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Each episode of the podcast Personal Kosmology traces one seeker's journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that broke them open, and the questions they're still living.
I'm drawn to people who didn't just change their minds, but rebuilt their lives around what they found.
In their stories, you may recognize your own.
s1e1 Final - Mark Gober
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Mark Gober: [00:00:00] Your life's been focused on accomplishments and not love." As a banner.
If there was 1% truth to any of it, then my random and meaningless universe life path- Right ... was wrong. And that meant that most people around me who believed implicitly in random and meaningless universe were wrong. Many of my professors at Princeton were wrong. How can this be true? And it wasn't as if I heard one podcast and my life changed.
It was incremental. It was the cumulative evidence. Those few experiences that I had were very validating that the spiritual is real.
Real. I can't express it clearly enough. This is not a joke.
It's a remembering. . It's, "Oh my goodness, how did I forget?" This is the most obviously true thing that I've known throughout eternity, and we forgot.
And I had to grieve my life. I got lost in the accomplishments, in the worldly stuff, and I remember thinking to myself, "How did I let this happen?" It was tragic .
Devin Martin: Welcome [00:01:00] to The Personal Cosmology of Mark Gober. I'm your host, Devin Martin, and we are here with Mark, who is a new friend of mine. And I wanna start by just saying thank you for agreeing to be the first guest ever on my podcast and asking me zero questions about what it is or what we're gonna talk about.
And I'm curious, is that just because you do a lot of podcasts, or what? You just- Yeah ... prefer not to know?
Mark Gober: Well, Devin, thanks for having me. Yeah. I've done a lot of podcasts, so I'm numb to it. And also, I like you a lot, so I know wherever it goes, I'm cool with it. It's funny. So we, we are new friends. Um, since I moved to Austin, we've seen each other a bunch of times- Mm-hmm
out at events and fallen into conversation. The idea for this podcast has been around long before we met, but only two days ago when I asked you, uh, did I realize you're actually probably, like, the ap- perfectly ideal person for this. Huh. And so I'm gonna try to [00:02:00] explain what we're gonna do here and guide you through it.
Um, and I think because of the books in front of us, you'll realize, like, I'm interested in seekers- Mm ... in people who have questioned reality, questioned their understanding of the nature of reality, and I love origin stories. So as a coach, I have asked 1,000 people, more than 1,000 people, to tell me their origin story, and it's often around their career, but we're weaving in spirituality and, you know, ev- every aspect of their life.
And so I wanna understand the docuseries you're working on, the seven books you've written, but I wanna get there by going back and understanding, essentially, a, the convers- a conversation in three chapters. First, the world you inherited. Mm-hmm. Second, the moments when that started to crack or maybe be broken wide open.
And then third, kind of the edges of your thinking today. Okay. So if you don't mind, take us all the way back. You know, where were you born? How were you raised? What were you taught is [00:03:00] good, true, beautiful, real, worth doing with your life? What to believe? Any stories that that triggers, I'd love to hear. I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, in a Jewish household, but not religious.
So I had a bar mitzvah, but the more I learned from science, the more I thought that all religion and spirituality were just superstition. And did your parents believe? Um, I don't know exactly- It wasn't discussed ... where they stand, but it wasn't a, it wasn't a major part of our lives like other religious people who it was super clear that God was their life, for example.
Hanukkah Jews, Passover maybe. Yeah. High holidays. Yeah. But not ritualized part of your life and not... Did you talk about God? If anything, I just rejected it. Yeah. I didn't like it It just symbolized some big institution I didn't like the vibe, and maybe it was the institution and the way the synagogues were.
It just felt really somber, and I didn't understand what they were really talking about and why [00:04:00] it was relevant to me as a real thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then were you I'm interested often in the intersection between science, religion- Mm-hmm ... and personal experience. Were you raised in a like we believe in science household, and was science the way to find the truth in the universe?
I think that attitude came from me- Mm-hmm ... more than my family, for whatever reason. Maybe it was just my academic upbringing, where I, the things I learned in school led me down the path of believing that we live in a random and meaningless universe. I can relate. This is why we connected probably. I mean that very literally.
Yeah. Up until about 10 years ago, I would've said that is 99.99999% the case, random and meaningless, this reality. And were you asking these questions to yourself from a young age? Were you- Good question ... contemplating these things? I, I've thought about this a lot. And I do remember asking questions when I was very young, I don't know how old, of, [00:05:00] "Well, if God exists, who created God?"
And in undergrad, I went to Princeton, and I started off in the economics department just because- Yeah ... I thought going into business would be a good thing- Yeah ... without actually being interested in economics. And then I took an astrophysics course and was like, "This is the coolest thing ever." Yeah. "I need to switch my major to astrophysics."
And I met with the head of the department. I was halfway through my sophomore year, so it would've been a very late switch and I would've had to make up math classes, and I was on the tennis team. So I had this big division one obligation, and I thought to myself, "I care too much about grades, and my grades are going to suffer."
Really? I, so I don't think this is a smart move for me to major in astrophysics. So you were a good student, you were a diligent student. Very diligent. You, you believed in the go to high school, get into a good college, get a good career going after that? Yeah. As it was happening, I didn't necessarily believe that.
Maybe when I got to junior year in high school- Yeah ... I thought, "Okay, now it's college time." I was the first [00:06:00] of three boys. So- Mm ... I didn't really have a precedent, and I was the first grandchild on one side of the family. So there was- Everybody's watching ... everyone's watching, but there was no precedent. I said, "Okay, I guess now this is time for, to apply to colleges."
Prior to that, I just wanted to do well. Mm. And I don't, we could probably spend hours trying to figure out where that comes from. That, I, I focused on metrics, grades, being a competitive tennis player, rankings, winning, losing. So you're hyper-rational. Yeah. And wanting to win. Yeah. And economics- And I was very social
is a great way to win. Economics is a great way to win. I try to do everything. And did you have any idea what your career would be afterwards? No. No. I coach a lot of people who end, end up in finance or something adjacent, and there's this process of like you get into the best school you can get into, you pick the major, like economics, that seems widely gonna like lead you somewhere, and then you get recruited somewhere- Yeah
and decisions are all made for you That's basically what happened. But even going to Princeton was [00:07:00] not really on my radar. When I was in, earlier in high school, I would've said, like, "That's not for me. That's other, other people go to- Mm ... Ivy League schools." And I decided to apply, to apply early decision.
The reason I applied, it w- it was the number one school m- based on the rankings at the time, but really, the tennis coach there, Glenn Michibata, was former world number one in doubles professionally. Oh, wow. Top 50 in singles. And he saw me play and said, "If you get in, you're on the team." So I'm like, "Okay, I have to do, I have to apply here."
Yeah, yeah. And early decision was the best odds of doing it, where the way they used to do it, I don't know f- how it is now, but- I don't know ... you apply to one school early, and you can't apply anywhere else, and if you get in, you're bound. Yeah, yeah. So I applied and I got in, and then all of a sudden I'm going to Princeton.
So did you finish the economics degree? At Princeton? Yeah. I switched majors. I d- I didn't do astrophysics. I switched to psychology. Where does that come from? Interest. I think I took a, maybe an intro s- to psychology course. Something happened, some- and I [00:08:00] said, "Th- I would actually be more interested in taking courses in this domain.
If I'm gonna be- And that wasn't gonna put you behind in your grades the way astrophysics would. Right. I didn't have the same concern, and I thought I'd be more interested, and I also thought it would be practical. So still, but still not thinking, "I'm gonna go be a psychologist- No ... or a therapist or anything."
No. I remember talking to my thesis advisor about it and talking about PhD programs, and I just thought to myself, "This is not what I wanna do. I don't wanna be a PhD." So I learned, I took courses that I thought would be of interest. In particular, judgment and decision-making psychology. Mm. The work of Daniel Kahneman- Oh, yeah
who won the Nobel Prize. My thesis was on Daniel Kahneman's work. Oh, we could argue about that another time. Okay. I'm fascinated by him. Thinking Fast and Slow is the book he wrote- Yes ... many years later, but prospect theory, he won the Nobel Prize for that, and I was looking at elements of prospect theory that I didn't think were fleshed out enough in my thesis.
I have this, uh, hypothesis or, I don't know, belief maybe that there's actually a third system of thinking. Okay. And he's collapsing two of them into one. And so slow thinking is the [00:09:00] rational thinking. Mm-hmm. And the fast thinking is what I would call reflex or instinctive or... And I think he conflates that with intuition- Hmm
which transcends and includes the other two. My understanding of Kahneman, I wasn't even asking you this at the time, is that it's not a very spiritual perspective- No ... like most psychologists. So I was just on the rational track. Non-local brain access to information is not, not in his wheelhouse. No. Well, it's interesting you mention non-local consciousness because that's become a big part of my life, and that wasn't even an issue that I remember coming up.
Mm. Th- there was this underlying assumption throughout my psychology courses, including neuroscience, that consciousness, the part of us that experiences life, emerges out of our brain. Right. It just pops out, and it's a presupposition that's so obviously true in academia that they don't even talk about it.
Yes. And so is this, when is this point you said maybe 10 years ago where you started to question some of these things? Was, wa- was there a turning [00:10:00] point where- Yeah ... academia was starting to fall apart? I mean, it sounds like you never really f- fully bought into Judaism as a religion the way it's taught to you.
No. But academia was, did you have a, a break from the power structures that'd be there? Well, I, I moved into the professional world, which sort of became a continuation of academia in terms of the mindset. It was very achievement-focused. Yeah. And the more I learned about science, just on the periphery, the more I was hearing from physics that we live in this massive random universe.
So I was, the belief system became more embedded. And was that- feeding some sort of n- nihilism in you and- Yeah ... affecting your mood and your- I was nihilistic, but actually that's a rational response. Right. And I knew that because I thought to myself, "Well, what happens when we die? Why is everyone running around caring about things because they're gonna be dead, and then it's lights out?"
Yeah. And I was right, given the belief system I had. Mm. It wasn't something I had enough time to think about necessarily 'cause I [00:11:00] went into investment banking out of undergrad- Okay ... because that's what people do. Yeah. And I graduated in 2008. This was during the financial crisis. So- Started my career, July- Thrown into 80 hours a week 80 would be- Plus
a good week. Yeah, yeah. Uh, worked at UBS, and I was in the group, it's called the financial institutions group. My clients were banks, insurance companies, asset managers, and we were doing mergers and acquisitions- ... capital raising, restructuring. Yeah. And my bank was one of the banks having problems. About 10% of my class that started in '08 was cut almost immediately, so it was mega stress.
And you're dealing with- you're staring at spreadsheets all day- Yeah ... putting together presentations. Working on pitch books that no one's gonna look at for deals we're not gonna win. Yeah. Basically a human machine, and that's the deal. It's a privilege to have this opportunity to work- Right ... around the clock.
If I left before 2:00 AM, this is what I would say to myself, "If I leave before 2:00 AM, this is a good night." And so I'm amazed at how many people go through that, and- and some just break down and fall, and, but they, [00:12:00] they regret not being able to make it through. I'm amazed at how many people go through it without a crisis of faith, like believe that this is a path to a good life.
Were you- No, I wasn't necessarily of that belief system, but I knew that long-term it would be a stamp of credibility in the business world. Yeah. I wanted to quit my first day. I remember staying up until 6:00 AM or something working with a spreadsheet that an, an MBA intern had left me that didn't give me any ex- any explanation of how it worked, so I didn't know how the spreadsheet worked and what the weird formulas were to go to working with some software.
And I just thought to myself that, "This is really what the job is? This is so mindless. I don't wanna be here." And I stuck it out. For how long? For a little under two years. Oh, wow. And the story behind that was I knew I didn't wanna do this long-term, and it's, it was a two-year program, which is how it works at most banks.
Yeah. You get an offer for two years, and if you're lucky, you get a third-year offer- ... to be a third-year analyst. So I got a third-year offer, and many of my colleagues who got a third-year offer, [00:13:00] they would take the offer and then find another job and leave. Right. I said, "I don't even wanna have the option of potentially staying, and I wanna openly look for a new job."
So I declined the third-year offer. And then I had a health scare- When was that? ... around, around the time of that offer. Fall of 2009, I was working on a financial model with my associate near me late at night, just another night, and I sort of passed out at my desk. My heart started beating really strangely, and my face, like, kinda went down in my desk.
And everyone said- Extreme stress, exhaustion, just- Well, I thought I was dying. I thought I had a heart problem. Really? So they, the people at the, at work said, "Go see a doctor, please." So I saw a doctor, and the doctor said, "This is just stress. Your heart's fine. Like, you need to chill out, man. You really need to chill out."
And what happened during that week, so I took a week off. Wow. They told me, which was very... That was nice of them, investing in the world. Did they tell you to do that, or did you say- I'm, I, I can't remember. I- I'm curious if they were like, "Okay, that's cute. Get back to work," or if the doctor's orders were- I think they were worried about me.
Yeah. Um, and I, it might have been a combination where we discussed it, but I don't remember [00:14:00] exactly. Took a week off, and I remembered that I had gotten an email from one of my college buddies about a new firm that was starting, and I just had forgotten to respond to him because I was so busy. It was a firm that spun out of the Boston Consulting Group, one of the biggest consulting firms in the world, advising large companies in all kinds of industries, and this new firm was going to be focused on intellectual property- Oh
and helping companies with their patent portfolios. Was, which is what these guys did at BCG, but they were gonna do it in a smaller firm where they could do the actual deals. So let's say you're working with a huge company that's got tens of thousands of patents. At a large consulting firm you say, "Okay, these patents, you should license them.
These you should sell. These you should keep. Good luck." Yeah. At the firm I ended up joining, we would do that and then do all the deals to try to help- Hmm ... with licensing transactions and the M&A and everything. And I thought, "This would be... This sounds like a pretty cool opportunity that's not-" Leveraging your skill sets but doing something more interesting and maybe less grueling?
Yeah. And more interesting in that I was learning about technologies as [00:15:00] well, and I had this thesis that we're gonna be moving toward more and more technology in the world. Yeah. So if I could understand the rights behind the technology, this would be a, a niche but not really a niche. And so you're still on a pretty s- straight and narrow career path, business professional- Yeah
and I mean, the i- you're now, I, I was wondering, like, if you introduce yourself now, you say author? I don't think of myself as an author- Really? ... 'cause it's been so recent. The first book came out in 2018. Most people who know me don't... They think of me as a tennis player or someone, I was super focused on business or patents.
It's a new thing. And how would you, do you think, how do you think you would've defined your identity back then? Back then I would've used a professional identity You would've, yeah Because that's really how I thought about myself. That's how I was measuring my success, was how well I did, what labels I had, promotions.
And did you have a goal? Was there, like, a number in the bank or a lifestyle or a social status or a title? I [00:16:00] really didn't. Hmm. It was this phantom future that maybe it's just gonna get better- Right ... and then I'll know that I've made it. Yeah. But then I'm gonna die and it doesn't matter. And you were still in that.
I was. That was, that was still looming. Looming. You, you were staying busy enough probably not to ponder it all day. Yeah. But it was there. It was there. And early in my career, especially at this firm that I joined, so I left in early 2010. I left New York to join the firm in Boston, and then Silicon Valley, they had another office, and I spent most of my time there.
Oh, cool. I was working a lot. Small firm. I was ... I presented to boards of directors in my, of public companies in my mid-20s. So I got major responsibilities, but I was doing all the work. Yeah. So I, I... In terms of the hours, it was a little bit better, and it was more grueling intellectually. Had you had any experiences at this point that looking back you see as, like, a crack in the worldview where...
Like, I remember being 12, and I, I didn't have any words for this at the time. I was lay- I had just gotten a stereo system in my bedroom, and I was laying on my [00:17:00] bed and I put on the radio. And I, I had, like, five CDs, you know? But then every once in a while, I'd put on the radio, and I'd put on classical, and Vivaldi's Four Seasons came on.
And I laid there and something happened and I floated up out of my body, and I looked down and I saw myself on the bed, and I was like, "Oh, I fell asleep." And then I realized that I was wide awake- Hmm ... and present in my room, and then it just collapsed and I was back in my body. And I never talked about it, and it, nothing ever happened again.
But now looking back, I'm like, "Wait a minute." That something was going on there, and that could have been a clue that consciousness is not, you know, fixed in the body. D- did you have any, like, experiences in nature or doing drugs as a kid- No ... or nothing? No. So pretty- Didn't do drugs as a kid. Hmm. Drank alcohol socially- Yeah
college and afterwards, but no experiences like that. In fact, I'm remembering now, when I joined the new firm, I started to read books a little bit, which was a weird thing for me. I wasn't a big reader. Right. And I had a little bit of free time, and I started reading some [00:18:00] books, including Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.
And I thought it was the best book ever- I- ... criticizing religion ... I often say I was raised fourth generation Jewish atheist. Okay. And if I had been introduced to the, the four horsemen, you know, Dawkins included, they would have been, like, my heroes when I was in high school. Luckily, I never came across their books till much later.
So that, that sucked you in, and you were like, "Yes." I thought it was so good. I was like, "This guy, he gets it." So how, how long did you maintain that? 'Cause you're pretty far from that now. Far from it now. It was 10 years ago, around the time I turned 30, and it was a combination of factors. Some disappointing relationships- Hmm
and professional disappointments. Let me give some context here. The industry I joined was heavily focused on the valuation of patents, and a patent is a right to exclude someone from doing an activity in business. Yeah. And it's literally a set of words. If you read a patent, it's a legal document that says what is claimed is, [00:19:00] and it's some run-on sentence, and your rights are what are contained in those sentences, in that sentence, and then any subsequent sentences.
The laws changed, basically, which made it more difficult for someone who had a patent that was being infringed upon by someone else to actually enforce the rights. Mm. So people would steal technology and then go to court and lose because the laws changed or, in the case, one that I worked on, a judge overturned a jury verdict for a very large amount.
Of- Was this related to software becoming- No, this- ... wherever he was? Software was an issue that where software patents because of an a- a decision called Alice. Yeah. They were easier to invalidate, meaning the patent office granted the patent and then they took the rights away and said, "Actually, we shouldn't have granted this patent."
Innovation was hard to prove when there was all this incremental land grabbing going on in software. Yes. Yeah. And software is much more intangible, but I was working with some companies that had hardware. Oh, really? And they were still, there were still issues in the court system. So the patent valuations went way down.
There were deals that I worked on that went south- Mm ... because there were [00:20:00] these patents that we thought were valuable, and the marketplace was not giving that value because the laws changed. So who would wanna buy a patent if you don't know if you can enforce it against someone or keep them out of this technology?
Right. The valuations plummeted. So I was in the great financial recession of '08- Yeah ... and then the great patent recession that most people don't know about. Oh, wow. Which was a very difficult thing for me to stomach. And then I thought life had no meaning. And I'm thinking to myself, "What am I really doing here?
Why, why do I care so much? What do I... Should I even be doing this job? Why have I spent so many years striving and struggling?" And did you have a fantasy? Like, did you... I mean, to me, there's two types of fantasies in that situation. One is the barista fantasy, which is like, "I want no responsibility. Just let me serve coffee all day."
Mm-hmm. And the other is like, "I could be a musician," or, "I could be," you know, something fantastical that you don't let yourself believe in. No. No, no dreams? No dreams. I had never had time to really dream because I was so focused on winning and trying to achieve. So suddenly you're just not winning and life is meaningless.
Yeah. Meaningless. I [00:21:00] felt like I was a zombie. So what do you do? My buddies in San Francisco, they remember me. Most people on the outside would've said, "Mark's fine. He's doing great." I was really in bad shape. Mm. And what was, what was there for me to do other than just continue? And I just stuck with it at the firm, and I started listening to podcasts.
Mm. I remember- Who was out then? I remember one of my buddies sent me, uh, Tim Ferriss interviewing Marc Andreessen. Oh, interesting. And at the time, that was a novel concept. Podcasts were newer, where I could sit in the car driving- Yeah ... from San Francisco to Silicon Valley and listen to smart people talk.
And it was a new hobby for me to at least have some stimulation intellectually outside the office. Yeah, yeah. And this was really the beginning because listening to Tim Ferriss, he was talking about psychedelics, which I was not ready to do. Mm. As someone who didn't do drugs, I wasn't ready to take a pharmaceutical drug or a, a psychedelic, but I was interested in what people reported.
You were still protecting the moneymaker, the, the rational brain, the- Mm-hmm. Yeah ... the integrity of that and whatever the ego believed it was in [00:22:00] control of. Whatever fears I had or paradigms around losing control or just- Right ... that's just something you don't do, Marc. Yeah. You wouldn't do a psychedelic.
That's not for you. But I was intrigued, and I remember, uh, Tim Ferriss talked to Martín Polanco about ibogaine- Oh ... 10 years ago. Was that 10 years ago? Wow. And I, I heard him say that, and I thought to myself, "That, I should probably do that." And here we are about 10 years later. I did ibogaine. I'm sure we'll get there.
Yeah, I wanna get there. Um, but listening to Tim Ferriss led me to alternative health podcasts because he was in that realm of just how do you work with mind and body in a new way. Right. And that led me to other shows, including one called Extreme Health Radio- I don't know that ... which is very alternative health show, people curing themselves of disease outside of the pharmaceutical industry basically.
Full of both amazing information and conspiracy theories, I'm guessing? Mm-hmm. I would just say people really curious about health. Mm-hmm. And there were some personal stories. People would come on and say, "I was using this supplement and I healed myself of X." It sounded pretty remarkable, but [00:23:00] I was fascinated.
This is beginning to question the healthcare system. Maybe in hindsight. Which la- which, which I know later you did it- ... quite extensively. Yes. I wasn't at the level that I, I got to with the book in Anti-Upside Down Medicine. I was curious. And maybe it was just entertainment for me to say- Mm ... "Okay, like, what's going on here?
Maybe is there something I can implement? Are there supplements, nootropics I could take?" And listening to this show, Extreme Health Radio, I would typically listen to a podcast and d- go in reverse chronological order. I would listen to the most recent one and then go backwards. Yeah. So I ended up on a podcast that had come out months before, and it was with a woman named Laura Powers who claimed to use psychic abilities to heal her clients.
And was that just like alarm bells, red flags, but also some, are, are you starting to like be open now and you can take this seriously? I was confused because the hosts of the podcast, I regarded them as sophisticated people- Right ... because I'd heard them before. So there's real cognitive dissonance at this point.
And they were taking her seriously and agreeing with her. She's talking about communicating with [00:24:00] angels. I was like, "Okay, this is weird." I was intrigued enough to continue listening, and then at the end of the podcast, Laura says, "I have my own podcast called Healing Powers, and I interview a lot of people who talk about these things."
So I said, "Okay, I've gotta just check out this podcast." And I ended up binging all of her episodes from 2016 back to 2011. They were pretty short. Oh, wow. And it was person after person talking about things like the afterlife, the evidence for that, quote-unquote, paranormal experiences. And I don't even like that word because I think paranormal assumes that we know what normal is.
Right. And we should probably rethink that. Those are- Yeah ... the paranormal's actually very normal to me now. At the time it was not, and I was freaked out. Freaked out the more I listened because I k- I got to- But compelled at the same time. Like- Y- yeah, exactly. There- You have to keep going back and looking at it, but it's freaking you out Because I understood the implications.
If there was 1% truth to any of it, then my random and meaningless universe life path- Right ... was [00:25:00] wrong. And that meant that most people around me who believed implicitly in random and meaningless universe were wrong. Many of my professors at Princeton were wrong. How can this be true? And it wasn't as if I heard one podcast and my life changed.
Yeah. It was incremental. It was the cumulative evidence. But there were a few pieces that stand out to me. Hmm. Like what? Um, there was an episode Laura did on Healing Powers podcast with Paul Davids, who was a Princeton grad, psychology major like me, and he was a Hollywood producer. Transformers and lots of- Hmm
things that I had heard about. Mainstream success. He's a rational human being who can navigate the world. Mm-hmm. Credible guy. Yeah. To me, for Mark Gober, that was a very credible person to be on the podcast. And he was talking about his new film called The Life After Death Project. Hmm. He had worked in Hollywood with an older colleague who was an atheist, and his colleague said to him, uh, "I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I die before you and there is an afterlife, I'll drop you a line."
And he died before Paul. [00:26:00] Very strange things started to happen, somewhere in the range of 300 anomalies- Wow ... that Paul could not explain. He ended up writing a book about it. One that really stood out to me was Paul was home alone with a stack of papers. He left the room and came back, and there was a wet ink blot covering some of the words on the page that he did not put there.
And the words that were, had been covered were related to the deceased colleague. Really? So he ended up sending this ink blot to chemistry labs to try to find out the composition, and there were very strange things with the chemistry of the ink. So this is like Ouija board, but on, on another level. Like...
He left the room. He didn't put the ink blot there, and it was there. And this, he was telling stories over and over again, and combined with other things I had heard on previous episodes, I was trying to figure out what's happening here. And that led me to say, "I need to read books on this. I need to see if there's science."
And what did I find? Peer-reviewed literature. Yeah. I found that Princeton had a lab run by the [00:27:00] former dean of engineering studying psychic abilities in humans. That the University of Virginia has a division of perceptual studies at the med school studying children with memories of a life that is not their own?
Yeah. Those ... I went down this rabbit hole probably 14 years ago, and I, I met a guy, and he was like, "Let me just send you peer-reviewed papers." And he just kept sending me papers. And I couldn't believe ... These people know they're gonna be attacked, and so the design rigor, I mean, it was amazing how well-designed these studies were and how, you know, statistically significant the results were over and over and over and over again, and how it's just not in any way accepted or discussed in the rest of the university that it's in.
Yeah. Like, blew my mind. Like, now it's starting to be, I think. Like, were you coming across, like, Dean Radin and people like that? Yeah. And now I'm on the board of the Institute- Oh, nice ... of Noetic Sciences. Dean Radin is the chief scientist, so I get to see the science- Yeah ... that they're doing. And it is rigorous, because it has to be.
The results contradict the mainstream [00:28:00] view of reality, so they have to cover all their bases. And it's amazing how hyper-rational, supposedly, academics can look at this stuff and just dismiss it out of hand as impossible, and therefore they don't take the data into account really. It doesn't feel like they're being rational about the data.
It frustrated me. It's one of the reasons I decided to write the book, because I- What was, what, what was the first book? An End to Upside Down Thinking. And it's- And tell, and tell me where that, where that title comes from. My publisher. I wrote the book- ... reached out to him. Uh, reached out to a literary agent, Bill Gladstone of Waterside Productions.
He responded to my email. So the story was- Yeah, yeah ... taking a few steps back. Yeah, tell, tell me how this came to be. I became obsessed with this topic, and my apartment in San Francisco became filled with books. Specifically, like, psychic phenomenon, the scientific rigor behind it- Yes ... and why it's not accepted?
All, all the above. The afterlife, the evidence for that, for near-death experience, mediumship, communicating with deceased individuals. Mm. These phenomena that, if any of them were true, would change my whole life. Right. Because I would have to think about my identity [00:29:00] differently. And what I realized was that there was a common thread among these phenomena.
They all related to the brain's relationship with human consciousness. Yes. And the conventional perspective in academia is that the brain creates consciousness. Epiphenomenon, whatever the hell that means. The hard problem is intractable. Yes. The consciousness is this thing that we all experience and have.
We can't see it. We can't point to it. We know we have it. We know the brain is related to our conscious experience through the field of neuroscience. It's correlated. Right. Damage one part of the brain, and the person ha- will have a shift in their consciousness, and we can point to the parts of the brain that are correlated with the consciousness shift.
Many neuroscientists will then say the brain creates consciousness- Right ... because they think correlation means causation. Yeah. It's the- Did you come across people like Rupert Sheldrake? His metaphor of the brain as being like a TV receiver, like an antenna. Yes. And if you damage an antenna, you don't get the pictures on the screen, but you don't open up the TV looking for the actors.[00:30:00]
Well said. And that, that's where I was heading, to say, "Oh, that would explain so many of these phenomena that seem paranormal. They're only paranormal because we believe consciousness is stuck in the brain, and we've eliminated the possibility of any spiritual essence." Right. Because spiritual, that would be superstitious.
And had- uh, was that word on your mind at this time? Was this stuff just weird science, or were you thinking, "Wait a minute, what's this whole religion, maybe spirituality thing? Like, what's going on there?" Internally, it got very spiritual quickly. It did. I was doing everything you could imagine with every kind of healer.
Mm. Reiki, past life regression hypnosis, between lives regression hypnosis, every psychic available . And so you were starting to have first person experiences that validated it? Yes. Were s- sometimes, not every time. Yeah. People were able to know things that were shocking that I could not explain, and my life got really weird.
Synchronicities- Synchronicities ... meaning f- the same word would appear over and over again, some esoteric word, or- Did you ever doubt your sanity? Like, [00:31:00] "Oh, God. Now I'm- Yeah ... over pattern matching. I'm seeing the same word, and I'm creating synchronicities." Absolutely. So I kept doing it. Mm. And I got to the point where there was too much evidence.
If I wanted to be honest and rational, I couldn't dismiss everything that I had encountered. And my approach to this topic, and many topics, is if, if there's one exception to the rule, the rule is wrong. Right. So all I needed was one example of non-local consciousness or phenomena that we can't explain, and then we have to rethink reality, and I had more than one.
Yeah. What was the most compelling? Was it, like, a past life regression or- For me as, personally? Yeah. Like, what, do you remember one thing that you were like, "Oh, God. That's real"? I spoke with a woman, she claimed to be a medical intuitive- Yeah ... meaning a psychic who focuses on health. Yeah. And I heard her on a podcast, and enough, I became interested enough to say, "I wanna do a session with this woman."
So she had never seen me before. I don't think there were pictures of me online, maybe from college. And sh- on the phone she told me to go in front of a [00:32:00] mirror and had me point to an area on my jaw and neck area where there had been a skin irritation before. And only, the only people who would've known that were people who had maybe seen me a week before for a few days.
Right. And she had me point to the exact spot. And at first I was confused. I'm like, "Why does she have me point here?" I'm, "Oh, that's where the skin irritation was." Very specific. Yeah, very specific. I've had a couple of those experiences that it's just really hard to dismiss. Yeah. And so that sends you back to research and trying to understand why and how and- And I'm like, "Is this possible?
How? Is there research on it?" And every time I would go back, I would see this peer review literature. I would see, for example, Dr. Jessica Utts, who was the president of the American Statistical Association. Mm. And she wrote to the US government, quote, "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established."
And yet it gets no traction, right? That's compelling for me. Or looking at [00:33:00] declassified CIA documents with my own eyes that anyone can look at that talk about the use of psychic abilities for national security. MKUltra and things like that starting to come up. And Stargate. Yeah. W- and so, but still working.
Still working. Like, and showing up and defending patents and- That's a great point ... getting deals done. It was a very disorienting period for me. To go home and research these things and talk to psychics and have energy sessions, and then go into a business meeting, travel to Korea, and try to do a, a deal, uh, with patents, and it was very confusing for me.
There's a schism in your life. There's this major... I mean, I named my coaching company Lifestyle Integrity when I realized that I was experiencing that, and I was like, "I wanna be one person. I wanna be the same person everywhere all the time." And to live in integrity means I have to... My deepest beliefs about reality have to show up in the work I'm doing, and I was doing security systems.
Like, defining boundaries and keeping track of who crosses them is absurd. I'm about dissolving boundaries, like. And so I had... I, at some point it became so painful for me to be out of integrity that I just quit and walked away [00:34:00] without knowing what to do. Were you starting to get there? Like- Yeah ... how, were you thinking about leaving?
I had thought about it before the spiritual awakening just because I was so lost, and the industry was going south. And I thought, "Should I leave, or should I stick it out and the industry will recover, it's just a cycle?" I was in that phase of not being sure, but I also didn't know what else I would do.
And at the time it was actually a good setup, because I was more senior at the firm. I could delegate and then spend my time researching. So it's kind of supporting your hobby. At first it supported the hobby. Yeah. There was not a thought of writing books. There was not. Let me be very clear. This was not about writing books.
This is- You didn't grow up as a writer- No ... you didn't imagine, you don't think of yourself as a creative? People who've known me for a long time, it was a very surprising thing. Yeah. And still surprising that I, I enjoyed writing. For me, it's a medium by which I can express an argument very clearly. Yeah.
It's just a mode of expression. Just- And a way of thinking more clearly? Does it force you? Yes. The book is a product of my own evolution. It's the output that [00:35:00] occurs after something's happened internally, and the writing process solidifies it for me. Right. And sometimes, actually I would say very often with these books, is I think there's a good chance I can have a book on the topic, but I need to see if the argument is good enough.
Mm. So writing is an exercise in whether I convince my- can convince myself or not. And so all the while you're wondering if you're gonna throw it away before- Yeah. Uh, maybe this isn't gonna happen. Oh, that's fascinating. But let's see. Let's see how... If I really push it, Mark, am I willing to publish all these things as I read it?
How did you s- first start writing? Did you write blog posts? No. Or were you just writing in a journal? Or- Well, that's a good point. I'm remembering. I f- some of the stuff I forgot. I did a little piece- Mm ... it was maybe 10 pages or so, that I wrote for friends six or so months into this journey. For skeptics?
For skeptics. Didn't have my name on it. And it w- I wanted to share this information with my friends. I was doing it socially over brunch in San Francisco or whatever and just saying, "Hey, did you know that UVA has this division of perceptual studies?" [00:36:00] And most of my friends were shocked, and they would message me or talk to me later and say, "I'm still thinking about what we talked about."
So I knew that this information had an impact, and then there was so much in my mind that I wanted to synthesize it and put it into something. Yeah. So I did this short piece and sent it to friends, and it was making rounds in very small circles. But I wasn't thinking about writing a book. Although one of the psychics did tell me that early on.
That you would end up writing books? It was Laura Powers. Yeah. I did a session with her. Be- the podcast I listened to initially. Oh, wow. And, uh, she might've been the first session I ever did with someone. I said, "I need to do a session with this woman." "She's a psychic, let's go." And she talked about me writing.
That's, I mean, I mean, that's clearly signal right there. Maybe. Or she planted a seed in your head. Or she planted a seed. I don't know w- what's what. But I remember hearing that and it w- did make a big impact on me, 'cause like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Yeah. I don't- I'm- I write legal documents, basically
and I was on my way to being a partner at my firm. Mm-hmm. So that was on my mind, too. That, the titles really mattered to me still, so I, I didn't think of writing. And, uh, is your [00:37:00] lifestyle growing in sync with your earnings? 'Cause I notice a lot of people get the golden handcuffs issue- Yeah ... where walking away becomes harder every year.
There is an element of that, but for me, I'm not a huge spender. Mm. Just because there aren't that many things that I really want. It just doesn't, it's never really mattered to me. You didn't want the suits and the cars and the- I just didn't care enough. Yeah. But I was in a very stable career, and I knew that was a good thing long term, and if I ever had kids, then I, you know, these would be good things for me to stick with.
And to be in this area, if I could've been an expert in this field, which basically every industry's dealing with, intellectual property rights. Right. To have the business angle, not just the legal angle. Most lawyers don't understand business strategy, which is why our firm existed. Th- there was a lot of, there were a lot of good things there for me.
All right, so explain this transition where you... Did you start writing first or leaving there first? Or... I was at my firm. This was summer of 2017. Mm. So about a year into the research journey. Okay. I had an idea before going to work one day. "Mark, you should write a book about this topic." And then [00:38:00] I thought to myself, "No.
That's crazy." And then the thought came back. I pursued it. It was 4th of July weekend of 2017. I said to myself, "I'm gonna write this whole book over the long weekend," because I worked a lot and I, this would be a good time to finish it. So I went into investment banker mode. Didn't finish the book, but I got a big chunk done.
Really? And then I was able to finish it over the next few weeks. And so this was all kind of, you were pregnant with it, it all just had to, like, flow through you? It, it had to flow through me in that I needed to synthesize. It's not a stream-of-consciousness book. There are hundreds of citations. There is.
So I had books all over my apartment- Mm-hmm ... and I had to find what I had highlighted, not knowing it would be in a book, and then quote it. So it's a very tedious process. All my books- But you were like in a fugue state. You were, you were inspired. Inspired. Had to finish it. Was really excited about it.
Wait, so wait a m- a matter of weeks you wrote a book? Yeah, yeah. All the books happen quickly in terms of the actual typing. Is there usually a lot of research before that? The research is the writing. And are you organizing and documenting and collating in the research phase so that it's all [00:39:00] accessible?
I've started to do that more. When I read books physically, I'm underlining and folding pages over. Yeah. And I've started to now if I have an inkling that maybe this is a book, I'll make notes somewhere, just a running list of, "See this podcast, minute 10 talks about this." Sorry, so what was the initial, "I'm gonna write a book about..."
I wanted to find a way to summarize these phenomena that sounded crazy psychic abilities in human beings, the idea that we're all telepathic and don't realize it. How could that be true? That there's an afterlife, and we have amnesia about this, and we forgot we have an eternal soul. How could I summarize this in a way that would appeal to a rational audience?
Someone like me a year before, what would be needed? That was my thinking. Hmm. So the book is basically looking at this question of the hard problem of consciousness. How is it that something non-physical like consciousness could emerge out of something physical like a brain? Right. Not understood. And I love topics like this, where the mainstream agrees, [00:40:00] "Okay, we've got a problem."
Any mainstream person as of now would be okay with that question. We don't understand how consciousness could emerge from a brain. We've never seen it. Yeah. We've never seen that. Okay. Many scientists will then say, "Okay, we just haven't figured it out, but the brain produces consciousness." What I tried to do in a book was present the most compelling evidence I could find that consciousness can exist non-locally outside the brain and beyond space and time.
And were you delving into Hinduism and Buddhism and, you know, sacred understanding, or just staying with the mainstream science? Personally, I was. Yeah. I only talk about those traditions a little bit at the end of the book. I don't use the word spiritual in the book- Okay ... in Answering Upside-Down Thinking.
I, I really tried to keep it scientific because I knew how triggering those things would be for someone. And at this point also, to be clear, you're sober as, as far as, like, psychedelics are concerned. Yeah. Yes. So I, I wanted this to be a rational book to put this debate to rest. [00:41:00] Yeah. And I got very lucky.
I reached out to Bill Gladstone at Waterside Productions. He, uh, was representing Eckhart Tolle, Neale Donald Walsch, people in the spiritual space and also in the business tech space. He read my email somehow and then sent me an agreement. So you didn't have an official pitch agent, any of that stuff?
Nothing. That's not how it's supposed to work. I just, I just had a manuscript as this guy working in Silicon Valley. And so you wrote an email explaining what was in the manuscript, and he said? I followed the protocol on Waterside's website. Okay. I think it was some sample chapters, very basic things, and then I sent him the full manuscript, and then he decided to publish the book.
We talked about it, and there are a lot of reasons that I wanted to go with Waterside, and they've published all my books, and the book was published in 2018. Did you realize how easy and lucky that was compared to most people who write books? I knew that something strange was happening. It seemed very mystical.
Instead of, yeah, did that feel guided? It felt guided. And the way things happened with- And to be c- like, you're not, like, you don't have a platform, you don't have an audience. No. You don't have any built-in sales- [00:42:00] No ... guaranteed. I am not someone who should be writing books. Okay? Especially on this topic, to challenge the meta paradigm of science, because this is talking about the nature of reality.
It affects every field of inquiry. Right. And through my publisher, I ended up getting endorsed by credible people. Dr. Ervin Laszlo, Nobel- Yeah ... Peace Prize nominee. Dean Radin endorsed the book, Rupert Sheldrake, Eben Alexander, Harvard neuroscientist, or, or Harvard neurosurgeon. Yeah. Some credentialed people were supporting this work.
So I was... It was very... It was a, a weird transitionary period of, what's my life gonna be now? How, how did this happen? And you're still working. Still working. Made partner right around the time my book came out, fall of 2018. And one of my high school buddies from Baltimore, he knew me from tennis days, we were on the high school tennis team together, good friend, he's in the podcast world, and he said, "We should do a podcast."
And I had been thinking about it, too. Why don't I... I learn so much from other people's podcasts. Why don't I try to share through my own? And I wanted to do long-form podcasts, and he said, "Mark, please trust me. [00:43:00] We need to create a narrative series because it's gonna reach so many more people." Mm. And that's what we ended up doing.
I did 50 long-form interviews, and we took clips from those interviews and put it in- into eight episodes. Oh, amazing. It's called Where Is My Mind Podcast, still out on Spotify and all the major players, where each episode might feature five to 10 experts and a conversation between me and my friend to try to make it relatable.
And did that get you an audience for the book? It probably helped. I still hear from people about the podcast, just 'cause it's, it's bingeable within a few hours. That came out in 2019. It, it probably helped somewhat. I hired a few publicists back then, so I was doing tons of interviews. And that was also an adjustment.
All, like, I'm doing a show on PBS, and - And what do your coworkers know, and what do they think? I give them a lot of credit. I told them the book was coming, and I was a little nervous to talk about it with them. Number one, they supported it And they were open to the ideas. Really? And I think they're open because in the world of intellectual property, especially with patents, we are working with [00:44:00] innovations, which by definition are novel and non-obvious.
Right. That's how you legally get a patent. So they're used to people challenging paradigms, and I, I think they appreciated the way that I went about it. And were you thinking career change at this point? Were you thinking, "I gotta get out of here?" Or still like, "Hey, this is great. I've got the means to have this amazing hobby."
That's basically what I thought. And were you thinking, "Okay, one and done. I wrote a book. I'm good"? Yeah. And people were asking me, "What's your next book?" My publisher was telling me I was gonna write tons of books, and I'm like, "Dude, come..." I'd have to be so passionate about another topic that's that important.
How could that be? How could there be more topics like that? I thought I was done, and I would just stick it out with my firm. And I did the podcast, so that kept me busy for another year. End of 2019, the podcast is out, and I thought to myself, "I can't do this anymore." That split energy we talked about before- Yeah
of how can I be passionate about one area and then go to a business meeting? What happened to me was that it became so difficult to do a basic task in my nervous system. Yes. To [00:45:00] take a, a five-minute call for work, I just couldn't even tolerate it. And, and this, I believe, and I've seen this in so many clients, this is where people get sick.
Yeah. Like, you, you had one health scare, but if you just keep grinding and some internal, you know, dissonance is happening. I, I often e- equate it to, like, an autoimmune condition. You know? It's like if one part of you wants to reach out and another part of you's pulling back, there's all this friction in the system.
And if you have to, like, force yourself to do work you don't believe in, it hurts, and it wears you down. Yes. It's like driving a car with the emergency brake on. Like, it's, it starts to smell funny and break down. It was painful. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. In my s- there was something in me that couldn't do it anymore, and I made this very strange decision to say, "I'm gonna leave the firm," I told my business partners.
And I didn't have another job lined up. And you weren't crushing it with book sales- No ... and podcasts- The book business- ... sponsorships ... for your audience's benefit, is not a good business. You have to sell a lot of units. Yeah. And I'm not Malcolm Gladwell or Prince Harry selling a ton of books. You can maybe get on stage and get paid for that, but- [00:46:00] It's really hard.
Mm-hmm. And I wasn't doing this for a business. I wa- I was doing it out of passion, and I thought it was gonna help people. And also, there was a real spiritual mission. All these books. Mm-hmm. And even doing podcasts. I have a very spiritual view of reality, and I think they're... We're in an evolutionary realm, whatever it is, where we need to learn these things, and that's why I wrote the book.
I, I equate it sometimes to, I think humanity is going through a rite of passage. We've basically been like children- Hm. Yeah ... you know, destroying the planet, and we need to wake up and become adults. And I think it's this spiritual awakening, which I think includes throwing away material reductionist views on what consciousness is, and probably some true rites of passage.
Devin Martin: Maybe psychedelics are involved. I don't think they have to be- Mm-hmm ... but I think they, they work pretty well. And I do think it's, it's a trend that's happening, but we're kind of in a race with technology to see if our wisdom can keep up with our power, I think. Mm-hmm. They are both accelerating. Yes. I mean, rel- today where we are in 2026 versus when my book came out in 2018, huge difference.
Mark Gober: Huge difference. Much more research. The telepathy tapes came out. This idea of non-local consciousness is- Yeah ... [00:47:00] becoming mainstream. Michael Pollan wrote books, psychedelics and consciousness. Like, that, that reached a lot of people who never would have considered these things. Mm-hmm. Dean Radin was just on Joe Rogan.
Right. Huge deal. Just amazing, yeah. I mean, the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been around since 1973, and in 2026, Dean Radin is on Joe Rogan. Yeah, I think he- That's a- I think he talks about, he's been involved for 25, 30 something years- Yeah, a very long time ... noetic sciences, yeah. And he was at the US government's program and at Princeton, so this...
He's a legend in the space. Finally, now he's getting primetime. Right. So explain to me how the other books came out. When I... I remember having discussions professionally in late 2019, thinking about bringing in new business and what was gonna happen for the next year, and as I went home and thought about the business, there was this internal knowing, I can't do these things anymore, th- this is not for me.
And when I realized that I was gonna make the decision to [00:48:00] leave, an idea came in. Oh, there's another book here. So it was this energetic shift. Mm. When I let go of the commitment that was not aligned- Yeah ... and internalized it, the idea for book two came in. Mm. I think there's a real learning in that. Yes. I often say, uh, for me, the biggest, the most important things I've ever said are, is, is no.
Like, saying no to something that's out of integrity for me is often a precursor, and I feel like it creates a vacuum that sucks in clarity. Well said. But I, I can't find the truth when I'm full. And so, like, I, yeah, I, I left my career of 13 years to go live in a mountain in a log cabin for a year. I had no fucking idea what I was doing next.
But I had this intuition that it would emerge if I gave myself space, and my whole career since then has come out of that. But I think saying no to something, especially a stable career, not knowing what comes next, is terrifying. Terrifying. Were you scared? Were you- Yes. I, well, I, I was maybe more [00:49:00] terrified of saying no and disappointing my business partners and my colleagues.
I was one of the first employees. I was very early at the firm. Spent 10 years there. It was almost like family in a way- Yeah ... to be in the trenches with these people for so many years. So you didn't have the fear of, like, "I'm gonna be broke and homeless"? I had confidence in myself that I could figure it out.
Mm. That I'd be okay. Whatever happened, I didn't know I would get into other topics that I've written about. Many of those topics I was not interested in- Yeah ... when I left my firm, but I knew I couldn't do it anymore And I gave myself space. So the way it worked was I, I didn't just leave immediately. I said, "I wanna stick around to help transition out clients and make sure it's smooth."
Mm. So I was working part-time for a little bit before the world shut down in 2020, and I, for the first time, I was able to go on some retreats. Ah. So where'd you go? I did an Ayurvedic panchakarma retreat. Okay. Dr. Lad's Center, the Ayurvedic Institute. This was in New Mexico. Now he's in North Carolina.
Amazing. Five-day cleanse, eating kitchari, and having ancient Indian massages. [00:50:00] And were you trying to heal something or just curious? I had heard good things about it. Mm. And I never previously had the time. Because in client services- Yeah ... I was always on call. Right. No matter what time, every ... Most of our clients were in emergency situations.
I had to be ready, and now I could finally exhale. For the first time in my professional life, I could exhale. Went on that retreat, took a week off, did a silent meditation retreat. Vipassana? Not Vipassana. It was a woman named Mukti, who's Adyashanti's wife. Oh, okay. Adyashanti's a well-known spiritual teacher.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Adyashanti. And it was during that retreat, we were ... It was no talking or gesturing at other people. There were some satsangs between- Eyes down when you're walking around kind of thing? Yes. Yeah, I've done that. But we were able to have notebooks. So I think it was the last day or second to last day, all of a sudden an outline for book two- Really?
was coming out. Okay, I know the, what this book's gonna be. It ended up being the book An End to Upside Down Living, my second book. And so was that about careers are out of alignment and- I talk a little bit about my personal journey. It's the most autobiographical of my books. Mm. But it talks about the spiritual journey in general too, because what I went [00:51:00] through is very common.
Yeah. Even though my specifics might be different, there's a trajectory, and I'm sure you see it with your clients. Yes, all the time. So I wrote about that, and I wrote about approaches to living life with this perspective of non-local consciousness, where spirituality is real. How should we think about actually living?
For ... The first book is the science. The second book is a little science, but more philosophical. Are you questioning, um, I don't know, Darwin? This idea that, like, life is about competition, survival of the fittest, and, like, getting into, like, maybe there's collaboration. Maybe we're not as separate as we think.
Was ... Were you becoming a mystic? Yeah, I would say so. I probably became a mystic very quickly and was just hesitant about how to describe it. Yeah. The second book, An End to Upside Down Living, has a lot of mystical thinkers. Mm. About how, how should we contemplate reality? And after the retreat, I had a week in between the next retreat, which was Adyashanti's silent retreat for another five-ish days- Oh, wow
almost a week. And in that week, I finished the first draft of the book. [00:52:00] Wow. Of An Ence Upside Down. You are a fast writer. It was fast. There were people- I, I heard you say early on you enjoy writing, which is not something most writers say, and it's probably because you don't sit there and suffer for two years on one book.
Yeah. I wanna communicate things. I don't look at it as writing. There's something I think is important to be said, and I wanna communicate it clearly. And you're not a perfectionist? I am. You are? 'Cause that's often... When people say writer's block, what, what it sounds like they mean is actually they're refusing to write something that's not good enough.
Hmm. Like, if you're willing to write crap, you can always write something. Right. Maybe I don't have that fear. Yeah. I have, I have a confidence that the ideas have been marinating for long enough. I just need to get the right words in place and cite, do the citations properly. And they're iterations. The first draft is the first draft, and then I go and massage it and- You were also a professional who had to produce every day, and Malcolm Gladwell once laughed at Tim Ferriss on his podcast 'cause Tim was like, "Well, tell me about writer's block.
How do you deal with that?" And he was like, "What are you talking about? I was a journalist. We just handed in copy multiple times a day." Yeah. Like, that's an amateur attitude. Like, get over it. In hindsight, I realize that my academic and [00:53:00] professional careers- Prepared you ... prepared me. Writing books relative to what I used to do is easy.
Hmm. It actually feels easy. Be- I was doing things where the next morning it had to be client ready for someone's business. Right. Where, like, real things were at stake. And here you can just write a draft, come back to it later. Mm-hmm. And your publisher was like, "Yep, I love this." I've gotten lucky with my publisher because they get manuscripts, and they don't know it's coming.
They don't know the subject matter. And I'm wondering, are they just gonna say Mark's crazy now- ... and dismiss the manuscript? But that's every time they've accepted it. And you have an editor there who gives you a hard time and- We- ... beats it up and polishes it. We polish it and there's a whole process, but it's usually pretty quick.
In terms of the editing with my publisher, it's, it's never very structural. It's, "Well, did you consider this point? Maybe think about integrating that, but let's keep the book as is and make sure there are no typos." That's- So it sounds like your books come out pretty well-formed- Yeah Again, this is the training.
They had to be well-formed professionally. When I'm creating a presentation and a narrative for a board of [00:54:00] directors for a business that might be going under, I better get it right. Were you nervous about putting your story in there? Yeah, a little bit. Um, less and less so these days because I look at life from a spiritual lens.
What is the risk that's really believing things about what I am that come from my old worldview? Right. Versus we can have this conversation and someone might hear it, and it could pique their interest, and they could have a life shift because we're both being vulnerable. That's worth it to me. And would you say the nihilism was removed or healed at this point, or you had a different view on reality and meaning and...
Like, was life feeling more full of love and meaning? More meaning. I think I'm still on this quest of t- really trying- Yeah ... to understand the granularity of reality. But I went from there's no meaning to there is meaning, let me try to figure it out. That's a huge shift. And what I feel is that there cannot be a bigger shift.
There are shifts within the spiritual realm, huge paradigm shifts, but going from atheist agnostic to spiritual, I- Yeah, I mean, to [00:55:00] me, it's like the, the shift from zero to one is infinite. Like, no faith to faith. You know, and that's kind of what we're talking about. Yes. This is like there's faith. You don't actually know what it's there.
But faith is a rational process. Mm-hmm. You know? You're, you're thinking things through, and you're saying, "Okay, I'm ... It's, it's worth the effort." You know? Like, curiosity is a leap of faith, right? Sure. And the irony is my prior belief system and the mainstream academic perspective is a leap of faith, which I describe in my books, because they believe there was a universe first, billions of years, then evolution.
Humans have a brain, and consciousness pops out. So there was a universe that preexisted consciousness. That's what they believe. Oh, right, that you, you have questioned the Big Bang, right? That's its own issue. You ... But yes. Th- this is a topic- ... I have my whole entire life not believed in the, in the Big Bang, and I don't feel like I
it's justified. Like, I have no right to have a belief about this. And so I went out and bought books on the Big Bang for years, trying to convince myself it was real. And I just don't [00:56:00] trust ... I, I was a math kid. I was like- Mm ... math was my worldview growing up. I don't trust people doing math to infinity.
Like, I don't trust taking a formula and just letting it run its course and assuming you know what's on the other end. Yeah. And I feel like that's what the Big Bang is. It's like we see a whole bunch of information moving in one direction. Let's just play it out in our minds and assume we know what's on the other side.
It's ... I kind of feel like that's what Donald Hoffman's doing right now. With his belief that you can quantify qualia and do game theory and figure out that, like, consciousness is 0% correlated with reality. It's like there's a little too much faith in math. Yeah. And for me, losing faith in math was like a ma- that, that I think led me into nihilism.
Mm. 'Cause all of science and all of rationality is kind of based on math. Like, at some point if I think hard enough, I can make sense of the world. And when I lost that, it was like, "What's left?" Like, did you still believe reason was the ultimate way to truth? I was letting that go- More ... more and more, that there were other ways of obtaining knowledge that were beyond the intellect.[00:57:00]
And I was coming across many accounts of this in altered states of consciousness, a near-death state, a psychedelic, a meditation. So what was your first psychedelic experience? 2019, so after the first book, had a mild experience. So it was not one that necessarily validated what I had written about. It was not, not transformative in that way.
Within the last year, there have been a few that were much more validating of, "Oh, these things you wrote about, Mark, yeah, they're real." It really hammered it home for me. What was the first big one? Psilocybin. High-dose psilocybin. Set and setting? Was this like a sacred ritualized experience- Ritualized and- Or was it a bunch of friends- No
at an amusement park? No, ritualized. To me, these are not recreational substances- Yeah ... for the record. And I, I have mixed feelings on psychedelics. I think there's a lot of risk to them. One of the reasons I didn't wanna do many psychedelics, and I was talking to Dave Asprey about this, 'cause he was pushing me on his podcast.
Hmm. He's like, "Dude, you're studying consciousness and you're not doing psychedelics? How can this... This [00:58:00] doesn't work." And I told him I didn't feel like I was equipped to deal with those realms- Really? ... because to me, it's very real to open up one's mind to things that we normally filter out, and there are beings, energies, intelligences that are not always benevolent.
Oh, so you already knew about that and believed that that was a real thing. That it was very real, and I was afraid of it. And I thought to myself, "I don't wanna go there." It's in... I've written about this in, in Ent- Upside Down, Contact, for example. I talk about contact with non-human intelligences. This comes up in Rick Strassman's DMT study.
Right. University of New Mexico. He's giving people dimethyltryptamine, which is a chemical produced by the body, but it can be given in a psychedelic format externally, and people were having experiences with entities that were not always pleasant, including alien abduction . And were weirdly consistent with each other.
Yeah. Yeah, so I, I... And he got freaked out and stopped the, doing the work. He stopped the study. Yeah. So I'm thinking to myself, "Should I... I, I wanna stay away from this world." But ultimately, there have been things in my own psyche, [00:59:00] forms of anxiety, things that I just felt like I was not overcoming. Yeah. And it led me to the point of, "Okay, I'll try it, and I'm gonna be super disciplined."
We skip the meditation thing, but after I wrote that, I, I did two meditation retreats, silent retreats, in 2020. And then after that, when the world shut down with COVID, I was meditating on average five hours a day. Okay, I was gonna ask you if it was a daily practice. It became- So you were serious ... it became serious.
I did 10 days in a row of 10 hours. Not consecutive 10 hours. I would do usually two-hour segments or one-hour segments. A ton of meditation. No major experiences. I felt energy, but I was definitely not... I wasn't validating the things I wrote about. I had two instances where I thought that if I let go anymore, that I would disappear, and my body shut it down.
It felt like there was too much energy flowing. Yeah. So there was a... That was weird, but not to the level of high-dose psilocybin, for example. I, I used to go to a Zen center up in New York, and the dirty secret I found out is that almost everybody who commits their life to Zen had a major LSD experience.
Hmm. And I, I find it's rare that anybody who wants, [01:00:00] wants to do the hard work if they don't know there's a there there or can figure out how to slowly let go if they haven't had their, like, m- mind blown open by a high dose. Yeah. Like, once you've been there, it's, it's a little more approachable. But when you haven't been there, you have no idea what's possible.
Right. So you, so you did a high-dose psilocybin experience and- Yeah, and I, I think having done meditation probably helped because I did feel in control enough that I could steer my consciousness, I could set intentions, ritualize everything, to say, "This is..." Ask the medicine, "I... Thank you." Like, actually treat it with reverence.
Yeah. That was the approach And there were a few psilocybin experiences I had. One that was, um, with a facilitator, MDMA, then psilocybin, then ketamine over about seven hours. This wasn't a sound meditation, was it? No. Okay. No, it was just the, these various medicines. And those few experiences that I had were very validating that the spiritual is [01:01:00] real.
Real. I can't express it clearly enough. Like, this is not a joke. And this is one of those things that everybody who's done psychedelics says, and people who don't are like, "Yeah, okay, you were on drugs." But, like, the gnosis, the knowing that this reality is more real- Mm-hmm ... than my normal, sober, waking reality is so consistently compelling And yet so hard to talk about to anybody who hasn't had the experience.
It's a remembering. Yeah. It's, "Oh my goodness, how did I forget?" That's really what I said to myself. This is the most obviously true thing that I've known throughout eternity, and we forgot. And it's something I've discussed in my books, amnesia. We have amnesia in a body, and now I feel that experientially.
Yeah. And, and the traditions, the sacred traditions, you know, the perennial philosophy talks about this. They all talk about this, this idea that, like, either, you know, God separated itself into many beings and we can have an experience and forget or, or just this sense that enlightenment is the most mundane thing in the world.
It's literally just like it's not adding anything, it's stripping away all the [01:02:00] layers that you've, you're adding to your experience, and it's just getting down to the fundamental root of experience. Yeah. Like, that was the biggest revelation for me ever, I think, in meditation, was the realization that bliss was what was always already there underneath all my mishegas, you know?
It's the stripping away, and I, I s- I've seen that with these medicines, especially with ibogaine, which was the really big medicine experience. So this is one that I feel like is my next... I'm c- I'm coaching people now through doing ibogaine, and I feel bad that I haven't done it yet. And I'm so curious what that exper- 'cause, you know, people have wildly different experiences.
Some people go there because they have trauma, some people 'cause they have addiction, some people 'cause they're curious. We all have shit to work on. So is that... Has that, that your most recent big experience? Yeah, most recent big one, and who knows if I'll do medicine ever again. I feel like I'm- And stop me 'cause I feel like I, I know there's a lot of books- We can, yeah
and we can go through it- No, this is big ... I mean, chronological, but, like, this is more- This is big stuff ... present, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the short version is I just kept writing books. I meditated, wrote "An End to Upside-Down Living," then got interested in politics, wrote about politics, and [01:03:00] then aliens, and then the World Economic Forum, and then medicine- Mm
and cosmology. And there were seven books by the end of 2024- Wow ... on these wide-ranging topics. And 2025 were these medicine experiences. Early '26 was the ibogaine. Okay. Yeah. I went to the Beyond Center- Yeah ... in Cancun, Mexico, which is a high-end facility. I think it's very important for ibogaine to be watched after.
Medically supervised. Ibogaine is not a joke. Yeah. So- And Tom and Talia, who run that place, are amazing. They're, they're amazing. They're, they're legit. Yeah. And it's a healing facility in that I... There were two doses of the medicine for me over 10 days. The rest was healing and integration with coaches, and the integration has been months after.
Right. So I think it's not just a one and done. All these medicines, by the way, the danger is that it's such an awesome state to be connected to one's soul. Th- what I'm feeling is that it, it gives us messages, shows us what to work on. It actually is the beginning. It exposes what's there to be worked on, and then we need to live.
Yes. Versus [01:04:00] continuing to go back. And I see s- people wanting to continue going back, and I don't think that's the... That's dangerous. I, I think it, yeah, it undermines the work. The last post I wrote on this was Psychedelics Will Show You The Work. And, and the danger is y- you get this amazing connected feeling, you get some huge insights, and then you have an afterglow for...
You know, ibogaine has the longest afterglow. Mm-hmm. It's, you know, four, six weeks maybe, and then you come back down to your normal reality and s- maybe some things have changed, maybe not a lot, and then people want another experience, and what that can do is just wipe out the first layer of insights. Yeah.
I spent 10 years integrating some of my experiences. I think it's gonna be a lifetime for me. I mean- With ibogaine ... I think there's that as well, but, like- ... before I felt like, "Okay, I'm actually now ready for something new to work on as well." Mm-hmm. So yeah, what, what was that like? Take a step back. What is ibogaine?
'Cause I, I actually use this term with some people and they've never heard of it. Right. I, I- Even though- I, I'm so in this world I forget- Me too ... that it's still weird. And it's gotten a lot of press recently because there have been approvals from the government to research it [01:05:00] because it's so effective helping with PTSD for combat vets, and also for addiction, chemical dependency.
Our friend Evan Baehr texted me, he said, "Can you fly to Aus-" Before I lived here, he said, "Can you fly to Austin tomorrow and meet me in the governor's office for the signing of the bill that dedicated $50 million," which to be matched by private $50 million. So Texas is now leading the country in psychedelic research, which is crazy- Incredible
for a conservative state. And it shows how effective this medicine can be. So ibogaine is an alkaloid derived from an African root bark called iboga. Yes. And there's another plant that also has ibogaine in it, which is what I took at Beyonder. There's another plant that has ibogaine, they extract it from the- Tabernanthe mannii and Tabernanthe iboga I think are the two plants- Yeah
that I know of that have ibogaine in them. It's, I, I'm gonna mispronounce this. Voacanga africana, something like that? Is that what it's... Oh, so you weren't taking the pure distilled ibogaine? It was pure distilled ibogaine, but extracted- From that ... not from iboga but from this other plant. Okay, okay. It's the same compound.
Iboga has been used in West Africa for [01:06:00] many, many years. By the Bwiti. The Bwiti tribe. And iboga has many alkaloids in it, including ibogaine. That's one of them. I probably would've preferred to do iboga, because I'm guessing there's intelligence in the plant. Yeah. There's something complementary about having the other alkaloids.
Yeah, it's like taking pure THC versus some more complex- Yeah ... you know, orchestra. It's just more challenging. Where are you gonna go to do that? Health risks potentially. Um, I was able to go to a controlled medical facility. They had an open date at Beyonder that worked with my schedule, and I was able to clear out that time.
I looked at the calendar and said, "I can do 10 days." Yeah. "Okay, I'm just gonna take this. I'm gonna be well supervised." So my first dose was day five at the clinic. The other days were just getting ready, thinking about intentions. I thought a lot about intention for this, and Beyonder does a good job with everyone.
The four intentions I set. Mm. I said, "Show me how to serve God, show me how to love myself, show me how to receive and give love, show me how to be fully [01:07:00] authentic." Mm, I love it. "And show me any blocks in the way." The first intention, show me how to serve God, I'm referring to whatever the benevolent source of reality is, but I had seen in some of the other medicine journeys, or not seen, it was just coming through as if it were the most obvious truth.
The words coming out of my mouth, Devin, were things like, "We are instruments of the divine. I only exist because God exists." I only have anxiety because I'm not asking, "How should I be serving God?" These ... Like, what is going on here? So I, I thought a, a lot about those statements that were coming out and felt so natural.
What does it mean to be serving God? Mm. So that was one of the reasons for the intention. So- And did you have a definition of God at this point? Not really. I mean, I, I think of it as the ultimate source of reality that is benevolent and the interconnected substrate. It is the reason that we exist. The reason reality exists is because of this.
Some people would call it a field of consciousness, but this word, that was the word coming out- [01:08:00] Mm ... in the other journeys. And it was very clear to me that that, that was a serious thing versus something more vague of, oh, consciousness. I remember as an atheist realizing that I started using the word God and was comfortable with it, and it freaked me out.
Mm-hmm. And I, I, I will still say I still don't believe in the God that my parents don't believe in. Okay. You know, the, like- Yeah ... mythical bearded guy in the sky who's separate from us and judges us and merits out, you know, good and bad punishments. But there's no other word that seems to suit. I mean, ultimate, ultimate, the love, whatever, but God seems to all of a sudden have this usefulness in my life.
Mm-hmm. I feel the same way. And it's strange. It's, as a, you know, I think of myself as a quite rational human being who rejects a lot of the, like, harm that re- certain religions have done at certain times in the world in the name of God, and yet for me to then let them take God away from me seems absurd.
There's a distinction between an institution and des- a descriptor of the nature of reality. Yes. And that's [01:09:00] what we're speaking about here. Spiritual but not religious is this emerging trend- Yeah ... that is, you know, encapsulating a lot of this. So I wanted to know, what does it mean? Yeah. Show me how to serve.
What it ... And, and it's ... Now when I think about trying to deny God or whatever we wanna call it, what an arrogance. Yeah. Because if it, if that is the source of our existence, if we wouldn't even exist if not for this underlying force, what worse thing could we do than say that that thing doesn't exist that created us?
Like, self-negation. Ugh. Yeah. Very dark. Yeah. And my books get into that as well, why, why might that occur. I think it's a very disempowering perspective that we're coming out of, hopefully. Mm. So that's where I was. Show me how to serve God. Show me how to love myself. Show me how to receive and give love.
Show me how to be fully authentic. Show me any blocks in the way. And I figured with those intentions, I would cover basically anything. And the way it's given, uh, the Ibogaine's given at Biion is in pill form. Okay. So took the pills, and I remember as I was ingesting them, [01:10:00] I set the intention that I wanted the full experience.
Give me everything you got. Do you think at this point, with your other experiences, you had developed your capacity to surrender? And I don't know if that makes sense to you, but to me this is like a key, the ultimate skill in spirituality, but in psychedelics it's very, very explicitly powerful. Resistant, to me a bad trip is resistance.
If you resist what's arising, it gets dark quick. Yeah. I had developed the capacity, but what was coming up was really unpleasant. Mm. So within 30 minutes I was thinking, "How long is this gonna last?" Really? "Can I get out of here? I don't wanna do this." And we, and we didn't say this, ib- ib- ibogaine generally lasts...
I don't know when it ends, but let's say four to six hours of the flood dose is when it really peaks. Many, many hours after that. I, I was probably going for 24 hours- Yeah ... at least. I, I don't know when it ended. I really don't. So [01:11:00] 30 minutes in you're like, "Oh, God, make it stop." Yeah. Was it physiologically uncomfortable, psychologically?
Everything was uncomfortable. Everything. Everything, because it's a hospital- Comprehensively uncomfortable ... setting. There's an IV giving electrolytes- Oh, and you can't move ... because the heart can stop with ibogaine. There's cardiac risk. Yes. And at Biopunt, any clinic someone is considering, this is a super important thing, uh, to look at.
EKG, the first thing that happens when you get to Biopunt is there's an EKG. Yeah. And if the EKG doesn't look good- It's... And they have paddles. They can shock your heart and... Uh, they must have had them somewhere. Yeah, they do. But the, we were being watched by nurses, had heart monitors, so stuff all over my chest, uh, blood pressure, squeezing my arm, and then something on my finger.
So I'm sitting there- So you can't get up and do yoga and sing and dance and- No. And with ibogaine, there's ataxia, meaning the body basically can't move. Mm. It's hard to move the limbs. So like I'm frozen in this bed, having the most uncomfortable sensations. Going to the bathroom, they carry the person to the bathroom because you can't, like, really move.
This is a good sales presentation for them. It's rough. [01:12:00] I wanna be truthful here. Yeah, yeah. This is not... I think it's, it can be very evolutionary and, and impactful, but it's not through pleasantness. Yeah. The way that I've described it is that ibogaine expresses love through the truth even if the truth is unpleasant.
Yeah. It's, it's kind. It's not nice. Kind in the long run. Yeah. In the short run it looks not kind. And so how long... Was it uncomfortable the entire time? Yes. Really? The whole time. 'Cause there are people, to be clear, who experience beauty and bliss most of the time. Very good point. I, there were people there at the same time as me who had incredible divine experiences, no issues.
So many of the people at the clinic, alcoholics, drug addicts, people who've had serious issues, I think I had the worst experience out of anyone there. I was the guy that people were pointing at of like, "Oh, that guy. Oh, he's having it rough." And not because you had some major unresolved traumas that were coming up.
No, I didn't have a new trauma that came up or anything like that. I wasn't sure if that would happen. Some people [01:13:00] surface a buried trauma, for example. Yeah. I- So what was the content of your experience? Ibogaine tends to be autobiographical. Right. It tends to take people into their own life, and that was different from, than the other experience I had had, which felt more like being blasted out into my spiritual self.
Yeah. This was in. So imagine a triangle that's inverted and you're going down to the base of it. It's like bringing you back to the root. Iboga's known as the root plant of Earth. Ayahuasca's the crown plant. Yeah. Ibogaine takes you to the root. So does this mean, like, childhood? I've heard some people say it's like a cellular scan of their body, and they're seeing, you know, microscopic health issues.
I did feel things all over my body. I didn't have that experience. I would describe it in, let's say, two different ways in terms of what I was seeing. There was, like, a physical seeing and then a seeing in my consciousness. Mm. The physical seeing was ... I think when my ... There's p- typically a mask- Yeah ... that's on, but [01:14:00] I kept taking mine off.
I was just such a mess, taking it on and off. But when I would sit there, I could see faces. They looked like they were cartoon drawings, and the teeth were almost, like, Aztec square- Mm ... crystal skull type, tribal. And if I would look at the faces, they would make eye contact with me and come towards me. And their faces would, would transform into almost a scary looking thing.
And I was thinking the whole time, "Get out of here, beings. This is not why I'm here. I'm not here to come hang out with you. I'm here to l- to, for my intentions." So I would shoo them away. I wouldn't make eye contact with them. It was almost like this highway. They kept coming. And some were male, some were female.
Then there was one illustration in particular I remember, there might have been others that I ... I don't remember everything that happened, that related to my childhood, and it was drawn out. Something very specific. Mm. So this was w- that's one example of what still blows me away, of the intelligence of this medicine, that it was able to bring out things in me.
It felt like it knew [01:15:00] me better than me and was ready for me, at a creepy level. How is it possible to ingest - And is it not you? Is it all not you? Is it not me? That's the question. Is it my higher self that I was tapping into? It felt beyond my higher self. Really? That's what it felt like to me. I, I describe it as an emissary of the divine.
It felt like I was interfacing in a serious way of, like, do not mess around. The ... Reverence is a word that I never really used- Mm ... until after that experience. This is, this is something to take very seriously. This is a force beyond your capacity. Yeah. It felt like the ultimate force or some emissary of it that is so in alignment with truth that it's just like everything that's not aligned is gonna be shown.
And was it starting to reveal to you that this was about your intentions? The f- one of the first things I remember, a few things "We're all just characters here." That was the first thing that came in when the medicine hit. It's something I would've believed before, but the more I [01:16:00] think about that, the more that I feel into the IB and experience, very profound, that there's a divine energy that we are tapped into as souls or otherwise, and Dev and Mark, we're characters temporarily.
Yeah. Huge. And then I think the next one was, "Your life's been focused on accomplishments and not love." As a banner. Just blunt, in your face- Mm-hmm ... undeniable. I said, "That's true. It, it, when you put it that way, that's very true." And then it pulled up, I m- I don't remember the sequence, but, "Okay, you came here for these intentions.
Let's go through them." And it pulled up all four intentions. It was almost on a whiteboard, but this is the vague part. This is the other part of what I was seeing. It was in my consciousness. Mm. Not the visual faces or drawings. In my consciousness it was c- being shown the, um, the intentions. And then it was just, I was being brought to childhood My cat that died when I was young, my childhood cat that I loved, all of a sudden I'm bawling.
Y- I spent most of the time crying. [01:17:00] Sorrow. And was it basically like ... I often think of one way to think about trauma is that an experience is so overwhelming, you can't fully process it in the moment, so it's kinda like your body stores it for later. Mm-hmm. And it gets triggered. You know, somebody can say something that relates to it, and it comes up.
And so, like, part of healing trauma to me is feeling the emotions fully. Like, allowing them to be expressed. Yeah. Like, letting them pass through you, and being empty. And then I think there's a freedom to it. I think that's what was happening. A lot of emotion that needed to come out, which was related to my life, but it also felt like it had an ancestral edge to it.
The Jewish lineage- Had you gotten into this yet to, uh ... There's a book called It Doesn't Start With You that's about this, which, you know, I mean, the, the ... There's an epigenetic version, but there's also a much more metaphysical version of how trauma's passed on, and, uh, we've talked about this as, uh, Ashkenazi Jews.
Like, there's a reason why Jews are neurotic, you know? Yeah. Persecuted people have, are, have anxiety that it could happen again, and it ... I've watched it in my kids. Like, they seem to be born with some hypervigilance that, you know, like, [01:18:00] it's not nurtured, you know? And it's ... It makes sense when you understand the generational story.
I was able to see that at a different level. I had done things like family constellation, Bert Hellinger's work, which is more the mystical- Yeah ... the, the ways in which our ancestors affect us. Dr. Richard Massey here, is here in Austin. He does family constellations. Mm. And the idea is that we will take on or mimic the suffering of our ancestors as a way of expressing I love you- Mm
on an unconscious level. That's beautiful. It's also very perverse- Yeah ... because it leads us into dark territory, but it's out of love ultimately. Yeah. That whole area, I had done family constellation before, and what Richard said to me, he was like, "Dude, none of this stuff you're dealing with is you, just so you know.
We can trace this back very easily." And I listened to him. I didn't fully understand it. When I got into ibogaine, I understood that. And have you come across, uh, Thomas Hubl's work? Mm-hmm, yeah. He works with the collective shadow. Yeah. So he'll go to Germany and say, "You may not have been here in the Holocaust, [01:19:00] but it's weighing on you, and it's weighing on all of you, and the only way to release it is together."
And he'll go to Israel and Palestine, and he'll work with, you know, like ... It's kinda like it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. Like, you're carrying this, and you can do something about it, which is a beautiful realization that, yeah, you, you've been handed a burden, but also you're empowered to heal it.
Totally. That ... This is ... This was one of the big overarching messages- Mm ... I felt with the medicine. And I was getting the sense, okay, Mark, it ends with me, and for progeny, it ends when you do the healing, then your offspring are healed, and this is what needs to happen not just for you, but this is how we're gonna heal collectively.
So that was one of the big messages, but I was also shown on a more Let's just say personal level, elements of childhood, and just remembering what it was like to be a child- Mm ... if that makes sense. What's the mindset? Would you say you have, you have had a lot of childhood memories? A lot of people don't have extensive memories of childhood, and then in these experiences a lot comes [01:20:00] back.
I would say it was more like that, that the memories were coming back. It w- especially from around the time of infancy or just- Mm ... being very, very young, of the feeling of what's it like before all the conditioning of the world. Yeah. What's the essence of Mark like? I was kept in that place for a very long time.
Mm. And I was brought to a place that I call the divine lens, pulled out of the character Mark, but still very aware of the character Mark. Because with ibogaine, it's not being blasted. I was very lucid. Yeah. I had to call coaches in because I was crying so much, and I said, "I need help. Bring people in to help me."
And I was able- Just like, "Hold my hand. Just, like, soothe me." Talk me through it. Yeah. And, uh, I was able to have conversations. Mm. So there's a lucidity with it, which is fascinating, to be, "Okay, I'm in the divine lens. I know I'm Mark, but wait, I'm not Mark, and I'm watching the character Mark from the divine lens."
It's mind-blowing for this to happen because I saw Mark not as my identity- Yeah ... but rather as a divine character who is temporarily here. Have you had these experiences in meditation of what's often called witnessing [01:21:00] consciousness? No. Which is ... In, in a sense it's the ultimate dissociation, you know? And it's kind of the final step before non-dual realization.
But it is this awareness of the ego watching ... I mean, there's been times when I've watched myself read a book or drive a car and I'm like, "Look at Devin." And I'm like, "How is ... Why am our ... Why aren't I doing that? It's just happening." It was like that except the character Mark had this shiny quality, almost like a comic book.
Mm. That, that it's a divine character. So it's not who you are, but this is a spiritual reality that we're in. Yeah. So heavy. Sometimes I'll tap into it in other normal states of consciousness or through meditation, and I'll remember what it was like. It's a mini life review, basically. And it was starting to show me about self-love.
Mm. And it would show me Mark in his awesomeness. Say, "Look, from the divine lens, how awesome is that guy?" And it would show me in my element, and then it would show me, "This is what you've done to yourself, and all the ways you've betrayed yourself, and worked so hard to [01:22:00] try to please other people, or said yes when you should have said no."
Mm. And I had to grieve my life. All the ways that you let should fill in where there was want. I got lost in the accomplishments, in the worldly stuff, and I remember thinking to myself, "How did I let this happen?" It was tragic. And it's interesting, 'cause you had already done the work to tear down these paradigms- And-
and build a new understanding. But obviously, years of your life went to the old way of believing, and then there's all these vestiges of that that still drive us today, right? Mm-hmm. This is after 10 years of a lot of work. Yeah. I was seeing this. And the unprocessed emotions, as you said, that came up. Mm.
And there was just so much crying from e- every angle. Being an infant and seeing my parents and the child-parent relationship in a beautiful way. Th- there's just heavy, heavy stuff. And what you initially said about the first 30 minutes being, like, miserable, get me out of this, this sounds like it could be interpreted as hard or bad, but also [01:23:00] as sweet and beautiful.
Yeah. Like, were you still saying, "I want this to end"? Yeah. You were. It was uncomfortable. Yeah. I like to move around and I couldn't really move. Yeah. The, the sensations that were coming up just didn't feel good Physically ... physically, my mind was racing Mm And there was so much that was happening. There was a tape recorder, and I, I typically, with the few journeys I've had, I haven't done tape recorders because things are happening so fast.
Yeah. And with ibogaine, I wish I could remember more of what happened. And what they say at the center is that it's happening whether you remember it or not. I do think some of the insights are valuable, though. I mean, for another example. It, the journey was being narrated to me- By who? ... by different voices.
And they had different accents. There would be a Southern voice. So an image would be shown to me, and then this Southern male voice would come in and narrate what was happening. And then a male gangster voice would come in and describe. And were these aspects of your personality? I really feel like I was interfacing with an entity.
With an entity. With, with- Or multiple entities ... an intelligence that was c- coming. Yeah, it [01:24:00] w- I- ibogaine, as I remember it, was an entity that I could sort of see. Mm. It was like a purple rectangle that was really thin with black edges, or maybe the reverse, black with, with a purple cape sort of, that was always there.
And I felt that it was this highly divine intelligence that is there for truth. Mm. And very other, not- It felt other to me. I know many people say it's just a conversation with your higher self with ibogaine. Yeah. I, I felt like it was more. Yeah, and I, I think this is one of those, like, unknowables that is fascinating to explore.
And I think from one perspective, all consciousness is one. Exactly. And so it's always gonna be paradoxical, but I do think from the separate self perspective of this body, this ego, this mind, there is other. And so I think I try to hold both. Yes. It felt like layers of consciousness that we're trying to put into words here, that I'm trying to express.
Yeah That- And especially if you're going back to [01:25:00] these infant experiences, which, like, I think Terence McKenna has spoken about this better than anyone I've ever heard. But he talks about the undifferentiated wonder of being a newborn and just, like, almost, like, staring at beautiful colors and shapes and energies and patterns and mosaics, and then there's this moment where your mom walks in the room and goes, "That's a bird."
And it goes from, like, unimaginable wonder to, like, "I know what that is." And now we look at everything as like, "I've seen a can before. I've seen a person before." And we don't really see it anymore. Mm. And I think in psychedelics what happens is sometimes all... I, I, I think conceptual mind can get stripped away completely.
Yeah. And the ego just happens to be maybe the most persistent concept, but you're left in this, like, overwhelmingly beautiful and intense undifferentiated experience. That, again, felt very familiar. Right. It was similar to one of those prior experience I had had, except with ibogaine I was there for hours.
Kept in this place that I will never be able to forget. Even though it did fade, the, the most intense part of this divine lens, [01:26:00] it's almost like trying to grab onto water. Yeah. You can't... It's so ephemeral. Even in the state of, let's say, 10 hours into the Ibogaine journey versus four hours, there's a big difference where it can be forgotten.
Yeah. So it stuck with me enough to say, "I can't tell you all the qualities, but I know it's real, and it's very important, and we've never, we've never not been that." Did you get directives? Like, is it clear what the work is? It's clear in terms of what I want to continue working through. So self-love, for example.
I said, "Show me these things." So it, it showed me this is how you can view yourself from the divine lens, or you can view yourself through this lens, where any little failure or perceived imperfection, you can hold onto and let them accumulate, which is what I saw myself doing. Any little thing, I never let it go.
Mm. And that adds up over time. Yeah. So it showed me that. A, a few months later, I did the Hoffman process- Oh, right. Tell me ... which is, I think, a very strong combination for [01:27:00] people who have experiences like mine, where it was so family-oriented and childhood-oriented. Hoffman process is a week-long, very intense, hardcore...
This is not a joke, no medicine. Take your phone at the door. It's like a psychedelic journey without ingesting anything. And the teachers are the psychedelic medicine- Mm ... walking you through a process that's been refined over 50 years. And I, I'm bringing this up because when I was in the flood dose with ibogaine, one of the, the coaches came in, and I was ta- I was saying something to the effect of, like, "How did I let this happen?"
And being very critical of seeing how I tortured myself. Not, not using self-love- Not using self-love ... already. And she was pointing that out very gently. And, and getting to see that pattern through the Hoffman process and work on it- Mm ... even more deeply and release it through a lot of expressive work, through anger and hitting things, and a lot of grief comes up there, and re-patterning and programming it.
It gets to m- a place of self-forgiveness and self-love in a new way, for oneself and for one's [01:28:00] family, parents, grandparents, and so forth, because they, they show the links in these patterns. Yeah. So I wanna, I wanna make sure we fit in, in the, in the time we have remaining, what's next? Like, I know you're working on a docuseries, and we could talk about that.
I also know that started before ibogaine, right? Yeah. And so I'm curious, like, where are the edges of your thinking now- Mm ... and, like, what projects might be next? Like, what rabbit hole do you wanna go down? Well, docuseries is very early stage, so I don't know when that's gonna come out. It's not imminent.
I've interviewed a bunch of people already. I think it's gonna be great, and it relates to the brain and consciousness, and interviewed Dean Radin and- Mm ... a lot, a lot of the, the credentialed people in this area of consciousness. Is this, like, the first book on film? Is it... It won't-- I don't know exactly how it's gonna pan out, but many similar topics.
In terms of how we construct it, let's see. Is consciousness non-local for the skeptic? And the implications [01:29:00] of that And taking into account that there's some kind of cultural shift happening with things like the telepathy tapes and- Yeah ... psychedelics becoming legalized, and all people having these experiences, and meditation mainstreaming.
And I mean, the research just keeps happening in all of these fields. I don't know, like, is Nature publishing this research, research now? Like, is, is it getting mainstreamed in academia? It depends. There are very few papers that make it through to the top, and what the scientists tell me is the papers will get rejected by those top journals on the basis of the subject matter.
Right. It's not because the study was poorly done, it's just we are not gonna publish something on this. It's not, it's not your rigor, it's not your stats- Yeah ... it's ... But there one, there was one published in 2018 in American Psychologist. Mm-hmm. The official peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Psychological Association.
So to anyone who says there's no rigorous research, read that paper, and it accumulates decades of research. That's a, a meta-analysis of- Yeah. Edzel Cardeña from Lund University. And it's showing that there is psychic phenomenon in, [01:30:00] in- Statistical evidence for many psychic phenomena That's a slam dunk.
Yeah. For a rational person, how could that paper make it through? And in my podcast series, Where Is My Mind?, I interviewed Dr. Cardena about this, and I asked him, like, what was the process like to get this paper approved? And he said they were very tough, but ultimately they were fair. And that's a rare- That's-
statement. That's heartening to hear. Mm-hmm. And so is this documentary now more revealing the thoughts that you've had for a long time, or is this pushing you the way the writing does to, like, really get outside of your comfort zone and- Hmm ... explore new topics? I think this will be maybe a new way to express ideas that have been in the works for the last 10 years, and an opportunity to share it in a new way.
Yeah. Because, as we've discussed, this material completely changed my life, and I know it could do that for other people in a positive way. I've never done video format before. Yeah. And I wasn't looking to do this. Uh, the filmmakers from New York reached out to me, Annie Sundberg and Beth Kojima. Annie's done many [01:31:00] well-known films: the Joan Rivers documentary, um, the Surviving Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh, wow. And so very experienced in this realm, and I think it's a good combination for us to... They have the film expertise to try to make it appealing. So they read the book, and they said, "I think we can do something fascinating here." They reached out and they- yeah, they said, "We'd love to do this with you, and th- this is a good time for it because people are open."
And so I'm, I will be the narrator of the series. My personal journey likely will be weaved in in some way, and talking to many of the people who affected my life in such a positive way. All right. Now gi- now give me a little bit on non-human intelligence. What's going on? I mean, the government is disclosing, uh, there, it appears to be mainstreaming the fact that we're not alone in the universe.
Maybe there's crafts here, maybe there's other entities or beings that have been living here for thousands of years. Like, I know you've gone fairly deep in this. I also know it's evolving in real time. Are you currently exploring this? Not that much. I wrote a book on it, An End to Upside-Down Contact, and that explores [01:32:00] allegations of contact with non-human intelligence.
And I divided it into two basic categories. One is non-UFO contact experiences, so someone takes DMT, a psychedelic, and they encounter machine elves or have an alien abduction. Someone has a near-death experience, and they encounter a being of light- Right ... or a deceased relative or a religious figure. There are many states of consciousness that don't involve a craft in which people throughout history have talked about, well, yeah, there are other intelligences.
Angels, whatever you wanna call these things. There's a whole realm there, and I think that gets lost from the conversation all too often because we're focused on the craft. But there's a lot with the crafts, too, and I talk about the allegations throughout history. Vimanas in the Hindu literature, they talk about these flying crafts.
This is all very ancient stuff. Ne- Nephilim, the- In the Bible? Yeah. They talk about the... Yeah. Who, who knows what these beings are or were, and what's multidimensional, what's popping into our world and popping out. I, I tried not to draw too many conclusions in that book. Mm. Rather, I [01:33:00] intended to show the wide range of research that's been done to stimulate thinking.
I'm at the point where I think we're not alone, and I say this clearly in the book. There's too much evidence we're not alone. The beings, some of them are benevolent, and some of them are not. Mm. And some are in between. Some are tricksters. Some are really satanic, demonic, and others are angelic. There's a wide range, and it's an ancient phenomenon.
It's not new. And it feels like, it seems like based on a lot of evidence, whatever these intelligences are, some of them have an impact on our society and have had an impact on human society for a long time. I mean, the impacts that come to mind for me, like, there's very credible stories of them shutting down nuclear weapons.
It's in the book. The more speculative things are like we've been genetically engineered by a higher being s- or some among us have been altered, and I don't know how to go about exploring that. Yeah. How do we prove it? There's a lot of ancient literature that talks about things like this. Zecharia Sitchin, his Anunnaki theory, the way he's [01:34:00] interpreted the Sumerian texts.
He gets more into the genetic engineering, multiple gods. The Popol Vuh, Mesoamerica, Mexican area, they have kind of a similar story of- Mm ... reading Genesis, the, the creation story. What, how do we weave all this stuff in? It's hard to know with certainty. To me, I feel like one of the greatest assets in life is to live in a mystery and not collapse into belief or understanding.
Yeah. And so this feels like one of the most potent places to practice that because it feels like it's designed to fuck with our desire for certainty. That was my takeaway when I researched this topic. I said, "No one knows what's going on. None of these researchers has a clue." So let, let me just try to summarize what they're talking about.
And we could be dealing with a phenomenon that has a highly deceptive quality. I'll give an example. There's a, a phenomenon called a screen memory, screen memory, where a person will say they saw an owl on the side of a road, and they stop their car and they look at the owl, and then all of a sudden it's [01:35:00] like five or six hours later.
They have missing time. Mm-hmm. Very common phenomenon. And they wanna try to recover the memories. What happened? So they go to a hypnotherapist. John Mack from Harvard, who was the head of psychiatry there, was using hypnotherapy to help people who alleged they were abducted by aliens. It's a way of recovering memory.
So they go to a hypnotherapist and the person, once they're under, the hypnotherapist will say, "I want you to go up to the owl on the road. Imagine you're back there." And the person will say, "Wait, it's not an owl. It's actually a gray alien." Really? So the question then becomes, can we even trust memories when people encounter other intelligences?
Because if they can alter our consciousness, then we don't even know what was actually experienced. And, uh, Disclos- Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg came out recently, and I was just saying to you earlier, like I know some people in the movie industry think it's a garbage script and they don't love it, but I know a lot of people who are in the disclosure space who just think it's full of Easter eggs.
And one of the ones that has been shared with me a couple times is the animals. Mm. [01:36:00] And they purposefully are kind of mediocre CG because they are something other than an animal appearing to us a- as an animal because that's what our mind is comfortable seeing. Specifically the cardinals- Hmm ... are something I've heard many people talk about multiple times before the movie came out, and when the cardinals were in the movie, they were like, "Yeah, of course."
There are a few animals that appear repeatedly. So, uh, owls are common, deer, raccoons. Kary Mullis, he invented the PCR test, won a Nobel Prize. Mm. He had an experience in the woods with a glowing raccoon that said, "Hello, Doctor," and then he had missing time for a few hours. A very good friend who is gonna be on the podcast in the future, his entire experience in this realm started with going out in his backyard, bending over, and getting headbutted by a deer that i- came out of nowhere.
And then that night he had contact And to this day we, I was there. Like we, to this day we're just like, "Wait a minute. What, what, what happened?" Like, are we over pattern matching? Is there significance [01:37:00] here? Like That it's a deer and that's not uncommon. It's not uncommon. There's also a phenomenon called switching off, where a person might see a craft or something strange and not to, not think to take their phone out and take a picture of it.
And then it dis- then it goes away and they're like, "Wait a second, I wanna capture that." Yeah. So there's an alteration of consciousness, which makes this phenomenon very difficult to pin down. Yeah, I think that's... It's going to be a weird couple of years. I mean, there might be a new release. This is July 2nd, so Friday, July 4th, supposedly there's, the US government will release the fourth tranche.
Huh. And what I've been told by people who know what's coming is that they're gonna get increasingly compelling. Okay. They're supposed to be, start out kinda boring and mundane, and then get extremely weird. Mark, I could, I could talk to you for... I, I think we'll talk for many, many years. We will. Um, but thank you so much for coming on and being vulnerable and real and playing with me.
And, uh, I hope we get to do this again in the future. For sure. Thanks for having me on. Awesome.
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