Mark Gober went from investment banking to writing a book that dives deep into consciousness anomalies.

 

photo by: Skeptiko

 
Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Mark Gober to Skeptiko. Mark is a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist and strategist turned author. He has a terrific book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, which is certainly right up our alley here on Skeptiko. Mark, thanks so much for joining me.  
Mark Gober: Thank you for having me Alex. 
Alex Tsakiris: So I met you through my friend Rick Archer who I can never give enough praise to for his very excellent show Buddha at the Gas Pump, which I think has really set the tone for so many of these questions about consciousness and transcending that consciousness, which your book is precursor to. I mean you have to at least be able to address the topics you’re talking about, in terms of materialism and scientific materialism in particular, but I thought Rick did a great job and then I was super excited in this interview to kind of extend that and see where we might take that beyond that. So awesome.  
Mark Gober: Sounds good.  
Alex Tsakiris: So I  like playing this little game that I call Skeptiko Jeopardy and I particularly like it in this case because as I mentioned, so many of the topics you’ve covered in your book, we’ve covered a million times on Skeptiko, a billion times with a million guests and a lot of the same people you’ve talked to as well. 
So really, I think the cool thing about that is it’s an opportunity to kind of move past that and dig into some of the deeper questions in terms of the implications of An End To Upside Down Thinking beyond the proof.  

 

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Alex Tsakiris: But before we get there, you do have an interesting background and I’m sure people would love to hear more about that. So tell folks a little bit about this. You’re a super smart guy, a Princeton guy, and then also this outstanding tennis player. I mean Silicon Valley, you’ve kind of got it all, the whole package. Why do you want to throw it all away and pursue the spiritual path?  
Mark Gober: Well, this was not planned. This is all actually pretty new for me. After I graduated from Princeton, I worked in investment banking in New York during the financial crisis, so that was 2008 to 2010. I wasn’t thinking about consciousness then at all. I left Wall Street and joined my current firm, it’s called Sherpa Technology Group, now based in Silicon Valley. I’m a partner at the firm and we advise companies on business strategy and intellectual property matters. So when innovation is involved and patents in particular, we help companies with strategy and helping them transact assets. That’s what I do by day. 
It was in about August of 2016 when I first started hearing podcasts that exposed me to topics related to consciousness that I had never heard about before in any serious way, and at first I wasn’t, it didn’t like change my life or anything but I started to hear enough independent accounts that a lightbulb kind of went off,