All Episodes
Previous Next
June 25, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:36
Edition 734 - Mike Godfrey
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is definitely the Unexplain.
Hope everything is good with you here in the Northern Hemisphere.
We've just passed the point of the longest day of the year.
A couple of days ago, 21st of June, that is always the longest day of the year up here and down in the southern hemisphere, things start moving the other way.
And what is it, a minute a day?
The change is, so our days get shorter by a minute and yours get longer.
And as a man used to say, on American TV, the world turns.
Which it certainly does.
Still crazily hot.
What if I got here as a temperature where I'm recording this?
Now I'm recording this in 28 or 29 degrees, and it's only June.
So who knows?
July is usually warmer.
So is August.
Who knows what is going to come our way in those months?
I think I'm going to have to try.
Not that I can, but I think I need to try and find some ways to spend some time by the coast or something.
That would be nice.
So, life goes on here.
Thank you for all of your emails and suggestions.
Please keep those coming.
Let me know how you think the show is doing.
I know that some people have been a little concerned we've done a lot of UFO material lately, and we have because simply that's been in the news.
And a lot of the mainstream news hasn't done that stuff justice.
So I've tried to do it on this podcast and also on the TV show.
But I do realize we've done a lot of that.
We've also done a lot of artificial intelligence news because that, again, is hot button and in the news.
And so that is what we're going to do this time.
But I promise you that I do have, and I'm in the process of booking podcasts through July, August and beyond that.
We're going to go back to a lot of our more core subjects, the crypto and the ghosts and all of those things, if you're concerned about that.
But at the moment, I think the agenda is taking us towards those stories about the UFO's UAPs because all of that is happening at a tremendous pace, don't you think?
And the AI stuff, who knows where that's going?
So the guest on this edition is a longer conversation with a very accomplished guy and a very switched-on guy, I think, Mike Godfrey.
I've known him for years, described as a tech investor and CEO of Insignia Cybersecurity, one of the biggest and most respected organizations in that field.
Mike Godfrey is a great encyclopedia of everything technological, has got his finger massively on the pulse.
So we're going to talk about AI and hacking and quantum computing.
And also one of the things that's very close to Mike's heart, his interest in simulation theory, the idea that everything that we see around us, everything that we experience has been created by someone and is part of their computer program, kind of like the Truman show, but on steroids.
And you'll hear Mike's thoughts about that on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thanks as ever to my tech guru, Adam, for making sure that everything gets out to you and for maintaining the website and everything else.
Thank you to you for all your communications.
Don't forget, when you get in touch with me through the website, theunexplained.tv, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And if you would like to make a donation to the show, then that would be gratefully received.
And if you have, thank you very, very much for doing that.
You can do that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
And that's for donations to the online version of this show, keep everything cranking.
As a disc jockey friend of mine used to say an awful lot on London radio, if you're in the southeast anywhere, you might remember the word cranken, keeping it all cranking.
But that's a long time ago.
And like I always say, maybe to the point of tedium far away.
So here I am, sweating in a pair of shorts once again.
Not a pretty image, but that's the way that it is.
Let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, Mike Godfrey from Insinia Systems.
We're going to talk about everything tech and the future thereof.
Mike, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
No problem, Hurt.
My pleasure.
Hey, Mike, it's been a long time since we've done anything that's been longer than five minutes or so, so it's nice to have a deeper conversation.
These days, there is so much to talk about in this field, and I know that people are going to be interested in this because you know your stuff and all of these things we're going to discuss are hot-button topics.
For people who never heard you before, and you've got to remember there are people who only hear the podcast and don't see the television show or hear the radio show in the UK, just give me a quick, you know, two-second summary, 30-second summary of you and what you do.
So, yeah, my name is Mike, Mike Godfrey.
I'm the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Incinio.
So, yeah, I was really brought up in computers, electronics, engineering, and have spent at least the last 28 years of my life building and breaking computers.
So, yeah, very in touch with the tech industry, tech community, cybersecurity, hacking, IT, emerging tech, AI, etc.
Yeah, I guess that in a nutshell is me.
I'm not sure, and I suspect you can't name names of companies that you assist, but give me an idea of the scale of businesses that you get involved with.
So, I work for some huge companies from vehicle manufacturers to security companies, monocise security companies.
I mean, companies like antivirus companies, very large billion-pound organizations generally, but also down to friends of friends that consensus have had this problem with this or that problem with that.
So, yeah, wide range of stuff, but generally very large, large corporate companies.
And is it possible?
This is a really crazy question, okay?
But I ask crazy questions, so let's do it.
Is it possible these days to run a business without extensive technology?
Could you do it with just, you know, your phone and an email these days?
I know you're going to say it depends on the kind of business, but are there any businesses that can exist without an extensive and big investment in tech?
Part of the issue is that even if you have a very small company, the chances are that your suppliers or your supply chain will be using technology.
I struggle to think of any business now that isn't exposed to technology in some kind of way.
Although what's actually quite interesting is that a huge portion of the internet is accessed through mobile devices.
So if you're a plumber or a gas engineer, then I've got no doubt at all that you'd be able to run your business from generally from a mobile phone.
But I think our exposure to tech now is so great that it would be very, very difficult, in my view.
Let's ask you a left-field question, and we'll get back to the whole issue of hacking and security later.
But just this at the top of it, been in the news again lately, and it astonishes me that the British government appeared for a long period, and they still do it, to run a lot of its business and messaging on WhatsApp.
Does that surprise you?
No, not particularly.
So WhatsApp is a very good framework for being very flexible.
So if we want to start a group, if you were to ask me what is the easiest way to start a group, I would probably say WhatsApp.
There is other messaging apps, so things like Signal, things like Telegram, et cetera, but they have different uses.
They're not sophisticated.
But it's actually an interesting point because what you find is that organizations, whether they're military, government, or even just businesses, find it very difficult to not use mainstream tools because of how well developed they are.
So like I say, if you ask me which messaging app is probably the best one for us to use, I would undoubtedly say WhatsApp.
So yeah, it's very difficult to use ones that aren't quite as sophisticated, definitely.
And the media who jump up and down and say, you know, how is our government using a tool for communication that we all use?
You know, that can't be right.
They should have their own secure systems, which I'm sure they do as well.
But WhatsApp is very convenient, as we all know.
Should those people really get themselves an education on how this works?
Yeah, I say so.
So it's very difficult.
And actually, you sometimes create more of an issue when you develop your own tools because WhatsApp is constantly developed, constantly patched, constantly updated.
So we benefit from all the security bugs.
So for example, when one person is hacked on WhatsApp, they're generally very quick to send out a fix to that.
And obviously the government benefit from that as well.
So once you start understanding technical knowledge about encryption and encryption standards and encryption in transit, encryption at rest, etc., then you realize that actually it's probably far easier for the government and actually far more secure to use these types of tools and develop something in-house.
That then has a threat or a vulnerability identified in it, which a nation state can exploit.
And then you're only as good as a very small specific team who then have to deal with that.
Yes, it's very, very difficult to do.
Right.
So bespoke is not always the way to go.
No, absolutely not.
No, that's why sometimes mainstream tools are actually far more secure and offer far better security overall.
Definitely.
Okay, let's talk about artificial intelligence.
Are you surprised by the fact that the media is complete, apart from UFOs, and in the United Kingdom, of course, it is mostly politics in the news and it's hard to get anything else in.
But when they're not talking about, you know, Boris Johnson or maybe occasionally UFOs, they'll be talking about technology and the threat from artificial intelligence.
Are you surprised that we are in a situation where there is such a lot of focus on this?
Or is there really a whole raft of this news that we've been sleepwalking into?
I think we have undoubtedly stepwalks into this.
So I think I gave the first talk I gave on AI was in 2015.
And at that point, AI wasn't particularly sophisticated.
And I think people at the time completely dismissed AI and said, no, this is a million miles away.
And I said to people, look, don't dismiss it just yet because this thing is a seriously fast learner.
And not only that, but its perceived IQ is extraordinarily high compared to ours.
So I said, look, this thing is adapting and learning very, very quickly.
And in a few years, we're going to be in a completely different place.
And I think a lot of people brushed it off.
And then obviously with the release of ChatGPT, the launch language model, it has just gone absolutely through the roof.
So this is something that's been spoken about for years.
Even when Kasparov lost Chester Deep Blue, people were talking about this.
And autonomous, AGI, AI, etc.
So yeah, I'm very surprised really.
And a few people have spoken about it.
So Leaping Computer, etc., have spoken about this, Wired, et cetera, a lot over the years.
But yeah, the mainstream media just completely slept into this.
This courtnam from Lefil, definitely 100%.
And does it surprise you?
Nothing surprises me about governments these days and our government maybe in particular.
But our Prime Minister said two months ago we're going to have a light touch regulation when it comes to AI and this will be a place where people can develop AI and we're going to be quite easygoing with it.
And in the last week, he said we want to be a center of not AI regulation, but we want to be a center where we understand it better.
And if regulation is needed, then we will understand better than others how to do it.
I think is more or less what he said.
Yeah, I'm highly sceptical about that because when you look at anything that's regulated, so for example, the financial industry, people are regulating the UK.
We have the FCA, which is very good.
Obviously, the US have an equivalent.
So what does everyone do?
They go to places that aren't regulated, whether that's Northern Cyprus or anywhere else in the world that isn't regulated by the FCA.
And they utilise that to work around it.
So sometimes regulation doesn't help.
I think it can make it more difficult and people will work around it anyway.
So yeah, I'm highly sceptical of that actually being of much value, to be honest.
Would you have no regulation?
I'm not sure if I'd have no regulation, but I think I definitely understand that unless you have worldwide regulation, it's going to be very difficult to keep a hold of.
For example, if we're doing what we're doing and we're heavily regulating different aspects of it, and I'm sure that military and government stuff will not fall within that regulation, but if you place that regulation on us and then China, Iran, a lot of other countries that may not be our best friends don't have that level of regulation, then I think it really doesn't do us many favours, really.
And also, I think that the cat is out of the bag with this.
I think we're trying to kind of lock the stable door when the horse is bolted.
It's going to be very, very difficult.
I think it is.
There was a piece in The Guardian this week.
The rise of artificial intelligence is inevitable, but shouldn't be feared, according to, quote, the father of AI.
His name is Jürgen Schmidhuber.
He believes that AI will progress to the point where it surpasses human intelligence and will pay no attention to people.
He says what's coming is inevitable and we should learn to embrace it.
In other words, it's going to be that powerful, but there ain't nothing we can do about it, so we've got to work with it.
Yeah, so I think undoubtedly it's definitely going to be that powerful if it's not already.
And I have some strong views on this, if I'm honest, but I think, yeah, it will undoubtedly surpass human intelligence.
You can ask ChatGPT far more than you can ask me, and you'll get generally much more sophisticated answers.
So, I'm going to be correct.
You know, I'm sorry to jump in, Mike, because recently, and I've mentioned this before, one of my listeners, Carl, asked ChatGPT for a biography for me, and it was 50%, more than 50% completely wrong.
It said, for example, that I was born in Manchester, and I wasn't born in Manchester.
I was born in Liverpool, and it said that I worked for the BBC in Liverpool, which I never did.
So it's got a ways to go, hasn't it?
It has.
So it comes out of what's called hallucinations, so AI hallucinations.
Sometimes it will just make information up.
But the interesting thing about it is that if you ask me something, I could get that wrong.
Some of the stuff that I was taught in primary school has been disproved and is now taught in a completely different way in secondary school.
So some of the knowledge that I've got is out of date, definitely.
Obviously, I'm only as good as a human.
So yeah, undoubtedly, I'll misremember stuff.
Obviously, we suffer from things like the Mandela effects.
And this doesn't.
So what we're trying to do, and coming back to the original question, is reinforce human learning.
So yeah, reinforced learning, Scott RLHF.
And that's basically still training ChatGPT.
So bear in mind that these large language models have largely been trained by reinforced learning from humans.
So humans saying this is a good answer, this is not a good answer.
Obviously, they're training it on the way that we respond to it.
So for example, if the person you mentioned went back to ChatGPT and said, no, this is all wrong, then it would learn from that.
But like I said, I don't think we should underestimate it because in six months even, this will be a completely different thing.
It generally is only wrong once or twice.
And then like I said, it's a very fast learner, much quicker than us, and has access to a huge amount of data.
So yeah, I don't doubt it was possible at all.
And the other thing is that when they say it will completely ignore humans, so maybe it will, maybe it won't, but we're going into territory that we definitely don't understand.
And I can't see that it would.
If there was anything that wanted to become substrate independent and to live on its own, etc., then it would undoubtedly have to consider a bunch of threats against it.
But I do think that it wouldn't even identify us as a threat.
I think it would see us as so primitive compared to itself that it could just decide to wipe us out.
Who knows?
It could decide that we're not a threat at all and it's not interested.
But we don't know, really, is the bottom line.
Isn't that very scary?
Yeah, I'd say so, especially as, I mean, like I said, one of the very strong views that I have is on Moore's Law.
So if you're familiar with Moore's Law, it was developed a very long time ago, now a very long time ago in terms of tech.
We said that computing power doubles every two years.
Now that was true when humans were drawing out transistors and different elements of CPUs.
But as soon as computers started developing the next version of itself, I think we went over this briefly on your show, Howard, then computing power must double far, far quicker.
It becomes exponential.
So if it was two years before, the next one would be a year, the next one would be six months, the next one three months, six weeks, three weeks, until it gets down to three days or it's generating the next version of itself in a split second.
If that happens, you only need a very small amount of time until it's effectively developed everywhere it can go on silicon-based chips.
And I just can't see that we haven't got to that point because you wouldn't slow it down.
So if you've got a computer designing the next version of itself, and you'll see this on Chat GPT, as soon as you send a question to it, before you've even lifted your finger, it's replying.
Now that could be something very complex about a medical issue or it could be something about a very specific piece of law.
But again, I think what people forget is that as soon as you click that or you press the enter button, you submit that, that is working at the speed of light.
So that's going through everything in a fraction of a second and then replying to you, like I said, before you can even lift your finger.
And I just don't see that we're going to compete with that.
And I don't see that that hasn't already absolutely smashed through Moore's Law and that we're now at a point, I don't see we can be at a point where we haven't got an almost limitless amount of competing power.
I don't have anything like the level of tech savvy that you have.
But one thing struck me about the way all of this is going.
And it is that if somebody, a bad actor, maybe in a general election somewhere or some other context, maybe a presidential election or maybe a business thing, decided to flood the internet with fake information, like loads of it, billions of bits of data out there that are all wrong and incorrect.
Wouldn't ChatGPT or something like that seize upon that incorrect data and fail to identify it as not being bona fide?
So it's a very good point.
And this is why purposely OpenAI haven't or hadn't allowed ChatGPT to browse the internet.
But also we have to consider a couple of things.
So firstly, humans are very susceptible to that.
So what ChatGPT would do, for example, is if we were to flood something, to say something negative, let's just say about UHIR, for example, we'd flood the internet with all of those posts.
But ChatGPT would have the capabilities to look at when domains were registered, when that story was posted.
So it could score that story quite highly as to whether it's new, as to whether it's relevant, the context of it, is it just negative?
It could look for a balanced view, etc.
Where we know that most people don't see that, if we look at what happened in Pizzagate in the US, a massive conspiracy theory over there, that was generally driven by Facebook and by a very small number of actors that were posting stories that were quite obviously fake or at least misrepresentations.
And then people were acting upon it.
So it happens to humans anyway.
So I'd actually say that AI is probably far less susceptible to that in some ways.
But let's not forget that if that puts an output out to humans, then we're only as good as the humans reading it.
And we should never just take AI or any output really in its literal form.
And that's why I always look for multiple sources of information, multiple points of corroboration.
But unfortunately, some people don't.
And I think AI will literally be far more sophisticated.
In fact, I think we'll get to a point where if you ask AI a question on something, it will probably come back with a far better, more balanced, more contextualized answer than you or I would, really.
Bearing in mind that we are human beings and as such, delightfully sometimes and not delightfully other times, you know, we are fundamentally flawed.
If AI in the future delivers material that is defamatory or derogatory about you or me or anyone, who would you sue?
It's difficult, isn't it?
So it's a question that happens a lot.
Or, for example, if it gave you medical advice that was wrong, which you acted upon, or anything like that.
And unfortunately, as with any of these types of technical solution, generally it says that they offer no guarantees of an ambest effort.
So they'll make their best efforts be as accurate as possible, but basically don't rely on this information.
So I think you'd probably struggle to sue people.
And that's why it needs to be heavily regulated around medical, financial, that kind of stuff, because even though ChatGPT has read almost every medical book and can probably give a very good answer and indeed did, if you remember the story about the vet who had something very specific, put the symptoms into ChatGPT and it came out instantly with a condition that affects around one in 10,000 cases.
So probably quite difficult to spot by a human.
But ChatGPT did very well.
But there's always caveats to say that this is not sophisticated in medical stuff, etc.
And I think it'd be very difficult to have any kind of recourse against someone, definitely.
And as a number of people have pointed out to me, and quite rightly, we mustn't be talking this stuff down because the benefits of artificial intelligence may well outweigh all of those downsides that the media.
And I've talked about such a lot.
For example, again, the Guardian newspaper reported doctors, scientists and researchers built an artificial intelligence model that can accurately identify cancer in a development they say could speed up diagnosis and fast track patients to treatment.
That's on every level good.
Absolutely, yeah.
And in the short term, I've got no doubt that it will be.
And when I say the short term, I'm talking 10 to 15, maybe 20 years at best.
But after that, I think we're going to have some reasonably large issues.
Whether we have to look at, I almost said human rights then for AI, but obviously it's not human rights, is it?
And I don't know what it would be.
It's new territory, really.
So yeah, rights for computers, rights for artificial intelligence.
Do we look at whether they can pass the Turin test, which computers have for a long time?
And then we start giving them rights.
I think there's a lot to iron out, but I do definitely think in the short term, it will be very good.
And again, I think if you had the full power of ChatGPT, which we don't, or any other large language model that's read every single medical book and remembered it, contextualizes it, etc., then I think you would get a very, very accurate answer.
In fact, I remember seeing a study a long time ago which said that, and I'm going to say a long time, five years or so ago, at DEF CON in the US, which said that an automated and an ML, so machine learning driven doctor, is accurate with first-time diagnosis about 85% of the time.
Apparently, compared to your standard GP, they're accurate on first-time diagnosis about 40% of the time.
So already we're being surpassed in the medical field because let's not forget that these kind of fields rely on the retention of huge amounts of data and constant studying.
And as you say, we are only human.
We're amazing in a lot of ways, but let's not forget that we can only see something the size of a postage stamp, which I talk about a lot.
So we're filling in the blanks with peripheral.
We forget stuff.
We misremember stuff.
Sometimes we have good days.
Sometimes we have bad days.
We're susceptible to being unwell.
None of which applies to large language models with ChatGPT.
And if you look at the state of our NHS health system in the United Kingdom, you know, it's got a lot of demand at the moment.
It's under enormous pressure.
There are wonderful people working in it who do great work.
And I've experienced that, especially when I had the fire in my flat, my apartment, recently.
They were wonderful.
I got all the help that I needed.
And they said, if you have more problems, come back.
So that was good.
But on another side, I had some blood tests, which is something that is going to be spread over a longer period.
Six different samples they took.
That's a lot.
And at the moment, the results of those tests have been delayed.
It's coming up for a month.
I'm still waiting on the results of those tests that could show anything.
Now, I would guess that if artificial intelligence could be deployed to scan my blood samples, then maybe I wouldn't be waiting so long for those results.
Definitely not.
You'd have the results, I would say, instantly, and I don't think we're a million miles away from that now.
So let's not forget that a lot of this is data points, which AI computers are absolutely perfect for, really.
Analyzing data, analyzing anything like that, and then outputting a result is what computers are perfect for.
So I've got quite a strong background in sensor technology, and some of these sensors that we deploy take hundreds of thousands of data points, even a very short period of time.
Things that we would never ever be able to go through as humans, but as computers, it goes through it instantly.
Like we say, come back to ChatGPT replying in a split second.
So yeah, I don't think we're far away from actually getting a much better service.
And this is no knock at the NHS.
The NHS is a great organisation.
Both my children have been born in NHS hospitals, etc.
And what could be better than the start of a life in a hospital?
So yeah, I'm definitely not knocking the NHS in any way at all, but they are humans.
And like we said, a human factor.
In fact, as a qualified pilot, one of the first things they teach you, I know we've spoken about before, is the limitations of human performance.
So understand your limitations as a not particularly efficient human sometimes.
And that's what we have to understand.
But I think, and if you look at this, I was at the Science Museum a few weeks ago, and we were talking about medicine in the late 1800s.
And they had an idea.
But I think everybody thinks that we're at a point now of being so technologically sophisticated that I don't think we've touched the surface at all.
And the reason why I mentioned that in the late 1800s is that they're giving out these different medications and performing surgery, sometimes even by a local barber.
And they're performing this type of surgery, thinking they're at the cutting edge.
And when you look at it now, you can't believe some of the things that they've done.
And I think that when we look back, even in, I could say 20, 50 years, you'll tell somebody, hopefully if we're still around, that it took a month to get the results of your blood test.
And they'll find that absolutely astounding.
They just will not believe it.
It's just something my kids will never know a life without the internet.
And even when I say to my daughter that we didn't have the internet when I was young, she just can't believe it.
She just cannot grasp the world with no internet.
Well, even I, Mike, you know, I've been in situations recently where I've started to think, how would I have done That without access to this wonderful thing that I personally discovered in the mid-90s and absolutely transformed my life in the snap of a finger, in a heartbeat.
How could I live without it now?
And the truth is, although it frustrates me enormously, especially when companies have over-reliance on it and it actually slows them down, but I couldn't do anything that I do.
The fact that we're talking right now and you're at your home, but we're speaking in studio broadcast quality, the fact that we can do any of this and exchange information and data while we're doing it is just like miraculous.
You know, the speed of it is astonishing and the potential of it is amazing, but we just have to be a little open-eyed when we go into it.
I see this week, for example, and you'll have seen this, that Intel, the people who are still, I think, the premier makers of computer chips, announced the release of its newest quantum research chip, Tunnel Falls.
Now, you'll know what this means better than I will.
It's a 12 qubit silicon chip, and it's making the chip available to the quantum research community right now.
I mean, that is the beginning of a whole new frontier.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, I mean, this is 100% the next generation of computing with quantum computers.
And I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen many more quantum computers come out now, because that has always been part of the issue.
So, as you say, Quibbit-based computers, basically, to explain some in very simple terminology, what we have at a moment is CPUs analyze ones and zeros to binary.
So, at the CPU level, every single thing done on your computer is ones and zeros.
And I explained this to my daughter about her TV.
I said, well, how does it know to place this black particle here or this purple particle here?
And it's done through binary, through mapping every single thing in millions and millions of lines of binary code that it does in Instant.
The problem that you have with that is that it has to analyze, like, this one's a one, this one's a zero, etc.
Whereas with quantum computing, a qubit can be both things.
So it can be a zero and a one, or both at the same time, which is known as a superposition.
So it really does enhance and amplify the amount of data that can be processed in a very, very short period of time.
And these quantum computers are absolutely different levels compared to our general CPU, silicon-based CPU computers are a completely different place.
So yeah, it will change a lot, undoubtedly, over the coming period, definitely.
The world is full of bad actors in every field who spoil our party.
So while we're enjoying all this technology, I'm guessing the technology can benefit us, but is also a boon to hackers, people who would steal and misuse your data and information.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, 100%.
So I come from a period of time where hacking tools only really started coming out when I was 16, 17 with an organization called Cult of the Dead Cow, who were a bunch of guys that were at MIT.
And yeah, they started writing hacking tools.
But back then, you really had to learn a lot about hacking tools.
And even up to recently, use different hacking operating systems that are widely available.
They're in every ethical hacking course.
And you'd use them.
And the amount of frustration that you have trying to configure tools, use tools, deploy stuff, nothing ever works.
That's the reality of it.
Nothing ever works first time.
And it takes a huge amount of time to get that right.
Whereas now, even with ChatGPT, you just paste the error that you're getting into ChatGPT and it comes back with a solution instantly.
So it really has enhanced the capability of ethical hackers, of hackers, of criminals, even people writing scripts.
So scams.
Yeah, scams that people are putting, generally written by ChatGPT.
So yeah, it's very, very difficult to stop.
It's like anything, isn't it?
Well, there's a good side, there's a bad side, and I don't think we'll ever stop that.
Even at the most fundamental level, one of the ways that you used until recently to be able to tell that something was a scam for you was that they probably misspelled something or they failed to capitalize letters that they should have capitalized and vice versa.
It would always give it away.
Or just bad grammar, bad English, whatever.
Now, of course, that's going to be less and less so.
And that's a bit of a worry.
Gone are the days, absolutely.
Yeah, so you would generally be able to spot these scams quite quickly.
And interestingly, you could actually spot the output from ChatGPT reasonably easily.
It's always perfect, uses American spellings, that kind of stuff.
But now what people do is they effectively train ChatGPT on their own tone.
So very quickly, even just by sending a few emails, you can say write it in this style and it comes back and it is super, super difficult to identify.
But let's not forget as well that we can use AI to detect AI and that is obviously becoming a huge thing where AI algorithms are being used to detect the output of AI, especially with AI generated sound.
Again, things that wouldn't be detectable by you or I as humans, but stand out like an absolute sore thumb to AI.
One of the interesting things that she is with AI generated pictures, so if you look at them, AI is still not great at getting fingers right at the moment.
Just have to say to my listener that a plane is going over your location.
I can hear that.
No, I mean, that's the amazing technical quality.
Sorry, you were saying.
That's it.
So yeah, so AI to detect AI is going to be absolutely key moving forward.
Because at the moment, like say AI-generated images, you may be able to say that those fingers don't look right.
But really, there's probably hundreds of thousands of errors in that image that the human eye would just not see.
But AI would.
So that's going to be an interesting point as well.
This technology and the quantum computing, will it help us turning, you know, flipping all of this on its head?
Will it help us actually track down some of these hacking gangs, some of these people who do it for a living and do it to a high degree of sophistication?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So there's already some very, very sophisticated tools.
So one of those tools, for example, is a tool called Nux.
So it's a forensic investigation tool.
And even a number of years ago, it was very, very powerful.
So for example, you could have criminal gang have used a laptop and a USB stick.
They then split that up.
So the USB stick disappears to another area of the country.
And what would happen is that that laptop would get taken into custody.
That would be imaged on this tool, on Newix.
And two years later, you could then get this USB stick.
But if that then came into custody, you could stick it into Newix and it would say, bang, did you know that this USB stick was used on this laptop, which was in custody?
And it was unbelievably powerful back then.
It also would take things like contacts.
So what a lot of people that were selling narcotics would do is they'd send out a text to an address book with effectively a weekly menu.
But what they didn't realize was that as soon as you make free calls, this tool could tell exactly who you were.
Because, for example, Howard, you're probably the only person in the world that's got my phone number, someone like Paul Sinclair's phone number, and someone else's phone number.
So it's a unique fingerprint that to you.
So as soon as you start applying AI and machine learning to what is an already phenomenally powerful tool, I think it will be busting gangs that are using technology all day long.
At least in the short term, where we certainly gangs are upskill and they understand how the police investigate things as they do.
And then it will be a chicken and egg game, really.
So that's all about a technical version of circumstantial evidence.
You know, my dad was a copper, and quite often they would build up a case that was made up of a lot of circumstantial background evidence.
They'd be looking for the killer fact, but the more of this circumstantial stuff you got, the more it pointed the finger to the person who was the perpetrator.
And similarly with the technology, as you say, you may not think that you're giving away a smorgasbord of data that indicates that it's you, you're to blame, but you are.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you're giving away so much that people don't understand.
So there's an interesting case actually of three-armed robbers.
So they've met up, got somewhere and they said, right, guys, mobile phone's off.
So they all turned their mobile phones off together.
That was enough for the police to find them because it's abnormal for three phones in very close proximity to all be turned off at the same time.
So yeah, trying to be more secure was what found them.
But you're always giving away everything.
It's the same with people that have what are called burner phones.
What they don't realise is as soon as they leave that burner phone next to their normal phone or next to their wives or girlfriend's phone, that then creates metrics that can be measured as well.
So the police can say, okay, well, we know that this phone that we're looking for, we've got no idea whose that is, is next to this person's phone, which is on a contract with VE and we know exactly who that is.
So yeah, there's a bunch of different ways.
And it's very, very difficult to be successfully technologically sophisticated to stop yourself being investigated in this kind of way because it's just abnormal.
So it's very, very difficult.
The hacking, as we record these words on Friday morning, things may change over the weekend.
I don't know.
I don't think the story will change over the weekend.
But BBC says cyber criminals have told the BBC they don't have data belonging to large UK organisations thought to be the victims of a mass hack attack.
Firms including the BBC itself, British Airways and Boots have told staff that sensitive payroll data was stolen in last month's breach.
Now the hackers, Klopp, speaking over email, I'm still reading this story here, Mike, claim we don't have that data.
Now that, according to the BBC, raises the possibility that another unknown hacking gang has got the stolen data or that Klopp is lying because, you know, we're taking their word for it.
That whole case is developing.
I think we're going to hear more about it.
And very disturbing.
What are we to make of it?
So by the look of it, it's a standard supply chain attack.
And I have to say that I do generally get this right with how these are done just by looking at the evidence.
So it's very clear how Twitter was hacked.
If you remember when Barack Obama started tweeting loads of stuff, Elon Musk, etc.
And with this, it's very difficult to believe that this isn't a supply chain attack.
So especially where it's around a specific thing like payroll.
So this looks to me like they're using a third-party piece of software, which then has been hacked.
And that has obviously provided the keys to the kingdom of a lot of these organizations.
So whether they have that data or not, we don't know.
So clock hackers could have taken a lot of data, but then have deleted a lot of data.
Someone like BA, for example, very sophisticated now in cyber attacks.
They've been attacked a number of times over the last number of years and they would have a very robust response, which maybe this hacking team doesn't want to put up with.
So they might find that literally it's a lot easier to delete BBC data.
Obviously, the BBC is very well plugged into the government.
Delete BA data and just utilize data from two or three organizations who are going to pay them millions of pounds.
And let's make no mistake about it.
Organisations do pay millions of pounds to these hacking teams.
There's no indication that any organisation has paid anything.
But we do know if we look back historically, yes, organizations, local authorities around the world to get their data back have paid these people.
100%.
Yeah, and like you say, though, it's still very much emerging on this one.
And we don't even know if a ransom's been asked for.
No, no, indeed we don't.
We don't.
So they could just use that data for other purposes.
They could chop that data up and sell it.
It's just still valuable to them.
So yeah, we don't know a lot about it at the moment, but like I say, we can definitely say, well, I would put my heart and say, no, this is a supply chain attack.
You know, very, very worrying for those organisations, you know, because they're going to be in the spotlight as well.
You know, the likes of the BBC, some of those organisations, British Airways also, are involved with high net worth individuals, famous, prominent people.
Will the hackers, do you think if they have that data, will they be crunching that data to try and zero in on those people?
I mean, we're only speculating here.
Absolutely, yeah.
So one of the first things the hackers do when they get big data sets is they filter out all London postcodes.
They then filter out things like West London postcodes and very affluent areas.
So yeah, 100% they target that.
They then target things like Amex cards, which are generally higher limits.
So from the first four numbers on the credit card, you can tell whether it's a Visa, Moscow, Amex, etc.
So they filter all that out.
So yeah, there's a lot to do.
They'll also filter for things in banks like Coots accounts, Barclays Premier accounts, High Net Worth accounts, et cetera, because that is obviously the most valuable data.
So yeah, there's a lot that goes into it to filter out that data.
It's generally done very quickly.
And some of these organizations might help people, assist people for a short period by maybe giving them a subscription to something that will allow them to check their status and give them tips on how to protect themselves online more generally.
But I would guess that For those organizations and the people who were involved with those organizations, and you know, it's not, as far as I understand, it's not everybody who worked for all of those organizations, but it is still a lot of people.
It's not just a year that those people are going to be vulnerable to that extent, is it?
It's potentially forever.
Absolutely forever, yeah.
So, things like your mother's maiden name, your date of birth, things that you cannot change is out there now thanks to these organizations.
So, I get asked this a lot, and I have to say, look, firstly, we have to understand that these companies are the first victim.
BA does not want to come and tell you that they've been hacked and given away your details.
So they're generally the first victim of the attack.
The other thing is that it's very unfortunate in things like supply chain attacks, because BA or the BBC, for example, could have very, very good, sophisticated internal security procedures and controls.
But when they rely on third-party software, their security then becomes the third-party provider's security, which they really don't have much of an input in.
So it's very difficult for them.
But I'm kind of 50-50 in this.
I don't like being overly harsh on companies that have been hacked by very sophisticated hacking teams.
But at the same time, I do take exception sometimes to when my data is given away, as it was in things like the Adobe attack, the Dropbox attack.
I was customers of them.
So I always say to people, if you've used Adobe, Dropbox, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, then you've got them to thank generally for your data being out there, amongst others.
And then they say, don't worry, we'll give you monitoring on your experiential credit report.
And I said, oh, great.
So when somebody uses my data they've stolen from you, at least I'll see it.
But then we'll doddie.
So yeah, it really does worry me.
And this is why a lot of effort is really being placed on how much data we share with companies.
So if I make an inquiry to a company about something reasonably generic, to get a quote for a car, for example, I don't see why they need my name, address, date of birth, because they're trying to pre-qualify me, right, as a sales lead.
But at the same time, I don't agree with it because then all of my data goes to them.
So, yeah, I think we have to be very careful who we continue to give.
I always stop people when they question me, even if it's with companies that I know and the famous companies.
And they'll want you to give the whole gamut of data.
And they'll say, you know, date of birth.
And I say, do you need that?
And usually it turns out that they don't.
And they will accept my query anyway without the date of birth rather than lose my call.
Yeah, 100%.
And I do the same thing.
And it's interesting that you're still met with some hostility sometimes when people ask you for your inside leg measurement.
And you say, do you really need that to determine the price of a car?
Well, you know, only a tailor or clothing company should really need that kind of stuff.
Sometimes I think it's completely unnecessary.
But I worry about where all of this is going.
That's my problem.
No, me too, definitely.
Okay, so that's more or less got us up to speed with the state of technology 2023.
Let's spend the rest of this conversation.
We've got about half an hour thereabouts to go, so we can do it within that time.
You're very big, and this is a surprise in some ways, was when I discovered it, when you told me.
You're very big into simulation theory.
If I just read a definition for those who don't know, and you can tell me whether you agree with this, whether it's right.
I found this online.
I didn't use ChatGPT.
I just did a Google search.
Simulation theory says that we are all likely living in an extremely powerful computer program like the matrix.
It sounds far-fetched, but Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom showed in 2003 that it's more probable than you might think.
Bostrom's seminal paper, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation question Mark, explains that future generations might have mega-computers that can run numerous and detailed simulations of their forebears.
In other words, ancestor simulations in which simulated beings are imbued with a kind of artificial consciousness.
The odds are that we are products of that simulation.
Do you believe that?
I absolutely wholeheartedly believe that, Howard, yeah, which I think surprises a lot of people.
But I think that really is through, I wouldn't say lack of understanding, people just don't understand it, but simulation theory.
So as you say, Nick Bostrom came out with his initial theories in 2003.
I was well embedded in the internet then.
So Above Top Secret is where I spent most of my time and some of the very old conspiracy things, even though Bob Blazar, etc.
And what came across or came into my radar very quickly was Nick Bostrom.
And it's actually really interesting.
So when we look at the simulation theory, firstly we have to understand that there's probably four, well, there is only really four scenarios.
So as humans, especially humans have access to computers, number one is that we will lose interest in simulating, which I find very, very unlikely, especially with VR, etc., the way that's progressing.
Number two is that we will never meet the point of technological simulation, so where we physically cannot simulate, but if you use an Oculus Rift or you've been on VR lately, again, I find that very, very, very unlikely.
Number three is that we will wipe ourselves out through nuclear events or something else that's catastrophic before we simulate, which may or may not be likely.
And number four is that we will get to the point of technological sophistication where we can simulate.
And if we do, and if number four is true, which I find to probably be very likely, considering I don't think we're many years away from that point, if not there already, then it would be very, very unlikely that we are the first people or humans to simulate.
And it would actually be far more likely that we are already in the simulation.
So at the moment we're talking about, aren't we simulating ourselves so that we can ultimately, in some kind of metaverse, live forever?
But what happens, you're saying, and this introduction that I read is also saying, what happens if some generation, some generation previous to us, I think is what I'm saying, has already created this and actually we are the simulation?
Yeah, so the really interesting thing.
So again, you know, being a conspiracy theorist since I was very young, and like I say, being on the internet at 12, 13 years old, reading into all of this, I'd like to think I'm reasonably well read and Eric von Daniken and the rest of it.
And one of the things that I came across when I was 19 was Zeitgeist by a guy called Peter Joseph.
And I'm not sure if you've seen that documentary, but at the time it was like one of the Bibles for conspiracy theorists.
And Peter Joseph starts off By talking about the sun god, and basically says that gods and religion were misinterpreted as sun gods, etc.
And he's actually come out since and said that he understands he was completely wrong on that.
But there was a lot of other conspiracies about 9-11, which I think is probably quite accurate, etc.
But the reason why I say this is because as I started traveling, so I'm very lucky, like I said, I say my eyes have been open to this since a young age, very lucky to have been to Iraq, to Syria, to Afghanistan, to Israel, spent a lot of time in Israel, going through these biblical sites.
And when you look at the history books, what they explain is actually the birth of something.
So the Big Bang, for example.
And if we look at that very quickly and we say, right, okay, so we've got God, whatever we interpret God to be, and God is going to build us a universe.
So he builds the earth and the universe in six days and the seventh day he rested.
We have to think about how God would build that universe.
And again, I'll come back to beliefing in a second.
But would he build it in a physical environment?
So for example, Howard, if you were God, then would you say, okay, build it in a physical environment in a shoebox and it's going to outgrow that in X amount of time?
Or would we build it in what we now know is a digital environment?
So something which we could expand with hard drives.
So I'm going to caveat this very quickly by saying that I don't believe we have the terminology to properly define this.
So at the moment, we're aware of a physical space, of a digital space.
We're now going into quantum, as we've just mentioned, quantum computing.
But for all we know, simulations could have been made in a post-quantum world, in a multiverse computation by a civilization that's got dimensional mastery.
So a bunch of different ways.
So when I say about would you build it in a physical world or a digital world, we may actually be building something seven times on from that.
But the point is that when you actually look at the history books, and the Bible is one of the oldest history books, then it explains everything that actually sits with the simulation theory quite well.
I.e.
the birth of something being built in an environment.
And now we're coming out with a lot of different things that are becoming more mainstream about multi-dimensions and that kind of stuff.
The only real feasible way of doing that would be in what we understand as, like I said, digital environment or whatever the next versions of those environments are.
So if you go for the multiverse idea, then that kind of accepts that we're already in a simulation because you can't do that any other way?
No, almost no other way.
And in fact, so again, there's been some really, really good research on this.
So I first came across Nick Bostrom 20 years ago.
He's, of course, done 20 years worth of work since.
And one of the interesting things was simulating the round worm.
So the round worm is a very small worm.
It's about a millimeter in size.
It's got 959 cells, 302 neurons, and it's got 94 body muscles.
And that was one of the first living things to be simulated, which has now been successfully done.
So that now sees virtual food, it has virtual offspring.
It operates in the exact same way as the real roundworm.
So how do we know if that knows if it's alive or not?
We don't, but one thing that we can do is we can look at things like a grid structure.
So if we look at games, simulations or anything, we know that it has to be built in a subatomic grid.
So something which is smaller than an atom.
So a bunch of scientists years ago on the fringe started measuring to see if this grid exists.
Because like I say, any game or any virtual environment that we know is built on this grid.
And they did that by looking at cosmic rays and the cosmic ray cutoff.
And this to me is fascinating because this validates that this grid system does exist, at least in their view.
So what they looked at was that when cosmic rays scatter out, if they go horizontal or vertical, they lose a certain amount of energy.
But when they go diagonally, they lose a lot more energy.
And the reason why is because at a subatomic level, they're actually zigzagging because they're having to follow the grid within the universe.
So they've proved, I think, beyond any doubt, really, that the cosmic grid exists.
And that, again, speaks to the simulation theory perfectly, really.
But there's a lot more in this as to how we perceive the world, how we perceive reality.
Obviously, perception is a reality of what we see.
And people say, well, there's no way we could simulate everything.
But in fact, we don't need to simulate everything.
We only need to simulate what people are seeing.
So if you think, how, if you had a, say, even a computer from 10 or 20 years' time and you walk around with it, that will be quite capable of simulating whatever you see.
Now, like we said earlier, bear in mind, as a human, you can only see something the size of a postage stamp.
The rest of it is all reasonably blurry peripheral that your brain makes up the rest of.
You can only hear from 20 hertz to a number of kilohertz, so you're not even hearing a lot that's around you.
You're not seeing radio waves, you don't see air, you don't see oxygen.
So in fact, what does it have to simulate?
Something that you see.
And you're electronic.
So really, when we talk about simulation, all it needs to do is give you a feed of electronic signals.
And that will be enough to make you believe that you're in a simulation.
Definitely.
Okay, if we are in a simulation, that would explain maybe, possibly it seems to me, some of the stuff that we describe, we think of as wondrous, maybe psychic, whatever.
Give you an example, happens all the time.
Sure, it's happened to you a lot.
Yesterday, I'm thinking to myself, I must contact my friend Michelle.
I haven't had any contact with Michelle for four months or so, and it's high time I did that.
About three hours later, Michelle's in America.
I get an email from Michelle.
Now, that may just be coincidence, but what if we were all part of the same simulation and data was spilling over between the simulation that she's part of and the one that I'm part of, or the subset, whatever it might be?
That would explain that strange, intuitive thing that happened.
Absolutely.
Yes, ESP.
So my dad was definitely not a conspiracy theorist.
My dad was a very well-skilled electrical, electrotechnical, electrome-mechanical engineer.
And my dad firmly believed in ESP and in fact believed that he almost mastered it, really, especially with his siblings.
So was always quite open to that and understanding that.
And again, speaks to the simulation theory.
So string theory, again, things being connected, like you say, yeah, completely, again, doesn't disprove the simulation theory in any way.
And in fact, I struggle to think of things that do.
So I have to have debates with this about my friends that are somewhat religious.
And again, it doesn't actually contravene or contradict any of the religious beliefs.
So if you look at what happened with Jesus And the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant, which there's a really interesting book on called The Manor Machine.
Again, it all ties into the simulation theory.
And one of the really interesting things that I find is that we have the periodic table, so we have a bunch of elements that we can use for specific things.
Indeed, we do.
But I don't think we've discovered a lot of stuff yet.
And I only look at games, it's a similar thing.
So if you look at the gaming environment, you collect tokens, you collect coins, you collect different things, you put two things together and it makes something else.
And again, it feels like we're in a more advanced version of that.
So yeah, it's really interesting.
And I think definitely speaks to that.
And one other thing that I would say quickly is that we have to think as well about how similar we are to computers.
Like I say, we're electronic, we're driven by a brain, and we effectively run different programs all day long.
So when you're young, you learn something, just as a computer learns something.
So you write some code.
And when you're young, however, one of the early things that you would have learned to do is send electrical signals around your body and route them to your legs.
And that's called walking.
So you then remember that sub-program, that sub-program gets stuck in your brain.
Now you can walk.
Similarly, you then create another sub-program that tells you how to balance and move your legs in a circular motion.
That's riding a bike.
So over time, being humans, we build all of these sub-programs up.
We build all of this knowledge up, again, not in a completely dissimilar way to a computer.
And then we can recall that data whenever we want.
So there's a bunch of similarities here.
And I'd say we're electronic, first and foremost, really.
If I was creating a simulation, though, and creating people like you and me, why would I program death into it?
It's interesting.
And that's one of the things that I've never really been able to answer with this.
And not through, let's say, lack of effort or lack of understanding, but coming to a similar question is my father's passed away.
He passed away 2016.
So if you then go to a psychic, then who are they actually communicating with?
Because if we believe in reincarnation, who decides how long that person stays in a specific environment where it's able to communicate with them?
And then who decides when they move on?
And really, it comes down to perception, time, etc.
I think that it's quite well documented, well definitely well philosophized that we cannot live forever and we don't know.
So we could be even one of the things that I kind of think is that we could be on a lunch break out in our real life.
So we could be post-nuclear apocalypse.
We could be living on something like the Eberkenezer in the Matrix.
And in our lunchtime, we could plug in and we could come and live our life as a human on the virtual world, which used to be our world, before we go back and live a pretty depressing life somewhere else.
We don't know.
So yeah, we don't know.
But what we do know is that things have to start, things have to end.
It's one of our laws of physics.
Nothing lasts forever.
What goes up must come down.
And I do think that part of that's probably built into it.
And again, if we get into reincarnation, that kind of stuff, maybe we're here to learn lessons before we go on to somewhere else.
And it will tie us into that.
As part of the simulation.
You know, if you think about it, when I was a kid, I always wanted to be a broadcaster.
I used to watch the TV and I used to see these continuity announcers, people like that.
I wanted to be one of them.
I wanted to be on air.
I never had any doubt.
Age four, if you'd asked me what I wanted to do, then I wanted to read the news on TV or be a continuity announcer.
Well, by and large, I got to do the things that I wanted.
You know, some of the experiences were not happy ones.
Some of them were incredibly happy ones, but I lived my program.
The thing that I programmed for, I got.
And that's happened to me a lot in my life.
If you believe in simulation theory, maybe we all have the capacity beyond the controller and the creator of the simulation to change the simulation that we experience.
100%.
Yeah, so we don't know how simulations are entwined.
We don't know if you're just running your own simulation, Howard.
In fact, the interesting thing is that how would I know that you're real?
So again, perception is reality, but I know how I think.
So I know what goes through my head.
I know my perception of reality.
But for all I know, you could be what some people, including Elon Musk, referred to as an NPC, a non-playable character.
So this could just be my simulation.
You could be living just in your simulation, where I'm just a simulated person who's talking to you.
We don't actually know.
But if you were a simulation, And I haven't been able to predict any of the things that you've said in this conversation.
But why would you, if I was a synthespian who's completely individual and again, programmed to seem random or programmed to respond in the same way.
I love that word synthespian.
That's an actor within the simulation.
Yeah, really, yeah.
So I'm not actually sure what the exact definition of it is, but like you say, it's an actor within the simulation.
So a computer-generated 3D character, effectively.
But I'm not sure what the absolute definition is if you look it up, but that's how it's well understood anyway.
And yeah, look, bear in mind, Hardy, you'll be able to have this conversation with ChatGPT in a few months or even a few years.
You'll be able to have a conversation which is indistinguishable.
So at the moment, we can detect if something's simulated.
So if we make a cup of coffee and that coffee tastes like milk, then we know that there's an error in the simulation.
So we'd be able to detect it.
At the moment, if you speak to AI, you can detect it because there's a bit of a delay.
Maybe we wouldn't have as fluid a conversation as we're having now.
But if you've ever seen Westworld, and especially the new version of Westworld, how far away are we from symphespians being indistinguishable to humans?
And I really don't think we're far.
If you look at a lot of the advances of Boston Dynamics and a lot of these other organizations that are building these things, I don't think we're a million miles away.
And also, one of the things that you say about simulations, that we could be in nested simulations, for example.
So one of the things the Bible says, if anybody's familiar with the terminology for Pete's sake, what we're talking about is St. Peter, who is effectively the gatekeeper to heaven.
And we know that we're not guaranteed to get into heaven.
I'll say heaven in inverted speech marks because I'm like, what is heaven?
Well, to me, again, if you read the Bible and you read what Jesus said, and I have to say, look, I went from being skeptical about religion from seeing Zeitgeist to then going to Israel.
And in fact, when you go to a place called Capernaum, you use the Bible as a guide.
So it talks about Jesus' house, talks about where he lived next To an olive press.
Now, I wouldn't say that I'm particularly traditionally religious, but I have studied a lot of these things and been to a lot of these places, and I do think that Jesus existed.
And again, if you look at what he says, he basically says there is a different world for you, i.e., heaven.
Learn the lessons that you need to learn here, but you're not guaranteed to get into heaven.
Which sounds to me like a different simulation or a different area of our simulation, that we need to be here to learn sufficient lessons before we become enlightened and get access to a different area of it.
So, again, I think a lot of it speaks to that.
And I think soon it will be indistinguishable, really, from reality.
I agree.
And what about those people like my mum, who in an era, and I've told the story before, but my dear late mum missed along with my dad every single day of my life.
But she told us from as early as we could understand how she nearly died when she was 10 years of age.
She had a very bad bout of pneumonia.
In those days, it could still kill you, but it nearly killed her.
The doctor said she will either come through this night or she won't.
And on that night, she had an experience of a beautiful place, more beautiful than anything we can imagine.
She often described it to us right up to when we lost her.
Trees and fields and wonderful beings.
And she said to them, I love this place.
And they said, you have to go back.
And she said, I don't want to go back.
I wonder how this ties into simulation theory.
It sounds to me like it could very easily.
100%.
Yeah.
So a simulation within a simulation, or for all we know, she's left a simulation and seen what we would understand to be the real world if we're not in a nested simulation.
So bear in mind that we could be in multi, multi, multi-levels of simulations.
So even when we dream, for example, when we dream, we're unconscious.
And I've always found sleeping and dreaming to be quite strange, actually, that you lay in a bed and you effectively unplug from the physical world.
And then a lot of this different stuff happens in your mind, which like we say is electronic, is effectively a computer.
So I find that very strange.
And yeah, so I've listened to a lot of near-death experiences.
And I do think that, yeah, maybe that's people leaving.
And again, I don't like to say our simulation because it sounds like I think we're in a game, we're in the Sims.
And I don't.
I just think that our physical environment is not how we perceive it.
I think that there's a lot of different things that we do.
So for example, if we look at our timeline, and this does science this question, if we look at our timeline from the beginning of Earth to where we are now, and we laid that across the football field, the time that we've actually had any type of technological advancement, or even if we look at the time from the ancient Egyptians up until now, that would be one thousandth of a blade of grass on that football field in terms of the timeline.
So for all we know, there's many other planets out there.
And if we look at the Drake equation, then we know that there's potentially many, many, hundreds of millions of other habitable planets out there.
Now, if one of those civilizations is a thousand years ahead of us or 10,000 years ahead of us, that's what we could perceive as God.
And I don't think that they would really be incapable of building multiple layers.
In fact, when you look at UFO experiences, people say they've gone into a UFO and it's expanded massively in size.
It's a 20-foot UFO, but when they've gone in there, it's the size of a football stadium.
And again, that could be bending space of time because space of time is only our perception.
So the point I'm making is that we perceive our environment to be our physical environment.
And some people will say you're talking absolute nonsense.
There is no afterlife.
We live now.
We die here, and that's it.
But people that have these type of experiences, like your mum, for example, and like a lot of people that have other near-death experiences, will say, no, there's definitely something else out there.
And again, I think that speaks to the simulation theory, because if there's something else out there, we cannot be in a single physical environment.
We must be in what, like I say, we would understand as a digital environment or four or five versions on.
So whether that's the omega point or something else, definitely.
Okay, coming to the end of it all now.
Does it make you feel, knowing what you know, having learned what you've learned, does it make you feel any better about this life and its fragility?
No, in short.
So I think that I'm somebody that has spent many, many hours watching QFO documentaries, researching this stuff, looking into string theory, quantum physics, quantum mechanics, etc.
And I think it's very, very important to switch off and not let the world, well, not let time pass you by.
So like I say, I've got two young kids.
I've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old.
And I think it's very important to separate any of this, which I don't think you'll ever know.
So if we knew that there was an amazing afterlife, which is much better than here, then people would be far more tempted to commit suicide and that kind of stuff.
So I think that we are stopped from peeking behind the curtain in a number of ways.
And I think it's very important to live in the here and now.
Absolutely.
So, no, I'm quite relaxed about it, to be honest.
I'd like to think there's something else, but I don't think we'll ever know what, if I'm honest.
I think that's a good point to park it, unless there's something I've missed, Mike.
Thank you very much for this.
I know that you're very busy.
Life is going to get increasingly busy, I think, from the conversation that we've had.
Is there the work that you've done on simulation theory, stuff like that?
If people want to learn more about you, is there a place where they can do that?
Not specifically from me, but I would definitely point people to Nick Bostrom, who I would say is the, as you quoted Nick Bostrom.
And I don't think we've spoken about Nick Bostrom before, but he is the lead philosophizer, I would say, on a simulation theory.
And what I would say is, look, this isn't a crazy out there conspiracy.
It's a lot of sensible people looking at physics, looking at electronics, looking at the human body and saying, look, this is actually probably far more likely than people think.
So yeah, like I said, some really sensible research, and Nick Bostrom is definitely a good place to start.
And Lex Friedman, but yeah, definitely good places, 100%.
Glad we had this conversation, Mike.
Take care.
Not quite.
Thanks a lot, Howard.
Anytime.
Mike Godfrey from Insinia Systems and a pretty deep dive into everything technological, good, bad, and indifferent.
And the idea that this may all be a simulation.
How do you know that I am real?
How do I know that you are real?
I don't know.
What is reality?
Sounds like a George Harrison song, doesn't it?
What is?
I've given up trying to figure that one out years ago.
All I know that I've had a life full of weird coincidences and some strange things have happened to me.
And to some degree, it's been guided, almost.
I don't know how or why.
If I'd been guiding it, then I'd have made a bit more money.
I'd have engineered that into it.
But it's been a pretty damned interesting ride.
And it's been better than working for all these years, as they say.
Okay, more great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
Please keep in touch with what I'm doing through my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of the Unexplained with Howard Hughes, the one with the logo on it and no other page.
Thank you for being part of that.
So, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And in the summertime up north here, and in the wintertime down south, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection