From Great Reset To Great Awakening w/ Mark Gober | AMP #397

MARK: And yet in the Great Reset, what do they talk about? They talk about the return of big government. So, you can see for someone like me, who has this very libertarian perspective, I read this and say that is very dangerous. They want more government. They want global coordination of governments. Of course, because we want to help you. This is for the betterment of society. But to me, it violates the non-aggression principle. And historically, we've seen how this has gone wrong before.

AUBREY: Mark Gober is one of the great thinkers of our time. And he translates that into his podcasts, in his speeches, and into the many books that he's written on a variety of different subjects. In this podcast, we dive deep into the cultural woes that we're experiencing right now. And what it would look like to have a different culture, a culture that represented this more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. And what the challenges are with what we're facing, and what the opportunities are for where we're going. So, I hope you guys enjoy this podcast with Mark Gober. Good to see you in person, brother.

MARK: Thank you for having me, Aubrey.

AUBREY: So, you just told me that right before you came, you sent in your manuscript for a new book, about the Great Reset? Sounds a bit ominous. Like there's some scary shit that might be coming down the pipe that's been pretty much out in the public. They're talking openly about it. But explain the Great Reset to people who've maybe heard the word, but don't really understand what's going on?

MARK: Sure. One of the reasons I decided to write it is that I realized a lot of people might have heard the term but actually don't know what it is. And it's a vision for the world that's been laid out by the World Economic Forum, which is one of the most powerful bodies in the world. And in June of 2020—

AUBREY: Some might argue the most powerful. Hard to say.

MARK: A powerful organization that has influence in global governments, global businesses. So, it's something worth paying attention to if they're laying out a vision for the world. That's the way I look at it. But in June of 2020, they announced that it's time for a Great Reset. That COVID-19 presented an opportunity for the world to be reset in a way that they view to be positive, or at least that's how it's positioned. But I think there are potential dangers with it. With everything, like technology, for example, it can be used for good or for negative purposes. And I see the Great Reset in that way. So, what I try to do in the book is to look at different areas that they talk about within the Great Reset and actually wrote a book as well called "COVID-19, The Great Reset" that lays out all this stuff.

AUBREY: And when you say they, were their authors mentioned? Or the author byline was World Economic Forum?

MARK: No, Klaus Schwab, who's the head of the World Economic Forum and his colleague, Thierry Malleret. They're the authors, the co-authors of "COVID-19, The Great Reset?" I say they because it's also hard to know who is actually endorsing which aspects of it. And I try not to point fingers at individuals because you don't actually know who's endorsing what. But the themes are definitely being carried out. So, the six areas that I look at in the book, and they don't organize it this way, but I, as I studied it, saw these six categories for where society's heading. One is culture.

AUBREY: Where they want it to head.

MARK: Where they want it to head, and it seems like it's also heading in that direction already. But there's cultural aspects, political aspects, economic, environmental, technological, and metaphysical. So, what I do in the book is just go through what they have said, or what they've omitted in those areas and show the potential dangers because I think it's just important to be aware. And we were talking before the interview. One of the themes that probably drove me to write this book is that compassion can be weaponized. People who have really good intentions and they want to do good things for the world can sometimes overlook how their behavior or the things that they're pushing for are actually not so compassionate?

AUBREY: A lot of times, aphorisms, they have a root in something that's meaningful. And the phrase, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There's probably some reason why that exists and has lasted in culture for as long as it has. That's a warning.

MARK: I use that quote in the introduction for that very reason. Because good intentions are inadequate sometimes. It's a good starting point. And I think one of the reasons I was so sensitized to this is that my prior books focus a lot on metaphysics, and spirituality, and the science that suggests that we're actually spiritual beings, which I didn't used to believe. And then I realized, wow, there's a lot of science pointing this direction. And that world promotes compassion, as it should, because the spiritual dimensions seem to suggest that that's actually built into the fabric of reality. So, that's a good thing. But where can it lead us astray? And when I look back at my history of trying to research all this stuff, my second book, "An End to Upside Down Living," I talk about approaches to life based on having a spiritual worldview and how it's shifted my life. And one of the approaches I called compassion with discernments. And there was a story that I came across when I was studying awakening journeys of people, whether it was through psychedelics or meditation, they've had awakenings. And this one woman, I think it was just through meditation, she was feeling loving towards everyone. And she was in this state of bliss all the time. She met a man who she then let into her life and didn't realize that this guy was not good news. So, he ended up living with her and she said it was hell. The guy manipulated her and did all sorts of bad stuff. But that story just stuck with me of someone who had really good intentions, but just didn't have the discernment to see the potential downsides. So, that's kind of the psychology that I'm approaching with this book and hoping to impart on people.

AUBREY: I think both of those things are natural pairs. And I've been studying the Kabbalist's tree of life. And there's pairs of different balances between this overwhelming desire to love and then the necessity for boundary, and they're paired on either side of the tree of life. And it's three different pairings that all have a similar flavor of this, this kind of yin and yang of like, yes, I love you. I'm so compassionate. I want to do only good. But here's the discernment. Here's the boundary. And here's the logistical aspects that are required to do this. And that's part of the human condition is to feel all of that kind of divine impulse, but then also honor this dimensional reality that we're in and understand that there's other darker impulses that also exist in the universe that impact, at least this third density, in a way that we have to be mindful of both. So, I really like your compassion and discernment combination. It's very much a Kabbalist way of looking at this.

MARK: And it's something I'm just appreciating more and more for the reasons you're saying. That we live in a dimension that is not all unconditional love, even though people do experience that when they go to these other dimensions. In near death experience, people come back and say, we're all interconnected. The universe is made of unconditional love. And they can't express it with words, but they felt it. And this is so many people.

AUBREY: And then they post that on Instagram and someone's like, fuck you pseudo scientists quack with your woo woo bullshit. Hope next time you die for real. And they're like, what the fuck just happened? So, that's our reality.

MARK: That's our reality. And if people haven't experienced that themselves, they can't relate to it. And people have these experiences, they're called NDEs for short, near-death experience. They might have been atheistic beforehand. It changes them forever. And it's something I've studied a lot because psychiatrists look at this, and they see the way people change after an NDE, that they actually change their priorities because they've had this other experience. But the piece of it that's missing from those experiences is the discernment aspects because they were in these other dimensions, or whatever it was. Like you say, we live in this whatever, material 3D world where there is duality that we have to be aware of. It feels like an increasingly important topic, to have both the compassion and the discernment at the same time. Not to reduce the compassion in any way. But boundaries, like you say.

AUBREY: I prefer the two cups of ayahuasca, 100 micrograms of 5-MeO-DMT near death experience, personally, than having the universe to construct something mechanically. Definitely prefer to keep it this way. But it's the same result. You feel something that you know to be true. And then how do you integrate and translate that into the life that we certainly live. So, this is all going to be ground that our audience is very well familiar with, for the most part. However, let's go into these six categories. And what I would like to propose as a rough itinerary for this conversation, is that we actually cover these six categories as the Great Reset would have it, and then cover them as we imagine, just from our own limited purview. Not saying that we're the experts or that we're writing the antithesis of the Great Reset, that we have any right to do so. This would be a collective effort of the best minds of indigenous wisdom, to scientific wisdom, to philosophical wisdom, to all of the whole, everybody needs to come together to figure this thing out. However, we're going to do our best to just throw some ideas out there on the opposite positive side of how this could be better. And maybe the Great Reset does have some good ideas that we'll take. So, we're going to basically look at these two things, compare and contrast. See where we end up?

MARK: And they do say some good things in the book. They talk about health, they even talk about the dangers of technology. So, it's not like it's all fully evil. There are aspects that could turn in that direction. But I like the way you framed it. Let's just go through each one, talk about the positives, negatives, and how we might envision something better.

AUBREY: Let's go fine. Bon voyage.

MARK: And I want to emphasize here, they don't lay it out like this. This is my interpretation of these six categories. So, the first one is culture. And they talk about having a more equitable world with more fairness. And they focus on things like justice, which in some ways, that's a very positive thing, especially given human history where we've had all sorts of prejudices throughout history. But the question is, how can that be weaponized? That's what I'm looking at.

AUBREY: This is classic propaganda idea. You name something that you can't argue with. We're here for justice. Of course, who doesn't want justice? You want justice. Black lives matter. Yes, of course they do. But that doesn't mean you can do anything if you just call yourself that. And it doesn't mean just calling the name justice makes justice. Doesn't mean that you say fact checker, that you're actually checking facts. None of that actually works? But the strategy is named something that's inarguable. And then if people are against it, then then you pretend that they're against the name of the thing, which no, you can't be against the name of it. Of course, it's true. However, what you're doing underneath that name is where you have a problem, but then people lose the distinction. And then that's a big problem. So, of course, any propaganda strategy is going to name something that you can argue with.

MARK: And there's no definitive endpoint. Where do you get to the point of final justice and final fairness?

AUBREY: And who decides?

MARK: And who makes that decision? That's the critical point. So, if you have an organization that is controlling or has a great influence over governments and governments have great influence over the people, that could potentially be dangerous. And if you look at human history, governments have done some horrible things. Under the name of, this is also a really important point, under the name of the common good. That we're doing this for the betterment of everyone. And there are people like Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and also G. Edward Griffin, they've talked about this notion of collectivism. That we need to focus on the group society. And the danger there is that you could ignore the individual in that process because the individual doesn't matter. All that matters is the greater good. And so, it can become an excuse to do horrible things to individuals in the name of just the collective. So, these terms around culture—

AUBREY: And we've seen this with communist regimes around the world.

MARK: Communist, fascist, any totalitarian regime becomes ultimately collectivistic in its rhetoric. And a lot of the cultural stuff seems like it's in that direction. This is for the greater good, it's for greater equality. And it's vague. And it ignores the fact that there are individuals that make up the collective. You can't have a collective without individuals. But also, with regard to equality and equity, because those terms are coming up a lot more these days, especially like DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion. This is something that's really big in businesses, which of course, sounds good. And there are benefits to stuff like that, like you say. But the term equity in particular, that typically means equal outcomes. So, how could that go wrong? That means people need to have equal outcomes. So, let's say Aubrey is running a marathon and you do really well, and you do better than someone else. They could say, that's not equity. The next marathon, Aubrey's got to

AUBREY: They got to Tonya Harding my legs, clearly.

MARK: Than we've had equity.

AUBREY: That's equity.

MARK: We've got equity. So, this is the key is what do these terms really mean? And Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning economist, he said, people are not equal. We're fundamentally diverse. And in order to make them equal, you have to treat them unequally.

AUBREY: And also, we are equal. It's just on the spiritual dimension of actual worth, of actual how much does God love us? Equally. Equally. That's true. It's true. Fundamentally. You are worthy of as much love as any other human being on this fucking planet, no matter who you are. True. However, if we're running a race, or if fucking Nancy Kerrigan and I throw a better triple axel than you, then sorry about it. My triple axel is just way doper. It's clean. What do you got to do?

MARK: But this stuff gets weaponized. And I think there's a lack of appreciation of what you were just describing, which is a paradox. The paradox that we are equal, and at the same time not equal. At one level, we're equal. At the spiritual dimension, we're all one. We're part of this infinite field. But we're in this material world, where I have a mind, you have the mind, there is a division, there's duality. People can pick and choose, go back and forth between the two and not acknowledge that the paradox actually fits. You have these two seemingly contradictory ideas that fit together. And I think a lot of that becomes lost in this cultural battle.

AUBREY: Equality of outcome is one way to look at it, which is clearly dangerous because then it gives authority to basically take from some and give to others. That doesn't actually sound fair at all. And then the other one is equality of opportunity. And I actually think this is a lot more interesting and important. I think, basically, there should be a starting point for the race. If we're talking about a marathon, let's remove all the categories that would prevent you from starting the marathon at the same time as everybody else. But that gets tricky, too. It's very complicated to do that. And I think the intention for that is a lot more reasonable to say equal opportunity. And certainly, you have to look historically, that people of color and women have not had equal opportunity. And we're making great strides in providing equal opportunity. And that should be celebrated. For sure. But then how you enforce that can get a little tricky. Can get a little odd when you start getting into the details of Title Nine, and you get into the details of affirmative action and these different plans, and the way that they handle NFL coaches or things like that. When you talk to people in the NFL, the impulse is right, we all agree with it. Then it just comes down to the logistics. Is this really doing what we want it to do? Or is there a better strategy? But applauding also the way that the heart wants that. The heart wants us to have a chance, to train the same way, to run the same race. That's something that we all definitely want, but it's just about, what are the logistics?

MARK: Right. And who sets those rules?

AUBREY: Who sets the rules?

MARK: That's really the critical part of it.

AUBREY: And are they working? This was something that Milton Friedman did a bunch of... He would look at. Do seatbelt laws save lives? And his conclusion was looking at the data. No, they don’t, actually because people drive faster because they feel safer. And then they kill more pedestrians again, in more wrecks. I haven't looked at that study in a long time but that was in one of the classes that I took actually, University of Queensland, where we talked about that. Everybody just says seatbelts save lives. They do if you're wearing it, and something happens in that case. But actually, generally, they don't necessarily. And so, we're not actually looking at what the law is actually doing. We're just imagining it. Same with cannabis laws. Everybody had all these ideas about why cannabis should be illegal. And Colorado's like, it's legal. Everybody's like, uh-oh. Just everything gets better. Accidents go down. Revenues go up. People are more chill. It's universally better.

MARK: There's a difference between things that sound good and things that actually do good in practice. And there's a psychology behind this, which I get into the book as well. I talk about cognitive biases. Daniel Kahneman's work, Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist. He talks about, for example, framing effects. The way you frame identical situations can change the way people interpret those situations. So, for example, something that is 90% fat-free will be interpreted differently than calling it 10% fat. Very different. So, we have to be aware of that with all this branding that's being thrown at us.

AUBREY: Depends on if you want fat, I want the fats. 10% fat, fuck yeah, let's go. Is that all? I can pump that shit up. Let's party.

MARK: But that's what we're seeing with a lot of the branding for the societal movement, it's framed in a certain way that appeals to the psychology of particular people.

AUBREY: And so going to this diversity, equity, inclusion. Yes, we do want all of that. Framed in that way, we do. But how that actually plays out becomes very, very fucking tricky.

MARK: What are the metrics on which we're going to be diverse and inclusive? Like Thomas Sowell the economist, he said, if we want to be, I believe it was he said, if we want to be inclusive or diverse, look at the sociology departments in colleges, it's very much left leaning. They don't have ideological diversity. Diversity and inclusion go across many different areas. And typically, it's just thought about in maybe just the racial domain or gender, which are important things, but there are other areas too, that aren't often included.

AUBREY: And also, there's this interesting kind of arbitrary way that we look at race and inclusion as well. My wife's Hawaiian and Filipino and I'm Ashkenazi Jew and Russian. But we're just white. Even though we're pretty, caramelly, tannish looking in general, but there's big lumps of categories. And I actually understand why those categories were lumped. Because back in the day, horrible shit was done to people with particular tones of skin. But even still then, there was also... And I don't even know how this actually worked. What if it was like a dark person from Mumbai? Were they treated the same as an African person when the skin tone was... It's a very interesting thing. But nonetheless, you can't argue that people were discriminated against wildly and horribly mistreated based on things like skin tone. So, it's important to acknowledge that important acknowledge the current existence of racism. That is an actual factor that we have to deal with. And then also realize that the old ways of classifying actually don't fit the new world either. Like filling out my race on a driver's license is like, white, I guess. But my ancestors fled the pogroms in Russia, where there was armed Cossacks coming around to Jewish houses and looking to slay them. And they escaped before. Then Nazi Germany did the same thing to everybody else in there. But white, whatever. You know what I mean? And my wife, Hawaiian is her thing. I think there is a Pacific Islanders thing, actually, that they put on there. But nonetheless, it's a very weird thing that we have to just lump ourselves into a category when we're this diverse melting pot and mix. I think it's just the remnants of the ghosts of racism past that have extended into presence, some of these ghosts still exist and I don't want to deny that there's still the ghosts of racism past. But those ghosts need to be exorcised in the minds of all of us. And I agree with that. But nonetheless, the old system can't apply forever. We have to be able to look at how we're all this crazy mix of all of these different races. I think A. J. Jacobs wrote a book called "It's All Relative," showing how we're only certain degrees of separation from every single human being on the planet. You know what I mean? And so, we have to have a new model that envisions, maybe we need a bridge from where we were, and we're still bridging from where we were, a very dark, racist time, particularly in this country, to the to the next time. But we can't stay on the bridge forever. The bridge has to lead to somewhere. And at some point, we have to kind of imagine that we're going to a place that's not looking at these metrics in the same way.

MARK: I agree with you. And in the book, I talk about this notion of antiracism, which in some ways, like you describe is very relevant and important. But how can that be twisted to become racist in its own way? Where certain skin colors or ethnicities become preferred over others. And some people have called this an oppression Olympics, where there's almost a competition to see who can be more oppressed, whether it's on the basis of race or other categories. It's called intersectionality. That's the term use of basically the different ways in which a person can be evaluated. It's not just their ethnicity, but it can be their sexual orientation, their gender. And you basically evaluate people on all these different metrics. And then it starts to become its own form of a problem, where it's like you're dehumanizing the person, you're just categorizing them. And there's a new book out by Vivek Ramaswamy, it's called "Nation of Victims," where he talks about this victimhood mentality that's actually being encouraged through a lot of this stuff, these cultural movements, which have some basis. There's some good to it. But it's been weaponized, where excellence now is being demonized. It's like a form of privilege to be excellent. And that's a dangerous trend, especially given that we live on a planet where we've had oppressive governments throughout history. You need to have a strong populace. People that want to be excellent. They don't want to think about being victims all the time and not wallowing in that.

AUBREY: It's wildly disempowering to consider yourself a victim. I think it was Castaneda who said, you can't be a victim and a hero at the same time, or you can be a victim and a warrior at the same time, basically. You have to choose one or the other. You're either a victim or you're the captain of your fate, the master of your destiny. And you have to make that choice. Now, of course, the paradox is that we are both, to a certain degree always. But it's the mentality that says, yes, you can overcome this, whatever it was. We can't know how hard it is. My brother Mehcad, he had to deal with some really intense shit growing up, from racist police brutality type of situations. I can only empathize with him, just like he could only empathize with what my great grandfathers had to deal with, where they're living in a hut out in the woods near the Black Sea. And there's mountain riders that could come and slay the family. He's got ancestors that had other shit. We can only imagine what it's like and imagine what we've experienced. But fundamentally, this is something that we have to recognize. This is all true. And we can still make the choice to say, all of this is true, maximum compassion. However, we can all decide that these challenges are actually what's going to define us and make us actually great. And that decision is the empowering decision, which is going to be healthier for the psyche long term. And it doesn't deny what happened. It's not denying what happened. But it's a different mentality that you put on that says, whatever you went through, there's a way through. There's a way out, there's a way to find your power, your voice, your strength. That's, I think, the message that's different. It's not, let's compete to see who's the biggest victim to then say, I don't have any responsibility because why would I? I've been victimized so much that I've put my personal power at such a low point that I have no responsibility and you can't ever criticize me for what I do. So, I'm going to be as small as possible. Doesn't help. We need lions. We need people who are sharing their voice and singing as part of the chorus. Everybody. And then the whole narrative should be shifted to encourage people to, I know it was hard, and we're not denying how fucking hard it was. But we need your voice, and we need you strong, and we need your heart, and we need you. We need you. To me, that's the message that needs to be there.

MARK: And this is getting to the solution, I think, cultural issues. To me, it's a both-and, rather than an either-or solution. We can acknowledge victimhood, we can acknowledge horrible things that have happened with regard to racism and other cultural issues throughout history.

AUBREY: Bias towards sexual orientation, bias towards trans community. All that's real. It's all real shit. And let's transcend it. Include that and transcend it.

MARK: Exactly. So, two things. On the darker side, this has happened before in other cultures. So, I referenced some people who escaped from communist China in the book, and they said, what's happening in America is the cultural revolution that we experienced there. And depending on the estimates you read, like "The Black Book of Communism," says that 65 million people were murdered in communist China as a result of similar types of themes. So, that's why this is a really important thing to keep in mind. But in terms of the positive solutions. You were alluding to something that I actually wrote about in the book and Ken Wilber, the philosopher, talks about the integral models of development. Both on personal levels, but also...

AUBREY: He's big in the include and transcend. That's where it comes from.

MARK: That’s it. Include and transcend. And that's how I see it for all these categories. There's a point to everything that they're saying. But we can include the good parts and leave the parts that are going to take us down a dark hole that we've seen throughout human history.

AUBREY: What else on the culture side are you seeing as a potential threat and then a potential way that that could be addressed and remedied in the more beautiful future?

MARK: I think we covered the basics. I go into some more details. There's a really interesting book by Gad Saad. It's called "The Parasitic Mind." And he goes through parasitic ideas in society, where basically, like post modernism, social constructivism. These ideas where basically objective truth doesn't exist, or people are skeptical of objective truth. They can make up whatever truth they want it to be based on what is politically correct. So, I go through some of the examples of that. It's actually pretty hilarious. There was something called the grievance studies affair. Are you familiar with that?

AUBREY: No.

MARK: James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose. They wrote hoax papers that talked about... One of them was hit Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf using feminist buzzwords. Really extreme stuff. I have like a summary table in the book that goes through all this stuff. It's hilarious, but journals accepted these papers. So, the idea is that if you say something that's in the direction of what's considered culturally acceptable, they'll accept the papers. And then they came out later and they were trying to make it as ridiculous as possible, basically.

AUBREY: This is a very interesting time where there's different tribal lines being formed. And there's a cultural tribal identity that you could call, and I don't like calling it any names, but it is a something. And it's whether you call it woke, or whether you call it liberal, or whether you call it whatever it is, whether you call it postmodern, and they all weave in and they're not exactly right, and they're not exactly wrong. But there's a kind of a team. And the team supports a variety of different things. And it is politicized in a way, but it goes beyond politics as well because even the politicians don't actually ascribe to what the team is actually believing. They just pretend to in a lot of ways, is what it seems for me. Seems like most of the time, it's same shit, different piles. And they just pretend that they're belonging to a team, but they really don't belong to any team other than the let's get reelected team of themself. Seems like that for me. But there's these kinds of team affinities and every team believes that they're better than the other team. This is a problem, ultimately, because then rational thought goes out and it's team above all. And it's just kind of like fucking Lannister mentality. The family, the family, the family. It's the same. It's the team, the team, the Lannisters, the team, the fucking whoever else. And even if you got a good team, it's still the Starks, whatever. It doesn't matter. That idea is ultimately going to put you in perpetual conflict and also not allow you to see actually the good, and the reason, and the compromise that's necessary to move forward. So, a transcendence of this team mentality, which slides in... First of all, it gives you a sense of belonging. And second of all, if you believe that your team is better than another team unequivocally, then if somebody else is on the other team, you're by nature, better than that person. So, you're better than half the population. Even if you're in the bottom quartile of your team, no worries, you're still better than 50% of the other world who's on the other team. It's a way that the ego can place itself in comparison with the rest of the world and give itself other people to stand on top of in the egoic ranking system in whatever virtue they're ascribing. And for some people, the virtue is the old virtues of strength, and power, and money. And then there's the counter virtues of ethics, morality, compassion. And so, you're just changing the game and describing, depending on your virtue plex of what you value as most virtuous of the virtues and then you place yourself on top of that, and then you're better than somebody. This is what these teams are allowing people to access and why it's also so hard to let go of any of the tenets of your team belief.

MARK: And people like to win and they like to be right. So, there's a psychological incentive to stick with your position even if it's disproven or if there's contradictory evidence comes out. But the way I describe it in the book, because the Great Reset has a particular version of its direction for society, and I label it as leftism, and distinguish it from liberalism, because there is a difference. And Dennis Prager, who's a prominent conservative, has broken this down. A lot of conservatives have looked at the left generally. That's what I look at in the book. I call it a leftist movement. And some of the differences between leftist and liberalism, according to Prager, and I agree with them is like, for example, liberals with regard to race tend to not want to look at race. Whereas leftists want to focus on race more. Liberals might be more open minded to capitalistic ideas economically, whereas the left really wants to get rid of it. So, it's more of an extreme version of some of the ideas. And that seems to be very much in alignment with the Great Reset. And that's why I focus on that. It's not to say that the far right hasn't had problems, too. But interestingly, Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist, he talked about this. That on the far right, we can delineate where there is a problem. And we've seen it historically. We can say, that is going too far on the right, whether it's racism and things like that. But he says on the left, we haven't really set those boundaries to identify, we're going too far, and this is a dangerous territory. But I thought that was a really interesting point. Because with the these leftist movements, which seem to dominate education system, and I talked about this in the book, that academia is dominated ideologically. It's not balanced. Where do we say that it's too far? And if everyone is sort of in that mindset because that's the media we're consuming and the education we're consuming, we might be less inclined to see that we're getting to a dangerous point. And I point back to the Cultural Revolution in China, where people who have been through this, they're seeing we're moving in that direction.

AUBREY: It gets really tricky for someone like myself, who's been a massive proponent of have allowing radical personal sovereignty in the decisions that we make? Whereas traditionally, the right has been trying to regulate what you can do to alter your consciousness, how you can have sex, who you can marry, all of this shit. This is fucking archaic, caveman bullshit. Fuck off with all of this pseudo fundamentalist, puritanical nonsense. if you want to fucking smoke weed, take mushrooms, and butt fuck your buddy and marry him, go for it. Go for it. Whatever. Do it. Live your life? So, that's what was like a left leaning principle. And then there's other things where it's definitely more conservative in the way that we're looking at free market economies. And then also recognizing the dangers of those and how the influence and the capture that pharmaceutical companies... There's fucking problems. But there's generally other things that kind of make sense on the other side. So, to say that I'm one side or the other, that's always been impossible. I see ridiculousness in all things. Also, the kind of hawkish militarization of the right is like, y'all, chill. We don't need to explode more people for real. Everything will be okay. I forget the forefather who was basically talking about, we just need to take care of ourselves and not get entangled in all of these different political things that are going on. But then at the same time, I also understand sometimes there's crimes against humanity. And if we have the power to do something, then in some ways, we have the unique responsibility to help. But are we actually doing that or are we just trying to get oil? So, I doubt that. So, on that side, I'm like, chill on the fucking bombing everybody y'all. I think the soldiers in the military are heroes by nature, but their weapons are being pointed oftentimes at the wrong direction. Mad respect to all of the servicemen and everybody who's signing up. My criticism lies not with you. Know that. Anybody is in the military. And actually, anybody who's enforcing anything by means of violence, you can be a shithead for sure and I'm not excusing your personal behavior. I don't know if you're an asshole or not. But I appreciate what you're doing. But if you're enforcing bad laws, or you're fighting a war, that you shouldn't fight, that's the place that I have issue.

MARK: I'm with you.

AUBREY: It's a weird thing. And everybody wants you to be on one team or the other. I'm like, no, I'm not on one team or the other. I think Trump's an idiot and Biden's incompetent. What do you want from me? You know what I mean? What do you want?

MARK: So, I actually wrote a book called "An End to Upside Down Liberty" because I was coming up with the same problem. I see issues on both sides. So, I end up in a very libertarian mindset, where I think that government is ultimately the problem. And this is leading into our discussion about politics and economics too, with regard to the Great Reset. For me, there's a principle in libertarian philosophy known as the non-aggression principle, which is very simple. Don't initiate aggression on any person's body or the property that they rightfully own. And if you do, then they have a right to self-defense. And aggression can be physical violence, fraud, coercion, theft, anything like that. Super simple. But if you believe in the non-aggression principle, look at the way we run society and the way we run governments. The governments violate the non-aggression principle all the time. They can force you to do things you didn't consent to explicitly, maybe implicitly, you did. So, that's what my book on liberty is all about. To me, it’s all about the non-aggression principle.

AUBREY: What they should enforce is your violation of the non-aggression principle to other people.

MARK: Protecting people's property when it comes—

AUBREY: And their personal self.

MARK: And their personal self. So, let people do what they want to do.

AUBREY: As long as it doesn't impinge on somebody else's selfhood and their rights, in general, to property, et cetera.

MARK: It's simple.

AUBREY: It's simple.

MARK: And it also has a spiritual tie. And that's what really drew me. This is important. We talked about this in our last conversation, the life review phenomenon. When people have a near death experience, they often become all the people that they impacted in their life. They relive their life, sometimes from birth. Like for my podcasts called "Where's My Mind," I interviewed a guy who actually had multiple near-death experiences. And he started from birth each time and had to relive stuff, including being in Vietnam. His name's Danny Brinkley. He had to relive combat days in Vietnam, killing people. So, he felt what it was like to be the person that he killed. And then he felt what it was like to be the child that no longer had a father. That changed his life. And this is what happens to people who have these near-death experiences. He was struck by lightning, had cardiac arrest. It wasn't like he was voluntarily taking DMT or something.

AUBREY: Do they get to relive the dope stuff? They're like, man, I gave that one girlfriend five orgasms in one day just with my mouth. You get to relive that moment, where's like, that was dope.

MARK: I haven't heard people talk about that. But I have heard them talk about it. So, this guy, Danny Brinkley, he changed his whole life after he experienced the negative stuff, not knowing he was going to have other life reviews. So, he became a hospice volunteer and helped people in the dying process. So, in his life reviews later, he felt what it was like to be the dying person. And he got to feel the good stuff. So, part of his life mission and many other people too is to—

AUBREY: Dear God, in my life review, I want to live all the orgasms that I've given to my partners as a woman. Thank you very much, God. Appreciate it.

MARK: I wonder if the ND researchers have looked into that. It has to come up.

AUBREY: People just haven't asked.

MARK: Maybe they haven't asked.

AUBREY: Maybe set your intention. Make a good request. So, when that moment comes, and then then I'm going to get that grant, and it's just going to be like, overwhelming. Oh, God, it's too much.

MARK: That would make for a good scientific paper once you get it approved. I never thought about that. But anyway, back to non-aggression principle. It ties into non-aggression principle. Because if you believe in the life review as telling us something about the nature of reality itself, not everyone reports a life review. But it happens a lot. So, how could you become another person that's telling us something about the nature of reality? That were interconnected. And somehow, when consciousness is liberated from the brain, like in a near-death experience, or something else, you can look at life through different lens. That's wild. So, if it's built into the fabric of reality itself, that we're interconnected and we should try to treat people well because we're interconnected, the golden rule, which is found all over the world in like every culture. The golden rule is built in the fabric of reality. That's what the live review tells us. How do we apply that to government and to private property? Would you want to initiate aggression against someone's property or their body?

AUBREY: And the golden rule, I think, is actually mistranslated. When I talked to my mystical Christian mentor, Ted Decker, saying, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Really what he translates that as is do unto others because they are you, as they are you because they are you. Is really what that's saying. Do unto others because you're doing to yourself. And this is the ultimate level of the truth. It's not because that's the moral thing to do, to treat them like you do, which is again, an equitable claim. This is no, this is both an equitable claim and also a perfectly equitable claim because it's a metaphysical claim that it actually is you. And you can't escape it. You're always doing unto others as you do to yourself. The golden rule is golden because you can't fucking break it. You can only just skirt it for a moment as you live in the myth of separation, which says, I'm me, you're you, I can hurt you and not hurt me. You can kind of get away with that on a limited dimensional dimensionality. But that's going to bust, that's going to break. And then you're going to be back into the golden rule, living it from both sides. And I think this is the idea where, my very first psychedelic journey, this is what I experienced. I experienced the life review. I had a full dissolution of my body and a full life review where I got to recognize, and I was a complete atheist before going into this, and I realized this is heaven or hell. You pass through this liminal stage and you're either in heaven or hell. You're in the heaven of reviewing all of the good that you've brought into the world, or the hell of looking at all the pain that you've caused, or some combination therein. Mostly on the heaven side. But I had some things, like little moments where I mistreated a classmate or really could have been more honorable to a girlfriend or something like that. There's moments that were deeply painful. And then long letters of like, hey, I saw this from a different perspective. And I could have been more forthright with how I was feeling earlier. And I was scared to tell you and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So, it wasn't major shit, but I could feel the pain of that, and I couldn't look away. I just couldn't look away. And I could also feel the joy of it. Like how much I love my mom and love my sisters and really tried my best in so many cases. And there was just incredible rapture in the recognition of that. And so, that changed my worldview forever because you can't look away. You can't look away from what you've done. That keeps me in check. I know that to be true. And I've repeated that for 23 years where if there's ever something where I was out of line, the medicine shows me, and I have to look right the fuck at it. And I can't look away. And because of this, I trust myself with power. Fundamentally, I trust myself with power. Because I know that there's a greater power that I'm subject to that will strip me of whatever biases, justifications, rationalizations I might come up with and show me the fucking truth. So, I better look at things honestly. And I better treat people actually, equitably, lovingly. Otherwise, I'm going to have to, like one of those horror movies where they keep someone's eyes peeled open and they show them horrible shit. It's like that. It's like that.

MARK: So, Dr. Bruce Greyson from the University of Virginia who studies these near-death experiences as an academic. What people tell him is that these life reviews are not just about morality, it's natural law. That's the term he uses. That this is exactly as you're describing part of the reality that we're in. So, that's pretty powerful. If we know an aspect of natural law through these experiences, what does that imply about the direction of our society and how things should be structured? Because the direction that we're moving in is one that is violating the non-aggression principle constantly, under the guise of it's for the common good. We know what's best for you and therefore, we have a right to impose this. In the book, I refer to it as an elitist mentality, this idea that... Which, in some ways, people might have a benevolent intent, where they're like, I'm really well educated, and I know what's better for you better than you know for yourself. And I'm going to impose it because I really want to help you. That can be a dangerous thing. That's different than a suggestion. With a non-aggression principle, I can be like, Aubrey, this is my advice to you. And you the same to me. That you're not forcing me by giving me advice. But you're not violating the non-aggression principle in the process. Whereas the way our society works now, especially with governments is that things are imposed. We know what risks you should be taking and therefore, we're going to impose it on you, even if that means violating your bodily sovereignty, for example.

AUBREY: Let's go into this one. Fundamentally, vaccine mandates are something that I strongly oppose.

MARK: Me too.

AUBREY: And I strongly oppose that. However, let's hypothesize a scenario. This is where it gets difficult. Because I think some people were living in this mental frame which I believe is incorrect. There's a new book coming out called "Cause Unknown" or unknown cause or something like that by Edward Dowd, who's looking at the excess deaths that have happened since the vaccine were rolled out. It's interesting. I haven't read it yet. It's hasn't released yet, as far as I understand. In any case, this this idea of the mandates, in this particular instance, was really deeply wrong. And for a lot of reasons, in my opinion. However, let's say that we had true, actionable information about a next, a next, let's say a next pandemic. One of us is Bill Gates, one of us is Klaus Schwab, who do you want to be?

MARK: I give you the choice, Aubrey.

AUBREY: I'll be Klaus. So, I'm Klaus, you're Bill. And not that they're in charge of everything. But Klaus and Bill are like, what are we going to do about things? And I'm not suggesting that they're the ones deciding everything. I think it's much more complicated than that. But in this example, Klaus and Bill gets to decide what happens. And Klaus and Bill are actually not horrible people. Also, maybe a stretch. But who knows? Who knows? We don't know. Anyways, I'm like, Bill, check it out. There's this new virus that's coming around and it's literally going to fucking kill a bunch of people, mortality rates are like 40%. Doesn't discriminate between age and health. This is nasty, man. And we didn't make this one. And I'm not suggesting that they made the last one. I'm just saying that's what Klaus is saying. He's going, we got an actual really good vaccine. But after this last COVID pandemic, people don't really trust us anymore. They're a little skeptical. Things got a little squirrely. We didn't run that one as good as we thought we could. So, there's going to be a lot of vaccine hesitancy. But if people don't get vaccinated, population is going to be decimated. I think we got to roll out mandates, Bill, in this case. Because what we've done in the past is really fucking people up. So, this is the complicated positions that you could find yourself in with this much power if you believe these premises. Now, of course, this is a thought experiment. So, in this thought experiment fuck, what do you do, Bill? What do you do?

MARK: So, the way I think about it, and I talk about this in my Liberty book is basically a new way of structuring society entirely, which gets rid of government as we do it currently. Because the way we do it currently is certain people have authority over people within a jurisdiction. And that authority is implicit, meaning the individuals within the jurisdiction didn't sign a contract saying you have a right to impose all these things. So, the government is a service provider that provides like, courts services, road servicing, a lot of important stuff. But there are other service providers in society, like lawyers and consultants, and everything you can imagine where there are customers and the customers hire someone. And typically, if it's an important service, you hire a contract and you say, you're going to do these things for me as a service provider. If you don't, we can terminate. You have all the stipulations in the contract. We have a social contract, and this gets into something in the Great Reset. They talk about redoing the social contract, which they acknowledge is often implicit. To me, this is the key, because now we're getting into non-aggression principle, golden rule stuff. If it's implicit, can you really force things on people? Anyway, what's the solution to something like this? The way that it's envisioned in the future by many economists in the Austrian school of economics, it's the Mises Institute, M-I-S-E-S, talks about this a lot. They're based in Alabama. A society based on private property entirely. So, the rules with regard to whether it's a pandemic or anything would be made by the private property owner. If let's say, there were a pandemic, within a certain community, let's say, where people voluntarily subscribed, they could say, I'm giving my rights to these people to make decisions about health. Because they have consented, then that's a different story. And maybe other parts of the world, let's say other communities will say, we're not doing any mandates. They're the owners, they're allowed to do that with their property. They might say, you need to have this injection in order to enter our property. It's their property, they can do that. And the theory economically is that this works itself out in the end, because people will flock towards the places, the private property owners that do things in a better way. And they'll go away from the other ones. And this is the theory behind capitalism is that it's self-correcting.

AUBREY: Part of the problem with that, if I'm going to be devil's advocate, and I don't disagree with you. The devil's advocate move is because you can make that argument about abortion rights right now. And so, you can say, you want an abortion and your state doesn't allow it. Hop over to this next state and you can get an abortion. But some people are like, I can't fucking afford to go over to this next state, I can't afford to move. Still, nonetheless, I'm suffering from this oppressive rule based on... And the abortion thing is certainly complicated. And I don't want to simplify it. But it would be the same idea in this, that some people don't have the mobility to actually up and move. But in general, I think what you're talking about is probably the best solution, because there's just casualties and losses on all sides. Which is the tricky part.

MARK: Always. It's tricky and it's imperfect. But the question is, is it less imperfect than our current system which imposes on people? And the term that's often used, the one I use in my book is voluntaryism. It's a form of libertarian society where everything is voluntary, you abide by the non-aggression principle, effectively. And with regard to abortion, it's really complicated because you're also dealing with the termination of a life, which some people might regard as an aggression toward that, but—

AUBREY: Hypothetically dealing with termination of a life, again, this becomes a deeply philosophical issue. When does life begin? And when is this removing a skin tag? I'm not trying to be reductionist in saying it. But you can argue that that's life as well. But what is a differentiated life? And what is part of your life? And is your right. So, it's fucking massively complicated and not worth us discussing on this podcast. But ultimately, the nuanced complication of all of these things is rich. And that's why it's important to chart a good course. And unfortunately, we're in a position now, where the only reason why this conversation, this hypothetical conversation between mostly benevolent Klaus and mostly benevolent Bill even makes sense, is that the government has done such a shitty job establishing trustworthiness that actually, there's resistance to the truth about this new hypothetical virus that's coming around. Because we absolutely were duped. And there's lots of metrics to show ways in which we were duped during this last pandemic. So, the credibility of the government is low. The government's lying to us all the fucking time and we're starting to see that. So, when you lose credibility, then you can't actually say... Because if there was credibility with the government, the government could just go like, listen, y'all, we can't force you to do anything. But this is gnarly. And this vaccine really works and it's actually safe. Here's the data. Here's everything. Please. And it would actually work. And then people would flock to it and do it. But because of the loss of credibility, now we're in a fucking tricky spot that's now like, what do you do in these type of situations? Of course, it's just a thought experiment. And I think people thought that way. The reason I'm bringing it up is people, I think, thought that way during the last pandemic, actually legitimately. And they were faced with these complex decisions of these people aren't trustworthy enough, they're not going to get vaccinated because they're conspiracy theorists. We have to force them to do it. So, their intention was good, it's just their information and their analysis, their discretion was bad. But it allows for some humaneness to realize, in these experiments, when you're like, if we don't do this, a bunch of people are going to die. You really believe that, then the impulse is going to be to violate the non-aggression principle.

MARK: They'll justify it. The ends justify the means in this situation. Now, the way I would think about this, or the Austrian economics perspective is that if we had regulatory agencies with financial accountability, they would go out of business if they did a bad job. With the way government works, they don't go out of business. And in fact, it can be the opposite. If the government does poorly in a certain area, they can say, we need actually more money. And they get their money through taxation or through printing money, central banks. If you do that, as a business, you're done if you don't do a good job. So, a potential solution is that the market would work this out, where you'd have an agency that's effectively a private regulator. Or an entrepreneur can come up with some alternative solution where they have proven their trustworthiness in the past. And because of that, they get paid to put their stamp of approval on drugs, maybe. And therefore, people would trust it out of their own self-interest, they'd want to trust it.

AUBREY: As we said, solutions are all imperfect. But to me, to chart this new course, we have to chart a course based on new first values and first principles. And if the first value in first principle is non-aggression, then we have to actually allow everything to fall in line with that and realize that things might get a little wonky for a little while as we make the transition. But we're charting a course towards truly a more beautiful world. And that will come with sacrifices and costs. And just helping encourage people along the process. But it's benevolence combined with principles that accord with the natural laws and all of these things start to line up. And I think it's the best we can do. Acknowledging that it's imperfect.

MARK: And also on a spiritual level, going back to first principles is that my view of reality is that we live in some kind of an evolutionary universe, that the property of consciousness that we're all a part of, is evolutionary.

AUBREY: Indeed.

MARK: And I don't know if that's the full meaning of life, but it seems to be part of it, that we're having experiences and we're growing through that. Like the life review seems to suggest that. If you look at some of the reincarnation research, children with past life memories studied at the University of Virginia. If you combined reincarnation with the life review, it suggests that maybe there's an engine for evolution built into reality. So, if you accept that as even partially true, then what is this voluntarist society that we're talking about based on non-aggression? What does that do for people evolutionarily? It allows them to take risks on their own terms, and to make mistakes on their own terms. Rather than having those mistakes imposed on them by a third party that they didn't necessarily explicitly consent to. Therefore, like you said, it will get hairy, it will be imperfect, but people will make mistakes on their own terms, and therefore, learn through that process. So, I know it's a hard concept to grasp. But it's evolutionary as well.

AUBREY: I love this, I love this because it's establishing evolution of the soul and of humanity as a priority in the cosmos, and to allow evolution to occur in the best way. Now, there's bounds on that. You can't evolve in your understanding that you don't want to kill somebody by killing somebody. And that's cool. That's not cool. We got to protect people from that level of making mistake in order to evolve. There are bounds, of course. We don't disagree with that at all. But placing evolution and the freedom to make our choices and make our mistakes, this is how a kid grows up. Do you really think that you can make the decisions for your child their whole life and they're going to live a fulfilled life and actually live their dharma and live their purpose? Fuck no. You got to let them live their life probably way sooner than most parents actually acknowledge that you got to let them live their life. But everybody knows this. But nonetheless, the government still tries to be the devouring mother and fucking overbearing father and not let us live our life, especially when it comes to the sovereignty of our own consciousness. Don't tell me not to do mushrooms. Have you done them? Do them with your friends. They're awesome. Fuck you. You're wrong. And that's fundamental reality.

MARK: And yet in the Great Reset, what do they talk about? They talk about the return of big government. So, you can see, for someone like me who has this very libertarian perspective, I read this and say that is very dangerous. They want more government, they want global coordination of governments, of course, because we want to help you. This is for the betterment of society. But, to me, it violates the non-aggression principle. And historically, we've seen how this has gone wrong before.

AUBREY: Totally. Nay, no, good. Next category.

MARK: So, we covered the political one.

AUBREY: I think so. One aspect of the political that I think we need to get to is, we have to break the yoke of the two-party system. We have to fundamentally break that yoke. Because to try and decide red or blue, and that's the only decision that you got, it's fucked up. Because they can just play games with each other, positioning against each other and making the decision fully tribalistic and actually impossible to distinguish any real meaning. Until you get a disruptive force in there, that can actually change things up then it just changes the dynamic, three is different than two. Even three.

MARK: It's relatively better. It's still government, but it's moving toward a more, I don't know if it's decentralized. In a sense, it's decentralized and has—

AUBREY: And it has the opportunity for that. Because if you did have a Libertarian candidate, for example, who's proposing smaller government, everybody, even Republicans might say, we want smaller government. Does the government get smaller under your rule? No. Maybe it grows less big than the other side. But you're still fucking big ass government. Big ass military. It's not really making any fundamental difference, but it would at least leave room for a legitimate... And to do that, the media would have to shift. You want to talk about equitable, inclusive? How about we equitably include some fucking third-party candidates in the system? How about that? Of course not. They're not interested in that. They want to keep their fucking duopoly on our political system. So, I don't know. I think something like that is necessary, even though I still have very little faith in politics as it is. But what else could we fundamentally do other than... I think one of the ideas that Schmachtenberger is working on is actual live populace votes on particular issues. So, you're actually proposing something like you do on the ballots for the states, but you're doing it on a bigger scale where people are voting on that. But then, that requires both trust in the voting system, which I think is questionable at this point. I think both sides. I think to think that one side is being unfair, and the other side isn't, that doesn't make any fucking sense. I think both sides are trying to cheat as much as possible. I think it was Tito Ortiz, the fighter, was like, if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. I think that's like the political motto on either side. Everybody's trying to game the system as much as they can. So, you have to have trust in that system. So, you have to have like some Price Waterhouse Cooper fucking holding that you can really trust to hold this accountable. And then you have to have fair media coverage. There's a lot of things that you have to hypothesize for it to work, but maybe that is the way. A different educational system so there's education around what you're actually voting on, rather than just tribal impulses and anger, and whoever is more effective in their ad hominem character assassinations.

MARK: I think what you're describing is moving in the direction. If, let's say, voluntarism as the ideal of government is completely gone, involuntary government is completely gone. It's all private property, you consent to everything. How are we going to get there? There are lots of theories. Some people say it has to happen immediately, and other people say it will be gradual. So, I think what you're describing are gradual shifts toward smaller government, more decentralized government, giving people more explicit consent over the issues. We have to move in that direction, it feels to me. But you reminded me of two points that I want to mention here because this really shifted my view of government when I learned these things. One is if you think about the way we do government in the world, we say like we need to have the structure in place because human beings are too irresponsible and untrustworthy and warlike. And if you let the people go by themselves, you'd have complete chaos. So, we're going to put the structure in place. And we're going to have a social contract that's implicit and let these people rule. The problem with that is who are the people that you're putting in power? It's a subset of the people that you just said were untrustworthy, irresponsible, and warlike. And not only are you putting them in a position of power, they have unilateral decision-making authority over you. So, logically, we got a problem here, because you've defined humans a certain way and you're taking some of those humans and giving them power. And not only that, but positions of power naturally attracts certain types of people. Not every politician is bad, but you can attract even psychopathic personalities who just crave power, they have no empathy. That's a psychological phenomenon that's acknowledged. So, that's really problematic on its face. But also, the way we do taxation. Getting to the point that you mentioned of trying to vote on each issue. We can be forced to fund things that we find to be immoral and still have to pay for.

AUBREY: We've given $68 billion to Ukraine. I don't like the fact that they're being invaded. I don't know what the fuck's going on out there. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. But where was my consent in that? It's a big whack of cash. It's a lot of people we could help and a lot of things. Maybe that's the right move. But there's no accounting for it. Who knows where it is? There's like a trillion that will disappear off the accounting. I don't know where it goes. What do you mean you don't know where it went? It's crazy.

MARK: If it were you, just you putting your money where you want it to go and pick the charities yourself, if you had causes that you really liked, it would be much more efficient in theory.

AUBREY: Yeah. And if you wanted to support the Ukrainian cause, you could donate to that. And again, I'm not saying that that's a bad allocation of money. But there was absolute non-consent. I don't know enough, really. I don't know what the deal is going on. Seems like Russia's being a dick. Most likely. But I don't know.

MARK: But in what other area of society are you forced to put money towards something that you don't necessarily know about? Or that you might even find outright immoral? So, that's a real problem. And then going back to the spiritual aspect of it, you're going to force someone to support a cause that he or she finds immoral. Wow. So, you could look at taxation that way. I'm flipping it on its head because we're not trained to look at government this way. We're trained to look at it as this benevolent force that's going to help. There are positive aspects to governments. And there have been good politicians throughout history. There's that aspect too. It's the both-and. But we've got to look at what this is objectively. Take away all of our biases. Do you fund things—

AUBREY: Do you think the last good politician was murdered? You think JFK might have been the outlier and he might have been dope as fuck?

MARK: I've seen so many theories on this. I think the official word from the National Archives is that there was a conspiracy involved. They think there was a conspiracy involved. Now why? I don't know.

AUBREY: I don't know. It seemed like when I look at everybody, it seemed like, he might have been the fucking dope one that actually split, his survival would have split the future. We would be on a different timeline. We're in the parallel universe of JFK getting killed. In another universe where he's alive, we're in a whole different universe. I don't know. Who knows? I actually thought Obama was going to be that dude, personally. When he first ran, I was like, we're back, baby. We got this. And I don't think he was horrible. But he certainly didn't live up to what my hopes and dreams were for the excellence that we needed. He had amazing dignity, super credibly dignified. Person who presented and some cool stories. Like my boy, Ben Nemtin got to shoot hoops with him in the White House. He was a dude. There was lots of good things about him. But he wasn't the guy that I hoped he would be from a leader standpoint. But it seems like JFK might have been that dude. Obviously, he probably was having sex with Marilyn Monroe. And there's probably some other weird shit that was going on. All that aside, I don't know.

MARK: Whoever it is, the things that I would look for in that person would be someone that is trying to shrink government, trying to make government less active in our lives, and wanting to decentralize power. I would look at that probably before anything else. Because that's someone who wants to reduce the violations of the non-aggression principle.

AUBREY: If you could have anybody be president right now, who would it be?

MARK: It's a tough one man? You need someone with real integrity that wouldn't be warped by the power that can overtake people. I'll talk about some people just generally and not as real candidates. But someone in the school of thought of these libertarians that I really respect in the Austrian school like Ron Paul, who's not running anymore. But he talks about a lot of these principles.

AUBREY: I've always appreciated what he's had to share.

MARK: He talks about the non-aggression principle. That, to me, aligns with my values. That's a powerful thing. And there's some other people that talk similarly like Thomas Massie, Congressman. So, I would say anyone who's talking about non-aggression principle.

AUBREY: That's a big one for you. And I think it's a big one for me, too.

MARK: Because it encompasses so many things.

AUBREY: It's a guiding principle. It's at the foundation of the platform, I think. Cool. Politics, complicated.

MARK: Complicated. But for me to simplify it, smaller and less centralized.

AUBREY: And more localized.

MARK: And more localized. And what is the Great Reset one? They want a global, centralized, bigger government.

AUBREY: We got a case study going on in China. Let's just look what's going on there. And another one going on in North Korea. What's the, she's the political refugee that's been on Jordan Peterson's podcast? I forget her name. What? Yeonmi Park.

MARK: From North Korea?

AUBREY: Yeah. She gives the inside scoop of what's actually been going on and it's fucking terrifying.

MARK: That's the extreme of where it can go. But we're on that road. People are pointing to Canada a lot with the truckers. Their bank accounts were frozen. That's a scary thing.

AUBREY: Sure, and if we have CBDCs, then everything can be frozen not just your bank accounts, your whole money supply.

MARK: Yes, exactly.

AUBREY: And that's fucking scary.

MARK: To me, this is the technology part of the Great Reset. The pros of technology are there but how can it be used to control people? And it's tied into politics. They're all interrelated. So, economics next?

AUBREY: Sure.

MARK: It's related to politics, of course. But they want to—

AUBREY: Probably more than we think.

MARK: More than we think. And this again, this is one of the key principles—

AUBREY: It might entirely be politics, actually. It might be a money driven corporatocracy that's actually running the show universally. And actually, the World Economic Forum as the ambassadors of the true power of the world, which is money. That is actually the power force. Money itself is actually running everything. And when I asked Brett Weinstein what he thought the meta problem with our world is, he said it's the problem of money corrupting and capturing politicians, capturing controlling interests in this nefarious way.

MARK: Cronyism. And that's one of the other problems of having this government structure is that the government has control over the citizens, it can impose things against their will. And it can be influenced by other people who have the funding to say, just do this.

AUBREY: Not only can be, it is.

MARK: It is. In practice, it is.

AUBREY: And media is influenced by the advertising dollars and influenced by the government, which is influenced by campaign contributions. And it's this whole circle, right being captured.

MARK: Which then mind controls the public because they're only exposed to certain things, and they get repetition. One of my favorite quotes is from P. J. O'Rourke, who said, when buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. So, that's the problem with government intervention in the economy also, is that it can be influenced by the special interests who are funding the politicians to alter capitalism in whatever way that those other people want, who aren't even in the government. And that's what the Great Reset seems to be moving toward. And there's a phenomenon known as ESG, environmental, social, and governance, which is a really big buzzword these days that companies are abiding by ESG. And in some ways, that's a really good thing. Because we want to protect the environment, we want good social outcomes, we want good governance. But what is the version of that that's going to be imposed? That's the big question. And if people at the World Economic Forum or other influencers like them get to set the rules and get to say, this is our version of environment, this is our version of social, this is our version of governance. And if you don't do it, then you're going to have problems with the law or who knows what the problem is going to be? They get to then steer the whole economy and get to shape how businesses are run. And they can implement an ideology through that.

AUBREY: That's what's happening.

MARK: That's what's happening. And there's a book called "Woke, Inc." by Vivek Ramaswamy, which has been very popular. He goes through this. He's a finance guy himself, Harvard grad. And talks about how it's essentially the marriage of a woke ideology with capitalism to make a worse version of capitalism, where the winners of capitalism get to control the system, effectively, by influencing how capitalism is run. And it allows big companies to have this facade of benevolence. And maybe some of them are, but maybe some of them aren't. And they get to say, we care about justice. And we're following these ESG regulations. So, my point with all this is we have to be discerning again. There's a lot of compassion that can come with this, but we have to be discerning. And also, it's not a voluntary version of ESG, typically. What Klaus Schwab calls it is stakeholder capitalism, which is in opposition to shareholder capitalism, which is typical capitalism. So, a few definitions here. Capitalism is just people making exchanges voluntarily. So, you buy a bottle of water from me, that's capitalism. There's no intervention, there's no government saying it's evil, you guys can't exchange. So, capitalism is often demonized, and I think unfairly. It's allowing people to engage in consensual exchanges. And Murray Rothbard, who's one of my favorite economists in this area, he's an Austrian economist, he makes this point which is that some people in society will allow consenting adults to do things in the sexual domain and say, you got to be free to do that. But when it comes to consensual trade, that becomes a problem. So, it's sort of like this selective application of consensual relationships. And that's what capitalism really is.

AUBREY: One of the areas where you can apply the principle of non-aggression is non-aggression toward the environment, actually. There is some value to this, but you have to apply it first from the principle of non-aggression. First, from the protection of the collective commons. And you have to have some genuine integrity about this. My father politically was libertarian and so I was exposed to libertarian philosophy a lot growing up. But he was always like, I'm a more environmentally leaning libertarian, where I'm considering the sovereignty of the environment as something that we should treat the same way we treat the non-aggression principle towards people. That we can't unnecessarily violate the environment. And then actually, this is the place for government to create regulation in some ways, because obviously, we can see how this can go awry, where there's just strip mining, where there's just pools of toxic waste that's leaking into rivers and streams and then getting into our crops and animals. And also, the way that different glyphosate is used and the deleterious effects of that. So, you can't let capitalism just do whatever the fuck it wants at the cost of the environment. The environment has to have a voice. There's some legal activist groups like Earth Justice. And I don't know how good they're doing at it, but they're trying to give people a voice. I'm here representing the dolphins against these plastic companies. I'm here representing the Everglades against this. I'm here representing the water supply of this Northeast region or whatever. And I think there is a place for protecting and upholding the non-aggression principle to the environment, but it can very easily get twisted with idealism.

MARK: So, the way the Austrians handle this question of environmentalism is they say, it comes down to private property again. Where if there is a polluting entity that disrupts or harms your property, or even the air over your property, then you have a legal right to go after them. They are initiating aggression against your property through their pollution. So, what Rothbard says is the problem with the environmental stuff is the inability of government to protect people's property. And if they did that properly, then they would hold the right people accountable. So, that's how they correct it. And there are also some examples that the Austrian economists give of highly centralized governments where they control the economy, where they destroy the environment. So, the USSR is an example. There's a book called "Ecocide in the USSR," that they did the most damage that you can imagine to their country. And they were a socialistic, communistic controlled country. So, it comes down to who's the controller and are they going to be competent to actually take care of the environment and protect the property? So, the Austrians would say, the private property owner has to be the responsible one. And the argument I actually make in my liberty book is that it's not just voluntaryism that we should be moving toward. And this applies to the Great Reset too. I call it non-dual voluntaryism. So, I look at politics from basically two dimensions. One is the metaphysical dimension and the other is the political dimension. The political dimension is either, you're on one end of the spectrum, a voluntarist, where you just want it all to be consensual. And the other end of it is statism, where you believe in the state to rule. So, I think we need to be moving toward voluntaryism. That's my argument. But then there's another axis of what I call non-duality, highly spiritual, the acknowledgement that we're all interconnected versus scientific materialism or physicalism. The idea that we are just biological robots in a meaningless universe, to quote Alex Securus. That's how I used to think. So, it creates a two-by-two matrix. You have the political axis and the metaphysical axis. And what I'm arguing is we need to be moving toward the non-dual and the voluntarist society together. Why is that important? Because in a voluntarist society, people have lots of liberty to do what they want as long as they're not initiating aggression. But how are those individual decisions going to be made? If they have a spiritual compass, they'll want to make better decisions for themselves and for the environment. That's the argument I'm making. So, it's both the metaphysical and the political together.

AUBREY: How do you handle the situation where, let's say, my wife's grandfather, he lives in Hawaii still. And let's say hypothetically that pollution from China is impacting his private property in Hawaii. So, what is he going to do? Is he going to file a lawsuit against China, or some factory in Guangzhou? It becomes difficult with the nation states and how interconnected the whole world is. That becomes also a challenge. I'm not for this one world government idea, but you start to actually understand that fuck, there does need to be some kind of cross border, at least legal accountability because you can... If I do a bunch of pollution on this side of the line and it's coming over to this side of the line, because pollution doesn't actually recognize borders, it doesn't give a shit. Or you do something upstream and then the stream goes across over another country, but you can't do anything about something where it is upstream. That's a problem. So, in some ways, that would be an argument for at least some form of global court system, at the very least. But the problem with setting that up is you're also then backdooring in all of the totalitarian bullshit as well. That's also complicated.

AUBREY: Which is also scary, because then you get this oligarchic warlord mentality where you're getting this tribal infighting over perceived violations. It's a sticky wicket, as they say, for sure. I think, first of all, we got to agree on the principles. And then we got to collectively come together and figure out the solutions. But the problem is that we're not really agreeing on first principles, like non-aggression.

MARK: And also looking at the alternative. Like you just mentioned a lot of good points about how this could go wrong. And the alternative is, we've got governments and they're doing the same thing. They've got wars going on and killing people. So, the alternative is not so good. So, what I'm referring to is, I call it a less imperfect solution.

AUBREY: I'm with you, man. I'm with you. And really, I think from a meta perspective, what we're talking about is getting to... What I'm getting from this is the necessity for shared values, shared first principles. It's something that I talked to Rabbi, Dr. Marc Gafni a lot about is the necessity to establish common first principles and first values of the cosmos, evolution, non-aggression, personal sovereignty. Certain things that are really, actually universally agreed upon. And then how the logistics play out, we do our best. But we have to agree on the first values and first principles.

MARK: That's how I look at it too. And to me, the first principles are built into the fabric of reality. That's what the evidence points toward.

AUBREY: It's not a first principle if it's not. It has to be true all the way up and all the way down.

MARK: And yet, what is the Great Reset talking about in terms of these... These are metaphysical principles we're talking about. Silent. They're not talking about—

AUBREY: And that's what you're talking about, what's omitted.

MARK: It's omitted. They're not talking about a spiritual revolution, which I think, and I know you think this is important too. We got to get connected. And that's not what they're talking about. And there are people that are associated with the Great Reset, like Yuval Noah Harari. And they take on a very materialistic worldview, which is the idea that life is random and meaningless, that consciousness, the reason that we are aware is solely because of our brain. And when the brain shuts off, that's the end of your consciousness. That's it. And if you believe that sort of thing, life doesn't have fundamental meaning. You can do things without metaphysical consequences. There's no life review. That's BS, that's superstition, under this materialistic perspective.

AUBREY: So, then life review, and the eternity of our existence beyond the physical dimensions is also a first principle and first value that we have to kind of agree on to actually understand justice.

MARK: I'm with you.

AUBREY: So, that becomes another one. So, we're starting to propose what these first principles of first values actually start to look like, that can then shape everything underneath it. And how that happens because we have to get from here to there. It'd be one thing if we were riding that train all the way through and we had years to evolve the complexities of how that works out. And we were creating our own. In the Hebraic lineage, there's the Torah, which is the guiding principles and stories, and there's the Bible, and there's these guiding principles and stories of the divine, which are often also wildly misinterpreted. But then there's the Talmud, which is exploring, in these like 50-50 balls, what do you do in this situation? And Ari Shaffir does a great job. I mentioned this in another podcast. Talking about some of these somewhat ridiculous cases that they came up with. Like they have a mandate against not eating pork products. And they actually talk about in the Talmud what happens. At what portion of ham that gets put in a soup are you not allowed to eat the soup? And they draw a line at 1/60 ham. If it's less than 1/60? ham, go ahead, eat the soup, no big deal. More than 1/60, you got to throw the soup out. And so, you have to start to figure shit out. You have to start to draw little borders here. Which is also ridiculous. But that would take time to evolve. But fundamentally, the first principle, and not that I agree with this, even though that's my lineage. I don't have an issue, particularly with pork versus other things. I think the ethical treatment of animals is important. But they're trying to sort out, where do we draw the line? And it's going to be imperfect because that's the existence that we have. But we at least would have time to start figuring out all the little rules that we agreed upon and made sense.

MARK: But it starts with that acknowledgement of a spiritual dimension to our existence. That's fundamental. And this started my personal journey. In 2016, I was a hardcore materialist, working in finance in Silicon Valley, thought life was meaningless, and hit a wall in a lot of ways. Because it's hard to live that way and deal with the ups and downs if you think there's no meaning behind it. But then I came across the science of consciousness and that there were rigorous scientific studies out there that were suggesting that our consciousness is not stuck in our skull. That psychic phenomena, which sounds like science fiction, there are scientists running those studies. I'm on the board of an organization called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It was founded by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, who wanted to be able to study these things at an independent organization. Because at mainstream academic institutions, you're typically shunned for this sort of thing. Can't get tenure if you want to study psychic phenomena. So, that's part of this building the first principles, I think, is building scientific open mindedness. Whether it's consciousness studies, or around the pandemic. There's been a lot of suppression and censorship. And Dr. Mario Beauregard, who's a neuroscientist in this area, who studies spiritual phenomena from a scientific perspective, he said in an interview last year at a neuroscientific institute in Canada where he does stuff. He had funding to look at scientific stuff from the spiritual realm. And he was told that as long as I'm here, this person who was the head of the organization, as long as I'm running this place, you will never run these studies here. So, it's something I'm coming across a lot in my research that there's this suppression. And why is this so important? Because exactly what you said. We need to get to some first principles. And some people like me, I needed science, to get me over that hump to be open to these phenomena. And if you're going to suppress the science, that could help suppress our collective movement toward these first principles.

AUBREY: Fundamentally, suppression is anti-scientific, entirely. Actually undermines the entirety of science itself, which is the process of asking questions and testing your hypothesis. How do you actually say that you're pro science if you're suppressing information and the review and analysis of alternate hypotheses? You're not. You're in the dogma. You're in a religion. You're a fundamentalist at that point, not a scientist.

MARK: Yep. And that's the irony and hypocrisy of all this is it's anti-scientific somehow. So, part of the let's say positive, Great Reset is, I think, open mindedness and openness of ideas. Like this notion that certain ideas are dangerous, that is a slippery slope to me. Where you can't express an opinion because that opinion, I talk about this in my culture chapter, that words are violence, that they're synonymous. The economist, Thomas Sowell says it's almost like people are saying that a match is a forest fire. You need someone to light the match and put it in the forest—

AUBREY: And it needs to catch.

MARK: And needs to catch. There are steps in the middle. And this idea of trying to suppress words, I get very concerned about. And the World Economic Forum, among other bodies like it, they talk about the dangers of, quote unquote, disinformation and misinformation. And who determines what those words mean?

AUBREY: There's this strange tangential thing that's happening with the World Economic Forum. Because obviously, my path wasn't through the gates of science. My math was through direct experience through my work with psychedelic medicines and the great traditions around the world. There is a variety of different psychedelic medicine practitioners and shamans that were invited to the World Economic Forum summit to offer their medicine. And I'm looking like, what? What is this about? Now, of course, there's the nefarious application because as we know, Moctezuma was serving his priests teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods, psilocybin mushrooms as they were ripping the hearts out of thousands of people they were sacrificing and then feeding the gods through Huitzilopochtli, the hummingbird god, the war god's mouth. And they were using psychedelics for that. So, it's not like psychedelics are all good. They're a tool that can expand your consciousness. But I think when you look at consciousness, you have to look at consciousness as both all the dark and all the light. There's polarity in at least most of the strata of consciousness. And so, psychedelics will open the gates. But depending on where you're looking and what energy you're refining, you're going to find greater access to those entities and those energies. So, I wonder, is this some even deeper nefarious plan? Or is this actually they're trying to figure it out the best they can and they're using the tools that they think might work? And maybe it will work. Maybe Klaus will be like, I had this Ayahuasca journey. You won't believe it. I've been totally fucked up. I'm so sorry, y'all. I got a new plan. Wouldn't that be a curveball? That'd be the surprise of the century. But I don't know. I suppose it's possible.

MARK: Or come out with a new reset. I don't know.

AUBREY: The Great Awakening, which is a nomenclature that we just found out both of us is kind of going around as the antithesis of the Great Reset. And maybe they merge.

MARK: It's hard to say. It's hard to know and I—

AUBREY: Seems unlikely.

MARK: It's hard to know the intent of any individual. And that's another reason I try not to point fingers at people because you just don't know. They might actually think they're doing a good thing. But there are also psychopathic people that want to control the world and that's happened throughout history. They've gotten positions of power. AUBREY: And here's another thing to look at. Psychopathic people, yes, for sure. I've encountered dark energies and dark entities that exist in the psychic slash astral realms. I've encountered them. And we know this. They're in all of our stories. Whether it's the Gnostics talking about the Archons, or whether it's the ideas that Demiurge, or whether it's the enemy, the devil, whatever, Zoroastrianism, pretty much splits consciousness in two and talks about the dark side and the light side. And then there's a unicity, there's a union of the dualism that ultimately you can get to as well. But nonetheless, all of these things are available. But basically, the idea could be that they're not psychopathic, they're just serving a different energy, they're serving a different god. And they're actually the loyally and devotedly serving a different god and getting access and power from that. And I think you have to suppose that that's possible as well. That this is not actually a psychopathology. This is actually just devotees of a different energetic signature that is more anti life than life. That's possible, too.

MARK: I'm glad you brought that up. Because the way you're describing it is how I'm starting to see the world myself and I talk about this in my book "An End to Upside Down Contact." I talk about contact with non-human entities, both the dark and the light. And the theme that emerges is that there are these dark entities out there and some people worship them. And they will do horrific rituals to invoke the beings who seem to feed off of fear and terror and the destruction of innocence. So, people can be influenced by those energies. Sometimes subtly, but other times, like you say, explicitly where they're serving a master. And there's also maybe more subtle manipulations like blackmail, and bribery, and threats that can control people's behavior where they just, they go along with certain things. So, I just mention this because I see a lot of finger pointing out there, as if people know for sure what a person's intention is and why they do things. And we just don't know.

AUBREY: I think it's a lot safer to point at anti life energy or life energy as a loose idea. And then people are both typically participating in some combination of both. I think it would be very rare to find someone who's pure good and pure evil. I don't think that's the way our system is built up. We're a mix of all of the others and we choose our course and we line up somewhere on the spectrum. But we contain the entirety of the polarity. And I think part of actually being good is to recognize your badness. To recognize that there's pleasure available in these darker impulses. And I think we get this. And for a pointing out instruction, a thought experiment. Imagine you watched a movie with a horrible villain. Villain is doing fucking horrible shit. They've killed the hero's family, they've tortured people, they've just done monstrous things. The hero gets the upper hand. Hero gets the upper hand, and the hero looks them in the eye and as they capture them, they go, and your death will not be quick. And everybody in the audience is like, yeah. What is everybody cheering for? Torture. Infliction of suffering. But we just have a justification that allows us to enter into the ecstasy of torturing somebody. We're all there. We've all been in a movie. In "300" where the queen, Gorgo, she stabs the traitorous cunt, I don't know who his character was but the guy who was undermining Leonidas and the thing after he basically forces her to have sex with him to try and save her husband. And he goes, this will not be over quickly, and you will not enjoy it. And you're like, motherfucker. And then she grabs his knife and then stabs him and whispers in his ear, this will not be quick, and you won't enjoy it. And you're like, fuck, yeah. You know what I mean? It's like we're participating in the joy of righteous, in our mind, righteous murderer, suffering. But there's joy in it. And that's recognizing that all of these feelings are available to us. And it's our choice as to where we line up on the spectrum. And I think an acknowledgement of our badness and our capacity to receive pleasure from our badness is necessary to say, I get it. I have the badness within me, and I could enjoy it, but I won't. Because of things like life review, and because of things about the choice, about who we are as a person. And I think that's also necessary to navigate.

MARK: David Hawkins, a spiritual teacher, he called it the juice that we extract psychologically from watching certain, what we consider to be justice or something, or revenge. And we get a pleasure from it. There's a psychological incentive to go after that. And I think you're right to point out that part of this evolutionary journey is to acknowledge that that aspect is within all of us. And it's the choice of what we're going to go toward. The way that I frame it in my book "An End to Upside Down Contact," because I looked at all these energies out there that people are reporting, throughout history, throughout different cultures all over the world. That our brain is effectively tapping into stuff all the time. And there's a book called "The Science of Channeling" by Helané Wahbeh. She's the director of research at Institute of Noetic Sciences. And she says, basically, we might be channeling stuff without our explicit knowledge of it. Where do our thoughts and creative ideas come from? Who knows? Maybe they're being influenced by things we don't see with our eyes. And we also have this ability to control our mind, to try to steer it in a certain direction, to try to choose what we call, quote unquote, good over, quote unquote, evil. And I think that's essential in this positive reset too, is acknowledging that these things exist within all of us. And to go back to Ken Wilber. He talks about waking up, cleaning up, and growing up as different aspects of our evolution. That's really stuck with me. Because waking up, that's really important too, acknowledging our spiritual dimension and living a life that way. But cleaning up is really important. That's looking at the darkness within us individually and societally. And I know psychedelic work goes into this. But there's a lot of other shadow work that people can do to look at that darkness. But the key is to acknowledge that it's there and not to do a spiritual bypass and say, I don't want to look at that.

AUBREY: It's all rainbows and butterflies over here. Then actually, your darker actions are in the shadow. Your own viciousness and aggression goes kind of underground and you don't actually see where you're being vicious. You could be pretending like, I'm just sending this person love. But meanwhile, you're just gossiping amongst your friends and actually spreading poison in your own vicious way. But you're unaware of it because ostensibly, instead of being like, hey, fuck you, which is the authentic response that you would feel. You're saying, it's all love. I got a place for you on my altar. And then meanwhile, you're being vicious. And you're not even aware that you're being vicious. But that anger has to go somewhere. Instead of outwardly expressing it and allowing it to move through you, you hide from it. And I think this is the this is the problem of shadow, fundamentally.

MARK: And this happens with spiritual teachers, too. Like the fallen gurus. They haven't addressed certain shadow. Mariana Caplan, who's examined lots of enlightenment experiences and teachers. She says, it's money, sex, and power. Those are the three things that will corrupt someone who might even be, quote unquote, enlightened in certain ways. But I think it's also important, as our society evolves forward, to acknowledge the dark side of all that. And I'm reminded now of the story that's really stuck with me. David Hawkins, spiritual teacher. He wrote "Power vs. Force," but a lot of other books, too, that have had a big impact on me. And he claims that as he was going through his enlightenment process and surrendering all of his attachments, reaching states of bliss that people have described all over the place. He said he was in this place where it was like just him. So, he was beyond his body. And then he said, a knowingness came, presumably an entity. That's what he was describing. And said, you've transcended all of your personal karma. All power is yours, take it. And he thought for a minute. He said, it can happen in an instant. But he was like, wait a second, if I am everything, why do I need power over others? I reject this. He calls it the Luciferic temptation. And he said in his teachings, he wanted to tell that as much as he could, because he felt like there was a responsibility to teach people that story, because everyone will encounter it at some point on their path, that you'll be tempted by something. But that's acknowledging that there is deception and there is temptation. Some people don't want to acknowledge that. Some spiritual teachings say, we shouldn't even look at those things because it's too much negative energy.

AUBREY: Luciferian kind of concepts are interesting. It's something that's evolved for me over time. But I like the way that Dr. John Churchill, the Mahayana Buddhist described it. As Luciferian translated as the light bringer. But what it is, is the false light. It feels like light. It feels like lifeforce and feels like the fuck of the constant, fuck of the cosmos that you're getting. It feels like it, but it's not actually. It's what Marc Gafni would call pseudo-Eros. It has similar qualities to what authentic power, and authentic love, and authentic expression of your sexuality looks like. But it's just twisted slightly. And that's where it throws you off course. It's the false light. It's bringing the light and saying, here's your special little light, rather than light is everywhere. And it's yours and not yours always. And Luciferian tries to say, no, it's yours. It's your light. You get this, you get to wield it. And that makes it the false light. And I was like, that's a pretty interesting way to look at it.

MARK: It's discernment again. It's the same theme to acknowledge that there can be a trick. To not just follow... David Hawkins used to talk about the distinction between perception and essence. Perception is what something appears to be on the surface, like judging a book by its cover. The essence is what something actually is. So, is it the false light, what we just perceive as something benevolent? Or what's underneath it?

AUBREY: And I think a disambiguating. If you want to ascribe to this pantheon of dark entities and disambiguating Lucifer from satanic energy. Which I think is the acknowledgement that this is not light, this is darkness. It's not trying to candy coat it. The satanic energy's like, no, this is darkness. You're actually taking something innocent, beautiful, full of life and you're destroying it and violating it. And there's going to be a pleasure response or some kind of devotional action that you get, or some kind of reward of some sort from this, but there's no trickery.

MARK: It's explicit.

AUBREY: Its explicit. And I think that's a kind of reasonable disambiguation. I've encountered dark entities. I Don't steer my ship there in the psychedelic journey. So, I don't know enough about it to comment from a place of Gnosis, but it seems to make sense if you start to look at the way that these different energies can appear. And then I think there's a value to deifying... Because these energies exist and where they aggregate, where they clump, where they find commonality, you can deify that and then actually understand that even if that deity, you can say it's real or not real, but whatever, it's still an aggregation of energy. And that aggregation of energy that has certain qualities. So, go ahead and make a symbol for it, just like we use words, so that you can actually understand it and call it what it is and then be aware of what it is. It's just a way to actually organize our consciousness. And I think that's actually helpful. That's why I think actually the polytheism and the animism is actually oftentimes more helpful than the monotheism. Because when you get to the god is everything and everywhere and that's all there is, and there's no other deities. It's true. I think all the deities participate in the one god. But how does that help you make decisions? And how does that help you figure out what to do? It's very hard. Because if all is everything all the time, then all is God, then what's good and what's bad? And certainly, some things feel good. A hug is different than a punch in the gut. It's just different. But is that God's work? If God is everything all the time, all at once, then of course it is. But that doesn't help. You know what I mean? I think we're just missing, sometimes, an intermediate step of the polytheism and animism, which is just the breaking down of reality in these different forces, which then includes that and then transcends it to the recognition of the all is God principle.

MARK: There's an acknowledgement that these things exist that's needed. To deny that is denying part of reality. And also, it can make one susceptible to some of these deceptions. And also, some might even say that psychopathic energies, what we call psychopathic, like you say, is just tapping into the dark force. Psychopathy is a reflection of dark energy, in a sense. And without understanding that that dark energy exists and wants to take away innocence and wants to torture and bring about fear, it's difficult to even relate and to acknowledge that's possible. And I think it's really important when evaluating things happening in the world, that there can be dark energies influencing stuff that want us to be more in fear. Because if you ignore it and say, no, it's just all light, love and light and it's just unity, then you won't think about the downsides. And this is again, back to the beginning, compassion with discernment.

AUBREY: So, I think what we're really covering here is we're covering the differences between the spiritual dimension of Great Reset ideology, which is, there's no higher power. There's no fundamental meaning. None of these deities or energies actually exist. And this is kind of this postmodern Harari, everything is just a story. And no story is fundamentally different or better than another story. That's loosely, if I'm going to paraphrase, what he's trying to say. And that's why he's paraded on stage at all these WEF conferences because that's in their spiritual ideology, which is an inherent justification for basically doing anything because there's no first principles and no first values. There's no life review. There's no existence of anything else. So, your story is as good as anybody else's story. And if your story includes infanticide, it's just your story. That's fine. It's just good as a story which says, no, don't murder children, or molest them, or anything. That's fundamentally wrong. And that's participating in a darker energy. And while we acknowledge that energy exists, and certainly can acknowledge it potentially even has a place in the cosmos, it doesn't have a place here. Not here. Not now. Not on Earth. Not on our watch.

MARK: And there's a duty, I think, to make sure that doesn't happen on our watch. I see this sometimes in spiritual teachings, like complacency or passivity. And then going back to David Hawkins, he told another story that stuck with me. He referenced Ramana Maharshi, this enlightened sage from India who said that the world that we see doesn't exist. And at some level, like you're saying, Aubrey, that's true. This is an illusion. We're all just one. But what Hawkins said is that most people are not operating at that level. Their reality is not that the world we see doesn't exist. They are operating in a world where there is suffering. And Hawkins said that there is a spiritual duty, therefore, to try to alleviate suffering. Because people are not operating from the reality of unity consciousness. That's not their every day. It's irresponsible to ignore it.

AUBREY: I don't think anybody is actually. I don't think that's part of the game that we're in. One of the spiritual teachers that I admire the most is a teacher named Mooji, Mooji Baba. Unbelievable. They call him, I don't know, I think the laughing sage because he finds the laughter, the cosmic giggle in all of these aspects. And I've loved watching his content and I listened to some of his meditations. So, all praise to Mooji. However, when he's going from his ashram to another place, he has his disciples and people who are with him, that hold a parasol above his head so that he doesn't get in the sun. He doesn't like being in the sun. He's, I think Jamaican-born person, Jamaican descent. He doesn't like the sun. Doesn't like being in the sun. Doesn't like being hot. Okay. So, even that, if you just said, everything is all one, the sun is the same as the shade and it doesn't matter, why would you have a parasol? You can't have both? Even at the highest levels of consciousness, there's still preference, which is discrimination, which is saying, I prefer no sun over sun. And so therefore, there's going to be a parasol that's going to accompany me when I'm walking on a very sunny day. Great. But let's just acknowledge that. Acknowledge there's no escaping the laws and existence of this reality. Certain things are going to feel good on the body. Certain things are not, period.

MARK: To do otherwise would be to deny reality. And that does happen sometimes. It's very counterintuitive. But people can justify weird things by saying, there's no you. There's only the collective. There is no individual. Things like that. Which is partially true, but not fully.

AUBREY: True but partial. What of these categories did we miss? I feel like we skipped at least one.

MARK: Briefly on the economic part. We talked... Stakeholders—

AUBREY: So, let's go into this. The Great Reset came out with this famous line, you will own nothing, and you will be happy. That is some fucking real dystopian rhetoric there.

MARK: So, that's referring to a 2016 article in "Forbes" and also a video that was on YouTube that has been taken down, that refers to the world in 2030. So, some people say, they were just laying out a hypothetical world. It's not their plan. The people who defend it will say that. But it is a scary concept, the idea that private property will be limited. They will frame it as a shared economy. You're going to be sharing things. But also, in that "Forbes" article, the author writes, I'm going to have no privacy and I'm okay with that. But I just hope they don't use that against me. Given what's happening in the world, that's a scary thing, lack of privacy. And then they start talking about things like AI and the impact of robots in the world. Very sci-fi, dystopian kind of future, where you don't have sovereignty and there are machines that are doing everything for humans. And maybe even merge with humans. This gets into the technology aspect of the Great Reset, like transhumanism. Where a human being becomes merged with technology under the auspices of wanting to enhance the human. And maybe in some cases, technology can. But the danger is, what can that do to our spiritual connection? That's what I wonder.

AUBREY: Before you start trying to tinker with the human, how about you fucking understand it first? I would say that's a prerequisite. Let's maybe hold for a moment because we have no fucking clue how majestic a human being actually. Truly. So, until we understand that, let's not tinker with it. If you were messing with a nuclear reactor, you wouldn't be like, not really sure how this works but let's just throw some pieces on here and see what happens. You got to understand it. And that means not only understanding the mechanical, Newtonian physiology and biology, but it's also understanding the metaphysical reality of a human being. And that's something that I think is so lacking in this narrative of transhumanism.

MARK: Yes. And part of it is the idea that because there is no spiritual dimension, we can play god. You were alluding to this before. People can just become gods and tinker with biology in whatever way they want.

AUBREY: Also, without consent.

MARK: Without consent. And I wonder about DNA. There's so much we don't know about DNA. And what happens when we start tinkering with it? What does that mean spiritually? I don't know.

AUBREY: We're running an experiment. We have a, quote, vaccine that's actually making changes to your RNA DNA landscape. This is fundamentally what we're doing. And we're running the experiment now. We violated the principle of non-aggression because this was not consented upon for most people. There was mandates. There was at least strongly applied pressure. Like if you want to keep your job, which maybe you need to support your family and blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's not need in the fact that you would die, we wouldn't kill you. However, you couldn't have a job, you couldn't do this thing. And in certain countries, it was much worse than even we had here. At least there were certain states that were more reasonable. And also, this is fundamentally permanently altering your DNA. And we haven't really done any longitudinal studies on that. But you don't get the choice anyways. That's not right. That's just not right.

MARK: Coercion was used. Do this or you're going to lose your job. And that's a form of aggression. That's a violation of the non-aggression principle. It wasn't injecting it in someone's arm, but it was making it difficult. It wasn't fully voluntary. And like you say, we just don't know the consequences of this stuff. And it's hard to measure, maybe. We might not have the tools to be able to measure spiritual connection as it relates to our DNA, for example. I'm just theorizing here. Because we don't know a lot about DNA and it's—

AUBREY: How much is required from the vessel itself if we are radio transmitters to cosmic frequencies? Certainly, I've felt that in my own body. It's far harder to connect. Try to meditate when you're really sick, or things are really off in your body of a bunch of information. It's not nearly as easy. The radio's not tuned in the right way. But when you feel real good, you've been fasted, you're really clean, the radio's in pristine condition, you can receive some powerful connections.

MARK: So, we don't know what we're doing. It's like a science fiction experiment to do this sort of thing. And that's what the Great Reset literature talks about. And they even acknowledge the potential for dystopia within technology. They don't acknowledge the metaphysical part of it. But even the metaverse, what does that mean metaphysically? To put someone's consciousness in a fake world. Could that be used for good? Let's think about psychotherapy. Maybe you could reenact a situation and overcome fears or overcome trauma using the metaverse. So, there are positives to VR. But how could it go wrong? If someone's consciousness is trapped in a fake world and they're not interacting in the world, they're not spiritually evolving in their physical vessel in the same way, that's not being considered.

AUBREY: It's interesting, because some part of me is like, if you create a really dope VR game and people want to play it, my libertarian is like, go for it. However, the transparency about what is coercive under the surface, I think that's the problem with the social media algorithms because it's a black box. And because of what they're actually coercing you to do, it's not a neutral tool entirely. The system is built to be manipulative. And if the manipulation is covert instead of overt, that's a violation. But speaking of which, I think Elon is talking about open sourcing and publicly putting all of the Twitter algorithms out. I don't know if he's done that already. He's already exposed a bunch of stuff. I think it's really cool. And I'm a big believer that actually, this is going to create another... Yes, there's all this Great Reset stuff. But there's also some powerful badass people who hopefully are on the good side. And I know some people will be like, Elon is just one of them, blah, blah, blah. Maybe. But I don't think so personally. It's not what I feel. Again, we don't know. We don't know the intentions or ideas of anybody. But I don't feel that way. He's gotten a hold of Twitter right now and he's exposing all of the disgusting underbelly of everything that was going on under the surface. And then it's going to illuminate everything and then really put pressure on Meta and all of these other networks to say, shit, look at what Twitter discovered they were doing. And can we assume that you guys weren't doing something similar or worse? Of course, we can't. You were all peas in a pod. And so, while we can't necessarily prove it, we can assume that this was what was going on. So, he can then genuinely create a new, free, actually non-aggressive and non-manipulative platform where people can speak and share ideas, and everything is in the public domain. And if you get stuck on Twitter and all you're doing is looking at Twitter for six hours a day, and he's like, here's the ways in which Twitter is trying to grab your attention. Be aware of this. We're open sourcing all of this. You got to be mindful. That's the same argument with drugs. Got to be mindful. If you do these substances, it's going to alter your consciousness in this way. It's going to be highly pleasurable. We're going to let you know what's up with it. Your choice. Your life. And I think that's fair play.

MARK: But the transparency is important. And going back to this free-market idea is that transparency will be encouraged through the market because people are going to want to buy services when there's transparency. Think about any product. You're going to be more likely... If you have two equivalent products and one's more transparent than the other, that's the only difference, which one will you choose? Probably the one that's more transparent. You're serving customers better and therefore, you're probably going to profit more by bringing about transparency. So, we'll see what happens with Twitter. It might attract more people.

AUBREY: I think long term, it's going to be that way. I think they're going to get viciously attacked. And they're going to get a bunch of people, where if you're on Twitter, it means XYZ about you. And there's going to be a lot of pushback as there always will be. We'll see. I think we're in a time where there's certain areas where people, they're not comfortable attacking. And I think this is actually the genius of the new psychedelic renaissance. Particularly with what MAPS has done with the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. They're doing the studies on treatment-resistant PTSD for first responders, and military. And one thing you can't do, even if you're deep into the woke ideology of the far left, you can't attack first responders and military. They're like a sacred cow. You just can't. You can attack the policies, you can attack all of that, but you can't do that. Even in the very highly politicized situation where the police moved into Washington DC and the National Guard moved into Washington DC, the left was still championing the military and championing that because you know you can't attack... Of course, you can attack police, obviously. And then we saw that happen. But generally, this kind of first responders, veterans kind of thing, we can't do that anymore. And I think that's where psychedelics have gotten this protective bubble around them. And also, you can't attack mental health. You can't attack people trying to treat depression because that's also woven into the pharma, which has captured all the media, which is promoting different things to label things as depression and treat it. So, it starts to undermine the system in such a fundamental way that you can't. And so, it's this interesting, strategic gameboard that's happening right now. I don't think MAPS necessarily did this on purpose, but maybe a little bit, where they're like, if we just focus on these people, people won't attack what we're doing because you can't attack these people. They're protected in the cultural zeitgeist.

MARK: And they also tend to focus on the integration aspect of working with a therapist, in addition to just taking the substance. So, they're focusing on a holistic aspect, which is harder to attack too.

AUBREY: For sure. So, a lot of intelligence behind it. This is 4D Chess that is going on right now. And I think we can wish for a time where there is no strategy at play. But this is a debate that I have in my own mind. Where's the place for strategy? And where's the place for just radical, messianic truth. I'm just going to speak my piece and whatever Eros come may come? And fuck it. And I think the impulse is just like, share everything, hold no opinions back. Be slayed if you're slayed, cancelled, if you're canceled, deplatformed if you're deplatformed. But is that really the best thing for the world? It's a tough personal call for all of us.

MARK: I'm with you. I have the same questions when I write these books and even do interviews. What do I want to cover? I have to think about it. Because the, I don't know, there's a part of me that just wants to say as much truth as is out there and not worry about it. But then how much should be strategic given the world that we live in? It's probably a balance.

AUBREY: I think strategy has a seat at the table. I think there's a problem when you... And this is something that Marc Gafni talks about. You get a problem when you take one value out of the field of values. And I think this is an error that a lot of people make in ethics in general. They'll take one value, isolate it from the field of values, and say this is the value. So, if you say truth is the value. Yes, it is a virtue. It is, it is a value. It is a virtue, but it's not the only one. There's the virtue of do the most good and do no harm. These principles. We got to weigh these. We got to weigh these. What's my ability to do the most good? What's also my allegiance to the truth? What's my allegiance to do no harm in all of these different things? So, as soon as you've raised the whole field, you build out your field of value and virtue and move them all together, then I think you can have a more comprehensive picture. Because otherwise, this platonic idea of this is all the way, all or nothing binary, you're either honest fully and transparent fully, or you're not, I honor that. And I think we admire that when we see it. When we see a hero in a movie that's like that, we're like, yes. I think we're drawn to that. But it is a constant personal decision. And I find myself leaning more towards less and less strategy. That tends to be the trend where I'm where it's going. Less strategic, more just feel it, listen to the universe, and go with it.

MARK: That's been my trend, too. Because when I wrote my first book, I was still working in Silicon Valley. So, I was really like, I'm going to talk about psychic abilities and past lives? I said, I've got to do this and I'm going to just prove it with science, so I'm covered. And now, writing books about aliens and the Great Reset, clearly my filter is gone.

AUBREY: And I think it's also a reflection of the way that the collective consciousness is shifting. It's now more reasonable to talk about these things. And I think it's also important to not get swept away. I think it builds credibility and trust when you actually recognize the faults in the areas and the sides that that are traditionally in your camp. So, for me, I talk about it all the time and I think, I probably think that most astrology is a bunch of bullshit. And most psychic readings are also a bunch of bullshit, and actually oftentimes more harmful than they are helpful. However, sometimes it's not. And potentially, there's some really key guidance that you can get from these fields. But you only have credibility if you actually say, there's going to be a lot of people pissed that I don't like astrology or gene keys, or all of these different things. Personally, for me, I'm not convinced. I think a lot of this is Barnum effect, Forer effect. It's a lot of confirmation bias. When you hear something and then you attribute it to... I think a lot of factors are going on when most of this is bullshit. But yet tomorrow, I've got Paul Selig coming on the podcast who channels wisdom from the Guides, and I fucking believe him. I also have Matias de Stefano who's talking to me about past lives from his post Atlantean life in the city of Kem. And he's singing me Atlantean songs and I'm crying because I know they're true. And like both. But that's credibility is to be like, I don't accept everything. But this is what I do believe. This is what I don't believe. And same in politics. And that was an issue I had with Trump supporters fundamentally and also anti-Trump people. He's not all of one thing or all of the other thing. You can argue that he's a fucking idiot in a lot of categories. And I think there's a very strong case that he did some actually intelligent things as well. And some things were actually productive. You have to look at both of those. Or else, I inherently don't trust you. If you're just a black and white thinker, that's fundamentalist ideology. That's not rational thought.

MARK: There's nuance in everything, just like you're saying about the nature of reality. There's oneness and there's duality and there's beings too. And with regard to the psychic stuff, I'm with you that it's not all real. But there are some that are real, and there have been studies done on them. And it's statistically provable. It's not 100% accuracy. But that's metaphysically really significant. Wow. If you can know things beyond what chance would predict, that means we don't understand science as well as we think we do. And to me, that's the significance more than anything. Our paradigm has to shift to accommodate some of these, quote unquote, anomalies.

AUBREY: My personal theory is that part of what is possible is what is in accord with the collective field of belief. And this is something I've talked to Charles Eisenstein about, Matias about. The things that happened during the time of Matias's life in the civilization of Kem because of the field of belief, were fundamentally different than what's possible now. Because the field of belief actually informs reality as to what is possible. And I feel that shifting and I actually think far more, quote, magical things are going to become available and start happening than we could ever fathom because actually, they weren't possible for a while. Except maybe in the rarest circumstances where there was a microcosm of a field of belief where you had everybody in a room that was abiding by a certain field of belief that created a bubble within the greater collective field of belief. But the moment you insert a scientist who's participating in a different field of belief, it breaks the bubble and you're back into the collective field of belief. So, that same phenomenon, some psychic ability, or something is no longer possible when the field of belief is broken. This is just an idea that I have. But I think the collective field of belief is shifting and I'm here for it. I'm excited. I think we're going to see some really cool shit happen.

MARK: It seems like there's a shift for sure. I've had a personal shift, but I've seen other people as well in the last few years. And the way I think about it metaphysically that, to me, makes it very possible what you're saying, is if we regard all of reality at the fundamental level, to be consciousness, that we're all interconnected as a part of... It's like Bernardo Kastrup, the philosopher. He says that all reality is one universal consciousness, like an infinite stream of water, where each of us is a whirlpool within that stream. So, we're separate, but interconnected. And if that whole stream is just made out of water, i.e., consciousness, then the way in which those individual whirlpools are steering their individual consciousness, it should affect the overall state of the stream. And that's what you're describing.

AUBREY: And vice versa. The stream affects the whirlpool as the whirlpool affects the stream.

MARK: But the critical part of this is where are we directing our consciousness individually and collectively? And that's why the work you're doing is so important. And that's why these conversations, I think, are so important because it can open someone's mind. My journey started listening to podcasts and I became exposed to stuff that I was closed off to before. You never know what that first domino is going to be for someone and what the ripple effect is going to be. Like the butterfly effect. A butterfly mathematically flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in New York.

AUBREY: I still don't understand that. Makes no sense to me. Because I fart all the time and I don't think it's caused any disasters. Been such a pleasure, brother. Thanks for coming on. You've listed a bunch of books that you have. You have a new one coming. When's that come out and where should people go for just general resources? Where should people follow you?

MARK: First of all, thank you so much for having me, Aubrey. It's been a pleasure. And it's really fun to be able to have a conversation like this with someone so open minded. And I really appreciate the work you're doing as well. So, thank you for that.

AUBREY: Likewise.

MARK: To find out more about my work, my website is a good place to start. It's markgober.com, M-A-R-K-G-O-B-E-R.com. And I have five books that are on Amazon in Kindle, Audible, or hardcopy. And the newest one is called "An End to the Upside Down Reset," which comes out in December 2022, or January 2023.

AUBREY: Upside down is a big theme. It's in Kabbalist literature. It's called Sitra Achra. It's the upside down. And also, "Stranger Things" does a great job fictionalizing. But it's cool. It's like the upside-down world. And I think this is the split. Are we going to navigate our way to the upside down or are we going to turn things right side up? I believe in us. I think we're going to do it. Let's go. Let's go! We love you. We'll see you next week. Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit subscribe, follow me at AubreyMarcus, check out the Aubrey Marcus Podcast available everywhere, and leave a comment. Let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future. Thank you so much.