could easily run amok together with
• 52:43
  the danger of nuclear technology and other biochemical
• 52:47
  technology. You know, we're not always
• 52:49
  taking responsibility for the things that we're creating.
• 52:51
  You know, we create these monsters sometimes.
• 52:54
  And there's lots of stories throughout the wisdom traditions
• 52:56
  and there's lots of literature too, just secular literature
• 52:59
  that talks about this, how we don't always take and not just
• 53:03
  Frankenstein and Pinocchio. I've been reading a lot about
• 53:07
  these different writers who have confronted this, this notion of
• 53:11
  of do we take responsibility for the non human intelligence in in
• 53:15
  front of us? There was this writer called ETA
• 53:18
  Hoffman who wrote about this like almost 200 more than 200
• 53:22
  years ago, actually about essentially there there's a man
• 53:26
  who falls in love with like a non human similacrum of what
• 53:33
  could be a fiance. His actual human fiance turns
• 53:36
  out to be kind of a, you know, it's kind of a tough
• 53:37
  relationship. You know, they argue a lot and
• 53:40
  he writes poetry for her. She doesn't like it and tells
• 53:42
  him to throw it in the fire. And, you know, there's a lot of
• 53:44
  friction, a lot of human friction in that relationship.
• 53:47
  And he winds up falling in love with a similacrum called
• 53:49
  Olympia, which is this sort of this this machine of sorts
• 53:53
  that's been fabricated, you know, Frankenstein, like by a
• 53:56
  famous physicist who sets up shop across from him.
• 54:00
  And it's the story of falling in love with this with this
• 54:03
  creation, right, with this man made creation, this demiurgic
• 54:06
  creation and ultimately doesn't doesn't end well, right?
• 54:11
  He commits suicide in the end, which is a whole nother story.
• 54:14
  Well, we've, we've actually seen that array with AI.
• 54:15
  Well, this is yeah, they're saying people fall in love with
• 54:18
  AI, but but those are those are programmatic decisions.
• 54:23
  That's my point. That's my point.
• 54:25
  And, and yeah, I completely agree with you on that, by the
• 54:27
  way. I'm, I'm, I, I very much believe
• 54:31
  that right now there are many leaders that are putting profits
• 54:37
  over people. And it's much.
• 54:40
  Yeah, I've got, I've got, you know, a couple of friends who
• 54:43
  have started over the years, very positive journalism
• 54:49
  outlets. Well, one of them is called the
• 54:51
  Progress Network by Zachary Carabel.
• 54:53
  And positive focus news that's finding the scientific
• 55:01
  breakthrough articles, the acts of beauty and love, which by the
• 55:05
  way, is most of our actual experience in the world around
• 55:08
  the world. If people think about their real
• 55:10
  experience versus what's pushed to them as a dystopia that
• 55:15
  doesn't hijack your amygdala, it actually opens your heart.
• 55:19
  And because we're wired for such scarcity, you know, as I as I
• 55:24
  said in the opener, you know, we've only had electricity for
• 55:27
  .1% of the time. It is easier business.
• 55:31
  I would actually say it's lazy business to say I'm just going
• 55:36
  to push to people's bases fears because then they'll be click,
• 55:41
  click, click, click, clicking like a mice in the maze looking
• 55:45
  for the cheese as opposed to really open one's heart.
• 55:50
  And I'm not saying it's going to be easy.
• 55:53
  I just think that we're going to be able to see that that future
• 55:57
  of abundance. And, you know, I envision the
• 56:00
  way it's going to happen in, in, in the book that that that I'm
• 56:05
  writing. I'm in the tedious editing
• 56:07
  process. You know, exactly how that is.
• 56:09
  I'm almost done with that. Actually, this is probably the
• 56:10
  week that I'll be done with that.
• 56:12
  And and you'll get you'll get one of the first copies as PDF
• 56:15
  because I'm going to ask friends to review it, you know, if they
• 56:19
  feel moved, provide a testimony. Sure.
• 56:21
  And and so, you know, I, I, I am envisioning like how it happens,
• 56:28
  but it's it, it really is going to take a hard shift for
• 56:32
  humanity. And I think it's going to be a
• 56:34
  little bit tops down and a lot of bombs up where people start
• 56:38
  to demand that future of abundance for everyone.
• 56:42
  And I, I in the book covering case studies in terms of how
• 56:46
  we've done that, like one of the most interesting trips Deborah
• 56:49
  and I took recently with the kids was we went to Bhutan in
• 56:52
  December. There's a whole country who made
• 56:55
  a constitutional choice to codify gross national happiness
• 57:01
  obviously is deeply rooted in Buddhism and inner contentment.
• 57:08
  And you know, there's American woman with us.
• 57:10
  You know, it's a family trip. And there there were new
• 57:13
  friends. We, we made friends with them on
• 57:15
  the trip, you know, with her family.
• 57:17
  And she was crying at the end. And she was like, I really want
• 57:21
  to be able to bring this beauty and love back to America.
• 57:26
  And we all felt it. And you know, that's a choice,
• 57:32
  right? They made a conscious choice.
• 57:35
  And so I, I highlight them as a case study at the end of the
• 57:38
  book. And why should we believe that
• 57:40
  this is even possible? And you don't want to know the
• 57:43
  things I get from, you know, my capitalist friends and, you
• 57:46
  know, look, I'm definitely a capitalist and entrepreneur.
• 57:50
  You know, that's that, that my medium that I've worked in to
• 57:54
  create a better world through technology has been that medium
• 57:57
  like going on epic journeys with teams and creating great
• 58:00
  cultures and everything else, you know, being being a
• 58:05
  capitalist in that medium. I have, I have prioritized that,
• 58:08
  but I've done it in a very conscious fashion.
• 58:12
  And so really the whole purpose of the podcast and the book is
• 58:15
  to get humanity to open its eyes and have a heart shift.
• 58:20
  And I'm certainly not alone in this.
• 58:22
  I think Dimas Asibus is well on this journey.
• 58:25
  I think Mustafa Solomon as well on this journey.
• 58:27
  Mustafa Solomon has really been, you know, he's the Co founder of
• 58:30
  Deepmine in charge of everything AI Microsoft.
• 58:33
  He's he's been he's been really highlighting over and over again
• 58:37
  of AI is seemingly conscious. It's not conscious.
• 58:41
  You know, I had on episode 12 with the Neil why AI can't
• 58:47
  become conscious on today's constructs with bits and bytes,
• 58:53
  you know, ones and zeros and and now that episode we went really
• 58:58
  deep. But in that episode he educated
• 59:00
  me and there are already 9 nonprofits set up to give AI the
• 59:03
  same rights as human beings today, you know, 9-9.
• 59:08
  Yeah. I mean, maybe there's more now
• 59:09
  that episode was a little while ago, you know, without things
• 59:12
  are progressing well. So, so this is the, the
• 59:16
  technology, I think is a forcing function.
• 59:20
  And I do think the divine is working through us to
• 59:23
  collectively wake us up and get us to make this fateful choice.
• 59:27
  And we make the right choice. We, we allow love to conquer
• 59:31
  fear. We lead with the heart versus
• 59:33
  the head, treat each other with the humanity that's with us all.
• 59:39
  Then we do have an unprecedented take off globally because now
• 59:43
  we're starting to collaborate in a global way.
• 59:45
  We should, I mean, I'd love to discuss this with Demis and
• 59:48
  Mustafa and, and others because our, our trajectory is not a
• 59:52
  good one. Our trajectory is release the
• 59:54
  technology 1st and clean up the mess 2nd.
• 59:56
  And that that's why the social media mess is playing out in
• 59:59
  courts right now, you know, years after its deployment, we
• 1:00:02
  don't have that much time to. I mean, and it's funny because
• 1:00:06
  AI raises very philosophical questions about the nature of
• 1:00:09
  our creation, you know, which doesn't strictly involve
• 1:00:13
  engineers, right, right. Or technologists.
• 1:00:16
  I really do think that we need to have more conversations with
• 1:00:20
  open minded thinkers across all disciplines.
• 1:00:22
  Totally agree, including philosophers and including
• 1:00:25
  humanists. At my alma mater at Brown,
• 1:00:27
  there's a wonderful program on AI and the humanities.
• 1:00:30
  I think that like as you look back in history, there's a
• 1:00:32
  reason I mentioned ETA Hoffman, by the way, which is a story
• 1:00:35
  from 200 years ago, like we often think about movies
• 1:00:37
  nowadays, like the movie her, right?
• 1:00:38
  And just like falling in love with with these simulacra.
• 1:00:42
  But these stories have been around a very, very long time,
• 1:00:45
  right? And part of my research is we
• 1:00:48
  talked about Adfontes before, like getting to the root, to the
• 1:00:51
  source of things. We have been having a
• 1:00:53
  civilizational debate over the nature of our encounter with non
• 1:00:59
  human intelligence for a very, very long time.
• 1:01:03
  And there are ancient myths that talk about this that it sounds
• 1:01:05
  like, you know, and again, the I went to law school because
• 1:01:08
  there's no career path for people who like myth and just
• 1:01:10
  like to sit around and read. And I recognize that 20 years
• 1:01:13
  ago. Turns out, like I mentioned
• 1:01:15
  before, I don't think that was a bad decision as all this debate
• 1:01:19
  is playing out. And I mean, seriously, we should
• 1:01:21
  organize some conversations around this.
• 1:01:22
  Yeah, You know, I think about Pygmalion and this, you know,
• 1:01:26
  and I know this sounds like it's unrelated and, you know,
• 1:01:28
  classicists, you know, should be out of jobs and and humanists
• 1:01:31
  shouldn't be weighing in. But it's the story of Pygmalion
• 1:01:34
  is the this this artist, this, this sculptor, this creator, if
• 1:01:38
  you talk about the taking responsibility for your
• 1:01:40
  creation, this creator had a piece of ivory and turned this
• 1:01:44
  ivory into this, this cherished object and, and infused this
• 1:01:49
  ivory with his passion with his soul, right?
• 1:01:53
  And just would spend all this meticulous detail chiseling it
• 1:01:56
  until it was perfect and then and then re perfecting it.
• 1:01:59
  And then once he had constructed this woman, his his ideal woman,
• 1:02:02
  right. And this is very different from
• 1:02:03
  the Olympia falling in love with the robot type story right from
• 1:02:07
  ETA Hoffman. Pygmalion falls in love with
• 1:02:09
  this thing because so much time and dedication and effort and
• 1:02:13
  ritualistic awareness is spent constructing this, this thing,
• 1:02:17
  recognizing that it's the soul at work in creating this, this,
• 1:02:21
  this object of love, right. And then once it's perfect, then
• 1:02:25
  he starts to give it clothing and then he'll put a necklace
• 1:02:28
  around its neck. And then he'll begin to interact
• 1:02:31
  with it and touch it and he kisses it eventually.
• 1:02:33
  But then he goes to the temple of Aphrodite.
• 1:02:36
  And he's, you know, he's, he's a bachelor.
• 1:02:38
  He's looking for the love of his life.
• 1:02:39
  Maybe he has it, but his, his bequest, his, his, his, his
• 1:02:43
  search at the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
• 1:02:45
  He doesn't ask for an ideal mate.
• 1:02:47
  He just asks for the the the consummation of his of his
• 1:02:51
  soul's other half, right, expecting what would happen in
• 1:02:54
  which that he goes back and this this seemingly inanimate statue,
• 1:02:58
  right, this lifeless object has become alive.
• 1:03:02
  But the the answer is it, it does that not because of his
• 1:03:06
  narcissism, but because of his humility.
• 1:03:09
  He goes to the goddess and and, you know, relinquishes his his
• 1:03:13
  will, right, says basically, let, let thy will be done right,
• 1:03:17
  which is a line from the from the our father in the Christian
• 1:03:20
  tradition, Fiat Woluntas Tua. He's like Aphrodite.
• 1:03:23
  Let thy will be done to this thing.
• 1:03:25
  I've spent so much time, you know, perfecting and re
• 1:03:28
  perfecting and and then he winds up not only merging with this
• 1:03:33
  object of his right, this human, non human merging, right, But
• 1:03:37
  they eventually have children and then continue to to
• 1:03:40
  populate. Not because he was a
• 1:03:42
  technologist, because he was an artist, right.
• 1:03:45
  And maybe there's no difference between the two, but I have, I
• 1:03:47
  have a feeling if more of our technologists today would take
• 1:03:51
  cognizance of the things that they're creating with true
• 1:03:54
  responsibility. And true responsibility means
• 1:03:56
  ritualistically approaching the nature of this creation and
• 1:04:00
  thinking about the consequences several generations from now,
• 1:04:03
  not just next year. I'm thinking about the training
• 1:04:05
  model and thinking about how you can produce more friction along
• 1:04:10
  the way. Because a lot of the models we
• 1:04:12
  have today are kind of based on this frictionless chatbot
• 1:04:17
  fluidity, which is very inhuman, but it, but it entraps humans
• 1:04:21
  like a doom scroll just, you know, and, and, and it tricks us
• 1:04:24
  into thinking that there's this intelligence, this sentence that
• 1:04:27
  loves us, that is infinitely patient, that is infinitely kind
• 1:04:30
  in some cases, maybe maybe even sycophantic, right?
• 1:04:35
  And, and that's a training issue, right?
• 1:04:37
  It's also a user issue too, but like.
• 1:04:39
  But the point being, there are lots of stories, lots of ways of
• 1:04:42
  thinking about why our creation comes about and the difference
• 1:04:45
  between art, religion and technology.
• 1:04:47
  Some would argue there isn't much of A boundary between them,
• 1:04:50
  and that we should be having further enriched discussions
• 1:04:53
  about ways to approach what what could be the greatest or the
• 1:04:57
  most dangerous object of human creation in the history of our
• 1:05:00
  species. It is it is going to be.
• 1:05:03
  I mean, I have one, one thing that I have, I, I will not claim
• 1:05:09
  to have many abilities, but I will claim to have this one.
• 1:05:12
  I've had it since I was very young.
• 1:05:15
  I am very good about seeing what's going to happen with
• 1:05:18
  technology. Tell us, man.
• 1:05:19
  And well, we are, we are making explicit choices right now.
• 1:05:24
  I mean, in episode 11 with Byron Reese, you know, he, he, he
• 1:05:29
  talks about the and and that episode's a very optimistic one.
• 1:05:32
  It's it's on the path to utopia. OK, but he but he talks about
• 1:05:36
  the fact that it's an explicit choice for Chachi PT to refer to
• 1:05:39
  itself as I. Exactly.
• 1:05:42
  OK, as opposed to Chachi PT says blah blah, right?
• 1:05:45
  So so it is personalizing it, it it is.
• 1:05:51
  Let let me just say this, I do think that more and more of the
• 1:05:56
  leaders of these models are waking up and putting out super
• 1:06:02
  thoughtful, super cogent arguments for how responsible we
• 1:06:07
  need. I read Dario's recent piece.
• 1:06:09
  Which is, which is fantastic, fantastic.
• 1:06:11
  Paradigmatic even. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:13
  The Adolescence of Technology is that piece amazing.
• 1:06:16
  You know, you know, one of the one of the institutions that put
• 1:06:20
  out my favorite report on AI last year was the Vatican.
• 1:06:24
  Did you know that? No.
• 1:06:25
  Have you read it? Yeah, I have.
• 1:06:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing.
• 1:06:27
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:06:28
  I mean, it's, it's it's really, really thoughtful.
• 1:06:32
  Yeah. I mean, I, I, I was curious if
• 1:06:34
  you read that. I mean, what did you think about
• 1:06:36
  that? I I thought it was incredible.
• 1:06:37
  It's, I mean they, they, they, they've often weighed in on, on
• 1:06:40
  technology in, in different ways over there.
• 1:06:42
  They're. One of my case studies in the
• 1:06:43
  book. Is that true?
• 1:06:44
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:06:45
  Because I think it's a big deal. I mean, you know, the new Pope,
• 1:06:49
  you know, going out and saying we need to see the God in
• 1:06:53
  everyone's eyes, regardless of race, regardless of religion,
• 1:06:57
  That would have been pretty heretical 1000 years ago if
• 1:07:00
  you're the Pope I. Can't.
• 1:07:01
  Imagine the Pope saying that. I don't, I don't, I don't
• 1:07:03
  disagree, right. Yeah.
• 1:07:04
  Now there was a call to the world.
• 1:07:05
  I mean, it's, it's there's a moral basis to it that you might
• 1:07:09
  not find in, in other critiques. It shows up in Dario's too,
• 1:07:12
  obviously. But I think there there's
• 1:07:14
  there's a heavy emphasis from the Vatican on making sure this
• 1:07:17
  works for everybody, essentially that it doesn't make the rich
• 1:07:20
  richer and the poor poorer, which seems, you know, almost
• 1:07:23
  inevitable, right? Which is why I think these
• 1:07:26
  conversations are are like, not just important and critical, are
• 1:07:31
  like, are we at a life or death moment?
• 1:07:32
  Well, let me, let me push on that because, because here's
• 1:07:35
  here's what, here's what I foresee.
• 1:07:36
  Yeah, it was, it was January 21st of last year that Trump
• 1:07:42
  announced Project Stargate. Hey, that's 500 billion of
• 1:07:45
  funding that he announced it alongside Larry Ellison, my UC
• 1:07:50
  son Sam Altman. OK, that's in the race to AGI.
• 1:07:54
  There's this fear based mechanism where it's like if we
• 1:07:57
  get to AGI before China, it's better.
• 1:08:00
  If China gets before us, it's it's horrible, you know,
• 1:08:03
  etcetera. So it's this, it's kind of like
• 1:08:05
  a space race versus the Russians or a race to invent, you know,
• 1:08:10
  the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project. 500 billion of funding
• 1:08:15
  is more inflation adjusted than we spent on the Manhattan
• 1:08:18
  Project or the Space Race. OK, inflation adjusted.
• 1:08:22
  Since that time, there's been around 7 trillion of worldwide
• 1:08:26
  announcements towards this race, OK?
• 1:08:29
  We're we're in very unprecedented territory.
• 1:08:31
  The day before Project Stargate was announced, January 20th,
• 1:08:36
  that's when DeepSeek announced the R1 model.
• 1:08:39
  OK, you can't script this any, any any better.
• 1:08:43
  And it was a week later that NASDAQ lost a trillion dollars
• 1:08:47
  of market cap led by NVIDIA losing 600 billion.
• 1:08:52
  And that was a huge wake up moment for me because one of the
• 1:08:55
  foundational pieces of literature growing up as a
• 1:08:59
  technologist, which I was like, oh, it's going to be very
• 1:09:01
  interesting to see how this plays out.
• 1:09:03
  And I I agree with them, But it'll be interesting to see was
• 1:09:06
  when Neil Stephenson wrote his non fiction work in the
• 1:09:09
  beginning was a command line. He's you know, he's a famous
• 1:09:12
  science fiction author. I love the Diamond Age and Snow
• 1:09:16
  Crash, but he basically forecast that Linux would win the
• 1:09:19
  Internet, that open source would win DeepSeek-R1 has now been
• 1:09:25
  vested many times over by many different Chinese open source
• 1:09:29
  models. They're also American companies
• 1:09:32
  who have open source models. And, you know, Open AI has
• 1:09:36
  accused DeepSeek of stealing the weights.
• 1:09:40
  The, the, I think, I think that's a little bit of sideshow.
• 1:09:43
  The big point is that this manifestation of intelligence
• 1:09:47
  that we can use, which translates automatically from
• 1:09:50
  any language, you put anything into it, you can talk it to
• 1:09:53
  ancient Greek in English. You know, it's a very pithy
• 1:09:56
  example is, you know, being in Japan, being able to, you know,
• 1:10:01
  as a vegetarian, it's actually surprisingly hard to navigate in
• 1:10:03
  Japan and having AI read all the reviews in Japanese.
• 1:10:10
  So it's local language to me in English to summarize for my
• 1:10:15
  dietary restrictions, which restaurant I should eat at.
• 1:10:18
  OK, it's a very pithy example, but it's still kind of mind
• 1:10:21
  blowing because that I don't even know how that would have
• 1:10:24
  been possible. I mean, I would have spent hours
• 1:10:26
  and hours with Google translator or something like that to get to
• 1:10:29
  that point. And now you can, you can just
• 1:10:32
  talk with the ancient spiritual text.
• 1:10:34
  You can, you know, you can be in Japan and take a photo of Zen
• 1:10:38
  Buddhist art and it will give you the entire history much
• 1:10:40
  better than a than most tour guides would, you know, and
• 1:10:43
  because it's reading all of the text about that piece.
• 1:10:48
  So basically I think that humanity at large is going to
• 1:10:54
  have access to open source AI, probably 90% of humanity within
• 1:11:00
  the next 10 years. And even the energy thing right
• 1:11:04
  now is a sideshow because once we decode the material science
• 1:11:11
  breakthrough, we need to capture the sun's energy.
• 1:11:13
  Then you have ubiquitous energy to use these models anywhere
• 1:11:17
  you're at in the world. Remember that Africa leapfrogged
• 1:11:19
  us with mobile, right? They, they didn't have to screw
• 1:11:23
  around with the landlines because they were later adopter.
• 1:11:26
  So open source, in my opinion, is going to win.
• 1:11:29
  And that means that all of humanity, not all, but almost
• 1:11:33
  all is going to have access to really powerful intelligence to
• 1:11:40
  make that choice of do we want to use this for destruction or
• 1:11:43
  do you want to use this for abundance?
• 1:11:45
  And that I think is a very good scenario because it really
• 1:11:50
  forces humanity. It's not just I do not agree
• 1:11:53
  that that it's this power structure where you know, Max
• 1:11:57
  tag mark and envision and life 3 dot O that like 1-1 company
• 1:12:02
  breaks out with AGI and then and then decides they're smarter
• 1:12:05
  than everybody else. Like, you know, that they're
• 1:12:06
  like the senators of the world or whatever.
• 1:12:09
  That's not the way it's going to play out.
• 1:12:11
  These these these AI engineers are moving around so quickly
• 1:12:17
  company to company. They're getting paid a lot of
• 1:12:19
  money to do so. It's it's, it's distributing the
• 1:12:22
  intelligence about how to actually make these things.
• 1:12:24
  That's even more complicated though that so that's it's one
• 1:12:27
  that's unregulatable then at that point.
• 1:12:29
  Yeah. I mean it is globally
• 1:12:30
  unregulatable. I think that's an illusion.
• 1:12:33
  I don't think it is regulatable. I don't think so either way.
• 1:12:36
  And so, so you've got, you basically got, I just think that
• 1:12:41
  AGI once it's created is going to happen simultaneously, nearly
• 1:12:46
  simultaneously and then go open source almost as quick as well,
• 1:12:53
  which is great if most of humanity is wired for good.
• 1:12:57
  Well, that's this is the, this is the crux.
• 1:13:00
  Just the crux, Yeah. Do you think we are?
• 1:13:02
  I do, I do, I do, I think I think that now and I do think
• 1:13:06
  that we need a catalyst and, and and the first part of the
• 1:13:09
  lattice actually did come from a psychedelic journey in terms of
• 1:13:12
  how we would have that unification and not that is a
• 1:13:16
  huge part. I mean, you know, one of the,
• 1:13:18
  my, my favorite chapter of love conquers fear of the book is
• 1:13:21
  chapter 12 on what is our reality.
• 1:13:23
  And I quote from lots and lots of texts I've, I've read, right.
• 1:13:28
  And trying to decode this. I've read, you know, over over
• 1:13:30
  55 books in the last year, like really trying to grapple at what
• 1:13:34
  is, what is this actual reality we're in?
• 1:13:38
  And I think if, if, if all of humanity could see that we're
• 1:13:44
  our actual reality is rooted in love and transcend, you know,
• 1:13:48
  what Gary Zhukov calls the five sensory human, where everything
• 1:13:53
  that you experience, you know, directly through your senses is
• 1:13:56
  all there is and have this awareness of consciousness being
• 1:14:00
  fundamental. Michael Pollan's new book coming
• 1:14:02
  out, etcetera, That that will cause some unification, you
• 1:14:08
  know, and, and we have to transcend the dogma of
• 1:14:14
  separation. You know, this, this, what I
• 1:14:16
  would actually say is the illusion of separation.
• 1:14:18
  So I, so I, I, I foresee the way it's going to happen is
• 1:14:23
  spirituality and science coming together.
• 1:14:26
  I, I, I and, and, and that doesn't mean the religious dogma
• 1:14:30
  comes together. I think actually the religious
• 1:14:31
  dogma melts down in that, but there's all types of power
• 1:14:35
  structure dogmas that are going to meltdown as well in this
• 1:14:38
  forcing function, so. Yeah, I just, I think it feels
• 1:14:42
  like time. It feels like time is short and
• 1:14:44
  that we're living through an epochal moment where the
• 1:14:47
  materialism of the past, it's only the past 300 years really
• 1:14:51
  you know, as as the Reformation LED into the scientific
• 1:14:55
  revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and then to post
• 1:14:59
  Newtonianism. This is this is all relatively
• 1:15:01
  recent in the grand scheme of things across human history.
• 1:15:04
  For for most of even Western history, I would say that there
• 1:15:08
  was a platonizing function that was carried through by some of
• 1:15:12
  the Neoplatonists that I mentioned and also by
• 1:15:14
  Christianity, which was influenced by, by Neoplatonism
• 1:15:17
  and idealism. This notion that that
• 1:15:19
  consciousness is, is fundamental.
• 1:15:21
  And again, that's like, you know, it's like Plato one O 1.
• 1:15:24
  It's like consciousness is, is fundamental.
• 1:15:26
  And that really was the engine behind a lot of Western
• 1:15:29
  civilization for, you know, 1500 years until the scientific
• 1:15:33
  Revolution. And I think civilization has
• 1:15:37
  there's this pendulum swing back and forth between these world
• 1:15:40
  views. And it's often, you know,
• 1:15:42
  they're often seen as as at odds with each other, you know,
• 1:15:46
  science and religion, faith versus logic.
• 1:15:48
  But I think the pendulum swing that we're going to experience,
• 1:15:51
  that we are experiencing right now, I think people can feel it
• 1:15:54
  is that Emerson had this famous quote that you don't often
• 1:15:57
  realize that actually Aristotle Platonizes and that you don't
• 1:16:01
  have to abandon. I mean, you don't have to
• 1:16:02
  abandon science and reason and logic to nonetheless do the self
• 1:16:07
  inquiry and do the responsibility checking that I
• 1:16:11
  think is going to like truly determine the fate of our
• 1:16:14
  species. So of course empiricism matters.
• 1:16:17
  The technology matters, but the intent, the framework and the
• 1:16:23
  the way that we engage that technology, which I don't want
• 1:16:26
  to call it platonic, but this I think with like with an
• 1:16:28
  awareness that we may not have access to base reality and there
• 1:16:32
  may be ways for spirit and matter to be in conversation.
• 1:16:36
  And this is the great alchemical dilemma, you know, for for
• 1:16:39
  centuries now, I think that we're we're playing the part of
• 1:16:43
  alchemist. Yeah, I completely agree.
• 1:16:45
  And the thing about alchemy, which distinguishes it from the
• 1:16:49
  science of today, the way it's practice for the most part.
• 1:16:53
  And many of the quantum physicists are great example of
• 1:16:55
  this, by the way, because if you actually look at what they were
• 1:16:58
  reading 100 years ago or more, you know, these were is a
• 1:17:01
  different time. And they were all reading the
• 1:17:04
  classics. A lot of them knew Latin and
• 1:17:05
  Greek. A lot of them were reading
• 1:17:07
  Vedanta and non dual exercises. And so it's no coincidence to me
• 1:17:12
  that that they then develop all these these revolutionary
• 1:17:15
  quantum insights into the nature of reality.
• 1:17:18
  About it became more spiritual as they did.
• 1:17:21
  Exactly right. It's not good.
• 1:17:22
  Exactly. So they were they were these,
• 1:17:24
  these were great thinkers, great philosophers across the board.
• 1:17:28
  And it was a transnational conversation that was happening
• 1:17:31
  around Einstein, but which we still haven't fully
• 1:17:33
  incorporated, I think, into our worldview, this notion of like
• 1:17:36
  superposition and this notion. We never reconciled quantum
• 1:17:40
  science and classical science. Well, to this end, that this is
• 1:17:42
  this is the great yeah, this is the the the, the Holy Grail of
• 1:17:45
  physics. And I think the way the the
• 1:17:48
  alchemists, This is why I talk about history.
• 1:17:50
  The alchemists were also struggling with that friction
• 1:17:55
  between matter and spirit. You know, Newton, the the great
• 1:17:58
  materialist who gives us this clockwork universe, this, this,
• 1:18:02
  you know, mechanistic universe is also sometimes referred to as
• 1:18:05
  the last, the last magician, right?
• 1:18:08
  Because the alchemists understood that, as I was
• 1:18:11
  talking about the Pygmalion myth and they, they understood better
• 1:18:13
  than us. I think that the, the true
• 1:18:16
  science Skientia, which is knowledge that, that the, the,
• 1:18:20
  these breakthroughs and these discoveries in this process of
• 1:18:22
  iterating on our technology and our creations.
• 1:18:25
  It's empirical to an extent, but it only works to the extent that
• 1:18:28
  you yourself are also being transformed in the process,
• 1:18:32
  right? Right.
• 1:18:33
  That you are the alembic. That's why they used all this
• 1:18:35
  chemical, right? This is what separates chemistry
• 1:18:38
  from alchemy. They used all the other
• 1:18:40
  symbolism in this allegory, basically just to say one very
• 1:18:43
  simple point, that you, that you are the experiment, right?
• 1:18:46
  You. And this is what Pygmalion
• 1:18:48
  realized. He's the experiment.
• 1:18:50
  It's not about the statue he's creating.
• 1:18:52
  He breathes life literally into the inanimate universe, into
• 1:18:56
  matter that the spirit of what whatever it is we do, whether we
• 1:18:59
  have souls, whether, you know, we're trapped in bodies,
• 1:19:01
  whatever we are, that we breathe existence into things.
• 1:19:05
  And this is what artists and do and theologians do and also
• 1:19:08
  technologists that we breathe stuff into existence.
• 1:19:11
  You, you can talk about this conversation as your soul song.
• 1:19:14
  Talk about a song. I mean that that's really cool.
• 1:19:16
  You know, you write books and you create companies, but I
• 1:19:19
  think it's really cool that you talk about when you're pressed,
• 1:19:21
  you talk about a soul song. So you're, you're so musicians
• 1:19:24
  do this too, right? And this is where a lot of
• 1:19:26
  inspiration comes from, like the the breathing into us and the
• 1:19:30
  using of this man. Ruben, you know the the creative
• 1:19:33
  act that a lot of these musicians are getting downloads.
• 1:19:37
  I I think. I they, they're, they're like
• 1:19:39
  channeling, you know, some of their greatest.
• 1:19:41
  Work. So that's closer to alchemy,
• 1:19:44
  what musicians are doing. I would say that is much closer
• 1:19:47
  to the alchemical process we need right now.
• 1:19:50
  I know this sounds crazy around the AI conversation than is
• 1:19:53
  currently happening. I completely agree with you.
• 1:19:56
  I mean, I'm so glad you said that.
• 1:19:57
  I I and I think it is happening. I.
• 1:20:00
  I think that the consciousness awakening, the rise of, you
• 1:20:06
  know, kind of, I would say the psychedelic renaissance, you
• 1:20:09
  know, I mean, I mean, I live in a state, you know, in Texas
• 1:20:13
  where last year they passed 50 million of funding for ibogaine
• 1:20:18
  research to save vets. But all of these vets, and it's
• 1:20:22
  over 80% of the time are curing with one dose of ibogaine, their
• 1:20:28
  suicidal thoughts, you know, and, and, and it'll cure an
• 1:20:32
  opioid addict or cure an alcoholic almost every time with
• 1:20:36
  one dose. And you know, we've seen this
• 1:20:38
  results with psilocybin, etcetera.
• 1:20:40
  You've, you've talked about quite a few of those things and
• 1:20:44
  you know, Ayahuasca, you know, Graham, who opens your book,
• 1:20:48
  talks about Ayahuasca being a cure for many people.
• 1:20:51
  So I think that if this is happening at this moment,
• 1:20:56
  because the divine is waking us up now look, if you don't take a
• 1:21:01
  spiritual view of that, you know, for for those that are
• 1:21:06
  that are watching this or listening, you could say there's
• 1:21:09
  something about natural selection and evolution and
• 1:21:12
  consciousness that we don't understand that's trying to wake
• 1:21:15
  us up to not extinct ourselves, right?
• 1:21:18
  OK, fine. That's that.
• 1:21:19
  That would be an OK interpretation to again, two
• 1:21:22
  things can be true at the same time, science and spirituality.
• 1:21:26
  But one thing that I don't think is forecast enough is that as
• 1:21:32
  AI, quantum computing robots, you know, brain computer
• 1:21:37
  interfaces exponentially take off and they're all
• 1:21:40
  exponentially taken off. We're in the upward, upward part
• 1:21:43
  of that exponent. It will allow us to decode our
• 1:21:48
  reality much faster than ever before.
• 1:21:51
  Like we're going to, we're going to, we're going to find out what
• 1:21:54
  the limits of quantum physics are.
• 1:21:56
  We're going to be able to decode what the nature of consciousness
• 1:21:59
  is more and more. 11 problem I have with with, with, with
• 1:22:05
  people, you know, making this assumption with malt book or
• 1:22:08
  whatever that, Oh my gosh, it's already conscious.
• 1:22:10
  It's inventing a religion, It's inventing a language is, you
• 1:22:14
  know, I agree with Mustafa Solomon.
• 1:22:15
  It's seemingly conscious. That's right.
• 1:22:17
  And it's, it's, it's actually cheapening when people make
• 1:22:21
  that, that leap. It's cheapening even the view of
• 1:22:24
  like, what makes us most human? That's right.
• 1:22:27
  And what makes us most human is our consciousness.
• 1:22:29
  Without our consciousness, there's we're just robots.
• 1:22:31
  And that's right. And we've been down this road
• 1:22:33
  before. This is why, again, history is
• 1:22:35
  often prologue for this. I mean, this, you know, the
• 1:22:37
  Eliza effect is something we've known about since the late 1960s
• 1:22:41
  with Joseph Wiesenbaum at MIT. You know, he had like one of the
• 1:22:43
  first chat bots that was, it seemed, you know, people would
• 1:22:47
  talk about their problems. And we were amazed.
• 1:22:49
  Imagine in the late 60s, like where I'm amazed now when I go
• 1:22:52
  and chat to PT Imagine in in 1966 having a chat bot talking
• 1:22:56
  about your issues and your problems.
• 1:22:57
  And they, they called the Eliza effect because they noticed
• 1:23:00
  almost immediately that people were over attributing sentience
• 1:23:04
  and, or even even better than that affectation and
• 1:23:08
  understanding to, to, to a bot, right, Which is clearly not,
• 1:23:12
  not, not conscious. And so like we've known about
• 1:23:14
  this already for generations. I mentioned these older stories
• 1:23:17
  to, to say the same thing. Like, I think that whatever's
• 1:23:20
  happening now, I think in order for our, our, our spiritual
• 1:23:23
  maturity to catch up to what this is, we just need more
• 1:23:26
  friction. It's just, it's this whatever
• 1:23:28
  this technology is and there's, there's, you know, clearly
• 1:23:31
  benefits to it, but I can use psychedelics as a very concrete
• 1:23:35
  example that I, I think I know a lot about at this point.
• 1:23:38
  I think it's very dangerous. I think psychedelics at scale
• 1:23:41
  are extremely dangerous, for one very simple reason is that we
• 1:23:45
  don't have the worldview at scale in the West to hold that
• 1:23:49
  kind of dissolving experience. And it's a very sacred
• 1:23:53
  experience and you have to go in with great intentionality and
• 1:23:57
  with great care, but. What do we do with it?
• 1:23:59
  But we but we've been commodifying it.
• 1:24:01
  And so we, it kind of comes back onto the onto the radar Western
• 1:24:05
  civilization, the 50s and 60s. And then there was, you know,
• 1:24:08
  that that great flowering of thought, which was interesting
• 1:24:11
  and a sort of a failed social experiment and then the war on
• 1:24:14
  drugs and now there's this other renaissance.
• 1:24:16
  But you know, I think it's like, I've been just really
• 1:24:18
  disappointed by like the tenor of the psychedelic conversation.
• 1:24:22
  It's one of the main reasons I still haven't hadn't done them
• 1:24:25
  is because we turn this stuff into well, first of all, we
• 1:24:28
  pathologize it. A lot of the conversation around
• 1:24:30
  psychedelics is around around pathology and around healing our
• 1:24:35
  psyches as if that's the seat of the soul, right.
• 1:24:38
  Psychedelic is the thing that manifests the soul.
• 1:24:40
  You know what is the soul for? For the Western materialist
• 1:24:43
  mind, the scientific mind, the empirical mind.
• 1:24:45
  Oh, it's that thing. It's the psyche, which means
• 1:24:47
  soul in Greek. And now we psyche for us means
• 1:24:50
  the thing in our brains with all our roses and our problems and
• 1:24:53
  psychedelics are there to help, help our, our problems and
• 1:24:56
  because we have no, no bucket to put this stuff.
• 1:24:58
  And so I gave a talk at at Harvard Law School last year on
• 1:25:01
  this, which is why I'm, I'm, I'm ranting.
• 1:25:02
  I'm not going to. I'm not.
• 1:25:03
  I'm not going to say. It online?
• 1:25:04
  Yeah, it's online. Yeah, I'll put a link in the
• 1:25:06
  show. And I'll send it to you.
• 1:25:07
  But in, in essence, the, the very, very short version, and I
• 1:25:11
  don't have much to say beyond it, is that, you know, we, we,
• 1:25:13
  we try to turn it into medicine. It's not medicine.
• 1:25:16
  It's not any medicine that we we've ever encountered before in
• 1:25:19
  the West over the past, you know, 100 years in allopathic
• 1:25:22
  medicine, because how often have you been told to take a Tylenol
• 1:25:26
  and then listen to a four hour soundtrack?
• 1:25:29
  I mean, clearly there's something more than the
• 1:25:30
  pharmacology at work. And, you know, Timothy Leary
• 1:25:34
  and, and, and Richard Alpert in the very early days in the 60s,
• 1:25:37
  refer to these things as nonspecific amplifiers.
• 1:25:40
  They're just taking what's there and they're amplifying it,
• 1:25:43
  right. And so the medical model isn't
• 1:25:44
  really quite cut out to holding this experience, which is a bit
• 1:25:47
  more than the pharmacology. Like we all know that.
• 1:25:50
  And anyone who's, you know, had an experience understands that
• 1:25:53
  there's something a bit more different happening, you know,
• 1:25:56
  And so, OK, so if it doesn't fit into medicine, does it fit into
• 1:25:59
  religion? Is it, you know, I, I, I
• 1:26:01
  subtitle my book the religion with no name, right?
• 1:26:03
  But I'm talking about something prehistoric and animistic and
• 1:26:06
  shamanistic. Most of the religions we have
• 1:26:09
  today, the biggest 5 religions on the planet.
• 1:26:11
  You know, you talked about this tension between like the Mystics
• 1:26:14
  and the, and the, the engine, right?
• 1:26:17
  The empire of religion. They're two very different
• 1:26:19
  things. Having this like direct
• 1:26:20
  encounter with the sublime, which in often cases is, is
• 1:26:24
  horrific, by the way, not beautiful, but horrific.
• 1:26:27
  Meeting the, meeting the great monster at the center of reality
• 1:26:30
  versus the great Angel. You know, more often than not,
• 1:26:32
  it's the, it's the, it's the devil at the center of, of
• 1:26:35
  reality. And so you know, it's, it's a,
• 1:26:37
  it's a, it's a jaw breaking experience that doesn't fit with
• 1:26:40
  religion very well and has the, the, the capacity for a lot of
• 1:26:44
  mind warping because it very much depends on the, the
• 1:26:47
  container in the setting. And like, what kind of church is
• 1:26:50
  this? Under what auspices?
• 1:26:51
  Who's serving this stuff? Set in.
• 1:26:53
  Setting this super important. But I mean, we don't really have
• 1:26:57
  a traditional set and setting. I wrote the book as an example
• 1:27:00
  of how other folks across Western history develop settings
• 1:27:03
  for this right, which have since disappeared, You know, which
• 1:27:06
  leaves us today with the only option of, you know, which
• 1:27:09
  cultures have managed to keep this alive for centuries of
• 1:27:11
  millennia. They're traditional cultures.
• 1:27:13
  And you find them around the world and the Americas and
• 1:27:16
  Africa and Asia and Australia and New Zealand and they're,
• 1:27:19
  they're everywhere. And this is a global phenomenon
• 1:27:21
  that has been with humanity for, since its inception.
• 1:27:24
  I do believe as hunter gatherers, that 99% you talk
• 1:27:28
  about, you know, we were foraging and experimenting both
• 1:27:30
  for, for health and for enlightenment.
• 1:27:33
  And you know, this of of course, our confrontation with
• 1:27:35
  psychedelics would happen. Some cultures kept it alive.
• 1:27:38
  We did not. And so that leaves us in this
• 1:27:40
  weird position of Co opting like ayahuasca, for example, that is
• 1:27:44
  an Amazonian tradition that the average western mind is not
• 1:27:48
  suited for, you know, And so I go to kind of like great lengths
• 1:27:51
  in my book. And when I talk about not Co
• 1:27:53
  opting traditions that just don't make sense to to the West
• 1:27:57
  world views and deities and notions of reincarnation, for
• 1:28:00
  example, that don't fit well in a materialist paradigm, not to
• 1:28:04
  mention like the social injustices.
• 1:28:05
  So just you know, Co opting different traditions.
• 1:28:07
  So like all that said, we have no frame.
• 1:28:11
  We have no framework whatsoever for individual, you know,
• 1:28:15
  preparation or experience with this, let alone at scale.
• 1:28:19
  So I don't know where that leaves me with psychedelics.
• 1:28:21
  Do you think? I mean, just to give you a bit
• 1:28:23
  of hope here, I do think that that as we decode our reality
• 1:28:30
  more and more and find out that we actually come from a place of
• 1:28:36
  light and love, that that will be a unifying event for
• 1:28:39
  humanity. Because what you experience with
• 1:28:41
  your near death experience, whatever experience through
• 1:28:44
  psychedelics as well as meditation, you know, sometimes
• 1:28:48
  like just just deep prayer. I mean, I've, I've had that
• 1:28:51
  experience growing up where I knew that I was in the presence
• 1:28:54
  of, you know, God, this, this, this loving force.
• 1:28:57
  I can feel it all over my body just just in witnessing, you
• 1:29:01
  know, this, this beautiful, you know, sunrise and just feeling
• 1:29:06
  it like feeling that. And I, I do think that we're
• 1:29:11
  going to decode our reality more and more and that's going to
• 1:29:15
  help unify. And it's, it's, it's, it doesn't
• 1:29:18
  have to be a psychedelic catalyst.
• 1:29:21
  It, it, it could just be understanding what the nature of
• 1:29:25
  consciousness is. You know, there there's a great
• 1:29:27
  book that that I read last year called Why Buddhism is True by
• 1:29:31
  this guy Robert Wright. And he's holding on the entire
• 1:29:34
  time to the natural selection. This is how our brains evolved.
• 1:29:40
  But it ends in a spiritual tone. And he's been meditating for his
• 1:29:45
  whole life where he says, look, let's be thankful that whatever
• 1:29:51
  the Buddhist were teaching. And when you go into these
• 1:29:54
  states of meditation, like like a Bhutan and you see that the
• 1:30:00
  reality of our connectedness is rooted in love.
• 1:30:04
  He said It could be the opposite.
• 1:30:06
  Like it could be that you go into meditation, you're like, Oh
• 1:30:09
  my gosh, it's dark and scary in there and like freak out,
• 1:30:11
  etcetera. But it's not, you know, it's,
• 1:30:13
  it's, it's, it is, it does lead to this deep, deep inner
• 1:30:17
  contentment. And I, I, I really think that
• 1:30:20
  you're going to see more and more of that, you know, I'm
• 1:30:23
  sure, you know, you know, John and Lauren, you know, Jason's a
• 1:30:26
  big investor in their company. I'm an investor in it.
• 1:30:28
  There's going to be more and more of these technologies
• 1:30:31
  created that allow us get to get in these states of love.
• 1:30:38
  And if our actual reality beyond this one, beyond the veil is
• 1:30:42
  rooted in that, like you as a, as a 5 year old boy saying to
• 1:30:45
  your mom, like, what's what's wrong?
• 1:30:48
  Then we have a lot to look forward to as we decode that
• 1:30:52
  and, and, and how that can unify humanity.
• 1:30:55
  So I think it's just a different arc of the same thing that the
• 1:31:00
  Mystics were on, but it's more technological arc.
• 1:31:03
  They were experimenting with technology, right?
• 1:31:05
  It was just a natural technology that's right of a psychedelic
• 1:31:09
  and whatever their concoction was, which we actually don't
• 1:31:12
  know what all the ingredients were, right?
• 1:31:13
  You can't you can't decode that in the immortality, right?
• 1:31:17
  So I mean, you know, there's been pieces of it found like the
• 1:31:21
  like ergot, you know, it's one of the one of the catalysts, but
• 1:31:24
  we're going to decode more and more and that that's super
• 1:31:27
  exciting. It's like the next frontier of
• 1:31:29
  the immortality key. In a way.
• 1:31:31
  It's like the immortality key is now going into a, a A-frame of
• 1:31:38
  we're going to understand more and more about our reality.
• 1:31:41
  We only know what 4% of the universe is even made of, right?
• 1:31:44
  We call that matter 96%. We just call dark energy dark
• 1:31:47
  matter. It's just a, it's like a, you
• 1:31:49
  know, the programming term would be that's a kluge or plug, you
• 1:31:52
  know, for what we don't know. Yeah, you know, we have no idea.
• 1:31:55
  And the Hermetic axiom that would complement that is that we
• 1:31:59
  know about, you know, 4% of who we are.
• 1:32:02
  Yeah, right. Is if this macrocosmic,
• 1:32:04
  microcosmic philosophy has any merit to it, it's that as we
• 1:32:09
  begin to decode the the universe that seemingly sits outside of
• 1:32:13
  us, if it does at all, maybe it doesn't.
• 1:32:15
  If consciousness is fundamental, that what we're really
• 1:32:18
  excavating are layers of the self.
• 1:32:20
  And that so that that's the appeal I keep making is that,
• 1:32:22
  and there's a particular responsibility among the very
• 1:32:25
  few technologists who are creating the models that may
• 1:32:30
  wind up being that this, this open source global experiment.
• 1:32:33
  I think there's a particular responsibility on a very small
• 1:32:36
  group of humans to very mindfully excavate alchemically
• 1:32:42
  those layers of the self to understand like and talk about
• 1:32:47
  it in psychology, the very the latent subconscious right
• 1:32:51
  impulses that are being breathed like Pygmalion, that are being
• 1:32:55
  breathed into this into this creation.
• 1:32:58
  I think it's really important that we take like a page from
• 1:33:00
  the, the great innovators and the the geniuses, really both
• 1:33:04
  artists and technologists of the past and understand that as
• 1:33:07
  we're decoding reality, we're really decoding the self.
• 1:33:10
  And so that if you were just to focus on the self and there are
• 1:33:12
  a whole contemplative movements based on this, by the way, that
• 1:33:15
  if you just go within, you actually discover more about the
• 1:33:18
  seeming universe out there than if you were just tinkering with
• 1:33:21
  matter, right? And again, this is the Holy
• 1:33:23
  Grail of physics and also of theology and philosophy, I would
• 1:33:26
  say is that we really don't know where that, where that crux is.
• 1:33:29
  But I, I would argue that whatever this process is, and I
• 1:33:32
  do hope it leads to abundance. I feel like the 99% of the work
• 1:33:37
  right now is, should not be on coding and it should be on
• 1:33:41
  excavating layers of the self and, and really bringing to the
• 1:33:45
  surface the kind of, of anima of impulse that we're breathing
• 1:33:50
  into these creations. And I think that can happen in
• 1:33:53
  dialogue, honestly. Yeah, well, what is the
• 1:33:56
  Christian, I'll say mantra, the Kingdom of God has found within.
• 1:34:00
  And that, of course is is in all spiritual traditions as well.
• 1:34:04
  If if you were to wave a magic wand.
• 1:34:08
  And you know, one of the case studies I have in the book is
• 1:34:10
  the Cosmos Institute, which I'd love to introduce you to Brendan
• 1:34:12
  and Adrian McCord because this is what they're focused on, but.
• 1:34:16
  That's good to hear. But yeah, but but you know what?
• 1:34:19
  How would you design the wisdom tradition or the school or
• 1:34:24
  whatever? You know, how, how would you
• 1:34:26
  design it based on all of your knowledge of the past wisdom
• 1:34:31
  traditions? Because you, you've gone very,
• 1:34:33
  very deep on that, like, like, you know, how would you, how
• 1:34:36
  would you design it today? So we talked about like the set
• 1:34:38
  and setting of some of these ancient initiatory schools.
• 1:34:42
  And the answer for me has gotten a lot easier over the past five
• 1:34:44
  years as as I've learned more about the psychedelic community,
• 1:34:49
  it would not involve drugs. I think that we are symbolically
• 1:34:52
  illiterate as a culture. And what I mean by that is that
• 1:34:56
  when you enter into these altered states of awareness, if
• 1:34:59
  it happens accidentally, spontaneously or, or or by
• 1:35:01
  design, typically you're entering into a dream like
• 1:35:04
  field, right. That that is somewhat different
• 1:35:06
  from what we're doing right now in this, you know, alert problem
• 1:35:09
  solving state of consciousness as as Graham Hancock refers to
• 1:35:11
  it. Yeah, this is, this is one way
• 1:35:14
  of encountering reality in in those altered states which are,
• 1:35:17
  which are very expansive, right. Typically information arrives.
• 1:35:22
  You've talked about like transmissions, you've talked
• 1:35:24
  about sentences and language that somehow flows through you.
• 1:35:27
  You know, it happens intuitively, sometimes
• 1:35:30
  telepathically. It happens in ways we don't
• 1:35:33
  really understand, to be honest. It's a great mystery.
• 1:35:36
  But the, the one thing that unites all that, I think is the
• 1:35:39
  notion of the symbol or the allegory.
• 1:35:41
  I mean, how, how often have you sat down in a dream and read a
• 1:35:44
  textbook line by line? I can't even read in my dreams.
• 1:35:47
  The, the words get, get, get blurry and fuzzy after a few
• 1:35:49
  seconds. So it's, it's non discursive is
• 1:35:52
  my point. And that's, that's a bad thing
• 1:35:54
  for a culture that's, that's about symbolically illiterate,
• 1:35:57
  right? And, and, and Jung wrote a lot
• 1:35:59
  about this, as did Joseph Campbell.
• 1:36:01
  I think the best thing we can do is become symbolically literate.
• 1:36:05
  He talked about synchronicities. A synchronicity in, in my
• 1:36:08
  working definition is the ingression of the symbol into
• 1:36:13
  waking life, right? You can, you can call it from
• 1:36:16
  the subconscious or the unconscious or the dream world,
• 1:36:18
  but there's a reason typically it happens in the form of, in
• 1:36:21
  the form of symbols, right? And so there is a way to begin
• 1:36:24
  studying that, that kind of thing.
• 1:36:26
  I mean, I would, I would read, I would, I would read, read, read,
• 1:36:28
  read. I don't think anybody should be
• 1:36:30
  having a psychedelic experience without several years.
• 1:36:35
  In my case, it's been decades and I still feel unprepared for
• 1:36:37
  it without deep, deep reading over the the wisdom traditions
• 1:36:43
  and the ways people have approached these issues before,
• 1:36:46
  which is which is becoming symbolically literate and
• 1:36:49
  preparing for that grand awakening.
• 1:36:51
  Ataloosis, for example, it was a once in a lifetime experience.
• 1:36:54
  So. And they had to get to a certain
• 1:36:56
  level of advancement. And it was typically for those
• 1:36:58
  kind of like in mid, we don't really know, there's a lot we
• 1:37:00
  don't know. But typically it was for those
• 1:37:02
  who who are spiritually advanced or, you know, had at least had
• 1:37:05
  at least spent something like 18 or more months preparing for
• 1:37:08
  that, that journey. They would, you know, make a
• 1:37:10
  pilgrimage from all across the Mediterranean to just outside,
• 1:37:13
  you know, Athens, which is where Elusis is today.
• 1:37:16
  And then they would go once and have to do it again the next
• 1:37:18
  year. And so the first time, as best
• 1:37:20
  we can reconstruct it, they weren't offered that initiatory
• 1:37:23
  potion. If if some kind of magic potion
• 1:37:25
  was involved, it was only on their second visit that they
• 1:37:28
  became in a pop days, which is that the one who sees it all
• 1:37:31
  like a full-fledged initiate, right.
• 1:37:35
  But again, that's also within a culture that had a story that
• 1:37:39
  they were born into, where they interpreted Demeter and
• 1:37:42
  Persephone, the goddesses that they would meet face to face in
• 1:37:46
  the underworld during this experience, as a real thing,
• 1:37:51
  right? And so they had symbology, they
• 1:37:53
  had stories, and they had a worldview from the time they
• 1:37:56
  were born. And they would hear stories from
• 1:37:58
  people who'd done this before them, right?
• 1:38:01
  And they had parents and siblings and aunts and uncles
• 1:38:04
  who had been through that kind of experience.
• 1:38:06
  And although they didn't talk about it because it was illegal
• 1:38:08
  to talk about your initiation, this system had worked for
• 1:38:12
  centuries and centuries and centuries.
• 1:38:14
  And so much of the culture was based on the naturalness.
• 1:38:18
  And so to take an idea like that and import it right here to, you
• 1:38:23
  know, a culture that has not kept that kind of tradition
• 1:38:26
  alive, that myth alive, right? Because myth is the flip side of
• 1:38:29
  ritual. Like you can't just take the
• 1:38:31
  drug and forget the myth, right? It's one coin.
• 1:38:34
  And So what we should be doing, and it's a long answer to your
• 1:38:36
  question, but I think we need to be investing in story together.
• 1:38:39
  And so I think I think the the greatest preparation for death,
• 1:38:42
  right, which is how Plato talks about philosophy are those who
• 1:38:45
  are consciously preparing for death is to is to really invest
• 1:38:51
  and study how people have approached these questions
• 1:38:53
  across time, both in the East and in the West, as a lot of the
• 1:38:57
  quantum physicists were doing 100 years ago, both from
• 1:39:00
  predecessor traditions that predate our own into the into
• 1:39:04
  the great Stone Age and beyond. And I think I mean, my one
• 1:39:08
  answer is just read, just read, just read and dialogue before
• 1:39:12
  experience. That is that is the the the, the
• 1:39:14
  richest training possible for investigating the nature of
• 1:39:18
  South. And then I would just invite
• 1:39:20
  self inquiry and dialogue before any out of body experience.
• 1:39:24
  I think there's a lot of training we need and a lot of
• 1:39:26
  storytelling for our culture to be able to re appreciate, you
• 1:39:30
  know, a new myth for the if the age of abundance is a new myth,
• 1:39:34
  then we should be in in in the business of storytelling right
• 1:39:39
  now more than anything. I think those are wise words and
• 1:39:42
  a good, good place to end the conversation.
• 1:39:46
  I know I'm keeping you on a Sunday here away from your fat
• 1:39:49
  lion. How much of A know how much of A
• 1:39:51
  great dad and husband you are? But you know I will.
• 1:39:55
  I will end by saying, you know, before I did any psychedelic
• 1:39:59
  catalysts, like I spent many years studying Vedanta.
• 1:40:02
  You talked about Vedanta earlier.
• 1:40:04
  You know, I went to India, I stayed down in Swamiji
• 1:40:05
  Parthasarathy, you know, of course I've studied Torah,
• 1:40:09
  etcetera. And and so I, I really was
• 1:40:14
  prepared and I think that's AI think those are wise words to
• 1:40:17
  end on and. And you know, I, I do want to
• 1:40:21
  connect you with the Cosmos Institute because I think
• 1:40:23
  they're actually doing exactly what you're awesome.
• 1:40:25
  I didn't know that, but there's others, there are others.
• 1:40:27
  So, so that's, that's, that's super exciting.
• 1:40:30
  And hopefully some of those, maybe you're already involved in
• 1:40:34
  some things like that, but so hopefully some of those you can
• 1:40:36
  get. Involved in I would I would love
• 1:40:38
  to. Yeah, but I love your heart and
• 1:40:40
  really appreciate our friendship.
• 1:40:42
  And big shout out and thank you again to Jason Carp for
• 1:40:46
  connecting us back when. So thanks so much brother.
• 1:40:49
  Thanks for having. Me, man, you bet.
• 1:40:51
  Well, thanks again, everybody for tuning in to another episode
• 1:40:54
  of Love Conquers Fear. I am going to remain on the
• 1:40:57
  road. You'll see in the next two
• 1:40:59
  episodes. Those are in New York City with
• 1:41:03
  two very good friends that are also in the Henry Crown
• 1:41:05
  Fellowship with me at the Aspen Institute, which is another
• 1:41:08
  organization like Cosmos, which is really trying to bring out
• 1:41:13
  the best and leaders and get them to lead from the heart
• 1:41:17
  instead of just from the head, which is what we're going to
• 1:41:20
  need for team humanity to make it.
• 1:41:22
  This is the forcing function moment and it's going to be a
• 1:41:26
  wild ride over the next 10 to 15 years.
• 1:41:28
  But we're all in it together and we're 99.9% genetically
• 1:41:32
  identical across the world and we sure squabble a lot about
• 1:41:36
  that .1% difference. Thanks again for all the love
• 1:41:39
  you're giving. And yeah, I really, really
• 1:41:42
  appreciate the shares and all the comments.
• 1:41:45
  You know, daily now I'm getting people talking about the heart
• 1:41:48
  shift that they're having, and that means the world to me.
• 1:41:52
  This is my soul song and thank you so much for being a part of
• 1:41:55
  it.