Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Rizwan Virk (on the simulation)

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Rizwan Virk (The Simulation Hypothesis) is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and bestselling author. Rizwan joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the VR ping pong game that tipped him off we might be in a simulation, his ten stages of singularity that the physical world isn’t exactly what we think it is, and comparing the NPC versus RPG versions of the simulation. Rizwan and Dax talk about whether The Matrix was prophetic, if such AI advancement is inevitable how we would know if we’re in a simulation, and the observer effect in quantum physics as illustrated by Schrödinger’s Cat. Rizwan explains ancient Eastern religious and philosophical origins of the sim, the bizarre notion of consciousness that the past isn’t fixed, and the Mandela Effect as evidence of the existence of alternate timelines.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and add free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dak Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Hi.

Today we have Rizwan Virk. Rizwan is a MIT computer scientist, an entrepreneur, a video game pioneer, a professor, and a bestselling author. His books are The Simulation Hypothesis, Ding, ding, ding! Startup Missing Models, Zen Entrepreneurship, Treasure Hunt,

and now the second edition of The Simulation Hypothesis, out now. Guys, it's a sim episode. It's a sim episode and it is so good. We couldn't have had a better person on to discuss it. No, it was great. It was titillating. Please enjoy Riz on the sim.

We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We could all use an escape these days and the best way to do it, Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We could all use an escape these days and the best way to do it, Audible. With over one million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible. Hi, it's Emily Durham,

the host of the Straight Shooter Recruiter Podcast. Now what would you do if you went on Love Island UK to find the one and boom, your ex is one of the Casa Amor girls. Because personally, I'm packing my bags. The party is over, people. Like, I'm done here. There is no more for me to give.

Obviously, that is not quite what you can expect from Harry this season. Because honestly, every time I log in to HeyU to watch Love Island UK, I'm holding my breath because I don't know what to expect from this man. He's incredible TV, a roller coaster of emotion, an indecisive icon, emphasis on he is incredible TV, but also Megan and Dee as a couple. You know what, let me not spoil anything. All I can say is this season is reminding me why I haven't been on a date in months, okay? Mostly because I have been home glued to my tv watching every single episode on Hey You.

I am so excited for the finale. I actually don't know who I think is going to win, but all I know is is no one better be breaking my girl Yasmin's heart, okay? Leave her alone. You can watch Love Island UK with me on HeyU, the home of reality TV. Travis fell in love with the perfect woman. Beautiful, understanding, available 24 seven. There was just one catch, she wasn't human. Binge all episodes of Flesh and Code early and ad free right now on Wondry Plus.

Watch all episodes of Flesh and Code early and ad free right now on Wondry+. We've been discussing it without any authorities present for seven years straight. That's right. So it's kind of fun to have someone who's given it a real deep dive. And if you negate anything we've been saying, we will cut it out. That's right. You contradict any of our opinions. You go by Riz, yeah? Yeah, I go by Riz. But if I want to say Rizwan.

That's fine too. That's what it is though? Yeah, that's what it is. So where did you grow up? I grew up in Michigan, in the Midwest. Where in Michigan? Where is this from? Yeah, go by Riz. But if I want to say Rizwan. That's fine too. That's what it is though? Yeah, that's what it is. So where did you grow up? I grew up in Michigan in the Midwest. Where in Michigan? That's right, you're from Michigan.

Yes, I am sir. I remember seeing that. I'm gonna guess. We do this thing, right? Yeah, yeah. Lavonia. Not bad, guess. Actually south of Detroit though.

On the way down to Monroe, not far from Toledo, Ohio border, but between Detroit and Monroe, it's called the down river area. Oh yes, down river. The Detroit River goes from here down into I guess Like Erie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah good job and you could see the nuclear reactors within a five-minute drive Yeah, about 10-15 minute drive. Oh, I'm a lab was down there. I think it was well certainly in the 70s and 80s It was kind of peak fear around nuclear energy. Did you guys ever think like are we gonna be radioactive living this close? Yeah, I remember growing up

They were telling us that Detroit was one of the first targets for a nuclear attack because of the industrial capacity Yes, they made a lot of warplanes there in Detroit exactly and then for a couple of years We moved to North Dakota in the middle of nowhere, and I thought oh now We're safe turns out that's not the case because most of our ICBM silos are in North Dakota and North Montana. Oh boy. So those cities would have been targeted next or first depending on what the service is. Maybe your dad just loved to live on the edge. He just wanted to have a little sense of...

How's this adventure? Yeah, you wanted to feel the end could be near. He was an adventurous guy. What did he do for a living? He's from Pakistan, which is where I was born, but he ended up going to Paris and ended up working on a PhD. Of course he had two kids and a wife back home and they wouldn't let him work with the visa

he had in Paris so he ended up not finishing the PhD and ended up coming to Detroit and was an economist. And mom did she work? She was just at home taking care of us and she had four kids. When were you born? So I was born in 1969. Okay great so I'm 75 so we're in a similar era in Michigan. You're 75, you were born in 75. I was born in 75. It's always, it's always. I'm a glitch in the sim.

You gotta give me your secret there. Ah. When I grew up and went to elementary school in the 80s in Michigan, you hadn't dared be anything different. It was fucking dangerous. I mean, even if you were just under the median height, you're gonna get your ass kicked. So was it rough?

It was a little rough. My first few years were in Detroit itself, which was pretty rough if you know that area, like the cast corridor. Oh yes, murder capital of the country for many years. But eventually we moved to the suburbs and it wasn't as bad, but yeah, you definitely got a lot of that. See, I might think it'd get worse for you when you move to the suburbs and it wasn't as bad But yeah, you definitely got a lot of that see I might think it get worse for you when you move to the suburbs Because if you're in downtown Detroit, it's mostly black. I did get mugged once. I think I was in the fifth grade by another kid

Okay, I was just scared so I just dropped the groceries he wanted and I ran No, I didn't even anything fun Fun and I mean, it was just some chubby kid Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Maybe he just wanted vegetables. Maybe he didn't get good food at home. We're going to have some compassion.

It's possible. My uncle was right there watching. It wasn't like a dangerous situation. I'm like, I live right there. I drop my groceries and I went home. And then the suburbs, they were better though. I mean, just probably in general threat to your life, but then just bullying, I would imagine, could uptick. There was an element of that when you're different. And then when I started driving,

and I didn't realize this till years later, I thought this was normal, that the cops would just stop you and ask you. Just check on what's going on. What are you doing? Oh, I'm just driving around. Where do you live? Well, I live over there.

Okay. Yeah, where are you going? Exactly. Once I drove out to meet a friend in rural Michigan, we were dropping them off after the fireworks. Have you ever watched the Detroit fireworks? Of course, many, many times. I dropped off my meet a friend in rural Michigan, we were dropping them off after the fireworks. If you ever watched the Detroit fireworks. Of course. Many, many times. I dropped off my friend who lives on a farm,

and then I was driving home, and of course the cops stopped me. There's a brown guy driving through rural Michigan in the middle of nowhere, which was 99% white. Yes. I was fine with it, because again, I didn't realize that was weird back then. I just figured, that's what they do. Yeah, in retrospect.

In retrospect, I realized. I bet the white kids weren't getting pulled over. Yeah, exactly. Now I understand what they mean by driving while black or driving while brown. Yeah. So do you go to MIT first or Stanford first? I went to MIT and Boston first.

And what was your major there? Computer science. I had enough of Michigan. I wanted to go to either the East Coast or the West Coast. Ended up at MIT because it was the place for computer science. Oh yeah. I presume you applied to many places? I applied to three places. or the West Coast, ended up at MIT, because it was the place for computer science. Oh, yeah.

I presume you applied to many places? I applied to three places. MIT, Stanford, and University of Michigan. No Caltech? No Caltech, because I didn't know much about Caltech at the time. I mean, I had rarely left Michigan. The only time I really left Michigan was... Cedar Point.

Cedar Point, which is in Ohio. And, oddly enough, it was the 80s, so the Japanese car companies were ascendant. And so we had a Mazda plant right near where we lived in Flat Rock. So they would send seven high school students every year to Japan for like six weeks to live with the Japanese host family. You did that? Yeah, so I did that when I was in high school. Whoa!

Oh wow, what was that like? That was a ton of fun. Luckily they spoke some English and then I ended up in college spending a summer in Japan when I had learned Japanese You speak Japanese? I used to okay You had to study it for like four semesters and then I spent a summer there But I was not living with group that spoke English necessarily So I really had to learn Japanese to get around and I took trains all over that was a lot of fun And then eventually I ended up selling my video game company to a Japanese company a number of years ago

So I had this kind of Japanese thread. Now my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, has actually been published in Japanese. Oh, how cool! Hoping to get back there. Okay, so Computer Science, MIT. I mean, at the time you probably felt like it had been going on for a while, but now in retrospect you're kind of in the infancy of that, majoring in Computer Science.

The infancy of the ideas. Yes, AI and a lot of different things. Yeah, I was in the infancy of that. So there was a wave of AI that had just ended at that point, which was expert systems and rules based, where they thought AI should be programmed. Before the neural network kind of break through. But even back then in the early 90s, we were learning about what's called a perceptron,

which is basically the model of a neuron, which makes up a neural net. It fires when it gets its input. So it's a piece of software, and we had very small neural networks, and we were training them to be able to recognize handwriting, like the post office was using it to try to get zip codes.

I mean, that was the extent of neural networks. We interviewed Fei-Fei Li. She did ImageNet. So there was, the one you're referencing is the TextNet, or whatever that was called, WordNet. WordNet, yeah. And so she did images. But when you leave MIT and you go to Stanford,

do you continue on with computers? Yeah, so what I did was I became an entrepreneur first. One of the reasons why I think we're in a video game type reality is I believe we have these storylines to our lives and perhaps these storylines have been mapped out already by us before we came into the sim, which would be before we incarn into the sim, which would

be before we incarnated. So if you had asked me back at MIT or even earlier in high school, what are you going to do for a career? I mean, obviously, if you asked me when I was really young, I might not have known the terminology but I said I was going to be a software entrepreneur and then I was going to be a writer. Now, back then, I thought that transition would happen when I'm really old, like 28. Which I considered really old back then.

Of course, it didn't happen until I was 48, but it was as if we had this kind of storyline. So I was a software entrepreneur for a while in Boston in the enterprise software world. Video games now? Not yet. It was more like enterprise software, big databases, SQL databases, companies like Lotus and IBM,

and we had thousands of companies using our software. I got my taste of Silicon Valley, raising millions of dollars, being the hot company in the space, and then finding it all crashed down. Which was quite an experience. In the late 90s, the first tech bubble. Yeah, during the dot com days.

And so in fact, I wrote a book called Zen Entrepreneurship about my experiences at that time, where I was leading this double life, where by day I was running a software company. And in the evenings and in the weekends, I'd be like exploring different aspects of consciousness whether it's through Buddhist meditation, shamanic journeying, you know using drumming or flying off to places like the Monroe Institute.

Similas Ivan? No that's more of a recent thing in terms of psychedelics. Well it's popular now. It was around but it just wasn't a normal thing that people did. It wasn't around for civilians. Enhancing your brain. It was to go do drugs. Well, I had read the Terrence McKenna book in high school. You know, there were

psychonauts. I can see that was such a fringe thing. Yeah, it was a very fringe thing. Now, it's not a fringe thing at all. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's hard to not bump into somebody right now who's on shrooms somewhere in LA for a walk. Yeah, people are microdosing it all the time as part of their lives. Yeah. On that topic. For for some reason whenever I'm in LA, I get asked more. Of course you do. Than in other cities like in Phoenix. In academia, which is where I am now. But after I wrote the first edition of the simulation hypothesis, so the brand new edition

with all the AI updates is out this summer. But when I wrote the first edition, I was here in LA and I had lunch with a group of friends and one of them was Sean Stone, who was the son of Oliver Stone. Oh, okay. And he said, oh yeah, I know it's a simulation. I said, oh great, I just wrote a book about that. He goes, because when I was on DMT, I think it was DMT, it was one of these.

Some psychedelic. I saw all the grid lines of the simulation. Oh. Yeah, but what I think he saw is a flashback of Matrix while he was inebriated. It's an interesting discussion to have. Yeah. When you get into video games,

because I feel like this is a very relevant piece of your exploration of the sim. I eventually moved out to Silicon Valley and went to Stanford Business School and looked at starting a company out in Silicon Valley and a friend of mine had started a company that was doing Facebook games. My old business partner from my previous ventures

was out here and social gaming, so I don't know if you remember on Facebook there were games like Farmville. Uh huh, yeah. There's a bunch of mafia games, a bunch of different games, and it was the first time a social platform like that had really ventured into the gaming space.

Because games were considered AAA games that took millions of dollars and huge studios, and PC games were starting to become a little more relevant But there was the gamer community and then there was everybody else right yes, and when the iPhone came out in 2007 in 2008 they did something great which was they opened up the app store It was great from a developer point of view because now people could build games and so you could have a small team You need to have Activision Blizzard behind you as a publisher now. It's changed There's a million apps in the app store and there's this whole issue

It does Apple have a monopoly because it's become the largest Segment of the gaming industry is mobile bigger than console bigger than Hollywood and the gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood box office and music Combined I remember reading that Call of Duty as a property is basically like the top 10 grocers of all time. But that's not even mobile, is it? Or is it? They're starting to be. So many of those AAA games are starting to have iPad versions.

I don't know specifically for Call of Duty, but even that revenue is dwarfed by the mobile games. Fortnite, for example, is a mobile game. Pokemon Go, you may have heard of. Yeah. Back in the early days, when I was at Stanford, one of my classmates from Stanford was doing a mobile game company.

One of my classmates from MIT was doing a Facebook game company, and so I used to spend a few days a week with each of these guys to kind of help them out, because I had been through the startup cycle and the venture capital cycle at that point, once before during the dot com days, and I had seen it crash as well.

And then a couple of us started a game company and we had the number one game in the app store for a while. This is going back, wow, time flies. We're going back like 15 years now. It's only accelerating. That's true, yes. Of course, time inside the simulation may not be like time outside the simulation,

but that's another discussion we can have. And then at some point you start this lab at MIT. Yeah, so we sold our company to a big Japanese company and then I became more of an advisor and investor to a bunch of different startups. Bitcoin was starting to become popular back in 2013. Back in the day I remember literally I would walk to downtown Mountain View to the Bank of America and I pull out a hundred dollars and I meet a guy and I give him the hundred dollars cash and he would literally transfer one Bitcoin over

to my phone and it was a very small community at the time. 1000X by the way, because it's roughly $100,000. Yeah, that's right. It was roughly even a little more than that too, right? Yeah, about a thousand, yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's these great stories of guys who bought pizzas for two Bitcoins,

like that's $200,000. No, no, no, not two Bitcoin. It was something like millions of dollars today. So we're like 40, 50. Oh my God. Let's say you said 12 bucks was a pizza, 12 Bitcoin. Even that would be $1.2 million. Yeah, exactly.

Because that was even before when I was involved. That would almost make me suicidal. But I was like, I bought four pizzas. I would have $60 million right now. They actually have a Bitcoin Pizza Remembrance Day, and I think it just happened. Which was the day that they spent what would be something like, I don't know how many millions of dollars now, but it's in the many millions now. Oh, fuck. That's heartbreaking. So it's kind of crazy.

Okay, so Play Labs comes... Play Labs comes after that, so I was trying to figure out what to do next. And so I ended up starting a startup accelerator at MIT, at the Media Lab physically, it's part of what's called a Game Lab. And that was like a program for students who wanted to start game companies as well as just other entrepreneurs. So it's like a mini accelerator that we did in the summer on campus. Give me a good excuse to go back. So what are the pieces that start coalescing into you getting more and more suspicious that it's a sim? There's three different threads what happens right around that time when I was running this program at MIT in the summers I was back in the Bay Area and

Virtual reality was starting to become popular and so I went to this company in Marin County and it was basically a game company and They had a virtual ping-pong game. It was a company called Free Range Games and they put on this headset and it was big, first of all, this is 2016. And there were wires coming from this. So there's no mistaking that I got what we used to call a toaster on your face.

And I started to play this ping pong game and what started to happen was that the responsiveness of the game was so good, the graphics were not great. But it was so responsive that I started to feel like I had a real paddle in my hand, and I was playing a real ping pong game, and I was hitting a real ball. Did it have some kind of feedback?

There was no haptic feedback. There wasn't. It was just that if I put my hand in the right place, the ball would move. So they got the physics engine right. That's kind of what we call it in the game industry. And it was so realistic in that sense that for a moment, it fooled my body into thinking I was playing

a real game of table tennis. I tried to put the paddle down on the table. I tried to lean against the table at the end of the game, and of course the controller in my hand fell to the floor. And I almost fell over, and then the wires started to jerk me back up. I wish there was video of like all these early people trying this shit, yeah.

So it was crazy, but then I began to wonder, how long would it take us to build something like the matrix and I realized there's stages that we Would have to go through of technology you labeled 10 or not yet 10 or so is what I came up with of stages of technology that would get us to that point and I define that as the Simulation point and it's a kind of technological singularity Now when we hear the term singularity most people think AI, Skynet. Yeah, define singularity for folks. So there's a few different definitions but the basic idea is that technology will start expanding so fast it gets to a point where nothing will be the same and that could be through in computers learning intelligently so it could be through super intelligent AI, it could be through human mergers with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about a bit.

The term was actually used by John von Neumann. The greatest of all time. The greatest of all time, pretty much. We still use the von Neumann architecture in our phones and in our computers all these years later. But he said it was a point beyond which everything would be different for humanity. And then Wernher Wenge was a science fiction writer, but who's also a computer scientist,

and he wrote a paper on the approaching technological singularity, and that's where it really took on the meaning. It has its own propulsion and momentum that outpaces anything we could do to kind of contain it. It's now its own organism running freely, in a sense. Right, and then for us, life is different. Now, I define the simulation point

as a kind of technological singularity. It's not exactly the kind that they're talking about, but basically it's a point at which our virtual reality gets so realistic, it's indistinguishable from physical reality. So like this could be a virtual set. In fact, people watching this on YouTube don't know if it's a virtual set or not. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of it is that with AI characters that are indistinguishable from characters that have humans controlling them, which you think of as smart NPCs.

So NPC stands for non-player characters inside video games. Those are all the AI characters. So they don't have a player. They're not an avatar of a player. They're just a character in the game. But bartenders, people who operate stores that sell you weapons. Yeah, no one's playing the game as a clerk,

I can't imagine. Right. Earmark that, that's one of my counter arguments to this whole thing. That's actually a good point. We'll come back to that. Yes. We can have those AI characters,

and then the third point is that the world itself is generated through AI so that it looks infinite, or it looks almost infinite, so we can go to different places in the game. So that was the first main thread. But then I started to pick up these other threads. So like the subtitle of the book is an MIT computer scientist shows why AI,

okay that's the first key thread, and virtual reality too, quantum physics, and the third thread is eastern mystics, and turns out not just eastern, but western mystics as well, have all been telling us that there is something wrong with the central materialist view of the world, that the physical world is not what we think it is, that it's some kind of a hoax,

and it's a hoax that's built on information of some kind. And so as I started to go through these different threads, I realized, oh, they're all saying something kind of similar, which is that the world itself might not be real, and that's what led me very deep into the rabbit hole of simulation theory. Yeah, so I think one way to start this would be to talk about the two different versions.

So as I understand them, you have what you're talking about, which is you are probably in theory, some physical being plugged into a computer somewhere in a physical space space and that you're experiencing this simulation as we all are, but that you are somehow playing a game. That's one version. You've picked this game and we're experiencing it now. Another one, I find this one more compelling, is computer technology will reach a point where we will be able to replicate every single element

that's happening in the universe. And when we have that and we can deploy models to test theory. A common one people will think is, okay, in the future, let's say 200 years from now, AI is done when it's done, we can do this. They're still dealing with global warming issues. Let's deploy a billion scenarios that have all the same contributing factors that we currently have,

let them play out and see if one of these billion models solves it for us. But with real people? No, every single thing in the model would be simulated. There'd be no one plugged into. So we would all be simulated. Yes, but that the simulation would be so good and for the model to actually prove anything, the participants inside would have to have autonomy and free will and all the things we're experiencing. Consciousness?

Yeah, consciousness. It wouldn't be a good model. That's a huge... That's a debate. Would they have consciousness or not? That version of it to me makes the most sense. And you can imagine that, yes, there's a computer somewhere that's running a billion different models.

We all listening are in one of those billion models and they could be happening in one second. So they can hit enter, deploy the models and they could accelerate the time frame to just be two minutes. Right because the time inside the simulation would be completely different than the time outside the simulation. What appears like years to us or could be clock cycles. You hear about these computers that have 20 megahertz or 8.5 megahertz processors. What that means is operations per second that a computer can do. And so many of those operations could constitute

a whole cycle, but it's sort of a quantized version of time in a digital universe. And just a quantized version of space. So those two versions that you talked about. Yeah, which one are you more drawn to? First of all, it's an axis. On one end of the spectrum, you have what we call the NPC version, where everybody is AI. 100% NPCs. And then the opposite I call the RPG version, which is the role-playing game version.

Uh-huh, yeah. Where everybody is a player of the game. And then you have various percentages. Because if you go and play a game like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or any of these massively multiplayer online role playing games, you'll see that there are player characters, avatars, they're called, and there are also real people. But then there's AI, NPCs. There's NPCs and real people. And real people.

And that ratio at its apex is what? What game has the most amount of real people inside? Fortnite. Just as an example of this type of game, which is like a battle royale type or PUBG, where everybody's in there, you have 20 people or 100 people or whatever the number is fighting against each other. Whereas say, in a game where you've got lots of orcs

that you're shooting or Minecraft, which has a lot of people, but then there's the villagers in Minecraft, which are not necessarily players, if you've seen the Minecraft movie. So it could be totally variable, how many real people are in the sim and are not necessarily players, if you've seen the Minecraft movie. So it could be totally variable, how many real people are in the Sim and are not? Yeah.

We and our friend group are kind of constantly trying to figure out who's real and who's AI. Primarily our friend Eric. I feel like we all do it, like who's who. We know one of the girls in the group is AI. Molly, she's too perfect. Yes, they made her a little too perfect on accident. I see, yes.

And so she's obviously. We're gonna discover her circuitry at some point, we all perfect. Yeah, they made her a little too perfect on accident. Yes. And so she's obviously... We're gonna discover her circuitry at some point, we all think. And then like Eric could not be the construction of a computer, because he's so messy. Unless they're that smart, which they might be at making these people flawed. That's interesting, because once I had a woman tell me,

I think my husband is an NPC. Right? I said, that's probably not a healthy way. Well, that's the scary slippery slope. If you start thinking people aren't real. Yeah. Well, then you're entitled to abuse them without any moral. Exactly, kill people.

If you've ever seen the movie Free Guy, have you seen that film? No. With Ryan Reynolds. No, Fall Guy. No, he also did Free Guy. What? Yeah, he'll do any movie with Guy in the title. Well, right, he did Fall Guy.

That's well, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, I didn't see Free Guy. So it was about this game and in that game, people were abusing all the NPCs. Also Westworld. Westworld as well. I think there's something in the middle between these and that is NPC mode. And that is when somebody is a player character, but they're taking on a role for you in your storyline.

Because if you think of video games and how they work today, it's kind of like when I was a kid, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons, and you would have a character sheet, and you would say, okay, my race is an elf, profession is a thief, or a warrior, or a wizard. I mean, they only had a limited number of professions. And then you would roll the dice,

and you would get like your strength, you would get your charisma. But you have all of these attributes, and then you have roll the dice and you would get like your strength, you would get your charisma, but you have all of these attributes and then you have a backstory and a storyline and a set of challenges and quests and that's what we think of as sort of life selection and in that storyline different people might play different roles as part of your adventuring party, your friend group, you may have quests with individuals as well. So this idea of NPC mode is where we turn into somebody, and you've seen the term being used online disparagingly where an NPC is somebody who doesn't think for themselves

to just repeat what they've heard, whether on the media or social media. So basically everyone goes into NPC mode on social media. But this idea that we've forgotten what our storyline was or that we're a player, but we're just sort of acting off of, like an AI, basically. Now, the Matrix is the most popular representation of this idea that we live in a computer simulation,

but the Matrix, if you think about it, is more on the RPG side, in the sense that Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity, they all existed outside the simulation. In little pods, creating energy for the whatever. Yeah, the AI. Yeah, yeah. Which had taken over. And in fact, interesting enough, in The Matrix,

if you watch the scene where Morpheus explains to Neo what's going on, he says AI was perfected when? In the early 21st century. What's happening now? But whether you believe in the dystopic side, you don't really need the dystopic world outside But in the simulation they were characters that were based on almost exactly like their physical representation I'd say what they don't have to be but there was another sim movie that came out that year that I think Shows off this axis that we're talking about now, which is these two versions being the ends of the axis There's a movie called the 13th floor

It was based on a novel from the 1960s named Simon LaCroix 3 which was turned into a German TV show World on a Wire Which was then turned into this movie, but in this movie it was 1999 the year that both of those movies came out It was overshadowed by the matrix, so it didn't get as much attention, but they had created a simulation of 19 I think37 Los Angeles. Oh those characters inside LA at that time were pretty much AI or NPCs but they were living their entire lives they don't know that they're NPCs. Spoiler alert it's 25 years later. But what happens is when one of the players went into the game they actually took over that avatar of that NPC, and then they were playing it,

remembering what was themselves outside. Yeah. Interesting. And so this raises this idea that we could be in like the Sims. If you play the Sims, yes, it's your character, but you're kind of watching them do things, and then you're giving them some direction, but it's not the same as when you're controlling every sword.

Okay, so the most compelling argument or thought that I have that makes me open to this notion is, if you can just imagine how quickly technology is accelerating and computing power, and now we're going to have this other person helping us, AI, which is going to accelerate it even further. They're going to code faster and better, and then that's all going to start ramping up. Now, if you just allow yourself to think, where would that technology be in 50 years? And then you think, well, likely the technology will be at a place where it could create this world, this simulation. So if we know that it's inevitable, you have to acknowledge that you might potentially be in one,

because if it's inevitable, then how would one know? And by the way, this is my argument against why I believe we will never figure out time travel. Because if we had figured out time travel at any point in the future, they would have come back at some point. Now maybe you could argue somehow they came back and we didn't know, but just to know that

if time travel ever was possible, we would know. So in this same way, the tech, as soon as you're open to the notion it could go that way, then you have to kind of wonder, are we in one of those in the future? Right. And whether it's 50 years or it's a hundred years or it's a thousand years. I think the key word there is it's inevitable. Now there's a new version of simulation theory or a new flavor of it going around, which is the prompt theory.

What's that? If you've seen these videos out there, in fact, I just showed one of these videos this weekend at a conference, and basically AI has gotten so good at generating videos now, especially with the release of Google's VO3. And by the time this episode is out,

who knows what other. Every month, there's like new AI that's being released. But now it can do not just video but audio combined. And so you have all these people saying, we're not prompts, we're not prompts. And I showed this video and people were like, wait, that was AI? That wasn't real actors in the video? So yeah, that was 100% AI. Then you have guys saying we will ban the prompt theory from our schools.

But it's so realistic that the video is already getting the point. But a person is doing it, right? A person is telling it what to say. Yes, it's giving it the prompt. Yes. Create a world where characters are arguing about this and denying that they're not UPCs, whatever you're saying. UPCs, yeah.

And then it just goes. It goes. So it's not like you have to tell it, oh, there's a person of this height that says this line. You're not writing dialogue. You're not writing dialogue. You're just saying, here's the prompt, generate a video. And you could get specific in your prompts if you want to.

You can say, give me a video of a classroom, or you could be more general and see where it goes. Either way, the point is that it ends up generating what look like humans. And then one guy goes, yeah, we must be prompts because we used to have six fingers and we only have five now because the AI was so bad. I was making a joke because you could tell

it was an AI video because some of the people would have three arms or six. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't very good at actually generating it. It's not at the point yet where it can generate an entire virtual reality. It's very important to recognize the gap between what you're seeing 2D that's been generated versus what it would be like to be inside of it.

Well, unless that's already happened and we're in it. If it really is indistinguishable, then the chances are at least 50-50. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day. Yeah, and with over a million audiobooks, Audible originals, and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to.

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Why would the sim allow you to discover you're in a sim? Yes. Well, that depends on what the purpose of the sim is. What problem are they modeling out, potentially? Yeah, and so people often ask me this, and this gets to your earlier point about running multiple simulations as well. People ask me, what's the purpose of the sim?

And I say, well, I'll ask you two questions. So why do we play video games and then why do we run simulations? And the answer to the first question is for fun. Yeah. Because we want to have experiences that we can't have outside the game. So in this quote-unquote physical world, if it is that, I can't jump on a dragon or a spaceship, at least not yet. So it's to have these experiences that we can't have outside. But why do we run simulations? It's usually to see what will happen for an entire civilization. You design an airplane, all airplanes that are designed now,

the structural engineers will start running it through all of these computer-generated models, and they'll figure out so much stuff about how it's going to fly before they ever take it up in the air. Right. Like that's a very simple application to save thousands and thousands. AI is now doing this with drugs. You used to have to run these trials that would take X amount of time and now the AI can run the trials and they will be almost identical to what the real trial would be.

Theoretically, because there may be confounding factors in the real world that the AI hasn't taken into account yet, but that's where we think it can get to. But yeah, I just read something about how AI's being used now to try to figure out the dates of documents, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just read something where supposedly they're from hundreds of years earlier than we originally thought,

because AI is not just looking at the carbon dating, but it's looking at other documents from that era and saying this is similar to that. It's very good at catching patterns. And similarities of patterns. But so we run a simulation in order to see what will happen, like in the case of the airplane, or if you think of the very simplest even non graphical simulations, they used to be a population of fruit flies. You have like a little equation, you say you start off with 10 fruit flies,

they multiply at this rate. After one year, how many are there? After two years, how many are there? But then in order to make it run, and this is where things get really weird, you end up having to run it multiple times. And then look for a pattern within that. To say what's the most likely outcome? If we change these variables, and what's the most favorable outcome that we want? Same with designing of a plane or a car, you would go tweak the variables. And so, you know the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick? Dick no So he was the guy who wrote the books behind Blade Runner Minority reports and other science fiction movie on his work and the man in the high castle if you ever seen that series

I didn't see that was that the Nazis won the war yeah So the Nazis and the Japanese won the war the Axis powers and they basically split America between them And so it's an alternate timeline. But then there was this guy who was able to jump into our timeline in the show. If he watched the show at the end. So I interviewed his wife, Tessa. She was telling me a bit about how he came to believe

in some of this stuff. But he gave a speech at a science fiction conference in Metz, France all the way back in 1977. We were pretty young. I don't know if he'd even been born yet. She was 10 years out. Yep. And he said, we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is

changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. So that was the famous line related to sim theory. And supposedly, the Wachowskis were inspired by Philip K. Dick Amongst others so I asked Tessa, you know, what would he think of the matrix and she said oh first He would love it. The second thing he would call his agent to see if he can sue them for some of his ideas and get a piece of the revenue Yeah, I thought that was funny. Okay, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I like it I've had many different thoughts and experiences

that also dissuade me from it. So we had this unique opportunity where we were on a trip with Bill Gates last year for a week in India, and we're on an airplane with him, just the three of us, and I said, what do you think of the simulation theory? And he said, it would be absolutely impossible for there ever to be computing power that

could account for every single atom in the universe. And that if that computer existed, it would be larger than our planet. Even if you model out Moore's law and everything else, that there would never be the computing power to predict the movement of every single atom in the known universe as we currently know it. And I thought, well, if I were gonna believe anyone on the prediction of what a computer's capable of, I think it'd be him. But that's like, what if this room is the only actual room?

But it's not, Eric and I argue about this all the time. We can point a telescope anywhere in the galaxy and we're gonna get information that would have to be consistent with our current theories in physics and it happens. Right, but this is where quantum physics has a bunch of weirdness. So this is the second thread that I started to explore when I was looking at simulation theory and the third thread is the religious ideas. So in the quantum physics thread there's this problem in quantum mechanics called the observer

effect. There's this idea that there's a probability wave of outcomes and we only see one of those outcomes or in the double slit experiment you have a particle of light called a photon which can only go through one slit at a time but what experiments show is that it goes through both slits at the same time. So the best way to explain it is using Schrodinger's cat. Well really quick the light one's good. So depending on how light is observed, it can be both a particle and a wave. That's crazy. That's crazy. Because what it's saying is until it's measured or observed that it's gone through boat slits. But when it's observed, it's as if it only went through one of those. Right. That's right. And that's the weirdness.

This is why Feynman said nobody understands. Niels Bohr said, if you aren't truly shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it, because it defies common sense. So the cat is a good way to think about it. So instead of two slits, think of a cat in a box. And this was put forth by Erwin Schrodinger, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

He said, if you had a cat with some poison in a box, and you had a little radioactive material that has a 50% chance after an hour of releasing the material which releases the poison and kills the cat, then there's a 50% chance that the cat is dead and a 50% chance the cat is alive. Now what he says is if the box is closed, common sense tells us that the cat is either alive or dead. It's been an hour. We don't know because we haven't looked, but it can't be both.

But what quantum mechanics is telling us is that both exist in a state of what's called superposition, meaning it's got both of those positions. It's alive and it's dead until somebody looks. Right, right, right. And then what happens is we say in the Copenhagen interpretation, which is the most popular interpretation,

there's another one, the multiverse, which we can talk about with superheroes and timelines and there's a whole bunch of interesting elements, but it stays in this superposition and then the probability wave collapses to just one probability. Right. And that is the probability that is observed at that time.

Which is that the cat is alive. Or dead. Maybe we're having this interview or maybe we're not having this interview today, right? Those are two different positions. And now there's a whole branch of computing called quantum computing, which is able to simulate this idea

of bits having multiple values rather than having just a value of zero or one. They have both values, which means they can explore every single possibility. So one bit has two possible values of zero or one. Permutations. So if you have two bits, you have four permutations. And if you have three bits, you four permutations and if you have three bits you have eight, sixteen,

thirty-two, sixty-four. Now if you have sixty-four bits you have two to the power of sixty-four. Now that turns out to be a very large number like 18 quintillion. And so for most computers to go through all the possible values of that would take an eternity. A great way to explain this is the old chessboard in India. So there's this king who loves to play chess. Nobody wants to play chess with him anymore because he's too good. He finally goes to this wise man and says,

I'll give you anything you want if you play chess with me and if you beat me in chess. And so the wise person or the sage says, fine, I'll play you. If I win, you will give me one rice for the first square on the chessboard. You'll give me two grains of rice for the second one and four grains of rice and then eight grains of rice and 16 and you'll just double it for each square

and so of course the wise man wins the game and it turns out two to the 64 would be enough rice to cover up all of India right back to the bits in 64 if you have three integers that you could be multiplying it by no so if you have three bits let's say in order to figure out what the right answer is, you would have to explore every single one of those values. Now two to three is only eight. So that's easy. A computer can do that really fast. But when the number of bits grows, these problems grow exponentially. Meaning it doesn't just double the time it takes, it takes way more than that because you're raising to a power and so these problems from exponential growth are not

Doable with existing computers so classical computing which is what all of our computers are built on right now Which is what Bill Gates does Bill Gates owns a quantum computer. He's quite aware of quantum computing He is but being aware of it and thinking of the universe as a quantum computer are different things So what quantum computers can do is they can theoretically. He said no one understands what the quantum computer is doing either. Exactly. Yes, yes.

But it's been posited by people like David Deutsch at Oxford and Seth Lloyd at MIT, who are two pioneers in this field, that the reason it can arrive at the right answer in a short amount of time is because you can think of all those bits and all those values as being alternate universes. So it is actually using computing power

from all these other multiverses. So now we're thinking like Marvel, Dr. Strange, and the multiverse of madness, or Spider-Man if you've ever seen Spider-Man, where they've got Tom Holland, and who are the other two, Andrew Garfield. They've got the three different Spider-Man. And so they've got different versions in these universes,

and so it explores all of these areas at once and then it comes back to the existing thing. But the main thing in computer science is optimizing. So what it seems like this weird quantum phenomenon is saying is you can have lots of probabilities, but it's only that which you observe that needs to get rendered. In a video game, it turns out that's exactly how we build

an entire 3D world, like we mentioned Fortnite, we mentioned World of Warcraft, there's a bunch of others as well. There was a game called No Man's Sky a few years ago, and they had two to the 64, the same number we're talking about, they had 18 quintillion worlds. Now they didn't design all those worlds,

they just get rendered for you using AI when they're needed. So your computer can't render the whole world. It only renders what's there. The idea is that the universe itself, why would this weird thing exist in a purely material physical universe? You wouldn't have this weird disinformation mechanics.

And so in trying to come up with an explanation for these different interpretations that people have, which nobody understands, one new explanation is that the world is rendered on demand as it's needed by observers. And so you can look at a telescope, and now suddenly that galaxy, and then as we get better telescopes,

it needs to fill in, and that's exactly what video games would do. telescope and now suddenly that galaxy and then as we get better telescopes it needs to fill in and that's exactly what video games would do. They would fill in the pieces that are needed and then they cache on the server so caching is like storing something so that when you look back at it you'll see the same value again. It only has to construct it once. If there's multiple people looking at it you get what's called coherence in the quantum world across these different people and so that's I think one of the arguments that gets around this issue where it's not a brute-force calculation. This is why predictions are

so bad because they always extrapolate based upon the current trend and so for example Intel back in the 2000s their chips were getting faster and the reason why is they're squeezing more and more transistors into the small space of a microchip. They said eventually this would get too hot, hotter than the sun. But that was using the current architecture. Right. So they went to a whole different architecture. They went to optimization technique.

Or there was the astronomer who wrote a piece in the New York Times, I think in the 20s, he said, There's no way we can get to the moon. Let me calculate and show you why. And he said, we take all the fuel that's required. That's going to be more than the rocket of the ship therefore we can't go there but what they don't take into account is optimization. And what if quantum mechanics and this is what I'm suggesting in my book is an optimization technique of the universe. It would at least make sense from a informational

point of view. Now the thing that most physicists don't argue as much about today they would have 20 years ago is that the universe actually consists of information. We think this is a physical table, this is a physical coffee cup, but there was a guy named John Wheeler, who was my favorite physicist of the 20th century. He was at Princeton and he worked with Einstein and he worked with Niels Bohr, he worked with a bunch of guys, and he came up with a phrase towards the end of his life. And he said physics went through the end of his life. And he said, physics went through three phases in his life.

We thought originally everything was a particle, like an atom is a solid object. And then we said, well maybe everything is a field, and we calculated. And at the end of his life he said, everything is based on information. So if you think about it, the table is 99% empty space. You go into the molecules, they're pretty empty.

You go to atoms, electrons are kind of these clouds, but there's really not much there. And there's the nucleus, and you can keep doing that. At the bottom level, what we call a particle is just a series of answers to yes-no questions. It's just the properties that make it a particle. And those properties are like spin and electrical charge, these types of properties,

there's a bunch of them that physicists love. Yeah, we keep trying to find the quintessential element that everything is built from, but we keep getting smaller and smaller as technology permits us to, and we don't know that we've found the bottom. Right, so Wheeler said at the bottom, it's just information.

So he came up with this phrase, it from bit. And what he said was, is it it just information. So he came up with this phrase, it from bit. And what he said was, is it it here? It looks like an it, but it's actually a series of bits. And those bits are now getting rendered for us in some way to make it look as if these are physical. We're really touching the sofa.

We're really touching this coffee cup. And so it from bit is quite interesting because it shows there might be an information substrate to the universe. Okay, so one great thing I heard, Yuval Harari has been long predicting, I think in Homo Deus, we're gonna become basically a leisure class

as everything gets automated and AI is running everything. And the interviewer asked, well, what will people do all day long? And he said, people will enter simulations. They will entertain themselves with adventures through simulations and the interviewer said like well, that's a bleak future Or just all in these imaginary games all day long and he said there's nothing new about the simulation Humans religion is the simulation. We have been playing the simulation game for a long time. We're here on this place It's not the real place. It's not the permanent place. Ultimately you'll go to heaven, that's the real place.

You're engaged in acts of virtue, there's almost a point system, and that people are almost, especially in the Middle Ages and some of these other times, like they're engaged all day long in the pursuit of going to heaven. Eastern religions with reincarnation and stuff, definitely what you do here brings you to a different level

in the next life, and the next life is very video gamey. Very simple. So I liked his answer. It made it feel a little more hopeful. This won't be new for us. So let's talk about religion and philosophy and how these kind of concepts have existed for a very long time.

Yeah, so if you think of how religions evolve, there's generally two ways. There's what's called a theophany, where the divine makes an intervention in the founder of the religion's life, whether it's a burning bush or an angel grabbing the Prophet Muhammad in Islam, or it's through yogic techniques, you have a mystic who is then able to perceive the nature of reality. And they come back and they say, oh, this whole thing that we thought was real is not real. That there's actually something else out there. There's more. And in fact, what they've been telling us all along is that the world is a kind of a hoax.

An illusion. An illusion. So in the Hindu traditions you have the term Maya, which literally means illusion, but it also means a kind of carefully crafted illusion. So in the Hindu traditions you have the term Maya which literally means illusion, but it also means a kind of carefully crafted illusion. If you go to a magic show, you know you are not really seeing that magician saw the woman in half, but it's kind of fun to think how did he do that? Is it real? So you kind of agree to be part of the delusion. And then it turns out there's almost identical language in the Quran, for example, where it says, we have set up this world as a pastime, a sport, a game for your amusement. And then I was able to find a verse that said basically that this is an enjoyable delusion. What is that?

It's like a game. And even in the Indian traditions, there's this idea of the lila, which means like the game play or the stage idea of the lila, which means like the gameplay or the stage play of the gods. And if you've ever seen that game, shoots and ladders. So that's based on an ancient Indian game, which was like snakes and ladders. Oh my God. Is this where your original fear of snakes comes from? Is this your genetics coming out? We did a flightless bird on this actually. And I was scared.

I'm afraid of snakes too. It makes sense. They're scary. Well, even in the Judeo-Christian, you've got the snake tempting you. Exactly. Snakes have been getting a bad rap for a long time. They sure have. Exactly.

But that game was actually meant to simulate life, and you'd roll the dice, and if you ended up on a snake, it was like karma dragging you down. And then at the top level is where you try to reach enlightenment. So you're going through these multiple lives. And so you see the same metaphors being used again and again. And then of course, in the Christian religions and the Judeo-Christian tradition in the Bible, you have the here and the hereafter. And so it turns out they've all been telling us that it's a kind of hoax. And what's the purpose of the hoax? It's to have certain experiences and certain challenges and tests, right? It wasn't meant to be like in the Matrix, Agent Smith, as the AI tells Morpheus,

that this wasn't the first version of the Matrix. The first version was everything was great. We gave everyone everything they wanted. The human mind wouldn't accept that delusion. So we had to create this world with all of its challenges. And that's true in video games as well. So there's a in video games as well. So there's a guy, Nolan Bushnell, who was the founder of Atari. I'm going back to the early days of video games. I used to play Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

And he said, the rule in video games is make them easy to play, but difficult to master. And people always say to me, if this is a simulation and if I chose to be in this game, then I would be a billionaire and I would be a movie star and I would have all these planes. Be Monica Padman, yeah. Yeah, that's...

I'm just an NPC anyway. Oh, no. You would be more controllable. But how many times would you play that game? You'd play it once, you'd play it twice, and you'd get bored with it. And so, there's also this idea that incarnation is an act of forgetting in all the traditions and not just the religions but in the philosophical traditions too. In Greek lore Plato talks about Lethe which is

the river of forgetfulness and you cross that river when you come in so you kind of forget about the plan that you had before you came in and that's what makes it fun because now you can approach these challenges in a fresh way. Well, how about we learn this from Rami Youssef, the actor, that in Arabic, the word for human translates kind of to forgetful. That's right, and in Islam, in the Sufi traditions,

they get very explicit about it. They have the 70,000 veils between you and God. Each of those veils goes up, you forget some aspect of God. That's really interesting. And more than that, if you've ever talked to any people who've had near-death experiences, many of them report what's called a life review. And a life review is where you have to replay every single event from your life, but you have to replay it from the point of view of the other person so you can see what it's like. Oh, I've not heard that detail of it.

And that's an important detail. In fact, I think that's one of the most important details. You're an outside observer of your own life. You're the other character. You actually get into their shoes and you actually see what it was like. So I first heard about this from a guy named Daniel Brinkley who wrote a book called Saved by the Light.

He was struck by lightning back in the 70s and was dead for so many minutes. And he used to be in Vietnam and he used to shoot people. He had experienced what it was like to be shot by his bullet, not just the pain of the person, but then he had to see the ripple effects of what happened to that person's wife and kids. They had an omniscient kind of point of view.

From an omniscient kind of point of view. From an omniscient, but also from the point of view of those people, so you get the feeling of it. Now, this would seem strange at first, but another virtual reality story in Silicon Valley, around that same time, I was involved in a startup that could take a video game that had been played, and you could replay it.

That's pretty common now, if you go to YouTube, the most popular content is watching people play video games. Can't remember, I had a run up, but yes, I acknowledge it. I remember my nephew when he was three, said to his father, my brother, he's like, I wanna watch Star Wars. He said, oh, you wanna watch Star Wars the movie? No, no, I wanna watch the man and the woman

play the Star Wars game. Oh my God. Right, so it's just a recording of a gameplay session. What the startup did was you could put on a virtual reality helmet and you could be inside the Call of Duty game or the Counter-Strike global offensive Which is the first-person shooter and we could go to any XYZ coordinates

So you could see the bullet coming at you that your character shot them with now We can't give you the feelings of the other people we can't show you the ripple effect now it turns out that is in These ancient traditions as well So in the Bible you have the book of life where they write down the names of the people that will go to heaven. But if you talk to some people, they write more than that. They write down the deeds that you did. And in the Quran, they get very explicit.

They call it the scroll of deeds. You've probably seen the images of the angel and the demon. But basically they say there's two angels that are writing down every good deed and every bad deed that you do. And then at the end of life, what the day of judgment is, is you have to open your book. And there's an actual verse that says this,

because most people think God is judging you. Read your book, see what you have done. You yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner. So, you know, I was asked to give a talk at a Islamic jurisprudence conference in the UK, and I said, well, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and a technology guy. Why are you asking me to do this? There was an ayatollah in the audience, and I was giving them a different interpretation

of the world as a virtual reality. And it turns out that what these guys are all saying is not that there's a physical book. There's like billions of angels on everybody's shoulders, writing down with a feather pen, he got up in the morning, he went to Los Angeles. But rather that this is a metaphor for what's really happening, which is that everything is recorded

in some giant database and can be replayed for us. And that is the purpose of life. That gets back to the golden rule, which is do unto others. Why? Because you will have to be them and you will see exactly reap what you sow. So what's really interesting is I clearly see

all of these parallels. I acknowledge them, I agree. But you and I have two completely opposite takeaways from that. So your takeaway, as I understand, is people have always been mildly aware of the sim. Yes. They've been trying to express it

with what limited abilities they had in that era. Right, metaphors. Yes, and what I interpret is humans as a species who are addicted to story and addicted to status as social primates will always construct these narratives. And you are yet another person taking what's around you, and you're just constructing a religion narrative, and God is the programmer, or God is the computer.

And so you're just trapped actually in our biology, and your mind's telling you, no, we've actually figured out this other thing these people were attempting to figure out for millennia, and I think we have opposite conclusions. Does that make any sense? Yeah, I think so, but what I'm doing is updating the metaphors.

There's metaphors that talk about incarnation in these traditions, and they say the soul goes into the body in the same way that a body puts on clothes. So that's a metaphor, and so my point is that there may be something completely ineffable, unable to be able to put into words about ultimate reality.

And so these guys did the best they could at the time, and we're doing the best we can. So we're trying to update the metaphors in a way that would make sense to modern people. Yes, but can you acknowledge that if we had evolved to have the same intelligence we have, but we were a tiger instead of a chimpanzee, we were a solitary animal, there waspanzee. We were a solitary animal.

There was no status, there was no hierarchy, there was no gods. That you would be bringing to bear all this intelligence, but you would be off in a completely different direction because you'd be a solitary animal that doesn't even think that way. That actually all you're doing is dealing with all the new technology

and these age-old questions of having consciousness. And with consciousness comes ego, and with ego comes an awareness that I'm gonna die. And all of these things are incredible motivators to force your thinking into explaining them. So some people say that simulation theory is religion for atheists. Yes, it is.

In a sense, it's a type of religious view, because what is religion? I mean, Yes, it is. In a sense, it's a type of religious view because what is religion? I mean, yes, it's a set of practices, but going back to at its core, what is religion? It's trying to define the ultimate nature of reality, what happens after we die. Well, Genesis, how did we get here? Where are we going? Yeah, it's an explanation.

It's an explanation. It's interesting that you aren't more skeptical and that you go, look at all the humans that came before us. They were attempting to answer this question and they were all wrong. Yet I'm in the generation that will be right. But I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying they were right for their period of time. They were right, but it wasn't actually a God and it wasn't really Yahweh and it wasn't

really the Son of God, Jesus. It wasn't any of those things, but they were trying their best to do is put in placeholders for what we now know. Some of that. So for example, in Genesis, it says, God said, let there be light. And then it goes through and says, God says, create the land. And then he creates the waters and the foliage and then the animals and then the humans. And what is the method that he used for creating this?

He spoke. He said, here, create this. And what I'm saying is, before, that would be completely dismissed by the scientific community. That's ridiculous. You can't speak and create a world, that's just not how it's done.

You can't do it in six days. We have a lot of geology that would say it didn't happen in six days. Didn't happen, right? But you can now. You can actually tell AI to create an entire world for you in six units. Yes, but I think we're seeing iterations.

This is the latest iteration, and I don't disagree with you. Yeah, we're seeing iterations of the oldest question we've had. Yes, absolutely. And we're just in our time doing our iteration of it. Yes, and there may be other iterations, but I'm saying that the iterations

are getting closer and closer. It's getting more compelling because the actual possibility of this fantasy is seemingly upon us. Yeah, we're seeing it. We're seeing AI make worlds. So this theory is not like a god and a snake where we've never seen any evidence of. But rest assured, our level of conviction currently is the same level of conviction as the people that were following Mohammed through the desert.

But if you're Mohammed, you had that experience with an angel, or if you're somebody who's had a near-death experience and you've had that experience of a life review, or you're a yogi who has meditated and suddenly you remember your past lives, what I'm saying is for them, it wasn't just a social story. For them, it was something they actually saw.

And now you can argue that. You can say that's all bullshit. But in academia, we say that's all bullshit. That doesn't really happen. This machine has already been doing what we hope that the computing power will actually do, which is we have been able to see from someone else's perspective always.

That doesn't require any technology. We have empathy. In fact, it was imperative for our survival because we would deal with people of higher status and we had to be able to predict what they wanted to hear from us to get the thing we wanted. Like our hardware is to do exactly this, to put ourselves

in other people's perspective, to be capable of all these things. I just think that is the ability of our human brains because of how we evolved. And here we are again, and there's a little bit of arrogance on our part to think, no, but we're the ones. Now we have the deets. Now we actually know. Would you agree there's a little bit of lack of humility? And by the way, I love it. I think about it all the time. And I would say there's a lack of humility today in science

thinking that we know everything and that this is all there is. In fact, we may know only 2% of what we'll figure out. Even this idea of the past, I mean, if you go into quantum mechanics, it gets so weird that the past isn't fixed anymore. Correct. It starts to become so bizarre. We're really starting to question time in general. Yeah, and now we're getting into big questions of consciousness.

Physicists have been debating this for hundreds of years. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics says, consciousness is fundamental, matter is derivative. Most scientists today would say no, matter is fundamental and consciousness just comes from having a bunch of neurons That's all there is. Yeah, these are determinists Yeah, but it's interesting because if you talk to doctors, they'll kind of take that point of view and you talk to nurses So Polsky who is my favorite person alive? He believes that the consciousness is just there's no free will right within the system

So these are ongoing big big debate That we haven't yet resolved so you can think of simulation theory as a metaphor that allows these people to talk to these people. These people think they have the answers, the scientists. These people think they have the answer. The ayatollah. The ayatollah or the yogis. The yogis think they have the answer,

but they don't talk to each other because they say, oh, those guys are just materialists who don't know anything beyond. And these guys say, those guys are just a bunch of mystical blue ha ha's who don't know anything. Perhaps the answer is not that. Yeah, you're saying they're kind of saying the same thing. They're all saying the same thing.

They have different mechanisms. That's all these things have. Yeah, I agree with you there. [♪ music playing on video game music playing on speakerphone.com.au. A.I.D.A.D.A.D.] Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. This is Nick. And this is Jack.

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Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our town. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents. There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people, ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized

crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the earth or destroy it. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. Last one I want to just throw out there.

Again, I hope I'm being clear, I love the simulation. I think about it all the time, we talk about it all the time. So it's like I'm not in or out, but one thing that I think is unavoidable to acknowledge is the people who the simulation theory appeals to.

People like you, people like me, people like Monica, people like Elon Musk, people who seem to have been luckier than other people on planet Earth are more inclined to believe something stinks. You are not hearing a ditch digger who was abused as a child, whose wife left him, who's dying of alcoholism going,

God, I bet this is a simulation. Well, they're not real, so. Right, right, so the excuse, right, so I wanna work through it. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. No, but that is it. Eric would say, well yeah, he's an NPC. That's dangerous. But it is. Exactly what I wanna point out.

So A, it's the people who believe in it are luckier than other people. I'm one of them. And then for your theory to hold, well why am I so lucky and these other people are not? Well, they're fake. And that is the biggest, elitist superiority complex one could have.

If you are forced to write off 80% of the world who doesn't like their lot in life and there's no fucking way they paid for the simulation. But aren't we saying that the simulation is built for, you're supposed to have challenge. That's variant, I guess, per person. Again, it depends on your point of view on this axis of RPG versus NPC versus just model.

Minimally, that weeds out the participation model. This would just have to be a model simulation to come up with answers. Possibly. To me, that's definitely one possibility. But the counterpoint to that is this is a question that religions have struggled with for years, which is why is there suffering in the world? You have God created everyone he loves everyone why on earth is this person a beggar and getting beat and enslaved?

And this person's a king exactly and so one of the first Indian yogis to come to the u.s. Was a guy named Swami Yogananda came here in Los Angeles He wrote a book called autobiography of a yogi if you guys have ever heard of it He's the rock star of the yogi world. Yeah, Steve jobs favorite book was autobiography Yeah, it was given out as funeral to everybody and so he among many Spiritual leaders over the years have struggled with this question and he said God why do you allow such suffering and this was during the world? Who are one so this was the first mechanized war? Yeah, we're being killed at like a horrific level was the gnarliest war we've probably ever had.

Now we have weapons even greater than that, but he got a very strong answer. The answer came to him in a vision. What the vision said to him was, life is like a film, a projector, and the characters in the movie are suffering, but the actors don't actually suffer. In fact, I mean, we're here in Los Angeles.

What are the roles that the actors want that they're gonna win an Oscar for? It's the ones that have the most suffering. And so he used a technological metaphor to try to describe this thing that religions have been saying for thousands of years, but he would say ceaseless joy is not the nature of this world, right?

And the Buddha said, suffering is a key part of this world. But that's a highly misinterpreted. Yeah, it may be. Life is suffering isn't I am a slave. It is I suffer from my craving and lack of acceptance of my reality. That's correct. So I just want to be very clear on that.

Buddhism isn't there should be a slave class that suffers. No, no, no. Buddhism is how do you get out of this? Yes. Suffering. How do you end craving? How do you end the attachments and the craving and all of the despair and all of this other stuff as well

by getting off the wheel? My conclusion, he did a good job, he did his best. The bottom line is there isn't a God because you cannot come up with an explanation for why so many people are suffering in this completely horrific way. Even if you make up that they're actors and they wanna do it, it's a total.

It's not actors. That perspective would say the point is the afterlife. So this suffering and what's happening here is not your eternal life. So that's the actor element of it. That you're suffering for this time in order for this. And there's a consolation prize. And that's the best we can do to not feel terrible about how unjust this planet is. How are the people who are causing that suffering, what do they choose to do, and perhaps they are playing a role?

Now this is just a suggestion, right? Yeah, yeah. That the reason they're in this world is to allow those people to make the choice. So they can learn, whether it's in the afterlife or in their next life or once they're outside of the game, oh, I shouldn't have done that. I made bad choices along the way. This is victim blaming is what it is. Well, that's one way of looking at it, but then we're right back to is there a God or not?

We have to look at both sides of it. Oh, I know, but the other side, it's been explored for 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian religion and all these other religions and they're all attempts to buffer how unjust and how unfair it is. Then the message is usually don't treat people that way, right? But the message is never received by humans and that to me is the social primates problem. They need these religions to teach them this basic truth that you shouldn't treat people badly,

but they can't quite do that because of the nature of this world and because of the craving and everybody's trying to get ahead, which means somebody else has to be left behind. So in my opinion, that is because of the social nature of the world, but the spiritual provides a different perspective,

but that's a different perspective. We have to acknowledge the people who are drawn to the sim theory. It's super relevant. It's not people who are suffering. It's people who it's worked out for pretty well. That's not entirely true. That's like saying the only people that believe in religion

are people that are not suffering. And that's not exactly true. I wouldn't say that about religion. I would say that's unique about simulation theory. But simulation theory is perhaps another version to what I'm saying, particularly in the RPG version, which is the version you don't like, but that version is actually closer

to what the religions are saying. And so when you suffer, if you view it as a new kind of challenge, or the difficulty level of the game is up to nine or 10, and we've all had suffering of various kinds, I think that provides a different perspective because people say, well, what does it matter to me in my life?

That's a question that I get a lot is why should I care? And I said, well, if you view it as if you have a certain storyline and a certain set of challenges that when something bad happens to you, perhaps there's a storyline that you're part of that this suffering can be thought of as a challenge. When the rubber meets the road, if you're talking to a young woman

who was raped by her father for 18 years, and you look at her and she says, I'm in a simulation, and you say either, yes, you're in a simulation and you're real, or you're a computer-generated person so that my life has perspective. If your worldview is those are the two answers for why she's had the worst experience on planet Earth,

I think that's insanely patronizing to her experience. That chunk has to be accounted for. But what's the difference between that and religion? That's why I hate religion. Or in general, the reality is some people suffer more in life than others. And you can say that's because of God, you can say that's because of a game you can say that's because of a game

where some people are titrated to have more or less. It's all the same thing. It's not though. Because there are real explanations for why that woman is in that situation and it's not God and it's not the simulation. It's the socioeconomics, it's the history of the parent who abused her.

You're saying people will stop trying to fix the problems if there's just like, this is the way it is. Well, why would they? This is a simulation. I see that fear. Yeah, but to simply say that they're not going to try to fix the problems the next time around, right? That that woman or that young man is not going to try to fix that with their kids because

they're in a simulation is not necessarily the case. If you're that woman, how about that? That's all I'm asking. If you're that woman and you're hearing the three of us talk and you're that woman and you're like, you guys think this is a simulation? Do you not see inherently the deep offense to that? But do you also see how it could offer her a glimmer of hope?

You're seeing only one side of the story. I'm seeing her side, the one we're encouraged to see. But don't you see, she could say, okay, this is the suffering that I'm seeing her side, the one we're encouraged to see. Yes, but don't you see, she could say, okay, this is the suffering that I'm going through right now, this is not all that is, that perhaps there's a part of me that's bigger than this. That is the historic salve that has tried to make those people not revolt and overthrow the government

that was oppressing them. Right, so in your opinion, then religion is just a social construct and there is no mystical reality, and that's okay as a perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is my point of view. Yeah, that's why when I love sim what ultimately I'll find my way up to my objection is the same one I had about religion. Yes, I think that's coming through clear. But is that you have an objection to religion and that's okay because you know I spend half my time with people who have serious objections to religion and half my time with people who say there's something there. I want you to count me in the middle. That's kind of where

I've ended up and I tend to have sympathies with both sides and as we try to understand the physical world, even if you believe, okay, there's nothing outside, it's just so strange that we can't find a good explanation for why these things happen. It's very possible that what we're finding is that the world isn't as real as we thought it was and it isn't as physical. And most scientists won't argue with this. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah. I was talking to a Nobel Prize winning physicist

in the UK at the University of Cambridge last year and he says, well, that part, nobody's gonna disagree with you anymore. They used to. Yeah, self-organizing complex systems are to me the one bit of magic I still believe in. Yeah, and built on an information substrate. And sometimes things happen to many people that can't be explained with a purely materialistic

explanation. Would you say maybe yet? Yes. Or because they haven't thought through a model. There's so much we don't know. We would both acknowledge. There's so much we don't know. I'll give you a computer example that would seem like magic and would be written off if

we didn't know anything about how computers work But we do so I was shopping for a backpack and a website and I went to a specific website Specific backpack somebody said these are good and then later I'm on my phone Okay, and I'm in some social media app and I see an ad for that backpack and I say whoa What a weird coincidence young to find the term synchronicity and the synchronicity is when an inner thought Jung defined the term synchronicity and the synchronicity is when an inner thought accounts with an outer thought. I would say oh my god it's a glitch in the matrix because I don't know that there's an information substrate. There's a thing called advertiser intent. I registered my intent, but it's in a database that I can't see. It's in the cloud somewhere.

Perhaps some of the weird glitches that people see including things like synchronicities. The Mandela effect, that's a really fun one. Yeah, the Mandela effect is one that I've talked about in one of my books. Yeah, I love it. The simulated multiverse. That to me defies explanation. How on earth could this many people be this wrong about the same fantasy?

Yeah, exactly. And so if you take an information-based view and say there's a substrate here that will record this information, even though we can't see it, then maybe there will be an explanation that science will eventually be able, and that's why I think simulation theory is a way to put, like one physicist told me it's a framework or a scaffolding around which they could start to explore some of these mysteries in ways that can't be.

And the Mandela effect is a really weird one. Soap stop stuffing. I'm certain that's a product. Yesterday when we were recording this was the anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Oh yeah, there's a bunch of Mandela effect about that. There was that guy that was in front of the tank. Yeah, sat in front of the tank.

And they call him Tank Boy. Do you remember if he was killed or not? I would say he was not. That's what I would say. Yeah. But if you get a group of people together, there will always be one or two who remember he got run over by the tank

and it was the bloodiest thing they ever saw on TV. Which you would think would be so memorable. Exactly, it's so memorable and it's so strange. Yeah and so you know the term Mandela effect was coined by a blogger named Fiona Broom and she was at a comic-con like the one they have in San Diego I think this was in Atlanta and it was a Star Trek panel with the actors from like the 60s series and there were the Trekkies in the audience and it was a Star Trek panel with the actors from like the 60s series, and there were the Trekkies in the audience, and they were like, oh, do you remember that episode when you did this and Spock said this and Kirk said that? And the guys on stage were like, there's no such episode. And the audience is like, yes, there absolutely was. If you

know Trekkers, like these guys know their episode. They know their shit. They know their shit. And so that's what caused her to start investigating, are there phenomena like this? Wow. I mean, there are pictures of people next to the Thinker. Do you remember the statue of the Thinker? The David? No, the Thinker.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you remember where his hand is exactly? On his chin? And in fact, that's what it is today. But there are pictures of people standing next to the statue. Next to it! There's literally a picture from the London unveiling of one of the first casts of The Thinker. The title of the picture is G.B. Shaw, George Bernard Shaw,

in the pose of The Thinker, and he's like this. He's doing it. Oh my God. And it's just bizarre. How does this happen? And now we get back to Philip K. Dick, the sci-fi writer, said that he came to believe that there was more than one timeline, that maybe these things happened.

Like the Germany and Japan timeline actually happened. The simulators didn't like the outcome and they changed the variables and they're rerunning it again. And maybe it's still going on at this point. Maybe we're only on a branch that exists for some period of time. Now, I dismissed the Mandela effect.

Ultimately explainable somehow. But then I had a good buddy of mine from MIT who worked at Google come to me and say, hey, have you looked at the Mandela effect? And I said, yeah, you know, bad memory, whatever. The usual explanation. And he said, well, you know, bad memory, whatever. The usual explanation. And he said, well, the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good explanation for that.

So I started to look into it in more detail. And then you find that there are people who have closer proximity to something, or there's significance for something, that still remember the opposite of what happened. Now, most people may not remember X or Y, or did Nelson Mandela die in prison in the 80s or not. But there's at least one blogger who says

she was a journalism student, and she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela, and they told her he's too sick, you can't interview him. She came back to the US, got a job with, I think it was like NPR in Chicago, and then she remembers him dying. As a journalist who's covering this thing, now is it possible that time isn't what we think it is? and then she remembers him dying. As a journalist who's covering this thing,

now is it possible that time isn't what we think it is? And it turns out quantum mechanics, I don't know if we want to get into this, but there's an experiment in quantum mechanics called the delayed choice double slit experiment. It's basically telling us that what we think of the past may not be as fixed as we think it is. And the best way to explain it is if you had light coming from a billion light years away

from say a quasar or something, it would take a billion years to get here because it's a billion light years away. Easy math. And suppose there's a black hole in the middle or one million light years away and the light has to go to the left or to the right of the black hole. And then we can measure using polarized light or telescopes. However it can be measured, whether it went to the left or the right. When would the decision have been made whether to go to the left or the right? Because clearly you can't do both. Well, what this experiment, which is proposed by my favorite physicist of the 20th century,

John Wheeler, and he couldn't perform it when he was alive, but people have performed scaled down versions of it now. What they found was that that decision is made when the telescope measures the light. So a million years ago, something happened, but it's only when we measure it today that this outcome or that outcome happens, even though it's the past.

From our perspective, it's the past. What it's showing us is that time is weird. It's very weird. St. Augustine said, what is time? If no one asks me, I know, but if you ask me, I do not know. Right, exactly. Because we don't really know what time is.

And so it starts to mess with your ideas of reality and turns out in a simulation or a video game, you fill in those details from the past. Like when you come to harvest your crops, they haven't been running the whole time. What happens is it just calculates what would have happened to those crops. Right. Using probabilities. It says from the last time you logged in to now, this is what happens. It fills in the past. Just like I was saying, we fill in different parts of the world as you observe it. And that to me suggests if

time and space are both quantized, and we know space is quantized, meaning there's a minimum level like a pixel, and if time is quantized, which scientists are starting to suspect, but no one's proven it yet, that is more like a simulated world. Than a materialistic. Than a physical world

with continuous time, with just one timeline, and that's it. Thanks. Yeah. Riz, you are so intelligent. It's intimidating to argue with you. You're fascinating. What you're holding in your head is very impressive. It's been a total honor to get two hours of your time.

Well, it's been a lot of fun. And I like this topic because it brings together many different threads and that's what makes it interesting. That's why I wrote this book. Yes, and everyone should check it out and it's updated because obviously when you wrote it, initially AI was kind of unpredictable where it's at now. You were required to incorporate where we're at now.

Absolutely, I'd laid out the 10 stages and I thought AI was a future stage and it turns out it's a current stage. Yes. So it's happening much faster. We're gonna witness it. We already are. I know.

So everyone check out the simulation hypothesis. It's available now. Riz, this has been incredible. I hope we get to talk to you again. I would love that. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Absolutely.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Okay. Oh my God. Okay, we've been holding on a story and we need to hear it. I know. I almost, the, the thing I worry about is I don't think you're going to believe my retelling of it.

And that's why I suggested we might need testimonials from people that were involved. It's too, it's too much to do. To do. It's a bit of a cum do. Cumbersome, inefficient. Adding more people to edit and lay in. It's too much. It's just, we just, it's too much, okay? You can ask tonight if I told this story fairly.

Okay. I also need one more preface. Okay. This is a very hard story for me to tell because I blundered in a way I hate to blunder. Okay, well, I'm gonna say, I don't know what you're about to say, but I'm proud of you for owning that you blunder.

In a way that I would least want to blunder. I even thought like while it was happening, I was like, well, this would clearly be, in any other circumstance, I would tell this story in the fact check. The fact that I blundered, I really was on the fence about it. Well, I would tell this story in the fact check. The fact that I blundered, I really was on the fence about it. This is almost as bad as my relapse story for my ego.

Okay, well now I'm probably. Now you've got a zone, I think. Anyways, let me tell you the story. Okay. Can I ask questions during the story? Please. Okay, so Eric and Molly and the kids, their children are here visiting in Nashville.

And it wasn't our first boat ride. I think we had a couple of good boat rides before this, but we went out on, I think it would have been Saturday. We decided, okay, we're going on the boat. It's gonna be a few hours. Like we're gonna drive to the end of the lake and go to this restaurant we love. And then on the way back, we'll do some tubing and we'll find a cove and that's the game

plan. Like we kind of know we're going to spend a few hours on the boat. Well, as we're driving to the restaurant, I see this cove and I'm immediately remembering people have in town have said like, have you gone to two foot cove? And I can see that, oh yeah, there's a sandbar that's two feet deep. There's a bunch of boats parked around it. And I think this is off schedule, but let's maybe we should drop anchor over there. The kids can swim by the fucking sandbar. Maybe we'll play some spades on the boat.

Right. It's kind of an impromptu decision to pull in. I need to add that my pontoon boat, which I love, has double bimini, meaning it has this, and you've experienced it now. It has this huge shade over the entire length of the boat, which is 25 feet. Yeah. So, okay, we pull up, there's tons of boats.

We pull by two pontoon boats that are tied together. They're hanging out, they're clearly together. Then another two dudes to the right of that, they're not tied up together, but they're around each other. I go up front to drop the anchor. And I'm telling you, at this point, I'm like 50 feet from these boats. I have so much room.

Okay. And I'm in the middle of like getting the anchor out and unraveling it and throwing it in and like tying it up to the thing. And in that amount of time, the wind, which was pretty severe, has taken the boat quickly towards the two pontoon boats that are roped off next to each other. Okay.

And so I'm in this situation where I'm at the front of the boat holding the anchor and I'm trying to decide, do I try to get this anchor to see and stop us from drifting into these boats or do I quickly run and start the boat up and put it in drive and that whole thing? Okay. I gotta add one thing. My biggest fear in life is ending up on the website,

the Instagram account, Qualified Captain, which is my favorite site. It's all guys shitting the bed in their boats. Either they drive their boat into the boat ramp and they bury their truck in the water or a bunch of hijinks and fails. It's called qualified or unqualified? You know, I always say qualified captain,

but it would make more sense as unqualified captain. Unless it's the funny, it's like funny. I think that's what it's, it's one of my favorite accounts. If not my favorite account, let me see, captain. I'll tell you the real name of it. The qualified captain. If you peruse through here, it's just guys losing control of their vessel

and it's so embarrassing. And ever since we got the boat, I said, my only goal is somewhere to not end up on the qualified captain website. I don't want you filming me fucking up. Okay, so we're drifting very quickly. I make the split second decision, fuck, I can't count that the anchor is gonna grab. I'm gonna go back, I go back, I started up.

By the time I get the boat started, we are now drifting into this pontoon boat. The dude, there's a dude on the pontoon boat, he sees what's about to happen. So he comes to the edge and he starts to try to push us in the other direction, I was like, great. So like he's doing that and we just kind of glide by. Now we glide between the two that are roped off

and the other two that are scatty wampus. And it's very, very tight. Like we're almost gonna hit the other one and now. And so we drift past and I think, oh my God. We just avoided that. There's a woman in the water behind the pontoon boat that couldn't see what was going on. She's on our own swimming.

She's floating in a tube like everyone else is floating and enjoying the day. And so as we're gliding by that boat, she's already yelling at us, what are you doing, put your body there. She's starting to shout directions at us. It is stressful. The kids are yelling at me to do things.

You know, and I now realize, but we have scraped their boat. I can see that we scratched the pontoon boat. The guy that was helping push, it scratched that. Yes, the pontoon boat that he was standing on, it has been scratched. And I'm like, oh, fuck. And there's all these, now everyone's watching, right?

That everyone that's parked out there, something's happening, she's yelling. And I'm like, so we get free of it, but now I gotta, I need to go back around and come up to them in control. But again, the wind's blowing like crazy. I have this huge sale and the fucking pontoon is just a big kite, cause it's a big square.

I immediately, immediately I go, oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'm gonna pay for this. I'll make this right. I'm so, so sorry. My bad, full ownership. I'm so sorry. I have Kristen write my name and number on a piece of paper. Now the woman in back, she's now,

I mean, she already thought all hell broke loose before she knew there was a scratch. Now she's really, now she's on the boat. Now she's screaming. What are you? Is she part of that boat? I don't know this yet. Okay.

And I don't know her age, but I'm't know this yet. Okay. And I don't know her age, but I'm gonna guess around 50. Okay. And then- Your age. Yes. And now a third guy enters the scenario, which seems to be her friend, and this guy's older.

Okay. He seems to be in his 60s. And he's now yelling at the top of his lungs, why is your vessel number? He's like, you know, give me your... And so we drive back up, Kristen Hanson got the piece of paper. We don't hit them, thank God.

Oh my God, what if it happened? And the woman is like, she's very upset. She's really, she's swearing, the kids are a little rattled. And he looks at this piece of paper, and I gotta add one thing for color commentary. The entire time this is happening, the dudes that were in the unroped off boats. One of the guys saw that it was me.

He's now going, Dax. He's screaming. So while all that chaos is happening, I have this guy over here going Dax. We're neighbors. We're neighbors. My dad, my dad has seven hit songs on the radio. I'm like hearing seven hit songs. We own restaurants. We're neighbors. My dad has seven hit songs on the radio. I'm like hearing seven hit songs. We own restaurants.

We're neighbors. And I'm like, I'm trying to be friendly to him, but they're all screaming. So now as I come back around to give my piece of paper, this guy is still, it's like round three of all this information. He's now, he's put his boat in driving. He's just tailing us wherever we go.

He's yelling. It couldn't be more chaotic. Give the guy the number. And we're like, okay, great. We gotta get be more chaotic. Give the guy the number and we're like, okay, great, we gotta get out of here. I just wanna get out of here. So we start pulling away and she's like, what are you doing? Get back over here.

You get back over here, you're hitting and running. And I go, no, I'm not. You have my number. I'm so sorry. I'm going to definitely make this right. I could not be more openly saying I'm sorry. I'm responsible and I'm gonna sorry, I'm going to definitely make this right. I cannot be more openly saying I'm sorry, I'm responsible, and I'm gonna pay for it. No, you get over here!

And I'm like, I'm not gonna rope my boat up next to this woman. The kids don't want me to, whatever. How is it hitting and running if you handed the thing over? Well, thank you. So I start driving away. Great. Phone rings, great.

I gave him my number. I don't mind talking to him. He was calm. So I got on the phone with him. He Great. Phone rings, great. I gave him my number. I don't mind talking to him. He was calm. So I got on the phone with him. He's like, hey, okay. So I go, so yeah, so here's my number. You know that it's real. I'm so sorry.

Please, I can't wait to pay for it. I'm really, really sorry. He's like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's cool. And he goes, oh, hold on. So-and-so wants to talk to you. And I'm like, oh my God. And it's the woman. And so the woman's on the phone and she's like,

you get back over here, I'm calling the TWA, the Tennessee Water Authority, who's the cops on the way. I'm calling them. And I go, okay, you can do that, go ahead. But you have my number and I'm gonna pay. And there's really no reason for you and I to sit next to each other. That's what's gonna happen next.

You better get back here right now. I'm calling the cops, you're getting arrested. I go, okay, I don't wanna talk anymore. I'm gonna pay for it. I hang up. Good, that sounds good. We cross the lake. It's about another 15 minute ride to the end of the lake

to the restaurant we wanted to go to. Obviously the kids are like, are you going to jail? You know, like everyone on the boat is now, what is gonna happen? I'm like, I don't know where I'm gonna go to. Obviously the kids are like, are you going to jail? You know, like everyone on the boat is now, what is gonna happen? I'm like, I don't really know, but I'm not sitting in that group of 300 people. One guy's telling me his life story. Everyone's got a camera out.

I just wanna get the fuck out of there. So we get to the restaurant, we sit down, we've just ordered drinks. We've been there for four minutes. Are you, what's your state when you're at the restaurant? I'm 85% confident that she's gonna call the TWA and she's gonna say, and they're gonna say, do you have any idea who this person is?

And she's gonna say, yeah, I have his number. They're gonna go, well, then that's not a hit and run. That's kind of where I'm at. I'm like, I'm not in trouble. I don't feel like I'm in trouble. I've done everything right other than hang with her. But are you feeling like, like, even if you're like, I'm obviously not getting arrested,

I would feel that like, well, obviously I'm not getting arrested, but this whole thing just, I mean, it's like chaos and cluster. I am thinking, oh my God, everyone on this lake's gonna know this story in five weeks. And again, my ego. The story's gonna be like, I drove my boat into somebody and I don't know what I'm doing.

Yeah, exactly. That's where my head was at, probably like ego management. This whole lake's gonna think I'm a fucking putz who can't drive a boat and blah, blah, blah. But I'm not really thinking the cops are gonna take this seriously. So the manager comes up right after we order drinks. He goes, hey, there's a few officers here

that wanna talk to you. I asked them to stay outside so that they didn't work in the restaurant, everyone watching, would you come to the office and back? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I get up and I walked through the kitchen of the restaurant and then I go into like the office of a restaurant and there's two officers.

There's two officers, they're young, they're nice, right? I basically tell my whole story to them. I got to back up. There was an exchange you need to know about. And I want to read verbatim so I don't mess it up. Okay, so this is the text exchange. "'Please let me know how much the damage is "'and I will be all caps happy to make it all right.

"'I will Venmo you the money or mail a check, "'whatever you prefer.'" Great. I'm texting with the dude at this point. He said, "'I trust you'll make it right. "'I think blank's name has the cops coming to us to file a report. Okay.

And I go, okay, whatever she needs to do, as long as she's honest about the fact that I immediately gave you my number and did not run, nor was there a collision. We drifted into you while both people were anchored. Again, extremely sorry for the inconvenience and I'm happy to fix it. And can you explain to Karen

there is no boat registration number because it hasn't been mailed from the county yet, but the boat is fully registered with my county, numbers haven't arrived yet. He said, hope y'all have a great rest of the weekend. Sorry, we had to meet like this. Okay. Okay. Her name is not Karen.

I've let one thing out. I couldn't resist. The fact that she's calling the police on me is not Karen. I let one thing out. I couldn't resist. The fact that she's calling the police on me is textbook Karen move. So I've been so nice, so nice, and I just let one, I was a little naughty, and I said Karen. What do you mean you said Karen?

I said please just make sure Karen's honest about the fact that I- Oh, I didn't even put, oh. I just slid it in. Oh my God. I just couldn't resist. Okay, great. Because it was insane.

Like, yeah, whatever. Okay, so now I'm in the office and I'm talking to the two police officers and I tell them the entire story and they're like, okay, great. Our boss is looking at the damage and he'll be on his way and so he's gonna come over and hear your statement too. And now Kristen enters the thing too.

So now we're both in there. The officer who's fucking awesome comes in. He hears the whole story and he's like, okay. He goes, okay, so yeah, that's not hit and run. You gave your information. He said, um, also I just saw the boat. We don't even file reports unless it's above $2,000 in damage. And there's no way that was, you know, so all that happens. I go back to the restaurant and now she starts texting me. Okay. She said hi, it's blank boat you hit

I'm sorry, but I just bought the boat last week. I'm not a Karen, but I was a bit upset I understand things happen. And yes, I did tell the TWA you left your number. I said great I just talked to them and we're all good. Again, extremely sorry I scratched your new boat. I feel terrible, especially if you just got it. The wind was stronger than I evaluated. Great. She said, I totally understand and have been there. I'm sorry I freaked out, all good.

I'll be in touch. I said, great, just let me know when you have a bid. She said, will do. And again, I'm sorry for being a Karen. And I wrote, ha ha ha ha ha. And I'm like, I love her. I love her. I cannot believe that she was able to come through.

She was so mad. But anyways, now it's been very lovely. And now I've had several exchanges with her that are very, very lovely. I think the win of the whole situation, which is completely never happens, is my kids were like, dad, I'm so proud of you. I thought you could have even been meaner to her.

And I never get that feedback. Yeah, their expectations are set. Yes, so I magically stayed super nice and apologetic the whole time. Yeah. That's very good. Yeah, do you believe that? I do believe it.

I do wonder if it has to do with your culpability. Like if it was just a scuffle. I generally overreact to injustice. And there was nothing unjust about me being in trouble for hurting her boat. Like, and I was like, again, I immediately was like, this is me, that's my bad. Yeah, so maybe that was at play,

but I am very glad you didn't overreact. I'm also being watched by people. The one guy screaming my name. So minimally he knows who I am. So that's helpful, knowing that I'm not anonymous watched by people. A long guy's screaming my name. So minimally he knows who I am. So that's helpful knowing that I'm not anonymous in this situation. I can't just fly off the handle. That's helpful.

So it's not all my willpower. Sometimes that's helpful, but sometimes it causes like, I think it can cause you sometimes to get extra panicky when there's like that kind of chaos or people are noticing it's you or everyone's noticing everyone on my boat is they got opinions. Yeah. Go here, turn here. What are you doing?

Yeah. Everyone's yelling. Go back. At first it was like, go back. She wants you back. I'm not going back. Right, right, right. I'm not sitting next to her.

Yeah. I'm happy to talk to the police, but I'm not going to hang with her until then. Yes. I think that was smart. I just would have escalated more if you had gone back. The only pat on the back I'll give myself is all of that pie. So those things really helped me behave correctly. But I am, that's a dream. We're friendly now. I never had these outcomes where like,

like I burned the house down and the people leave hating me and I hate them. And like, this is awesome. We went through this whole thing. I mean, she couldn't have been more mad at me. And I couldn't have written her off more as being just an insufferable Karen. There's no way back.

And then just, I had to go first. I just had to be really nice first. And guess what? She was really nice back ultimately. Okay, this is a great takeaway. Yeah, I'm learning at 50. I love that. To resolve these things in a way

where everyone actually kind of feels better at the end. Yes, that's great. It took me a long time to get here, but it's possible. And I didn't feel, that's what it's really epitomizes is my, I don't feel control, I don't feel in danger, I don't feel control. I don't feel in danger. I don't feel scared. I don't feel like, I feel fine to take it on the chin. This is really funny.

It's actually confidence was the ability to just take it on the chin. But I thought confidence was don't ever let anyone do that. So it took me a long time, but I've had a couple now experiences where I'm like, oh, this is way better. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I think you saying you love her now feels strong to me, but I think you respect her reaction. You respect the exchange. Deeply. I think for her to come back from where she started and I called her a Karen, for her to make a joke about herself being a Karen, I really applaud it.

Yes, yes. I do too. Everyone then handles it. You can do almost anything to me, but if you give me like a heartfelt apology and ownership of it, I can let anything go, pretty much. You just want the person to acknowledge.

Yeah, how they were acting. Yeah. So anyways, now I like her. I'm excited to see her on the lake. Okay. Yeah. Great. She is still someone who does just,

just a reminder, you did get a lot of information. You got great information, which is that she does cool down and can see things clearly, but she is also a person who does over... Who called the police on me from... Okay, has big reactions. Yeah, there we go, big. So, just, you know, both are true. Both are true.

She probably was like me as a kid, you know? Yeah. She must have been like, you can't just smash my fucking boat. Yes, exactly. She and I are the same. Let's say these are cars. So, if someone...

It would be the equivalent of definitely in a parking lot parking, you rub up against someone's bumper. Right, and then you leap, but then in that case... And you give the person your number. Yeah. You don't wait for the police to come talk about... That's what I was gonna ask, I was like, do you wait?

And in fact, in California, you don't even wait for the cops when there's a collision. You just exchange information and then you all bounce. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. But I mean, I do know states differ. I was thinking of that.

Like California is like that. Yeah. I think no fault states are like that. But some you do need the cops to come and do an incident report, but that's not how California is. Right. And so I felt like, oh, this was California, I've done the right thing.

But again, I don't really know what happens in Tennessee. Maybe I was supposed to sit there the whole time. There's a huge crowd of people fucking coming in. Did he say, but like that? No, no. He didn't say it, okay. He's like, you gave your information. So that was fine, okay, interesting.

Now what's more interesting is if what I've been able to keep all that same composure, if it was a guy and that's probably different, I would probably have a harder time just taking it on the chin from a guy. In fact, I'm pretty pessimistic about that. Maybe now moving forward, you could try it. I think what happens with a guy maybe is like, I'm not going to threaten a woman. Yeah, you just know it's not an option.

It's not an option. So I could just trick myself into like, because in that situation, my only option is to be nice. I'm not gonna scream at a woman. I'm not gonna hit a woman. Yeah. Unless she's trying to stab me. I think thinking of it as nice,

it's just civil. It's just like, I don't think anyone needs to be overly nice. I mean, obviously great if you are, or she is, or he is, or whatever, but just civil, we're just people, and we made this happen. I made a mistake, yeah. And we're gonna just be sort of, what's the word,

direct about it, just like this is what happened, and I'm gonna just be sort of, what's the word, like direct about it. Like just like this is what happened and I'm gonna fix it. Yeah. It doesn't have to be so emotional. Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I'm sure. Wow.

And I do believe you. Like I, what do you, what part did you think I wouldn't believe? That I handled it so peacefully. I guess I have some text evidence that helped. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's pretty scary. Also scary that these boats can just fly into other people's boats and cause damage.

Well, I learned a lot. My boat is a kite. Yeah, too thin. Perfect amount of thin. Yes. It's perfect. It's been a while since I've been called into a room to talk to the cops.

Yeah, did you feel like old? Like it was old? I've been called into a room to talk to the cops. Yeah, did you feel like it was old? I've been in that situation many, many times, yeah. Yeah, probably my most practiced behavior is trying to talk my way out of trouble I've gotten. Starting in school, you know, like learning to talk to the principal and the vice principal. I've had to talk my way out of situations, don't get me wrong, but not with the cops.

Right, right, right. I started my training with the principals. Yeah. I was pretty good at like, I would push the ding, ding, ding, the substitute teacher to the breaking point where they did their, you gotta go down to the office. And then I would talk my way out of that. That's so mean.

I know, I'm not. I'm just wanting you to know that, I have not been a perfect boy. No one's been perfect, but. I was trying to make jokes and entertain everyone. Did you use your stapler everywhere? No, I wasn't that type of disruptive. I was make a joke disruptive. I wasn't shoving anyone or tripping anyone

or calling girls names. Sure. I mean, me, anyone or calling girls names. Sure. I mean, me, I was calling girls names to Erin. I wasn't perfect. I was in junior high. I might've called people names. What'd you call? I just don't know. I don't have any specific memory,

but I'm just being honest that that might've been on the table. Yeah, you did. But never did their face. What'd you call them, a piggy a girl. You just called her Karen. Oh God, I'm just burying myself deeper. Say it. There was a girl in high school and my friend Brian Bullis and I sat behind her and I didn't notice, and also Bullis was such a character.

He's one of the most distinct friends I've ever had. You'll often hear Erin and I imitating him. He's like, I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom.

I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. Brian Bullis and I sat behind her. And I didn't notice, and also Bullis was such a character. He's one of the most distinct friends I've ever had. You'll often hear Aaron and I imitating him. He'd talk like this, Shepherd, what are you doing after school? He was like 45 years old in school. He had been kicked out of a really nice Catholic private school and he wore sweaters and khaki pants.

Shepherd, do you golf? So we were behind this gal and he noticed first, he goes, shepherd, was this gal beheaded? And I go, what? He goes, look at that scar on her neck. Oh. And she did, she had a scar that went completely across her neck as if she had been beheaded.

Oh my God. Then we were obsessed with what happened. Of course. So we had a whole semester of, Shepard, I think what happened? You know, it was just a lot of theorizing on what happened. She probably had a tumor. Well. I mean, let's.

Maybe she's at a rock concert and had a good time. No. No. Not a scar across the whole back. But I bet if that was- Shepherd, do you think she died? Okay, if she was in my school, with the girls, depending on how young we were, it would have been the like,

you know that wives tale about the woman that wears the red scarf around her neck, cause actually like, it's like her head came off. When she takes it off, her head falls off? Yeah, and it's red cause of the blood. Yeah. It would have been her. You would have thought that was her. And certainly she did have some dressing and gauze

on there post procedure that were probably red, like a scarf. I wonder what happened. It was a horrific. Shepard, I think she went through the windshield backwards, he'd say. That's not funny, because that is what maybe could have happened.

But not backwards. How would you end up going through it backwards? I don't know. Wow, yeah, kids are kids. Yeah. Kids are kids. Yeah. We've all done it.

Yeah, we see things, we see things, and then we focus on them. We focus on them, and we just want to feel like we're not the lowest on the totem pole. That's right. It's so... It's so social, primate of us. It is, but it's to be overcome, but it's real.

I know, you gotta transcend it. What you do is you get older. Some people. You hope, but school, we're not there yet. Yeah, it's true. Okay, great story. Thank you. I'll try to keep gathering stories.

Okay, I'm glad with the way it went. Little small update before we wrap up. We did watch What Lies Beneath last night. And I'm gonna give an objective retelling of the scenario. You were hell-bent on seeing it. No one was very amped up to watch it. Okay, hold on, hold on. I gotta add a little caveat there.

We talked about this on the fact check, some fact checks go, I said, can we watch what lies beneath? And you seemed excited about that. Yeah, because you looked very excited and I was not gonna rain on your break. But listen, I was a sex to see it. I remember it-ish.

Sure. And yeah, Lake, let's eventize this. Yeah. But no one was dying to watch it, but we all watched it because you wanted to. Molly acted it. And it was great. And everyone was so happy that you suggested it.

And Eric was jumping out of his chair. Screaming, we were making screams. I was making a lot of noises for a different reason and I got yelled at for it. What was it though? I didn't see. It was the intimacy parts. I was like vocally having a.

Oh right. Yeah. And. I didn't know. Look, I will tell you, so we're in a room that has tears and you were making some. That sounds even worse than a movie theater. I don't know and I, you were making some.

That sounds even worse than a movie theater. I don't know, okay, I have a weird. You know I'm so sensitive. No, I am now sensitive. This is why I fucking hate hearing anything, right? Because back to when I heard those girls talking about the Brad Pitt episode, they mentioned something about how you guys

both talked about your theaters. And it really, I hated that, obviously. And then now it's in my head, and now I have to say a room with tears. Now do you think it's just tone deaf to talk about your theaters in public? That's a good argument. Is it that, or is it like,

they're mad I bought a theater with my money? Like what do people want you to spend this money you make on? It's the first one. It's the first one. And I can like sort of understand it. Yeah. And I guess that's why now I'm like. But it's really funny though,

if people just go a step further, what you're saying is you want me to lie to you to remain relatable. You would pick dishonesty over triggering. I get it, I get it. I just laid out a scenario the other day and we were having a hypothetical conversation. I said, yeah, if you're with me

and you can't make your mortgage payment and you see me buy something or rent something, that's hard. It is hard. I understand all of it. It's like, yeah, what are you gonna do. That's hard. It is hard. I understand all of it. It's like, yeah, what are you gonna do? That's your- But I'm gonna keep doing it because I'm just not gonna be dishonest.

I didn't watch this movie in my bed on TV. We watched it in- A Room with Tears. 10 seat movie theater. But I also, it's like, there's just like, they're big couches. It's comfortable. It's not like a movie theater that you'd go to at the movie theater.

That's all I wanted to specify. Like tears sounded like maybe there was, there's like a hundred seats in there. Yeah, there was like a couple, whatever. We were watching the movie. I don't, I don't want to do this, but like, and you were in a space that I couldn't really see you. I was in the front row of many, many rows.

It was about 20 rows. Oh my God, no, there's three rows. Okay, you and Chris. I was in the front row of many, many rows. It was about 20 rows. Oh my God, no, there's three rows. Okay, you and Kristen were in the front. And I'm getting a forehand massage, that was loud. What? I'm teasing. I was trying to make it worse. That's what I was actually about to say.

So you're making like kind of these sexual noises because you're talking about the, you're doing something about the movie, but we don't see you. Yeah. And you're sitting next to your wife and there's this sense of like, what are they doing? Oh really?

Yeah, remember I said, what are you doing? But listen, that just goes to show how poorly you could hear. The noises I was making were not sexual. This was the noise. Oh, oh, oh,. I don't know. Okay. That was like, and that was as low as I could do it. Cause what I wanted to go, oh, like that, that's how I felt.

But sexually? No, I'm disturbed. You remember what this was all about? I had vocalized how disturbing this intimacy was to me. You didn't love watching the intimacy between the two characters on screen. I did not. I did not.

So okay, that was you feeling like E, but E could go a lot of directions. But hold on. Before you ever saw the intimacy, I said, I do got a flag that I don't love the intimacy. Yeah, that's right. So then the intimacy started, and then I was making noises. Yeah, that I don't love the intimacy. So then the intimacy started, and then I was making noises.

So how could you, why would you think they were pleasurable noises? When I just said I'm disgusted by this. I didn't know it had anything to do, I thought you and Kristen were doing something sexual. In a room full of people. Or like she was just, not necessarily sexual, sexual, but like she was like cuddling you.

Or you were just making, you were being too vocal about how pleasurable it was. Okay, but this was the noise, you ready? Okay. Oh. Yeah, I don't know what it sounds like. I think it sounds more like, if you're gonna misinterpret it,

I would be like, oh, he's pushing a shit out up there. No, it was OCam's razor and it was wrong, more like if you're gonna misinterpret it, I would be like, oh, he's pushing his shit out up there. You feel very comfortable in the zone. No, it was OCam's razor and it was wrong, but it normally would have been right. But the simplest explanation is that I announced that I'm grossed out by this and then you hear noises while it's happening. So OCam's razor would say, oh, those are noises of disgust.

It depends, it all depends. Anyhow, so I would- Great film though, great film. Didn't know it was Robert Zemeckis. Yes, Robert Zemeckis, and it was great, it was spooky, it was great for the lake. And okay, but I want people, I never want people, a group of people especially, one person maybe,

to do something just because one other person wants to do it. I'm against that. Oh, I'm not. I am. If it's not inconvenient, like, you know. But it is inconvenient. If it's a movie, this movie was three hours long, if people don't wanna do it.

The five of us are gonna have a fun time watching any movie. I know that. So it's not gonna be a loss. It's just if you present with me the 100,000 movies over the last 45 years, there's so many I'm gonna pick before that. And I think everyone there

would have picked a different movie. But you were first in and you were very vocal about wanting to do it and it all made sense, so we did it. That's not a big concession. It's like if you want to eat at a restaurant really bad, I might not be in the mood for that. I'll go.

Yeah, you're right, that's fine. It's just if no one was in the mood to watch a movie and then one person wanted to watch a movie, that is like, okay, I guess the next three hours is going to be doing something I don't want to do. I don't like that. And it is three hours, because we gotta stop and talk a lot.

Which is why it's fun, no matter what we watch. Yeah, it was fun. I think watching a movie altogether is fun. Really fun. But yeah. I don't have a bad memory of watching a movie together with people. Yeah, neither.

But there was a incident, scenario that happened recently. I'm not gonna go into too many details, I don't wanna upset anyone. But no one, present company excluded from this incident. Rob, can you leave? No, Rob's present company, he's excluded. I know, I'm teasing. So in a group of people, one person wanted

to do something with the group. Well, this is a theoretical? No, this happened. Oh, this is real, okay. It's hard to not give details. So one person wanted us to do a talent show, an adult talent show. And I was like... Not happening.

No, yeah, immediately when I heard... Yeah, I would never even pitch this to you. It's insane you went into performing. I'm a good performer. You only do character voices, you have no talent show. How dare you. Don't be so offended, I'm just... I'm just thinking it through.

Okay, thinking through. I'm thinking about, I don't think those are the same things. Right. Personally. I don't think going and doing a talent is the same thing as performing in a, as you or as. Or singing or doing character voices or.

Yeah, I don't sing in my acting. I'm not taking on a role that's singing. Then you would, right? Probably not. If I had to, but probably not. If you got offered a role you wanted that you had to sing. I mean, if it was like, but if it was like a two liner. Mindy Kaling. I sang for Steven Conrad and you know I'm terrified.

I've had to sing in auditions. I've had to do that. Yeah, so you did. Yeah, I've done it, but I don't like doing it. Anyway. You don't like performing, that's all I'm saying. Oh my God, anyway. That's not true, you love performing at live shows.

You do a stellar job. I'm a good performer, and I have performed many times in my life. Yes, you have. Many plays. Many plays. A couple thousand commercials, a few movies, a couple of high quality television shows,

cable television shows. If you don't think being a flyer requires performing, you don't understand cheerleading. That is a performance. It is a performance and I bet you love performing and you could do it if you didn't like performing. I can see loving the physical aspect of it in the challenge of landing your stuff.

It could be very internally motivated. Yeah, but you have to be good at performing in order to be good at that. That's the front face. I'm just saying, I can imagine someone, the audience is irrelevant to them. That's not why they're doing it. Yeah, that isn't why I did that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's actually not why they're doing it. Yeah, that isn't why I did that. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually not why I do any of my performance. You're many of my performances. It's not. It's for me, the way I feel when I'm performing or I'm in a character or I'm doing this. So it's, yeah, it's not about the audience. So maybe that is the difference.

Yeah. You're more pure than me. I'm very pure. I'm 100%. I'm a little monkey on a sidewalk and I have symbols. And if you give me a couple of peanuts, I'll clang those symbols until your ears bleed. Yeah, I'm not, I don't like attention.

So that is maybe capping. And I love it, unless I'm crashing a boat. That's true. And I don't want attention. Okay, so a talent show was presented and I was immediately like, no. But it was fun, like I do understand the idea. Yeah, the spirit's great.

The idea is also like interesting talents, like not your average talent, like do something silly. This person saw it on TikTok or something. Or saw someone do this crazy, yes, this crazy talent. They were inspired. They watched Americans Got Talent the night before. Something happened.

Sure. And was, and brought to the group, right? Now I will say, I said, ee, oh, the same, similar noise to what you were making yesterday. Yeah, did someone think they were moose hoofing you? I was getting, yeah.

I said, ee, so not for me, but totally happy to watch this. Totally happy to be the audience for this. As everyone knows who listens most likely, I cannot be peer pressured, right? So like, that was that for me. End of the line. Now, what also was clear, also nobody else wanted to do the talent show.

It was not just me. I wasn't- Right, sacrificial lamb. I was not like, if everyone else wants, like I don't do that, right? I know what I wanna do and I don't wanna do it, I say it. But then it kind of led other people to have to be like, oh, I don't really have a talent,

like doing the nice way of trying to get out of it. And it was not happening, but this person wanted it really, really, really, really bad and was, brought it up multiple times. Took another run at it, we would say. Yeah, and then, you know, texted the group and I was like, well, my talent is that I can't be peer pressured, so I will not be participating. And I kept reiterating this.

I am happy to watch anyone do their talent. You'll be a great audience member. I'll be a great audience member, but I'm not going to participate. Yeah, yeah, we got to. And then it got really tricky because it was happening more than once. And so I had to really sit with, like, why do I feel very, really like, stick in the mud about this?

Like, I feel like I will not. Like you're being insolent. Yeah, and I did have to be like, why, I could just do some dumb thing. Get up there and blow a fart, walk off. Never, that is not a talent of mine. That's not even one of your talents. So I, you know, I was like, what is it?

And I ultimately, I was like, what is it? And I ultimately, I was like, I think that I feel some level of injustice that a whole bunch of people would be doing something that only one person actually wants to do and everyone else is like having to do to appease one. And that, yeah, I think- That's what is now triggered with this movie. The movie, that's what I'm saying.

But again, hold on. Yeah. Hold on. Okay. Those asks are so different. Come sit through a movie with us versus go figure out a talent and then perform for us in front of everyone in 25 minutes. Those are much different requests.

Yeah. They're dramatically different. I know. I, I just, I, it's just coming up now where I started to feel guilty because I was like, well, all these people did something for me that only I wanted to do. Maybe I should have done that. Yes. But again, there's a difference between, um, do you want to play war with me?

Game of cards? And I think it'd be so fun to paint my barn. Yeah. Yeah, that is how it feels. It's like, I would wanna do one thing. I really don't wanna do this other thing. But I'm just giving everyone permission to say, we're not doing it.

And I'm like, that's fine. I'm devil's advocating something. Oh wow. Fuck, this is bad for me. Uh oh, real time realization. Yeah, okay, secret turkey, original secret turkey. Lily, who's here right now as a young Vlad. She witnessed the car fuffle. She brought up secret turkey,

she wanted us all to participate and it was like, fuck this, this is Thanksgiving. We all gotta now do something. And guess what? It's the greatest. It's the best thing we've ever done. And now it's a tradition that we won't miss. And you do, we've already beat this into the ground,

but that disposition of I won't be peer pressured. Yeah. You do miss out on some stuff. Yeah, you do, you do, you do. Sometimes your boobs are out on a Guadalupe River and you were right. Sometimes. You actually miss out on something.

Gets up literally. In front of Danny Ricardo. Stranded in front of an F1 driver. It is 12 gorgeous friends. Choking some water up. Pulling fish out of your fallen bathing suit. But ultimately I did participate in Secret Turkey, so it's like, I think I'm making the right decisions. Yeah, yeah.

Well that one's different. A kid asked. So you gotta do it. You gotta do it. Alright, well that's it. Let's do some facts. Okay, now this Epi-Riz simulation. So interesting. So interesting. I was a little more combative than normal, as I recall.

Yeah, you were, yeah. Yeah, I felt real defensive of the people that didn't get good luck in life. He was so nice. He was. I felt bad that I had to push back, but I had to say it's not fair. That can't be right for the disadvantaged people.

Yeah, I just wish you were nicer to him, but that's fine. Because he felt like your dad a little bit. Yeah, he did. Yeah, but I gotta respect your, I gotta show respect to your dad and to him in the same way. I understand.

Bring them my best. I get it. Okay, I looked up the percentage of people who've tried shrooms. This says, we estimated lifetime prevalence of psychedelic use by age category using data from a 2010 US population survey of 57,873 individuals aged 12 years and older. There were approximately 32 million lifetime psychedelic

users in the US in 2010, including 17% of people aged 21 to 64 years, 22% of males and 12% females in that category. Rate of lifetime psychedelic use was greatest among people aged 30 to 34, total 20%, including 26% of males and 15% of females. And we gotta acknowledge that was 2010, they've gotten way more popular in the last five years.

Definitely, definitely. Is the largest segment of the gaming industry mobile, And we gotta acknowledge that was 2010. They've gotten way more popular in the last five years. Definitely. Yeah. Definitely. Is the largest segment of the gaming industry mobile? Like he said, yes. Largest segment of the global gaming industry is indeed mobile gaming.

It accounts for over half of the total gaming revenue surpassing both console and PC gaming combined. I don't do any of it. Me either. My son was playing a lot of video games on his phone, I noticed. He likes them. Oh really?

Yeah. Which one is his fave? I didn't ask. I just could tell it was a game. You didn't wanna know? Yeah. It's like hard, because you gotta monitor these sons

on playing video games. Yeah. He's old enough now that I worry less, but yeah, I just was more interested in like, oh, he likes those. We don't have that in common. You don't want him to turn into adolescence. I don't want him to go backwards.

No, he's made such great strides. Adolescence the show. Yeah, that too. I don't want him to kill anyone. Yeah, exactly. I looked up his Call of Duty, have an iPad version. Yes. Oh, great.

It does. Okay, what is Bitcoin today? Oh, it's high. We've rebounded, I think. It's high, yeah. 109,101. Okay, that's. 109,101.

Is that our peak so far, since we've been reporting on this? It might be, it's up, it says 0.14% today, probably from yesterday. Right. Are you reporting on this? It might be, it's up, it says 0.14% today, probably from yesterday. Right. You are worried that we're jinxing it by saying it, and I think you might be right, because we haven't talked about it in a while,

and now it's up. Yeah, so if you report it on the next fact check and it's down, we'll know, and we'll be targets of crypto nerds, so we gotta be careful. Okay, but I'm still gonna do it, because I'm not scared. I saw Peter Thiel is announcing a new cryptocurrency.

Oh really? Yeah. Oh boy. Okay, Bitcoin Pizza Remembrance Day is May 22nd. It marks the anniversary of a day a Florida man paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas in the first Bitcoin transaction. 10,000?

Yeah. Oh my God, I'll do it. I won't ask you. Yeah, do it. I'm gonna do it. Oh wow, it gives me a number. It doesn't even, 1.09E9. Does that mean nine zeros? Oh my God.

I'm gonna divide that by 10. Yeah, okay, so it's $1.09 billion. Oh my God. Oh, for a pizza. Oh, that's heartbreaking. $109 billion. That's insane. I'm intrigued too by this guy who,

he's remained anonymous, but the guy who created Bitcoin, who has a ton of it, but it's unknown, but someone thinks he's in the $150 billion range. Are you allowed to be unknown when you're like, amassing that kind of money? That feels wild. You sure can. You can keep it nice and discreet. That's if I ever get $109 billion,

you might not ever see me again. I'll keep it really discreet. Hey! Sorry. Well, you will, but not the real, $9 billion you might not ever see me again. I'll keep it really discreet. Hey! Sorry. Well you will, but not the real, come on now, I'm talking about the real world. Well you said you.

But the informal you, or whatever you said. Oh my God, the more, the royal you. The more. The royal you. This is the trajectory, the more money you get, you Dax, the less you see Monica. No, that is the trajectory. The more money you get, you Dax, the less you see Monica. No, that is not true. I've seen more of you with the more money.

It's in fact the exact opposite. The more I see you, the more money I make. Okay. Oh, this was wild. He brought up fruit flies as an example of something. And while I was listening and editing, I was currently being swarmed by fruit flies as an example of something. And while I was listening and editing, I was currently being swarmed by fruit flies. Ooh, I think that's why they study them.

They breed so fast. Oh, I'm in the middle. I, oh my God, it's cause I'm eating more fruit because fruit in the summer is so yummy and obviously I've been making all these peach galettes. But man, do I have a fruit fly issue. And that was Sim and then it was SIM that it was SIM. Yeah, double SIM, SIM squared.

I will say I have gotten to eat crow over the years because I remember when I was in the groundlings, Caitlin's boyfriend, long-term boyfriend at the time was a scientist who studied fruit flies. And I remember thinking, what a boring thing to dedicate your life to studying this one tiny organism, the fruit fly. But half of the studies I've read since then,

it's all work on fruit flies. They figure out almost everything they figure out on fruit flies. So then I've come to realize, no, he was at the epicenter, the white hot epicenter of what you'd wanna study as a scientist. I hope he's listening and he receives this apology. Jude, shout out. the epicenter, the white hot epicenter of what you'd wanna study as a scientist. I hope he's listening and he receives this apology.

Jude, shout out, you were right, I was wrong. The fruit flies are the future. And the past. Yeah. Okay, I just wanted to do a couple more, there were a couple more Mandela effects that I hadn't heard of. Have we talked about Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle? Mm-hmm, and he does, right?

Or he doesn't? He doesn't. But I think he does. Me too, me too. Yeah. Also, does the fruit of the loom logo pour out of a cornucopia? Mm-hmm, I mean, I think that, but it's not true.

It's not true, it's not true. Why do we all think these things? It doesn't make any sense. Exactly. Well, Sim, what do you think the peanut butter is called? The like really popular brand of peanut butter. Jif. Do people think it's called Jiffy?

Yeah. Yeah, I don't have that one shockingly. I think this might be the craziest one. It's not Luke, I am your father. What? It's not. It's no, I am your father. No, I am your father. What? It's not, it's no, I am your father. No, I am your father. Luke, I am your father.

Oh boy. Luke, I am your father is ingr- That is so zeitgeist-y. Yes, it's that. And it's not even real. Oh my God. If I were watching the movie and I heard that, I go, why did they change this?

They edited it after the fact. I know, same with Mirror Mirror on the wall. It's not Mirror Mirror on the wall. What is it? It's Magic Mirror on the wall. Oh, that's garbage. No, it's definitely Mirror Mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all?

But it's not. It's not, but it's not. I think they're so fun. Spanker butt, cherry red. Do you ever have to spank these bad boys' butts, cherry red? You need to watch more Steve Bruhl, Monty. Where'd that come from? Steve Bruhl.

Because Snow White? This episode's about horse. Not horses, it's about horse. He is so funny. All right, well, that's it for us. Did it make you believe more or less in the Sim this episode? Cause I have to say, I hate to say this, because I was forced to take that position,

I kind of convinced myself a little more of it. I believe less in it than I did. I just can't get over that point that there's a vast disparity in how this stuff spread out. I understand that, but like, the point he was making, which I did very much understand is like, but that is the reality of life.

The reality of life is some people, whether it's a sim, whether it's God, whether it's just the way the cookie crumbles, people, there is a disparity. Well, that would, to me, would point to that there is only reality, because if there's a God and God created disparity, what kind of God is this? And if there's a Sim that created this great disparity, what kind of Sim is that?

You have to reject any systems that are being proposed to you where it justifies tons of people got the short end of the stick because they'll be rewarded later. That's like such a cop out for a system to me. I mean, I agree with that. Like I understand that it can get slippery into like, well, this is just the way it is. Or you go, well, you're fake.

And that just to me seems like the ultimate insult on top of everything else is like, I have to say you're fake to accept my good fortune. Yes, but that's looking at it in a very, I think, black and white lens, whereas I think he's just, he's kind of saying it's an explanation amongst all these other explanations that exist.

For reality. For reality, yeah. And the space time stuff is very interesting. Yes, but isn't it interesting we just kind of inherently don't trust reality? Like that our hunch from the beginning has been like, well, no, this must have been created by God. Or this must, you know,

or there must be punishment and rewards coming later. Or this has all been designed by a computer. It's just interesting that we have such a suspicion about our reality as a baseline. Yeah, because life is wild. It's weird. We don't really have control over it, so we're all looking for answers.

I still love this topic. Me too, I love it. I wanna be on record saying I really love the topic even though it was so harsh on it. Still so fun. Fun topic. All right. All right, I love you.

That's it, love you, bye. Bye. Bye. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.