Brett Hurt began programming at seven and eventually founded Coremetrics, co-founded Bazaarvoice, took it public, and founded data.world. He made the money, bought the Lamborghini, and achieved the freedom he had imagined since childhood.

Then he tried retirement.

“It was so empty,” he says. “It was so empty.”

Success forced Brett to confront a question failure had allowed him to postpone: What is all this capability for?

His search led inward through mystical experiences, psychedelics, meditation, and the writing of Love Conquers Fear. It also changed how he understood the responsibilities of technologists as artificial intelligence expands humanity’s power.

In this conversation, we explore success and emptiness, the uneven development of powerful people, love as an expansion of who counts, the structural dangers surrounding AI, and why inner work matters even though it cannot replace regulation, accountability, or distributed ownership.

We have moved from “revenge of the nerds” to “responsibility of the nerds.”

The AI alignment problem begins within.

John W. Price signed his record deal in blood. Then he became a single father with a crib beside his bed and no idea who to be.

How do you grow up, make a living, and become someone others can depend on without losing what makes you alive?

John’s path took him from touring musician to Jungian psychotherapist through unexpected fatherhood, sobriety, meditation, and a psychology class that moved him to tears. A student who had scraped by suddenly found himself earning straight A’s. He eventually earned a doctorate in Jungian psychology.

But the fire never went away.

In this episode of Personal Kosmology, we explore what happens when a life built around freedom and intensity meets the demands of caring for someone else. We talk about the people who helped John find his way, the therapist whose 90-day challenge became five years without alcohol, and the fear that becoming quieter might cost us our spark.

We also get into the difference between growing older and growing wiser, and what happens when we lack role models or rites of passage to guide us. Adulthood asks us to find our place within society. Elderhood asks us to go further: to challenge society and help it evolve. That takes discernment, responsibility, and enough of our original fire to question the world we have learned to inhabit.

IN THIS CONVERSATION
• Music, belonging, and the freedom to be yourself
• Unexpected single fatherhood and the end of an imagined future
• Sobriety and the power of someone who can challenge you
• Meditation, ambition, and the fear of losing your edge
• Discovering psychology after years of struggling in school
• Jung, spirituality, and the limits of certainty
• Therapy, authentic connection, and what it means to care
• Maturity, mentorship, and tending your fire

What part of yourself have you worked hardest to keep alive as you’ve grown up?

ABOUT JOHN
John W. Price, PhD, LPC, is a depth psychotherapist, musician, and host of The Sacred Speaks. He co-founded The Center for the Healing Arts and Sciences.

CONNECT WITH JOHN
Website: https://www.drjohnwprice.com/
The Sacred Speaks: https://www.youtube.com/c/thesacredspeaks
The Center for the Healing Arts and Sciences: https://www.thecenterforhas.com/

PERSONAL KOSMOLOGY
I’m Devin Martin, an executive life coach collecting the origin stories of seekers. By understanding how extraordinary people make sense of life, you’ll better understand how you make sense of your own.

Explore the show: https://personalkosmology.com/
Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033NFLUJZEpM757VPosS9H

Subscribe for more conversations about how we become who we are, and who we might become next.

Personal Kosmology: Long-form conversations about the stories we live inside, one life at a time.

“You don’t really learn much when you learn about a person’s genetics.”

That is a surprising claim from Linea Avey (formerly Linda Avey), co-founder of 23andMe. But it captures the journey that followed her breakthrough in personal genomics: the more we learn to measure about a human being, the clearer it becomes that no measurement tells the whole story.

Linea traces her path from Lutheran minister’s daughter and committed atheist to biotech entrepreneur, health-systems builder, and spiritual explorer. She recounts spitting into an early saliva DNA kit, discovering that her genome was sitting on a company server, and realizing that the science existed before anyone knew how to put it into people’s hands. That insight led to an early meeting at Google, a partnership with Anne Wojcicki, and the creation of 23andMe.

But genetics was only the beginning. Linea explains why genes need phenotype and lived context, why individuals should own their health data, and why prevention cannot thrive inside a system financially organized around treating sickness. From patient-led research and wearable technology to AI and the Lifespan Project, her work has become a search for a more complete model of human health.

Then the conversation moves beyond what science currently knows how to measure. Linea reflects on materialism, consciousness, non-human intelligence, an unexplained light in the sky, and the breathwork session that led her to change her name from Linda to Linea.

We also explore:

The saliva test that helped inspire 23andMe
Meeting Anne Wojcicki and becoming an unexpected entrepreneur
Why genetic information is nearly meaningless without context
Participatory research, chronic illness, and wearable data
Building a prevention-first alternative to the sick-care system
Personal ownership of health data
Science, spirituality, UAP, and the limits of certainty
The meaning behind her new name

This is a conversation about genetics, health, identity, consciousness, and what happens when curiosity becomes stronger than certainty.

Personal Kosmology - Long-form conversations about the stories we live inside — one life at a time. - PersonalKosmology.com

What happens when the identity that makes you acceptable becomes the very thing you need to outgrow?

Mollie Adler was a child paralyzed by questions about death, obsessed with ancient Egypt, mythology, and the search for meaning. Then, in eighth grade, she decided that version of herself was not cool. She would become “the hot girl.”

That decision eventually took her from a childhood bedroom filled with Harry Potter to winning Miss Teen Wyoming, pursuing a career in music, and being repeatedly valued for how she looked. As Mollie puts it, she was “completely shaped by being consumed as a young woman.”

By her late twenties, she was deeply depressed and taking six psychiatric medications. The biomedical framework gave her diagnoses and symptoms, but she felt it could not explain what had happened to her, who she was, or how to build a meaningful life.

Then she bought a tarot deck.

The first card she drew was Temperance, an image of integration that would come to symbolize her entire journey. Tarot led her back toward mythology, Jungian psychology, the feminine hero’s journey, and the strange spiritual questions she had abandoned as a child.

That search became Back From the Borderline, a successful podcast exploring psychology, spirituality, mythology, and the limitations of reducing human beings to diagnostic labels. It also led Mollie into the world of the Bledsoe family, where she witnessed an anomalous orb experience that challenged her understanding of what is possible.

Today, Mollie is the co-founder of Moods, an AI platform she describes as “reflective intelligence for your inner world.” Moods attempts to combine emerging technology with ancient symbolic frameworks while resisting the addictive, extractive incentives that define so much of modern technology.

This is the story of a woman who grew up without maps, tried to become what the world rewarded, and eventually began building new maps of meaning for herself and others.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Mollie’s childhood fear of death and fascination with ancient Egypt 
• Why she abandoned her authentic interests to become “the hot girl” 
• Winning Miss Teen Wyoming and being consumed as a young woman
• Sexual exploitation, depression, psychiatric diagnosis, and medication
• The possibilities and limitations of mental health labels 
• Tarot, Temperance, Jung, and the feminine hero’s journey 
• The Bledsoe family and Mollie’s anomalous orb experience 
• Why people turn to AI for therapy, spirituality, and shadow work 
• The risks of AI psychosis, sycophancy, and ungrounded meaning-making 
• Building Moods as a non-extractive technology for the inner world

CONNECT WITH MOLLIE

Back From the Borderline: https://backfromtheborderline.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backfromtheborderline/ Moods: https://moods.world

EXPLORE PERSONAL KOSMOLOGY
https://personalkosmology.com

Subscribe for more conversations about how extraordinary people come to understand themselves, reality, and what matters most.

This episode discusses sexual trauma, suicidality, psychiatric diagnosis, and medication withdrawal. It reflects Mollie’s personal experience and is not medical advice. Never stop psychiatric medication without guidance from a qualified medical professional.

                              Personal Kosmology 
Long-form conversations about the stories we live inside — one life at a time. 
                            - PersonalKosmology.com

What happens when you stop looking outside yourself for the rules of how to live?

Alli Schaper grew up wanting to do things right. She was religious, achievement-oriented, eager for approval, and eventually earned a master’s degree in accounting and became a CPA. But the path that looked right on paper slowly gave way to a much stranger one.

Today, Alli is the co-founder and CEO of SuperMush, co-founder of the Microdosing Collective, host of Into the Multiverse, a psychedelic advocate, entrepreneur, and community builder.

Her journey there was anything but linear.

In this episode of Personal Kosmology, Alli traces the experiences that changed how she relates to her health, career, spirituality, relationships, and ultimately death.

Years of chronic health problems first forced her to question how much of her own wisdom she had outsourced to experts. Functional medicine and functional mushrooms opened one door. Psychedelics opened another, challenging beliefs she had inherited about drugs, consciousness, and God.

But one of the deepest transformations came through the sudden death of her father.

That loss pushed Alli more directly into questions most of us spend our lives avoiding: What happens when we die? Why are we so afraid of death? And what might our relationship with death reveal about the way we are living?

For Alli, mushrooms became more than a health product or psychedelic tool. They became a metaphor for life itself.

In a forest, fungi break down dead matter and return its nutrients to the soil. Death becomes the raw material for new life.

As Alli puts it: “Mushrooms are one of the best teachers ever of death.”

Her story is also about learning what to do with the parts of ourselves that once seemed like liabilities.

The desire to be liked became an ability to connect deeply with people.

A love of partying and socializing evolved into building communities.

Achievement and perfectionism became tools she could use rather than rules she had to obey.

Networking ambition led her to a surprising conclusion after 360 coffee dates in a single year: success without meaningful relationships can leave you “alone on the yacht.”

And the impulse to look outward for answers gradually became a willingness to trust direct experience.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Growing up Lutheran and experiencing religion through fear and obligation
• Alli’s extraordinary birth story involving her mother and aunt
• Perfectionism, approval-seeking, and rebellion
• Choosing college by Googling the #1 party school in America
• Becoming a CPA and entering corporate consulting
• Chronic health problems and getting off 12 pharmaceutical medications
• Discovering functional mushrooms
• Why she once believed psychedelics would “fry your brain”
• The psychedelic experience that led her to quit modeling the next day
• Reconnecting with God through direct experience
• Inherited belief versus embodied knowing
• What 360 coffee dates taught her about success and loneliness
• Building SuperMush around mushrooms, lifestyle, and community
• Microdosing and psychedelic advocacy
• Experiencing psychedelics with her parents before her father died
• Near-death experiences and the mystery of what happens after death
• Why Western culture struggles to confront mortality
• Death dinners, surrender, and learning to live with less fear
• What fungi can teach us about decomposition, renewal, and life

Alli does not offer a neat answer to what happens when we die.

That may be the point.

Her story is about becoming more willing to enter the questions directly, to trust what she experiences, and to allow mystery to change the way she lives.

GUEST LINKS

Alli Schaper: allischaper.com
Instagram: @allischaper
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/allischaper
SuperMush: supermush.com
Microdosing Collective: microdosingcollective.org

Into the Multiverse Podcast:
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-multiverse-podcast/id1590612760
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/5HiGSnP57NisM8prbeHhQ4
YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCuHyvb1YxQygW-9yG66b6Cw
Instagram: @intothemultiverse

Also from Alli: “Mushrooms Eat Death For Breakfast” can be found at allischaper.com.

Welcome to the Personal Kosmology of Alli Schaper.

Subscribe for more conversations with people whose experiences have forced them to reconsider what they believe about themselves, reality, and what it means to live a meaningful life.

Ryan Graves did not grow up dreaming about UFOs.

He grew up in rural Massachusetts, reading science fiction, playing sports, questioning religion, and imagining the technological future. He studied aerospace engineering, became a Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot, and eventually found himself operating some of the most sophisticated aviation systems in the world.

Then those systems started detecting things that were not supposed to be there.

After a major radar upgrade, Ryan and other pilots began seeing unidentified objects operating inside military training airspace off the East Coast. The tracks appeared repeatedly. Multiple sensors confirmed that physical objects were present. Some hovered. Some moved at extraordinary speeds. Some seemed to operate in ways the pilots could not explain.

Then another pilot came back from a flight shaken.

He had nearly collided with one.

His description: a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere.

The object passed between two Navy jets and came roughly 50 feet from the cockpit of the lead aircraft.

What followed is what makes Ryan's story so interesting to me.

This is not the story of someone becoming convinced that aliens are visiting Earth. Ryan remains extremely careful about what the evidence does and does not allow him to conclude.

It is the story of a person trained to trust data, make decisions under pressure, and distinguish signal from noise being forced to confront evidence that did not fit his model of reality.

And then confronting something perhaps even harder: an institution that did not seem equipped to deal with it.

Ryan eventually learned that multiple near misses had gone unreported. The objects continued appearing. Pilots altered training missions to avoid them. Years later, the 2017 New York Times story revealed that the problem had not simply been resolved somewhere higher up the chain of command.

Ryan decided to speak.

That decision eventually took him to the Pentagon, Congress, national media, and ultimately to founding Americans for Safe Aerospace, where he now works to build credible reporting systems for military pilots, commercial aviators, law enforcement, and others encountering anomalous phenomena.

But this conversation goes much further than the sightings themselves.

We talk about:

• What Navy pilots actually see on radar and why the publicly released videos tell only a small part of the story
• The near collision with the cube inside a sphere
• Why multiple independent sensor systems matter
• The stigma that kept pilots from reporting what they saw
• What happened when Ryan tried to brief Congress
• Why "unknown" does not mean "alien"
• How to remain rigorous when evidence challenges your worldview
• Epistemic humility and the discipline of not reacting too quickly to strange information
• Reports involving consciousness, intuition, and anomalous experience
• Extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial, and other possible explanations
• Whether advanced intelligence might understand physics and consciousness in ways we do not
• Why Ryan had to recover some of the childlike comfort with mystery that his career as a fighter pilot had trained out of him

One of my favorite ideas from the conversation is deceptively simple:

We do not have to choose between believing extraordinary claims and dismissing them.

There is another option.

Pay attention. Gather evidence. Stay curious. Resist premature certainty.

Ryan Graves has built a career around doing exactly that.

Welcome to the Personal Kosmology of Ryan Graves.

What do you do when you achieve everything society tells you to want, only to realize it all feels hollow and meaningless?

That is where Mark Gober found himself after Princeton, Division I athletics, and a successful career in finance. What came next was a radical rethinking of consciousness, meaning, success, and how to live.

Mark Gober followed a path that looked almost impossibly successful from the outside. He went to Princeton, captained the Division I tennis team, entered the world of finance, and eventually became a partner at an investment firm focused on technology and intellectual property.

He was also, by his own description, a materialist. Consciousness came from the brain. Psychic phenomena weren’t real. Spirituality was superstition. Life, ultimately, had no inherent meaning.

Then he started looking at the evidence.

What began as an intellectual curiosity turned into a much deeper confrontation with the assumptions underneath his life. Research into consciousness, near-death experiences, psychic phenomena, and the nature of reality pushed Mark toward a conclusion he never expected: the worldview he had inherited might be fundamentally incomplete.

And if that was true, it wasn’t just an abstract philosophical problem.

It meant reconsidering what mattered.

It meant questioning the identity he had built around achievement.

And eventually, it meant grieving the life he had spent pursuing.

In this conversation, Mark and I trace that transformation from the inside out: from Princeton and Wall Street to consciousness research, from materialism to a participatory view of reality, and from accomplishment toward something much harder to quantify—love.

We discuss:

• Why success can become its own kind of trap
• The assumptions hidden inside scientific materialism
• The evidence that changed Mark’s mind about consciousness
• Near-death experiences, psychic phenomena, and anomalous cognition
• Why intelligent people often dismiss certain questions before examining the evidence
• The difference between skepticism and dogmatism
• What happens psychologically when your worldview begins to collapse
• Why Mark came to believe that consciousness may be fundamental rather than produced by the brain
• How a change in metaphysics can radically change the way you live
• The cost of building an identity around professional achievement
• Why Mark eventually had to “grieve” his old life
• Love, meaning, and what becomes important when death is no longer understood as the end

Mark Gober is the author of An End to Upside Down Thinking and a series of books examining consciousness, psychic phenomena, politics, health, and the assumptions underlying modern culture.

This episode is not an argument that you should believe what Mark believes.

It is an exploration of what can happen when someone is willing to follow a question far enough that the answer threatens the structure of his own identity.

That is the territory of Personal Kosmology.

Each episode traces one person’s journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that transformed them, the questions at the edge of their thinking today, and how those changes have altered the way they live.

By understanding how extraordinary people make sense of life, you may better understand how you make sense of your own.

Welcome to the Personal Kosmology of Mark Gober.

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ABOUT MARK GOBER

Mark Gober is an author, researcher, and former finance professional whose work explores consciousness and the nature of reality. His first book, An End to Upside Down Thinking, examines evidence suggesting that consciousness may not be generated by the brain. He has since written extensively about related questions involving science, spirituality, health, politics, and human flourishing.

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ABOUT PERSONAL KOSMOLOGY

Personal Kosmology is a podcast about how people come to see the world the way they do.

Host Devin Martin is an executive life coach who has spent nearly two decades studying human transformation from the inside out. Each conversation explores a guest’s intellectual, psychological, and spiritual development—not simply what they believe, but how they got there.

Subscribe for conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, artists, spiritual practitioners, researchers, and other people willing to question the maps they were given.

🌐 personalkosmology.com