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Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Is Consciousness Outside of The Brain?! Physicist and Inventor of the Microprocessor, Federico Faggin, explains how Science and Spirituality are Merging In His Quantum Field Theory of Consciousness. His powerful awakened Revealed the Truth About Reality.

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Mayim Bialik

Comedy, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.85.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What happens when one of the greatest minds in modern technology has a spiritual awakening that shatters everything he thought he knew about reality?


In this exclusive interview on Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Federico Faggin — legendary physicist-turned-inventor, creator of Silicon Gate Technology, father of the first commercial microprocessor at Intel, and early pioneer of AI — opens up like never before about the transformational experience that changed the entire direction of his life.


Faggin reveals the moment a beam of pure love, peace, and joy radiated through him, showing him that consciousness—not matter—is the true foundation of reality. This awakening didn’t just shift his worldview…it reshaped his life’s work, his understanding of physics, and his mission to bridge science and spirituality.


Federico Faggin breaks down:

- How his spiritual awakening rewired his life & work

- Why Consciousness & Free Will actually explain Quantum Physics (and not the other way around)

- The 3 levels of reality, and why our spiritual reality is inseparable from the material one

- Why humanity faces destructive consequences (like environmental collapse) when we’re out of alignment with true reality

- How gravity itself is “proof of love” at the deepest level

- How ego overidentification blinds us to the true nature of existence

- Why the boundary between science & spirituality has already dissolved

- How the next evolution of medicine will awaken a deeper understanding of oneness, consciousness, and free will

- Why your personal happiness is ultimately up to you and no one else

- His insights on the Afterlife, Collective Consciousness, and whether we’re living in a Simulation


PLUS...Federico shares a special sneak peek at his groundbreaking new book!


If you’ve ever wondered what consciousness really is, whether science can explain spirituality, or what happens after we die, this conversation will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about reality.


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Federico Faggin’s book, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature: https://a.co/d/hC8xFjf


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Transcript

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0:00.0

My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash break down for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash break breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. I had been pretending to be happy for a number of years, but I was not paying attention to my inner life. I woke up around the night incredible, and it was coming out of my chest. And it was wide-sintillating life and it was love but also peace and joy. The peace I have never felt before and my conscience is everywhere. That conscience was not just in my body, we are a field, we are not the body. I am a part-color one. Only one to physics could explain what happened. Physicist Federico Fajin invented Silicongate technology and the microprocessor. The foundational breakthrough now powering all modern technology. His remarkable and spontaneous spiritual experience revealed the true nature of reality and changed how quantum science is explaining consciousness and how the world really works. There is no longer a boundary between science and spirituality who I am was not at all or I thought I was. I thought I was separate from the world. I was studying science, biology, trying to understand how things work. I realized that books were talking about electricals by a chemical signal in the brain as if that was a conscious experience that doesn't make any sense. For me to know myself, I need to know the others like myself. That's what cooperation is and what is that allows us to cooperate. Love. Love is the taste of meaning. The next evolution in medicine would be for all of us to have a better collective understanding

2:47.3

of this oneness and the deeper reality that consciousness and free will are providing, so that even medicine could be affected by the ways that we approach the cellular systems. That was the problem that no sign visit actually solved. Ihh! Shhh! Hi, I'm Maya Mialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. We've talked a lot about reality here, and maybe reality is more than we can see. But today we have the opportunity to speak to one of the greatest technologically savvy, intellectually rigorous physicists who has changed the way we literally live our lives. Meaning he created Silicongate technology in 1968. That's what underlies all of modern computing. Why would we speak to this man about consciousness and reality? Because he had a remarkable spontaneous spiritual experience which allowed him to combine everything he knew about physics, neuroscience, biology, and computers to construct a theory of everything that explains literally not everything you experience, not everything you think you know, everything that subserves everything that we experience. Federico Fajin is an Italian physicist turned inventor. His latest book, Irredusible, Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature is a fantastic journey about the oneness and the totality of our existence, as well as the significance of consciousness and free will as fundamental components, not just of our existence, but the existence of the universe. This is a fascinating conversation. We touch on health, our internal experience, the idea that we create our reality and how to shift it, the nature of happiness, and what will actually bring us happiness, as well as how the world can possibly change by better understanding that we were all interconnected and a part of the whole. And if you're watching this episode and you think there might be something wrong with your screen because you see smoke coming out of our ears, that's just our brains working really hard to grasp and understand this conversation and the implications it has for how we view reality and how we go about loving each other and loving ourselves and how the role of love actually can change the entire world. Without further ado, we welcome from Italy, Federico Fagine to the breakdown. Break it down. I wonder if you can tell us what is your mission? What do you think your purpose is before we get into how you got here? Obviously, my purpose is to do what I came here to do. And so then the next question is what did I came here to do? I think what I'm doing right now I think is my purpose, you know, to have lived many lives in one life and to have reached a level of understanding that without the... I'm speaking about my fourth life now, without the other three lives I could never have achieved, and the other three lives were quite full. My second life... My first life, of course, was born, raised, you know, and educated and first work experiences in Italy. Then went to the US. My second life was as an inventor, both technology and products, and then managing the R&D of Intel at one point, and then decided to be an entrepreneur. So I started my own company, started several companies, and that developed different aspects of me. After having done all of that, I was unhappy. So I didn't understand why, why should I be unhappy when I have achieved everything that I could possibly imagine to be happy and I had all the reasons to be happy. And then I had an extraordinary experience of consciousness because

7:05.3

I wanted to understand. And that changed my life. And so I'm on my fourth life after this extraordinary experience. And I'm really now I know that I came here to do that. And I needed all the other lives in order to do that. So many people look for happiness in things and in titles and in accolades and in careers. What do you think was necessary about that journey? Do we all need to struggle? Like does everyone have their own personal struggle? And at the end, there's a spiritual awakening waiting? I don't know if that is for everybody, but certainly for me was I had to go through many struggles, but also I enjoyed every part of my life. So it wasn't like, oh my God, you know, how, what am I going to do to do? No, no, I've always followed my passion. But I was expecting, though, that after having achieved all of what I've achieved, beautiful family, everybody healthy, a beautiful career, famous enough money that I didn't need to work. All that kind of stuff that normally living in a living in a beautiful place like Silicon Valley and on the go, I was right. I wasn't happy and I didn't know why. And of course, now I can tell you because I didn't I was believing outside of me and not paying attention to my inner life and I had completely neglected my interiority. But it took a while. Then I had to go through some struggles to actually figure out what was going on. And after 20 years of work, I realized that I actually ended living many of the traumas of when I grew up and so on so that those were out of the way. And I achieve a high level of tranquility, if you want just my mind is not busy, my mind is perfectly fine. And I don't have all these jumbles and stuff that was on all the time that I had before. I was restless before. I didn't know that I was restless, but because I know that I was doing the right thing. But now I can tell you, I never was where I was. I was always somewhere else in my mind. I was my project, what I was going to do two weeks from now, tomorrow, a year from now, and on a go, I was right. So now I'm just living my life and I live in like day to day as it happens. But I know that I am living exactly what I need to live. And that change completely my inner, my interiorities are very tranquil, serene. A lot of the focus of our podcast and our interest is the intersection of science and spirituality. And one of the reasons we're so eager to talk to you is because your brain, right, is holding so much of what many would deem the materialist side, right? you have the ability to be rational. You're an inventor. I mean, you've changed the world with the technology that you created. And also you have access to a completely other side that many people consider unable to be reconciled with this scientific rational side. I wonder if you can talk us through what the actual spiritual experience was that you had and how your rational mind came to understand what was transforming inside of you. I had several, many in fact transformative experiences, but the first one was the most important because it revealed that who I am was not at all what I thought I was. I thought that I was separate from the world and I lived as a separate individual. Even if I love many people, obviously my wife, my children. But still, I'm separate. I don't know if it was end of December or early January, but it was in the Christmas holidays of 1990. And it was after I had realized that I had been pretending to be happy for a number of years, but I wasn't happy. And I was studying neuroscience at that time. I was doing developing neural networks. My company was in that business starting in the sixth. I was studying neuroscience, biology. I was trying to understand how things work. I realized that those books were talking about electrical signals, biochemical signals in the brain as if that was our experience. They were describing in a sense our conscious experience by electrical signals and biochemical signals. So wait a second, that doesn't make any sense. Yes, there is something going on in the brain and clearly it has to be connected with our experience. But how can electrical signals in the brain be the taste of food or the smell of flowers or the touch that I have when I touch something, that goes, you know, that, that is a transformation that has to go from there to the feeling side, because I understand, not by seeing the analytical scene, I understand by the sensations and feelings that are, you know, the qualia that David Chalmers, as you probably know, you know, later on, seven years later, wrote a book, you know, the unconsciousness he realized that that was the problem that no scientist had actually solved. And so I actually discovered that on my own at that time because I was trying to understand what's going on, to understand how to make better computers that learn and so on and so forth. But I also realized that that was my problem. My inner problem was about that. You know, I realized that consciousness must exist somehow, but I didn't know what it was. And consciousness was also what made me suffer. And I didn't know that. So I had two good reasons to find out. Personal reason and of course intellectual reason because I wanted to understand as a physicist I'm always trying to figure out things. And it was in that climate that one night I woke up around midnight I was thirsty, went to get a glass of water, went back to bed, and while I was trying to get back to sleep, a beam of light, it was a, you know, energy, but in cranny body, was coming out of my chest, and it was white, scintillating light, and it was love. It was me, because my consciousness was in this energy. I was also this thing that was coming out of me. How is that possible? Then this thing expands or blows up, covers all the space, it's white light everywhere and my consciousness is everywhere. So now I'm observing myself outside of myself because I realize that I am that consciousness. But that consciousness was not just in my body, was also outside of me. I wanna hit pause here. Because most of us do not go about our lives and all of a sudden have a beam of light explode from the center of our chest and like go into the universe. It's not something normal that we experience. It's not normal, of course, right? You were not drunk. You were not sleeping. I didn't drink more than a glass of water than the night. Everything was fine. I was in my best form. I was skiing all days. So I was physically very, very active as well. I mean, you know, this is completely incomprehensible. It from any points of you, I'd never had anything like that. I could not even have imagined possible. This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews an Open Door Media Brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Beton and Noam Weissmannmann dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens.

16:05.9

It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout and disagreeman at least once. Michal and Noam tackled the tough topics, like anti-Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion, with guests like Brett Stevens, Michael Rappeport, and Sarah Herwitz. In this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating

16:24.7

some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life from food to music

16:29.5

and common- and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life

16:28.3

from food to music and comedy, thoughtful, joyful, and always honest. That's wondering Jews

16:33.7

with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube

16:39.0

and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out wondering Jews with Michal and Noam,

16:42.7

podcast and subscribe at unpacked.bio-nmx. My Mbox breakdown is supported by by optimizers. You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affect your magnesium levels. And low magnesium, it makes everything harder, not just sleep, focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added magnesium breakthrough by by optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, see if you wake up more rest and refreshed, you've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day. No questions asked money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene overall. Bi optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan, what do they get when they go to bi optimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker? You get 50% off your entire order and a free bottle of massimes. Bioptimizer is best selling digestive enzyme. That'll be added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code. That's a $20 product free on top of your discount already. This is a limited time offer and while supplies last, you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it in stores.

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So maybe you were already thinking about it, this is the sign. Go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker. Use the code breaker, grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year, you finally start sleeping again. Besides the feeling of love, were you able to kind of step outside of the experience and

18:23.6

say what is going on?

18:26.1

Or were you so immersed in the experience that you didn't have that perspective? I was the experience. While the experience was going on, I was the experience clearly. While this was going on, this light was everywhere, since, since the lighting, a thought forms in my mind. And the thought is, wow, this is this stuff of which everything is made. And by that, those were mental words. But before the mental words, there was a thought. And for the first time, there was a thought that was before it became words. This I realized later. But when I was doing it, it was like I was stunned because it was a thought, and then there were words. Where normally, before I was always thinking in words, so there were never thoughts that were without words. And in fact, it was only with a lot of work that I did later, that I could separate the thought before it's verbalized, it's ray-fine in our mind, which is how it must be in consciousness before it is transformed into words, mental words. And then the thought that we normally think is the thought, which is already mental. It took me years to actually, you know, meditation, so on, and then realizing what I was doing. So, now moving back many years forward, but back at this point, I realized that there was a distinction, there was a distinction between this flash of insight and then the words. I said, this is what everything is made of. Also at that time, my de-feeling with that energy was not only in love, but also peace and joy. They were mixed in. They were not separable. But the peace I've never, never felt before. Peace was a new idea for me. Peace was, I am that. My restlessness was no longer there in that experience. You know, I, because my restlessness was the fact that I was never where I was. But now in this experience, I am that. This stuff is me because myself, the sense of self, my consciousness goes out there. So I was both the observer and the observed. That's another complete change of perspective. As I was telling you before, I thought that I was separate from the world now. These experiences, I am the world observing myself. Big change of perspective. I am a part hollow one. I had, because I had the same character one, I had the same potentiality of one, but I'm also a part of one. Just like a cell in my body is a part of the body because it has the genome of the entire body. Every cell contains the genome of the whole organism, of one of the one organism. In this case, we are a part of the universe, which we are a feel, we are not the body. So clearly, the idea that I am before my consciousness, the sense of myself was only in my head. I was not even in my body, it was in my head. And now, with this experience, it's everywhere, not only in my body, but also outside of my body. I mean, that's a change like this to this, right? Complete reversal of perspective that I had before. And the other thing is that my body was vibrating, you know, and it was hot. So every aspect of me was living this experience.

22:28.2

It was a lived experience.

22:30.2

It was a lived way to know. You know because you experience all those things I can say now, but they were implicit in that experience, but it took years to unroll in a way that experience would probably last

22:45.6

a minute, maybe two, but no more. So this was just like a unbelievable flash, but it changed my life, because it told me that what I thought I was was not what I was, because the sense of truth of that experience was so strong that I

23:07.8

could not compare to anything that had happened in my life before, there was as true, as powerful. Consciousness is the one that allows you to know that. Is this an imagination? is this a fantasy or conscious can actually tell you if that is true or not or close to the truth than any other thing. All of us have one day or another had a dream that was so vivid that you thought you were the dream right and you

23:45.8

were truly existing in that dream I had many dreams before of that with the nature but even more later after this experience but you know where basically you wake up and for a second you thought you were actually you know this reality is the it was the dream not other one. But this one was even stronger than that. And that's why it had the power to transform, it transformed my life, otherwise how could it have the power to transform my life? I would have doubted my own, you know, my own experience, right? I would have said, well, maybe a better, a better good see a psychiatrist here and see what he tells me, right? So he tells me what I feel. Well, you know, we should be able to know what we feel ourselves. There's a few points here in your story that stand out for me. One is we hear a lot of people who have a drastic spiritual awakening, which it sounds like this was for you, where they question it, right? They wonder, am I going crazy? Am I making it up? What did I feel or not? And the difference between an imagination and a fully embodied experience is the vibrating of the body, the fact that it was fully immersive and that you

25:06.8

are not just imagining something in a waking state or an imaginative state, you're not daydreaming, you're having a full visceral experience that is exceptionally powerful. Everything was going with it, you know, it was there was a unity in the experience, a unity in in this movie. I am inside, outside, and body, mind, and spirit.

25:29.2

The other thing that's fascinating and describes a lot of what is common in a way when you have a spiritual experience is realizing that thoughts exist before we're able to translate them. That information and ideas exist in this collective field that we're going to get into and we want the scientific explanation of how you think that exists, but that the universe, the world that we live in is made up of all of this information and simply our brains are the interpreters and the translators of that information into a language so that things can, for lack of a better word, exist all around us and yet they just can appear. And we have to figure out what does that mean? How do we communicate them? How do we translate that into something that's shareable? Yeah, well, the way I said these days is that meaning comes first. In other words, meaning comes before symbols. The symbols are invented in order to carry meaning, but if there is no meaning, there shouldn't be any symbols. Because the meaning comes first, and before symbols. In science, symbols have no meaning. The information is only the probability that symbols appear or not. that's it. It's no meaning to the symbols.

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