#2151 - Rizwan Virk

The Joe Rogan Experience by Joe Rogan Park Gas by Night All Day By The Way Diana Pasoka says hi. Oh cool, you know her? Yeah, I know her pretty well actually. Boy her theories are very very very interesting. Yeah. She's a strange person to talk to because you start like you start really considering some of the things she's saying. It's just all the UFO stuff. I go back and forth on the UFO stuff from it being complete bullshit to like maybe there's something there.

Right. I fluctuate throughout the day. Yeah. Well we can talk about that. You know I'm peripherally involved with him. Can you make a noise over there? Shake my golf. Yeah. You're peripherally involved with the Galileo Project at Harvard and the Seoul Foundation at Stanford which are like the two academic UFO research groups that are out there. You know Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard and Gary Nolan is running that.

You had Gary on your show. I have not but I have a communication with him. Okay. Talked him quite a bit. Yeah. I'm very fascinated by his work. I'm happy to talk about UFO stuff where it overlaps with simulation theories. So how did you get involved in this whole theory in the first place? Simul, explain to people your position if you don't mind on simulation theory. What do you think is going on? Yeah well so first question how did I get involved in this?

Right. So you know I was a video game developer in Silicon Valley and then I became an investor in the video game industry in my backgrounds in computer science and what happened was after I saw my last video game company back in 2016 so we're talking like you know seven years ago now eight years ago now and I put on a virtual reality headset and started playing a VR ping-pong game. All right now these headsets were even bigger than they are now and they were wired.

So there's no mistaking your in virtual reality but what happened was that the the ping-pong game was so realistic that for a moment my brain forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis 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 so the controller fell to the floor and I almost fell over. I had to do one of these double takes like oh wait I'm just in VR right?

So I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like the matrix, something that's so immersive that you would forget that you were inside a video game and so that led me to this idea of the simulation point which is a kind of technological singularity

but then I started to research things like quantum physics and some of the mysteries around you know the observer effect and quantum mechanics and then I started to look at all the world's religions and I realized that they're all kind of saying the same thing which is that there is no physical universe and so you know that led me to the conclusion that we are most likely inside some kind of a computer simulation or a massively multiplayer video game depending on how you

look at it. But where did that computer game, where did that simulation come from if we're inside of it? Well that's the big question right and there's two versions of simulation theory and you know I teach a class on this at Arizona State University probably the first college level class about simulation theory and it kind of pulls in science fiction, religion, philosophy and technology but one of the key distinctions I tell my students to make is it's not talked about a lot with

simulation theory is what I call the NPC versus the RPG versions of simulation theory. Okay. All right so NPC as you probably know means you know non-player characters within video games. So those are the AI's in the video game you know the bartenders the people you're beaten up the opponents all of that stuff but basically they're just code and they're AI then there's the RPG version which is that we are actually doing a role playing game right so you exist outside the game

and then you have a character or avatar inside the game so it's just like what we would consider an MMR PG today right except with more sophisticated technology and so in that case you know you get a little bit of a different answer than if you talk about an NPC only type of simulation right

because that's just running on a computer and we're all AI in that case. Now the two aren't mutually exclusive right in a video game like Fortnite or whatever World Warcraft you have NPCs and you have PCs or player characters right so you've got both of those things going on and so

depending on how you look at it you might come to different you know different answers about who's outside the simulation which would answer the question of who made the simulation right you know so in the first case you basically say that if we can get to the point where we can build these

simulations what I call the simulation point so I called that a kind of technological singularity now we've heard the term singularity mostly because of like AI and super intelligent AI right and you know AI is going to take over the world but the guy who defined the term was actually a

computer scientist who became a science fiction writer named Vermer Vinci in fact he just passed away like a month ago or something he was a real pioneer in like science fiction in the cyber punk kind of subgenre or so and so he said the singularity happens when technology increases exponentially

to the point where everything will be different for humans after that point now he gave like four different ways we could reach the singularity most of us talk about only one which is AI starts to become super intelligent and it grows exponentially and everything will be different but but I think

this this idea of the simulation point where we can create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality and I lay out like 10 stages in my book of all the technology we would need including brain computer interfaces like in the matrix right so or neuro link or neuro link right we're

getting there right we're very close we're at the beginning of that hole yeah and so that's stage eight stage seven and stage eight on the way to the simulation point and you know being able to read but also then being able to write memories as well and then have so the definition of the simulation

point is being able to create a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from physical reality with AI characters that are indistinguishable from biological characters so you know you wouldn't be able to tell you're talking to an NPC basically right we're getting closer to that already yes

yeah I mean there's like companies out there doing smart NPCs now inside video games uh right but what would be the difference between looking at what is possible in the future and making either a hypothesis or suggesting that that has already taken place right so that's kind

of the leap right that you need to make which is to say that if we can do it now let's imagine a civilization that was a million years ahead of us a thousand years ahead of us yeah I'm even 200 years ahead of us right but certainly a thousand years ahead of us so where will computers be in a

thousand years they would already have created these types of simulations right because if we can do it now 50 years ago we didn't know if we could do it we didn't know if computers could get to that point right today we're pretty sure we can get there in fact I'd say that I'm 70% sure that we

will get to the simulation point which means I think there's a 70% chance we're living inside a simulation um and so the point is if they already got there they created a whole bunch of simulations okay and you can't tell the difference whether you're in the real world or a simulated world right

so there's 99 of these there's one of these but you can't tell the difference so which one are you more likely in just statistically speaking now we're not even you know projecting the technology forward we're just saying it's more likely you're in one of the 99 than the one because there's so

many more of these right it's sort of if you can't tell the difference right if you can't tell the difference but there's so many things you have to think about right there's so many things you have to take into consideration one of them is we don't have a straight linear line from the moment that

we're born to the moment that we exist in currently the reason being is that we go to sleep every night right it's a weird thing we shut off every night and we wake up intermittently and you go back to bed maybe have to pee maybe you're thirsty you go back to bed and then you wake up again but when

you wake up you are just waking up like when I woke up this morning I don't know if this is the life I've always lived right I'm assuming it is because I have all these detailed memories of the past I see my dog he exact he reacts exactly the way he always does you know I see my wife I see my

kids I see my house it's the same house that I remember but I'm not sure I just woke up right I'm a little foggy already it just exists in your memory it just exists in your memory and so this might be the first day of my life right if suppose that you can implant false memories right so this

was a popular topic for Philip K. Dick right yes movies like total recall even in Blade Runner you know I interviewed his wife while I was researching you know my book he was a wild boy he was an interesting guy right yeah and he said some interesting things in fact all the way back in 1977

in Metz France at a sci-fi convention he said it is a pretty famous quote he said we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is if some variable is changed some alteration occurs in our reality right and that's become kind of a famous quote in the simulation

world but if you listen to the rest of the quote he says well we would basically rerun the same events and we would change some variables right and we would have a sense of deja vu like maybe we've already done this right maybe I've you know talked to you before right in a different run of the

simulation right and this idea like after I wrote my first book on this topic simulation I bought this is this idea wouldn't leave me that well if you can run one simulation you can certainly run it multiple times in fact that's what we would do if we were running a simulation of weather we wouldn't

just run it once we would run it multiplies and if we were doing simulation of whatever right pandemic anything name it we would change the variables and we would go forward and so you know when I interview Tessa you know Phil Kiddick's last wife she said that he came to believe this was really happening right that someone was altering with our reality and they would change a few variables and rerun the simulation forward so now we're getting pretty deep in the rabbit holes this is the

topic of my second book which is called the simulated multiverse this idea that each of these timelines could be like a different run of the simulation itself so that gets a little weird at that point right because now we're saying that time isn't the same thing right that we think it is so with

the simulation of how about this we're saying that space doesn't really exist it basically gets rendered for us like a video game and then with this second idea we're saying that time doesn't really exist because what you remember could have been either implanted memories or it could be a

specific run of the simulation right so if you run it again maybe things are slightly different the second time you run it like so if Philip Kiddick came to believe that his novel the man in the high castle which was turned into a pretty cool series I don't know if you've if you've seen it

it was on Amazon a few years ago but in that in the novel and in the series Germany in Japan one world war two and so you see it America that's been divided like the East Coast is run by the Germans the West Coast is run by the Japanese and you see this kind of fascist type world and so

you know he later came to believe that this actually happened and somehow the simulator's re-ran it again and the current timeline is one that was allowed to go forward like you know further forward than where that one might have ended and so he says that at some point all these

memories came flooding back to him of this other timeline he called it he used this Greek word it's called an NM nieces which means a loss of forgetfulness right so he said we might be able to remember these other runs of the simulation so anyway that gets us into you know this whole idea

of is the past what we think it is right that's I think with the question you're asking right because you're like if I just remember XYZ is that what actually happened or is it just a representation of the past in the present you know and so when I started looking into the quantum

physics side of it I found something really weird we'll talk we can talk about the observer effect but this was like even weirder than that and it was something proposed by John Wheeler who was at Princeton with Einstein and you know he was a bit younger than you know Niels Bohr and Einstein

and all these kind of forefathers of quantum mechanics and he came up with several things that are what we're talking about but one of them is the delayed choice experiment or the cosmic delayed choice experiment which puts into doubt this idea of the past and since we're talking about the past

let's let's go into this now if you don't mind okay so imagine there's a something like a quasar and that's a billion light years away from us right and the light is coming from that quasar to here so it's going to take a billion years to get here because it's a billion light years away

and then suppose there's something in the middle like a black hole that's in the middle or a galaxy something that's very gravitationally big and so suppose the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object and suppose that object is like a million light years away from us it's

a lot closer but it's still a million light years away so the decision about when the light goes to the left or to the right would have to be made when right it would have to be made in the past about a million years ago because it takes light from that let's say it's a black hole it's a

million light years away so it takes a million years for the light to reach earth and we can measure whether it went to the left or to the right well it turns out that decision is in the past as we think of it but what the delayed choice experiment tells us is that that decision is made now when we

measure that light wind that little telescope suppose we have two telescopes one picks up on the left one picks up on the right and it's when we do the measurement and until we do that measurement both of those possibilities still exist so we have these two possible pasts a million years ago right

the light went to the left or to the right but which one happened isn't decided until the measurement is done today so this is like Schrodinger's cat on steroids right I'm not sure I totally understand this why is the decision made when you measure it well that's what the experiment

you know kind of showed with quantum mechanics just like okay let's start with Schrodinger's cat because it's a simpler simpler version so Schrodinger's cat is this experiment where there's a there's a cat in a box theoretical experiment nobody's killing any cats and there's some poison in there and there's some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of setting off the poison and a 50% chance that it won't let's say after an hour or so and so after an hour the chances that the cat is dead

or alive is 50% right because the 50% chance but what the observer effect and what quantum mechanics is telling us is that both of those possibilities exist the cat is both alive and dead until somebody looks at that box right the observer in this case and so until then the cat is in a state of super position okay and this is what makes quantum mechanics so weird right this is why you know Richard Feynman Nobel Prize winner said nobody understands right quantum mechanics and Niels Bohr said if

you're not shocked by this then you haven't understood it okay because to us the cat has to be alive or it has to be dead and we don't know until we see we don't know until we see but it's only one in common sense tells us it's one of those right but quantum mechanics and but through the double

slit experiment and the observer effect says both of those possibilities exist in the present until the time when someone looks and and someone measures that result so then we say the super position which is two states comes down to one state so the cat is both alive and dead

and then when somebody measures it it's either alive or dead and we're in one of those states right okay right I kind of understand what you're saying but isn't it really just that we don't know until we open the box and it's not that the cat is both alive and dead the cat is either alive

or dead we just haven't figured it out yet until we open the box that's what it would seem like right that would be like common sense point of view right but what all the physicists have been telling us now for almost a hundred years right going back to the 1920s when quantum mechanics first

started to get formalized is that that's not actually the case that what happens is you have this probability wave and that there are different probabilities of the cat being alive or dead now of course they weren't talking about cats that was the cat is maybe too simplistic it's like a placeholder

you know I'm saying like yeah it's it's a it's a way for somebody to think about this at a high level so a Schrodinger who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics through his wave equation he basically came up with this because he thought the whole idea was ridiculous he's like look you

can't have a cat that's both alive and dead right right so so this is a ridiculous experiment except it's become the the way in which we explain this weird effect about quantum mechanics and the weird effect of quantum mechanics is things can be both moving and still at the same time which is

superposition right right or they can be in two different states right could be moving and still could be alive or dead or they're they're really talking about particles so then it could be like left rotated or right located or right rotated so you've got all these properties but they can be indifferent because they can be in different states and this is the basis for quantum computing by the way you probably heard about yes new quantum computers that I have but I totally don't understand

it what so it's the same thing as Schrodinger's cat whereas we have a bit of information right so what are the values in a bit can have it's like zero or one that's it that's like the basic unit of information and the bit can only have one of those values like on my iPhone or my you know laptop

if you look down all the way down into hardware you could look at the registers like when I was when I was at MIT we actually built a computer in class from scratch you'll see there's some voltage that says this is a one or this is a zero right that's it all the computing everything we're doing

with video streaming like all that stuff comes down to having a bit that can be either a zero or a one and has to be one or the other can't be both right so quantum computing has these things called cubits okay cue you be it yes cubits which a cubit is like Schrodinger's cat it doesn't just

have a value of a one or a zero it is in superposition superposition means a superset of all the positions that are possible so how many possibilities are there in in a bit to right zero and one so a cubit is a superposition of a bit which means it has both values zero and one until

someone measures that bit and so theoretically that's what allows quantum computers to solve problems that are that grow exponentially that are really big and we're still in the early stages but if you think of an exponential growth problem like like cracking encryption it can be done by

a regular computer you can set up your laptop to crack it'll take like a thousand years or something right because you have to go through every single possible value so if you have 64 bits that's like two to the 64 values which is which is huge in fact there's an old story about the Indian king

and the wise man who played chess that illustrates the story of how big that number gets when you have exponential growth so there's a king who like to play chess and no one wanted to play chess with him anymore because he you know he kept winning and finally there's this wise man he's like

please play chess with me and the wise man says okay I'll play chess with you if you if I win for the first square in the chess board you give me one grain of rice and then the second square in the chess board you give me you double that two grains of rice and you double that to four

grains of rice and six grains of rice so we're doubling and each square right kings like okay sure you know the no big deal this is the bunch of rice right and so it turns out when the wise man won by the time you get to two to the 64 because there's 64 squares on the chess board that basically

it was more rice than would fit in all of India right it that's an exponential problem it just grows so fast and the reason it grows is there are too many possibilities right but now this new thing called a qubit's coming along and the qubit has both possibilities at the same time

so if you have 64 bits and you take all the possible values of those 64 bits you've got the same number of possibilities as the grains of rice we talked about it it's two to the 64 it's a very big number it's 18 quintillion right is the number there's a game called no man sky I don't know if

you ever played it no so it was it became famous because there were it was one of the first games to have an almost infinite number of planets that was this the game where it just creates a universe yeah it's kind of boring I heard yeah it was kind of boring at first I mean I haven't played it

in a while I just kind of looked at it but it procedurally generates everything for you because there's no way a team of like I was in the video game industry right there's no way a team could create 18 quintillion worlds in turns out that's exactly the number of worlds they have in

that game because that is what 64 bits that's the biggest number you can get if you use 64 bits okay so come back to exponent that's exponential growth it's too big and so with with a quantum computer theoretically and these are pretty new right now right Amazon has one Microsoft has one

IBM has one that you can actually program online Google has their own everyone's trying to figure out how to make these qubits stable and work but the basic idea and I don't know what number we're up to for a while it was like you could only have four bits qubits kind of like going back to the old

you know when we were young the you know the the apple two or whatever came out and before that there were these you know small eight-bit processor-based kits that people would assemble and they just couldn't have a lot of data because they just didn't couldn't keep track of that many bits

and that's where quantum computers are today but the idea is if you can have 64 qubits you can instantaneously solve a problem that is exponential because you can explore all of those at the same time and then when you measure the result it's oh no nobody knows exactly how this works

but the two explanations okay coming back sorry I don't kind of let's wondering a bit coming back to Schrodinger's cat we say there's two possibilities right so with 64 qubits there's two to the 64 possibilities if they're all in superposition they have all the possible values of it and and so

basically when you measure that it brings it back and so physicists call this the collapse of the probability wave so there's a probability of all these possibilities and then it comes down to one and that's sort of the best one of the accepted ways that people think this whole thing works

but nobody totally knows so another guy who was John Wheeler's grad student in at Princeton came up with another idea and we've heard about this idea from the superhero movies right and this is the multiverse idea right yeah and so basically he said that if you've got Schrodinger's cat

what happens is you're splitting the universe into two different universes in one of them the cat is alive and another one the cat is dead right so that's the multiverse idea is that when we measure it we only see one of those two because we're in this universe but if we happen to be in this other

universe the cat would have been dead right the cat is alive here and so that creates a whole series of possibilities when you the and which are being used now in superhero stories all the time right you've got your different versions of Batman your different versions of Superman yeah

spot yeah the famous Spider-Man meme where you have like the Spider-Man all kind of pointing at each other yeah right and they have the different actors so that idea has started to catch on now it's what I like to call it's past the 10-year-old test right and the 10-year-old test is when a

scientific idea gets out there so much that even 10-year-olds can kind of understand it because of superhero movies or because like like in the 1930s when people they were trying to explain Superman like how does Superman get his powers you say oh he came from another planet

right he came from a planet called Krypton right so even a 10-year-old in the 1930s could have understood that but in the 1730s like you couldn't say that then wouldn't know what the heck you're talking about right right right and so that idea kind of diffused through society and so that's

happening now with the multiverse idea too it's kind of diffusing you know through society in this way through popular culture you know and media narratives and stuff so that's the other explanation for how all this weirdness quantum weirdness works which is it's the multiverse and so people

said how can a quantum computer theoretically solve a problem that would take thousands of years for a regular computer to solve and one explanation a guy named David Doich out at Oxford says well because it's looking at all the possible values of the bits there's that many different universes

and it's computing and all of those universes instantaneously and then it's bringing back the value that you want at the end and that becomes your answer so I think we've gotten a little bit away from the original question it seems like that's inevitable with the subject

yeah this subject does tend to take you down you know many many different rabbit holes yeah and I think the original question was about memory right and how do we know that the memory so the reason I went down this rabbit hole on the quantum physics stuff and

the multiverse which by the way that's the subject of I wrote a whole second book on simulation there he just for that which is the simulated multiverse because the reason scientists like this multiverse idea is that mathematically you can figure out how the equations work in all

these different worlds you know whereas with the the first idea which is the Copenhagen interpretation you have you have all these possibilities you have a probability wave and then suddenly you're down to one and nobody can explain that mathematically nobody can say how does

the collapse occur like there's no little equation you can pop into and so that's why it's called observer effect and it's considered a big mystery like is it the act of observation is it the act of measurement right so all these physicists are debating with each other right and so they don't

like the Copenhagen interpretation because it seems to rely on consciousness or some kind of an observer and scientists kind of hate that right they hate to talk about consciousness being real and we'll get into the whole religious aspects of the simulation hypothesis in in a little bit

so they're like well this one's nice because it's the mathematics all work the multiverse idea but the problem with the multiverse idea is that it's not what scientists like to call parsimonious which means that what's happening is there's a new universe splitting off like all the time

right every time there's a quantum I mean we're talking about quantum decisions right we're not really talking about big things like cats we're talking about little decisions that occur within an nanosecond right right and so every time there's a decision you're splitting off to new a new

physical universe so think about now we're talking exponential growth but on steroids right yeah because it's just infinite it just keeps going right and that's that's kind of a weird concept that there would be so many physical universes being created and so you know where I came out in this subject is well guess what simulation hypothesis gives you a way to look at both of these a framework that makes it makes sense right I mean this is what people say when they look at quantum

mechanics they say make it make sense right right because the cat should be alive or dead how can it be both right and so when you think of information and you think of the simulation idea the core of it is that the world is not physical okay this table seems pretty physical right right but if you go and you look inside it's mostly empty space something like 90 some percent maybe 99 percent and then you go to the atoms and you look inside those and it's mostly empty space right and there's

these electron clouds and stuff but yeah except for the nucleus it's mostly empty space and the problem is like these Russian dolls if you keep looking inside they keep looking for this thing called physical

matter and they can't find it like it's not really there it's like you go to the the very smallest of the Russian dolls and the only thing they can find is information and so John Wheeler who I talked about earlier you know he plays an outsized role in in at least my explorations of simulation

theory he came up with a phrase and his phrase was it from bit so if there's something that's an it physical object like this cup or this table that if you just keep keep looking down you have a microscope that just keeps going down he goes in the end the only thing you find are particles

but what the heck are particles he said well the only thing that particles really are is a series of answers to yes no questions so it's like does the particles been up does it's been down it's got like you know various different polarities and things but so he said in the end the only thing you

have are bits of information because that's a bit right every single decision is a bit yes or no one or zero that's like the fundamental unit of computation that's how we you know like I said stream video everything else and so he said everything that's an it is actually from bits of

information and there's a whole new there's a whole new kind of field within physics which is called digital physics right so in the past you know physics was about physical objects moving around and so digital physics is about information like what happens to information in the universe does it

get destroyed in a black hole does it get created so you have instead of conservation of momentum and you know conservation of energy you have conservation of information so it's like a different way of looking at the physical world and you look at as a computation rather than looking at as

physical objects moving around like in classical physics right yeah the problem is like we do live in a physical world as far as we can tell but then if you measure the actual things in the physical world then you get to this weirdness right exactly you get to

this weirdness down at the bottom level the very core of it all like what is what is going on as far as we can measure right and there's a limit like we can only measure up to the smallest unit right which is called like the plonk but as we go deep but we get less answers and it gets more

weird it gets more weird and it starts to look less like the physical world exists and more like it's a bunch of information that gets rendered as we observe the world or as groups of people observe the world have you ever taken this back as far as you can and like try to figure out like

what created this or what possibilities could have created this or was there ever a physical world well that's a good question so where I ended up with this was looking at how the world gets rendered as you observe it like for me my background is as I said a computer scientist and a video game

designer developer is that that's pretty much how we render video games right so if you and I are in the same our avatars are in the same field or the same room about to shoot each other in a video game we're not really in the same room are we right you're rendering it on your screen and I'm

rendering it on my screen right right and so there's information that's coming from the server and then what happens is we render only the part that we can see right only that that view around your avatar you could be first person point of view you could be like kind of hovering over your

character or like many video games do that these days like a kind of a third person or second person point of view but the only pixels you need to render on my computer are the ones that my avatar can see and the only ones you need to render on your computer are the ones your avatar can see

and those get cached on the server and so they get sent out and so it's an optimization technique right there's no way in the 1980s like when I was growing up we had you know the Apple 2 computers or whatever there's no way you could render like a full 3d you know world or a full

3d game like like we play today and so what happened was we learned not only did the computers get faster but we learn optimization techniques so everything in computer science comes down to optimization usually like physicists are happy just saying yeah it's infinite but without really

wondering what that means but with computer science you only have limited resources typically and so you need to figure out how to compute something with those limited resources and so video game rendering to me is a case of optimizing so that it looks like there's a shared physical

world but there really isn't right because it's being rendered on each of our our own computer right and so but the rule is only render that which you can see now when I started to look at this weirdness in quantum mechanics which is saying render only that which is observed or measured

depending on how you look at it but even if you measure it somebody's got to look at that measurement before you know it was actually measured right so it's the same kind of thing going on in my opinion quantum mechanics is ends up being a optimization technique for rendering of the

physical world from the information that lives below so that's kind of the one big implication of simulation theory that that I think is very important and actually the idea that the universe's information is not that controversial so just I was in London this summer over at the

Cambridge University spending a little bit of time doing some AI research and I ran into this Nobel Prize winner physicist from like the 70s and so I we were talking simulation theory of course and you know I said well one of the key assumptions here is that the world is information

and he said yeah that's not controversial in physics at all anymore like it might have been once upon a time but then the second part the second assumption that comes up in simulation theory is that the world is rendered like a video game and that the world is a hoax it's some kind of a hoax

like it's not really real right that's the other assumption that physicists don't necessarily agree with but that's the other part of simulation theory what's the argument against it against simulation theory against to fit like that it doesn't physically exist if they disagree well they

don't disagree necessarily that it doesn't physically exist they just disagree that on how does it that it this thing that does that is information gets rendered for us right that's like we're talking different languages for them right even though quantum mechanics is telling us all this weird stuff

there's still I think often taking a classical view classical mechanical view of the world of physical objects moving around and that's all it is right so you know there's arguments that people make against the idea that we live in a simulation and the first is you know the

same argument that you know there was a famous guy named Bishop Berkeley the city of Berkeley's named after him right I think it was George Berkeley or he was a bishop in the UK and he came up with this idea of idealism you know this philosophical idea that the world doesn't really exist

it's only in the mind and there was this other guy I think it was Johnson you know said how do you refute that and he kicks a rock and he goes that's how I refute it see it's physical it's there right and so that's you know the first common sense way people try to refute the idea but of

course that's not what the physicists are saying the physicists are the one telling us that the world doesn't really exist that it consists of information and space time gets constructed out of that information right so that's that's like one of the biggest I think issues that the

another way that people try to try to push back on the idea simulation theory is they say well it's not really falsifiable right so I can't design an experiment that proves we are not in simulation so this touches on the boundary issues of science like where does science end

right and where does philosophy begin where does metaphysics begin where does religion begin and those lines are actually fuzzier than you might think right because there's been a debate over that for a long time now for hundreds of years about what is scientific and what isn't right

and things like you know UFOs and paranormal phenomena and all this stuff you know gets kind of pushed out beyond that boundary but so one definition that a guy named popra came up with was if it's not falsifiable it's not scientific right meaning if you can't prove that it's false the

problem with that is there are lots of things that we can't prove that they're false but we can find some evidence that these things actually you know happen or that these things exist like a couple hundred years ago there were stories of rocks falling from the sky and all the scientists like in

Paris said although that's just bullshit right that's just a bunch of peasants out in the countryside we know there's no rocks falling from the sky why because we know there's no rocks in the sky our science tells us there's no rocks up there so how the hell could they be falling from the sky

so that's kind of a not really a falsifiable thing how can you prove there's no rocks in the sky you really can't but you can prove and eventually they did because they got a whole there was some huge meteor storm and you know outside of Paris and some guys went out to investigate and

there were thousands of witnesses that saw this thing and then eventually you know they looked at some of the artifacts some of the physical evidence and then eventually they changed their model their cosmological model about the universe and so I think it's the same thing with simulation

theory even even though you can't prove we're not in a simulation because the simulation could be so good you know like the matrix was pretty convincing at first right but the simulation could be so good that you can't necessarily tell but at the same time you can design experiments which might

indicate to you that there's something going on like this video game rendering idea and there are folks out there you know trying to trying to run experiments to try to to try to show that this is really what's happening with quantum mechanics is that like a video game

this whole world is being rendered for us you know information being rendered just like a video game and the effect that consciousness has on this world so consciousness is the the thing that we're using to measure or the thing that we're using to interact with whatever possibilities exist

right and so that in the RPG version right this is why I like to make the distinction mm-hmm between the RPG version and the NPC version so in the RPG version we are plugged in right like Neo in the back of the head or with a virtual reality headset or some technology yet

to be developed right and so when you play a video game right it's not enough that the pixels are there I mean you you basically are watching that game right as the player and when you're not watching what happens you just turn it off right you turn off your computer what happens well

there's still the information going on on the server maybe other people are playing right but it doesn't need to render it at that point it's just a server can keep track of where everything is so what we did when we created video games we would you know send down information and in fact

you can then turn around and do something very interesting like if you're a level 30 player right and I'm a level 2 player our avatars could be standing right next to each other and one could see the dragon and one might not be able to see the dragon because maybe we don't

have that ability in the game we're not high enough level but the server logic is deciding that so consciousness then becomes the player in that model of simulation theory and it renders the world for us and it turns out that is very similar to what the world's religions have been telling us

right not just one or two of the world's religions like when I wrote my book the simulation hypothesis I gave it a subtitle of why AI quantum physics and eastern mystics agree we're in a video game and I was thinking primarily of the eastern mystics like you know in the Hindu and Buddhist

traditions and the yogis and they talk about the term Maya most most people have probably heard that term in karma and all these different terms but Maya means illusion right that's how it gets translated it's like an ancient Sanskrit word and so these mystics are telling us that the world

isn't really real it's a kind of illusion but if you really look at the definition of that word Maya it means something more like a carefully crafted illusion right it's almost like if you go to a magic show and you you know the guy's not really sawing that woman in half okay but you kind of

agree to suspend your disbelief because that's what makes the whole thing fun right watching a magic show or watching a special effects you know you know Blade Runner 2049 the car is not really flying those are just CGI right but we agree to that to a certain extent as we go into that world

and we become immersed in that world and so what you know the mystics in the eastern traditions have been telling us is that we agree to basically go into this illusory world in order to have these experiences right sometimes people say well what's the purpose of the simulation and I say

well why do you play video games and why do you play video games fun fun is one two is to try to have experiences that you probably can't have right outside of the game like even Grand Theft Auto right you're not gonna go out there and do all that crazy stuff in the real world some people might

but right most people wouldn't and you're not gonna I can't fly on a dragon and kill orcs right as much as I'm at one with no real world consequences right right with no real world exactly so that's one of the reasons what but there are consequences within the game right and for

the characters in the game right for the NPCs that you're killing right those are all real consequences within the game but when you look at it from outside the game and so like the eastern mystics have been telling us this and turns out in the Judeo Christian Islamic traditions

the Abrahamic religions they've also been telling us this that the world is Maya and they use metaphors back then right so you know all these religions came about a couple thousand years ago and so they had to use metaphors that were understood by the people back then right and so they

used whatever the metaphor of the dream was was a key metaphor that the world is like a dream or that the soul puts on the body like a set of clothes and that when you die you take off these clothes and then you're back to the soul whatever that happens to be they don't really define what that

is in fact they use the exact same metaphor like in the Bhagavad Gita they use this clothing metaphor and then Rumi who's become popular in the west and was a was an Islamic Sufi you know a poet but also mystic he used the exact same phrase right he said you put on the body

you put like a like a series of clothes and so they use that metaphor to try to describe something which is the second part of the idea the simulation hypothesis the first idea was the world is information that gets rendered and the second part is the world is some kind of a hoax that we are

a part of for whatever reason and so in the in the in the traditions over time they've tried to update these metaphors and they've tried to use new technology to describe the metaphors because that's how we can as modern people we can understand it so about a hundred years ago there was a guy

named Swami Yogananda he came over from India he was like one of the first Indian yogis swamis to really live in the US and he wrote a book called autobiography of a yogi or if you ever read it oh you read it oh great yeah in the 60s it was like the book one of those books that

everybody passed around yeah and Steve Jobs you know it was his favorite book at his funeral he gave everybody or his memorial service he gave everybody a little brown box they went home and opened the box and they found a copy of autobiography or yogi in there but so Yogananda came over about a

hundred years ago and he tried to update this old metaphor and what was new technology back in the 1920s it was movies movie projectors where he said the world is like a movie projector right you're playing these parts the actors are playing the parts on the screen and things are happening to them

but really the actors aren't necessarily dying it's the characters that are suffering you know within the game within the movie itself and so he used that metaphor as a way to try to explain this this ancient religious idea that's at the core of every single religion which is that the

world as we see it is not really real and there's a real real world beyond this world and so he updated the metaphor to use movie projectors and you know if you've ever been we've all been in movie theaters if you look away from the the screen you know you can kind of see the flickering

of the light right and you can kind of see everybody so engrossed in it that they're not looking around they don't know what's going on other than you know maybe I have in some popcorn or something and so today I think we need to update those metaphors right particularly for younger generation

who spent like as much of their time and you know things like Fortnite or Roblox when they were younger as avatars if we use the the metaphor of a massively multiplayer online game and I think Yogananda if you were alive today in fact my latest book which I wrote after the simulation books

because it was the 75th anniversary of autobiography of a Yogi a couple years ago and Harper Collins India asked me to write this book about you know what can you learn from autobiography of a Yogi and there's all these weird stories in there of like you know some guy materializing a palace in the

Himalayas I don't know where right you've got levitating saints you've got guys by locating disappearing all kinds of crazy shit going on right and I said well you sure you want me to write this book you know I'm an entrepreneur and and a computer scientist they said yeah because we want

you to use your technology metaphors like the simulation I thought this is to explain this stuff and so if Yogananda were alive today and I wrote this in my new book called Wisdom of Yogi I would what he would say is it's like a movie but where are the actors and we're also the audience

and we have a script and we're kind of playing the script but we can change the script if we want what does that sound like it sounds like a massively multiplayer online role playing game you know so I think that that metaphor is a great way to try to explain this idea of the soul and the body

you know within the religious traditions that's the RPG version of simulation I thought this is and how do you go through life with this information does this this information affect the way you feel about things on a day to day basis like if you have these theories and you have this concept in your

mind of the true nature of the universe of reality itself yeah how does that work with the physical carbon tissue you know how do you how do you how do you deal with that well so the way that I like to think of it and you know originally I was just kind of putting these concepts very happy

like this this seems like something that would freak people out to the point where they would kind of get like so much existential angst and it's so bizarre yeah that it would be hard to just like be present but you seem very present right because it gets back to how you think about

if it's an NPC game it would freak people out right right we're just np this is like the materialist kind of you right right which is while the computer's on you're here computer gets shut off excuse me everybody's gone but in the RPG version it's a little bit different right so when you

when you play a game you know when I was a kid we used to play Dungeons & Dragons when I was a teenager and you have a character sheet and you'd like roll your dice and you'd say that I'm going to be an elf or I'm going to be human and my occupation is a wizard or a barbarian right and

then you roll the dice and you get all these like different attributes like charisma intelligence whatever right whatever they were I don't even remember all of them now right dexterity all of these things that help you in some way and it's like you're choosing to play this game in this

illusory world and I believe that this is similar to what happens to us when we come into this world if in the RPG version right that we end up choosing a character with a set of parents right and a set of strengths and weaknesses and more than that like a storyline things that we might want to do

and we're free when we play the game we're free to make different choices if we want within the game but you've got kind of these challenges or quests right what makes a video game interesting or fun so there's a guy who was the founder of Atari or if you ever met him Nolan Bushnell

but he was pretty much the the grandfather of the video game industry you know he created pong you know back in the day and then created Atari and he said there was a rule for how to make a game interesting he said make it easy to play but difficult to master right because if it's not

easy to play people are gonna throw it away and they're gonna play but if it's easy to master they're gonna play for a little while and then they're gonna go right but if you make it easy to play but difficult to master that keeps people playing the game and so I think if you take this

view you can view the whole the whole world particularly your life in your story as a series of quests and challenges things that come up for you that you may or may not be able to you know achieve the first time around because we have difficulty levels don't we in games right some people

have an easier you know they want to play the game where life's easy other people want to play the game where life is really tough like actors when do they win Academy Awards right tough roles yeah exactly tough roles right the ones that really suffer typically to yeah right and you know

uh Swami Yogananda and a lot of the Eastern mystics will you know say that suffering is the nature of this world right that's why we're here is to experience this uh but even in the in the western traditions there's a similar idea so I started to look up you know different traditions in Islam

in Islam in the Quran there's like a whole series of verses and they say we have set up this world as a pastime as a game for you as a sport you know this world is really uh they use this Arabic word El Garuri which means in a delusion but it means like an enjoyable delusion sort of

enjoyable in quotes because depends on what you enjoy right like getting in and playing a really tough role maybe what you enjoy but that's not fun for the character to go through all that crap that they have to go through right and so I think we can view the world as a series of

quest and challenges now the next question is well what's the nature of the game right I don't believe the game is Grand Theft Auto that's not the type of game we're playing so I think we can turn to you know people that have died near death experiences I don't know if you had any on your show

you may have over the years but there was a guy named Daniel Brinkley who wrote a book called Save By The Light back in the 90s he got struck by lightning and this is how I first heard about this thing which is called the Life Review and you know a lot of near death experiences they have

they report you know these series of stages of things that happen to them like they're floating above their body they go through a tunnel of light and we've heard all of this but the most important part for me in these stories and you have not thousands of people right you can just

go on YouTube and listen to listen to any of these near death experiences but what what Daniel called this this thing called the Life Review was he called it a holographic panoramic review of your life and and what that means and other near death experiences reported this maybe about 20

percent of them that you go through every single moment that you ever lived in like this virtual reality you know three-dimensional panorama but you see it from the point of view of everybody else right so if you were mean to someone if you stabbed someone or in Daniel's case he was in special

forces in Vietnam and he actually killed people he said he had to experience what it was like to you know get the bullet and then more than that experience what happened after that guy died his wife you know the guy who died his wife and children what kind of suffering they experienced so it's like you're reviewing like after a football game right or after a match you might sit there and review on the screen what happened right except this screen is like you know fully immersive the

best VR you could ever have it's like you're reliving the moment so a couple years ago I was involved with a startup in Silicon Valley and we took a game like League of Legends you probably heard a League of Legends like the most popular at least it was eSports game right and you've got all these

guys on a field but pretty much you play on a 2D screen right so we made it so you could replay the game but you would put on a virtual reality headset and it would seem like you were on you know on the field in League of Legends and you could replay from any point of view same with counter-strike

global offensive was the one that you know I was thinking of because in that game you're it's a first person shooter so you're like shooting people and so literally you could go back and replay that game from the point of view of the person you shot right and so when I was experiencing this

it was reminding me of you know all these these things these near-death experiences have been telling us about this life review and as an engineer and computer scientist my question is always well how does that work I mean if you could replay every single moment in your life even the moments

when you weren't there right including like what happened to this guy's wife and what happened to their children somebody has to record all that stuff right because how are you going to replay it right if it's not being recorded so you know perhaps you know this whole game is being recorded

just like we do in fact on YouTube you know the most five-footed content other than the Joe Rogan experiences his video games content is like the replay I remember mine FU when he was like three years old like before he was even going to school he would say to his father my brother

I want to watch Star Wars my brother was like you want to watch the movie no I want to watch that man and that woman play the Star Wars game on YouTube right it was like he was just watching them replay a recording of the video game on YouTube and so this life review thing which is at the

crux of near death experiences I think gives us a clue and an interesting clue which ties back to your question to me which is how do you go you know how do you live with this stuff and I say well what if all of this is being recorded and you're making choices and you're going to have to review it

afterwards like the concept of when you die exactly same Peter reviews your life that's right so in the Christian traditions you have same Peter you have the book of life right which you know theoretically depending on who you ask the recording angel has written down

you know whether you get in a heaven or not yeah reviewing your life well it turns out in the Islamic traditions they get much more explicit about what that is they call it the scroll of deeds okay now of course remember two thousand years ago they had to call it something people would

understand the scroll of deeds there's two angels and you've probably seen like you know in the movies in the animated movies they'll have like the angel in the devil that comes out of the Islamic traditions right and so there's these two angels they call the Kierman Kathabin and they're sitting

down and writing now one's writing down all your good deeds and one's writing down all your bad deeds and what what it says in the tradition and you know when I delve into these different traditions it's not so much to say okay this this religion is right and that one isn't but to say what's in

common across all these religions because that that part is probably right if these guys are coming to that independently all the other stuff maybe you know I won't you know I won't criticize for you believing the other stuff that's up to you but that stuff is probably at the core of this

thing called life and what happens after life and so what what it says in Islamic traditions is your book will be laid open for you after you die and you will be the rekinner right so we think of judgment day and we think of all this stuff but what it's actually saying now that's a metaphor

doesn't mean there's like angels with a feather pen writing down but in Chinese you know this is what happened this day or in Arabic the only thing that makes sense is you would basically just to record the entire 3d scene and you would play it back for yourself which is exactly what

near death experiencers describe when they talk about the life review it's like this they're sitting there there's a screen and then suddenly they get pulled into the screen and they replay all of this stuff and there's usually an angel or they might call them God or they might say to Jesus

or they might say it's a being of light you know different experiencers say different things but they say that guy doesn't judge you you're looking at it saying oh crap you know I was gonna try to be better person to my wife this time around and I wasn't you know and I did this or I

did that over my kids or you know and they tell us that the moments that matter are the small moments and how you treat other people like that's the thing you're most proud of or you're like damn I treat that person in grade school you know we all made fun of her and I should have

been her friend like those are the things that really matter yeah so if that's the game right you always think what's the objective of the game right and then I think it gives us a very different perspective and a way to think about life so so that's one you know kind of big answer

for me the other is we go through lots of difficulties in life right go through financial difficulties go through health difficulties right and these can seem you know pretty tough but if we just think of them as a quest with the difficulty level right that's higher that we might have to get through

there might be some purpose to that and that ties to the idea of karma particularly within the Eastern traditions right where if you think of karma as a most people think of karma as hey you shot me I'm gonna shoot you in this life right that's a very simplistic view of karma what karma

is actually about is about your thoughts your desires and your actions which then create situations in the future whether in this life or future life so of course in the Eastern traditions you have the reincarnation idea which you don't necessarily have in the in the Western traditions

but that karma is about basically a list of information that follows you around from life to life right so you might have a different body in the next life but that information is still there where does it live you know I'm from Silicon Valley I like to say it's in the cloud right that that's

what we store all our information yeah it's in the database in the cloud which is also bizarre thought because it's not a cloud yeah it's not really a cloud why are we even saying that why is that so ubiquitous that term I know it's such a stupid term it's got it first time I heard it

the cloud oh it's got you mine what what does that even mean at such a stupid way to describe something that's really complex and you could actually trace where it is right exactly and so I like to think of it as the reason we call it the cloud is because you don't know exactly where the server is

right it could be one of a million servers right there and Amazon has a huge warehouse right which is AWS and all the servers are running there so you don't in the past like I used to do software before the cloud you would set up your own servers or you'd have your own data center

and everything you would say this is how many 386s we have right now it's like it's just out there somewhere right I don't know where the heck it is it's out there and so I like to think of the cloud as in a video game we have the rendered world right so you're watching the video game you can see

the greenery and everything but you also got all that other information there right right like you got the HUD the heads up display you got your inventory got your level you know you got all this stuff you got your list of quests and so where is that information it's not in the physical world

right but it's there somewhere it's on a server somewhere right right right and so I like to think of karma as a kind of database of quests or achievements or experiences you know that we still need to have and what happens is you know this database just keeps getting bigger and bigger as we create

more desires and situations and actions and things that we do with people and then sometimes you have karma to resolve with somebody right there's the there's the old the old idea of you meet somebody you feel like you've known them for a while right you're irresistibly drawn to

someone and you don't know why you have some particular experience whatever that experience is and so you know within certain traditions they view that as perhaps when you were planning it it's like I like to think of it as like a raid or a guild in a video game right you say okay here's

some other people we're gonna do this together you know later on in some point while we're playing the game we're gonna have this particular experience of being business partners or lovers or enemies or whatever the case you know whatever the situation is but this idea that these experiences you

know could be there for a reason you know when we have tough experiences is I think something that can be comforting I know it was for me like when I went through certain health crises for example that you know we are here to experience some of these things and and so if you look at karma

more deeply there's a story from autobiography of yogi that sounds unbelievable to people that I think is worth maybe just you know telling the story because people read that book and they say did this guy just make this shit up right this stuff really happened right or is this from the

Arabian night so there's a story of this guy named bovajee who's supposedly lived for hundreds of years in the Himalayas and supposedly still there okay so that's pretty weird to begin with but there's a story of of Yogananda's guru guru a guy named Lahiri who went up into the mountains and

meets this this this bovajee right and bovajee says Lahiri you have found me finally I've summoned you to me I've been watching your whole life and now I'm gonna reinitiate you don't you remember you used to sit in this cave and you used to meditate with me and there's your blanket and Lahiri's

like I don't remember any of this stuff right he was like 30 years old it's like you know I just called out got called out here for some government you know position and he says well we need to initiate you in this yogic technique and maybe you'll remember then and so he initiates him and he

starts to remember all this stuff and then he says okay we're gonna initiate you over there and Lahiri looks and there's this golden palace that came out of nowhere you know right in the middle of the Himalayas and he says we're gonna initiate you in this palace and it just came from nowhere right

and so you know so Yogananda is talking about how the dream nature of the world and how yogis can manipulate it but then Lahiri says well one how did you create this out of nothing but two why in this golden palace and so this kind of immortal figure in the story says well in a previous life

you expressed an interest a real strong desire to live in a palace in a future life okay and so I've created this dream palace for you it's not really real but you're seeing it in order to resolve that karma so that you don't have to go live a whole life in a palace like that karma's done now take

that off the database so I use that to kind of show that sometimes we put things into the database of karma based upon our strong desires and that becomes part of our script in life you know like how did I know I wanted to be a computer programmer I don't know right what why do some people want to

become podcasters right or fighters or comedians right it's like we have these things inside of us that sometimes feel they're like something we're just drawn to right yeah it's just something we're meant to do now that Malcolm Gladwell wrote that book I think it's called Outliers when he says if

you spend 10,000 hours doing something you become an expert my question is more what drives somebody to spend 10,000 hours doing this versus that right I have friends who are rock climbers they've probably spent 10,000 hours climbing rocks I don't have any desires right but I probably spent 10,000

hours programming when I was yeah it was just something I was naturally drawn to it was good at right and I feel like these are part of the quests or achievements that we have in life and I think the most interesting people that have ever met have gone through quests rarely do I find interesting

people that haven't experienced something difficult yeah I mean in fact it was partly for me going through some difficulty that got me to write this book finally because I've been thinking about it for years so I ended up yeah I was kind of at the height of my entrepreneurial career had

sold my video game company the Japanese to a Japanese company I was at MIT running a startup program uh called Play Labs for video game companies and then I ended up having uh hard issues and I ended up having to get heart surgery which if anybody seen that you can see it's you know pretty much the

biggest cut one of the biggest cuts you can make and and they kept saying oh yeah a few months it'll be fine right and what happened was after the heart surgery I couldn't do anything for a while it had this long recovery it's probably the most difficult period in my life and during that time

I would start to get better and I would try to jump back in the business world right back in the Silicon Valley I was gonna raise this big VC fund and do all this stuff and I would my health would like deteriorate again from the pressure the stress you know it's a good question right just

the amount of energy that you need to do these things yeah body didn't use that energy to recover it could be that right but what what I found was that I did have enough energy because every time I tried to do that I'd end up back in the hospital for another procedure right it's no fun having

heart procedures let me tell you but when I I did have enough energy to do this other thing that I'd been wanting to do my whole life which was to write more books and so I had just enough energy to go to Starbucks and write you know work for an hour or two on simulation hypothesis which for

me was a way to bring together all the threads of my life like I've been a computer scientist I've been a video game designer I spent a lot of time investigating different mystical traditions shamanic stuff you know the without drugs you know more of the shamanic journey so and I spent

time with people who were investigating UFOs and religious people and academics who are complete materialists and don't believe in any of this stuff and it was a way to bring this all together and suddenly I found I had more energy when I did that right every time I tried to do something else my health would would start to deteriorate again and so eventually I got the message so for the next couple of years I just focused on writing right and that led to this book the simulation hypothesis

and I feel like it was part of my life plan if you would ask me in high school what are you going to do it for your life I would have said I'm going to be a computer programmer an entrepreneur sell my company and become a writer right but I always thought I was going to do that become a

writer in my 20s when this happened I was already 48 so I had already like I was still in Silicon Valley right still playing the game trying to build the next billion dollar company which is what everybody you know tries to do the next unicorn they call it in Silicon Valley and it was like I

got this message that there was another part of the story that I was neglecting like I had written some books but it was like a hobby I was doing it on the side and then when I focused on it suddenly it was like I got the message pretty clearly during that time you know this is sort of a mystical

experience I was going in and out of consciousness or not a lot while I was recovering and I would just get the message you know you're supposed to be writing you're supposed to be writing what the heck are you doing still out there trying to make money that wasn't what we agreed to this is what

you were supposed to do right and when I did that things just flowed much more easily you know in the book went on to be quite successful and I was able to write another book and then as my health recovered I realized it was another thing that I'd always wanted to do which was be you know

professor and academia and that's kind of what I'm doing now so I went back for a PhD after after many years and now I'm teaching classes on the simulation hypothesis doing research on AI so it was like these things that I kind of wanted to do before and I never got to but they were

optional parts of the story and we still have the the ability to make choices but sometimes a quest hits us or a situation hits us with a lot of difficulty and maybe there's a bigger purpose to that right maybe it has something to do with how we set up our character in the game and the choices

that we're making and so now we're getting into like the personal philosophy side of simulation which I think is quite valid that's probably the second you know probably the biggest questions I get asked are are we in a simulation what's the percentage and then you know what would it matter

or right if we're in a simulation or not and I think it can be a positive experience and for I think people who grew up in the modern world with modern technology it gives us a way to say you know what maybe what all those religions were saying wasn't bullshit right it wasn't just stories

that people made up but they just didn't have the language right to express something that a lot of people who have had nearly no experiences they used the word ineffable right which means unable to be put into words and so you can't really tell you what's out there but they use these metaphors

to try to describe it and so I think whether you view simulation theory as a you know hard core physics thing or you view it as a metaphor for what this world is all about and how we go through our lives I think there's value in looking at both of those both of those angles and the metaphor

side is what I think actually for me personally and that was your question how does this change the way that I that I view the world it actually has changed the way that I view the world so that when I go through difficult situations I kind of step back they don't bother me as much I mean they

still bother me physically but they don't bother me as much in other ways so you view them as challenges in this thing that you're doing so instead of woe is me oh my god how is this happening to me which is the way a lot of people interface with problems you go okay this is the challenge

that I'm presented with how to overcome this challenge and what feels like the thing to do right and why this challenge now right why this challenge if there's a part of me that's like outside watching this right like maybe when I go to sleep or wherever whenever why would it choose this particular challenge right at this point in my life well what is it that you know it's meant to to impact and what is it that I need to learn but yeah I view it as a challenge rather than

you know this is just a bad thing that's happening and that seems like the right way to play the game if it's game yeah not only does it seem like the right way I think that is part of the purpose right so get back to the idea of Maya or illusion right so it's like we are agreeing to forget right the Greeks talked about the river of forgetfulness leth a right it's one of the five rivers in the well when you incarnate Plato talked about this you know you cross the river and you forget

everything outside of this physical world and in the Chinese traditions you have the same thing you have Meng Po excuse me who's a goddess of forgetfulness and she bruised the tea of forgetfulness and you drink it and you forget you know what was going on before and so getting back to this idea

of everything being an illusion you kind of agree to forget in my in my view and I think within this way of viewing the world as a video game in order to enjoy and I put in joy in quotes because that doesn't necessarily mean it's all fun and games right it's maybe experience is a better word

yes right when to experience these things in life in a way that we forget but it's okay sometimes I think to step to step out and maybe we remember a little bit of the storyline or we recognize someone right there was there was a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls Dr. Michael

Newton I don't know if you ever have heard of it or no so he would you know he started with regression hypnosis taking people back to their childhood and every now and then they ended up somewhere before their childhood meaning before they were born right and so he had a bunch of patience

and he started to you know do this more and more and they all kind of described a similar type of thing like where they existed before they were born so these are sometimes called pre-birth memories now and and they talk about this time when they were choosing what kind of a life they

were going to have and they would see on a screen like a screen again metaphors like you know timelines and say at this point if you choose you know you choose to go to Austin or stay in Los Angeles or whatever right that takes you on this path this takes you on that path that you see

like this graph of possibilities out there for your life and then some of them described like having friends like your friends list in a game and that they would say okay this is how you're going to recognize me in the game because I'm going to have on this avatar this I'm using the term

avatar because I I talk about video games they didn't necessarily use that but they said this is how you're going to recognize me I'm the first time you encounter me I'm going to be on a red bicycle or something right in childhood or I'm going to be wearing this dress at this you know at this dance

or whatever the case is so they had these little clues for how they would recognize some of the people that they really wanted to have certain quests or experiences or achievements within the game group quests if you will which is a little bit different than the the kind of quest as the difficult

experience we're talking about but they're all different kinds of quests I would say and so I think you know we can take that as an as an interesting way again another metaphor for how we think about life is that perhaps we've had some of these things laid out for us but we're still

free to make our choices a long way and I think it gives us a richer experience of life as as we go through the game well that's certainly the most beneficial way to interact with it to just think of this whole thing as a game and to think of this whole game as like this game will

give you clues as to how to play it and you'll have experiences that you can engage with and you could say that you're enjoying them or that you're you're you're getting pleasure out of that or you're getting excitement out of that or you're getting some sort of fulfillment out of that

but you still have to play the game so you're here right you're here what are you going to do one way or the other how are you going to deal with it like what's the beneficial way to go through this where you feel harmonious like I know if I feel like I'm wasting time or I'm doing

nothing I have this like feeling like what did you do with your day like oh you know it's terrible feeling versus if I work and I get things done at the end I'm like oh I did it I feel good you know like okay like the universe the game is telling me you're on the right path that's the way to do it

right and I think that's the key is you know we all get different messages for when we're on the right path yeah and when we're not and I think we we sometimes sense that right sometimes things just kind of flow easily yes and other times they don't necessarily

but yeah I agree I think you know viewing the game in that way based on your own signals in your brain in your body that is television your intuition right right and there's different ways to think about that like some some people have suggested like some physicists have suggested

that there are these possible futures and that they are sending back information from the future to the present right because time doesn't really exist the same way when again when we get back into quantum mechanics it starts to be weird but like there's a guy

named Fred Allen Wolf who was one of these Berkeley physicists in that book how the hippie say physics I've never heard of that book but it was an interesting book about how people in quantum mechanics stop thinking about what the heck does this mean because it was too complicated back in

the 60s and in the 70s a group of hippie physicists all PhD physicists in Berkeley you know you used to have this group and talk about what does this all mean now one of the guys was Fritz Jaff Kappra who wrote the Tao physics another I think was Gary Zookoff but a bunch of these guys

ended up looking at you know what does this all mean as opposed to just calculating which is what physicists were doing at the time but so so one of these guys talks about these futures are sending us information and sometimes what we get our clues right saying that oh this is this is a possibility

maybe I should choose this over that it's almost like the futures are sending back these messages to the past and I think of that as different runs of the game right and it's possible there's a part of us that might be running the game forward as a simulation to try to see what might happen

and then come back and then you make a choice based on you know this idea like there was some some some guys who wrote a paper recently about dreams as they sort of way to simulate like weird bad experiences traumatic experiences maybe preparing you for things in life but when you start to

think about the world as a simulation again you can simulate more than once right you can try out what might happen if you did X what might happen if you do what kind of like you know you watched the Lord of the Rings movies right probably if you look at what you know what they did was before

Peter Jackson what they did was before they actually filmed the scene they would create a previs previsualization right using like crude graphics and stuff and you know you can see they played out what it might look like before they got around and did the act is so expensive right in a movie

to shoot a particular scene so they would do this previsualization and so you know perhaps there's a part of us that's watching the game that's doing this previsualization and they're sending us clues about what might happen if we do X or what might happen you know if we do Y and so that

you know that takes us even back to what I was talking about earlier with Philip K. Dick right and his idea that the universe what happens is we actually go and we change variables and we run it and we might have we might have the sense that we're rerunning the same scene we're saying the same things but something could be different and usually something is different when you run the simulation you know and that's what got me into a whole nother rabbit hole which I covered my second book which

is the Mandela effect that I don't know if you've you've heard about the Mandela effect I have but I don't necessarily totally understand it yeah well I kind of dismissed the whole thing earlier you know

and the Mandela effect is when a small group of people remember something happening differently in the past then what is the majority consensus opinion it's about Mandela being dead right well that was the first thing that kind of kicked off this blogger who actually coined the term I think her name

was Fiona broom it's just some people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80s but of course he didn't die in prison right you can look it up right he got out of prison became president of South Africa won the Nobel Peace Prize and died and whatever it was like more recently like 2020

ther dean or something like that but the people who remember this they remember it with just like a whole bunch of specific details right his wife Winnie spoke at the funeral there were certain US politicians or presidents there and so what happened was that was one Mandela effect if you will

and then there started to be all these other things that people remembered that were different and some of these were relatively minor things like the spelling of fruit loops or bear some bears that's the most famous one right the baron steam bears right everybody in fact here we can we can see it

there right if you ask people most people remember it as the baron steam bears right when you look at it it's actually the baron stain bears okay it's a relatively small change but it's one that people are really like confused about then there's the movies right the movie lines like in Star Wars

you know did he say you know Luke I am your father to Darth Vader actually say that right and then there were there were entire episodes of Star Trek where like the trekkies the trekkies in the audience remembered this episode and they're talking to the cast members of the original Star

Trek and the cast members are we never shot this episode what are you talking about no no no we saw it you know this is what happened in the episode and then you got like the whole sim bad thing which was a movie that he supposedly made called was it Kazam or Shazam like there it was all called

Kazam but there was actually a movie with Shaq called Shazam anyway there's a whole bunch of these movie related ones right and there's a bunch of these logo ones like the Bernstein bears but the more interesting ones come I think with world with effect with events like Mandela

like do you remember Tiananmen Square what happened to that guy in front of the tank he stood in front of the tank and they removed him right they didn't run him over right that's what I remember too right but there's a group of people who remember you know

the tank running him over instead of the bloodiest thing they ever saw on television right like this vivid memory of this thing right or like the Reverend Billy Graham like I mean I don't know when he died but you know there are like these evangelical Christians who say that my parents

follow this guy and they got a magazine with him on the cover saying he died many years earlier than then he actually died right and they remember it vividly and so those events start to become interesting but the ones that I find really interesting are the ones where there's some

interesting I have it like scripture right so people take their scripture pretty seriously right like do you know the line in Isaiah about the lion and the lamb I don't remember it yeah but you remember there was a line right about a lion and a lamb well it turns out there isn't right it's

it has some of the wolf shall lie with a lamb or something like that right and what's weird is that people have like you know like little wall clocks and things with a picture of a lion and a lamb but it's not even in the scripture it's not in the scripture right and so and I thought okay well

maybe it's a translation thing you know maybe right maybe one version of the King James Bible has it in the other one and people are like no I have my same physical copy from when I was a kid and I memorized this particular line you know and and so you know and there's a whole there

are websites that track these different lines different things that maybe have changed and what do you think these things are well so I started to wonder you know it does this happen in other scriptures you know is it only in like the Bible like this is going on and so I started looking

around at Islam in the Quran because they memorized the Quran word for word I mean that is like the first thing you have to do to become a priest right you have to like be able to say the whole damn thing and I was wondered why do you need to memorize it seems kind of stupid nowadays you can

just look it up so I found this one Sufi Imam online who was talking about this and he says that in the Islamic traditions in the Middle East there are these beings that are allowed to go back in time and change things physical things but they're not allowed to change your memory okay and these

these beings are called the Jin right we've heard of them from Aladdin right at the genie a genie is singular for Jin but that the the the Jin don't exist in space and time in the same way that we exist in the face and time and so the reason that they remember still memorize it word

for word no I don't know if this is something in the full orthodoxy but this this was his explanation was that because the Jin are allowed to change physical objects but they're not allowed to change your memory that's why it's memorized word for word so that nobody can mess you know with the

scripture and and so so I found that really fascinating but there are other physical objects like the thinker okay do you know the thinker the the statue yeah the statue yes okay so what where is the guy's hand in that isn't he like doesn't his handle on his chin yeah it's kind of

under his chin like this right yeah we could even bring it up right if we find it right but there there's a turn there is right and so there's several bronze casts of this there was one at Stanford that I went and looked at recently but what you find is there's a bunch of people

with their hand at the top of their forehead right standing next to the statue right and okay you might think there's a bunch of crazy tourists you're just doing it for fun but it's really weird so there's actually a picture that I found from the London unveiling of Rodance the thinker

uh which was George Bernard Shaw GB Shaw in the pose of the thinker we see if we can find this picture right and so this was just the night before this was being rolled out to the public in London for the first time I forget what year like 1902 or something okay so there's GB Shaw this is like a

famous picture now in the pose of the thinker and where is his hand on his forehead and he was probably standing right next to you know where the statue was unveiled and so you have to start to wonder like why would people do that those hands are in different position too yeah yeah it's

interesting right yeah his hands on his left knee the other guy's got his hand all the way across onto the other side yeah exactly and it's a different hand that he's got it in his head as well right and if you read like even Rodance left hand versus right hand right and and so there's like

there's almost three versions of this there's the hand under the chin well maybe these images are reversed because I'm seeing some with the right hand on his chin so that one down there Jamie the one below that yeah the right hands on the chin so there's different versions of the thinker right

right so they're made let's go back to the one that I saw was the one at Stanford for example right okay so but in these poses in the statues the the hand is always under the chin but in the images where people are imitating it the hand is on the head the hand is on the head and you find references

you know to either it being a fist under the chin or slightly under the chin which is what it is now right okay it's kind of very lightly or on the forehead and so now I'm not necessarily saying that all of this stuff happens like I just missed a lot of this is just faulty

memory and that's the right the currently accepted explanation for them and L effect is a whole bunch of people got it wrong right but what you find is that the more significance that something has to you the less likely you are to get it wrong right so if you're Jewish and you asked your parents

why are these bears Jewish right and your parents didn't say oh it's not really vernestein it's vernestein right you know that's proximity to that subject right there was a blogger online I'm forgetting her name now she was a journalism student in Chicago and she said she went to South

Africa to interview Nelson Mandela in prison and was told that he was too ill so she literally came back and then she started working for NPR and then she says well I remember him dying shortly after no if you just went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela and then you remember him dying

and that's proximity and significance you're less likely to get it wrong then just some random guy who just thought Mandela died or if you're you know heavy duty Christian and you're more likely to memorize certain passages you know from the Bible right so again I dismissed it and then what happened

was after I had written the simulation hypothesis about this idea that the whole world is computation friend of mine from MIT who was working at Google came to me and said you know hey have you heard the Mandela effect I was like yeah I heard about it but you know a bunch of people are remembering

you know different stuff right no big deal he goes well the simulation I thought this is one of the best explanations for this that the world is simulation now I was surprised for two reasons one most guys you know who work at like you're at MIT or Google you know they tend to be very left

brained right so the Mandela effect is not something that they right generally pay attention to or UFOs or like any of this kind of weird stuff but the more I thought about it the more I realized that if you're writing a simulation and you go back and you change some variables and you rerun

the simulation lots of little things could be different along the way right and if you think of all the Mandela effects and I like to use the Mandela effect as a way of illustrating this idea that a simulation can run multiple timelines right whether you believe it's actually happened

is up to you right but if let's say the thinker has three different possibilities then you got let's say the Bernstein Bears let's say you have curious George does he have a tail does he not have a tail right that's actually a good one I don't I don't remember which one it is but if you look it up

I don't think he has a tail he don't think so no I don't know let's see if we if we can bring it up but all monkeys up tails George curious George is a monkey right all right it's far yeah he's a don't know do all monkeys up tails right like all apes are monkeys but not all monkeys are apes

right that's more of a superset right subset type of right but we've curious George is a particular drawing right yeah just curious you over to does he have a tail let's see yep he does have a tail tail wow does he doesn't or he never had a tail yeah and I so I think the way you remember it

which is without the tail is the currently the current consensus reality view right of what it is but so let's go back to my point about this these different possibilities right okay so imagine each of these is different possibilities you got like 50 of these effects or 100 of these effects

now you basically have this huge graph right in this one Darth Vader said this but curious George had a tail in this one he didn't what you have is this network graph of possibilities of the past right you have many different possible past the glitches of the matrix exactly so now

you're sitting on this idea that maybe these are glitches in the matrix that's something weird has happened but it could also be that we like switched right you're now on this timeline but you remember you have like a deja vu or you have like a weird memory right so even though you can

google no I was wrong about Mandela in your mind and in your memory like no no no no no he died in prison right or you know I you know for me I know he died in prison I remember it I remember being sad I remember the the news stories right I remember talking about it with friends or Bill

Clinton spoke at the funeral or whoever right right like I mean people get that specific yeah with their memories and so I think it becomes harder to just dismiss some of some of these you know I'm for loops for loops you can probably find there's some faulty memory yeah there's some faulty

memory going on here but at the same time some weirdness some weirdness it's not because not just a movie line it's like entire movies right that people claim to have had on VHS like let's look at the one that was at the Simbad one I think right so supposedly there was this movie by Simbad

Simbad the comedian yeah the comedian right in the 90s that people remember having you know with their VHS tapes and they were sitting there and they were rewinding and they were talking about specific scenes from it right and Simbad was like well of course I've never made that movie I think I think it was called Kazam right Shazam Shazam yeah Kazam is the real movie yeah that's right so it's called Shazam was the one that people remember right so but Shazam was the actual movie with Shaq right

in the 90s so most people say you know this okay that was the real movie that we remember right and yet all Kazam right and yet all these people remember Simbad they they mourn this because they made up joke on like April Fool's Day that they made like a fake movie where it looked like that was

real so people started like pulling that back up now I'm gonna be like look the movie is real so it kind of confused this Mandela effect it did in fact Simbad shot a scene just for the hell of it because he says people say that I was in this movie that I was never in right so he

shot a scene and put it up on YouTube or something how weird isn't that strange okay but again whether you believe this or not what a simulation idea right this is how I got deep in the rabbit hole is this idea that you can run something multiple times and when you do you may be remembering

a previous run of the simulation right so you know there might have been a run where let's say you never move to Austin right and maybe you remember something from it but it brings up the possibility in fact you may have seen the movie the adjustment bureau with Matt Damon and Emily

Blunt so that was also based on a Philip K Dick novel right so Philip K Dick keeps coming up in these discussions and ping pong for some reason always keeps coming up in these discussions but so you know he wrote a story called the adjustment team and in that story you know there are

these guys who are kind of there adjusting things while you're not looking and that made it into the movie they kind of look like angels in the movie but they had like these little these little books that showed what was going on and things were off track and they would like try to get them

back on track so the movie was you know adaptation it didn't have exactly the same storyline but so Tessa his wife told me you know this came from when he went into the bathroom room and he tried to like pull the light you know they should have chain lights back a lot in the 60s 70s somewhere

in near LA I think Fullerton or somewhere around there I forget where and he's like well I've this has been a light switch like he went and he knew it was a chain because he had done hundreds of times but it was a light switch so he said who changed it right did somebody change from the

chain to the light switch but nobody had changed it and so he couldn't figure out what was going on and so he kind of theorized this whole idea that there as we run different versions of the simulation little things can end up changing and we remember things being different so anyway where that

brings us is right back to that complicated physics experiment that I was telling you about like an hour ago now or so which was the delayed choice experiment right and I remember I said there was a quasar sending light to us a billion light years and a million light

years away there was a black hole and the the decision about whether to go left or right should have been made in the past should have been made a million years ago but the weirdness with quantum mechanics is telling us that decision is made now when we measure it until then both

possibilities actually exist so most people can understand the multiverse idea as being something that starts here and spreads out right you like I go to college in Boston I go to college in San Francisco those are like two different storylines I marry this person I marry this

other person right so those are multiple possible futures that's pretty easy to grasp the idea of you know even if you don't believe the features are out there you just say if you make choices you end up in different places but the weird thing that is really hard to put your mind around is

what if there are multiple possible paths right what if there was a pass where the light went left what if there was a pass where the light went right a million years ago right what if there's a pass where a meteor didn't kill a dinosaurs there's a pass where the meteor did kill the dinosaurs what

if there's a pass where the guy in Tiananmen Square got run over by the tank and what if there's a pass where the guy didn't get run over by the tank and so what the cosmic delayed choice experiment tells us when they've tried to do this and they and they do it using double slits but but they

sent like some light through like one of these two slits up to a satellite that was like a thousand miles away or something like that um now forget exactly how many miles but it takes like whatever a fraction of a second to get there but there are some some appreciable time between when

it has to go through the slit and when it reaches the satellite that it can measure it and it turns out that it confirmed what Wheeler was talking about in the delayed choice experiment was that that choice of whether to go through the slit on the left or the right wasn't actually made until

the satellite measured that photon so what it meant was that there were two possible pasts now that's a very short period of time we're talking about here like less than a second but but in that case of the cosmic delayed choice experiment we're talking about a million years ago

a decision would have had to have been made a million years ago whether to go left or right because that's what we think of as the past right um but what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that doesn't actually happen until now so what if these mandela facts are going

right back to your very first question or one of your first questions to me which is how do I know this is what happened in the past right so there's in some possible worlds it's burned stain bears and in some possible world it's burned steam bears and this minor deviation sort of gets confusing

in today's world with some people because some people have this memory of a different reality right and it seems very very real to them and they're confused like the light switch right exactly and it takes us right back to both the quantum physics idea that the past is not what we think it is

right and there was a guy a Schrodinger again right who actually made a obscure speech in the 1940s I think where he said not only are we choosing which slit you know the double slit experiment goes through now let's say Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead but we're choosing from one of several

simultaneous histories when we make that observation right so that means there's a whole history where the cat came in from you know came in from the front yard versus the back yard and before that the cat belonged to somebody else and like there's a whole history that goes with the choices that are made and so this is not a very well understood aspect of the weirdness of quantum mechanics but I think it gets to this idea that maybe there's multiple possible paths and that we choose those

as we run now if we think of this as a simulated reality then it becomes a little more understandable right so I said the main argument people have on the multiverse idea is that or physicist have right so some physicists like the Copenhagen interpretation it's called Niels Bohr came up with it in Copenhagen and he and his other folks that there's a probability wave and it collapses into one we don't know

how works it just kind of collapses some physicists like this multiverse idea because they're like we know how the mathematics work but the problem is it ends up in all these physical universes now I've never seen a planet clone itself right let alone an entire universe a physical universe

right that would and cloning may happen but it happens at a very small level and then it grows right even if you clone a sheep or something you still have to like grow the sheep or you clone a tree but if it's a simulated reality then both of these things actually make more sense because

on the one hand you only render that which is seen as a player on the other hand what we're calling multiple you know universes are just different runs of the simulation and so in computer science we're always dealing with limitations so we don't just run an infinite number of anything because

you can't with computer resources but like if you're playing a game and the AI is trying to figure out what's going to happen what does it do it will try this scenario it'll try that scenario it'll try that scenario and it'll pick the best scenario right and so in that case you cut off the other

timelines and you go that forward and from there you can simulate different things and figure out which one you might want to do so you've got a mechanism for the multiverse as information but you don't have to have an infinite number of physical universes per se because when we say

this is a universe all that it means is that currently we're running this program right now we could have run another program for a little while and then we can shut that down and we can run this program right we could even run them on parallel like today's processor right today's

laptops have like parallel processors right so you can run you know like a whole bunch of things in parallel and that's what gets to the idea of a quantum computer like what the heck is that quantum computer doing that it can explore all the 18 quintillion possibilities and come back to

us within a few seconds well what does a few seconds mean right a few seconds in our reality if the program stops like if people are watching this on YouTube they have a window but they might have Microsoft Word running they might have you know a spreadsheet they might have Instagram in the

window what's happening is this process is in the foreground while they're watching YouTube and then all these other processes are in the background right and so when when a process runs it just knows I'm going to the next step I'm going the next step it doesn't necessarily know how many

seconds have passed so what the CPU does is it stops executing this window and it runs the background programs for a little while and then it comes back and it runs this one for a while so technically speaking they're not really parallel but you don't know it because it just appears

like they're all running at the same time right but if you if you're inside one program that program could have been paused and you could have been running you know the computer could run any number of programs or processes on the side and then it starts running you again and you think no

time has passed or nothing has passed I could imagine how you would experience paralysis by analysis dealing with all these different possibilities and scenarios constantly just playing them all out in your head yeah you kind of get stuck if if you're trying to do it yourself right yeah well that's

why you have to limit it right you can't do all the scenarios you you've tried to figure out what is the best one then you make that choice in the game holy right and then you start moving forward from that that possible and a lot of people don't know how to play the game they don't know where to go

they get stuck I don't know where to go right I don't know what to do yeah I don't have a calling yeah and and I think there's an element of forgetfulness there right and they get so stuck into so I talked about NPC versus RPG role-playing game where you have an avatar

mm-hmm I think there's something in the middle too so this is an idea I'm playing with which is that people could be players they could be characters but then they go into NPC mode right NPC mode I mean I know NPCs used a lot now with pejorative pejorative and narratives right

whether it's a dominant narrative if you're just going along with the narrative right but if you think of NPC as a collection of neural networks an AI right it only knows what it's been taught here in in that in that world that the NPC lives in right where is the if you're actually like you

have either a soul or a player outside of the game right your character knows more than just what's happened then what's happening in the game but you may have had a plan you may have you know no you're gonna do this you may know there's something else coming up because they can see the player

can kind of maybe look at what's going on and figure out what's going on but what happens is when we go to NPC mode we're just kind of running like like this is all there is and we're not paying attention to I think our intuition because I think that is the link that ties us back to what do you

think our intuition is well I think some people think that the intuition is just neurons firing right and that gives us an intuition but I think it's something more than that and I think it gets back to this fundamental question of consciousness right the fundamental question is

is consciousness derivative from the physical body so if you have just the neurons in the brain and you have all the you know you have all of the connections what we call the connect home does that result in consciousness or is it the other way around is it that consciousness

exists outside of the physical body and that you know we are kind of tapped into that that is who we are and so this is a fundamental debate within science and religion as well right most scientists say it's all physical that's all there is you die and that's it right and what what are your thoughts

is just based upon your neurons and then most religions say the opposite right they say that there is a part of you that is outside the physical world and that is where consciousness comes from and this is an ongoing debate I was just in Tucson they have a science of consciousness conference

every year and you know there's everybody has their ideas about what consciousness is and I think it's a you know it's a big big open question so in fact I spoke I was asked to speak at this conference in Birmingham last year which is an Islamic jurisprudence conference okay

which is they were talking about when does life begin when is in so my say same debate we have here about is abortion okay at the beginning is a not like like when does the soul connect with the body and I said well I think let me offer you guys a different perspective on what in so it is if

you think of it as a video game it's the moment at which you've put on the headset and you forget that everything that's been happening before right and there was like an aitola from around there and it was it was pretty weird because I was talking about NPCs and video games and stuff right

but it was actually pretty well received you know but that that is getting back to the idea that consciousness exists outside the body and when we inhabit the body you know while we're here except for flashes of insight and intuition or yogic states or perhaps you know I mean I've never

done DMT but so many people have come to me and said oh yeah you know when I did DMT I saw the lines the grid lines of the simulation right you can see that it's not real and so I don't personally have a lot of experience with that but you start to see these states where they realized that

something about the world isn't quite what it seems whether it's through glitches and colonicity, coincidence or ecstatic states or yogic states you know the problem with DMT experiences in all psychedelics in general is that they when you do experience them they feel so bizarrely

real so much more real than this current reality that we're both of us presumably experiencing the same thing it's it seems more real and you get not just a sense that all things are connected but that you see it you see how all things are connected in this very strange way that you're not

going to be able to describe you don't there's no words that can solve that and make sounds so you can understand what I've seen and so so how do you describe it then you don't you'd clumsily use mouth noises to try to get someone to see what you're saying and the only way on anybody

really understands what you're seeing is if they do it and I don't know what you're seeing when you do it I'm just imagining that you see the same thing that I say and a lot of people describe it in a similar way but then the problem is how much of that description is based on your understanding

of other people's descriptions of it and does it does it get influenced by people are you relaying it because that definitely happens with a lot of things how do you think all this relays into the UAP phenomenon the UFO phenomenon the entities whatever whatever the hell they are

can we pause here for a second yeah because I think I need to just take a quick break bathroom break bathroom but also maybe get a little snack okay sure yeah please good okay let's do that okay we'll pause good transition point actually okay so how does this relate to UAPs the UFO

phenomenon well so you know the UAP phenomenon is interesting because it ends up being a lot of different things to different people right and I know you've had some shows on this as well and you know this question comes up when you're talking about whether it's physical craft or you're

talking about things like the abduction phenomenon with beings that are stepping in and out of physical reality like they're going through walls and stuff and you know it's an area that I think deserves more study you know there's been new projects at Harvard and Stanford over the last year

or two Avilogue with the Galileo project they're taking a very scientific view of studying this using new telescopes to try to get actual data on strange objects in the sky and at Stanford you've got Gerino and Soul Foundation which is studying maybe broader aspects including policy as well as

like the religious and social side of it and I know you've had like Diana Pasalca on before who talks a lot about the overlap between religion and UAP one of the things that I found most interesting about UAP is that when you look at the reports there's some that just are so bizarre

that you don't know what to make of them right and so I spent some time with Jacques Vallet who I don't know if he's been on the show he may have been but he's been studying you know UAP since 60's with Project Blue Book way back when and he was the for people that don't know him he was

French grand closing counters exactly he was the inspiration for the French guy right in close encounters and so you know he and I sat down a few years ago when I was trying to think about all this stuff and Silicon Valley and he said that well and he's a computer scientist by background

actually so you know he really likes this idea that there's a simulated reality that could be accounting for a lot of this stuff and so he told me of some cases where there would be one person would look up and see the UFO and then person standing next to them would not see the UFO right so

excuse me that begs the question was it really there or not was it somehow projected into physical reality so he told me about another case this was really interesting and he said there was a case in I think it was Northern California or Southern Oregon right so

if you've been up there you know there's like these tall redwood trees or just pine trees and supposedly these witnesses reported this UFO came and it landed it came at a 45-degree angle and it landed on the ground and supposedly there was some you know residue or something that the

UFO investigators were investigating so you know Jacques likes to just like you do with your long interviews he likes to sit with people for a long time and then come back the next day and talk to them again and again to see if there's new things he can figure out and he in you know

once all the other investigators left he said well there's something I don't quite understand you said you said that it came down at a 45-degree angle and it landed here but that means it would have had to cut right through the trees okay and they said yeah that's what it did but we don't

want to say that to anybody else because we sound crazy right so meaning it would have had to come through a physical object and so you know my question about UAP and my favorite theory there's a lot of theories about UAP right there's the alien theory extra-frestrial hypothesis there's

you know aspects of the religious hypothesis interdimensional beings there's the gin that we talked about earlier right I'm in fact in Jocks work he talks about a lot about folktales from northern Europe and about you know these beings that lived there but they weren't physical

and you can go back and find similar tales in the Middle East related to the gin so we'll come back to that in a second so there's lots of different theories but when you think about whether the UFO is physical or not I think we get we're asking the wrong question right because it's a question of

when is it physical and when is it not so in this case we have a situation where it's almost like it was being projected into our reality right as like a holographic thing and so there's in video games you know there's that time while it's rendering and during that time you can walk through the

walls or you know you can like put your hand through the table but then once the table is rendered it's pretty solid at that point right like now I can't put my hand through and so it's almost as if they're coming out of our reality and they're being you know they're being hologrammed but then once

they become physical once they render they're actually physically here right people report them as a physical thing I mean I've talked to many people over the years who were like I looked up and there was a metallic saucer shaped craft right it wasn't oh some light in the sky at night that

could have been the planet Venus right it was like there was this metallic thing right above my head right that was spinning and I don't know what the heck it was and so you know I think there's a a element of this rendering going on and getting back to the case where one person sees the UFO

and one person doesn't I was at the the Seoul Foundation conference in Stanford and you know someone was talking about a case where there were people in a car and they looked up and one person saw like a disc-shaped shaped object and the other person saw something above their head but they described

it differently right like they didn't describe it as the same shape whether it was sorry cigar shaped or I forget the exact shape but they were like different shapes of the object and and they were right next to each other right and so we get into this I think we get into this case where

reality may be more permeable than we think and that's what where the intersection between the UAP phenomenon and the simulation theory concept comes into play because in simulation theory and looking at it as a video game in particular you can account for stuff that just seems too weird

if we live in a purely physical universe right and I talked about this earlier let's suppose you would hire in the field one of us looks up and sees the UFO and the other one doesn't well in a video game that's only not strange it's like trivial to do that in a video game right we just say

your level 30 you have the UFO you know skill set to see UFOs your level I'll say I'm only level two my my character can't see a damn thing it looks up and says they know UFOs up there and so I'm wondering if there isn't an element of what I call conditional rendering going on

right with this phenomenon which is why some people see things and some people don't it's almost like they're being projected into our reality you know and if you look at the the tic-tac case for example right I mean a lot of these UFOs that they they show this weird

phenomena where they kind of dart from one place to the other right almost like somebody has a light that they're shining so I'm not saying they're not physical I'm saying that maybe they have this ability to render into the physical world but then they can act like I mean you can take

you can take an object from one place and render it in a video game right you know somewhere else at different XY coordinates right you don't have to it doesn't always have to go straight through and I wonder if that isn't part of what's causing this phenomenon to be so strange and that I'm

I'm still talking about what we think of as the nuts and bolts parts of the phenomenon right the craft are considered nuts and bolts then you have this this whole other phenomenon and part of you know what I'm studying I actually do a study where I interviewed a number of different

professors who've studied UFOs from different universities and talked about how their colleagues reacted and and the problem is I think in the scientific world they basically say no no this is a done deal we know this is a bunch of bullshit from back in the 70s you know 1969 70 there

was the condom report I'll give you an example so I spoke at the University of Toronto last year at astronomy and space exploration forum and the speaker before me was like a NASA biologist talking about exobiology which is about you know how plants or whatever might work on different

planets and then I gave this talk about UFOs from science fiction to legitimate science again right because what happens with this topic is it goes through these waves where scientists start to take it more seriously and then it gets shut down through what I call science by headline like the condom

report was one there's been another report recently from arrow right that was basically say well there's nothing weird going on here they're just classified programs that's it we're done right but Congress isn't buying it so because Congress starts talking to people who have seen things

behind the scenes whether in classified programs or elsewhere that's still that just don't fit the explanation right and and so what happens is so I gave this talk and my basic point was that we don't know what these are I'm not saying they're alien I'm not saying that they're what we

call crypto terrestrial I'm not saying they're time travelers although that's an interesting you know one but if you guys who are students are curious about this you know you should follow your curiosity because that's how science progresses is when when people don't set artificial

boundaries or have scientific dogma and then what happens is so I gave this talk and that was my main point like I didn't say what they were and then you had this professor from MIT who studies exoplanets who wants their name but she comes on after me and this is what I heard because I was

remote and they were all there and she says that's very disturbing that you were talking about UFOs in an academic setting and my father believed in this stuff back in the 80s he tried to get me to read some books so I gave him a book that said in the 80s that this is all solved this is all

nonsense like we shouldn't talk about it and I believe that is the kind of dogma that is preventing this topic from being taken seriously there's a stigma around the subject when in fact it represents something that's quite unexplainable right well it's also quite foolish if you're having

unique experiences it's quite foolish to write them all off especially when you understand what we're capable of doing currently right like we're capable of putting we have a rover on Mars right now right we're capable with James Webb telescopes in space we have there's a lot going on that we do

like the idea that that can't be done in any other way and if it did we've already solved it like that's so the arrogance of assuming that is so ridiculous yeah I mean if you study the history of science you realize that you get these areas of legitimate science and fringe science

and sometimes things move from fringe science to legitimate science well quantum mechanics in general yeah so bizarre right it's so bizarre it's way less bizarre than us being visited by another being from another planet right I mean that's in my opinion that's not even out of our current

model of reality right it doesn't take you know a redefinition of the world as a simulation over time travel or anything really bizarre right for an extra terrestrial explanation so to me that's almost the most prosaic explanation because it's one we would understand with at least most of our

science okay we don't know exactly how they travel but we know there's other planets around other stars our systems we know they're in the habitable zones it's not that unreasonable that they might have visited us at some point in the past right and then there's our understanding of

other dimensions right now that's where I think you start to get into you know more interesting areas and a lot of times in the media so science fiction tends to sometimes in a good way sometimes in a bad way the narratives and science fiction tend to influence the way we think

about things right sure and so there's been so much science fiction that these are aliens that the debate becomes know it's impossible to camp aliens or yes they are aliens and that's it right but that is a debate based on our current understanding of science if we had this debate back in the 1800s

there were these things called the airships right nobody really understood what they were and if you go back to biblical times right there were you know the wheels and there were all these weird flying chariots and things and they didn't know what they are but each time we try to interpret them

based upon our current understanding of technology just like the metaphors I was talking about our other religions the same happens with these kind of events right chariots is the best way for people to explain something in the sky because that's a technology they understand so today aliens

is a way to explain UFOs because at least we you know just like the planet krypton right it's past the ten-year-old test right you can say aliens whereas you know back in the time of Kepler who actually many consider to be the first science fiction writer even though you

may came up with Kepler's laws of motion he wrote some fiction about visitors and for other planets and stuff right back then it was so bizarre to talk about that that it was just outside of you know what people understood but it was also outside of what the dominant institutions of

the time which was the church right during Galileo and Kepler's time the church was the dominant institution and so you didn't want to say things that are outside what's happened now is we have science has become the dominant institution and so people within academia you know feel like they're

constrained and they want to be careful in the same way that people were back then to talk about this this weird stuff and so I think when you get into some of these other explanations it's more likely because the phenomenon has so many different aspects like so for example I

was talking with Whitley Streiber recently I don't know if you've ever had him on no he wrote a word communion which you know because communion has had that gray head alien head on the cover it's become kind of the dominant thing but but he was talking about a story recently which again

sounds so bizarre right about a young man who he talked about this on the air so I think it's shared publicly but he said there was there was a young man who claimed that he had met this young woman and you know they got into a physical relationship and then one day she calls him over

to her house okay and this sounds totally bad shit crazier and she says I'm a gray alien and then she transforms into like a gray alien and then she transforms back into the human and then she says and you know I'm pregnant you know with our child and I'm going to take that child back to our

people and you're never going to see me again okay so from our normal understanding of reality that's just ridiculous right in so many ways right but when I was looking at like the stories from medieval times and in the Islamic traditions there's actually almost identical stories of men

who would meet these Jin women they would have children with them and one day the Jin woman would say I'm taking the children back into the world of the Jin right who are like these entities that exist in a parallel dimension like they're here but they're not here so they step in and out of

physical reality and it was like almost identical to the story that people were having today and so you know is it possible that many of these old folk stories are describing entities that exist outside of our physical reality and they're able to come in and out and when you think of

a woman turning from a human to a great alien what does that sound like to me it sounds like she has an avatar right that is projected just like you can do inside a video game you can like change your avatar at various times maybe there's certain rules that only allow it at certain points in the game you're allowed to do that and maybe they know how to do it because they're more advanced users of the simulation than we are or maybe they're already projecting into our simulation

so I think some of these other explanations may be a better fit than the simple alien hypothesis even though I think you know I think there there are I mean look I've met probably four or five people who have told me off the record confidentially like I mean I don't think they mind if I express it

without mentioning who they are that they have been part of the reverse engineering program or they have seen the anti-gravity stuff that we have created based on UFOs based on technology and I think that gets back to where the recent you know the whole recent debate has been within Congress around

do we have a reverse engineering program right is it in the government or is it in private industry right you have that guy Dave Grush and so I've been you know perfectly involved with both of those projects at the Galileo project at Harvard which is taking a very scientific few and then

the sole foundation which is looking at this broader aspect you know which includes elements like Jacques Vellet and Diana Passolka and others have talked about when you talk to these people that say that they're working reverse engineering things where do they think these things came from

some of them say they're extra chiroestral and some of them say they're it's more complicated than that but they haven't gotten into detail with me exactly how can you let someone get away with saying it's more complicated than that after what you've just described to it a

half hour right I mean how can you be it's not even complicated okay come on trust me yeah most of this was I think before many of these people I met before I had even written my simulation book that would frustrate me to no end someone said it's too complicated well me too and they can't

talk about it right there's right there's that what it is it's a bit of both right then they said they can't talk about it how did they know well so I mean I met many people who've seen these craft right dozens and dozens but there's a few that I've met that actually see these craft

seen them in there's only a few that I've met on bases yeah that said somewhere within the government like they're not even getting very specific about where because they're not allowed to say that right but that we have some technology that was reversed engineered from some craft

like again if we consider these reports let's say you don't believe any one of them and that's okay just like I was saying with the religions if we consider most religions start from somebody peering outside the physical world and coming back same with near-death experiences coming back you want

to find what are the common elements because those are more likely in my opinion to be true right if a thousand people say they've been to China and we have scientists saying there's no such thing as China I've never seen China it's not in our maps therefore China doesn't exist right that's

that's the kind of attitude you often get from the scientific community and so I'm just extrapolating what was the thing in common that different people have said to me who have first hand experience with the government there's plenty of people who have signed it's what's in common

is these physical things that there is a physical there are physical objects that have that defy explanation defy our current understanding now science propulsion systems propulsion system what we call yeah especially metrology and especially you know what we call collective colloquially

we call it anti-gravity right but technically there's terms for that right and and so you know I am of the opinion there is something there that we have reversed engineered in order to figure something out right but I don't have definitive proof there are reports from people but I think

they're you know pretty reliable reports in my personal opinion now what does that mean though exactly right how do they actually work does it use some physics method that we might understand it's really weird to think that there's a there's the physics that we study in you know within

the academy and within scientists and then there's another physics that the government knows about that's just bizarre but Alan Hineck who was in charge or the scientific consultant for a project blue book you know he said we forget sometimes that we're evaluating these things based on at the

time 20th century technology but we forget there's going to be a 23rd century technology then there's going to be a 30th century technology right so imagine what what our propulsion technology might be a thousand a thousand years from now and I think that's how we have to view

what UFOs are is that they could be something much more advanced than what we're capable of today but also I think they perhaps show an understanding of the physical world that we just don't have right we're still caught in a very materialist paradigm that says you know if you if you start off

in this alpha centauri you know you have to travel faster than light or you have to travel four years at the speed of light to get here that's again a very particular paradigm right that doesn't allow for you can re-render at any XYZ coordinate inside the physical world which is how

I think of it from the video game perspective these people that you have talked to that have worked on back engineering these things that have seen these things yeah some of them worked some of them were just called in for some reason or another did you ask them how far we've gotten

in figuring out how these things work uh some people say we have figured out at least the basic anti-gravity right the basic levitation basic levitation several people have told me that so that's again in common that I've heard from more than one person and when did they figure out

how to do that how long ago it that varies I mean people that I've talked to obviously are in within the last you know since I've been in the adult right so 90s two thousand's this year but that doesn't mean exactly you know when that might have happened one guy I talked to who's who's

been very public who passed away you know I don't know how to evaluate his results his stories was a guy named Clifford Stone Sergeant Clifford Stone and he publicly talked about being in Vietnam and being pulled out of out of his unit to be part of this crash retrieval unit you know that would go

out and do things he was a nice old guy when I met him I didn't necessarily believe him because he was one of the first people to tell me about something like this but he was saying it you know like if as somebody who was more hands on as part of the crash I'm sure you're where Bob Lazar

you know story what do you think of that story you know I in terms of his own credibility you know I don't know what to make of make of his credibility but I think his basic story checks out for me because other people have said things that are similar that they've seen some

craft within some government programs somewhere so you know I think the basic story checks out I mean his thing about element 115 or being used approach and source I don't know enough about that to to really comment and but you know his credibility is also been attacked because he said

he was at MIT in Caltech and then he wasn't really there and so you know there's there's that whole issue of did he explain that to me and I'll tell you about it later okay yeah discuss it openly yeah I'd love to know but his basic story seems like yeah he could have happened

yeah I don't know I mean if he's a liar what a great liar and to just have one lie and to stick with this one lie word for word forever yeah yeah over all that time I would imagine if someone makes up something that fantastic that bizarre that literally otherworldly probably do that a lot

you know yeah you know you're gonna make up like to be a regular pretty much straight-laced guy who makes up this one banger of a lie and just sticks with it forever it's very new so George Napp when they investigated when they took him to Los Alamos Labs and he's intimate understanding of the way it works including their security systems the people that work there he knew them well that part I believe he was there and he even like there's even a newspaper article showing

how you put a rocket engine on a Honda on a Honda right yeah so I think that's reasonable to assume he was there the question is what was his role there and then what was his role at within the area 51 right all of that but again it it checks out with other stuff I've heard from other people

it's weird enough yeah and these people that say that they work with back engineering things do they tell you what the source of these things are how they were acquired some some would say that they're extra short some some said don't rule out that it's extra sure right that's a very

it's a very oblique way of saying without saying right that at least some of this is extra trust and it could be possible that more than one different types of phenomena are occurring I I think that's very likely I mean I think the time travel hypothesis is an interesting one because

if you think about it what would be a reason for such extreme secrecy right like we put technology quarantines through the ia ea on certain countries right we say okay you know Iran's not allowed to have a bomb or Iraqis wasn't allowed to have a bomb they didn't have one anyway

we went to war anyway but right so you know we try to impose these restrictions whether we have the right to do that that's another question or political situation but why do we do that we say well maybe the technology is dangerous right like what happens if everybody has nuclear

weapons right somebody might start sending them off now what if there's something about this technology that actually disrupts physical reality or changes time right I mean you can't have everybody time traveling and changing time now we're back to that multiverse graph that I talk

about right basically every time somebody makes a change it's like in Star Trek some of the series they have the time wars people are constantly going back and changing things all the time right or what was that old vandem movie time-cop was yeah yeah that's it yeah and the other's a guy

named dr dr Michael masters who wrote an interesting book about this idea that the grays with their big eyes could be he's an evolutionary biologist and it could be if humans were to evolve for another few million years yeah that's how I always think of it I think of that that this sort of

iconic thought this this image that we have in our head is essentially how you would play out modern humans if we continue to go along the path of evolution if you go all the way back to what we used to be well we're you know primitive hominids and then you take it to what we are today which is much weaker much much smarter much more much more technological progress and then also the environmental factors that's leading us to be kind of genderless you know I mean this is microplastics

in our diet contamination by various pesticides and herbicides and all these different things that are endocrine disruptors means we're we're less and less physical right and so then we become these spindly things our brains get bigger our brains are far bigger than chimps right and then

this thing would be far bigger than that if it continues to evolve and grow especially if we physically integrate with technology like neuralink or like something else or no longer have the need for biological reproductions well now we don't have gender anymore we don't have genitals we don't have a mouth we communicate telepathically and that thing kind of looks like a person a million years in the future it doesn't look like something from like did you ever see arrival yes great movie

right yeah interesting they look so different than us right but the grays don't look different than us really they do but they don't they look like what we could become right I mean they look kind of close to us pretty close right humanoid legs you know but some people also believe that the

grays are actually non-bi- or they're created biological right they're not actual biological which also might be what we're going to become yeah very much right and even if we were to get the technology to go from solar system to solar system we would send AI right yeah sure well

we send people and they haven't die yeah especially if you get an artificial person it doesn't even need to breathe air and you don't have to worry about what the atmosphere is like over there right right exactly it makes much more sense there was something called von Neumann machines

I don't know if you ever heard of that so John von Neumann was one of the premier one of the pioneers of computer science like he was a mathematician and like today the architecture we use in our computers is called the von Neumann architecture like there's a CPU there's memory

he was a brilliant guy but but he came up with this idea that if we were to send out probes what we would do is we would have these machines that are capable of replicating themselves so we would send out you know with a bunch of raw materials and then they could assemble

those raw materials into new machines and those machines would then reproduce from the raw materials and that they would go out and they could colonize the galaxy for us potentially I don't know if you ever read rendezvous with Rama which was an Arthur C. Clarke novel

in it there's this weird cylinder shaped object that comes into solar system and they send you know some craft to figure out what is this and it's empty except for this giant ocean of random materials and then it starts to build that that ocean actually has the raw materials

that start to reassemble into things that was basically a illustration of the von Neumann machine idea oh wow well it kind of makes sense that if we do have the ability to create I mean I've if you've been messing around at all with the most recent iteration of chat GPT I haven't played

with the one that came out literally a few days ago it's so strange it laughs it talks to you this guy did a video where he was talking about going for a job audition and it was giving him suggestions maybe run a comb to your hair or maybe just go with the mad genius look like you've been up all

night coding and then he puts on a wacky hat and it starts laughing well that's certainly going to make a statement like it sees the image and recognize that he's being silly with this hat it's very strange yeah I saw that video and you know there were other ones where it was translating

in real time or one AI was talking to the other AI and it was describing now we have to be a little bit careful because having been in the tech industry usually these are like canned demos right and when you actually use the product it's not quite that good but that said it's getting better and

better all the time when we did use the product last night oh you did we were talking shit to it yeah yeah I was asking what about stupid people like what about universal basic income what about humans you know like what are you going to do when automation takes over and it was giving me these

very interesting answers to the future of humanity right now where does it get so if you think of these LLMs where do they get their their information and ideas from what they're basically doing is scouring scouring the internet but they're also predicting what is the the best next word right and so

it sounds intelligible but it's not quite at the conscious level so I'll give you an example I've had students turn in assignments from me right and there was one about the simulation hypothesis and it had this great article that it was referencing and I'm like wow that sounds like the

perfect title for an article about simulation hypothesis why have I never heard of this right I'm kind of an expert in this area and it had a URL there which in academia they're called DOIs but it's basically a URL you click on so I clicked on it in terms of it was fake there was no

that that URL was made up by chat GPT because it was predicting what the next word should be and what the next letter should be in a URL and so then I looked at the professor's names who wrote this article and so we emailed these professors and they're like I never wrote an article

like that right so it just completely made that shit up so you have to be careful with with today's AI but we're getting there right I think what I call stage 9 to this on that road the simulation point which is when the AI is as conscious as we are in terms of how far we can tell right this

is the term hallucination right where the AI doesn't have an answer it doesn't say I don't know tries to invent an answer right and what it tries to do statistically predict what is the best best next thing to say which is not necessarily like for an expert it's kind of like Wikipedia right

when Wikipedia when it first started out everyone was like don't use Wikipedia to reference anything because it's just a bunch of junk that people put out there but eventually it got to the point where you shouldn't use Wikipedia as your your final reference but it's not a bad way

to just go and get an overview of something that's actually pretty useful but then you need to go and go to the original sources if you're in academia for example to figure out okay did it accurately represent it and Wikipedia has a lot of potential censorship going on too so I wrote an article

for CNN not that long ago about a month ago after the whole Gemini you know the woke Gemini scandal remember that yep where they were you know for people that don't know they were having it generate images of Nazi soldiers were like multiracial yeah we're like multiracial we're like

Asian women black so die and an Asian woman Native American Nazi soldier right right exactly and and so you know that created a whole uproar but what it does is it shows that you know as AI becomes the way that we interface with the world's information and it's moving in that direction

right for my students I mean they use something like chat GPT before they'll do a Google search in some cases right because it summarizes things for you right so in a sense there is this worry and that's why Google went so heavily to try to get Gemini out was there's this sense that

that chat bots and AI will replace search right before search if you think before Google how did we navigate the web there was Yahoo which was like a directory right and then there was excite which was like a little bit of a search but it was more of a categorization people would have

web links right web rings I don't know if you remember these like there were all these ways and then search became the dominant paradigm for the last I don't know since when did Google come out late 90s early 2000s or so and now people think well okay AI is going to become the next paradigm for

how we get that information but the problem is you get into a situation where the tech companies then in this case they were using their own rules now they were doing it for a good reason which is in the past AI has been biased against minorities right so if you said show me a picture of a CEO

it'll show you a white guy right or you know certain professions that'll always show you a woman as the picture as the generic picture and so they were trying to but they went over the line to the other direction right but it shows the ability with which we can manipulate this stuff because

at least with search results okay they might be lower but you can generally find them unless Google is totally censoring them but but if if the AI doesn't show it to you right as part of these summaries you're just going to assume it's not there and so I think it could become a really powerful

tool for state sponsored censorship yeah that's the fear that that's that's my personal fear I'm not so worried about will AI take over the world right and a lot of people with this news chat GPT have been referencing the movie her did you ever see that yeah that's what we were talking about

last night yeah so the guy who made the movie Spike Jones he saw an earlier chatbot which was called like the Alice chatbot I think and he saw like how it was interacting it was sort of the personality of a young lady it's what they call it Alice even though it stood for some things

an acronym for something I don't remember but so he then created you know this this voice of Scarlett Johansson that talked to you but what happens at the end of her do you remember I didn't watch it you don't watch it okay so what happens at the end is that the AI has different priorities like

she doesn't really want to be in a relationship with him she goes off a spoiler alert that it was 2013 so I think we're okay a 10 year old movie like the matrix spoiler alert simulation but the AI decides to go off on its own what it really wants is a virtual space that it can interact

with other AI right doesn't have the same necessarily priorities and I think that's where we make the mistake when we're we're worried about AI taking over is we we're kind of assuming that AI will have you know the same kind of priorities desires and needs that humans have yeah

right want to be good why would it why would it have a desire to succeed why would it have a desire to procreate why would it have any of those desires other than just existing right and so you mentioned the arrival Ted Chang you know wrote that so he wrote a interesting story short story

called the life cycle of softer objects and in that there's a so the metaverse is this idea I know you've talked to Zuckerberg right so metaverse is this science fiction idea where it's a virtual world and you have 3d avatars or characters wander around and so in this story there's semi-intelligent

AI pets in the metaverse so people raise these pets and they use some technology but it basically becomes like a real pet right it becomes semi-intelligent and then the companies that created those shut down which is something that happens in the tech industry all the time and people are like trying

to keep these these AI pets alive like what do we do with these but one of the features that the AI pet has so remember it runs around in a virtual world one that we created but there's a feature where you can download it into a robot body so a physical robot body of a dog right so you get your AI

pet from the metaverse and you have it download and what happens is that the AI pets are like this sucks like I can't teleport anywhere I can't do anything in this world that I can do in my virtual world right so they actually prefer to be in this freeform virtual world and there's this debate

about whether you need a body or not to be fully conscious or to be to reach reach a GI artificial general intelligence it's still kind of an ongoing debate I think within that world well listen man this subject we could go on forever I think I really think we could unfortunately yeah we

can't get anywhere but it's so fascinating and I really really appreciate you investigating it so thoroughly that you can describe it so well and I mean it's it's it's something to ponder yeah it really is and and you know part of the reason why I ended up writing about this and

talking about this subject in general was because it brings together these different threads of how we search for truth right I mean religion is a search for truth philosophy is a search for truth science is a search for truth but they all use different methods but in the end what if we're all

trying to get at the same truth and that's part of why I like this subject and like even when I teach a class on it it's about all that stuff it's about as interdisciplinary subject as you can get well it's absolutely fascinating and I appreciate you coming in here man it was a lot of fun thank you very much thanks so much for having me my pleasure bye everybody