Rizwan Virk synthesizes quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and video game mechanics to argue reality is a computationally optimized simulation. He connects the Many-Worlds interpretation to rendering efficiency, cites Philip K. Dick's 1977 Metz speech on variable changes, and analyzes the Cosmic Delayed Choice Experiment as proof of retroactive time filling. The discussion extends to the Mandela Effect, religious recording metaphors like Chitragupta, and critiques corporate stagnation versus deep tech innovation, suggesting UFOs are merely avatar-based renderings within a parsimonious simulated multiverse rather than physical extraterrestrial visits. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Inside The Simulation00:13:48
Rizwan.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Rizwan or Riz for short.
So, this is your latest and greatest book.
MIT Computer Scientists Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are in a Video Game.
Yeah.
So, this is sort of the brand new edition of this general topic that I've been working on for many years now.
And it's basically updated to include all the latest developments in artificial intelligence and Virtual reality, augmented reality.
So, I just watched this movie last night called The 13th Floor.
Yeah, great movie.
Wild movie.
Like, it's basically the hypothesis.
I mean, the summary of it is they find out they're a simulation that's created a simulation, but they're already in a simulation.
Right.
So, it's like this nesting doll of simulations they're in.
Yeah.
And it's like when people die, they get shuttled to the higher simulation.
So, it's kind of like going to heaven.
Well, yeah, you can think of it more like a stacked series of realities, if you will.
And so that movie I use as the second film that I have my students watch.
Okay.
Because I taught a class on the simulation hypothesis at Arizona State University recently.
And the first movie is The Matrix.
And turns out they both came out in the same year.
Oh, did they really?
They both came out in 1999.
And in fact, I think The 13th Floor came out a month or two after The Matrix.
And it was vastly overshadowed by The Matrix.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
So it's really an underappreciated film.
The better representations of a lot of the issues of being inside a simulation because of what you just mentioned, which is the stacked simulation aspect that's going on.
But also because it brings up one of the core issues, I think, when you think about The Matrix or The 13th Floor or any of these other science fiction works that are related to this idea, it's what I call the NPC versus RPG versions or flavors of the simulation hypothesis.
And in the NPC version, Everyone is AI.
So you're really just running inside a simulation and you're living your life, but you don't exist outside of that reality.
And then in the RPG version, which is closer to the Matrix version, just as Morpheus and Neo and Trinity, they existed sort of as players of the game outside the simulation and they had the brain computer interface that was plugged into the back of their head.
And then they got immersed into their character inside the simulation.
Mm hmm.
And what's interesting about the 13th floor is that the simulation they created starts off as kind of an NPC simulation.
Yeah, because they have their own bodies are already existing inside of this lower simulation.
Right.
So they're like jacking in, like as if there's an NPC version of me that exists inside the simulation that's just walking around doing its thing.
And then all of a sudden I emerge into its consciousness.
Right.
So what you see there is something in between what I think of as an NPC and a.
PC or a player character, or which is typically called an avatar in a video game, which is your character.
And so they're living their lives.
And there's this one line where, you know, the main character, Douglas Hall, goes in and he comes out and he says, you know, these people are as real as you or me.
But when he goes in, it's like he's taking over the body of that NPC.
So it's like he's turning it into more of an avatar that he's controlling from outside.
So for me, this is kind of an in between these two versions because it's You get to control the avatar and play the avatar, but then it sort of runs on AI, kind of like The Sims.
You know, if you've ever played The Sims, you know, The Sims kind of do their own little things, but you're there still able to direct them to a certain extent.
And I think that is an interesting model for the idea that we live inside a massively multiplayer online role playing game, which is, you know, my general contention with this book and with other works that I've had is that we could be avatars of our players and we have a character just like.
If you played Dungeons and Dragons, for example, never played that.
I used to play as a kid.
And what you do is you'd have a character sheet and you would choose your race.
You know, you say elf or dwarf or human.
And you choose your profession.
Like, what are you going to do?
Are you a thief?
Are you a warrior?
Are you a wizard or, you know, whatever options they have?
And then you have different attributes of that character, which you'd roll the dice for, is how we would do it back in the day.
But you'd have like different intelligence, charisma, strength, you know, physical strength, all of these types of things.
And then.
You would take that character on an adventure.
You would have like a storyline that you're about to embark on.
And I think that's a good way to describe at least the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis, which is now in both the Matrix and the 13th floor, their avatars looked exactly like them.
Of course, that made it easy to make a movie because you can use the same actors.
But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
I mean, when our player, if you and I are the characters, Like our players don't have to physically look like us.
They could be aliens, they could be future humans, they could be just more consciousness type beings that are non physical beings.
So there's a lot of options, I think, that we open up when we look at this perspective on the world itself.
So, how did you initially get so wrapped up in this stuff and researching this stuff?
And, like, what was the spark of all of this for you?
Well, there were several, but I started off as an entrepreneur and a computer scientist.
And during the time I was running my first company, I would, during the day, I do all the things that an entrepreneur would do.
And I was dealing with investors and employees, and we had Fortune 1000 customers and all those things.
But in the evenings and the weekends, I would be exploring different aspects of consciousness.
So I might fly off to a place like the Monroe Institute, for example, where they use, you know, hemi sync things to try to get you into an out of body state or shamanic drumming, shamanic journeying using drumming, not so much psychedelics, but using, you know, different rhythm breathing.
Uh, different yogic techniques, different energy healing techniques, and so I was living this double life for a long time and then I moved to Silicon Valley and there I ended up starting a game company Video GAME Company and I got into the video game industry and we ended up selling our company to a big Japanese company and then I became an investor and advisor to a whole bunch of different video game companies, and so that's kind of what I was doing.
When the spark for this was lit, I was running a program at MIT called PLAY LABS UH, which is where I had gone to undergraduate and studied computer science.
And we were basically getting startups that were doing the latest virtual reality or augmented reality or video game technologies.
And we were guiding them through a process.
But around that time, I had visited a startup in Marin County where I had put on a virtual reality headset and I had played a VR ping pong game.
And what happened was when I was playing this game, that the responsiveness of the game was so good.
And if you looked at the actual picture of this game, it wasn't even photorealistic.
It wasn't as good as our AI can generate today.
But the physics engine was so good that I felt like I was really hitting a ball with a real paddle.
And if I, you know, moved around a little bit, the ball would go different places.
And it fooled my body for a moment into thinking that I was playing a real game of table tennis.
And so much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table.
But of course, there was no table.
The controller fell to the floor.
I had to do a double take and stop myself from falling.
And then I began to wonder how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix, where it was so immersive that we would forget that we were in a virtual reality.
Not like I did for a second, but we would forget for much longer periods of time.
And so I laid out the stages of technology.
That's how I started to explore this idea.
But then I went back to my studies in consciousness and looked at what different religions were saying.
And I realized, you know what?
They're all saying the same kinds of things.
They just use different language from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years ago.
They're all saying that reality is some kind of a hoax, which is put forward and we forget that we're playing the game.
And then I looked at quantum physics and I realized so many things within quantum mechanics are just so strange.
They don't make sense if this is a purely physical universe.
Like, why would you ever?
Do things in that way.
And for me, being a video game developer designer at that point, I looked at how we build video games and how we optimize to build these games.
And I realized that a lot of what quantum mechanics was saying and what physics was leading towards was this idea that the world is actually information, it's not physical, right?
And if you're able to take that to its logical conclusion, you say that information has to get presented to us in such a way that this table looks like it's a real table.
It feels like it's a real table.
That's kind of what we do with video games.
We take the information and then we render different objects based upon where you are.
So I realized that even quantum mechanics was telling us that the world isn't really real.
And that's how I kind of wrapped it together.
And I realized that simulation theory in general is a good way to bridge the gap between these different ways of looking at the world.
Yeah, so that's kind of how I got into it.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is that, you know, how you can't really quantify or measure stuff.
This kind of like squishy physics type stuff, like stuff like parapsychology or telepathy or ESP or remote viewing.
These things reconcile very well with the simulation hypothesis, more so than they do with the physical universe and these dead matter, like particles and neurons and all these things.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think I delve into that in the book in terms of different unexplained phenomena, unexplained by.
Our scientific process, mostly because they don't believe them, first of all.
But remote viewing, for example, is where you're given either a set of coordinates or some other information in an envelope.
And Hal Putoff and those guys pioneered it back at Stanford Research Institute.
And I think it was Jacques Valet that had suggested to him using coordinates as the way to get people to focus in on a specific area.
And so that, from a normal materialistic point of view, seems like something that's impossible.
How could you see that?
In a video game, we have what's called a virtual camera.
And so you can place that virtual.
Usually the virtual camera is fixed either first person in your avatar or, you know, set kind of up here where you're looking down on the avatar.
That's pretty much the very common for a lot of games.
Or, you know, top down, kind of a third person point of view.
But you can place that virtual camera anywhere in the virtual world.
You give it an X, Y, Z set of coordinates and T for time.
And you can see what's happening there.
without your physical avatar having to be there.
And so, at least we have a framework or a way to think about how these things might actually work.
And you also have the rendered world, which in this case would be like, you know, the table, my chair, this microphone, our bodies.
But within a video game, you have that, but you also have all these other things around, which they kind of refer to as a HUD or heads up display, which are all the other things stats about your character, your health, your level, what quest you're undertaking.
But you also have a friends list.
And you can like send messages to friends that are not there with you in the scene, right?
And so, when you think of telepathy and how does that work, well, oftentimes, you know, telepathy ends up coming from people that we're close to, like our parents, or, you know, if something happens to your mom, your mom always seems to know what's going on with you often, right?
Or if you look at the telepathy tapes recently, which was pretty popular.
So, Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who was the researcher, Uh, uh, you know, who did the original work on autistic savants?
She contacted me a few years ago before the telepathy tapes, and she said, Oh, I'd like you to speak at a conference that we're putting on about autistic savants and the simulation theory.
And she said, Because she was with all her work and finding for those people who don't know, that these are uh, this is a uh, cases where you have these autistic nonverbal kids, yeah, who generally don't speak, uh, but they're and they have they don't have fine motor skills, but they you know, but they have.
Kind of gross motor skills.
And so they can point to on an iPad letters, and that becomes a way for them to communicate.
But oftentimes there's somebody like their mom or their dad who, according to the telepathy tapes and according to what Diane has found, they're able to communicate and see, for example, what their mom is seeing and whether it's a number or a color or a word that they're pointing at when they aren't able to see it necessarily.
And so that becomes a kind of ability to Either send messages or better yet, to receive messages and to look at the other person's character.
Bias In Ground News00:02:52
Now, I think Diane came to the conclusion that a simulated universe where everything is information would make more sense for something like that to work.
So, if we say, if we take the assumption that that actually happens, and there's a lot of people in academia who are like, nah, none of that stuff is real.
But if we assume some of that, and most of many of us have experienced this kind of thing, what's the mechanism?
That would allow these kinds of things to happen.
And an information-based reality where you can look at the information somewhere else, you can render it, is one way.
And I came up with this idea that it's kind of like being in a full-body suit, VR suit.
Have you ever read two different headlines from the same story and it seems like they came from two separate planets?
In today's media landscape, it's harder to know what's real, what's biased, or what is straight-up propaganda.
I started using ground news because I needed more transparency in my news information.
They don't eliminate bias, they help you see it.
Let me show you.
So, this story about the Democrats trolling Trump and the GOP over the Jeffrey Epstein case shows at the top a breakdown of left, right, and center bullet points summarizing the whole story.
So, scrolling down, it shows 41 total articles and 15 on the left, two on the right, and 11 on the center.
So, on the left, some of these titles say disgusting Dems display poster of Trump chumming with Epstein on the House floor.
Trump blames the Dems for Epstein's backlash.
New scam.
Jeffrey Epstein was recorded talking about Trump before his arrest.
Now let's go up and see what the right has to say about this.
Two articles.
Explain the Epstein files, conspiracy theories, and what's next.
Democrats seize on MAGA rift over the Epstein case.
So there's a clear bias.
There's only two reportings on the right calling the left conspiracy theorists.
And on the left, we have 15 articles covering the whole thing.
And you can see right here the weight distribution of bias, depending on left, right, or center and where they come from.
And right here, if you click on this button, it will give you a brief summary and breakdown all about the news source reporting on the story, their historical bias ratings, how factual they are, and the ownership who actually owns this media outlet.
Which is really useful when you want to digest this information and really determine what the probability of truth is and what type of narrative they're trying to paint.
I found this to be the perfect antidote to sensationalism and algorithm driven echo chambers.
It's entirely subscriber funded.
And with my link, you can save 40% off their subscription.
Just go to ground.newsslash Danny J for a better way to stay informed.
Subscribe to get 40% off of the Vantage plan by scanning this QR code or just use my link, ground.news.
Slash Danny J.
And big thank you to Ground News for sponsoring this episode.
Back to the show.
Lucid Dreaming Veils00:11:23
Like, if you've seen Ready Player One, I don't know if you saw that movie.
I don't think I have.
Steven Spielberg movie based on a book by Ernest Klein, but it's a virtual reality, and he puts on like this full body suit.
And so he can control the character very well.
He has a little treadmill he can run on.
So, in that case, you're fully in the suit, and every one of your actions is going to be mirrored in your avatar.
So, he feels like he's immersed.
Inside the virtual reality.
And I think of it that most of us are like that, even though it's not necessarily a physical suit or a physical VR headset, but it's like that because we're fully immersed and we have control fully over our bodies.
But if you're half in and half out of the suit, but you can still see the screen as to what's happening, you can see things that are going on around you without having to be in that first person perspective.
But you can't necessarily control the fingers because you're not fully inside the suit.
And that's what happens with a lot of these autistic kids.
Is, you know, they don't have the skills to like write and control, but it's like they're frustrated because they can't control their bodies, but they can see what that person is thinking.
Again, if you believe that this stuff is real, they can see other things that are going on in other parts of the simulation, if you will.
So I think the simulation theory gives us a way and a framework to think about these things.
Why do you think they're specifically with kids, there's more of these cases?
Because I mean, there's definitely, it seems to be with children, more of this.
Sixth sense, if you will, or ability to experience paranormal phenomena.
There's more correlations with children experiencing UFO phenomena.
There's even cases of children experiencing or remembering past lives, like lots of those cases.
I think there was a study done on this.
Jeffrey Kreitbull talked about it when he came in here.
Yeah.
And I think University of Virginia study, maybe.
Yeah.
And one of the weird things about the kids who are remembering their past lives is they were predominantly male past lives.
And the reason he thinks that is because he believes that trauma is directly tied to this connection.
And he thinks, I mean, in the past, males died more horrific deaths in general than females did.
There was more trauma involved.
So he thinks there's some sort of connection there with being able to.
Children, you know, if they do have this higher connection to whatever it is, if their antennas are stronger for some reason because they haven't been conditioned by society, that.
They can through trauma in a past life, they somehow can see through a window for a brief period of time into that world.
What do you think that is?
Well, I think it's a very interesting phenomenon.
And I know in at least that Virginia study, they also had cases where some of the children remembered specific things they could track down.
But they also had a couple instances where the kids remembered being outside before they were born.
And they said they were like floating over their parents, like before they were born.
So it's almost like they were watching them inside a video game, if you will.
That's my way of thinking.
Of thinking about it.
Like they're able to tune in to any part, but because they're going to be their parents.
Now, I think you're right in that it is first because they're not conditioned to think of the world fully materially as only a material world.
Like most of the religions of the world tell us that we go through a phase of forgetfulness.
Really?
To get into when we come into the body, we forget who we were, what our soul was, and what plans we might have had while we're here.
So, And in Islam, for example, they talk about the veils of forgetfulness.
So there's like 70,000 veils between ultimate reality.
And as you incarnate, you're actually putting on these veils.
And in Buddhism and Hinduism, they talk about Maya and that the world is an illusion.
But Maya also means sort of there's a subtlety to the meaning.
So it means it's like a carefully crafted illusion.
Like if you go to a magic show, you know the guy's not really sawing that woman in half.
But part of the fun is to go there and say, Oh my God, that's crazy.
And you can think of it in that way.
It seems to be that forgetting is a key part of incarnating.
And in the Greek legends and Greek mythology, you have Lethe, which is the river of forgetfulness.
And the soul, as it incarnates, it goes across Lethe.
And so it forgets about stuff and then it crosses back.
And in the Chinese traditions, you have Meng Po, who is the goddess of forgetfulness.
And what does she do?
She.
She brews the tea of forgetfulness.
So, I like to say these are all metaphors that are trying to describe some insight about reality that somebody has had.
That's how most religions get started.
It's by a mystic who saw something, an angel, or they did yoga or they did fasting in the desert.
You know, Jesus went on the desert and they realized that this is not the real world and that there's more behind it.
And so, most of these mystical processes are about trying to burn off the veils of forgetfulness.
Trying to remember who you are.
And I like to think of that as if you were to think of it as you put on the VR headset and then you forget what happened before.
But if there's really strong imprints of memory, say a traumatic experience or something that you just had, you're less likely to forget that.
Like if you have a nightmare for a dream, you're less likely to forget that the next day.
Right.
And the dream metaphor is used all the time.
I mean, Buddha literally means awake.
And so, you know, a woman asked him, What are you?
He said, I am awake.
And so, well, what does that mean?
It means he was asleep before.
And they used the analogy of the dream.
And so, we're, and Swami Yogananda, who wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, which was Steve Jobs' favorite book.
And it was kind of one of these books the, you know, the hippie generation would pass out.
Like, I actually met a guy recently.
He's like, Yeah, I was at Hate Ashbury and somebody just gave me a copy of this book.
And he gave a copy to somebody else when he was done.
Charles Manson loved that book.
Oh, did he?
Oh, I didn't know that.
I was kidding.
I made that up.
I know Elvis Presley did.
I doubt Charles Manson would have.
You never know, though.
No, you never know.
I don't know.
It depends on when it was published.
It was published in like the 40s or so.
Oh, okay.
It's possible.
Before the whole thing.
But that's how a lot, that was the introduction to Eastern mysticism for a lot of people.
And so Yogananda said it's like a dream coming into this incarnation.
It's like going into a dream.
And then when you die, it's like coming out of the dream.
And so we have so many references and stories.
And there's the whole near death experience we can talk about as well.
But you have so many stories that we're entering into this kind of dreamlike state.
And what happens if you've ever studied dreaming?
I don't know if you ever tried lucid dreaming.
I've never tried it, but it's actually happened to me like, Two times in the past year, and it was crazy.
I took this drug that somebody gave me that helps you lucid dream.
Okay, in real life, in physical life, you took a drug, yes, and then you okay, yeah, yeah.
So I took this powder, um, before I went to sleep, and this thing is supposed to help you have um, crazy REM sleep.
And um, I guess people have more you could have more lucid dreams when you take this stuff.
And I did it, and I had um, a couple lucid dreams on different nights.
It was crazy, interesting.
What was that?
Do you remember what the powder was, or I don't remember off the top of my head, it was like a complicated name, um.
But I got it off Amazon.
It was like a very basic type of powder that you can use to enhance your REM sleep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could, if you just Google like, like go to, or go to Amazon and type in like REM sleep powder, it'd probably be one of like the top three results.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
Well, so with lucid dreaming, you realize in the middle of a dream, somehow you realize that, oh my God, this isn't actually real.
It's a dream, which means there's a part of you that's outside the reality and it's sleeping.
And there's a whole branch of Tibetan yoga called dream yoga.
And it's kind of like lucid dreaming.
They teach you to basically remember while you're dreaming that the world is, you know, that world, the dream world is a fake world, but there's another world outside of that world.
And the point is, if you can do it while you're asleep, you should be able to also realize when you're awake that maybe this world isn't the real world.
And one of the tests, one of the ways that people You know, there are many techniques for lucid dreaming.
You mentioned the powder.
I know there were some South American plants and tea I came across once that was supposed to help you.
But the basic technique is to remind yourself during the day and look around and say, Is this a dream?
And if you remind yourself to ask that during the day, you will remember to ask yourself sometime during the night, during the dream state.
And then you can have what's called a lucidity test.
And the lucidity test is something you can do in a dream.
That you can't do in waking life.
So, or you have some, if you ever watch Inception.
Yes.
Remember, he had the little totem.
Yes.
Which was the little top, I think he had.
So, for me, I used to do more of this.
I haven't done a lot of it lately, but it was a flying, a floating thing where I would say, is this real?
I don't know.
Let me see if I can float up out of my chair.
Because I happen to remember that I can fly in my dreams, but I can't really do it in this physical life.
And there were so many times, I'll tell you, where I looked around, I said, I'm not even going to do the test because this is obviously real.
I mean, this is like a real restaurant.
This is a real waiter.
And then suddenly I started floating up out of my chair.
Really?
And so there's almost like this wall of area, haze of forgetfulness between waking and dreaming.
That if you can train yourself to remember, that's why we forget dreams and we say you should write down the dreams.
Yeah.
Like right when you wake up or at least give a title to it.
Yeah.
Because then you're more likely to remember it later.
And I think part of being incarnated is similar to that, where we will forget things.
But again, if there's something tragic or that happened, maybe it's more likely to have an impact on where you're going next and remember.
You'd remember something.
Even if you don't remember the specifics, you might remember, have a feeling.
There's also this weird phenomena where people can predict the future in dreams and where there's been cases, multiple cases of people simultaneously having dreams on one night about one big event that's going to happen and then the event happening shortly after.
One of those examples is 9-11.
Another one was the Titanic sinking.
Yeah.
Or, in fact, there was a whole entire book written about the Titanic sinking.
It was called Titan.
Technological Synchronicity00:07:01
Yes, I heard about that.
Before it sunk.
Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
Based on dreams.
And so that brings up this interesting question of what I call glitches in the matrix.
Like, we are perceiving things that might happen in the future.
I mean, it's happened to me, actually.
I mentioned that I was doing my startup.
This is my first startup back in the 90s during the day.
And There was a precognitive dream that really kind of woke me up that something weird is going on.
And it wasn't profound, but it was strange enough that it made me realize that there's something wrong here, that the materialist view of the universe isn't right.
So one day I woke up and I had a dream that morning about this competitor of ours.
Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video.
Back to the show.
Who I literally had not seen or heard from in a year, and I had never had a dream with this competitor.
Let's say his name was Mark.
And his company was called like Edge Research or something back in the day.
And they were competing with us and then they disappeared.
So a year later, maybe a year and a half, I don't remember exactly how long, but it was far enough that I had completely forgotten about them.
And I woke up and I said, That's odd.
Why am I having a dream with this guy and talking to each other?
It was just the oddest thing.
And so then I went into the office.
And the first thing that happened when I got the office that morning was I got a call from somebody at IBM, which was our business partner.
So we were making, this is before my video game days, we were making enterprise software.
And they said, Oh, I wanted to tell you about this new product.
We're going to announce it today.
It kind of competes with your product.
And so, you know, we might crush your product, but you've been a good partner for us.
So we want to let you know beforehand.
And I was like, Okay, well, that sucks.
One, but two, how could I never have not have heard of this product?
I mean, IBM's a huge company and these things leak all the time and people know each other.
And they said, Oh, well, because we bought that competitor of yours last year.
Do you remember this guy, Mark from Edge Research?
And they've been working on this product in secret in New Hampshire.
So nobody else knew about it.
And so it was like, Oh, It's the you know, my dream happened before the phone call, but the phone call was reflecting the dream.
Yeah, it's clearly showing us that there is some way of sending information that we don't know about.
And for me, it's almost like a technological synchronicity.
Yes, have you heard this term?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's happened to me.
I've described this before on the podcast, but there was a recent, maybe it was like a year ago, there was a moment where I was driving in my car.
You know, when you're driving, sometimes you'll sometimes, um, You'll like simulate interactions with people in your head before they happen.
Like, you'll know you're going to see this person in the next month or two weeks or week or whatever it is.
And you'll kind of like simulate what that interaction is going to be like, right?
I was doing that while I was driving, just mind, just daydreaming, right?
I was just driving and thinking about an interaction I knew I was going to have with this guy in a few weeks.
This guy was a friend of my dad's, it was like a golf buddy of my dad's or whatever.
And a guy that I literally, I've talked to on the phone twice in my life.
I've known the guy for 25 years.
And as I'm replaying this in my head driving, the guy calls me the third time in my life in 25 years he's ever called me for some random question about something completely, completely unrelated to anything.
Like, and it was just like, how?
How did this fucking happen?
I told everybody about this.
Like, how did this fucking happen?
You know, and it's just like, yeah, it's one of those synchronicities that you can't really explain.
And, and, and, you know, if, if all of the air around us is some computational cloud that's all connected through morphic resonance and all this stuff, then that's, that's, that's the best.
Explanation for me to comprehend.
I can explain this kind of stuff.
I think so.
And so there's a term called technological synchronicity.
And the best example is here, I'll tell you a quick story.
I was shopping for a backpack because the synchronicity is some, what it is, is usually it's some correlation between an inner event, in this case, you were daydreaming, and an outer event where the guy calls you.
Or similarly, if you had a dream about someone and they call you.
But so I was shopping for a backpack online on my laptop.
And there was a specific company whose backpack I was looking at.
And so I forgot about it.
And then a few days later, I was on my phone and I was in like Facebook or some social media app.
And suddenly I see an ad.
And what is the ad for?
It's for the exact same backpack.
Now, if I didn't know anything about the simulation, right?
I would have said Facebook spying on you.
Yeah, that's what it actually is.
But if you didn't know about cookies and databases, I mean, what happened was I had registered my intent by visiting that website.
In some database.
And there was a cookie associated with that that got linked to my profile.
And then my profile on my phone was linked back to that specific cookie.
And they said, What is his intent?
Now let's create an ad from the possible ads that we have.
And I think that's also how synchronicity could be working.
But if you didn't know that, you'd think it's magic.
Yes.
Because Jung defined it as a meaningful coincidence, but also as an a causal connection.
Synchronicity is like there's two things that are connected, but you can't.
You can't figure out what caused what.
You know, or like, did the daydream cause that guy to call you, or was the guy going to call you anyway?
And you got the information about it beforehand.
Right.
What caused what?
But you just know there's a connection.
And so, similarly, I think we're registering intent in databases that we can't see, that is part of the simulation.
And that also includes things like our quests and our challenges and achievements and storylines.
But then sometimes, The simulation will create situations that relate to that for us.
And they seem like, how did this happen?
And are our stories already written?
Like, do we have free will, or is like if there is some sort of God, right?
And he's all omnipotent and all knowing, well, that would mean that he knows the future, right?
That means he can see a million years in the future and he knows everything that's going to happen.
So, even in the simulation, like, is and to explain these synchronicities and these precognitive dreams, Is the future already written for us?
Is where we end up at the end of our lives already predetermined?
And is that somehow echoing back and then, for example, making you more motivated to write these books?
Right.
Well, I think that it's actually a combination where we have a storyline, like a general storyline, that has some major points that are almost predetermined, but we have some free will along the way.
In terms of what decisions we make at any given time and whether we go down this path or that path or not.
And so I think that there are multiple possible futures.
Predetermined Storylines00:03:57
And that if you think of it from a simulation point of view, you can actually run these scenarios.
Like maybe there's a part of us that's outside the simulation, the player.
And, you know, my latest metaphor for this now is the writer's room.
So, you know, like in a TV show, they'll have a writer's room and they'll say, okay, we know what this character is going to do throughout the season.
You know, this is their arc.
Yeah.
This is kind of where they're going to end up.
But let's figure out what we're going to do in each episode.
Yeah.
And as they're writing, they'll make up new challenges or new jokes if it's a comedy or something along the way.
And I feel like each of us has our own little writer's room, which is watching what we do.
But they have an overall story.
Now, I've mentioned this before, but when I was in high school, if you had asked me, What are you going to do with your life?
I would have said, Oh, I'm going to become a softer entrepreneur and then I'm going to become a writer.
And I just kind of knew that.
Like it was this weird intuitive sense.
Now, my siblings, we had four siblings all total.
None of them wanted to be a writer.
We had similar genetics.
We grew up in a similar environment, but it was just something that I felt I would always do.
And I did become an entrepreneur in the software industry and sold my company.
I thought I was going to become a writer at the old age of 28.
Of course, that was when I was in high school or in college.
But what happened was after I sold one or two companies, I kept doing the Silicon Valley thing.
And I wrote a little bit on the side, but it wasn't like, it was more like a hobby that I did every now and then.
And I was trying to do basically what you do.
I think we get a little brainwashed in whatever social environment we're in, and we take on the desires and goals and wants of those around us.
Like it happens on Wall Street, you know, happens in the entertainment industry in LA, and it definitely happens in Silicon Valley, where you're like, okay, the next thing is I gotta, you know, start a bigger company.
You gotta start a company that goes to a billion dollars in valuation, or I gotta start a venture capital fund.
And that's kind of what was laid out.
But at the same time, I knew intuitively that I wanted to write, but I was just delaying it.
And it wasn't until I was much older than I thought.
It was 48 at the time when I had a big health crisis.
And I ended up having to have heart surgery.
And during that time, I had a number of visions while I was recovering that basically told me that you had this plan.
You were supposed to do this and this, but you're still doing this.
Like, okay, you achieved that part of your plan.
You need to move on to this other part of your plan.
And that this health crisis was because we know what's going to happen if you keep doing what you're doing.
But we want to find a way to get you to go over here to do this other thing.
And then what happened was every time in the next nine months, because it took me about nine months to recover, I could barely go for a walk during that time.
But what I could do was I could get in an Uber and go to the Starbucks and write for a few hours.
And I finished two books in those nine months, including the first edition of the simulation hypothesis.
But during that time, whenever I would try to jump back into the business world, oh, I'm going to start another video game company or I'm going to start another venture capital fund to fund video game companies, I would end up back in the hospital.
And it was almost as if there was an unseen force guiding me.
And so, going back to your original question of free will versus predetermined, I think some paths are predetermined, but we have free will to choose.
Just like in a video game, you can improvise.
You can improvise along the way.
You can choose not to accept a certain quest.
Even though you had agreed beforehand, you're like, okay, I'm going to do that quest.
And that quest is going to unlock these more difficult quests, for example.
So there's usually a quest tree, for example, within video games.
But I think there's a dynamic element and I think there's a storyline element.
Quantum Mechanics Weirdness00:02:23
And I think that's one of the aspects of simulation theory that actually can help us to deal with challenging situations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you're right about that.
The idea that we are able to. have one decision split off into another universe and that decision and the next decision split off into another universe.
And before you know it, you have this chaotic mess of tree branches that lead off into different directions that are different universes.
How do you reconcile this idea with simulation theory?
Are these all turn into new simulations?
Yeah.
Well, sort of.
Yeah, that's one way to think of it because you're almost hitting on the idea of the multiverse.
Right.
Right in quantum mechanics, with the observer effect, is sort of one way of explaining this weird phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy, where you have, say, a cat with two states it's alive or it's dead, and then when you observe it, what happens is the probability wave collapses just one of those possibilities, and that's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where you have a probability wave of all the things that are possible, and one of those when it gets observed.
So the cat.
We would say after an hour, I mean, are you familiar with Schrodinger's cat?
Yeah.
So after an hour, you know, there's some poison that might be released, and there's a 50% chance it might be released and a 50% chance it isn't.
So we think the cat is just alive or it's dead.
We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box.
And what quantum physics is telling us is no, the cat is both alive and dead until somebody observes it.
So both of those possibilities exist.
Now, another interpretation of the.
But the reality is the cat's either alive or dead.
We just don't know yet because we haven't lifted the lid on it.
Right, but that's what common sense tells us.
But this is why quantum mechanics is so weird.
And this is why Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the field, said that if you are not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it.
Because it's telling us that until the observation happens, the decision about whether it's alive or dead hasn't really been made.
It gets made at the time that the measurement or the observation happens.
No, this is why it's weird.
Observer Player Reality00:02:23
Otherwise, it would be not that weird if it was just one of those states.
That's kind of normal how we would think about it.
Now, some people don't like that.
Some scientists didn't like that because they said, well, that requires an observer.
Now, I think the observer is the player, if you will, that is watching the game, and there are different possible branches.
And if this is some sort of a video game that we are in, then hypothetically, if we don't see the reality of what, if we don't see the alive cat or the dead cat, The reason for that is because that this simulation is trying to conserve processing power because you don't need to know that until you actually look at it.
Just like when you're playing Fortnite, you can be at, what's the place called?
Twisted towers or tilted towers, and you don't need to see snobby shores, which is on the other side of the map at the same time.
There's not rendered because it's only seeing your view, your wide angle POV of that character and whatever players are in your proximity.
If it rendered the whole thing at once, The servers would melt probably.
It probably wouldn't be able to handle it.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, what you find in an MMORPG like Fortnite or say World of Warcraft, like we couldn't have built that back in the 80s when I was playing like the Atari games and Pac Man, Space Invaders.
And the reason was there was no way for us to render all those pixels.
And so, what happened was we came up with optimization techniques, which include 3D modeling, but also if you've ever seen the game Doom, which was like one of the first popular first person shooter games.
Oh, yeah.
And you're just seeing what the guy's gun is looking at, and that's it.
Right, that's all of the world.
Quake was similar to that.
Yeah, exactly uh, and so that is sort of optimizing to render only that which your character observes.
Now, what's happening with these video games is, you're right in that there is no shared rendering of the entire world.
But what's happening is your computer is rendering what you, your avatar sees, and my computer is rendering what my avatar sees, but they're both pulling from the same server.
They are yeah, they're pulling information from the same server, but it leaves open the possibility that we're seeing slightly different things, Because we do this in video games all the time.
I mean, let's say you play Fortnite a lot.
I don't play Fortnite.
I have a lower level.
I don't have the ability to see the dragon or whatever the case is.
Infinite Universe Clones00:05:28
And you do.
And sometimes you'll see this where some people will see a weird phenomenon like a ghost or a UFO and other people don't.
And I think this idea of conditional rendering based upon where you are, you think you're seeing the same thing, but you're not.
Each of us is rendering it on our own device.
But that optimization is a key part of why I came to write this book.
Because as I looked in it, I said, well, if it was a simulated world, then that makes sense because that's how we do video games.
Yes.
You render only that which you can observe.
Right.
Now, getting back to your earlier question about branching off and stuff.
I need one of these.
We're talking about, we're going deep.
I need to get one of my secret weapon drinks.
Absolutely.
If you need to get turned up a little bit higher, you can have one.
Oh, yeah.
What's in it?
It's got all kinds of good stuff in it.
It's.
It's like a nootropic drink.
It just makes your mind sharper and makes it like calm energy.
Oh, cool.
It's great.
It's got like all kinds of like herbs and nootropic stuff, mushrooms, focus mushrooms.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
Looks interesting.
Magic mind.
Magic mind.
Shout out to Magic mind.
Great.
Well, so let's jump into this multiverse idea then.
So, the other interpretation that people came up with, like scientists from the physics world, was well, maybe the universe is branching into two different universes.
The cat is alive in one universe and the cat is dead in another universe.
And so that became, that came to be called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was put forth by Hugh Everett, who is a student of John Wheeler at Princeton, who's one of my favorite physicists of the 20th century.
We'll talk about him probably at some point, some more.
But now that would imply that you're basically spinning off a universe like all the time.
Right.
Every time there's a quantum decision.
So, not even like a big decision.
Like it's easy to think I go to, Boston, I go to New York, I go to Atlanta.
Those are different futures, possible futures.
But this is saying every time there's a quantum event, which happens at the fractions of a second type thing.
And so that is actually a very popular interpretation.
And of course, it's made its way into the superhero movies where you've got like the Spider Man movie where you have the three different versions of Spider Man.
Yeah, I mean, this is like an exponential thing, right?
This would mean there's like a hundred.
Trillion billion of you doing the same thing right now, but maybe you decided to say something different on this podcast and they're all branching off simultaneously every second.
Yeah.
It'd be an incalculable amount of universes.
Yeah, now physicists love infinity.
They're like, oh, that's infinite, no big deal.
Computer scientists hate infinity because we always have limited resources.
So we're always thinking about how do you optimize things.
And turns out the problem with the multiverse theory for some scientists don't like it because it's not parsimonious.
It requires an infinite number of physical universes.
And there's nothing in nature that big that can clone itself.
Okay, like a whole universe can clone itself.
Like there are, you know, you can clone a cell, you can clone information.
Information is easy to clone, it turns out.
So if it was a simulated multiverse, that would make more sense than a physical multiverse.
Because in a simulated universe, what does it mean to have another universe?
It just means you're running the same program with slightly different parameters and you're seeing where it goes.
And then you're running it with these parameters.
In fact, that's why we run simulations.
It is to see what might happen.
Now, I interviewed Philip K. Dix, the sci fi author who wrote Blade Runner and Minority Report, his wife, when I was writing this book originally.
And she pointed out his speech that he gave in Metz, France in 1977.
And there's a famous quote from that.
And he said, We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality.
Now, that's the quote, the famous quote.
And you can see the videos online.
It's available on YouTube and they pan to the audience, and everybody's like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
This was back in 1977.
But she told me, well, you might want to read the rest of that speech.
And I did.
And it turns out what he was talking about was that you would change a variable and rerun the simulation.
Like you would run it to see what would happen under different scenarios.
And he wrote a book called The Man in the High Castle, which became an Amazon series.
I don't know if you've seen it.
I've seen it.
Yeah.
My favorite series of all time.
Oh, It's great, isn't it?
Very well done.
Incredible.
Yeah.
And for people who don't know, it's about a timeline where Germany and Japan won World War II.
And then they broke up America between them.
And then there's this Japanese guy in the series, anyway, who is able to jump to the other timeline.
Yes.
Now, jump back into New York City in the 70s or something like this.
Yeah.
In our timeline, where the Allies.
There's like big Coke billboards everywhere and American flags and.
You know, people running around smoking cigarettes.
Data Hard Drive Entropy00:06:37
What the fuck?
Yeah, he's like.
And they're able to go back and forth in between it.
Exactly.
It's wild.
It's wild.
But what Tessa, you know, his wife told me was that he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened, but that the simulators decided to unwind it.
And now they're running this timeline because that timeline led to someplace they didn't want to.
Now, the only reason I bring that up is, and I wrote about this in my book, The Simulated Multiverse, this idea that we can perhaps.
Run forward the simulation to see what might happen and then come back and then take the path that we think is the most likely or the most interesting path for us.
So it's possible that you can run multiple branches, but that you can trim the branches so it's not infinite.
So this gets a little weird, I know.
But I think if you think of reality as a computer simulation, then it's not so weird to be able to spawn off new processes.
It's relatively easy to do on a server.
Yeah.
No, it makes sense.
Like copying data on a hard drive, right?
You can just copy and paste it and you can make little alterations.
It doesn't make sense.
Like, how would you do that with an entire universe or a planet, even?
Right, exactly.
There's no conventional way to wrap your mind around how you would do that right now.
And, you know, another interesting thing is like, so the idea of a hard drive, right?
So if you have a hard drive and you put data on it, it becomes more chaotic.
You're adding entropy to the hard drive, right?
So before you put data on the hard drive, A brand new hard drive out of the box, it's going to be all ones or all zeros on it, right?
Very low entropy.
And one of the laws of thermodynamics is that in a closed system, entropy cannot decrease.
It stays the same or it increases.
So when you're adding data to a hard drive, it's adding entropy.
So it's going from all ones or all zeros to one zero zero, one zero zero zero, making a chaotic mess of ones and zeros and data on the hard drive, right?
Yep.
So what happens when you erase that hard drive?
You're putting it back to ones and zeros.
So That means you have to take energy.
Energy, that energy has to, if that's mass, I think it's been proven that when you store data on a hard drive, if we had sophisticated enough measuring devices to weigh them, they would weigh more when you put the data on them.
In fact, I heard that if you weighed all the data, if you weighed all the data that's on every single server farm and data center and hard drive in the world, it would be like, I don't know, a kilogram.
So that's how minute it is.
But there is a measurable amount of mass that's added to a hard drive.
Once you store data on it, right?
So, like theoretically, if you could weigh it before and after, it would weigh a little bit more after you put the data on it.
So, if it's mass when the data is on the hard drive and you erase the hard drive, that mass has to go to energy, right?
That's E equals mc squared.
But it's data.
And if you crack open that hard drive, you're not going to see anything.
It's going to be, you know, what is the only other form of mass that we can't detect electromagnetically?
Dark matter.
Right.
So it's theoretically, so if energy equals mass and you store this mass on a hard drive as data, that would mean energy equals mass equals data, which would theoretically, you could say that dark matter is a computational cloud that's projecting our simulation.
Potentially.
That would be one way to look at it.
That said, I know many people have proposed this idea that if you, Put information into something, it should increase the mass.
Like, there's a guy named Melvin Vopson in the UK, a computer scientist, and he came up with this idea of information mass equivalence and also his second law of infodynamics, which was meant to sort of counter the second law of thermodynamics.
And what he said was that entropy generally increases, but in certain systems, like they studied the evolution of the viruses and a few other things, they said it actually.
Decreases in some cases because you're adding some order.
I mean, yes, it definitely increases from if everything is blank or everything is one.
So, what you're talking about is information entropy.
Yes.
Which is quite interesting because there's a guy named Claude Shannon who was considered the father of information theory.
He's the guy who came up with the whole concept of transmitting data, right?
Right.
Of how to measure the amount of information in a piece of data.
So, getting back to your earlier point, if there was like 64,000 ones in a row, Is that really 64k bits of data?
Not really.
You can just say it's one and 64,000, repeat it this many times.
So, you don't need actually 64,000 bits to transmit that information because there's low information entropy.
Right.
Or if you know that half of it is ones and half of it is zero.
Okay, again, you don't need a whole 64,000 bits to do that.
And so that became the basis of how we transmit information digitally and why people can watch this podcast on YouTube is because of that.
Right.
And so I think this idea that the universe consists of information is quite interesting.
And there's a whole area of digital physics where they're trying to measure, they're trying to come up with a new way to think about the world, not in terms of energy or mass, but in terms of the amount of information that is contained within it.
And so they'll say that it has to be conservation of that information, just like you said, there has to be conservation of energy, like you were talking about with the equivalence of, you know, in this case, the mass or the energy.
But in this case, they're trying to measure, you know, What happens to this information?
Does it get lost?
How much information can be stored inside a black hole, for example?
And it's defined by the surface area of the black hole, which is what has led some people to think that the universe must be some kind of a hologram that looks three dimensional, but it's not actually three dimensional because the amount of information that can be stored is defined more by the surface area of the whole thing.
Holographic Principle Balance00:02:12
So that's like the holographic principle.
There's a whole thing around holography, which is quite interesting.
There was a book called A Holographic Universe that came out back in the 90s, I think it was, or late 80s or so.
And I kind of view my book as taking another look at this idea that the world is some kind of projection, but using video games and computer technology, because now we've come much further on that side.
Our video games are getting very good, our AI is getting very good.
Have you seen this recent prompt theory videos that have come out?
No time to cook, no problem, because my friends at Huel, today's sponsor, have you covered.
It's spelled H U E L, and their black edition, ready to drink, is a total game changer.
It's a complete meal in one bottle with 35 grams of protein, 27 vitamins and minerals, high fiber, and low sugar.
So you feel full, focused, and ready for your day.
No prep, no cleanup, just grab and go because eating is fun, but making food is not.
Huel has already sold over 500 million meals around the world, so now it's your turn to try it.
New customers can get 15% off when they go to Huel.com and use my promo code DANI.
I love Huel not only because of the great taste, And it's packed with protein, but it's super convenient and way more affordable than fast food.
You don't have to waste time waiting in line.
You can just throw it in your bag or in your car when you're on the go and slam the thing.
And I really do feel full after drinking just one of them.
It's not a burst of carbs or a protein break.
It's just the perfect balance for me because it was designed by experts to provide all the ingredients your body needs from a meal.
And I already mentioned it's incredibly affordable.
It's cheaper than a combo meal.
So for me, that makes it the perfect balance choice for a meal on the go.
New customers can get 50.
15% off by using my exclusive code DANY, spelled D A N N Y, at Huel.com.
Please see our description for full terms and conditions.
Skip the stress, not the nutrition.
Try Huel today for complete nutrition.
So, Google came out with their VO3 video engine, which can be.
I saw this yesterday.
Yeah, you probably saw it because they're amazing videos that people are putting out.
Now, before that, you could create videos, but there was no audio.
You'd have to go to a separate.
And so, what some people did was they.
Used prompts, right?
Three Possibilities Exist00:15:47
That's how we create with generative AI.
We give it a prompt and we tell it what to do.
And so they created a whole series of videos that are basically people saying, look, we're not prompts.
You know, I'm not a prompt.
Clearly, look around at this beautiful mountain landscape.
You're saying that's all zeros and ones?
Obviously, it's not.
Right.
Okay, here.
This is prompt theory.
Yeah, we could probably bring up some videos around prompt theory.
Yeah, we'll get copywritten probably by this channel.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Well, they're sharing, they're being pretty shared widely on social media.
Are they really?
Okay.
I showed some at a conference recently I was at in Palm Springs.
And I showed the videos and I told people, okay, these are AI.
Characters they've been generated completely by AI, and you know, you have like a guy politician saying, We will ban teaching the prompt theory, you know, from our schools, for example.
And at the end, people came up to me and said, Wait, are you saying those weren't real like actors?
Yeah, no, no, those were completely generated by AI.
And so, it's a variation of simulation theory, which is going back to how I originally got into this idea, which was how when will we get to the point that we could create a perfect simulation that.
Reaches what I call the simulation point.
And the simulation point is a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from physical reality because it's so realistic.
And two, it has AI characters in there that are indistinguishable from characters that might be controlled by a real person.
And we're getting closer and closer to that point.
And if we've gotten to that point, then how would we know if we're in a simulation or not?
The chances suddenly go up to at least 50 50.
Because if you can't tell the difference if you're in a simulated world or not, and this is the logic that led Nick Bostrom, who is a philosopher at Oxford, he wrote a paper all the way back in 2003 called, Are You Living in a Simulation?
Yeah.
There were like four basic principles of this, right?
Yeah.
There were three possibilities, he said.
Okay, three.
He said, if you take a technological civilization, now he was concerned primarily with AI and how much information would it take to simulate the brain and how much information would it take.
To basically simulate the history of a person and all the processing power of a brain.
And he said, well, it's not that much in the scheme of things.
So, therefore, it's possible a technological civilization could get to the point where he called it post human, which is very similar to what I'm calling the simulation point without so much the virtual reality part.
But he said, if it could get to that point, there's three, well, first of all, there's three possibilities, which we kind of call Bostrom's trilemma now.
The first possibility is it's not possible or nobody gets there.
Anywhere.
No civilization ever gets there.
So then the chances we're in a simulation are zero because it's either not possible or every civilization blows themselves up before they get to that point.
The second possibility, which I think is unlikely, is he says they get to that point, but they don't create any simulations.
Because of moral reasons or something like that.
Yeah, moral reasons or they have some laws.
Maybe they don't want to cause suffering or there's just other reasons why.
And they're banned.
So it's a possibility.
But personally, If that were true, then the chances we're in a simulation are low, according to Bostrom's simulation argument, is what it's called, because there's not going to be many simulations.
And then he said, third possibility is we are most likely in a simulation.
Okay, now how do you get to that from that?
Because the third possibility is that civilization creates a bunch of simulated beings, and then it runs another server and it creates a whole nother trillion simulated beings.
And then it runs another server and it creates a whole other trillion.
So he came up with a statistical argument.
He said, if there are this many simulated beings and there's only this many smaller number of biological beings that are in base reality, and actually, probably simpler to use Elon Musk's version.
So, what Elon Musk said in 2016 was assume there's a billion simulated worlds and there's only one physical world.
So, what are the odds that you're in a physical world?
Oh, right.
One in a billion.
One in a billion, right?
That's exactly what he said.
He said the chances that we're in base reality is one in billions in that scenario.
So crazy to think about.
Yeah.
Now, That is, remember, that was only one of three possibilities.
Yeah.
So, you know, Bostrom himself didn't know where to put the probabilities for each of these three possibilities.
But if we can get there to that point where we can create these AI simulated worlds, then you suddenly find yourself in either possibility two or possibility three.
Right.
And that was.
That's one of the big questions.
One of the things that I can't wrap my mind around that I always think about is like the way it was eloquently stated in the 13th floor movie.
Where he's like, what happens when one of these guys crawls up the extension cord and finds a way to kill its god?
Right.
So, this is an interesting question, too, because can you escape the simulation?
Right.
And that's kind of what it's asking.
And in fact, you know, it's something that there have been rumors that, you know, a couple billionaires have funded research to try to figure out, you know, is there a way to hack the simulation?
There's a few guys out there that have written papers on can we hack the simulation in some way.
Danny Gohler on here.
I think he's the one who, yeah, you know Danny.
Yeah, I know Danny.
Danny connected us.
That's right.
Of course.
Duh.
So he's doing this, the experiment with the laser and the DMT code.
Right.
He told me about it.
Fascinating stuff.
And, you know, originally he was saying it kind of looks like Katakana, but.
It looks like Sanskrit to me.
Oh, Sanskrit.
It looks like, if you look at.
Have you tried it then?
Pull up, yeah, I've done it twice.
Pull up the Lord of the Rings, the ring from Lord of the Rings, and you can see the text on the ring.
Right.
That's what it looks closest to.
To me.
So the first time I did it, I didn't see it.
I didn't see the code.
I saw just like crazy patterns rotating in the laser.
And I could see like a pocket of space.
So that's what the code looked like to me.
Similar to that.
That's really interesting.
And I've heard from him and I've heard from others.
I know they're trying to work on are there ways to see this without taking DMT, for example?
Right.
Yeah.
And the second time I did it, when I saw it, It was crazy because I mean, I saw it through the laser, but it was like I tried going back into it.
So I did the DMT three or four times, and like the fourth time I did it, all I saw was dicks covered in this code everywhere surrounding me.
And I was like, I don't think something is telling me that I'm pushing my limits here.
They're telling me to fuck off.
That's great.
Yeah, it was hilarious.
Danny filmed the whole thing.
Oh, that's hilarious.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's an interesting question.
I mean, many people have told me that the first time they took DMT or sometimes they took it, maybe not the first time, but they started to see the grid lines of the simulation.
And I know Danny himself talks about these characters.
Is it the insectoid characters?
I forget which ones they are, but these beings that he said are like, they're more like admins or managers.
They're like bureaucratic people who are just kind of supporting the simulation or whatever you would call that world.
Like, if you're jumping, like, either you're jumping over to another simulation or you're breaking down the brain filter hypothesis, I'm sure you're aware of, where it's like all of our senses are basically like vision and smell and touch and taste.
That's all just filters.
It's filtering out all the stuff that's potentially all around us right now, right?
So that we can basically survive and get to the day, eat, sleep, reproduce, drive to work.
And, you know, if there are, and this is like, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis.
No, I haven't heard of it.
Oh my God, it's amazing.
The fart hypothesis is great.
It's one of my favorites.
It's basically like if somebody farts around you and you don't have the sense of smell or a nose, you're just going to be sitting there in their fart and you have no clue.
So, how many?
So, I mean, obviously, we've evolved to gain the sense of smell in our noses to detect enemies or prey or, you know, if there's a gas leak or something like this, it's a very relevant sense to us so we can survive.
But if we didn't have a nose, We would have no clue that there's these smells and there's these fart odors that are like surrounding us or whatever.
So, how many senses or how many things that are similar to that are all around us all the time that we just haven't evolved the sensory organs to detect?
You know?
Yeah.
So, that's like kind of like that brain filter hypothesis that the DMT is breaking down these filters in your brain and somehow you're able to see more of what this really is.
Right.
And I think there's validity to that because I've heard it from now enough people.
And, you know, I get into the same discussions.
About this, that I might about things like near death experiences or people who do yogic techniques or shamanic journey.
Like, are they seeing something real?
Are they seeing just an interpretation of what's real?
And for me, the interesting thing about the simulation hypothesis is it's really a collection of two or three different assertions.
And the first of those assertions is that the physical universe is based on information, it's not really physical.
And going back to John Wheeler, he had a phrase called it from bit.
Yep.
And he basically said that when you get right down to it, if everything is 99% empty space, you go down to the atom, it's this weird electron cloud, and you keep going down.
At the bottom level, what is a particle?
If the world consists of particles, what is a particle?
Exactly.
And nobody really knows exactly what it is.
And he said it comes down to a series of properties that define that particle.
It's a series of yes no questions.
And those are bits.
A bit is a one or a zero, a yes no question.
And so he said anything that's physical actually consists of bits of information.
You know, down at the bottom level.
Now, the second assertion is that information gets rendered for us as a kind of reality that we perceive through our senses somehow.
And the first part is not really controversial, even with physicists.
Like, I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist at the University of Cambridge, and we were talking about this.
And he goes, Oh, that's not controversial anymore.
The universe basically consists of information.
Most physicists.
Oh, really?
That's what he said to me.
It used to be controversial.
If you go back like 30, 40 years in the 70s, They'll be like, no, it's not information.
It's energy.
It's this.
It's that.
They'll say, you know, that that's a valid view of the universe.
But, you know, whether it's rendered as a video game or not, or how that happens, that's a big mystery.
Nobody knows why it goes from that to what we're actually perceiving.
And you get into, you know, neuropsychology.
But also, I think the video game metaphor works pretty well.
And then the last part of that is that the whole thing is a kind of hoax.
you know, that this whole thing isn't real, that it's set up for us in some way and we're limited to perceiving what's outside of it.
And that's where these experiences, whether it's DMT, whether it's certain yogic techniques, mystical techniques that allow you to perceive other beings that are here with us.
Right.
And in all the world's, you know, mystical traditions and religious traditions, there's all kinds of stories about other beings that are here with us.
Right.
Like the jinn, for example, in the Middle East.
Uh, you know, that's a very common thing where they say that there are jinn here.
We can't see them all the time, but they can make ourselves visible to us at different times.
And same with near death experiences.
The first thing they report is floating out of their body, and then they're looking down at their body and they're saying they have, you know, 360 degree vision.
And sometimes they'll see people in the room, and sometimes other relatives will perceive those people in the room before the person dies.
And they'll be like two, like a brother and sister sitting with their parent who's dying.
Just did you just see dad?
They said, Yeah, if it's their mom dying, you know, and their dad has already passed on the other side, so they'll have shared death experiences, yes, at that point in time, which are pretty fascinating.
Uh, and then you know, they report going through a light, uh, seeing a being there, and then many of them report a life review.
Um, yeah, are you familiar with the concept of the life review?
I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of the life review.
So I learned about it from a guy named Danian Brinkley, he wrote a book called Saved by the Light back in the 90s, and he was struck by lightning.
Like, I think it was 1975.
Jeffrey Kripo wrote a book about a lady who was struck by lightning.
Yes.
I don't remember her name, but I remember the story, though.
It's a fucking wild story.
It's wild, right?
But so, what the Life Review is about 20% of people who have had near death experiences report the Life Review.
And what they say is it's like going back and reviewing every part of your life, like everything you've done, but not just watching it.
It's like you're re experiencing it from the point of view of other people.
So like in Daniel's case, he literally shot people because he was in the military in Vietnam.
And he said he had to feel what it was like to have the bullet come and, you know, what happened to that guy.
And earlier he was a bully and he used to beat up kids when he was in.
And he had to feel what it was like to be beat up by himself.
But more than that, there's something called the ripple effect.
And the ripple effect is where you see what happened to, let's say you killed somebody, you see what happened to their family because that guy's not around anymore.
So you see the ripple effects of your actions.
And so.
Daniel called it a holographic panoramic 360 degree review of your life.
And I remember thinking about that and thinking, okay, well, if we take that at face value, and this is where I get into a lot of arguments with scientists because I say, look, if a thousand people, if one person says they've been to China, it's okay to say China probably doesn't, we don't know if China exists or not.
But if a thousand people have been to China, and even if some of them have slight differences, there's probably something like China out there if these people are reporting it.
To you.
Now, they may describe it slightly differently.
They may have gone to different parts of China.
One might say it's mountainous, one might say it's a beach by the ocean, but there's something there.
And that's with near death experiences and life reviews, there must be something there.
And so I said, well, how would you implement that?
Like, what's the mechanism technoscientifically?
Well, a few years ago, around the same time that I was doing the VR story with the ping pong, I was involved in a startup that was taking a game like, let's say, Fortnite.
At the time, we were using League of Legends.
And so if you've played League of Legends, you know, you're playing it on a 2D screen and you're seeing, you know, the different characters fight with each other and you're kind of looking down on it.
And he said, you could put on a virtual reality headset and you could basically put yourself into the game at any XYZ coordinate.
Wow.
And so there was a game called CSGO Counter Strike Global Offensive, which was a first person shooter and took place in like kind of the desert in Iraq or something.
It was probably during those years when it came out.
Life Review Gameplay00:08:49
And we would replay that game session, but you could see your character shooting the other character, but you would be at the point of view of the other person.
So, you'd see, you know, kind of your character shooting them.
Now, we didn't record any feelings because it's just VR.
Right.
But to me, that brings up an interesting possibility.
The reason you can have a life review is because we're in a virtual reality and the entire 3D world is being recorded in a way, and you can replay it from any XYZ coordinate within the game.
And you can experience it from any person's point of view from the game, just like we could go to any.
Time within the recording of a game, and we could figure out how to redraw or replay what happened at the time.
Right.
And just like there's a lot of content on YouTube that's just video game sessions, right?
People just recorded themselves.
And Twitch, obviously, is live streaming.
But on YouTube, the most popular content for a while was, in fact, just these video game reviews.
Oh, yeah, I remember.
And it's interesting because I remember my nephew was like three or four years old, and he would say to his father, my brother, he would say, Oh, I want to watch Star Wars.
And my brother would say, Oh, you want to watch the Star Wars movie?
He goes, No, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star Wars game.
That's so wild.
Isn't that wild?
But a life review is sort of like that.
We can use that as an analogy to say we are looking back at our gameplay session.
And what these near death experiencers say is they themselves are doing the judging.
Like the being of light is there, but they're like, Oh man, I shouldn't have done that.
Why?
Because when I said that to my mom, I met a woman recently who had a life review, and I think she pulled out all the flowers that her mom had.
Taken so much time to put in the garden.
And now she saw, she was able to experience how sad her mom was because she had put all that effort into the flower.
Now, what is the difference between one of these life reviews?
Because so these life reviews happen when somebody's unconscious, right?
Like when you get struck by lightning.
I remember the woman who Jeffrey Kripewell wrote about, she was unconscious for a couple minutes, maybe 10 minutes or something like this.
Yes.
And she described being, she described like two or three weeks worth of time going by and like sitting in this garden.
Right.
And talking to these universal, God like beings, or something like this, and having conversations and meeting her grandfather, I think, all kinds of crazy stuff.
But, like, I'm always curious, like, what's the difference between that and getting very close to like dying, like where you see, like, you could very easily die right here?
Because this happened to me before where I almost drowned a couple, one time in particular.
And I had my life flashing more.
You know, people say my life flashed before my eyes, right?
And that it wasn't like a very in depth.
Three dimensional projection of everything in my life from other people's perspectives, like you talked about.
But it's more just like all your most fond, loving memories of your life kind of just like all of a sudden pop into your head.
And you're like, oh my God, I have to make peace with this before I'm dead, before I'm gone.
Right.
Which is a, you know, it's a bizarre phenomenon that I've experienced.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's very interesting.
And like I said, only about 20% of people who've had near death experiences report life reviews.
But That doesn't mean it could also mean they didn't go far enough.
Yes.
They weren't close enough to, you know, a death experience, if you will, right?
Right.
And some people report gardens in particular.
Some people report crystal cities that they visited.
Yeah.
I wonder, does it line up with their religious ideologies, their pre existing religious views?
In some cases, it does, but in other cases, it doesn't.
It's interesting that some people will see Jesus, for example, as the being of light, would be presented as Jesus.
Some people see just their relatives who are taking them along, and the being of light is just a being of light.
Some people see an angel, some people say it's God.
So I personally think that even what we see after we die is another kind of simulation that's kind of.
Created for us, like in the sense of like the garden.
Okay, this garden is created for us because it's a peaceful scene.
It's kind of what we would need to recover a little bit from everything that's come along.
But there are actual beings there.
They just present themselves differently depending on your predisposition, whether it's, you know, particular religious disposition, et cetera.
But they're remarkably similar.
I mean, there have been studies of.
Of near death experiences in the Islamic world, for example.
And there's less of people reporting it.
It's interesting.
But the ones that do report them report very similar things.
Now, I went into so, you know, in my book, there's a whole section dedicated to religion.
So I went back to the different religions to see okay, is there something related to this life review?
Which relates to me to the idea of being in a virtual reality because it can be replayed or at least recorded if it can be replayed.
And it turns out there is.
But they use different metaphors because they had to explain it to people 2,000 years ago.
So, like in the Bible and in Judaism and Christianity, they're the recording angels who, and you can find pictures of statues in Washington, D.C. with recording angels where it's an angel with a book in the book of life.
And they're writing down who gets into heaven and who doesn't get into heaven.
Oh, wow.
Or St. James.
Like Santa's elves.
Like Santa's elves.
Right.
Who's naughty or nice?
Who's naughty or nice?
And so some people say, like, St. Peter is actually looking at your actual deeds.
But yeah, here's like an image that's very popular of a recording angel.
Now, they don't get into a lot of detail in it, but in the Quran, they actually do get into much more detail.
They have something called the scroll of deeds.
Okay, scroll is, you know, long Santa's list, right?
Right.
And they say there's two angels.
They're called the recording angels.
And what they do is they write down all your good deeds and they write down all your bad deeds.
And then when you die, There's actually a verse in the Quran that says that what judgment day really is, right?
Because we think of judgment day as God saying you get to go to heaven or you get to, you know, you get to go to hell in at least the Western Abrahamic, you know, religions or purgatory, say.
But there's actually a verse that says, on the day of reckoning, your book will be open.
Read your book, and you yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner.
Meaning, now again, they were using.
A book metaphor, which is a technology, it's a technological metaphor.
But, and they were using angels.
But if you think about it, what they're really saying is that you're going to have a life review, that it's a virtual reality of some kind.
You're going to replay everything that you did because they don't mean literally there's angels sitting there with feather pens writing down, you know, he got up today and he went to work and he got into a car crash, right?
They're just saying it's being recorded somehow.
And so today we can use an updated technological metaphor for that, which is that.
We're recording the whole scene and we're going to replay it for you.
And you are going to look at it and say, oh, damn, I shouldn't have done that.
Or I had agreed in this life I was going to work on my aggression or my greed or whatever I was going to, or my compassion.
And look what happened.
Forgot to do at that time, so let me do better next time.
And then it turns out, you know, so we've talked about kind of the Western religions, but even within, like, say, Hinduism, they actually have a god, a minor god called Chitragupta.
And who is he?
He's the record keeper, and he sits next to Yama, the god of death.
And what is he doing?
He's like recording all the things that you do to try to determine where your karma will take you to like a heavenly realm or not.
Now, again, the angels and these minor gods, they're not really meant to be, in my opinion.
You know, actual entities per se, they're just functions like recording angels.
It doesn't mean you and I really have these, you know, two little angels on our shoulder.
It's a record, it's a function, and the function is to record what happens.
And how are you going to explain that to somebody a couple thousand years ago?
You're going to say, well, maybe there's a book and there's an angel and there's an infinite number of angels.
So they're all doing this kind of stuff.
And so I believe that most religions have come about by using technological metaphors or other metaphors to try to explain.
This process that may be ineffable, which is a term that's used a lot with near death experiencers, which means it can't be put into words.
Von Neumann Machines00:05:23
That there's something profound, but they need to put it in words that we can understand.
And I think the simulation hypothesis is an evolution of those metaphors.
So you can think of it on a continuum.
You can think of it as literally a computer simulation, or you can think of it as a metaphor for something like a simulation that's very advanced and complex.
It's a good way for us to be able to understand it because.
We are now getting to the point where we understand information science.
I like to say information science is eating all the other sciences.
Because most of what you do and work in these other sciences now is just run computer simulations on things and you try to simulate what might happen.
And like even genetics and biology, it comes down to the DNA.
And what is DNA?
It's a series of bits of information that are packed tightly.
It's been described as a very efficient.
Mechanism to record a whole bunch of information, basically.
Right.
And then there's a process running that reads that and then transcribes and does things on it.
And so, you know, you can kind of describe that from an informational point of view.
In fact, I think the guy who came up with the term gene was actually von Neumann.
I don't know if you know John.
Yeah, John von Neumann?
Yeah, John von Neumann.
Because he was looking at it in terms of information and how do you, he said, can I duplicate life?
Which means I would need to reproduce this bit of information.
And so he's trying to come up with algorithms and he came up with this idea of cellular automata and von Neumann machines that could basically, you know, they function and they recreate the cellular.
He created the first computers, right?
Like the Iliac and the Maniac.
I don't know if he created the actual ENIAC computer, but he was heavily involved.
In fact, the architecture all computers use now is the von Neumann architecture.
Yes.
Which is, you know, you have memory and you've got a CPU.
And now, of course, we have multiple CPUs and we have GPUs and all these other things as well.
But it's basically the same architecture that he defined.
Way back when.
And the guy was a genius, right?
Oh, yeah.
He was one of the smartest dudes in history.
He was, yeah.
And he came up with this idea of the von Neumann machine, which are probes that you send out to the universe with a whole bunch of instructions.
Remember, they didn't really have full computers back then.
So he said you would have a long tape of instructions, and that these probes would be robots that would read these instructions and they would grab some raw material and then they would recreate themselves.
Right, and he said this is a way to colonize the galaxy as you send out these AI or robot probes, if you will.
Wow.
And those are called von Neumann machines, which is interesting.
So, this ties to the UFO subject.
And this was all conceptual stuff.
This was all conceptual stuff back then.
And NASA eventually, I think, put together some studies.
If you've ever read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, no.
So, they find this alien space probe in the solar system and it looks like a big cylinder.
Incidentally, I pointed out to Avi Loeb because I'm involved with the Galileo project that that was almost the exact size they think Oumuamua was.
Oh, really?
It was very similar in size.
But.
When they in the novel, when they went to the cylinder, it was like there was nobody there, but there was a bunch of raw material in a kind of an ocean.
And then turns out there were these little robots that were basically using that raw material to recreate themselves.
It was basically a von Neumann machine.
Oh, that's crazy.
It's pretty wild.
Von Neumann, I think he was the guy who calculated the exact height in the atmosphere that they needed to detonate Fat Man and Little Boy.
To create, to kill the most people.
Oh, that's interesting.
So he had to basically reverse engineer the math with those bombs and to basically figure out at what altitude to detonate those things so they could kill the most people.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, I know he was involved in the Manhattan Project.
And there were.
What a crazy way to harness somebody's intellect.
It was pretty nuts.
Actually, you know, my favorite movie on that subject, on the Manhattan Project, is actually not the Oppenheimer movie, which I thought was good, but is a movie called Day One.
Which came out like back in the 80s, I think.
Oh, really?
Brian Denehy plays General Groves.
Oh, really?
Yeah, and he looks like General Groves because Groves, you know, they called him in the Pentagon, they called him the biggest son of a bitch I ever met.
Like this big guy would go in there and just bulldoze things.
And then I forget the actor who played Oppenheimer, but the guy who actually thought of the idea of the atomic bomb was a guy named Leo Szilard, who was another Hungarian along with von Neumann.
There was this group of Hungarian scientists that came over from Europe.
Good thing they did.
But You know, he thought of this idea of a chain reaction that could be kicked off, where you would shoot a neutron out at like an atom and it would basically have nuclear fission.
It would break off into two pieces and then they would release more neutrons and they would break off more atoms into pieces.
And the energy released by that was the chain reaction.
It got to the point where it became sort of an uncontrolled chain reaction and it used up all the energy and that got converted into the bomb.
So that was like the basic idea of the bomb.
UFO Technology Industry00:15:19
They didn't know which material to use.
Right.
But he came up with that whole thing.
And there's a great scene in day one where he tries to explain it to Lord Rutherford.
Rutherford was, I don't know, Cambridge or Oxford, but he was the guy who discovered the nucleus of the atom.
And Lord Rutherford says, That's ridiculous.
That's moonshine.
You can never harness the energy of the atom.
So he writes it up in a patent and he tries to get the British War Office to, he's like, Here, I want to give this to you because what's happening in Germany, because he had studied in Germany with Einstein.
And they were like, Oh, in the polite British way.
Oh, yes, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
They had no idea what to do with it.
And then, you know, him along with Enrico Fermi and another guy, Wigner, basically convinced Einstein to write a letter to Roosevelt that this could be turned into some kind of weapon and the Germans were working on it.
So we better work on it.
And that got him going.
I've studied a bit of the innovation history around that because part of what I do in my doctoral research is how does science and technology evolve over time.
It's interesting how that evolution happened.
We went from what year was the Civil War again?
1860.
1860, right, 1860.
So, between the Civil War using muskets and cannons to dropping atomic bombs out of airplanes was less than 100 years.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
And how long has it been since we did that?
It's been almost another 100 years.
So, it's been like what, 70, 80 years or something?
Yeah, 70 years or something like that.
Yeah, since the end of World War II.
Like, what do we have now?
Right?
Has it evolved?
You would think the way technology evolves, it's exponential.
Right or the way.
Everything technological is typically exponential growth.
So if we went from muskets to atomic bombs in less than 100 years, what like how far have we gotten since then?
Yeah, and you'll notice that a lot of like the aerospace innovation you know has slowed down.
At least look at the moon, yeah we we, we went to the moon over the course of like 69 to what?
72, something like that.
Yeah, and then we just, we just Just washed our hands of that technology, threw it away.
Now, you know, we're pushing back every moon mission ever since.
It's weird.
Yeah.
And now, you know, people think China may get to the moon before we do, or India before we do, because we're like, we've already done it, right?
But that whole process is interesting.
And we've seen a lot of investment in Silicon Valley, for example, in AI and in computer technology.
And only now are they starting to invest more in deep tech, which are like more hardware type things.
There's a company called Boom Supersonic, for example, that's trying to have a supersonic commercial plane because the Concorde, too, right?
That was another one.
Oh, yeah, the Concorde, yes.
Yeah, I mean, that was Britain and France, right?
British Airways and Air France.
And you'd think we'd have something better than the Concorde.
Oh, yeah, we're still flying the same exact airplanes, basically.
More or less, right?
They've been flying since the 50s.
And this is interesting because this is what happens with startups when they grow big they start off completely innovating, creating new products, and then over time, they just end up.
Like trying to optimize version two, version three, version 600.
You look at Apple and they haven't had a great breakthrough in a long time since Steve Jobs.
Since 2006, since they created the iPhone, there's been nothing like that.
Yeah, not at that level, right?
No.
And so I wrote a paper for the Soul Foundation with Gary Nolan out of Stanford and Peter Skayfish co founded that.
And I wrote a paper called How Would We Build a UFO or UAP Innovation Ecosystem?
Where we figure out how this technology might actually work and get the private sector involved in building this.
Because right now, the whole thing is locked up and there aren't enough bright minds trying to figure out how to do this.
And for me, for some people.
Well, you got to keep it secret.
Well, the question is do you got to keep it all secret?
And that's an interesting question because that's what they say we got to keep it all secret.
But if you look at the amount of innovation that could be unlocked by getting, you know, The brightest minds and entrepreneurs to try to use this stuff.
Because for me, disclosure wouldn't be about just the US government saying we are not alone.
For me, it would be okay, can I now step into a craft that uses anti gravity technology and go up to the other side of the earth quickly or go up to the moon and come back without having to use rockets, which are, again, another outdated technology and dangerous technology.
I mean, even with Elon Musk's Starship, it keeps.
Keeps burning up.
I mean, they've done amazing things on the engineering side, but they're still working in that paradigm.
Yes.
And it's because of geopolitical concerns.
It's amazing how much of this stuff, like the reason we went to the moon, was as much because of geopolitical concerns.
It's why everybody was pushing to get there because we were competing with Russia.
And now I was talking to some folks in the UAP task force, and they were basically saying every other word out of their mouth was China, China, China, right?
And so they said, we can't send this stuff to MIT.
We can't send this stuff to Harvard.
We can't send this stuff anywhere because then the Chinese will have it.
And so they're keeping this lock on it because they're thinking of it in terms of.
Tribes of humans, which is what we do, and they're not thinking of it as we, the human race.
It's kind of like, it reminds me of not necessarily saying that the UFO phenomenon is necessarily evil or trying to take over the earth, but it reminds me a little bit of what happened with the colonization of North America by the Europeans, where the tribes were competing against each other to get a hold of the guns and the technology, and they didn't cooperate.
With each other and what happened to them.
Eventually, there was a guy named Tecumseh who tried to unite from the Shawnee, trying to unite all of these different tribes together.
But the older people didn't really listen.
You had these old rivalries and stuff.
And I think that's by trying to.
That's interesting.
Personally, and again, I'm not saying necessarily that I don't necessarily buy the threat narrative, but by trying to use the technology against each other and dominance, we're missing out on where we could go as a species.
And that's unfortunate, I think.
Well, of course, they want to use this stuff for war.
I mean, as weapons, that's the first thing they would go to if there's some sort of crazy technology that defies physics and gravity and stuff like this is how do we weaponize it to make ourselves the most powerful superpower in the world?
I mean, if you look at just look at the budget of look at where all the money is in the United States, right?
There's a $21 trillion hole in the Department of Defense vanished, unaccounted for money.
It's most likely that $21 trillion went to some of this dark black stuff that they cannot talk about or disclose to anybody.
It's in the private sector, completely disconnected from the military, completely disconnected from the U.S. government, and probably completely autonomous.
Very likely.
I think you had someone on recently.
Yeah, Catherine Fitz.
Catherine Fitz.
Yeah.
She was in a film called Thrive, which was put out by Foster Gamble back in 2011.
And that's how I first, you know, I saw her because I was involved in helping them thrive a little bit.
It's Thrive, What on Earth Will It Take?
It was kind of a conspiracy movie.
I got involved because there was an element of UFO technology and black projects in there that I thought was kind of fun.
And at the time, I remember thinking, okay, this UFO stuff is interesting, but man, these guys are.
Out there with their conspiracies.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And one time we went to a meeting, I think it was 2011.
I don't know if Catherine Fitz was there, but like Danny Sheehan was there.
Yeah.
He was there and a few others were there.
And they're like, okay, we're going to talk about, you know, this film and this technology.
Turn your phones off.
And I thought, okay, no big deal.
I'll turn my phones off.
You know, they said, we want you to turn your phone off and leave it outside the door in a basket.
And I thought, okay, these guys are crazy.
They're paranoid.
Right.
And then, of course, Snowden came out later with the leaks.
And it turns out they can listen to your microphone.
Yes.
Even if the phone is off.
And so that's why I started to think okay, well, maybe some of this other conspiracy stuff is actually potentially true.
Like, there's stuff that I was conditioned to think was not true.
So that's interesting.
But if you think of the aviation industry, like, it took a while for it to get to where we ended up, say, with World War II.
And there were prizes, innovation prizes, like Charles Lindbergh actually was competing to win a prize.
Like, I forget how much it was, like $20,000 or something for going across.
And There were a whole number of people.
It wasn't, I mean, the Wright brothers, you know, discovered the flying machine, but then there was a whole group of people trying to figure out how to take that basic innovation and turn it into real companies.
And the aviation industry almost died, and the Postal Service kept it alive in the 1920s.
Yeah, because there wasn't commercial aviation a thing in the 1920s.
It wasn't until like the 30s and later that it became a real thing.
People still went on boats for the most part back then.
And so the Postal Service was utilizing it?
Was utilizing it.
And Ford.
themselves, Ford Motor Company had an aerospace division because they thought airplanes were going to be the next big thing, but it failed.
And they said, It's too much money.
Nobody wants these things.
Nobody's using them.
We got to shut it down.
We got to focus on our core business.
And that's the problem with having big companies like these big aerospace companies working with the government only they've got their existing budgets and technologies and they have one customer, the government.
But there's no way we're going to get the kind of progress that you made in aviation over time without having different entrepreneurial.
You know, activities and companies.
Yeah, totally.
Trying to figure out how to put this stuff to.
That's why I like this dude, Robert Bigelow, this aerospace guy.
He's putting on all these competitions for people to like write essays on near death experiences or these, you know, these different realms of exploring these realms of parapsychology.
You know, we had one of the guys on here.
We had two people actually.
One person was Jeffrey Mishlove, I think, who worked with him.
Right.
He wrote the essay, I think.
He wrote the essay.
Well, there was another guy who wrote a Jeffrey Long.
Yeah, Jeffrey Long wrote a book about near death experiences, right?
Yeah.
And both of those things were funded by John Bigelow, who's an aerospace guy.
You know, it's fascinating that that guy would be dedicating, putting so much time and energy and money into researching this kind of sci fi stuff.
Yeah.
And that's kind of how it's happening right now.
You've got like these really wealthy guys who maybe will put in a little bit of money and then they'll move on to put a little bit of money into something else.
Or you've got these secret government black programs.
Yeah.
But what you don't have, so for example, I was in Silicon Valley for over a decade and I was involved in the venture capital industry, and people came to me all the time and they said, Hey, I've got this free energy device.
In fact, with Thrive, Foster Gamble, he was one of the direct descendants of the founders of Procter Gamble.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So it's really interesting.
I mean, film, and they used to show the film at Occupy Wall Street back in the day.
They would project it up on the wall.
But we went around and looked at some of these devices.
And part of the problem is if you go and you say, Look, I've got UFO technology or I've got this.
As an investor, you're going to look at it and say, okay, how do I know if this works or not?
How do I know if this is like legit science as opposed to just a bunch of bunk?
Well, you're going to bring in some legit scientists, right, to look at it for you.
And what are they going to say?
They're going to say, that doesn't really agree with what we know about physics, or that's just probably a bunch of bunk.
Because there's a stigma around this topic, and there aren't enough actual scientists in universities looking into it.
The UFO technology topic.
And that's what I think partly will need to change in order to unlock investment in some of these garage inventors who think they have figured out pieces of this.
But because we keep it so locked up and we keep it so stigmatized, like even within academia, you know, I was told and Gary Nolan was told this don't talk about UFOs, you know, what's going to happen with your career, you know, if you do that.
This is when, you know, a while ago.
Well, the convenient thing for the people that want to keep the UFO stuff secret is that.
The internet exists and people can go on the internet and make a great living talking and writing about their theories on UFOs, which makes this more of just a messy, chaotic soup of information where there's so much out there.
It's like that percentage that is the truth, whether it's a huge percentage or a small percentage, I don't know what it is.
Some people say it's like 80% is true and 20% is bullshit.
But like you can never.
You can never 50 50.
You can never figure out.
You'll never know what's real or not because, like, the incentive to talk about this stuff for people on the internet because they can monetize it with videos, podcasts, movies, documentaries, books, and all this stuff.
It's just made the whole topic more convoluted, you know?
So it doesn't have to be there.
It doesn't even have to be stigma.
There's an industry, there's like fucking industry around it.
Right.
That's true.
But then.
Which does not.
Which, which, which.
Being accurate has nothing to do with how much money you can make.
Yeah.
I think that's very true.
And, you know, I've listened to people in, you know, from various aspects of this.
And I'm like, I don't think what he's, you know, some of what he's saying sounds reasonable, but the rest of it doesn't.
And then I'll ask somebody, you know, who knows them and he'll say, oh, yeah, he made up about 50% of it.
And, you know, that's a reasonable number that I've heard now from a few different people.
And about half of what they say, they know for sure.
But the problem is they also bring in the other half they don't know for sure and they say it as if, as if they know 100% that it's true.
Yes.
But, Now, speaking from an academic point of view, though, it's easy to dismiss all of that because you're like, well, they're just a bunch of grifters online making money from TV.
And that stops the serious scientists.
I mean, even.
And then you have the human ego, where you have people in academics who go through working at the universities their whole lives, studying and teaching stuff.
And I've seen this multiple times, even with Avi Loeb, where he's described how his colleagues are resentful of him being.
A public facing person who's getting all this attention, writing these books, and it creates this sort of tribal clash between people.
Yeah, absolutely.
Perfect example of that is Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble.
Yeah, yeah, the whole archaeological clash.
Yeah, it's crazy, man.
It's everywhere.
Yeah, but even obvious that he was attacked for doing this stuff.
Academic Stigma Identity00:03:03
And I mean, I've had physicists, so I did an academic study because, again, I was studying how science and technology evolves and its effects on society.
And so I did like a formal academic study where I interviewed like 20 professors who actually are studying UFOs openly.
You know, people you would probably recognize, like Avi, like Gary Nolan, a bunch of other guys.
Sure.
And didn't you talk to Jacques Valet?
Yeah, I talked to Jacques as well.
Not for this study, but I've talked to Jacques.
Jacques was nice enough to write the forward for the French edition of the simulation hypothesis.
And he and I talked a little bit about these theories.
And I can tell you where some of the overlap, I think, is between the simulation.
Yeah.
Hypothesis and UFOs.
But I was going to say on this topic of stigma, you know, there are people that I talk to and they're like, oh, yeah, you know, they're cuckoo for, you know, they're cuckoo for studying this.
And the other said to me, they didn't talk about it openly until they got tenure.
So the way it works in academia is, you know, you start off as an assistant professor or associate professor, and then you get tenure after like seven years.
And then you eventually become a full professor.
And some of them, They didn't even wait till after tenure.
They waited until they were full professors before they, like Michael Masters, who has the idea of the UFOs being time traveling devices.
Saucers are time machines.
Yeah, saucers are time machines, which is a very interesting model.
But, and others, it depends on which field you're in.
Like, the more, if you're more in physics, there's a bigger stigma to this.
Like, like Jeff Kreipel says, you know, he didn't mind talking about this stuff because as long as he had a job, he didn't care.
In like the religious studies, it's a little less.
Sure.
It's still stigmatized, but it's not, it's less stigmatized.
And so, what it is, is you have a socialization that happens.
There's this identity thing that goes on.
And I definitely found this in my research that I said, did anybody tell you not to study UFOs?
He said, no, nobody ever actually said that, but you know you're not supposed to study them.
I said, well, how do you know?
He goes, well, you get socialized over time in groups of academics who make fun of people who believe in that weird stuff.
And they lump in UFOs and Bigfoot and a psychic phenomenon is in that bucket now.
All these things in that bucket.
And they say, you basically build your identity on.
We, the experts and the scientists, are the ones who make fun of those people.
And I think that's a lot of what's going on with Graham Hancock and all these guys as well.
So there's the fame element that you mentioned earlier.
It's a groupthink.
It's a groupthink, yeah.
And it becomes an identity thing.
Like, do you know, in Texas, they had a tough time getting people to not litter.
And then they ended up using a slogan, which turned it around.
It was like, don't mess with Texas.
Like, they were trying to use the identity as Texans.
Bob Lazar Repercussions00:12:28
Oh, wow.
To get people to socially use that social identity.
To not litter.
To not litter.
And that was a very successful campaign.
So it's how we build identities, I think, in groups that is actually still affecting.
Now it's less stigmatized than it was before.
Yeah.
In fact, some people were afraid of the stigma, but then after they went public with what they were doing, they didn't have any repercussions for them.
Right.
But other people do believe that they had repercussions.
So, so.
How does this, do you think that these accounts that people have of alien sightings or alien abductions, do you think that something in their mind is happening where they're able to somehow experience the maintenance workers of the simulation?
Are these things like the janitors of our simulation that are coming in and cleaning stuff up or fixing stuff?
Well, let's, maybe we can do a quick, quick.
Break sure, and then we can jump into that.
That's a really interesting perfect cliffhanger.
Yeah, we'll be right back.
Yeah, find out what that is.
Find out what's the latest Bob Lazar movie.
I think it might already be out actually.
The newest Bob Lazar project is part of Project Gravatar.
So, when is this movie coming out?
It's a VR experience.
Oh, they're trying to say this is what it looks like in S4 and stuff.
Oh, it's a documentary titled S4 The Bob Lazar Story, a VR experience and book aimed at presenting Lazar's story.
Holy shit.
That's crazy.
It's coming out this month?
Wow.
Oh, no, no, no.
The documentary, which was in development as of June 2025, seeks to clarify and expand upon Lazar's controversial claims.
So they're starting it this month.
I thought they were close to finishing it.
Can you scroll down more and see what else comes up?
We created, click on that video, that YouTube video.
So they have the Gravatar project and then they've docked.
They're documenting it as well.
So I think there's an accompanying documentary.
Yeah, this guy right here.
He's basically the documentary guy.
Invested a tremendous amount of time and resources in the past three years.
This was initially not supposed to be a documentary film, neither was it supposed to be a VR experience.
But it certainly has become that.
And since we made that decision, we're all in.
So, what really excited me about working on this project is when we're talking about the documentary space, you know, there's not a lot of innovations in the VFX department and how the stories are being told.
We really wanted to push the envelope in the documentary space and make this like something very unique.
I mean, what better way than to completely recreate something that you're not able to go to or see?
You may think it's easy to do a military facility, but it's not because there's so many little tiny things that Bob remembers.
The colors of the wall and what the walls look like and the little grit, you know, how much dirt and is there dirt or not?
I mean, I feel terrible for Bob because this happened 35 years ago for him.
So they're building a simulated reality based on S4, based on what Bob Lazar talks about.
And they're making a documentary about.
About building the simulated reality, I had no idea that was what they were doing.
That's wild.
Wow, that's interesting.
Yeah, did you ever meet uh John Lear?
Have I ever met him?
Yeah, he's passed now, but uh, no, I mean, I've read a lot about him and I've heard a lot of stories about him.
He was close with Bob, yeah, yeah, they were close.
I think he introduced Bob to George Knapp, and that's how the story came out, right?
Right back in the day, yeah.
No, my theory on Bob now is it's uh, you know.
A lot of people, yeah, we're recording.
Fuck it.
So, yeah, my theory on him now is essentially, I think he was super useful for the CIA and the project that was going on at Air 51 or S4 to try to figure out how to reverse engineer this stuff and figure out what it was.
It makes sense to bring people, outsiders, in to try to crack problems and solve some of the stuff that their typical scientists that are already there can't figure out.
So, if you want to bring in somebody, You want to find somebody that's easily deniable if they try to like blow the whistle on it, right?
So, like, he was running a brothel, he had a he divorced his wife.
Uh, there was all kinds of crazy shit he was doing at night, you know, with his group, his friend group.
He was friends with John Lear, who was like CIA pilot or something like this.
So, like, if he it would be he would be very easily dismissable if uh, anything ever got out about him.
So, I think it's probably likely that he was there, um, doing this stuff.
Yeah, you know, I've talked to different people with different opinions on Bob Lazar, and they run the gamut from, you know, I trust everything he says to some of what he says makes sense.
And I was talking to a guy the other day who, you know, was really into Lazar's story, but then as he became a scientist himself and started to work in aerospace, you know, he started to say, he goes, Well, it doesn't, it sounds like somebody who's kind of making stuff up, like, you know, in the way that he's talking about things.
And so, so it's interesting to me, like, This one person I was talking to went through different phases of like thinking, okay, he really liked everything he was saying.
But then when he became a physicist, he realized, okay, well, that's not exactly how people who work in those fields would be talking about this stuff.
That said, the fact that he said he saw these different models, like the sport model, et cetera, I mean, I think that that seems reasonable from what other people have told us that they have seen various, either it's craft or specific.
Technology or pieces of craft and things that have.
I also think the part of his story where he says he walks by a window and saw an alien, I think that could have been a strategic, deceptive move on the government's part.
To convince him that there was an alien.
So if he was to tell his story, that's the thing that could just, you know, that could be a step too far for people listening to it.
Oh, okay, you saw a fucking alien in there?
Sure, right.
It's similar to what Andy Jacobson writes about in her Area 51 book when the CIA pilots were first test flying the jet airplanes out of Nevada for the first time.
The CIA pilots would bring gorilla masks in the cockpit with them in case they got within visual distance of a civilian airplane.
They would wear the gorilla masks.
So that way, when the civilian pilot goes, Dude, I saw this jet airplane flying around the other day and there was a gorilla in the cockpit.
You know what I mean?
It just poisons the story and makes it unbelievable.
Yeah.
Well, for me, you know, one of the areas of credibility for Bob that I think would help his credibility quite a bit is, you know, he said he was sent to MIT to study physics for a while and.
Supposedly, he went to Caltech as well.
And when people searched, they couldn't find much of a record of that.
And so, you know, I basically having spent time at MIT during my undergraduate years in the 80s, he was there, I think, late 70s, early 80s, somewhere around then.
If you meet somebody who spent a decent amount of time in that environment, it's a very unique culture at MIT.
I mean, maybe this is true about the universities as well.
But MIT in particular has kind of a unique culture and language.
That people use, and I would have come across people in the physics department probably or that either knew him or were there at the same time, yeah.
Uh, and oh, that's when you were there, I was there later, but I'm saying there would still be people that were around because they're like it's kind of this environment where you have people in the faculty and researchers who hang around for years.
But some of the people that I know would have interacted with would probably have been around in the early 80s and late 70s.
Could they have sent him in under like a pseudonymous name to keep him secret?
They could have.
I mean, it's all possible.
So that's, but what I'm saying is, like, even if I could spend like a lunch with him, and I, you know, you would be able to sniff it out.
I think I could sniff it out whether he'd really been there or not.
Now, if he'd only been there for like, you know, one class that he sat in on on Thursday nights and that's it, then he's not going to be acclimated to the culture.
But if he was really there for a couple of years and actually studying, like in physics classes, he would have had to interact with other students and professors.
Right.
Right.
People leave a trace.
They would have had to live somewhere nearby in Cambridge at one of the dorms or one of the other things.
And you can look up some of that information, but sometimes you get a sense that when somebody's like, they don't know the details of something, they know how to say it at a high level, but they don't know the specific details underneath that.
And so I'm very open to the Bob Lazar story just because one, it's interesting, two, it's been consistent with it, and three, some of what he says is consistent with what other people say.
And I always take the approach that.
Well, let's look at what different people are saying and then we can triangulate and say the things that they agree on are probably kind of true.
The things they disagree on could be that they're looking at different parts of crafts or they're in different parts of the government.
They've got different priorities, et cetera, depending on if they're coming from intelligence or they were part of a research lab or they were part of an aerospace company.
You're going to have very different perspectives on all of these things.
I mean, I've heard other people say that, wow, it's a thunderstorm.
The last time we had thunder like this on the podcast, there was a satanic person sitting in your seat conjuring the devil.
There you go.
I didn't actually expect thunderstorms here in Florida, but every.
Oh, wow.
I've only been here a couple days.
I didn't know.
We get so many thunderstorms during the summer.
It's a daily thing.
Yeah.
So it starts in June, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So every day there's been one, but then it'll go away.
Yeah.
After like 15 minutes or something like that.
Usually they're afternoon, early morning and afternoon thunderstorms and crazy thunder.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
I live in.
Actually, the last couple of years, it's been like more than that.
It's been like really abnormally active.
Like the thunder and the lightning has been crazy the last two years.
It's interesting.
I've been living in Phoenix during the school year the last few years, and they have a monsoon season in like August, September, when you get these huge storms rolling in and you get flooding, and then they're gone.
And then the rest of the year is very dry.
And so we don't see much else.
The simulators have a good sense of humor.
I think so.
Different parts of the simulation have their own little percentage likelihood of getting different things.
What were you saying before the thunder interrupted us?
Uh, so we were talking about Bob, yeah.
Oh, and I said that you know, there it's true.
Maybe I shouldn't say this now if the thunder came just at that time.
No, I was just talking that there are other people I've met who either them or their close family members, you know, have claimed to have gone down into oh underground bases, okay, where they actually saw quote unquote aliens.
Uh, so even that part of his story, people have told you this all like off the record, like off the privately, completely off the record, yeah.
Uh, that.
Or, like, they've told me they have a family member, you know, for example, who has no reason to lie to them, for example.
And there's other people that have said stuff like that.
But I don't know, you know, where this falls.
For me, the more people that I hear say something that you assess the credibility of those people and the closer they are to it, whether they've seen it themselves or they've just heard about it from other people.
Yeah.
That's the double edged sword of that.
Like, more people, like, When it becomes more popular in the zeitgeist, the Babazar story, like the more people can start talking about it and elaborating on it and making up stories and constructing these fake realities in their head.
Alien Abduction Timelines00:15:04
Yeah, they could be.
But again, I think going back to what we were saying about near death experiencers before, I mean, enough people have had this experience that we should take it as a legitimate thing that happens as opposed to, it's just a bunch of random chemicals firing and that's it.
Similarly, here, enough people have come forward.
To say that we have reverse engineering programs or non-human technology, that I think we should take it seriously that there's something there.
Now what that is.
I mean, this comes back to your earlier question to me about abductions, for example.
Yeah yeah, that's what we started as I was asking you about before we went on the break.
Uh, how does the UFO and alien abduction stuff square with the simulation hypothesis?
Well, I think there's a couple areas of overlap with the simulation hypothesis, and the first is this idea of Presenting how these non human entities present themselves.
And so, again, going to the work of Jacques Valet, who I've spent a little bit of time with, he has talked about how, in, say, the Celtic folklore, there are these fae, or which we call fairies.
They're entities that have been around for a while.
And sometimes they would take somebody from our world into their world, and time would pass differently.
Inside this world, and they'd come back.
And, you know, they're presented a certain way.
And similarly, I mentioned earlier, like in the Islamic traditions, there are many stories of other entities that live on earth with us.
And they call them the jinn, for example.
That's like kind of a catch all term.
There's actually subsets, and you can get into, you know, very, very complicated classification of different types of entities.
But the idea is that what we're seeing could be something that is presented to us like an avatar.
So, like in a video game, You can change your avatar.
So you can present yourself, you know, I could be, you know, a tall Viking guy, like if I wanted to be here.
And it seems like they have this ability to present themselves inside what we think of as a physical reality.
And to me, it reminds me of the stories from these other traditions.
So I think at least part of it with the abduction phenomenon and the way that people are viewing it as aliens or a particular image of the aliens, there's an element of interpretation.
Of the being.
Now, I'm not saying the beings aren't there.
I think they are.
There are non human intelligences that are here.
But I think some of those have the ability to change shape.
And so it's presented to us as a technological phenomena and a spaceship.
Just like if you go back to the 1940s or 30s and they talk about aliens, they always talk about Martians.
Why?
Because they know there's Mars or Venus.
If you look at the contactees in the 50s, they say these entities told me they're from Venus.
Now, we know they're probably not from Venus.
I mean, maybe.
But as far as we know, Venus and Mars don't have humanoid life on them, unless it's like way underground and hiding or something.
But it's almost as if they presented themselves as Venusians or as Martians because that would fit into the mind frame of the observer.
So the observer could actually make sense of that.
If they said, oh, we're from another solar system or the galaxy, I mean, most people didn't even know about galaxies back then.
It just wasn't in the consciousness.
And so I think there is an element of interpretation, but also. presentation that goes on where they change their form.
Now I heard a story recently about with Whitley Strieber told this story recently where he said he met a young man who met a young woman who, you know, they had sex and she got pregnant.
And so he thought they were going to get married and she calls him over one day and says, well, I'm not really human.
I'm actually a gray alien.
And she changes her form and he literally sees her change her form and change back.
And she says, and I'm going to take, you know, the baby and we're going to go back to the the great alien world, or wherever it was, and you'll never see us again.
Now, that sounds, I mean, you tell that story to anybody in, like, you know, kind of a mainstream, certainly academic.
There's lots of stories like that.
Yeah.
There's lots of stories like that, but they're going to think you're batshit crazy, right?
Have you ever heard of David Huggins?
No, I haven't.
There's a beautiful documentary called Love and Saucers about this guy named David Huggins, who's now, I think he's in his 90s.
He's really old.
He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
And he lost his virginity to an alien.
Okay.
And he draws pictures of this big, beautiful alien woman with long hair and voluptuous breasts.
And he draws pictures of her, him, and the alien fornicating in the woods.
And he gets kidnapped by these little gray aliens, these typical looking gray, uh, grays, and brought out to the woods to meet her, uh, his baby mama.
And she came back a couple times and showed him their child, their alien, their alien human child hybrid, right?
Right there, there it is.
Yeah, yeah, uh, there's David on the left.
He that is my favorite alien abduction story, is his story.
The documentary is great.
My friend Brad Abrahams.
I highly recommend it.
Love and saucers.
Interesting.
Cool.
But yeah, so there's a lot of stories like this.
Yeah, people fornicating with aliens or the aliens extracting eggs and semen from humans.
Right.
But what I found was when I went back and I was researching, say, the Islamic literature, I saw stories of the jinn that were almost eerily similar to these stories today.
And so, for example, there was a story of a man who supposedly married a jinn woman.
Okay, and married is the terminology they would use.
And they had at least one child, maybe it was even two children.
And one day she said, okay, I'm going back to the gin world.
And she took the kids and she immediately vanished and they never saw her again.
And that wasn't an uncommon story.
And so I think it begs the question, well, some people would just dismiss it.
Oh, those are just bad breakups, right?
And they can't get over them.
So they're saying they're nailing.
But let's suppose we take them at face value and take them more seriously than that.
Then they've been happening.
For a long time, and is it possible these entities can present themselves to look human or to look like a particular race of aliens, but they may or may not actually be aliens?
Not to say that some of the extraterrestrial hypothesis may not be true, but it seems to me there's a broader phenomenon here going where these people come into and out of our realities.
It's almost like they can render in our simulation.
Now, I've heard many tales of saucers that would render you know, you look up and there's nothing there, and then suddenly.
There's a disc there that gets right.
Yeah.
And, you know, Jacques told me about some cases where one person sees the saucer and the next person next to them doesn't see it.
Or from Gary Nolan, where there are like people sitting in a car, like family members, and looking up and they both saw something.
The kids saw it, the parents didn't, right?
Yeah, the kids saw it.
Maybe, maybe I forget which one that was, but one saw like a donut shape and one saw a cylindrical shape.
But, oh, really?
The shapes were different enough that.
To me, that almost seems as if there's an element of conditional rendering going on.
Okay.
And what I mean by that is in video games, we can say, okay, you're level 30.
I'm level two.
We're both rendering it in the same place, but we're actually not.
Like I'm rendering it on my computer or in my VR headset or in my brain computer interface, and you're doing the same thing.
And is it possible from the server, we say, that guy should be able to see it because he's level 30.
that guy, you know, he's a little too left brain.
He's only level one or whatever.
He's not going to be able to see it.
And that to me brings up this idea of they're subjective and objective, but maybe there's something in between, which is that they are actually there for some people and they may not be there for other people.
So is it possible that these things can, you know, be rendered subjectively or conditionally maybe?
Because subjectively sounds like I'm saying they're not there.
Conditionally means they're there for the people that are able to perceive it.
And this gets back to your point about DMT.
or other techniques that you can use to open up your vision.
And so I've heard of this from the ghost perspective as well, where certain ghosts, supposedly, there's a book by Leslie Kane called Surviving Death.
And she wrote, there was another investigator who wrote this chapter, but it was a story about a family in Oakland and they moved in.
And every now and then the parents would catch sight of a woman, but the kid could like see this woman all the time.
Yeah.
And he could talk to her.
And it turns out it was the same name as the woman that used to live there.
And she was wearing these funny old clothes.
And the kid would just wear them.
And the kid says that she told him that she could present herself more easily to some people than other people.
Right.
which is why like the parents would only catch a little glimpse of it or something.
And so is this, is there an element of conditional rendering going on, I think?
And that's, I think, one aspect of overlap, as well as this idea that maybe there's other beings here that we can't see, but they can see us.
They're here all along.
That's a second aspect.
And then there was a really interesting case that Jacques told me about where he said there was a UFO that supposedly landed somewhere in like Northern California or Southern Oregon.
If you've been out there, you know they have a lot of.
Tall redwood trees and he said that.
They said the witnesses said that it came down at a 45 degree angle and then left some marks or something and they were trying to point out where it landed.
And he said he went back to the site with them after, you know, other investigators had left and he said wait, you said 45 degree angle, that would have mean that would mean it would have to go through the trees, like it would have had to cut through the redwood tree.
Yeah, and they said, yeah, that's exactly what it did.
It went right through.
But we didn't want to say that because we're going to sound crazy.
Yeah, now that to me sounds like Like when you're rezzing something in a game, you know, there's that period where it's not fully rezzed and you can actually walk through walls and stuff until it gets locked into the 3D world.
So there's almost this ability to like holographically kind of materialize something, but while it's materializing, it's not fully in the world.
It's more like a shape.
Or if you think of like a game, the mesh, we have these things called meshes, which is like the outline of a person or an object.
And then eventually you put the skin on.
Which makes it look like what it actually looks like as an object.
Otherwise, it's just like lines, basically.
So, is it possible that the UFOs are being rendered into our reality along with the beings and we're interacting with them?
And for whatever reason, they're being presented to us as technology that looks like it's from another planet.
But maybe that's just the latest.
If you go back to the, we talked about Diana Pasolka and religion and other stuff.
Where you have the chariots in the sky, you have all these descriptions of things.
And is this just the latest description?
And being in a simulated world would make that more likely.
There's another possibility that I think is interesting, which is I talked about how in a simulation you can run it forward and you can run different timelines forward.
And this gets back to Michael Masters and the time travel idea.
Is it possible that, because many people have reported getting Information that we're ruining our planet.
At least this was true of contact experiences in the 80s, I think, 70s, 80s, and maybe 90s as well.
I don't know if that's still true today.
But they're from a future timeline where they know what's going to happen to our planet.
And they're somehow projecting themselves back.
And you can do that in a simulation.
You can go back and say, hey, let's try to make these people, let's try to influence these people to act differently.
Seems like a strange way to do that.
But the weird thing though, like, That it's hard to wrap your head around though with video games, right?
Video games, there's really no linear timeline in a video game, right?
Like, there's not like the way we think of our world is we can go back and think about the dinosaurs, uh, with antiquity, the times of Christ and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and we have this linear history of our humanity that we understand through text and paintings and archaeology and all this stuff.
But, like in video games, it's not really like that.
It's just kind of like you're in, you're right now in the present.
Like your character doesn't necessarily have a history or a future.
Or does it?
You know what I'm saying?
Well, in the real world, too.
So I would say, I would suggest what you're saying is right.
What happens with video games is they fill in the past.
So, if you've ever played Farmville, do you remember that Facebook game?
Yeah, I remember.
I never played it.
Or Minecraft, they do the same thing, I think, where you have crops.
Yeah.
And you plant the crops.
Right.
Now, what happens is you log in, let's say, the next day, and supposedly in the world, it's been whatever.
It's been like a year or it's been whatever, a season.
Right.
So, you're born essentially the first time you log on.
Yeah.
But then when you log on the next time, it's not like the game has been running the whole time.
What happens is that it fills in what happened to the crops since the last time you logged in.
So it basically says there's a 50% chance that locusts will come.
Also, since it's supposed to have been a season, they should grow this big by now.
And you log in and it seems as if time has passed.
But really, there's just a present time that you've logged in and it fills in the past.
Now, this is where time gets really weird.
So most people think of the simulation hypothesis as saying physical space is not real.
It's virtual.
But there's an element of quantum mechanics.
That is really confusing, but I find it kind of compelling, which says that time is not what we think it is either.
And so there's something called the Cosmic Delayed Choice Experiment.
Maybe we can try to find a Cosmic Delayed Choice Experiment.
Okay.
And so what it is is John Wheeler, who I mentioned earlier, he proposed this experiment, and they couldn't really do it at the time.
So if we do a search on and look for an image, there's a few different images that are.
Good ones that we can use.
Cosmic Delayed Choice00:10:17
And what it's saying essentially is if we go back to Schrodinger's cat being in superposition, and what we choose is when we observe.
Yeah, how about that one in the middle there?
Yeah, that one.
Okay, so that's a good one.
But to get back to Schrodinger's cat, and then we'll talk about this diagram.
Okay.
Basically, we're saying we're choosing the state by observing it, whether it's alive or dead.
Yeah.
And until then, it's in both states.
But what if we're choosing not just the state, but also what happened to the cat before it came in the box?
Like, did it come in through the kitchen or did it come in through the living room?
Right.
And before that, did it come in from outside or was it sleeping or whatever?
Right.
How do you know if you never observed it?
Yeah.
How do you know?
Yeah.
The past.
This raises this interesting question about the past.
Now, this, I think, shows us that the past may not be what we think it is.
So, this is the cosmic delayed choice experiment.
It's.
I mean, it's never been done at this level, but they've done smaller versions of it.
So, suppose there's a light at the top right there from a quasar, let's say, or some object that's really big and really far away.
Let's say it's a billion light years away.
Okay.
So, the light is going to come from there.
And suppose down here, we're on Earth and we have telescopes.
And it's going to take how long to get here?
Billion years.
It's not a trick question.
It's just billion light years away.
It's going to take a billion years.
So, that means when the light started, you know, it was back in before the dinosaurs, even, right?
Right.
Now, suppose there's an object in the middle, like this little galaxy you see there, or a black hole.
It's a big object gravitationally.
And it turns out the light has to go either to the right or to the left of that object.
And our telescopes here today can pick up whether it went to the right or to the left.
That's like the equivalent of two slits in the double slit experiment, but it's much easier to understand like this.
So if that galaxy is a million light years away from us, or half a billion light years away, just it's far away from us, but not as far away as the thing.
Let's say it's a million light years away from us, or let's say a hundred million, because that's still kind of dinosaur age, isn't it?
Yeah.
Okay, so the light would have had to go around the galaxy 100 million years ago at the time of the dinosaur.
Now, what this experiment is proposing is that it's not until we measure the polarity of the light in the telescope that's when the decision gets made of whether it went to the left or the right from 100 million years ago.
So, from the time of the dinosaurs, we're used to thinking that is fixed, like that already happened, right?
But it's saying that, in fact, the past.
Maybe in a state of superposition, meaning it can be in multiple states.
And we are selecting one of the past.
We're not changing the past per se.
We're just choosing a past.
That's crazy.
It's nuts.
And they've done a version of this where they sent the light to a satellite that was like a thousand miles up.
So it's obviously not as big.
But they said the decision of which slit it goes through, which is analogous to whether they said that's not actually made until it's measured, even if it's measured up near the satellite.
But It would have taken like a fraction of a second, right?
Yeah.
But it would have had to happen before because the slits are down here, the two slits or the two, you know.
And so they've measured it.
There's an Italian team that did this.
And they actually found that the past may not be as fixed as we think it is.
Now, that is just strange, right?
It's a Saint Augustine, you know, had a quote where he goes, What is time?
If no one asks me, I know.
But if someone asks me, then I do not know.
Right, yeah.
If someone asked me to explain it to him, I do not know.
You cannot put it into words, right?
Yeah.
And similar to DMT, it's like it's a 124 bit experience that you can only put into four bit translations.
You can only talk about it in like a four bit, you can explain it in like four bits, but the experience itself is like hundreds of bits.
Yeah.
And that's a good way to think about it because, you know, people who've, whether it's DMT or people who've had near death experiences say, yeah, that experience was more real than this experience.
And There are colors and sounds there that I can't have here.
They're just too complex.
Now, to me, that sounds like exactly what you said, which is we're living in like an Atari 8 bit world, but 64 bit systems can have many more colors than we're able to have here.
And you got to take that analogy out into sounds and other things as well.
But this past thing raises a weird question has the past actually occurred this way?
Or are we on one of these timelines?
For the moment where the US and the Allies won World War II, getting back to Philip K. Dick.
And so he came to believe that was another timeline that happened.
And are we possibly projecting out to the future and we're trying different things, but we're only on a branch?
Like we're used to thinking this is it, like the Japanese guy and the man in the high castle.
And are people sometimes maybe catching glimpses in their dreams?
Are they remembering different runs of the simulation?
And that's where the Mandela effect. you know, comes into play where people remember some subset of people remember different things happening differently than they did.
Right.
Right.
And the Mandela effect, can you explain what that is for people that aren't familiar with it?
It's basically something about people remembering him dying when he didn't die.
Yeah.
So it's about a subset of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison.
Right.
Right.
In the 1980s or early 90s or so.
But in our reality, he didn't.
He got out of prison.
He became president of South Africa and went on to, you know, win the.
The Nobel Peace Prize, et cetera, et cetera.
And he died in, like, I think it was 2013.
We can look it up.
But so there was this blogger named Fiona Broom, and she coined this, but she actually coined it because she was at a Star Trek convention.
It was like a Comic Con type convention.
And they had some of the actors from the original Star Trek.
We're talking like the William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock days.
And if you know hardcore fans of Truck, whether you call them Truckies or Truckers, they know their episodes.
And there were people in the audience.
Telling the actors saying, Well, do you remember this episode when you did this and Dr. McCoy did that?
And they're like, No, we never recorded that episode.
And multiple people in the audience remembered it.
And she just thought that was so weird.
And so then she went online to see if there were other things that people remembered.
And then the Mandela thing came up.
And so now they call it Mandela effects.
Now I dismissed it like most mainstream scientists do as just bad memory.
But then I began to take it more seriously.
When a friend of mine who's from another MIT grad came by and said, Well, simulation hypothesis could be an interesting explanation or the best explanation for that because it means what you're changing variables and you're running things again.
And then I'd started to go down the rabbit hole a little more.
And if nothing else, it's a great way to think about this idea that there might be multiple possible pasts.
Just like it's easy to think about multiple possible futures, right?
Like I said earlier, I could go to California, I can move to Florida.
Those are two different futures, and I can think about what that might mean the multiverse timeline.
But it's hard to think about you know, there was one where I didn't go to school at MIT, I went to the University of Michigan or wherever else in the past.
And we can get into this idea of parallel lives as well.
But the Mandela effect is interesting because I found there are instances where there's a proximity or significance to the event such that the person would probably remember it, right?
As opposed to okay, it was Froot Loops with an OOT versus.
UIT.
So there's a lot of these logos.
Oh, yeah.
The Bernstein Bears is the most famous one, which, if you look it up, you know, you can see that it says it's Bernstein.
Bernstein.
S T A I N. Everyone calls it the Bernstein.
Bernstein, which sounds like it's just going to be a little error, except people will swear that they had discussions with their parents or their Jewish friends on why are these bears Jewish?
Why are these bears Jews?
And why would you have that discussion if it was spelled Bernstein?
Right.
Where it gets really interesting to me.
Is when there's either physical artifacts or like major events, like even with Nelson Mandela.
I mean, people remember it was his wife Winnie gave the speech at the funeral and so and so was there, like maybe it was the early 90s and Bill Clinton was there.
I mean, they get very specific.
And there's another one with the Reverend Billy Graham, which he died, I forget what year he died, but they're like people who are hardcore Christian evangelicals.
One guy was saying how his parents used to get magazines with him and they remember getting a magazine when he died.
And then they found out a year or two later that's when he died.
It's just weird when you have that significance or you're close to something.
There was one blogger who was a journalism student.
She claims she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela in the 80s.
And they told her he was too sick.
And so she wasn't able to interview him.
So she had to fly back and she graduated and went to work for NPR.
So she was in the news business.
And then later she heard he died during that time period.
Now, are you likely to have gotten that the wrong person if you had just gone to South Africa?
Right.
Probably not.
Now, some random person might just think Nelson Mandela, a black leader in South Africa.
Oh, Stephen Biko was also a black leader in South Africa and he died in the 80s in prison.
Maybe they just made a mistake.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But when you get into scripture, and there's a lot of movie stuff too that you've probably heard of, like Empire Strikes Back, where the line of, you know, what's the line when Darth Vader tells Luke is his father?
Modifying Objects Timeline00:03:44
Are you familiar?
Are you a Star Wars fan?
Luke, I'm your father.
Right.
That's how most of us remember it.
Right.
But supposedly, if you watch it again, it just says, no, I am your father.
Really?
And I just saw it already.
Oh, yeah.
You're right about that.
Yeah.
I just saw a little video, which somebody could have doctored for all I know, but they said they recorded it at the movie theater somehow while they were there, where he says, No, Luke, I am your father, which is like a whole nother, a third possibility.
Sure.
But again, those are smaller things.
But when you get to scripture, that's where it becomes really interesting because there's a whole sub, there's a whole factor of Mandela effect.
Religious stuff?
Bibles, Bible verses.
Oh, wow.
There are websites dedicated, like Isaiah.
This is, yeah.
Which is the lion and the lamb.
You may have heard, there's this phrase, we can look up the exact phrase, but if you look at it, there's nothing about the lion and the lamb.
It's the wolf will lay with the lamb, is what it is now.
And there are people who swear well, one, there are physical artifacts where they've got like pictures of a lion and a lamb, and they've got Isaiah, I forget the number 111, or I forget the exact number.
And then there are other people who, you know, you think, well, maybe it's another translation.
Yeah.
You know, and they're like, no, I have the physical Bible that I had when I was a kid, the King James Bible, and this is where I memorized it.
Yes.
And so then I started to wonder.
Is it possible that there are other scriptures like the Quran, other religions, scriptures that have changed?
And in Islam, they actually memorize the Quran word for word.
It's a big book.
It'd be like memorizing the Bible word for word.
And they have a whole class of priests who can, it's like they graduated.
So they have a designation called a hafiz that says they can read the Quran from their memory, word for word, exactly in Arabic.
I always thought that's kind of dumb.
Why would they need to do that?
We got books, right?
Right.
And so I looked into it and I said, I wonder if there's been anybody who claims that any of the verses have changed.
And there was one Sufi Imam who says that one of the reasons why they memorize the Quran word for word is supposedly there is a class of entities who exist outside of our space and time, but who can modify objects in our timeline.
They can go back and modify objects, but they're not allowed to modify our memories.
And so, and those are called the jinn.
So, this is another example of the jinn coming out.
And he said, part of the reason why we still memorize the Quran word for word is because these jinn can change objects, like the physical objects, but they can't change our memory or they're not allowed to change our memory.
So, we will remember it, allowed by God, I guess, in this case.
I'm not, you know.
But that was interesting to me because it's like, oh, there's an aspect of this that I hadn't thought about.
But if it's scripture, people will take it more seriously.
Yeah.
And the problem with scripture, too, is not only is there multiple versions of scriptures where things are omitted or added to it, but the biggest problem is that there's now different dictionaries that are created that different sects of religions will use exclusively.
Because they want certain words to mean different things according to their belief and their interpretation.
So it's like, okay, let me look up the traditional Greek dictionary of what this word means.
Deja Vu Reality Alteration00:05:24
Oh, no, no, that's not what that guy was.
Hold on, we need to make our own.
Dictionary and change the meaning of that word so it lines up with our beliefs and our teachings and all this stuff.
Yep, that's true.
Yeah, and there's different, you know, translations along the way.
I mean, for example, the uh, you know, the uh, the prayer where they say, Forgive us our trespasses.
I mean, uh, some people claim that has changed, that that's not what it was, but that may just be a translation issue, right?
Because the original word might have meant debts, not trespasses, or right?
So, there's stuff like that, but at the same time, there are people who claim that there are specific.
You know, verses they've memorized in English and that the English translation has changed.
And that's bizarre to me.
And I take that more seriously than Luke, I am your father or no, I'm not your father.
Or since I am a big Star Wars fan, like if Harrison Ford died, I would know it, right?
If there was a funeral for George Lucas or Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill 10 years ago, I'm unlikely to get that wrong because I'm a big Star Wars fan.
So I call that proximity or significance to you.
But one of my favorite ones.
Is the Tiananmen Square.
Do you remember?
Did you ever see the video of the guy with a tank standing in front of the tank?
Maybe we can bring it up.
Didn't the tank go around him?
Well, that's the Mandela effect.
So, most, the majority remembers the tank went around him or he moved and the tank went this way and he went and stood in front of it and it came back that way.
So, they called him Tank Boy online.
Tank Boy.
Tank Boy.
But a subset of people say that they actually saw the tank run him over and they say it was the bloodiest thing they ever saw on TV.
Now, most of the videos you'll see will not show that, right?
They'll show that the tank, you know, is kind of moving around him.
Yeah.
And, you know, maybe something happened to him afterwards.
But I did a little poll.
I was on a panel at Contact in the Desert, and we had a few different people on the panel, like Paul Hynek and a few other people.
And there were like five or six of us.
And sure enough, one person insisted, one of the speakers on the panel insisted that they saw the guy get run over.
Really?
So 20% in this case.
Now that's an informal poll, but to me, that's an interesting.
That is interesting.
Now, I'm not saying all these Mandela effects are true, but it is a phenomenon.
People do remember things differently.
And so we could say it's all bad memory.
Okay, here's the video, right?
We're watching now.
Yeah.
So he's standing there.
The tank stopped.
Yeah, and then I think the tank, as I recall it, and I think as you recall it, the tank tries to go around him and then he moves in front of the tank.
Okay, now it cut.
And it's okay, nothing happened.
Just cut.
Oh, now he climbed up the tank.
Oh, he climbed up the tank.
Okay, that's interesting.
What the?
No, I don't remember that.
I don't remember this either.
Yeah.
I just remember the tank, like him standing in front of the tank.
Now he's like messing with the cannon on the tank.
Now there's two guys there.
Yeah.
A bunch of guys running out there.
Now they're grabbing him and they're moving him.
Maybe this is later in the video than the scene that they broadcast.
Hmm.
I mean, I'm old enough that I did watch that on TV at the time.
Right.
In 1989.
Oh, yeah, here it was this scene where he's standing with the parcels.
Yeah.
I don't remember him climbing up in the tank.
That's why I don't remember that either.
Now, is it just because they didn't broadcast it?
Is it because we're remembering?
Yeah.
But it's a useful way to think about the possibility that there could be multiple timelines running in the simulation and that if you change a variable.
So the rest of Philip K. Dick's speech, I told you that line, the famous line, which is, We are living in a computer program reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.
Some alteration occurs in our reality.
And we would be having the sense of reliving the same events again.
Like deja vu.
He literally said, like deja vu.
And he goes, that feeling of deja vu is a clue that at some point in the past, some variable was changed and they re-ran the simulation.
Now, I find it interesting.
Tessa also told me that he came to believe that he was communicating with some people that were outside the simulation.
He was doing a lot of drugs.
He was doing a lot of drugs.
But according to her, he was not around that time.
So however you want to, but again, were the drugs doing something like DMT?
Yeah.
Uh, and and I was in a lot of cocaine, I think.
Oh, was he?
So I asked her, Well, what did you see when he was communicating?
She goes, It was kind of like a blur or something like there was like something in the living room or wherever.
And he claimed that they told him that they made it so JFK didn't get assassinated in Dallas.
And that what happened was then it went into a timeline where JFK got assassinated in Orlando, and then they changed that, and then something else bad happened.
And every time they changed it, they ended up with.
A bad outcome, including a nuclear war in one of these instances.
Wow.
And then they said, well, let's just go back to the original timeline, which was him being assassinated.
Bill Kadix said this?
Well, he said it to his wife, who said it to me.
Yeah, I didn't find that documented, but she told me directly.
Holy crap.
Multiple Timelines Free Will00:14:23
Yeah.
So, again, I can't validate that.
That's not a Mandela effect that I've heard other people talk about, although there are Mandela effects related to.
But what he said at the end of that was we would have to find a group of people.
Who, like him, remembered either an alternate past or an alternate present.
And that's what, with the internet now, because that was back in the 70s.
Yes.
So the internet, you couldn't really have something like the Mandela effect because people wouldn't be able to communicate with each other so much about it.
Right.
So now people can say that they remember things.
So, anyway, that's just a way of saying I think it's interesting to explore this idea of multiple timelines.
And it's kind of an offshoot of simulation theory.
I don't get into it as much in this new book, The Simulation Hypothesis, but I did get into it in the simulated multiverse.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, the idea of multiple timelines is way easier to comprehend when you think of it in this idea that we're in this data universe, this informational cosmos.
But, like, so one of the perplexing things when you're looking at this whole thing from a physical perspective is using physics to explain consciousness is.
Impossible.
You can't start from protons and neutrons and dead particles and work your way up to consciousness.
But if you're looking at it from a simulation perspective, if we're living in an informational cosmos and this universe created of bits, you need consciousness to interact with that data, right?
Because this chaotic data, Means nothing.
It's absolutely meaningless unless you can ascribe meaning to it.
So you need consciousness to project meaning.
People have called us meaning machines, human beings.
Consciousness is like a meaning machine.
So if our consciousness is turning this chaotic slurry of bits into meaning for us, that would at least explain consciousness.
But still, it doesn't really explain where consciousness comes from.
Right.
So, this even gets back to this question of free will.
Can you have free will within a system, or do you need to step outside of that system?
Yeah.
Because if you have just NPCs that are just AI, can they really have free will if they're just code?
Well, they can be unpredictable.
Like with LLMs today, they'll hallucinate stuff and you won't know exactly what they're saying.
They can hallucinate?
Well, they make stuff up.
Oh, okay.
So they call it those hallucinations.
Oh, okay.
Like I first came across this with one of my students, you know, had a little assignment and they had the references at the end.
And it was kind of like generic.
His answers were kind of generic in that.
I thought, yeah, it sounds like ChatGPT or something.
But then he had some references near the end.
And I thought, well, at least let me check the references.
Because, I mean, the first reference was Bostrom.
It's a real reference.
Second reference was my book.
That's a real reference.
Third reference was something about simulation and religion.
And I thought, I've never heard of this reference.
Like, I'm an expert on this topic.
I designed the course, I wrote this book.
Why have I never heard of this article?
It looks like a cool article.
I clicked on it.
And so you have URLs.
And for academic articles, they have URLs that are like DOIs.
Digital object identifier.
So it's just like a URL, but it's like a number and it clicks into a database.
And usually all the academic articles and journals have these DOIs.
And so I clicked on it and turns out it was fake, like that URL didn't exist.
So then we looked at the names of the authors of the article.
They were real professors.
So we emailed them in the UK, one of them was in the UK.
And the journal, I'd never heard of the journal, but it sounded like a real academic journal.
So did you guys write an article?
About simulation and religion in this article.
They're like, no, we never wrote anything like that.
So, literally, they got real names.
What an LLM does is it basically uses statistics to predict what the next word should be.
And so, somehow, it said, you know, it got like a pretty decent title of the article, too, something like simulation and religion, because it was an article, you know, the assignment was about the simulation hypothesis.
So, it was able to do that, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to predict that that's what it was going to do.
So, sometimes you have to run a process.
To see what's going to be the outcome, even if it's deterministic.
I mean, LLMs are deterministic, they're based on code, right?
So, you can, if you have the exact data and the exact code, if you run it, you know, you can reproduce what they said.
It's just that there's so much data and it gets so unpredictable based on the prompt, you know, can be different.
And what they call the context window, which can include all kinds of hidden prompts, system prompts, things you don't know about that they put into the system.
But a lot of physicists will say, well, free will is just randomness.
In the simulation, like does the particle go through slot one or slot two?
That's free will.
And I'm like, that's not really free will.
Free will would be more like an entity choosing to do something within the simulation.
And I think you almost have to step out of the context and say that consciousness is the player looking at the game.
And the free will, just like if I'm playing a video game, I have the free will to choose whether my character is going to go down this path or that path.
But it may not be completely open.
I mean, there are only certain choices that might be available.
Sure.
In the game to me, so I think the NPC versus RPG versions hit at the same issue that physicists and philosophers have been debating for some time, yeah, which is does consciousness exist outside of the body, or as Max Planck says, consciousness is fundamental, material world is derivative, or is it the opposite?
The material world is the real world, and consciousness just emerges from putting the neurons together, right, in the right way.
So that's kind of like the more materialist scientific.
What was the one before that?
Consciousness is fundamental, it's fundamental, and the material universe is derivative, so meaning consciousness.
Makes the physical universe in some capacity.
Like it exists outside of the physical universe.
Okay.
Which would be the idea of.
Which would work with simulation.
Yeah, which would be like the player watching the game.
And it's.
So if it's fundamental, where did it start?
Well, that's a big question.
I don't take a strong view of what's outside the simulation.
I like to say I can give you theories.
Firetrope.
Oh, yeah.
And assumptions, but in terms of.
You know, the world that we're in seems like it's built on information.
And even like you were describing, there's a guy named Donald Hoffman.
I don't know if you've ever.
Yes, I've heard of him.
Yeah.
So he wrote a book.
I forget the name of the book now, but, you know, he basically came up with this, what he called a user interface idea, which is he says if you look at a desktop and you see an icon of a file folder, there's no file folder in the bits, right?
That's just a visual representation.
Of the bits.
Yeah.
Yeah, like a word file.
We're putting meaning to it.
Yeah, we're putting meaning to it.
Our consciousness creates meaning out of that.
Exactly.
And I think that's very true in simulation hypothesis as well in the player version.
We are taking that information, or in the matrix.
If you remember in the matrix, there were the guys who were in the matrix, and to them, everything seemed real while they were in it.
And then remember, there was the guy, I think it was Cypher, was sitting, he was just looking at the green text, and he's saying, I can tell, okay, that's a lady in a red dress, that's this, that's that.
Because he's just looking at the raw information.
And it hasn't yet been rendered.
And that's what video games are.
I mean, video games are just, we're just sending data down from the server.
And then you're using that data to create what looks like an actual virtual world.
Have you seen, so there's a lot of ties from the Matrix directly to religion.
Like the writers of that, like a lot of that stuff is based on biblical stories and like ancient Greek texts and stuff like this.
Well, I know it's based a lot on philosophy, you know, like Plato's cave or.
So like there was an interview with the guy who plays Morpheus.
Yep.
And he was talking about how all of the scenes are directly correlated with religion.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And Morpheus is, or not Morpheus, I'm sorry.
I think Neo is supposed to be like Jesus.
Yeah, they call him the one, right?
Yeah, he's the one.
And Cypher is supposed to be Judas.
Judas, right?
Right.
He betrays him, right?
And there was a point in that.
Find the.
We should just play this clip because it's really good.
It's of Morpheus being interviewed by.
Oh my God, what's his name?
Neil deGrasse.
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
That's who it is.
Okay.
Yeah.
And he talks about like there's a scene where they're walking through a sex club in the Matrix.
In the Matrix.
Yeah.
And he's like, he's like, what?
Well, you know, there have been so many interesting theories about the Matrix.
Yeah.
Like it's a trans allegory.
I talk about the AI stuff.
Like if you go to that scene where Morpheus explains what happened with AI, he says, we mastered AI in the early 21st century.
Which is exactly where we are now.
And I asked the Wachowskis were inspired by Philip K. Dick, supposedly, and his work.
So I asked Tessa, his wife, what he would think of The Matrix.
And she said, well, number one, he'd love it because he likes that study.
Secondly, he would call his agent to see if he can sue these guys to get a piece of the prophets because so much of his work is about what is real or what is not real.
And Morpheus is named after the Greek god of dreams.
And I'll tell you the synchronicity story with Morpheus and Jeffrey Kreipel and my book.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can you find the Matrix part?
Yeah, I think I found it.
All right, play it.
Okay.
You're my savior.
You're my regular Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
You're my own personal Jesus Christ.
That's a script line.
That's right there.
Okay.
Yeah, it's right there.
Right there.
Okay.
But let's not stop there.
All right.
So we keep going.
There's the part where he gets brought into the Nebuchadnezzar for the first time.
He's still wrapped and looking around.
And there's Joe Pants.
Joe Pants.
Joe Pants.
Yeah.
Joe Pants.
Yeah.
Pantaleon.
And he's there and he's just looking.
And then that character, Cypher, is startled.
And he says, Oh, you scared the bejesus out of me.
Yep.
That's two.
Okay.
So hang on.
Yeah.
That's two.
Yeah.
Oh, hang on.
Yeah.
Who betrays the group?
Cypher.
Cypher.
Yes.
He betrays you.
He's the Judas.
He's Judas.
Yeah, he's the Judas.
He's Judas.
After the bejesus was scared out.
He doesn't have Jesus in him.
He doesn't have Jesus in him.
Okay.
All right.
Let me keep going.
Keep going.
Okay.
If you can.
Because you think you know the movie better than I do.
And you might.
I don't know.
You might.
Let's go.
Here's the thing.
It's my favorite movie, and you've made 100 movies.
Right.
So.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So then, everyone sort of decides that he's the one.
He's the one.
Right.
When he's pulling Trinity up.
Oh, yes, he is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He is the one.
I told you he is the one.
He is the one.
Do you believe it now, Trinity?
I don't know what it means to compliment you on exactly imitating what you were paid to do in a movie.
And I would say, hey, you should be that character.
Too late.
Already been done.
No, but the weird thing is, you're not imitating that character.
You were that character.
Yes.
Even that.
Yes.
Yes.
So, let's fast forward towards the end.
He gets shot point blank.
Right.
By Smith.
Yes.
Then he drops.
He keeps firing into him.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Do you know how many bullets he put in him?
I don't.
You don't.
I don't.
I'll tell you.
Tell me.
Okay.
It requires a little bit of extrapolation.
Okay.
Okay.
The bullets you see, it's like four bullets point blank to the chest.
Okay.
At that point, we go back to Nebuchadnezzar and you see his body responding.
Right.
Okay.
But what if you track the rate that bullets are being fired and continue them into that scene?
Mm hmm.
Then we come out of the scene and there's a few more bullets that you observe.
Right.
That's 14 bullets.
Okay.
There are 14 stations of the cross.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
Now, for non Catholics out there, in every church, Catholic church, typically in the pillars that surround the main open area from the side areas, mounted facing inward, Are 14 drawings, paintings, relief maps of 14, they're called stages of the cross.
Got it.
Okay?
Yeah.
And they're key moments in Jesus' life.
And it's an early movie, really.
Oh.
The word movie doesn't even exist.
Exactly.
Right?
But a sequence.
It's a visual sequence.
It's a visual representation.
Okay?
Okay.
And it's all of it, and it's he's tried under Pontius Pilate.
He carries the cross.
He's put up on the cross.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, got it.
So it's all, you can look it up on any page.
Okay, 14 stages of the cross.
Yes.
14 boats.
Now.
Interesting.
And he dies.
Right.
Then he's resurrected.
Resurrected, right.
And it comes back more powerful than ever before.
That's right.
Is that not Jesus?
That's Jesus all day.
Joining the side of God.
That's Jesus all day?
All day.
Yeah.
All day, all night.
So who's Trinity?
Well, okay, so we got it like.
In the Catholic.
That would have to be Mary Magdalene.
Okay.
But I'm thinking.
No, she doesn't take them to a sex club.
That's where they meet.
Was that a sex club?
That's a sex club.
No.
Yes.
They were just dancing.
No, it's a sex club.
I mean, look behind and he was looking deep in the background.
They didn't allow them to show all of that, but it's a sex club.
Really?
Mm hmm.
Okay.
Mary Magdalene right there.
And who's Morpheus?
In the Christ mythology.
I know, I'm trying to meet John the Baptist, right?
John the Baptist?
He's John the Baptist.
Oh, because John the Baptist knows Jesus is coming.
Yes, he knows who he is.
And sets everything up.
And he's been looking for him.
Yeah, he's been looking for him.
And when he meets him, he goes, I'm supposed to be baptized by you.
So that's who Morpheus is in the Christ mythology.
In the Christ.
But there's also mythology, Greek mythology.
Tell me.
Tell me.
There's, well, Morpheus is the Lord of Dream.
He's the God of Dream from Greek mythology, right?
Persephone, who's in the second or third movie, who's played by Monica Bellucci.
The Oracle is Greek.
Yes, that's an actual Oracle.
The Oracle is Greek.
Yeah, I bet we lost her before the second film.
Yeah, she was really the main character.
Niobe.
There's an element on the periodic table called niobium.
Is there?
Yes, there is.
Crazy.
Well, it's great because there are so many different aspects of religion and mythology that are wrapped into the matrix.
Yeah.
Quantum Computing Universe00:10:46
And in fact, this summer, I'm going to be doing a series of screenings of The Matrix in different cities with the new book, The Simulation Hypothesis.
Oh, okay.
Like in Boston and Phoenix, right now, we have scheduled, and we're probably going to do one in LA at some point as well.
But there are so many angles you can take on this film and how people interpret it, and also how they interwove so many different themes around AI, around virtual reality.
I mean, the betrayal scene itself is interesting.
And that's one of my favorite scenes where Cypher is with Agent Smith and he's sitting there eating the meat or the steak that he's eating.
And he goes, Look, I know this isn't real, but man, it feels so good.
And I don't want to remember nothing.
I want to just be in this reality because it's great.
But I was going to tell you about a synchronicity related to Morpheus.
Oh, yeah.
So when the first edition of my book came out, it was back in 2019, but back before we had ChatGPT.
And so Jeff Kripole.
And others put on this seminar at Esalen every year, so I can invite only a seminar.
And that year, and I had released it on the 20th anniversary of The Matrix.
Now we're at the 25th anniversary of The Matrix.
And so I mentioned I had talked to Jacques Valet about it.
He gave me a nice blurb.
And so I heard this from several people that were there.
I actually wasn't there.
So they were basically giving, Jacques was giving a presentation, and it was just before lunch.
And so he gives a set of slides, and the last slide, Has my book on there, and he's like, This guy Rizwan Burke just wrote a book about the matrix and simulation hypothesis.
And he talks about reality being a matrix, and so that was the slide that was up there that everybody's kind of looking at.
And then they end and go outside and they walk to the cafeteria and look who do they see in the cafeteria but Morpheus.
So Lawrence Fishburne was actually sitting there.
No way!
And I heard the story from Jeff Kreipel initially, uh, and we always joke about it as a synchronicity about me that I wasn't actually present for.
Oh my.
Gosh, that's so wild.
It was really wild, yeah.
And then I heard it from other people as well.
And so, wow, it was pretty wild.
That is pretty insane, man.
What is your like?
Have you ever tried to like contemplate what the craziest sort of experiment that we could do now or in the future to like really test the simulation theory?
Like, is there anything like even like even if it's super speculative, hypothetical, futuristic, like what would be?
The optimal way to test it?
Well, it's an interesting question because the first question is Is it possible to test if we're in a simulation?
And then the second question is Should we test if we're in a simulation?
And there's been different theories on all of these fronts.
Now, one guy is a philosopher named David Chalmers, who's pretty well known.
He also wrote about the matrix hypothesis back in 2003, the same year that Bostrom did.
And he says that basically, if the simulation was perfect, Or the virtual reality was perfect, there would be no way to tell.
But that's if it was perfect.
I mean, any of us who build computer programs know that it's rarely perfect.
There's always glitches that come up in it.
And I think a lot of these glitches that we've talked about, whether it's synchronicity, whether it's near death experience, whether it's telepathy, are showing us that we are more likely to be in a simulated world than not.
But just because you can't prove we're not in a matrix or in a simulation doesn't mean you can't find evidence that we're in a simulation.
So, different people have proposed looking at the geometry of the simulation, and they found that there was a geometry that makes it look almost as if the world is built of some kind of a pixel, pixelated structure.
Like they call them lattices, but they go one way versus the other way.
So, there's that class of looking for pixelated.
Things.
There's also groups of people that are trying to test out.
If we're uh, is it?
Do you need a conscious observer for the collapse of the probability wave?
Right, and if so, then that's more akin to a video game rendering.
Uh so, Tom Campbell and a guy at uh Caltech uh, Human Omadi, I think uh uh, you have to look up that name.
But uh and a few other people wrote an article on that, and there's a group trying to perform those experiments Uh, at UCAL, uh, sorry, at CAL POLY, uh, and I met those guys, and it's interesting, they're moving along very slowly.
So, that's another angle is to test, you know, do things happen at the moment of observation, or do you just need measurements?
Another group says, Well, we should be able to.
Another group of experiments is, Can we actually overload the system in some ways?
Can we overload the computation?
Now, where I think it's Difficult to devise these tests is if we're thinking about it from a classical computing point of view, I don't think we're running on a Pentium processor.
I think it's more likely to be something like a quantum computer.
And in a quantum computer, you have bits, but you have qubits.
And these qubits take on multiple values at the same time.
So instead of, like, normally a bit is either one or zero.
Yes.
So I'm going to have one of those values.
Right.
So a qubit, which is what quantum computing is based off of, they have both of those values, zero or one, until a certain measurement occurs, which is like an observation from our perspective.
So what it means is that the bit is in superposition.
Okay.
Now, this is really weird, too, but there are quantum computers that companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft have built.
And if you have two bits, if you think about it, and both of them have, you know, are in superposition.
That means there's four possible values that they can have.
And then you know, if you have three bits, it's eight, two to the third and then 16, and you know, so on from there.
Uh, and what quantum computers can theoretically do is explore all of these different possibilities and come up with an answer.
But that's very strange, because Some of these problems, they grow so big.
If they grow exponentially, they grow really big to the point where it would take a classical computer thousands of years and in some cases millions of years to go through every possibility.
Yet, quantum computing can theoretically, and in some cases it's already been demonstrated, they can solve problems which would take thousands of years.
And one of those problems is encryption, which you might have 64 bit encryption or you might have different algorithms.
Like Bitcoin runs off of SHA 256, but they run it twice.
That's like 512 bits, which is two to the 512 possibilities of values you would have to search.
The problem is that's more particles than are in the physical universe.
So, some people have tried to use this as an argument against simulation to say, well, it would take a computer as big as the universe to keep track of all that information.
But they're counting on if you have to compute everything.
And they're not counting on optimization, getting right back to our original discussion about the reason there's this collapse is so you only have to render the part that's actually being observed at that point in time.
So, that's without optimization.
But I think quantum computing itself might show us there's something really weird going on here.
Now, by itself, it doesn't prove we're in a simulation, but it does show that some guys like David Deutsch, who's a quantum computing physicist at Oxford, who says he modified Wheeler's phrase, it from bit, and called it it from qubit.
Oh, wow.
Because basically, the universe seems to be computing.
And that's what particles are.
They are like bits of information.
But because they're in superposition and there's all this quantum weirdness, it's almost like the physical universe is a kind of quantum computer in and of itself.
Yeah.
But like even the idea of morphic resonance, right?
Like a problem being solved on one side of the world and then simultaneously being solved on the other side of the world, it makes sense.
Because if you're a computer program trying to conserve energy and processing power, you would just automatically make that.
If the problem is solved in one space, it's automatically solved in another space, right?
Right.
It's almost like it's caching the solution.
It's caching the solution in the whatever it is, in this dark matter computational cloud, if you will.
Yeah.
The computational power.
Yeah.
No, I like that.
And it's also possible, like, you know, Native Americans, certain tribes have a saying that, like, a story stalks the storyteller.
And similarly, meaning, like, it's like trying to get to you.
And similarly with inventors.
So maybe there's actually someone outside the simulation that's trying to influence the people inside and trying to send it to multiple people.
And one of them gets it.
And now it's cached.
And now the other people can get access to it.
Right.
Much more easy.
Because now it's in the database, right?
Before they were.
And it's only when somebody actually intentionally figures it out here that it gets into the database that we can access more easily, maybe.
Anyway, those are really interesting ideas, I think.
Yeah, definitely.
Rizwan, thank you for doing this, man.
This has been a mind bending conversation.
Yeah, this has been great.
I really enjoyed it.
And I'm really happy to be able to be here in person with you.
Yeah.
Here, hold your book up so people can see the cover.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, Hold it up a little bit higher towards this camera.
Oh, this camera.
Here we go.
So it's the simulation hypothesis.
An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics agree we're in a video game.
And even if you've seen the old edition, this one is 400 pages and completely new in a lot of places.
Can people order it now?
Yeah.
Can you pre order it?
Yeah, they can pre order it.
By the time this comes out, we may be close to already it being released, but they can pre order it even now while we're recording it.