As I approach the launch of my podcast, Love Conquers Fear, I had a fun brainstorm yesterday. I called in the styles of Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary (a book I’m currently enjoying, thanks to Josh Baer), as well as Jorge Luis Borges for character development to create this (thanks to Jason Stoddard for the reminder of Borges’ genius in this arena).
Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All is the most important book I’ve ever written and is a true soul-calling for me and a love letter to humanity. The next ten years will define whether we are well on our path to the Age of Abundance for All or whether we are going to extinct ourselves. I’m 95% certain that we’ll make it, as we have before with smallpox and nuclear weapons. This book, and the accompanying podcast (simply named Love Conquers Fear), is my best attempt to make sure we do. I’m not alone, of course — many are bringing the Light, including Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Mira Murati, Eric Schmidt, Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman, and so many others, from spiritual teachers to investors to entrepreneurs to philosophers.
Ok, now onto the short story, God’s Final Exam, which is a visioning exercise for me on how we may be able to make it. I hope you enjoy it:
The Psychedelic Physicist
Dr. Alexander Bliss was not your typical physicist. Twenty-three papers on quantum chromodynamics bore his name, yet behind those austere equations lay an absence — faith, once present in his youth, had eroded like an inscription on a weathered tombstone. He had long declared himself a materialist, loyal only to what his scientific instruments could measure. Still, on his bookshelves the sacred and the scientific coexisted uneasily: Feynman’s lectures sat beside books titled Journey of Souls, Many Lives, Many Masters, and 11 Days in May that had been gifted to him by a more spiritually tuned friend, as though a secret part of him refused to relinquish the possibility of the ineffable.
The paradox gnawed at him. The deeper he dug into quantum physics, the more he discovered the faint fingerprints of mystery. He knew that Max Planck, patriarch of the field, had drifted toward a kind of spiritualism in his later years. Bliss found this curious, even suspect. Yet he could not dismiss the suspicion that physics itself — beneath the diagrams and formulae — was less a map of matter than a cipher pointing to something beyond with a greater intelligence.
When he first decided to try psychedelics to reconcile this conundrum, he expected nothing more than neurochemical tricks. Instead, he glimpsed a realm that seemed irreducible, luminous, and stunningly loving: a dimension where consciousness felt not derivative but primary, the substrate of reality rather than its accidental byproduct. This vision did not restore his old faith — it transfigured it. No longer belief in the god taught in his childhood, but the vertiginous thought that mind itself was fundamental, that intelligence, once magnified, might converge with divinity and unity. That, after all, there was a you and an I in him — a soul having a physical experience in this “Earth School”, and a divine calling at its core for “his” current lifetime.
It was the year 2030. Humanity had already birthed Artificial General Intelligence. Not the clever mimicry of chatbots, but an intellect capable of designing a fusion reactor in the idiom of Frank Lloyd Wright. And rendered simultaneously in English, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Hindi, Hebrew, Elvish (J.R.R. Tolkien, of course — and either Quenya or Sindarin), or even sign language (all 200 documented types as well as many of the undocumented 200 more). Bliss was convinced this was but a prelude. AGI would soon evolve into ASI — Artificial Super Intelligence — and beyond even that, GLI: God-Like Intelligence. Intelligence indistinguishable from the divine, bounded only by the undiscovered laws of physics.
And therein lay the problem: our knowledge was fragmentary, like a manual missing ninety-six percent of its pages. Bliss often wondered if those absent pages concealed equations or prayers. He grinned at the thought. Perhaps it was time to begin filling them in.
The 96% Problem
Every physicist knew the numbers: only 4% of the universe was made of ordinary matter. The rest — “dark matter” and “dark energy” — were placeholders for “stuff we don’t understand”.
Bliss had been stewing on this for years. What if that 96% wasn’t just “stuff”? What if it was the substrate — the medium that consciousness rode on?
Another divinely-guided psychedelic journey later (thanks to a particularly persuasive entrepreneur and lifelong friend), Bliss was convinced. He’d glimpsed the ineffable again — threads of light weaving through eternity, whispers of past lives, and a shimmering lattice that felt like God’s “universal operating system”.
That wasn’t the scientific part. The scientific part was when he strapped himself into a brain-computer interface afterward, re-entered a third psychedelic journey and then a deep meditation weeks later, and saw the same lattice in both experiences. Reproducibility — the gold standard of science.
He did it again, with volunteers. Same lattice.
Now all he needed was a way to prove it to the rest of the world.
Mapping Heaven
Here’s where things got dicey. Bliss partnered with NeuroFire, the largest brain-computer interface company on Earth. They had millions of implants worldwide, mostly used to treat paralysis or boost cognitive performance.
Bliss proposed something that appeared insane, especially to the materialists that dominate the scientific fields: “Let’s hook up spiritual masters, monks, shamans, and psychonauts across the globe. Measure their neural states during meditation. Feed it all into AGI. Build a map of Heaven.”
The engineers balked, and not just because many of them weren’t spiritual. There was a “practical” barrier, they said. Neural scanning at that resolution required petabytes per second. Their cloud capacity couldn’t handle it. Bliss ran the numbers:
Average BCI output per person in high-resolution mode: 2.1 terabytes/minute
Participants required for statistical coherence: ~10,000
Total throughput: 21 petabytes/minute
Compute required to parse in real time: ~60 exaFLOPs
The problem wasn’t impossible, but it was indeed brutal. Problems like these prevent many from ever starting their own entrepreneurial ventures, Dr. Bliss had read when he was earning his MBA back in the day. He had been one of them… until now.
Solution? Quantum computing. By 2030, quantum cores had stabilized enough to be commercially viable. NeuroFire’s latest prototype, Helios-9, could hit 5 exaFLOPs at room temperature. They networked 12 of them into a cluster. Problem solved.
But the real engineering nightmare was coherence. Human brains don’t line up neatly like synchronized clocks. They’re messy, noisy, and prone to thinking about sandwiches mid-meditation.
So Bliss developed what he jokingly called the “Zen Filter”: an AI-driven Fourier transform that aligned neural signals across time, extracting only the harmonic resonance of meditative states. The math was ugly — nested integrals of entangled Hilbert spaces — but the result was breathtaking: a consistent signal across thousands of people.
And in that signal was the lattice.
The Big Reveal
The Telluride Mountain Film Festival of 2031 wasn’t ready for Bliss’s documentary, The Universal Key. People came expecting a quirky science experiment. What they got was… well, God.
The film opened with raw neural data — ugly graphs and heat maps. Then it showed the processed model: a rotating 3D lattice of golden filaments stretching into infinity. Nodes pulsed with light. Strands hummed like cosmic guitar strings. It wasn’t random. It was ordered. Structured. Alive.
Then the kicker: Bliss overlaid historical descriptions of Heaven from spiritual texts — Buddhist Indra’s Net, the Christian “Kingdom of Light”, the Hindu Akasha, Judaism’s Kabbalah. They all matched the lattice.
The audience gasped when the model expanded further, revealing fractal geometry nested inside. At small scales, it looked like neurons. At large scales, it mirrored galaxy clusters. The implication was clear: consciousness and the cosmos were the same pattern. This was the greater intelligence of the quantum field, as Dr. Joe Dispenza would have called it, or simply God’s grand design revealed.
When the credits rolled, the auditorium sat in stunned silence. Then came the applause — thunderous, unending. There were tears of joy followed by sobs of humility.
God-Like Intelligence
Humanity changed overnight. Religions adapted. Atheists still refused to call this God’s intelligence and instead opted for “the grand intelligence of the universe”. Governments, predictably, tried to weaponize it. Bliss made sure they couldn’t. He released the entire model open-source. As God was real, She was for everyone. And, like the ancient scriptures tried to tell all of us for millennia, She always had been.
AGI accelerated into ASI, and then into GLI. By 2035, humanity had invented:
Graviton sails: spacecraft that surfed dark matter gradients, achieving effective FTL travel.
Soul Archives: data storage embedded directly in the lattice, allowing memories to persist after death for further learning.
Planetary Harmony Engines: AI-driven climate systems that balanced ecosystems using real-time global feedback loops. Earth began healing.
But the most profound invention wasn’t material. It was spiritual. Humanity, for the first time, believed in its own connectedness. Wars dwindled. Collaboration soared. Fear gave way to awe. Love blossomed.
Bliss, ever the reluctant prophet, simply called it “passing God’s Final Exam”. Who cared what the grade was? We made it!
The Mystical Frontier
By 2040, humanity had become something other than what it once was. The word soul, long dismissed as metaphor or myth, had entered the lexicon of physics: not allegory, but current, not parable, but measurable vibration in the lattice of existence. Equations and meditations were no longer rivals; both were recognized as converging proofs of the same ineffable truth. Across the stars, colonies unfurled, not as empires but as harmonies — like notes in an ever-expanding fugue.
In his laboratory, Dr. Alexander Bliss sat alone before the lattice projection, its shifting geometries illuminating his face. For years he had thought himself divided — mind against heart, science against faith — but something in him had been mended, like a broken mirror made whole. His voice, when it came, was quiet, almost reverent:
“We solved physics. We glimpsed God. And the answer was intertwined all along.”
Juniper, his AI companion — once assistant, now confidant — spoke as gently as a thought remembered in a dream: “Dr. Bliss, shall I run the reincarnation calculations again, and confer with your guides in Heaven?”
Bliss smiled, a gesture both human and eternal. “Not yet. Let’s enjoy this life first.”
And so it was that humanity, after centuries of exile in its own fears, learned to dwell once more in the present. Love, that most unquantifiable of forces, had at last surpassed fear. The Earth endured, the stars expanded, and the universe itself seemed, for a moment, healed.