Mind the Shift

The human species has been around for some 300,000 years. A typical mammal lasts for a million years. We are not typical.  ”You might think we are in the middle of history. But given the grand sweep, we are the ancients, we are at the very beginning of time. We live in the distant past compared to everything that will ever happen”, says William MacAskill, associate professor in philosophy at Oxford university. MacAskill is the initiator of the Effective Altruism movement, which is about optimizing the good you can do for this world. In his latest book, What We Owe the Future, he discusses how we should think and act to plan for an extremely long human future. The book is basically optimistic. MacAskill thinks we have immense opportunities to improve the world significantly. But it dwells on the potential risks and threats that we must deal with. MacAskill highlights four categories of risks: Extinction (everyone dying), collapse (so much destroyed that civilization doesn’t recover), lock-in (a long future but governed by bad values) and stagnation (which may lead to one of the former). As for the risk of extinction, he concludes that newer risks that are less under control tend to be the largest, such as pandemics caused by man-made pathogens and catastrophes set off by artificial intelligence. Known risks like nuclear war and direct hits by asteroids have a potential to wipe out humankind, but since we are more aware of them we have some understanding of how to mitigate them or at least prepare for them. Climate change tops the global agenda today, but although it is a problem we need to address, it is not an existential threat. Artificial intelligence could lead to intense concentration of power and control. But AI could also have huge benefits. It can speed up science, and it can automate away all monotonous work and give us more time with family and friends and for creativity. ”The scale of the upside is as big as our imagination can take us.” Humans have invented dangerous technology before and not used it to its full detrimental capacity. ”It is a striking thing about the world how much destruction could be reaped if people wanted to. That is actually a source of concern, because AI systems might not have those human safeguards.” One prerequisite to achieve a better future is to actively change our values. There has been tremendous moral progress over the last couple of centuries, but we need to expand our sphere of moral concern, according to MacAskill. ”We care about family and friends and perhaps the nation, but I think we should care as much about everyone, and much more than we do about non-human animals. A hundred billion land animals are killed every year for food, and the vast majority of them are kept in horrific suffering.” William MacAskill thinks some aspects of the course of history are inevitable, such as population growth and technological advancement, but when it comes to moral changes he is not sure. ”We shouldn’t be complacent. Moral collapse can happen again.” William thinks we are at a crucial juncture in time. ”The stakes are much higher than before, the level of prosperity or doom that we could face.” William and I have a discussion about the possibility that alien civilizations are monitoring us or have visited Earth. William is not convinced that the recent Pentagon disclosures actually prove alien presence, but he is open to it, and he has some thoughts on what a close encounter would entail. We also talk briefly about the possibility of a lost human civilization and the cause of the extinction of the megafauna during the Younger Dryas. We have some differing views on that. My final question is a biggie: Could humankind's next big leap be an inward leap, a raise in consciousness? ”It is a possibility. Maybe the best thing is not to spread out and become ever bigger but instead have a life of spirituality.”

Everybody wants to forget about the pandemic, this bizarre period of aberrations. But the assessment of what played out and whether the many harsh policy decisions were called for has only begun. One of the saddest aberrations was infringements on freedom of speech. Few have experienced that more than Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford. As one of the initiators of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), he was actively silenced by the government, which, it turns out, orchestrated a censorship campaign by way of the social media companies. The GBD promoted focused protection instead of sweeping lockdowns: Shield the elderly and let the young go to school. The signatories opined, on evidential grounds, that lockdowns were more harmful than the disease. They based their proposition on the fact that there is an extremely steep age gradient in the risk of dying from covid. There were early signs that this view was held by thousands of doctors. But the ruling class was not amused. People like Francis Collins, head of the NIH, wanted to take down the declaration, and its initiators were ostracized and censored. ”My life is fundamentally transformed”, says Jay Bhattacharya. ”I used to be a quiet scientist, but during the pandemic, I have had to take a very public role. That has been in some ways gratifying, but at the same time it has been traumatic. Many friendships have been broken.” At one point, he says, one hundred of his colleagues circulated a silent petition to try to get the president of Stanford university to silence him. ”I have had lots of practice in how to forgive other people.” Since the summer of 2022, a lawsuit has been underway in which the Biden administration is accused of breaching the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech. Jay Bhattacharya is one of the plaintiffs. ”The evidence of this is remarkable. Government officials have coerced social media companies to censor ideas and certain people”, Jay says. ”There is a censorship network in the government and a dozen agencies. You could call it a ministry of truth”, Jay says, referring to a term in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ”This is the most important First Amendment case since at least the Pentagon papers (NYT v. USA; 1971). It’s been shocking to see the American government behave in this way.” According to Jay, the censorship may actually have led to more deaths than almost any other single policy, because harmful errors were not corrected in time. Jay thinks the lawsuit will go all the way up to the Supreme Court. – I don’t see how the government can win this. In this episode we also talk about • What the GBD did and did not propose. • How the declaration has been vindicated. • The Swedish pandemic model (”the best in the world”). • How leaders in almost the whole world were hypnotized by the draconian Chinese measures. • The continuous excess deaths (primarily caused by extended lockdown harm, according to Jay). • That more power to WHO is a ”terrible idea”. The Great Barrington Declaration: https://gbdeclaration.org/ The lawsuit: https://nclalegal.org/state-of-missouri-et-al-v-joseph-r-biden-jr-et-al/ Jay at Stanford: https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

”The Self Mastery work was what shifted my life after years of therapy, stress management and a feeling of hopelessness”, Eva Beronius tells me before this interview. ”I changed my internal world from a state of depression, PTSD and panic attacks to joy, peace and excitement about life. And a brain and heart in coherence.” Today, years later, Eva is herself a transformational teacher and guides others who want to go through this shift. So, what is Self Mastery? Well, it is not about control. It is rather about letting go of control. ”We think we want to control our thoughts and emotions. To me that is coming from the protector part of our ego mind, which says ’these emotions and thoughts are what is causing me to suffer, so I need to change them’. But we need to embrace them and meet with them”, Eva says. ”When I think of Self Mastery, I think of a skillful artist, like someone who masters the piano. It’s about practicing. It is about being here and being human.” What are we doing most wrong? ”That we believe the lies we tell ourselves. They come from societal conditioning, upbringing and avoidance of certain emotions. It’s not until you take those inner lies apart you can see the lies from the outside as well.” (And, by the way, even the concept of right and wrong is a belief.) Attention is a force, a superpower, Eva explains. ”Think of yourself as the sun, and the rays are your attention. Things appear when you put your attention on them. When you realize that, you can start using that, questioning your bullshit.” There are several practices one can use to stop believing the programmed lies inside. Eva recommends journaling. ”And you should do it in third person. That makes it easier to see your programming.” We talk about masculine and feminine energies and the misconceptions that surround those archetypes versus what is actually there. Eva is just now complementing her healing community with a sister community called fembodiment, which is about embodying our feminine energy. On sexuality, she says: ”It’s important to understand that it’s there for you. We tend to give it away. We think it’s about performing, something we do for someone else. When you shed that, you start to experience sexual energy as a force. We are living in an orgasmic universe. It’s everywhere. I mean, thermonuclear reaction in the sun, what is that?” Eva has a very special relationship with the Toltec spiritual tradition in Mexico in general and the ancient site Teotihuacán in particular. ”My first visit to Teotihuacán was like coming home. That was where I had my first awakening, in a sense. It all came out of necessity. I was suffering.” Teotihuacán was a spiritual university, a place where men and women came to wake up from the dream and realize their divinity. ”When you visit the place today, it’s like it is alive, and it wants to play with you”, Eva says. She arranges power journeys to the site in October every year. At the core of the Toltec spiritual tradition is the art of dreaming: to be dreamt or to be the dreamer. ”In the world there is a dream of suffering, a dream rooted in fear. That dream is what is dreaming you if you are not a conscious dreamer. Right now, the majority of people are being dreamt by this dream.” ”When you shed that dream of fear, you don’t need to learn how to love, because love is where you came from. Love is the force that created everything, and it is inside you”, Eva says. Eva’s podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/1eCcU4XLdZzBbIaOslrPtH Eva’s website: ⁠https://selfmasteryandbeyond.com/⁠ Eva’s Instagram: @evaberonius

We have all heard about the Roswell incident in 1947. But a series of UFO encounters and sightings at and around two air force bases in Suffolk in Eastern England in December 1980 amounted to something at least as spectacular. The Rendlesham Forest Incidents (RFI), as the 1980 events are called, were a sensation when they became known to the public in 1983. But in the decades since then, the hugely complicated case has been subject to massive cover-up and denial, according to a new book by Gary Heseltine, Non-Human The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incidents: Forty-Two Years of Denial. With his background as an interviewing expert with the police force, Gary has managed to dig up an impressive amount of new, mind blowing information; find new witnesses and elicit new information from known witnesses. ”I surprise myself. I really thought I knew the case really well”, Gary says, laughingly. The area around Rendlesham forest was the scene of a number of mysterious sightings and experiences: Strangely and fast moving intense lights, beams scanning the weapon storage area, at least two landed craft and a handful of testimonies about alien beings. In the book, Gary Heseltine meticulously dissects the often crucial details. He interviews people who were members of the US military at the two bases at the time. He elicits particularly interesting accounts from a sergeant by the name of Adrian Bustinza, who is an instrumental link between at least two of the nights when non-human activity took place. Another US service member, James Stewart, gives a mind blowing testimony about entities, strange footprints and a craft that landed and was being shot at. What Stewart experienced, however, turns out to have happened a year before the main events. Gary concludes that in all, no less than 17 UFO encounters took place over four consecutive nights, plus the one Stewart experienced a year before The deep research that was to become a book started in 2017, when Gary was appointed the lead researcher in the production of a documentary about the case. He then began looking for things he might have missed during years of private investigations. But in a way it began already in 2007, when Gary initiated a seven year long collaboration period with the key witness Charles Halt, who at the time of the RFI was the deputy base commander. Halt is a pivotal figure because of a memorandum he wrote that leaked in 1983. It was probably never meant to reach anybody outside the military or the government. What was in the memo could not be denied once it had got out, but anything else pertaining to the RFI could, and was. In the memo, Halt reported two nights of UFO activity. He admitted to having seen multiple UFO’s himself. But as Gary Heseltine has shown, there was more to the story. Gary ended the collaboration in 2014. ”Because I realized he knew more than he was telling me.” Not only the military is guilty of an incredible amount of cover-up and denial, but also the mainstream media, which has not been willing to seriously question the official story. Gary’s book UFO Truth Magazine International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research, ICER (Gary is vice president)

There is one person who probably has had more influence than anybody else over alternative views on the textbook narrative of ancient Egyptian technology. Christopher Dunn has written three prominent books on the subject. That is actually a piece of news, because number three hasn’t yet been published. It will be out by the end of this year. Chris Dunn is an engineer, and thus he has the perspective of the people who actually built the marvels of ancient Egypt. He is very much not an Egyptologist or an archaeologist. Precisely because of that I would not hesitate to call him a leading expert in this field. The two books he is known for are The Giza Power Plant and Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt. The upcoming book is a sequel to the first one and has the title Giza – The Tesla Connection, with the subtitle Acoustical Science and the Harvesting of Clean Energy. Those who are skeptical of the idea that the precise artifacts and impressive buildings of ancient Egypt must have been made with the help of high-tech machinery often ask: ”So, why haven’t we found any traces of those machines?” In fact, most machines that have been used to construct things are lost. Over time they corrode and turn to dust, especially if we are talking about an Egyptian civilization way older than the textbook dynasties.  ”I support the idea of a previous civilization that was met with a cataclysm”, says Chris. In his new book, he fine tunes his theories about how the Giza pyramids harnessed and transmitted energy. Important parts rest on the work by Nasa physicist Friedemann Freund. The Tesla connection is, among other things, the way the energy was distributed. Some say the knowledge about how to generate basically free energy has been actively suppressed since the days of Nikola Tesla, perhaps even longer. Chris Dunn is inclined to agree. ”There have been some very bright people out here who feel their ideas have been suppressed”, he says. ”There are vested interests that would prevent new technologies from being introduced, which would make their investments worthless.” ”In my new book, I am closer to describing more fully a better way to harness electricity. I expect it’s going to be 50-60 years before people take it seriously. That’s why I devote the book to future generations.” ”Or it may take a week. It depends who gets involved.” Links: Giza Power website Chris Dunn’s books Mark Qvist’s article on scanned and analyzed ancient urn Ahmed Adly, Youtube UnchartedX, Youtube

Anthony Willoughby has been described as an eccentric, an adventurer, an explorer, an entrepreneur and a team-builder. He has lived his life staying away from restricting social structures. At school, he was the odd man out. ”Oh, I was completely ostracized”, he says. Today, he sees that as a privilege, because he didn’t want to be a part of a mainstream he never understood. Anthony is an eighth generation expatriate. He grew up in Sudan, Egypt and East Africa, experiencing fascinating wildlife and adventures. Then he was sent to school in England, which completely lacked enthusiasm for life. His luckiest moment at school was when his house master said ”let’s talk about your future”. ”’Anthony’, he said, ’let’s make one thing absolutely clear: you are far, far too stupid to go to university’. I remember the sense of freedom.” Education has not changed in hundreds of years, and it is basically designed to train people to work in factories or go to the trenches, according to Anthony. ”The brain is damaged by it. It completely removes creativity.” So he began a life of travel and human encounters. He was based in Japan for 30 years. From there he made adventurous excursions to Yemen, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and East Africa. ”It was when I met with the Maasai in Kenya I saw people who had substance without arrogance. I thought: why aren't we taught presence, why aren't we taught identity, why aren't we taught who we are?” In Papua New Guinea, Anthony learned the importance of knowing one’s territory. That was the beginning of the two consultancies he is now running: Territory Mapping and Nomadic School of Business. ”Nomads have this glorious sense of being able to welcome people on their territory. They have absolute confidence. They know who they are.” He began asking business people ”what are you hunting, what are you protecting and what are you growing?” and had them draw their own territory maps. ”You can build teams in a company quite easily. But the purpose and the identity is what is missing”, he says. He and his associates are now working in exactly the same way with billionaire families in America as with homeless people in Wales. Anthony laughingly says that he in some ways loved Covid, and he loves the recently launched artificial intelligence robot Chat GPT. ”People thought structure, stability and certainty existed, but they’re delusions! They’re delusions that people build their lives on. But they’re meaningless if you don’t know who you are.” ”And suddenly the arrogance of knowledge does not exist. The only thing that matters is wisdom. We’re going right back to the basics.” Anthony’s email address Anthony’s two consultancies: Territory Mapping Nomadic School of Business

(For full Youtube) Not many people ponder the standard story of Earth’s deep geological history. Most of us know there have been many ice ages, but few realize that the science to explain them is far from settled. According to the groundbreaking work of Mario Buildreps, pen-name for Maarten D, the so-called Milankovich cycles cannot explain recurring ice ages (in all fairness, there is controversy around this theory). Buildreps’ astonishing conclusion is the following: The Earth has periodically expanded. During these periods of expansion, the North Pole has moved and the oceans have widened (the ocean floors are much younger than the land masses). Needless to say, these expansion events must have been accompanied with enormous seismic activity, floods and other natural disasters. The idea that the Earth has expanded is not new, but expansion has happened much more recently than the traditional expansionists believed, according to Mario Buildreps and his co-researchers. Mario is in a way building on, and enhancing, the theories of Charles Hapgood. One strange feature about the last ice age is that the ice sheet was clearly off center. It covered large swaths of Europe and North America, almost down to subtropical latitudes, but it didn’t cover eastern Siberia. Assuming that the geographical North Pole was located further south than today when the last ice age began, over Greenland, would explain this eccentricity. Oddly enough, the South Pole seems to have stayed put all along. In Mario’s model, the South Pole is the pivot point in the gradual expansion of the Earth. Mario discovered the ”wandering” of the North Pole when he measured the orientation of hundreds of ancient megalithic sites around the world. The hypothesis is that people have always oriented important buildings cardinally. It turns out that a large proportion of the ancient sites are almost oriented to today’s true north, but not quite. Mario realized that clusters of ancient buildings that are ”wrongly” oriented have exactly the same degree of deviation from true north. He eventually came to two conclusions: The North Pole has had five different positions along a longitude that stretches over Greenland during the last 450,000 years, and many ancient megalithic structures are much older than previously believed. According to this dating method, the Cochasqui pyramids in Ecuador could be a stunning 400,000 years old, and Chichen Itzá in Mexico 250,000 years, whereas the pyramids of Giza are oriented towards the current North Pole, which means their foundations are at the most 26,000 years old. Mario, or Maarten, is a former successful businessperson and an engineer. Math is second nature to him. His and his co-researchers’ calculations tell him that the likelihood that the different clusters of structures that have the exact same orientation ”fault” between them should be oriented to precisely the five locations of the North Pole concluded by Mario is pure chance is virtually zero. Mario thinks humanity has gone through many cataclysms. He downplays the special importance many ascribe to the Younger Dryas period as a civilization-ending event. Many scientific disciplines need to change their tenets when – if – Mario’s theory becomes mainstream and the paradigm shifts completely. Geology is one. Archaeology is another. Just consider this brilliant remark by Mario: ”Archaeological periods – Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age – are named according to the corrosion rate of those materials.” Indeed. Iron lasts a little over 3,000 years, bronze a little over 5,000 years, and before that, you only find stone, so you call it the Stone Age. But the truth is that only stone survives tens of thousands of years. Any material could have been used then. Mario’s website

As many followers of this podcast know, its host worked as a news journalist for more than two decades. In the summer of 2020, I left my job at the biggest newspaper in Sweden. That same summer, Ariana Pekary quit her job at one of the biggest news desks in America, MSNBC, without having any other media job waiting for her. That was a bold and unconventional step in a world of tough competition. Not only that: On her blog, Ariana posted a resignation letter, which went viral. These are some of the words she wrote: Behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done. “We are a cancer and there is no cure,” a successful and insightful TV veteran said to me. As it is, this cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis. This cancer risks human lives, even in the middle of a pandemic. This cancer risks our democracy, even in the middle of a presidential election. There is a better way to do this. I’m not so cynical to think that we are absolutely doomed (though we are on that path). I know we can find a cure. ”So much of the polarization in (the American) society is amplified due to the financial incentives of the news media”, Ariana says. ”It seeps into every newsroom, no matter how earnest the journalists are. And then it seeps into everybody’s living room.” ”It’s a cancer because it’s such an enormous problem that infects everyone. It’s incredibly damaging, and it’s only getting worse. That's why I felt I needed to say that in a public space.” Before she came to MSNBC, Ariana worked at public radio. She describes the difference as huge. At public radio, the numbers of listeners or viewers are not broken down on a day-to-day basis, as they are at commercial desks. ”This allows the journalists there to have real live editorial debates”, she says. For example, she was able to do an extensive documentary series about homeless children. She spent the bulk of a year interviewing families and people who worked with these vulnerable people. ”At MSNBC, they might consider that type of topic, but it would always be the first thing they would kill when something else came along. It is a big difference.” One particular American media dilemma is political partisanship. It exists elsewhere, too, but it is especially prominent in the US. It is a real problem which seems to be difficult to solve. I ask Ariana what she thinks about another cause of skewed news reporting, the negativity bias. I personally think it is one of the biggest media problems, because it permeates all kinds of journalism, and the focus on misery that is its result poisons people ’s minds. Ariana agrees that the guiding star of the news media, ”if it bleeds, it leads”, is sad. But she is not convinced that it is a major issue that has to be dealt with. ”It’s a complicated problem. You're going to report on something when it’s broken. If things are working okay, you won’t.” The media landscape is changing fast. There are ever more outlets for information, some reliable, some less so. Ariana thinks this is already changing the way we perceive news, and what it is. ”We need to exercise more humility, realize we don’t know everything, and that means accepting someone who’ll combat you with a different opinion, which can be very difficult. My hope is that we can start to raise an awareness that things aren't necessarily black or white.” Ariana’s ”dream” news media would break the us versus them perspective, the tribalism. ”Even if we have different opinions, we have a lot in common. There’s  a common denominator among all of us.” Ariana’s website Ariana’s resignation letter

David ”Diamond” Mauriello and Leah Shaper moved to southern Colorado to create an alternative way of living and to ”extract themselves from the system”. They perceived the majority society as increasingly unsound. Today, they are self-sufficient on healthy foods and energy, and they have made sure that they will be able to thrive even if a massive geomagnetic storm takes out the power and communication grids. That risk is not minimal. Significant changes are underway in Earth’s magnetic field. Diamond and Leah have a background in Academia and science, and they have delved deeply into the historic patterns and behavior of our planet and the celestial body that most influences it, the sun. The most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, the famed Carrington event, knocked out the little electrical infrastructure that was in place at the time. Today, as you know, society is completely dependent on such. According to Leah and Diamond – and many others who have looked into the historic data – it is a matter of when, not if, a major magnetic disruption with devastating consequences for modern society will occur. Another sun-related feature that is already here is a prolonged period of weak solar activity, something called the Modern Grand Solar Minimum. It will lead to significantly colder weather within a few years, especially in certain regions. ”The one thing everybody should come away with if they listen to this, is that there will be a large earthquake, there will be a VEI 7 volcanic eruption, and there will be a comet that hits earth. The question isn't if, it's when. And wouldn't you like a little peace of mind, to be prepared instead of scared?”, says Diamond. I myself have a slightly different approach to the prospect of a coming catastrophe. I am more of a take-life-as-it-unfolds person. Which makes for an interesting exchange of thoughts on that matter. To sum up, here are some of the many topics we cover in this lively conversation: • Toxic foods • False and true risks • Prepping for disaster • Censorship • Hypocrisy in science • The climate discussion • The Grand solar minimum • The geomagnetic reversal • Optimism vs pessimism • Hope of a brighter future on the other side of chaos • What we can learn from cataclysms in history • Earlier civilizations Enjoy! Oppenheimer Ranch Project on Youtube Magnetic Reversal News on Youtube Original ORP website Study on the Modern Grand Solar Minimum (by Valentina Zharkova, Northumbria University)

On February 19th, 2016, Jessica Corneille went to sleep and had a lucid dream. The next morning, she woke up and opened her eyes … ”… and I was flooded with this immense sense of well-being and connection with everything and everyone in the universe, a deep sense of oneness. It was a deeply lived experience, it was almost cellular and vibrational.” It was not something acquired, Jessica explains. ”It was rather as though a veil had been lifted and I could see what had been there all the time.” ”I was returning to a child-like state. Everything was amplified. Even just from a five senses standpoint it was as if everything was new, and paradoxically, it felt as if I was remembering old knowledge.” This transformational state stayed intense for several months. Eventually it waned, but it is still with her today. ”Six years down the line, I am still thinking about it all the time”, she says. The spontaneous spiritual awakening made Jessica feel compelled to leave a promising career in the art world and instead follow an urge to understand more of what these experiences are and convey that knowledge to people. ”I knew I needed to do something with this experience, some kind of selfless service to humanity.” Her new path led her to become a research psychologist. Her mission is to challenge the default pathologization of awakening experiences. ”If we could understand these experiences better scientifically, we could make a case for them not to always be considered psychopathology or mental health disorder within the mainstream psychological systems, which they are presently, unfortunately”, she says. Before her profound experience, Jessica was an atheist and had no connection to anything spiritual or religious. But the awakening brought with it a strong sense ”that everything will be well after my death”. ”There was a loss of fear. I will return to Source.” Many spiritual awakenings occur when the person is in some kind of trauma or crisis, like temporary clinical death, but Jessica experienced an ego death in a situation where she was happy. She had just moved to a city she loved and begun a job she loved. According to Jessica Corneille’s research, 91 percent of those who have had a spontaneous spiritual awakening experience positive effects already in the short term, and 98 percent experience that they are positive in the long term. The experience is transformative. There is a loss of fear and anxiety. ”These experiences are powerful. Overall, they are described as stronger than all other measured altered states of consciousness, like those induced by drugs or by other means”, Jessica says. She thinks there is hope for a better scientific understanding of spiritual experiences, which entails a possible bridging of science and spirituality. ”Look at the new research on psychedelics and on contemplative practices. And there is quite a lot of funding put into trying to understand the nature of consciousness.” ”I think we are going through a paradigm shift.” Jessica’s email address Bio on the Galileo Commission’s website Jessica’s scientific study on spontaneous spiritual awakenings Lecture by Jessica about her study on spiritual awakenings