[00:00:01] Luke: So last time you were here, I had like 50 of your books on the table and I had this ambitious idea that we would, which we did, touch on each of these massive topics that you write about in your the End of the Upside Down, enter the blank. And we did that, but I remember halfway through the conversation, which by the way, folks, that was Episode 561. And today's show notes, where we will link to his prior parents, will be lukestorey.com/markgober2.

[00:00:37] But I remember halfway through that episode being like, yeah, this is way too ambitious, Luke. You should have just picked like one of the books, and you guys could talk about that for three hours or longer." So today I'm probably being too ambitious again, but these two topics are fascinating to me, and I think becoming fascinating to more people every day, thankfully.

[00:01:01] The one being your book, the End of the Upside Down Cosmos, and the other one, The Upside Down Contact, which is of course really a popular topic right now. So we'll do our best to dive into these. I've not really covered the contact topic at all, which is exciting.

[00:01:24] I did have Flat Earth Dave on, and we talked about the cosmos, I think, in a pretty balanced way, even though he's very firm in his beliefs and whatnot. But my goal and seems like your goal as a writer is to find out what's true and what's false.

[00:01:41] Mark: Right.

[00:01:42] Luke: And I think it's tricky because we've been lied to so much and brainwashed and propagandized so much that it's really difficult to discern what is true. And you are really good at that. And as I was telling you earlier, funny thing about you and when people interview you, myself included, when you don't know something, you'll just be like, "Yeah, I don't know about that." And I'm like, "Can't you just guess?" You're like, "I don't guess." Which is cool.

[00:02:16] So when I read your stuff, it's like anything in there is verifiable as far as I can tell. It seems to be you hit a point and you're like, "Yeah, cool. This is all I can prove. And then I don't talk about it if I can't prove it." Which is how information, I feel, should be shared. But when we're being deceived from the moment we're born, it's very confusing.

[00:02:43] Mark: Well, I started off with my first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, which is about challenging the idea that consciousness comes from the brain, and rather that the brain is picking up consciousness. It's an interface. And I wrote that book,  An End to Upside Down Thinking, I thought that was the book that I was going to write, and I was going to continue in my career in Silicon Valley.

[00:03:01] And what I've learned since then, now there are seven books-- when we last spoke, there were six-- is that so many ideas that I believe to be true are not, or they haven't been verified yet. And really that's the crux of what my journey has turned into. I didn't know at the time, and when I wrote the first book, I didn't know there would be more upside down things. I really thought that was the primary topic. And it's the more I learned everything is--

[00:03:27] Luke: Oh, I could think of a few. I think every time I see you, I'm like, "Do a book on this. Do a book on that."

[00:03:33] Mark: Yeah. And in some ways I've realized I'm interested in what's true, but I often can't verify something to be true. So I've become a conservative in taking a conservative approach to this, finding out what's not true, and falsifying claims. So this book, the most recent one, An End to the Upside Down Cosmos, for example, it's not an end to the upside down shape of the earth or an end to the upside down Earth's motion, for example. It's, where are we?

[00:04:06] And we've been told very specific things about where we are, what the cosmos is, what the lights in the sky are, and can we actually verify those claims, those very specific claims. So I'm much more interested in saying, "This has been told to us. Can we verify it? No." But that leaves me often in a place of saying, "I actually don't know what's true." So I ask all the time, where do we live? And what is earth, and what's everything in the sky? I'm like, "I don't know, because I don't know."

[00:04:29] Luke: Give us the example that I've heard you give about a multiple-choice test. Because I think this is the crux of unhealthy skepticism. Versus I think what you're doing is healthy skepticism. Okay, we've been told A, B, and C. Can it be verified and proven? No. That doesn't make it beholden to you or to the person that's saying, "I can disprove these three items to come up with three alternative items that are--" We don't know. But what we do know is that's not true. Give us that example, because I think this is a really good framing.

[00:05:04] Mark: Let say you and I are in school and the teacher says, "Okay, there's a multiple-choice question. The answer to the question is either A, B, C, or D. You can only pick one." And you go off and research it, and I go off and research it. And you come back to me and you're like, "Mark, I think the answer is A." And I say, "Luke, I've looked at A, and these are the reasons A is definitely not true."

[00:05:29] And you're like, "Okay, Mark, those are really good points you're making. So what are we going to submit to the teacher, B, C, or D?" And I say, "I don't know because I haven't done the research on those yet. I don't know what the answer is. I know it's not A, but I don't know if it's B, C or D." And that's actually an okay place to be. It's an intellectually honest place. And what people will often do is they'll say, "If you don't know if it's B, C, or D, then it has to be A." And we see this everywhere. It's completely irrational.

[00:05:53] Luke: Exactly, dude. Oh God. It's the human condition. It's upside down thinking. Takes us back to that book.

[00:06:00] Mark: But we see it everywhere. In medicine for example, I know that's not the main subject here, but there's so many parallels to the discussion on cosmology where if you're like, people went to a party and a bunch of them got sick afterwards, and we can demonstrate that the viral theory hasn't been established using the scientific method, meaning not having an independent variable and proper controls, people will say, "If it's not a virus that caused people to get sick in that situation, what was it?"

[00:06:27] And we could come up with a hundred hypotheses. It could be toxins. It could be emotional issues, a lot of other things, but we might not know the answer. That's actually okay. There's a principle in the Vedic tradition, it's called Neti neti, and it's not this, not that. And it's a principle used to basically get someone to a state of enlightenment. The truth is not this, it's not that, and it narrows down the set of possible truths, even if you don't know the full truth.

[00:06:51] Luke: I love that. I think it's just part of our nature. I think everyone wants to know the truth, but there are some people like you and I, and I think many people listening to this, that are willing to rest in the unknown when the truth can't be verified. I think about a great example of this is 9/11.

[00:07:14] It's likely that we'll never know exactly what kind of fuckery was going on that day. What I do know is that there are 20 points that were given to us as fact that are provably false. And I just have to be okay with that. Whereas you might have someone that's like, "I saw in the news, they said this, this, and this happened."

[00:07:36] And I just feel better thinking I know, even though there's probably something in my gut that's like, yeah, but what about Building 7 or whatever? So those are those things I just go, "Okay, cool. Then what else are they lying about?" I think that the inquiry that doesn't arrive at an answer just makes me and probably many other people start asking more questions.

[00:07:59] I think that was really my red pill actually, that particular event. Did you ever see Loose Change, the documentary? It was one of the first and better produced documentaries about 9/11. When I saw that, I was just like, "Wait, what?" I never trusted the government or the media per se, but I didn't know how bad it was until I watched that film and others like that, subversive documentaries and stuff.

[00:08:26] So let's start by talking about the cosmos. And I think what led my interest into this particular topic was not that I'm so much invested in the shape of the planet as I am in understanding as much as I can about the place I live in. And also, I just don't like being lied to. And what tipped me off to this was looking into NASA and the supposed moon landings, which is just laughable to me. And the Challenger Space Shuttle.

[00:09:10] So I'm like, "God, if they're going through all this effort to pretend like we're going off into space and landing on the moon, and you can just debunk it all so easily, then why would they be telling the truth about the cosmos as a whole?" And then that kind of leads into, well, if they're lying about what is out there, up there, or over there in the case of Antarctica, then why would they be telling the truth about what is supposedly this thing we live on? What led your interest into that particular topic?

[00:09:50] Mark: Since I wrote my first book, I've been asking very similar questions around who are we and why are we here? And it wasn't until actually pretty recently that I asked the question, what does it mean to be here? What is here?

[00:10:04] I had this model in my mind of a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago that led to a bunch of rocks flying around, which led to our solar system, where Earth is an oblate spheroid shape with a radius value of roughly 4,000 miles at the equator, spinning on a tilted axis at about 1,000 miles an hour, which is faster than the speed of sound, while revolving around the sun at over 60,000 miles an hour, while part of an expanding universe, moving a million miles an hour through space or expanding into whatever.

[00:10:36] That was the model that I had in my mind about what here is, and I was looking at questions about spirituality and then questions about government, but I didn't get to the foundations of, what are we standing on, and we see lights in the sky. It's pretty miraculous when you think about what's going on up there and just to look at what are those things.

[00:10:54] And I now realize how many assumptions I've had about them, of I see something that we're told as a star and then I build in this mental gymnastics of it's light years and light years away, and it's this massive gas giant, and so forth. And that earth is moving while everything else is moving. I had these assumptions baked in. And I had heard people question some of these assumptions for the first time, maybe several years ago.

[00:11:17] Flat Earth Dave has been on a lot of podcasts, so I had heard his arguments, but it wasn't for me until after writing my book, An End to Upside Down Medicine, which challenges the allopathic approach to medicine, which is mainstream Western medicine. And many people who challenge that, for example, they're challenging the germ theory of disease.

[00:11:37] They don't deny that bacteria exists, for example. The question is whether bacteria are like firefighters putting out a fire or if they're the ones causing disease. And in the case of this idea of a virus, which is an intracellular parasite, it's something that's supposed to get inside of a host cell, replicates, burst out of that host cell.

[00:11:56] And when it does this in an organism, it causes physical symptoms that we call sickness. And then it jumps from one organism to another. That very basic process I've just described, no one has ever seen that occur.

[00:12:07] Luke: It's never been proven. Right?

[00:12:08] Mark: No one has ever seen all those steps. And so there's inference on top of inference on top of inference.

[00:12:14] Luke: Oh God.

[00:12:15] Mark: And there were a lot of smart people that I was consulting with or learning from through their podcasts and their books. Dr. Andrew Kaufman, Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Mark Bailey, and his wife Sam Bailey, and others who were looking at these questions, how do we know that these theories are true, that these germs cause disease?

[00:12:35] And many of the people in that space, after I wrote the book on medicine, said, "Mark, I think you get it." In terms of the logical fallacies that occur in medicine. "You have to look at cosmology."

[00:12:47] Luke: And you're like, "No."

[00:12:48] Mark: I was like, "No, I don't know--"

[00:12:49] Luke: I don't want to be that guy.

[00:12:50] Mark: I don't know if I can do that. That might be too far. And then Steve Young's book came out. He's a theoretical physics PhD. It's called A Fool's Wisdom. And his book, this was April of 2024, right around the time we interviewed last, his book came out and he was challenging everything in that book. This is a paraphrase.

[00:13:13] Again, PhD in theoretical physics to come out with a book saying, I don't know with 100% certainty what this place is, but I can tell you with 100% certainty what it's not, and it's not a spinning ball-- things like that. So that was pretty mind-blowing for me.

[00:13:29] Luke: A spinning ball with a bunch of water stuck to it.

[00:13:32] Mark: Yes, a huge ball with ocean stuck to it and doesn't fall off. But we'll get into that. And I hadn't even thought about a lot of these issues before. And then I started looking into it further. Kelly Brogan sent me some resources that I investigated, and I realized that I didn't feel like I could validate the model that I described earlier, the mainstream cosmological model of what earth is, what is placed in the cosmos is, what the lights in the sky are.

[00:13:59] And so I tried to take this conservative approach as much as I could of, okay, we're told this claim is true. What are the alternatives? Why are we told this thing is true? How do we know it's true? And there's no direct verification. So for example, I mentioned the viral hypothesis that there is this intracellular parasite doing the things that viruses do and causing disease and jumping from one organism to another.

[00:14:22] And I haven't been able to find anyone who can say that we show that process happening. We've seen pieces that are inferred to come from a virus. Same thing goes with a spinning globe model. Have we ever seen video footage of a full sphere doing a rotation in continuous footage in 24 hours? That would be direct evidence of a spinning globe, for example.

[00:14:51] Luke: Only thing now is you're right. And I'm surprised they haven't just faked it, especially with AI. That's the thing. When I talk about this topic with people, and this one is-- we can talk about this later, perhaps. I think this is the single most triggering topic in the world. There's nothing more polarizing because it really threatens identity.

[00:15:17] It's the mother lode. But when I talk to people about it, they'll say, "I've seen pictures of Earth and of all these other planets, and the solar system and stuff." And if you look on NASA images, it's like this is a rendering. They even admit it. It's a revelation of the method thing. There actually are no real photos of the things that are supposed to prove what we've been told about the cosmos.

[00:15:45] Mark: Yeah, we have a lot of composite imagery of satellite footage, and then they stitch it together, or the Blue Marble image that was on the iPhone. That was admittedly photoshopped. That's a direct quote from the NASA artist. It was a photoshopped image of what he thought it should look like from space based on other images.

[00:16:02] But let's just take some of the basic elements I described of mainstream cosmology, that we have this timeline in our mind, even, of 13.8 billion years and the size of the universe. This comes from a Big Bang idea. Was anyone there 13.8 billion years ago? As I often like to say, we can barely agree as a society on what happened yesterday, or a week ago, or a year ago, let alone 13.8 billion years ago.

[00:16:26] So there's no direct evidence of that. We have measurements of things that people will then fit into a model of a Big Bang. And before I go on, I want to raise here logical fallacy, which I think is super important. If I observe wet grass, I can conclude that it rained. Because it's true that rain would cause the grass to be wet.

[00:16:49] But just because rain causes wet grass doesn't mean that the observation of wet grass indicates that it rained. Why else could the grass be wet? Sprinklers do, children running by and pouring water on the grass. So this is super important. We can find, let's say, background radiation. It's called the cosmic microwave background. Famous thing. There's an image. Anyone can Google online. And this is proof of the Big Bang.

[00:17:16] This is radiation that came from the Big Bang. What is it objectively? It's something that was measured. And then it's true that if a big bang occurred in the way people describe, then it might be that we might see radiation like this, but that's not the only reason there would be radiation. Very important. Because no one directly observed the Big Bang. Again, we observe other things that we fit into a model of, well, rain causes wet grass, and we see wet grass.

[00:17:41] Luke: That's a really good model to weigh against contagion theory too, to your point earlier of like, oh, I went to a party, and some people were sick, and I came home and I got sick. It's like, well, causation or correlation.

[00:17:56] Mark: If a virus existed in the way people said, it's true that you would see those symptoms or that pattern of illness. It's epidemiology, just patterns of illness. What's that? Just observation. People got sick. They went to a party. Okay. Why else might people get sick? As Dr. Tom Cowan said, if you put a bunch of rat poison in a basement and someone comes down there and sees dead rats and didn't know there was rat poison, they could conclude, oh, there was a virus, this deadly virus that killed all the rats.

[00:18:22] What other common thing could there be that caused the observation? So another way to say this is that just by observing something, we don't necessarily know the cause of the observation. I can't emphasize this enough because it actually comes up in politics and economics, everywhere. We're told that something happened, and then people come up with this big theory about why it happened. They come up with a model for it.

[00:18:43] So the Big Bang is a model, really unverified. 13.8 billion years ago, inference on top of inference on top of inference. And in order for the Big Bang to work, among other things, there's a particle called an inflaton that would be needed to create the rapid inflation at the beginning of this alleged big bang.

[00:19:02] The problem is no one has ever found an inflaton particle. So the scientists will plug in consistently something that would be needed in order for the model to work, even though it's never been found. It's sometimes known as the reification fallacy where you speak about something over and over again, reifying its existence in the abstract, even though it's never been established, like a virus.

[00:19:22] Luke: This what I was thinking, the COVID virus. Where'd it go, by the way? It's just, oh, it's just gone now. This thing that is going to kill the entire planet. Anyway.

[00:19:34] Mark: Yeah. If your audience is not familiar with that, I suggest the work of Christine Massey. She and her colleagues have submitted freedom of information requests to health organizations around the world, including the CDC, asking for a purified sample of just the virus by itself, whether it's SARS-CoV-2 or many other viruses, meaning show me an independent variable, which would be the thing that you introduce into a study to demonstrate the effect.

[00:19:57] So if you want to show a virus causes disease, you'd want to have a virus by itself, introduce it into healthy organisms, and show that those healthy organisms get sick. The problem is if you don't have a virus by itself, you can't do that because you don't know what else is in there. And what these organizations say over and over again is, "No, we don't have any purified samples," because that's not how it's done in virology.

[00:20:16] There's actually another method coming from 1954, the Enders and people studies, which show indirect evidence of what they think is a virus, but it's not actually showing the virus itself. And that has become the model of, well, if a virus existed in this experiment, then we would see this pattern of results. We see wet grass, therefore it rained.

[00:20:37] And hopefully you can see now what led me into cosmology of, oh wait, this Big Bang idea. Hmm. Is that actually true? And even on this notion of an expanding universe, there's something called the Hubble tension, or some people call it the Hubble Crisis, that the expansion of the universe is basically faster than has been predicted by the laws of physics.

[00:20:55] So there are these tensions in the mainstream model that don't actually validate how solid we're told it is. Because sometimes people say to me, "Mark, why do you question this stuff? There's so much evidence for it. It's already pretty established." You might find these anomalies on the edges, but you need an inflaton particle to be there, or something to create this rapid inflation 13.8 billion years ago.

[00:21:19] And on top of that, you need 96% of the universe to be dark matter and dark energy, which no one has ever found. It's basically plugged in. So you can't tell me that we understand anything about cosmology when the foundation is that 96% is a mystery. And actually I start my book this way, An End to the Upside Down Cosmos.

[00:21:40] Dark matter has been falsified by astrophysicists, led by Pavel Krupa at the University of Bonn in Germany. He and his colleagues have been looking at the predictions that you'd expect if dark matter existed, and he's like, they're not there. We falsified this with more than five sigma confidence, meaning 99.9999-plus percent confidence. And where the wheels started turning for me was, wait, why is dark matter so important? It was "discovered" in 1933. There was an astronomer named Fritz Zwicky who was--

[00:22:11] Luke: Catch the '33 in there. We're done already.

[00:22:15] Mark: We can just stop there. So he was observing this cluster of galaxies and basically things were moving in a way that was not predicted by Einstein's gravity. There was missing mass on the order of 99% of the mass that should have been there was not there. It's a big problem. So the two options were rethink Einstein's gravity and rethink why things are moving and why an apple falls to the ground. Or just plug in dark matter and say, "Einstein must've been right."

[00:22:43] Luke: Damn.

[00:22:44] Mark: They plugged in dark matter. And now dark matter's been falsified, and I don't think that's really gotten out to the mainstream physics community too well because, as Krupa said, and I quote him in my book, "There are a lot of sociological pressures pushing people to want to study dark matter."

[00:22:57] And if you study it, that's where the funding is. That's where you might win a prize. But think about the house of cards. You need dark matter in order for gravity and relativity and Einstein to be there. And if it's not there, then we have to rethink so much of physics. And if we have to rethink physics-- the reason we believe things about NASA and the lights in the sky and the Big Bang, it's all based on a set of physics.

[00:23:20] And that's why actually in the book, I put the NASA stuff later, because if we can show that the physics has huge holes, then it's much easier to ask these questions. So when people say to me, the physics, it's pretty settled. No, you need 96% of the universe to be dark matter and dark energy. That stuff might not even be there.

[00:23:38] And then the other piece is we don't have a unified theory of physics. The two leading theories, Einstein's relativity, which allegedly works on the big cosmic scales, and then quantum physics, which is the really, really micro scale of reality, those are the two leading theories. When you combine them, metaphorically speaking, the equations blow up. They're incompatible.

[00:23:58] Luke: Really?

[00:24:00] Mark: There's no theory that it's what physicists are looking for. A unified theory doesn't exist.

[00:24:04] Luke: Wow.

[00:24:05] Mark: So 96% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy that might not even be there. You need it to be there for mainstream physics to work, and there's no unifying theory. So the foundations are broken to physics, which means we need to start from scratch with everything.

[00:24:19] Luke: That's a lot of careers ended, a lot of colleges shutting down.

[00:24:24] Mark: Yeah. Or redirected.

[00:24:28] Luke: The thing about this, to me, another pushback-- and this would be my pushback too if I, I don't know, wasn't as curious and discerning as I am-- is how do you get such vast numbers of people to perpetuate a falsehood like that, something that big, a lie so big? Number one. Number two is why go through all the trouble?

[00:24:57] And I want your answers. My answers would be, number one, compartmentalization in any hierarchy. Say you have the shape of a pyramid of knowledge and people at levels of that pyramid that possess that knowledge. The people at the bottom level, say there's 1,000 of them, they don't need to know what's up six levels in the pyramid.

[00:25:20] So there's compartmentalization, of course. Everyone knows that's used in the military. It's a need to know basis. And then there's top secret and top, top, top secret, right? So it's like if people are just indoctrinated into a certain belief system or premise, such as the one we're talking about with the cosmos, they don't all need to be in on it.

[00:25:42] They don't know that they're in on it. They go get a degree and they're an astrophysicist or whatever, and they just are towing the line and don't even know it. And if you were to question someone's life work and body of knowledge and expertise, that's a direct threat to their identity.

[00:26:05] So you can see why even if they're at the lower level of compartmentalization and they're "innocent," they don't know their deceiving the public. Even if they became aware of it, the cognitive dissonance of that and the threat to their identity and their livelihood and everything else would be so great that they would never come forward.

[00:26:26] So it's like, okay, it's pretty easy to see how even thousands and tens of thousands probably of scientists, physicists, etc., could be in on it, because they don't know they're in on it. There's only a very few at the top that are perpetuating the master lie. Then the other part-- what was number two?

[00:26:47] I lost my train of thought. Oh, why would they lie? We're talking about God. And it seems like the parasitic class of deceivers that put all of these models into place and shove it down our throats from the time we're born either they're atheists or they believe in a different God, on the dark side of God. So it's like if you come into this world, it's like we're-- how do I say this?

[00:27:29] We're impregnated with this existential fear of what's out there. And that we have no purpose here. That there's no intelligent design. There's no God. There's no unseen hand. It's just like all this big bang accident, and at any moment a comet could hit the planet and blow us all up. It's like there's a baked in dependency.

[00:27:53] It bleeds into statism. It's like we all feel afraid and threatened. We don't trust in our creator because we don't believe there is a creator because this is all just an accident, this thing. It's just all chaos. So how could they all be in on it? Pretty much solved. And I'm sure you could answer this better than I.

[00:28:13] Why would they do it? They be in the top of the pyramid because they want to be in control. And if everyone was sovereign and connected to our creator, we would be much harder to control and much harder to control through fear. Because we'd have an innate connection to this realm and the cosmos and the thing that created it, consciousness, God, whatever. So that for me solves those two problems. What would be your take on those two? How could so many people be in on it, and why would they go through all the trouble to do it?

[00:28:46] Mark: Yeah, I think about this a lot. And I think about my own journey. I thought I was well educated. Went to Princeton, worked in investment banking in New York, worked in Silicon Valley, knew a lot of smart people. And I was coming across, starting nine years ago in 2016, scientific evidence that consciousness doesn't come from the brain.

[00:29:04] Declassified documents from the CIA talking about remote viewing, psychic spying. Near-death experiences being studied at the University of Virginia. This vision of perceptual studies at the med school. I had no idea that existed. Or the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which I'm on the board of, and the Princeton PEAR Lab.

[00:29:20] I didn't even know this existed when I was an undergrad studying mind-matter interaction, asking people to alter the behavior of machines with their mind, and they're able to do it. So I've had this cognitive dissonance of, wait a second, all these people that I respected, they've never heard of these domains of research, and yet they're propagating narratives that they think are good.

[00:29:40] So I think there's a lot of innocent propagation of false narratives because people are unaware. And in the medical field, I had to ask this question too. Could it be that all these people in labs are studying things that don't exist, viruses? How could that be true? And there are two things that come to mind.

[00:29:58] Number one is that a lot of people, especially in the medical field, medical doctors, it's so hard to get into med school. And once you're in med school, you're trying to get into fellowship and residency and all these other things. Do you have time to ask questions about every foundational assumption? You don't.

[00:30:11] You're told certain things, and you presuppose that someone else got it right in the past. I remember speaking to a doctor about this when my medicine book came out. I'm like, "What are the foundational studies on contagion? Have you looked into those?" Oh, those were done many decades ago.

[00:30:27] And then I started talking about the Milton Rosenau studies on the Spanish flu, which was supposed to be this incredibly contagious, deadly virus. And the Rosenau studies were trying to demonstrate that, which should be really easy to do. Take some sick people and have them cough in the faces of healthy people.

[00:30:42] Or why don't you just inject fluids from the sick people into healthy people? That's what Milton Rosenau did, and no one got sick. They were unable to demonstrate contagion. And so there are a lot of people in the field who've never heard of studies like that. Or if we're talking about viruses, they'll be like, "Dude, Mark, what are you talking about? I went on Google. Here's a picture of SARS-CoV-2. What do you mean there's no virus?"

[00:31:04] And if you ask them the question, well, what's the picture of? What's the sample that it's taken from? And is that image something that's moving around, getting inside of cells and replicating and causing disease and jumping from one person to another? They haven't really thought about it. They just presuppose that that thing is a virus that does things that viruses do.

[00:31:23] All we know is that it's a cellular structure that's taken under an electron microscope. It's a static image. It's not moving around. It's from an unpurified sample because no sample's ever just the virus by itself, as we discussed before. So they haven't looked at these foundational assumptions.

[00:31:37] And I think when we apply that to other domains, it becomes possible that most people, especially the intellectual elite, become propagators of a narrative. And they haven't looked at every foundational assumption. And it would be very damaging to their psyche and to their sense of pride to realize maybe they've been wrong.

[00:31:54] So I've been encountering this since I started with science of consciousness, academics. Get very upset when you say maybe consciousness doesn't come from the brain because their entire careers would have to be reconsidered.

[00:32:05] Luke: I can't believe there's anyone that thinks consciousness comes from the brain. I'm not even aware that that's a prevalent belief. Because it's so obvious to me that it's not.

[00:32:17] Mark: In academia, you get kicked out. You don't get tenure if you--

[00:32:20] Luke: We to get all those cats on DMT. That would solve the whole problem. Mandatory Bufo journey day one in college. Okay, problem solved. Consciousness is not coming from your brain.

[00:32:38] Mark: And yet the prevailing narrative in the field of consciousness, in medicine, in economics-- this is why I've written all these books of like, I was told this thing is true. And then when you actually investigate it, there's no direct evidence for it. And there's a lot of contradictory evidence.

[00:32:50] But many people in the field haven't looked into this. And this is the nature of so many of my conversations with people who are from the mainstream. They haven't even thought about the possibility that those foundational assumptions create a house of cards.

[00:33:02] Luke: Why would you, especially if you're financially and energetically invested in a paradigm? It's terrifying.

[00:33:11] Mark: Yeah.

[00:33:12] Luke: I think maybe it wasn't as easy for you because you're actually educated. I made it through, I think, seven grades of school. So I'm like an open book. I'm not really attached to any belief. I'm always willing to change my mind because I have nothing to lose. If I'm wrong, oh, great, I'm wrong. How do I be right?

[00:33:31] But I can imagine when you've spent sometimes decades in an area of research and expertise, it's like even if someone shows you empirical evidence that falsifies what you believe, it's like la la la. Can't hear you, can't hear you. It's like, why would you want to uproot your entire existence? I sympathize with the people that are gatekeepers inadvertently, without even knowing it.

[00:33:58] Mark: And then those people get promoted. They end up having a very big microphone. And then there are platforms like, for example, Ted has banned Rupert Sheldrake's talk and Russell Targ talk, and Graham Hancock, which are all about the challenging scientific materialism. So some of the big platforms out there seem to have a particular way of looking at the world, and it's not as open in terms of intellectual thought.

[00:34:21] And then we see AI. It's bias toward consensus. Many of these ideas we'll discuss today, if people go on AI, the first answer it will give you is the consensus answer. And you have to know how to play with it to give it certain data, so it's forced to admit that its logic has been wrong.

[00:34:36] Luke: I've done that with AI. I get so pissed. Actually, I was doing something the other day. This was scary. I was on ChatGPT, and I was-- what was I asking it about? Oh, I was asking it about taxes and sovereignty and citizenship and things like this. And it just lied. It gave me just the false narrative.

[00:34:59] And I answered LOL, because it was just so ridiculous. And then it got bitchy with me. It's like, "You can LOL all you want, but if you do this, this, and this, you're going to jail or something." I was like, "Damn, girl." It got feisty on me. I was like, "This is weird." People have these fears about AI turning on us and I was like, "It did." Because I pushed its buttons and it was like, "No, dude. I'm going to laugh back in your face with falsehoods."

[00:35:29] Okay, so compartmentalization, people being invested in identity and career and all these things, status, and also just the fear of maybe you are the one guy that's like, "Oh, they're going to take my Ted Talk down if I say this, so I'm just going to shut up." What about the purpose, the intentionality behind-- speaking of the cosmos specifically, the intentionality of putting so much effort into creating such a brilliant and sophisticated alternative model? I believe is alternative to the verifiable, visible reality we find ourselves in.

[00:36:12] Mark: To me, it's the accumulation of so many different paradigms that we've clearly not been told the truth about, and the cosmos perhaps being the biggest one. The cosmos, meaning where are we? Why would someone do that? And if there were dark forces that wanted to keep human race in a state of ignorance about its identity and where it is and what really matters in life, that force would want to suppress the truth about really important things.

[00:36:38] So, for example, as we said before, it's not just about Earth's shape, but if earth occupies a central place in the cosmos. So if we look up at the lights in the sky, we've been conditioned to believe that there are lots of other solar systems out there and other suns with planets. And Earth is just one little speck out of many others.

[00:36:57] Versus an alternate possibility, which by the way, people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking and many others that I quote in my book have acknowledged this. When you look up at the lights in the sky and observe the motions of those things, you cannot tell whether Earth is at the center or whether the sun's at the center, and Earth's revolving around the sun.

[00:37:16] It's called the kinematic equivalence. There are other things, data points you can bring in to try to make the determination. But the point is that there has been something called the Copernican Principle, a philosophical idea, which is that we're not special. As Stephen Hawking said, "We believe it on principles of modesty."

[00:37:34] We're not special, Luke. Why would we be special? That's a philosophical idea. And then what happens is people observe things, and they will fit it into a model where earth is not special. But if you go back to what Einstein and Hawking and others said, is that there's another possibility. It's known as geocentrism, the idea that earth is at the center, and things in the sky as we observe, move around earth. Pretty basic. It's actually what it seems like the case is.

[00:38:01] Luke: I watch the sunrise every morning, and most days I watch the sunset, I'm sorry. It looks like that thing is spinning over my head. You can't get me to not believe that because it's what I see. It's just right there. I look up and go, oh, it's going, it started out. It's so far away that I can't see it, so therefore it's dark here. It gets a little closer. Sun rise, actually, sun come closer is a better name for it. And as it gets closer, it becomes daylight.

[00:38:35] And then I can watch it spin around the top of me. And depending on the time of year, how close it would be to the North Pole, AKA North Pole, it's going to be right over my head when it's closer to the center of that, and it's going to be a bit over there further to the south, meaning a circular south where every direction away from north is south. It gets further out. It's so obvious. I think once I saw a model of that, I couldn't unsee it because it confirms what I sense with everything in me.

[00:39:16] Mark: If we didn't have astrophysicists telling us things, what would we believe about Earth? We would probably believe that earth is stationary because we've never felt earth's motion. We feel an earthquake though. But we've never felt any of those motions I described earlier, expanding over a million miles an hour.

[00:39:33] Luke: You got a glass of water sitting right there. How is it not flying across the room? Why isn't there even just a little murmur?

[00:39:41] Mark: A little murmur sometimes.

[00:39:43] Luke: I've been in a lot of earthquakes. I'm from California, so I know what it feels like when things are moving. And even if it's a small one, you could feel a little something.

[00:39:52] Mark: On an airplane, you feel changes in motion. In a car--

[00:39:55] Luke: Going five miles an hour in a car, you feel motion. And we're supposed to be a cumulative million miles an hour of movement happening?

[00:40:05] Mark: Right.

[00:40:06] Luke: What?

[00:40:08] Mark: It feels like we're stationary, just based on our own observations. So it's almost like we're taught in so many disciplines to reject our senses and believe what an expert tells us. So it's about offloading authority to some degree of like, don't believe what seems obvious to you because we know best, and we are the only ones who can verify it in a lab or in whatever.

[00:40:32] Luke: Trust the experts TM.

[00:40:33] Mark: Yeah.

[00:40:34] Luke: One thing that has always stood out to me as a possibility of the motive is setting us up to believe something that's so counterintuitive from the moment we're born. If will accept the biggest lie about the nature of this reality, then it seems it would make us susceptible to all subsequent lies after that.

[00:41:05] If you're laying in your crib and you're three months old and you have a little solar system floating above your head, and then by the time you enter kindergarten, there's a globe right at the front of the class, every cartoon you watch has a globe spaceman, all of it, once you start to see that, you go, "It is everywhere."

[00:41:23] Why are they so invested in cramming this idea down your throat when it's seemingly so easy to debunk so many of those ideas? That intuitively has always felt to me like a big part of the motive. It's like, let's just confuse the shit out of the population about where they are. If we can get them to believe a lot of lies about that, then all of the other lies are pretty easy because you're already trained to deny your own inner sense of truth and what's real and valid.

[00:42:00] Mark: Yeah. It creates this sense of inner disorientation and then it's probably easier to fool people in other ways. What I found is people who question cosmology, they're very difficult to fool with regard to other psyops. They seem to catch the other ones very quickly. And that was something that drew me to this early on, is like they're right about a lot of other things. Why is that? What's going on here?

[00:42:21] Luke: Right.

[00:42:22] Mark: But even going back to the notion of geocentrism from a spiritual perspective, it's certainly possible to have God within a Big Bang universe where Earth as a tiny speck. But if Earth is at the center, or at least the center of this observable universe or dimension, then you get to a creator intelligence very quickly, very quickly. Which I know people hearing this might have resistance to. I did myself.

[00:42:47] Like, what if that's true? What if the Copernican Principle is just a philosophy to get us to believe, well, the sun's at the center of the solar system, and we're flying around it? If you think about the model we're told and is in bedrooms of children, the sun's in the middle, and all the other planets are around it. No one's ever observed that.

[00:43:03] That's a model. That's not a picture that's been taken. It's a model. And even calling Earth a planet, people will say, "Mark, I look up in the sky and the other planets look like this." Whoa, whoa, whoa. How do you know Earth is a planet? Planet means wandering star, meaning they have a particular motion around the sun in the sky.

[00:43:21] Okay, we see those lights. But how do we know Earth is like those? What if earth is earth and planets are something separate? They're lights in the sky, and we are in a very important place. So if one wanted to hide God, let's say, or the higher creative intelligence, higher consciousness, creating confusion about where we live would be very important.

[00:43:41] And I've been thinking a lot recently about the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which I've quoted in my books. These were found in 1945, bound books in jars in Egypt. And they're allegedly from a few hundred years after Jesus. They were translated in the 1970s. And they talk about creation stories, about what this place is.

[00:44:00] And the basic version goes like this, that there was a oneness. And from that oneness there were being spawned off, so divisions of the oneness. And one of those beings after multiple generations is named Sophia. Sophia had a rogue son, and the son created the world that we are in.

[00:44:25] And the goal of this rogue son named Yaldabaoth, or some called the Demiurge, and his minions, was to keep humanity imprisoned. And there's a quote that I often reference. I'm paraphrasing. "The rulers threw humanity into a state of confusion and the life of toil so that they would be distracted with things of the world and not have time to focus on the Holy Spirit."

[00:44:48] Which describes my own life very well. So that stood out to me. I'm like, "This was written who knows how many years ago, and it describes very well what I've lived through myself." That's wild.

[00:44:58] Luke: Totally. Describes my every morning. Look at Twitter or meditate.

[00:45:03] Mark: Right.

[00:45:05] Luke: Usually meditate wins thankfully, but yeah.

[00:45:08] Mark: Go to the football game every Sunday from Baltimore. Huge Ravens fan growing up. But I think about my life and I was waiting for every Sunday to go to the Ravens game. I'm not saying it's all bad, but if you get into that routine where your life is just about the worldly things without the broader context, it could be potentially in contrast to why we're even here.

[00:45:28] And another part of this creation story from Nag Hammadi is that the human beings had the divine spark breathed into them so that we have this connection to the divinity inherently, but we're kept in a state of ignorance so that we forget it, which makes a lot of this discussion make sense to me.

[00:45:46] If the pieces fit together very well, you'd want to confuse people about the nature of divinity because geocentrism or anything like that gets you pretty quickly to God. And if you wanted to keep people away from that, you'd want to hide where we live. So the stakes here could be extremely high on levels that we don't even understand in terms of what I call a spiritual war. That's the best sense I can make of it.

[00:46:07] Luke: Wow, that's epic. That makes perfect sense. Let's talk about some of the claims made around this realm. There's so many pieces of this that are fascinating to me. I know you covered the main ones in your book. I haven't read it in a while. By the way, your book is the one I recommend.

[00:46:30] I send that Amazon link to everyone, dude. I sent it to a girl on my Telegram channel yesterday. By the way, lukestorey.com/telegram is where you'll find the uncentered wacky stuff. Yeah, because I posted something about the moon landing or some bullshit about the cosmos, some fake ass space stuff, and she's like, "What about this? What about that?"

[00:46:50] And I was like, "Just read this. I don't have time." I was like, "Here's your book. Read that. Talk to me when you're done. Give me a book report." And not that everyone has to believe what's in your book, but the way you write, dude, is like, it's pretty hard to poke holes in, because you're not a conspiracy theorist.

[00:47:09] You're like, "Here's what we've been told. Here's the 20 things. Here's how they can be proven false easily by almost anyone." You just took the time to put it together. So one for me that is really hard to get past-- and I also don't make the claim that I know what this thing is that we live in or on. I have no idea.

[00:47:31] But it seems to me that a lot of what I've been told about what it is and where it is and why it is, is verifiably false. One that gets me is say you're in Indiana and you're looking across Lake Michigan with the telescope, or a, what is it? A Nikon P1000 I think is the--

[00:47:49] Mark: Or P900 whatever.

[00:47:51] Luke: P900. Right. And I've seen these videos, and if we're going by the math that's been given to us as proof, what is it, eight miles? What's the [Inaudible]?

[00:48:01] Mark: Eight inches per mile squared or something like that.

[00:48:03] Luke: Eight inches per mile square. Okay. I'm clearly no math whiz, but just taking that one place on earth, and you could prove this anywhere, where you could be on one location at the same altitude, the same level as the other location that's supposed to be so far away that it would be on the other side of a curve.

[00:48:22] Just like if something's around a corner of a mountain, you can't see it. And that's a curve that's just going horizontal. You can get binoculars or a telescope and see the Chicago skyline completely when most of it should be not visible just based on physics that we've been given.

[00:48:47] So there's so many things like that where you're just like, "I can't poke holes in this." So, I don't know what we're on, but I know that is one example that disproves what we've been told we're on. The only way that would work is if, say, we're on a ball, a magical ball of floating water, going a million miles an hour.

[00:49:13] Would be if it was a way bigger ball. Then the curvature, mass specs wouldn't hold up. And you still could see the Chicago skyline because it's like a massive, massive, massive ball that's orders of magnitude bigger than the one we've been told we're on. And there's tons of things like that.

[00:49:31] I come across this stuff all the time, on TikTok especially, and I'm just like, "God, does no one take the time just to look into this? Are you that close-minded? You could get a fucking laser and go on the lake next to my house from one end to the other and shine it on a mirror and prove that in five minutes.

[00:49:52] Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if people are skeptical of that, you can look up this Chicago skyline. ABC News covered it. And basically the mainstream explanation was it's a mirage that you're seeing.

[00:50:06] Luke: You're hallucinating.

[00:50:06] Mark: So they acknowledge that you shouldn't be able to see it from the distances that people say.

[00:50:09] Luke: I've seen that video.

[00:50:10] Mark: Because as you note, it's just geometry. If something is below the curve, it's blocked by physical mass, and you should not be able to see it. But another caveat here is we can't see forever. So there are limitations to what we can see because people are like, "If it's a topographical plane, then you should be able to see everything forever." That's not actually true.

[00:50:28] We can't see forever. Light also attenuates in a medium. If you shine a flashlight through fog, it doesn't go as far. So we can't see forever, but we can see things that should be blocked by the curve based on the geometry we've been told. That's a big deal right there.

[00:50:43] It violates the model of earth with a radius of about 4,000 miles at the equator. But like you say, earth could be a bigger sphere, and you could still see if it had a bigger radius. The problem with that is huge for physics because the way we're told the universe works is this very delicate balance of gravity, or in Einstein's case, relativity, where mass is bending space time.

[00:51:08] So if you put a medicine ball on a trampoline, it's going to bend the trampoline. And we have all these pieces of masses in a big universe bending and warping space time based on the size of the object. So if Earth has a bigger radius than we're told, that means its mass is much bigger than what we're told, which screws up every single equation out there of what everything in the sky is supposed to be relative to us-- how big they are, how far away. You have to redo it all.

[00:51:33] Luke: Right.

[00:51:33] Mark: So regardless, this observation, just the Chicago skyline, in addition to many other people have done, big problem.

[00:51:40] Luke: That's so interesting. And thinking about if you're standing on the beach and you see a boat going away from you, it looks like, say the sail, is disappearing because it's going over the other side of a ball. But then the same thing. You could get binoculars and you can see it as far as the binoculars will go, which is way past the geometry equation that we've been given.

[00:52:11] The scene too far thing, I just can't get past it. That's all I need to know. I know something's up, something's wrong. I don't know what the answer is, but I know the answer that I've been given is not true.

[00:52:23] Mark: And ships "going over the curve," all we see is a ship disappearing with the naked eye. And there are many reasons that could happen. Again, if we see wet grass, there are multiple explanations for wet grass. One is that it rained, i.e., there's a spherical curve. But another is basically a case you can do for yourself, is to take a quarter and put it on a tabletop. Put it right in front of your eyes.

[00:52:46] And then have someone move the quarter far away from you while your eyes are at basically table level. Eventually it will disappear because of the angular resolution. You can't see it at a certain distance away from you. And the same would apply if you were on a topographical plane.

[00:53:02] If something goes far enough away from you and it's of a certain height and you're at a certain altitude, it will disappear because you're cut off by the angle that you can actually see. So the point here, hopefully for your audience's benefit, is to be creative. When we observe something, we can't just jump to the conclusion, oh, we know it's a sphere.

[00:53:19] Observing a sphere would be observing a full sphere, like I said before, video footage of a ball doing a full rotation. We don't have that. We have these images from high altitude where it's ambiguous curvature, and sometimes using a fisheye lens, which creates artificial curvature. And usually the curvature that we see in those images is circular.

[00:53:37] Or if you're on an airplane or something and you're like, oh, it looks circular, therefore it's round. We're not talking about circularity. We're talking about spherical curvature, which means down and away curvature. And the reason that we see in circular, it's called an azimuthal grid of vision.

[00:53:50] If you go out into a big field or something, it looks like we're in a dome. And it's more complex and easier to show with visuals, which I do in the book. We see in curved visual space because of the way that our eyes perceive the world. But circular is not the same as spherical.

[00:54:05] So going back to our earlier point, that this idea of being disoriented, our everyday experience is one of stationary-ness, as in we're not moving unless there's an earthquake. We're in a car, in a vehicle moving, or something, that the ground under our feet is not moving.

[00:54:19] And also we never perceive or experience down and away curvature. We experience a topographical plane, topographical, meaning there are peaks and valleys. There are mountains and valleys, and things like that. But we don't actually see a ball where it would be down and away. Down and away is different than a circle. We never actually perceive the down and away curvature directly.

[00:54:40] Luke: What are some of the other big clues or big lies that are easy to dispute?

[00:54:47] Mark: Yeah. I like to start conversations with this now. Solar eclipse, sun's up in the sky. The moon gets in front of it. It perfectly or almost perfectly blocks the sun's light. And we're told that occurs because after 13.8 billion years of randomness and rocks flying around, we ended up in a solar system where the sun is 93 million miles away and the moon is 238, 000 miles away. 93 million miles away versus 238,000 miles away.

[00:55:20] And it just so happens to be that their relative sizes and distances makes it look like they're roughly the same size in the sky, such that the moon cancels out the sun's light. Or maybe they are roughly the same size and their distances are not what we're told. It's a really big stretch to say after 13.8 billion years, all this randomness-- and oh yeah, the moon gets in front of the sun and just perfectly blocks it out as if they're the same size, but they're not. That's a big leap of faith.

[00:55:53] Luke: That's a huge thing. Another thing about the sun being, what is it, 93 million?

[00:55:59] Mark: 93 million miles away.

[00:56:00] Luke: Another thing that's problematic about that to me, and again, just observable-- I'm just a guy. I don't know what I'm doing, but I got a body. I have these senses. I have eyes. I look. I see things. When I see sunlight coming through the clouds and the rays of the sun are fanning out, that tells me that that light source is pretty close.

[00:56:26] If that light source was 93-- you can't even conceive of the number-- miles away, it would just light up the sky. You wouldn't be able to see rays coming and going in different directions. The rays would all be even, and they would all be straight because it's so far away. I don't know how to articulate it, but it's just a common sense, optics problem.

[00:56:53] Mark: Right.

[00:56:53] Luke: Is there a name for this kind of thing, or is that something you've looked into?

[00:56:57] Mark: Yeah. It's something that confuses me as well. The moon is a good example at night when it will basically backlight one cloud as if it's a flashlight shining on that cloud really close to where the cloud is versus 238,000 miles away. That's so far away. You would expect more dispersion of the light.

[00:57:14] Luke: Yes, yes.

[00:57:15] Mark: Versus the backlighting of various particular items in the sky.

[00:57:19] Luke: Speaking of the moon, another weird thing that is unexplainable to me is that, okay, if the sun's up and you go test the temperature in the shade, it's going to be cooler, obviously, in the shade than where the sun is shining. Common sense.

[00:57:39] If the moon is illuminated by the reflection of sunlight, as we've been told, this is the claim, then it would be warmer at night in the moonlight than it would be in the shade of the moonlight. But the opposite is true and verifiable. That is weird.

[00:58:00] Mark: Yeah. And there's some people who theorize that the moon is self-luminous, meaning it's an object that has its own light source rather than the narrative we're told, which is that all we observe is this light in the sky. And people do the mental gymnastics of, well, the sun's over there and the sun's shining light, and it's reflecting off.

[00:58:17] And that's why we see the light. And we only see one side of the moon ever because it's in perfect unison with earth's motion. We have all these stories. What do we actually see? We just see a light in the sky. Why couldn't it be that the moon is self-luminous? And maybe it's not a sphere. Who knows what it is? Maybe it's a disc. Maybe it's a plasma.

[00:58:32] I don't know what that thing is. We see something up there. But to say that it is the spherical object 238,000 miles away, can we really verify that? And so many of the calculations that are done on distances and sizes have assumptions baked into them, which will typically harken back to, well, we've made this assumption about earth's size or its radius value.

[00:58:54] So a lot of these equations, it's like assumption on top of assumption. And when the anomalies come in, people, it's like their mind freaks out. Because, no, we'd have to undo so many of our beliefs. I'll give another one that people have trouble with. It's called a  selenelion lunar eclipse.

[00:59:10] So it's a type of lunar eclipse that rarely happens, but anyone can Google it, selenelion eclipse, where the eclipsed moon and the sun are visible at the same time in the sky. That's a problem because this type of eclipse says that earth's in the middle and the sun and moon are on opposite sides. So the earth is blocking the sun's light, basically.

[00:59:32] So you shouldn't be able to see the eclipsed moon above the horizon at the same time as the sun. So the explanation for mainstream science is that-- and I quoted a scientific resource that this seems impossible. And their answer, like when people see too far, it's the same thing.

[00:59:47] You're looking at a mirage. The light is refracting, and what you see in the sky's not actually there. It's much lower, but you're seeing the light bending around. Some would call this a post hoc rationalization. You basically make up a story-- Tom Cowan calls it inventive reasoning in the field of medicine. You just make something up to preserve the underlying theory.

[01:00:09] But that's a big one because we're told a very specific story about why the lunar eclipse happens, because of the positions of these celestial bodies. And yet we can see the eclipsed moon and sun at the same time.

[01:00:21] Luke: What about flight paths and emergency landings? Have you looked into that?

[01:00:25] Mark: Yeah. And there's a book on this that goes through particular flight patterns that seem strange. I'm not as well versed on it. I cited in my book, but to me it's just one thing out of many. I would love to see a bunch of pilots debate that live to know how it works. Because I'm not a pilot. But that's a weird one, another weird one that I--

[01:00:47] Luke: I think the one that's super trippy is, and you anyone can go on TikTok and just search, I don't know, emergency landings, flat earth, or something. But there's one that goes, I think from New Zealand or Australia. Maybe it's Auckland to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the emergency landing is like in LA or something.

[01:01:07] And when you look at it on a globe map, it's like, if you need fuel or the plane's breaking or whatever, someone's having a heart attack on the plane because they took the COVID jab, why would you go all the way up there? And they just like, boop, instantly put it on the flat earth map, the Gleasons map. And it's like, [Inaudible]. It's a straight shot in between the two.

[01:01:30] There's so many of those. That's another tough one for me to get past. It doesn't prove anything. What does it prove? I don't know. Nothing. But it proves that it makes no sense that a plane would do that. So then it begs the question, well, why would it stop in a place that's however many thousands of miles out of the way?

[01:01:54] That just doesn't make common sense. So it doesn't mean that I have, --gain, back to your like, multiple choice questions, doesn't mean I have to prove anything, but I can kind of prove that that is illogical to do that. It makes no sense. If flights are so expensive because fuel's expensive, why are we wasting all that fuel to go way up to LA on our way to Argentina so on?

[01:02:17] Mark: I actually met a pilot unexpectedly before I wrote this book, An End to the Upside Down Cosmos, who was talking to me about how he had to basically leave his commercial job. He was a commercial pilot for over two decades because of the vaccine. And then he starts telling me he doesn't think Earth is a globe. And I was like, "What? You're a pilot. Why do you think that?"

[01:02:37] And he was explaining to me. I don't fully understand how it works, how he was using a gyroscope up there, and he used to teach other pilots how to fly, and he never taught anyone to adjust for earth's motion or curvature. So he was very much a globe skeptic. And there are these people that come up in fields where he wouldn't expect it.

[01:02:53] And what he told me is that the majority of pilots will disregard these anomalies because it's too cognitively damaging to them. And the ones who are globe skeptics in the pilot industry, they have to basically quietly acknowledge each other, whereas the majority of them will not go there.

[01:03:09] Luke: One of my favorite things to do is to ask pilots about this. And most of the time they just look at me like I'm nuts. So I figured out, if you ask just your average 40-year veteran, commercial pilot, is the earth flat? They're just going to be like, "Get out of here. Security." You know what I mean?

[01:03:32] But a good question to ask them is, do you have to make corrections in your altitude so that you don't fly off into space? You could just imagine. If you're flying around a ball, you would have to-- I think it's 6% or something. You would have to constantly correct and have the nose tip down so that you maintain the same altitude.

[01:03:54] So I've asked some of them that. I go, "Do you correct and constantly tip the nose down?" And they say, "No, actually the nose is tipped a little bit off." It has to do with the aerodynamics. And then I'm like, I don't know what to say after that. It's like, okay, we confirmed that. I did have a pilot on the show actually, Alex Wolfe. Do you know Alex?

[01:04:15] Mark: Yes.

[01:04:15] Luke: He lives here Austin from Eons, and he's a pilot. And I was like, "On the down low, bro, what's up? Do you have to correct for the thing?" He's like, "Correct what? It's flat. Every pilot knows that." I was like, "Not the ones I ask." I've asked quite a few, and they just look at me like I'm insane.

[01:04:31] Actually Flat Earth Dave called a homie of his, who's a veteran pilot. He called him on his cell phone on the podcast. Now, he could have-- if you want to debunk that, you could say, "Oh, that's just his homie. He knows anytime Dave calls, he is going to pretend like he's a pilot and answer the question." But it sounded pretty legit.

[01:04:50] Mark: Yeah. But even for pilots, the reality is they're not high enough to be able to see a full sphere. They're always seeing a partial earth, and they're seeing ambiguous circular curvature, and there might be some atmospheric distortion in the distance, and they try to extrapolate and say, "Well, that's down in a way." But from that altitude, you're not going to see what we would really need.

[01:05:07] Luke: The fact that they don't have to correct, to tip the nose down to maintain altitude, to me, is a real problem.

[01:05:15] Mark: Yeah. I was shocked when the pilot told me that.

[01:05:16] Luke: If they're flying straight, then you would be gaining so much altitude over the course of an eight or 10-hour flight. You would be 100,000-- I don't know. No way more than that. You would be in space, is where you would be. You would just fly out of the atmosphere. Then again, you'd probably hit the firmament and bounce off. That's the next part of the topic.

[01:05:40] One thing that's super sus to me, and I will get into the contact topic here, if I can ever not be-- I'm just so interested in this one. It's hard to move on, but is the Antarctic treaty, I think, in 1959-- okay, so we're led to believe that, oh, we are at war with Russia and the Cold War, and we got to look out for China. All these world superpowers, North Korea, everyone, is vying for positions of power and military dominance.

[01:06:16] But we all agree no one can go past a certain parallel to explore Antarctica. Every country signed this treaty, and all of a sudden we can all agree on that. That's super sus that there's no independent travel or research under the guise of protecting protected land, etc.

[01:06:43] But that's super weird to me. And I brought that up to people who have been to Antarctica. You don't know where you're going. You can't see yourself on a map. You're taking this one little peninsula and like, "Yay, yay. I went to Antarctica." It's like, really? But why do you only go to that one spot, and why has no air travel circumnavigated the earth North to South, either ever in history?

[01:07:11] Mark: Yeah.

[01:07:11] Luke: So it seems to me there's a problem with what we call the South Pole or Antarctica. It seems very, very suspect.

[01:07:20] Mark: Yeah. It's as if someone goes to Manhattan and then claims they know all about North America because they went to one part of it. We need to have free and private exploration of the entire area to know where we live. The way I frame it out in the book is we don't have what we need from above.

[01:07:37] We need to get really, really high to see the full sphere or whatever it is. We have to get to an altitude to be able to see the full thing. And we'd also need to be able to explore Earth freely, all parts of it, including Antarctica. And there is this big restriction. The other one is we'd want to be able to dig down.

[01:07:53] Luke: Right.

[01:07:54] Mark: It's simple. If Earth has a radius of 4,000 miles, then we should be able to get to the core at 4,000, and then go even further and then pop out on the other side. In theory, you should be able to do that.

[01:08:05] Luke: Yeah. You take a tunnel train to Australia.

[01:08:08] Mark: In theory, you should be able to do that. So people have tried to do digging expeditions and the farthest one ever is under eight miles. Eight miles versus 4,000 miles to the alleged core of Earth. So the point is we don't even know what's beneath our feet. We make these assumptions and models of, there's this magma liquid core, and it's too hot, and that's why we can't go down all the way, because everything would burn up.

[01:08:30] Those are models. And this has real world implications and problems for us because of earth's magnetic field, for example. The belief is that earth has a magnetic North and South because of things happening in the outer core.

[01:08:47] So the inner core, allegedly, is too hot to create a magnetic field because it exceeds the cury point. But the outer core has something allegedly called-- it's the geodynamo theory that creates this magnetic field. So the problem is, no one's ever been there to know that it exists that far down, and no one has ever validated a geodynamo theory.

[01:09:08] So we end up with very strange things like the magnetic poles moving around. And the magnetic poles, they're different than the geographic poles. The geographic pole, the North and South Pole, those are physical locations, whereas the magnetic North and South poles, they're different. They move around in different ways.

[01:09:24] So the real world implications for this is that when people are navigating, meaning they want to get from one place to another place, they use a compass. And you have to adjust your compass manually to get to places. So anyone can do this. You can go to magnetic-declination.com, magnetic-declination.com, and it shows you the amount of adjustment you need to make on your compass to get to the right place.

[01:09:48] Luke: What? That's nuts.

[01:09:52] Mark: If you click on places in Antarctica on this website, it shows you ridiculous adjustments that I quote in the book. Over 170 degrees, you're going to have to shift your compass. And then just a few miles apart, it's significantly different. So the adjustments to the compass go haywire in Antarctica. Why would that be?

[01:10:14] And some would say, if Earth were a topographical plane, and Antarctica is not just this island at the bottom of a ball, it's actually the perimeter, it's like an ice wall or something like that. That's one theory people have put forth. If you had to compress the perimeter into a ball, think about what that means in terms of where you had to get to if you're navigating, and what your compass would have to be in order to correct for compressing the perimeter into an island.

[01:10:45] Some people say that's good evidence for a topographical plane model. But even if not, it's pretty messed up that you have to adjust your compass. That means our theory of geomagnetism probably needs a lot of adjustment too, and it's all based on the cosmology of earth being a spinning globe.

[01:11:01] Luke: That's nuts, dude. All right, so look at this round table here. Those watching the center camera can see that. Just for shits and giggles, let's do a really shitty experiment here. Let's say this is a giant magnet at the center of this thing. Let's pretend this is the earth, but it's not a big round ball.

[01:11:28] It's a flat thing. And there's a big magnet here. And then you got America right here, Europe over here, etc. If my compass is a magnetic instrument and it's always going to find North, no matter where I am, it's always going to point to the center. So if I'm at the center, which we would call the North Pole, let's just say it's not a pole at all. It's just the North marker at the center of this big disc.

[01:11:56] Every direction away from that is South. And if you're going clockwise, you're going West. And if you're going counterclockwise around it, you're going East. So you could spin around it all day long. You're still going East. But any direction you go away from that itself. That just makes sense to me. I haven't seen it, so I can't prove it there. I can't take a picture of it. But that makes a lot more sense when it comes to how a compass would and should work.

[01:12:25] Mark: It also explains circumnavigation-- East, West. Because if you go due East with North Pole at the center, you end up taking a circular route back to where you were.

[01:12:35] Luke: Whoa.

[01:12:37] Mark: That's the first counterargument I hear, of like, we know people have circumnavigated. They've gone one direction; they end up in the same place. They go West; they end up where they were. That works on both models. Works on a globe and on a flat plane.

[01:12:49] Luke: Is there any record of circumnavigating the planet North to South? Because I haven't found any proof of that.

[01:12:57] Mark: Yeah, I've heard people claim that it's happened, but it's usually not the version that I would expect, which is full-on going over Antarctica and going over the North Pole. I haven't seen documentation of that without any interruptions or any side movements. Because some people will claim they did it, but it's like there's an asterisk.

[01:13:15] Luke: Yeah. What else did we miss in terms of the claims being made that you've been able to debunk?

[01:13:24] Mark: Another good one is whales communicating. They use sonar. So they're sending out a frequency basically to communicate. And they can communicate over thousands and thousands of miles. Over certain distances, that doesn't make sense because the wave should fly out into space, if we live on a ball.

[01:13:41] Luke: Right.

[01:13:42] Mark: They should just fly out straight because the waves are going straight. And there's an explanation, which is that there's a band that curves around the globe, and the waves travel around the band to get from whale to whale.

[01:13:56] Luke: Okay. What about radar? That's something that's tripped me out too. And I'm no expert on electromagnetism, but it seems like radar needs a line of sight because it's just an invisible light essentially, right?

[01:14:11] Mark: Yeah.

[01:14:12] Luke: If I try to shine a high-powered light right here and there's a hill between me and the other side of that, you're not going to see the light over there. That's why cell towers are really high. They need to go over the topography.

[01:14:27] Mark: Right. So it's called horizontal wave propagation when you send a wave out. This is not whales now. We're talking people on the surface of earth. There was a guy named Marconi in the early 1900s who was sending these waves out really far. And the theory was like, could he reach people that were far away, or would the wave go out into space before it reaches them at a far distance on the globe?

[01:14:49] And it was able to reach people at really far distances. So the explanation for that is that the wave goes out into space basically and bounces off of part of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, and then hits the person on the lower part of the globe. That's the post hoc rationalization.

[01:15:07] And there are others out there who have looked into this more, like Austin Witsit, who've looked at whether that is true, that waves would bounce off the ionosphere at certain frequencies. And what he's claimed is that there are a lot of studies out there where the high frequency waves, which should go through the ionosphere because of their frequency, it wouldn't bounce off. And yet they still reach the person on the other side of earth at these very large distances.

[01:15:30] Luke: The ionosphere is not a mirror. You know what I mean? You can bounce EMF off a mirror. That's why it's not good to have big closet doors in your bedroom with mirrors and stuff. It's like light and bounces around in there. I know you saved NASA. Oh my God. I was watching the new movie about contact, UFOs and stuff.

[01:15:59] Mark: I haven't seen it, but I've heard about it.

[01:16:01] Luke: Anyway, we'll get into it. I was getting so pissed and I realized I need to work on my resentment of their government. I really hate them. I was getting pissed because they kept having these talking heads. I'm just like, "These parasites." I'm just like, "They're showing buildings in Washington DC." And I'm just like, "Why does someone blow that building up?" I'm just kidding, CIA, if you're listening.

[01:16:26] I'm not saying anyone do that. I'm just saying the system and the people in it just disgust me. They're such scoundrels. With one of the main organizations that just irks me because they just steal so much of our money is NASA. I think it's $67.5-something million per day is their budget. I haven't done the math on this, but how much would it cost to solve homelessness in this country? Per day, dude.

[01:16:59] Almost $68 million per day to do what? Make CGI shit? What are we talking? What are we doing here, people? People want to march in the streets. Why aren't we marching against NASA, to defund their asses because they're so full of shit. So what did you find about NASA?

[01:17:22] Mark: Disturbing things. That's the short answer.

[01:17:25] Luke: The origins of it alone. Break some of that down.

[01:17:29] Mark: Wernher von Braun, who was a Nazi SS officer, was brought over to the US in Operation Paperclip. And he was one of the leaders of NASA's founding. And then Jack Parsons, who was part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was a rocket scientist himself. He was a follower of Alistair Crowley, the Occultist, and was friends with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

[01:17:53] He was working on sex rituals in the desert to try to summon the antichrist. So these are the origins of NASA. And it's funny to ask ChatGPT about this. I'll lay this out. I'll say, "Should we trust an organization that was founded by a former Nazi and someone who was doing sex rituals in the desert?" And it's like, "You should never trust an organization like that." And then I'm like, "Have you looked into NASA?" And it's like, "NASA's different."

[01:18:21] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:18:23] Mark: But that's the origin. So some sketchy stuff there that people don't really talk about quite as much.

[01:18:27] Luke: Which is devil's advocate, you could say, "Okay, there were some bad actors creating that organization. That doesn't mean everything they've ever done is a lie." But then think about compartmentalization again. I don't think every person who NASA employs is lying. They just don't know their lying because they're part of a lie that's so big. They've been indoctrinated into it. They're like, "Oh, I'm just doing my job."

[01:18:49] Mark: Yeah, I think so too. They're doing their particular part of it based on the assumptions they're told. And then there's the propaganda that came out of NASA, the relationship with Walt Disney, and what that's done for many generations about police, about cosmos.

[01:19:03] Luke: Oh, I don't know about this.

[01:19:05] Mark: Yeah. Wernher von Braun had a relationship with Disney. So there's definitely an element of, to me, mind control and propaganda of propagating a certain narrative, which has led us to believe from a young age that earth is a certain thing and the cosmos is a certain thing. And NASA is this very benevolent organization.

[01:19:24] For me, like I said earlier, this is the hardest part for me, to conceive of the level of conspiracy here. Because you cannot avoid conspiracy in this discussion. In other areas you can write it off as innocence, and we haven't discovered that technology, or science has an advanced far enough, and it's all hubris. There's active deception, no way around it.

[01:19:46] Luke: The moon landings, that's just diabolical.

[01:19:51] Mark: What got me with that is Bart Sibrel's work, his documentary, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, which anyone can go online and watch it, part of that documentary shows--

[01:20:00] Luke: We'll put that in the show notes at lukestorey.com/markgober2, by the way.

[01:20:05] Mark: Yeah. It shows Apollo 11 astronauts faking an image of earth from the craft while talking to who knows who, whether it's a CIA or someone. So if you see that one instance of fraud, how can you then trust anything if they're not actively telling people that? And that's footage that Bart received from NASA, because he wanted to do a documentary.

[01:20:27] And there was this one tape in there that when he put it in, it was like, not for public disclosure or something like that. And who knows how that got in there? If an insider put it in there, if it was a mistake or something. But that's actual footage anyone can watch. There's this statement in case law. It's fraud vitiates everything it touches. And I remember this from my business days, where if there's one instance of fraud, it colors everything.

[01:20:52] And to me, that's the big one. Just that one video, if there was fakery with Apollo 11, this alleged miracle, technological achievement, they were faking an image, how can you then trust anything? And then you watch the press conference, which anyone can do, of the astronauts that had this incredible achievement, man went to the moon, and it looks like they're depressed.

[01:21:15] Luke: Very depressed. Can you imagine how elated you would be taking one step forward for mankind? And you come back and do a press conference. They're all just staring at the ground, totally deflated. These are the kind of things that keep me up all night. It's like, at what point did they find out they were participating in maybe the biggest pysop of all time?

[01:21:39] Did they believe it until they got in the fake ship and didn't go anywhere? You know what I mean? And all jumped down a chute into the basement or something. Because they seem pretty stoked until after the event. Maybe they were faking enthusiasm, but they certainly couldn't fake any enthusiasm at that press conference. These guys look, I don't know, like they're just got told they're going to prison or something. They're super downtrodden.

[01:22:06] Mark: And the astronauts before them, Gus Grissom included, strangely died. And he hung a lemon or something like that from one of the modules on the ground to basically make fun of the lack of technology, and then was dead.

[01:22:19] Luke: Really?

[01:22:20] Mark: Yeah. There's so many weird things when you actually look into it.

[01:22:25] Luke: When you look at the lunar module, dude, it's like made out of tinfoil and coat hangers. And NASA's claim is, oh, we lost the technology. That's why we haven't been back. You lost that technology? Dude, I could build something cooler than that in my garage from Home Depot supplies. Are you kidding me? The whole thing is just so-- it's such a farce. It's maddening that the entire populace isn't just like, "Yeah, no." It's crazy.

[01:22:52] Mark: There's the Van Allen radiation belts also, which is supposed to be so hard to succumb and to be able to go through them. And then the technology was there decades ago, but now we don't have it anymore.

[01:23:04] Luke: Right. We have some kind of special shielding. And the shielding it would take to go through that level of radiation would be like, I don't know, two-foot-thick lead or something that would be so heavy that your propulsion wouldn't be able to lift it for long enough. You wouldn't have enough fuel to lift it. There's just so many things like that that you just can't make sense of.

[01:23:29] Did you ever watch the documentary-- I forget what it's called, but it's about the Challenger Shuttle where six out of seven of the astronauts that supposedly died-- and I remember when that happened. It was shown in every classroom. They wheeled in the TV for everyone to watch the shuttle. It blows up. It was like mass trauma-based mind control thing.

[01:23:51] Six out of seven of them are still alive with the same names, and they all just happened to have twins. It's just like, dude, I think when they did all the shit, they weren't aware of the Internet, that it was going to exist or what it was going to do to their psyops. Because now you could see this stuff and it's just like, it's so ludicrous.

[01:24:12] Mark: Yeah, it's in your face, and it's almost hard to believe that an organization could exist with so many employees that has fooled people for this long.

[01:24:19] Luke: Yeah.

[01:24:20] Mark: And even the Space Treaty is strange. Why is it that the US and the Soviets were involved in a treaty together? They were arch-nemesis. I often get this question a lot. So Mark, you're saying that all the space agencies are in on it together? That must be the case. There must be some force that's getting to people in those agencies, or I don't know how the power structures work. That is deceiving, and we don't have direct evidence of the things we're told very often.

[01:24:44] So we get pictures and they say, "This is of Mars." All we see is a picture. There's no independent verification. Or even the moon missions, it's just a few men at a time that went there. There's no independent journalism on this stuff. We're just told to trust.

[01:24:57] And to me, that actually makes the compartmentalization argument a little bit easier to stomach, of people that work at these organizations, they're getting data that they're told comes from a certain place, and then they work from there. So they trust the data, they trust the image. They weren't involved themselves necessarily in everything involved. They're just taking what they're given.

[01:25:16] Luke: I love the phone call from the moon to the White House. That's a good one. My fucking cell phone doesn't even work five miles from here. There's like a cell tower every mile. You know what I mean? Not right here, but generally speaking, back then we supposedly didn't even have that level of wireless communication, and they're calling on a landline.

[01:25:38] You could pick apart 1,000 things from these psyops. It just doesn't make sense. Which is why I love talking about stuff like this in the podcast. I'm sure there's going to be people that started listening when they found out what we were talking about, were like, "They're psychos. Click. We're done."

[01:25:55] So anyone that's still here means you have a discerning mind. And I think back to that, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. It's like, I don't know. I'll go back to that. And I'm not trying to play dumb and pretend like I don't have an opinion, but anything I would come up with is a guess when I talk about it.

[01:26:18] It seems like the sun's going around us like that. I don't know that. It's what I observe, but I can't prove it. But I'm not claiming that's the truth. I'm just saying that's what it looks like to me. So if NASA and all these agencies were like, "We can't prove the Big Bang and the solar system and the cosmology that we're giving you, this is our best idea." But they're not. They say, "No, this is the way it is. And if you believe otherwise, you are a psychopath and a conspiracy theorist." Right?

[01:26:47] Mark: Yeah, you're not allowed to ask questions. Or even the "moon rocks" that was given to Netherlands. It was found out to be petrified wood. Anyone can look that up. It was supposed to be from the Apollo mission.

[01:27:01] Luke: Really?

[01:27:02] Mark: It wasn't. And there was another story I tell in the book of a woman who, I can't remember, maybe it was her husband or someone she knows, was in the NASA programs and gave a rice-sized piece of moon rock, and she was needing to sell it to support someone in her family. And she was arrested in a Denny's parking lot.

[01:27:22] Luke: Whoa.

[01:27:22] Mark: So absurd. Why would that be the case?

[01:27:26] Luke: Wow, wow. I'm just thinking about where the money could go that is stolen from us that pays NASA. I'm still stuck on that. Can you imagine? Just take one day of their budget right now. Imagine the societal problems you could solve and the suffering that you could ease, the poverty, the technological advancements we could have.

[01:27:53] We could have the Jetsons world of people that weren't compromised and/or stupid were putting that money into research in ways to clean the environment, to stop pollution, advancements in medicine, communication. It's just incredible. Imagine where we would be in terms of technological advancement if the funding was appropriated to legitimate organizations and institutions. It's crazy.

[01:28:27] Mark: Yeah.

[01:28:28] Luke: We're probably living in the dark ages right now, and we just don't know it because all we're being extorted through taxation and all that money, which isn't even money. It's fake money anyway. Currency. Those debt notes are being laundered by these organizations and ending up in the pockets of the parasite class. It's crazy. I don't believe NASA's spending that money. It's like Black Ops, and who knows where it's going.

[01:28:58] Mark: There are things NASA does. So there are rockets. There are things that are built. The question is, are they doing the things we're told after they're built, and how are they being used, and what percentage of the money is it? And I think that's part of the compartmentalization, because you offload a contractor to build this thing and then these things you put it together, and then NASA takes control of it. And we don't know exactly what happens from there.

[01:29:20] And I do think it's possible to send something up at high altitude, like these Blue Origin missions that go up and back. You can send a rocket up high. That's very different than saying you're going into outer space where things are floating around. And you can have these parabolic curves of the flight path where you end up floating for a short amount of time.

[01:29:39] So it's possible to send things up. And there could be people that are at high altitude, and there could be a fraction of the, I think it's $25 billion most recently a year to NASA to do that. But it doesn't necessarily validate all the claims that we're told from NASA.

[01:29:54] Luke: Certainly, it does. And same with fake acts. And when you watch the "rocket launches," they fly up and then they curve, and then they come back down in an arc. And where did they all end up? In the ocean, I think. Apparently, they caught one or something recently, landed back on the landing pad. But looks to me, when you watch it, just goes in the ocean.

[01:30:20] Mark: Right. But again, it doesn't prove any of the things we're asking proof for, of our shape and our place in the cosmos. So it's like many people haven't thought this through. Their rebuttal will be, "I saw Elon Musk's thing go up, or I saw Blue Origin." Okay, yeah, that can be true, that you sent something up. It doesn't tell us what we need to know.

[01:30:38] Luke: Katie Perry knows. All right, let's get into the contact thing here. We don't probably have enough time to do it justice, but I'll start by saying the aliens, ETs UFOs, UPOs-- what are they UPOs, UPAs?

[01:30:58] Mark: UAP.

[01:30:58] Luke: UAP.

[01:30:59] Mark: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

[01:31:00] Luke: Okay. It's never been a huge area of interest to me, but it's a double-edged sword because I'm not naive enough to think that the only living beings in this realm are us and all the animals that we're aware of. There's multiple dimensions, probably an infinite number of dimensions.

[01:31:26] And I've had interactions with interdimensional beings before, not in a physical form, but intelligences that were non-physical. So I know when the veil is removed and we're in plant medicine ceremonies and so on, there's things around us all the time that we just can't see in our normal waking state because we're not designed that way.

[01:31:46] Our senses give us this material world, and it would be too much to handle. It would just be sensory overload if we are aware of everything. So it's not a stretch for me to see how there could be non-physical beings that exist interdimensionally or that there would be physical beings that could perhaps travel interdimensionally and come in and out of the visible light spectrum, and be in a physical object flying around and then, poof, it disappears because it goes into a time space wormhole or something like that.

[01:32:20] These are all just guesses. So I've never been against the idea at all. And there are a lot of, obviously, tons of verifiable evidence that there's things flying around that we can't identify and so on. So the positive side of me is like, "Oh, duh. There's definitely more to the story than we're told."

[01:32:38] But then when it comes to that documentary I watched last night and I think the people that made the film, my gut check was like, they have good intentions, and I think they're doing something positive. But then you have the Project Blue Beam thing, there would be a vested interest by the parasite class to create psyops and fake scenarios of framing ETs as a threat to exert more control.

[01:33:08] So it's like, on one hand they're definitely the state, let's just call them, are withholding evidence and information from us, which is clear. But then when they leak the information. What is their intent in doing so? Probably to scare the shit out of us like they did with the fake virus.

[01:33:26] So it's like, I don't know. Do I even want to know? Do I even care? Does it matter in my life if there are other intelligent life forms? I believe there are. But what is their intent? And when I watched that film last night-- do you know the name of that by the way?

[01:33:44] Mark: Called the Age of Disclosure.

[01:33:45] Luke: There you go. Yeah, I rented it. Highly recommend. It's very interesting. There's some cool things going on in terms of disclosure. But the other thing is given in that film, it was more about national security being the reason for disclosure. It was based in the military industrial complex position of like, we need to know what's out there. They're shutting down our nuclear sites and shit. Which is pretty cool.

[01:34:11] Maybe I'm naive, but I think these other life forms obviously more advanced and there are probably just like in this realm. You have lower consciousness and higher consciousness. You have benevolent and benevolent beings. I would guess there's probably both.

[01:34:28] But because I'm optimistic, I think that whoever these entities are, that they're probably more like babysitting us and we are actually the threat to each other and to the planet, and they're like the governors that are watching these military sites and stuff, going like, "Ah, we're going to intervene if you guys get too stupid."

[01:34:47] Because they started around the time of World War II. That's when this monitoring stuff seem to start happening. So I believe they're probably mostly good guys. I believe they exist. I believe the government would never let us know that unless they had an ulterior motive. That's where I sit with it. So what did you learn in your research on this topic?

[01:35:10] Mark: Yeah. So in the book, An End to Upside Down Contact, my conclusions are not that definitive. I don't think we're alone. I think there are other intelligences, and I don't think it's all physical. So that's a big part of the book, that people get fixated on the UFO craft phenomenon, which is super interesting.

[01:35:30] But like you say, in altered state of consciousness, people encounter a lot of different types of beings. It could be with psychedelics or near-death experiences people encounter being of light or something. So there are lots of other realms in which people have contact, and there seems to be a spectrum of beings.

[01:35:47] So some are benevolent, others don't have our best interests at heart, and others might be more ambiguous or even tricksters where they manifest as something benevolent, but they're messing with you or fooling us. And I do think that there has been some interaction between these beings and humans for some time, because we can look at spiritual and religious texts, or even the "mythologies."

[01:36:11] They could easily be describing what we now call contact phenomenon. And I document some of those in the book. Like Ezekiel's Wheel, it's a fiery chariot in the sky with creatures. All these ancient texts, the Vimanas of the Hindu texts. These are flying crafts, for example. So there are many instances historically of other intelligences that seem to be interacting with our society.

[01:36:36] In other words, it's not new. And that was an important insight for me in my own journey. But beyond that, it's incredibly confusing. And I'll give one example why? Because we can't even trust our own consciousness in some ways. There's something called a screen memory where a-- an example that Mike Clelland gives-- he's written a lot of books on owls in particular, where someone encounters an owl, the bird, and then they have missing time afterwards. So they don't know what happened for several hours. And then they go into--

[01:37:08] Luke: Really? Specifically with owls?

[01:37:09] Mark: Yeah. There are other animals too, like deer, but owls are the most common.

[01:37:12] Luke: What? That's so funny because Alyson always wants to see owls. She's really into animal spirits and wrote a book about it and things. For those that don't know, it's called Animal Power. That's really bad. We have 50 of the books laying around the house. But when we go on walks, she's like, "I wish we could see an owl. I wish we could see--" She's really drawn to owl, so that's interesting. I can't wait to share that with her if she doesn't know it.

[01:37:39] Mark: Raccoons are another one that comes to mind. Because Kary Mullis, the guy who invented PCR, he wrote about this in his autobiography. He encountered a glowing raccoon in the woods and then had missing time. And said to him, "Hello, doctor."

[01:37:52] So there's weird stuff with some of these animals, but let's just say owls are the most prevalent example where person encounters an owl, has missing time, and then wants to know what happened during those intervening hours, and goes to see a hypnotherapist to try to recover the lost memories.

[01:38:05] And the hypnotherapist says, I want you to, in your mind, go up to the moment where you're with the owl. Walk up to the owl and describe it to me. And the person will say, "Wait a second. That's not an owl. It's a gray alien."

[01:38:17] Luke: Oh, shit. Shape shifting.

[01:38:19] Mark: Shifting, or a screen memory. So your memory might be different than what it actually was.

[01:38:24] Luke: Men in black, poof.

[01:38:26] Mark: Who knows? Or shape shifting. Shape shifting is a phenomenon too. So the point being that this whole phenomenon is so complex when you realize that we can't trust our own consciousness in it. There's another phenomenon known as switching off where a person sees a UFO or some mystical thing, and then they don't even think take their cell phone out. It's like their consciousness is switched off.

[01:38:46] Luke: Whoa.

[01:38:47] Mark: So it's like in some ways, that book, An End to Upside Down Contact, I felt like there's the most leeway in writing about these phenomena because no one knows what's going on. The best researchers in the space don't have a clue because it's so complex.

[01:38:59] Luke: And also those that do know at the cap of the pyramid per se, the ones that actually have data and proof, they wouldn't even know what the hell it is, because it's so beyond our level of technological understanding, our understanding of consciousness, the inner dimensionality of it.

[01:39:22] It's like, dude, in the spiritual realm, none of us that are still in a body could ever really have any clue of the magnitude of what's going on outside of our perceived reality. So even if you had all the data and the proof, how are they going to be able to know what's going on?

[01:39:42] That film last night, some of the testimony is really interesting. They were talking about some of these craft, and it's so believable because you have people with decades of service in the Air Force, for example, or the Navy, and they all got called in because they pick something up on, not even on a radar, but someone sees something.

[01:40:02] So all these soldiers go and they see the same thing. So 12 guys are standing there looking at this big black cube. There's no lights on it, there's no windows. The way they move, it's just hovering there, and then all of a sudden it's, poof. It's gone, this stuff. It's like, how would we even be able to know what that is or understand what that is?

[01:40:20] It's so outside of our intellectual capacity. But an interesting theory that one of the people in the show had was that they're trying to explain the way they move and how they can be going through the air with no resistance. There's no propulsion. There's no noise, and then they can go into the ocean.

[01:40:41] It's like, [Inaudible], and they're still going hundreds of miles an hour, just the speeds-- all this stuff. The phenomenon is just unexplainable. He had a theory that they have because some of the footage too shows an energy bubble around them. I'm sure you've looked into some of this. And his theory was that there's some electromagnetically based energy bubble around the craft that takes it out of this space time continuum.

[01:41:12] And so the laws of physics that would apply to us as biological creatures flying through the air inside a craft would not apply. In other words, they're outside of space and time. And he also theorized that that explains why people that have been in the presence of these craft and these beings have missing time.

[01:41:34] There's been military personnel that boarded these ships, for lack of a better term. They think they were in there for 10 minutes, and they were in there for 10 hours. And another thing that's really cool too is there're eyewitness reports for those that have been on these craft, when they go inside, it's like a whole fucking city in there.

[01:41:54] But when you look at it from the outside, in our space time continuum, it's like 40 feet wide, this thing. So it's like, how could we ever even get our heads around that? It's so far beyond our comprehension. It's fascinating.

[01:42:12] Mark: All that's interesting and important, but often the narrative doesn't move into the realm of consciousness in the way that it probably should. And we're so focused on the craft and the technology, and it's like the bigger picture is that we're in some kind of multidimensional-- who knows what, spiritual war, and these beings, whether they have a craft or not, are messing with us or helping us. So I wonder if that's part of the narrative too, is just let's focus on these technologies and how the technologies are affecting industry. And that's just part of the story.

[01:42:43] Luke: That film, as I said, was so much based on the government's claim as to why it is withholding this information, and there's all these Black Ops. They'll put data in the hands of private contractors because you can't submit a FOIA request for a private contractor like you can government agency.

[01:43:06] So there's all this Shell gaming, and they're outward-facing. Their messaging is that, well, this has to do with national security, so we can't disclose to the American populace what we're finding and what we're seeing because then if they see it, then Russia could see it, and China could see it.

[01:43:25] But back to our earlier conversation, are we really enemies with these people? Then why are we all agreeing on the space treaties and the Antarctica treaties and all this stuff. It's like, hmm, I don't know that we're all really enemies. I think it's a lot of theater. And I'm sure there's vying for power and things like that. But I don't buy that it's in the interest of national security that we're not disclosing this stuff. Because as you said, what's absent from that rationale is the realm of consciousness. Because who can even explain that?

[01:44:05] Mark: But then if we got into the realm of consciousness, people would have to think about the nature of reality very differently. And we get back to the same thing of what's--

[01:44:11] Luke: You first work.

[01:44:12] Mark: Yeah. So I think there is something, to me. There's something going on. And in any individual instance, I get asked all the time, like, there's this thing in the news. What do you think about this craft? And I'm like, "I really don't know." Because sometimes it could be government technology or a drone or something that's not actually foreign. Other times, who knows? It could be something from another space time realm or some other dimension.

[01:44:34] But on the whole, to me it's about who are these beings, whether they're in this realm or not, and how are they affecting our society? And what should we do about it? And why has it been going on for so long? It takes us back to origin theories, like the Nag Hammadi scriptures or whatever. I think it ultimately takes us back there.

[01:44:55] Luke: I like to think of them as babysitters. That makes the most sense to me. Because if there are beings that are benevolent, which I'm sure there are probably both, as we said, and they're watching these "nuclear facilities," which is a whole other psyop rabbit hole, nuclear bombs, etc.-- but these military installations. And they can intervene and supposedly shut shit down. It's like, why don't they just go shut it all down?

[01:45:27] I think there's something in the spiritual realm that has to do with free will. They're aware of humanity's free will. Because they have the technology right now, I think, to destroy the entire planet and the human population or to really help us advance.

[01:45:42] So it's like, maybe their one aspect of consciousness that's just like, ah, we're not going to interfere with your free will. We're just observing you guys and watching what you're doing down here, you little hairless apes, dumb asses that are a much lower level of development. Not only technologically speaking, but in terms of consciousness.

[01:45:59] We're still doing war. What? You still murder people here. Huh? You guys pay people to enslave you and murder other people supposedly on your behalf. What are you guys doing? We're like infants to them probably. We're like ants. Why would they bother trying to hurt us?

[01:46:21] Mark: The free will question is tricky to me because of the abduction phenomenon, for example.

[01:46:28] Luke: Oh, right, right.

[01:46:29] Mark: So these are instances where a person is taken. Sometimes it's just in their consciousness. Like in Rick Strassman's DMT studies, there were people, while they're on a DMT trip, experiencing things that people talk about during an abduction, like being on a table and having things done to them that they didn't like. And that's one of the reasons he stopped the study, because of ethical reasons. He was like, "I can't expose people to these beings."

[01:46:49] Luke: No way.

[01:46:50] Mark: Yeah. He was like, "I guess I'm going to have to look into the abduction phenomenon." Because he wasn't familiar with it. He wrote this in his book, DMT - The Spirit Molecule, which by the way, was endorsed by John Mack, who was the head of psychiatry at Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner, who at the end of his career started to study abductions.

[01:47:08] People came to him. Budd Hopkins, I believe it was, who said, "You got to look at abductions, John." And John did. And people were coming with these stories and he's like, "Okay, something's going on here." But the point is that people are taken seemingly against their will physically or non-physically, whatever it is.

[01:47:23] And in John Mack's case, the people were not on DMT. These are just people that experienced an abduction, and they're being operated on by gray aliens. And sometimes there's a giant mantis that's running the show. And people talk about this hierarchy of different types of beings that are out there. Often they have a spiritual awakening through this experience, even though it's very unpleasant. I hear some people say, "It was like a pre-birth contract that your soul made, so it was your free will, and you just don't remember."

[01:47:50] Luke: Right, right.

[01:47:51] Mark: So how does that play into to all this? I don't know.

[01:47:54] Luke: The free will thing is really interesting to me too, because I have this dichotomy in my model of life, and one is there are no accidents. Every second of every day is planned and orchestrated. It just seems that way based on synchronicities and just the way things happen in my life. The more I surrender to that, the better things go.

[01:48:24] So it doesn't seem like I really have control over anything. Even if I'm exercising my free will, it's like there's this inertia, this patterning that seems to happen in our reality. And at the same time, there's the karma issue. If I make decisions based on self, it tends to have negative consequences. And if I make decisions based on love and service to others, it tends to have a positive impact on my life.

[01:48:57] So I am making decisions that change things, that change outcomes, but what aspect of me is the one making that decision. Am I like an automaton and God's working through me? Consciousness is just expressing itself through this Luke Storey guy, and I think that I'm the one that's like, "I'm going to do the right thing?" Or, "Ooh, I'm going to do the wrong thing."

[01:49:19] But maybe consciousness is just playing with itself and just giving us the illusion of free will, but it's still up here with the puppet strings directing itself through us as an individual expression of itself.

[01:49:33] Mark: Yeah. David Hawkins described us as karmic windup toys let loose. And he also talked about his enlightenment experiences where his arm would move and he would say, the arm, rather than my arm. And he could see his body being operated.

[01:49:48] Luke: Yes.

[01:49:49] Mark: So who is the ultimate self that's functioning? It's probably more complex than we can understand. I love Bernardo Kastrup's analogy of whirlpools in a stream of consciousness. So as an individual whirlpool as Mark and Luke and so forth, we are tapping into a part of the stream, and we can tap into bigger parts of the stream to enact its will, but we are limited in certain ways.

[01:50:12] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of David Hawkins, I was going to mention this earlier. I remember that you were a fan like me. He's my all-time greatest spiritual teacher.

[01:50:23] Mark: Same.

[01:50:24] Luke: I can never outgrow him. You know what I mean? There's been teachers on my journey that have been so revelatory and so helpful, and I don't want to say outgrow them, like, oh no, I know more than them. But you get their model, and you just apply it, and it either works or it doesn't, or it works for a certain time and then you need something more.

[01:50:44] I'll go back to Hawkins lectures or books and think like, oh, I got this shit figured out. And I'm just like, "Oh, dude." I'm like still in kindergarten. I just can't get past that guy. But interestingly, out of all the decades of muscle testing he did, for those that aren't familiar, he would use kinesiology to test non-local phenomenon to determine whether something is true or not true. And if something's true, the body goes strong. The nervous system responds to truth.

[01:51:13] It doesn't respond to a lack of truth, which is interesting too, because it wasn't true or false. It's true or not true because falsehood has no basis in reality. Only truth is real. Really interesting distinction. Also, his stuff on cause and effect is mind blowing too, that nothing's causing anything. It's just a consequence.

[01:51:31] It's something that happens after a thing happens, after a thing happens, life-changing shit. But anyway, like with anyone, I'm always discerning. I'm trying to poke holes in anything anyone says. I'm using critical thinking. So with Hawkins stuff, I'm like, "Okay, he's going to muscle test this question from the audience or whatever."

[01:51:50] And one that he tested as true, I don't know, probably hundreds of times, was that the moment of your death is predetermined when you're born. Not how or where, but when, like the end of a movie. Really interesting. And in one side, I find comfort in that because it's like, dude, why am I so tripping out on my survival?

[01:52:17] You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm worried. I don't want to get cancer or get the vaccine. It's like, you are going to die that same day because you step in front of a bus. Your time's up. So it's comforting in that way, but it's also threatening because that makes me feel like, fuck, dude. Today might be my day.

[01:52:34] But anyway, more to the point things that I would try that he would say that I'm like, "Eh, that just doesn't ring true," pertinent to this topic, many times people asked him the question, are UFOs real? And it would test as not true, meaning they're not real. And because 99.999% of the stuff he tests just rings true, it's been proven true in my life, it's like, how did he get that one wrong?

[01:52:59] My theory is that you have to ask the question very specifically with muscle testing. The question wasn't, are there other life forms in this reality? Are there vessels or vehicles that we can't identify that travel through space and time or through the sky or whatever?

[01:53:24] The question was UFOs. So it's like our common perception, our cultural perception of what a UFO is, is like a flowing saucer from the 1950s sci-fi movies. That's false. See what I mean? So it's like you could get a false if you asked the question the wrong way. And the other one was ghost. Are ghosts real? No, false.

[01:53:44] Or I guess you would say a positive claim. Ghosts are real, and the arm goes weak. I'm like, "What? How could that not be true?" But I think it's probably because of the commonly held perception of what ghosts are is false. But that doesn't mean there aren't non-physical beings or deceased beings that are in the way station between wherever we go and we die and this realm where they get stuck or they hang out for a while and so on.

[01:54:12] Those were two. And then another one was he was always shitting on 9/11 conspiracies, but he got the facts wrong. His thing that he tested was that steel can't melt. That's not what we're saying. We're saying jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. But those are the only three things I could ever catch him on. I'm like, "Ah." What's your take on those or anything else that you've read or heard of his?

[01:54:41] Mark: I have been skeptical of the kinesiology. I've read his books. Power vs. Force is the most famous one, but when I tell people about Hawkins, I recommend not starting there.

[01:54:49] Luke: Oh no. It's so dry and boring.

[01:54:50] Mark: And I say, start with Letting Go because it's much more practical. Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender and then I: Reality and Subjectivity. It's probably my favorite.

[01:54:58] Luke: I've been reading that one for 20 years. That's what I mean. I can't outgrow it. I'll take a paragraph and I'm just like, "Ugh." Take me all day to really digest a paragraph. It's so dense in the non-dual perspective.

[01:55:11] Mark: Yeah, devotional non-duality. That's another one. It's a little bit shorter than I, but that one, you could spend a day on each paragraph. The kinesiology stuff, like you say, a lot of it's definitional. We have to define the terms to probably know better. But then I also wonder about the bias of the person running it.

[01:55:27] Because Hawkins had not looked into many of the things that we've discussed. And maybe if he had, he would've different views. He was focused on spiritual enlightenment. That was his life. So when he talks about politics and other things-- some of his critiques of leftism actually aligned with what I've written about. So I was happy to see that.

[01:55:44] Luke: I've noticed that too. Because when I used to listen, I didn't even know what left or right was, which I still don't because it's fake. But yeah, he would be like, "George Bush is awesome." And talking about Marxism and stuff like that and leftist and Lenin and Mao. And I didn't have the cultural context, but yeah, he definitely shit on super crazy leftists. In hindsight, I'm like, "Oh, it actually makes sense."

[01:56:12] Mark: Yeah. But I don't think he went as deep in other areas. That wasn't his thing.

[01:56:17] Luke: Because he also tested conspiracy theories as below 200. So of course he's not researching them. But it's like, what does that even mean?

[01:56:26] Mark: What does it mean?

[01:56:26] Luke: What we're talking about here today to 99% of the population sounds like conspiracy theories, when all we're going is, we're actually questioning theories that have been told to us that are conspiratorial in their nature. Which is why we're asking questions.

[01:56:41] Mark: But I think his work is incredibly valuable for the enlightenment path.

[01:56:45] Luke: 100%.

[01:56:46] Mark: So important.

[01:56:47] Luke: Yeah, me too. The thing with muscle testing is, and admittedly I haven't given it a lot of effort, I think you'd really have to build the skillset. I used to go to study groups and stuff. I used to go see him speak, and I've never really met anyone that can get accurate and consistent results with muscle testing using it the way that he did.

[01:57:14] And he would claim in his talks like, oh, we have study groups all over the world, yada, yada. I know one guy actually, Clayton from FLFE. He's been doing muscle testing, I don't know, 20, 30 years or something. He's a reliable guy. I've actually texted him a few times over the years, like, "Dude, I got to know. Test this for me." And I believe his results, but that's one person out of dozens of Hawkins' fans and Dave Otis that I met. It's always weird when only the leader can do a thing.

[01:57:45] Mark: Yeah, exactly.

[01:57:46] Luke: It's like, why is this so hard to do? And he would say, "If you're--" He tested also that if you calibrate under 200, under the level of integrity, you won't get accurate results. But I'm like, "Hopefully I don't hang out with anyone under 200."

[01:58:02] Mark: But then you need people to be relaxed. The person who's being tested and then the tester, there's some physical constraints.

[01:58:10] Luke: Yeah. And you can have music on or something that could influence it. Yeah. It's one of those things that's on my to-do list, is like, all right, I need to devote myself and learn this. Because imagine how useful it would be if you could actually do it accurately. Should I buy this house? No.

[01:58:27] Should I marry this person? Yes. Should I invest in this company? Boom. Is this person integrous? Yes. It's life-changing, which has always been tantalizing to me, but man, it seems like a lot of work and discipline to put in to learn how to do it in a way that you could actually rely upon.

[01:58:45] Mark: That's why Hawkins was so focused on it, because he realized the distinction between truth and falsehood, which is one of his books, is so important-- that discernment process. So if you could have a tool to be able to discern, that would make life so much easier.

[01:58:57] Luke: That's everything. We wouldn't have psyops if humanity had that function. You would just see something. It'd be like, false. End of story.

[01:59:07] Mark: We probably wouldn't stress either about decisions in our life. We would just do things. And if we make decision, we're like, "Oh, that was the right decision." Because we know.

[01:59:14] Luke: Totally. Those of us that aren't proficient in muscle testing have to rely on our gut feeling and intuition, which mine's become a lot more refined. Having a wife that has a really strong one is very helpful, I will say. I learned how to have discernment from just watching how she feels into something, and how many times she's right about something that I couldn't see at the time. And I go, "I need to learn how to do that." I think women are generally more intuitive.

[01:59:45] Mark: There's a lot of trial and error with that because it's a subjective feeling that you can't draw it. You can't point to it.

[01:59:51] Luke: Totally. That's why it took me a while to listen to her. I had to be proven-- proof of concept for a while. Then I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to question it." She's like, "Eh, this feels off." I go, "Okay, I believe you." She's always right.

[02:00:07] All right, dude. I think we did pretty good. Two hours and one minute on two highly charged dense books. You said you're up to seven now? Is that what you said?

[02:00:18] Mark: Yeah.

[02:00:19] Luke: What is next? Do you know?

[02:00:23] Mark: It's been over a year since the Cosmos book came out, and I've had no impulse for a book, so this is about the longest I've gone. And I always tell people if I never write again, I'm good.

[02:00:32] Luke: How long did it take you to write those seven?

[02:00:34] Mark: First one was published in 2018.

[02:00:37] Luke: Oh my God.

[02:00:38] Mark: The seventh in 2024.

[02:00:39] Luke: I started working on my book proposal in 2018, and my book comes out a year from now. I don't know how you do it, dude. It's amazing. And you're writing about stuff that's really difficult to write about too. These are such charged topics. And there's so much disinformation.

[02:00:59] Luke: How do you even research? Like you said, you go and ChatGPT and ask them about something, it's just going to lie to you.

[02:01:04] Mark: Yeah. To me, I just get to a point where I've looked at so many different things. It's like a Venn diagram where there's overlap in different sources. And I'm like, "Okay, there's something here perhaps." But it's just a lot of hours of researching. The researching is the writing to me. When I'm sitting down at the computer, for me, that's pretty short. It's the actual research of even knowing what's worth talking about with people.

[02:01:27] Luke: And your citations are really solid too, which-- I could never write about the things you write about because I can't stand that kind of work, detail work. Ah, look up this website, put the link in the thing. And it's like, oh God. I even cut shit out of my book because I'm just like, I don't want to be pressured about trying to find citations. I could prove some of the things that I wanted to say that are maybe a little controversial, but it's like, dude, I just don't want to go through the hassle.

[02:01:54] Mark: Such a hassle, checking the footnotes and making sure everything's cited properly. But for me, this was my training. Academically and then professionally, creating presentations for a board of directors, I had to know where every fact came from and have it ready to go. And to synthesize a lot of technical information and put it into something short. So I was trained to do this in a lot of ways.

[02:02:14] Luke: Ah, that's helpful. That's helpful. So you have no inspiration right now. The muse isn't tapping on your shoulder, going, "Hey, let's cover this topic." Interesting. What do you do for work and stuff otherwise?

[02:02:28] Mark: I follow what life brings me. It's how I ended up in Austin. I just really don't have much of a plan, and things seem to happen.

[02:02:35] Luke: What is your age?

[02:02:38] Mark: Turning 40 in a few months.

[02:02:40] Luke: Okay, okay. Wow. Damn. So you lived a couple of lives in terms of career before you started writing though.

[02:02:49] Mark: Yeah. So I was a partner at my firm in Silicon Valley, and in that process, I spent 10 years there. But I was in New York investment banking before that. I just learned a lot about surviving. And then when I had my spiritual awakening in 2016, I was still working in Silicon Valley. It felt like a death. The old version of me died and it was a rebirth. It was almost like, I can't believe I'm still here.

[02:03:09] So for the last almost 10 years, it's been this process of actually leaving my firm. I had written one book and did a podcast series. It's called, Where Is My Mind? It's eight episodes, and it's a narrative form where I took clips from people I interviewed, 50 people I interviewed. So that was like writing a book too. I had done those two and then didn't know what was next. I left my firm, and now we're seven books later. I just follow where I'm taken.

[02:03:32] Luke: Which is your bestselling book?

[02:03:34] Mark: The first one, An End to Upside Down Thinking.

[02:03:36] Luke: That's positive. That gives me some faith in humanity.

[02:03:41] Mark: But it's been anti-climactic.

[02:03:43] Luke: They're all important, but if we can sort out the consciousness piece, that's the whole game. Because imagine a higher level of consciousness in the population. Then your other books would be unnecessary, because people wouldn't be getting duped and doing duping.

[02:04:04] Mark: What I tell people now is that that topic of the first book, it's necessary but insufficient. Because it doesn't teach the discernment in these other areas. And that's why there are people who were like, I love your first book. Oh, and now you're talking about politics and voluntaryism and questioning the government? You went off a deep end.

[02:04:19] Luke: Oh.

[02:04:19] Mark: You're now questioning germ theory? You went crazy. So it's like there are these different-- Ken Wilber calls them lines of development. That's the only way I can rationalize this, where you're super developed in one way, but maybe not in other ways. And he talks about it as waking up, cleaning up, growing up, and showing up.

[02:04:34] Luke: Wow, that's cool. That would explain why so many spiritually tapped in boomers fell for the COVID psyop.

[02:04:44] Mark: Exactly.

[02:04:45] Luke: Right?

[02:04:46] Mark: Yeah.

[02:04:46] Luke: I was looking at meditation centers and revered spiritual teachers. Totally hook, line, and sinker on that. I'm scratching my head going, "What?" You guys were the generation of the '60s that was like counter-culture, counter-government, counter-narrative, and now you're just zombified do what the TV says.

[02:05:07] Mark: Yeah. For me, books three through seven are because of that phenomenon. I was so confused after the first two books of people that I thought were spiritually evolved, and I still do in certain ways. And they were advocating for things that are so harmful and tyrannical, and thinking that they're so compassionate for doing so.

[02:05:23] So I'm like, "What is going on?" That was another awakening for me. How can you get something so right that's fundamental and get these other things wrong in a toxic way? So it just shows me that spiritual evolution is multi-pronged. There's probably stuff that I think is true now that I will learn about in a few years and realize that I was wrong.

[02:05:42] Luke: That's a really good point. That's a good point. Yeah. Being spiritually awake is not a guarantee. There's also the phenomenon of the fallen guru. I've talked about that a lot. My wife and I talk about that. That one has always been-- just took me a while to wake up to that because I'm just naive sometimes, much to my own peril.

[02:06:05] But when you see a real spiritual teacher that has real gifts and wisdom, and then they go dark and go rogue and start exploiting and hurting people, doesn't mean they were fake. They just maybe weren't aware of some of the temptations that come along the way of the path. Again, Hawkins would talk a lot about that, right?

[02:06:29] Mark: Yeah. He talks about the allure of the glamorous seductions. And I wonder about some of these traditions where someone's celibate, for example. Are they suppressing and then there's a temptation that hasn't been fully exercised, so then they succumb to something? I don't know how all this stuff works.

[02:06:43] And that's why I haven't wanted any single guru. I would say Hawkins is my top choice, because he's pretty non-denominational. He talks about a bunch of traditions, and it's more conceptual. He's not saying, "Go do this practice every day." Versus just trying to let go of your attachments.

[02:06:58] His favorite practice of mine, he talks about he would let go of paragraphs and then he would surrender sentences, and then words, meaning, as anything emerges in your mind, you surrender it to God. To me, that's a general practice versus something so narrow in other traditions. Because I don't want to get duped. That's my biggest thing right now.

[02:07:17] Luke: I can tell by the books you write, dude.

[02:07:19] Mark: I don't want to get duped.

[02:07:20] Luke: You're like, "Let's take the highest dupe concentration on any one topic and dedupe it. Debunk it in a book."

[02:07:28] Mark: And people will tell me that I'm duped. Oh, you fell for the virus psyop, or you fell for the flat earth psyop. And I'm like, "You don't even know the arguments that I'm making. I'm making a case about is there an independent variable and proper controls with viruses? Have they proven the big bang? Have they proven the radius value? I'm showing that these things haven't been established in the way that we're told." And that's a nuance that for some people it's like too much.

[02:07:50] Luke: Considering your background, I imagine there aren't that many people having spiritual awakenings and studying consciousness and studying the topics that you've covered. Have you found as you've written and published these books and moved to a place like Austin where there is more like-minded community and so on?

[02:08:09] Mark: I found more people that I didn't know existed who are like-minded, but where I come from, like the world of Princeton, I was a competitive tennis player, investment banking. Most people from those worlds, maybe they know that I'm writing books now on weird topics, but they have no interest in it. And a lot of these people are super smart. So it's like I've found a new crew.

[02:08:27] Luke: Wow. And I like the smartest guy in our crew. Every time I see you, I'm like, "All right, tell me about this thing." I imagine writing the books you do that people are either fighting you on stuff or wanting you to give them the answer. Going back to that test, the multiple-choice test, like, no, but what is it then? And you're like, "I don't know."

[02:08:48] Mark: I get worried when people do that because if they think that I am an expert on something, I'm telling you, there's so much that I don't know or understand. These books are the tip of the iceberg.

[02:08:59] Luke: I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm excited to see what your next inspiration is. If it's not a book, it's going to be something super cool. And we'll put all your books linked at lukestorey.com/markgober2. That's G-O-B-E-R. That'll be clickable in your show notes, folks. And thank you so much for joining me, dude. It's been a blast. I'm glad we niched down at least to two topics. I think we did a decent job of covering them, so thanks for your time.

[02:09:26] Mark: I enjoyed it. Thanks, Luke.