Julian Dorey Podcast - #274 - MIT Simulation Scientist Reveals Truth about God & Consciousness | Riz Virk

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Rizwan (“Riz”) Virk is a successful entrepreneur, investor, futurist, bestselling author, video game industry pioneer, and indie film producer. Riz received a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT, and a M.S. in Management from Stanford's GSB. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS - Riz Virk X: https://x.com/Rizstanford - Riz Virk Website: https://www.zenentrepreneur.com/ - Riz Virk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rizcambridge/?hl=en ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Simulation Theory Origins Story, Consciousness Exploration 08:51 - Observer Effect, NPC vs RPG Axis Theory, (What is Free Will?) 22:03 - Bahgavidad (Soul Meaning), Contact Experience & Near Death 34:44 - Riz Take on Religious Texts/Truth 43:12 - 13th Floor 1999 Movie on the Simulation (infinity) 49:50 - How to Tell if we are in a Simulation, Elementary Cellular Automata 59:03 - 3 Body Problem Theory, Phillip K. Dick: “Computer Program Reality” 01:13:17 - Mandela Effect Ties to Proximity, 01:21:30 - Computational Multiverse Mandela Effect 01:42:03 - Creating Consciouss Beings in a Simulation Theory 01:48:01 - UFO Phenomena Cases 02:03:03 - RPG Version of Simulation Theory, Spiritual vs Pragmatic POV 02:20:29 - Life Review vs Life Preview 02:29:07 - Riz Views on Meaning of Life 02:45:02 - What is Consciouness, Michio Kaku’s Multiverse Theory 02:57:13 - Dreams & Love in Simulation Theory, What is God CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 274 - Riz Virk Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

you know riz every time i say your name now i just think of that little fucking ozempic ad who's on everyone's page you know the little nine-year-old it goes like this like the rizzler or whatever you know i heard of it i never actually saw that oh my god you're not missing much but he's on every single page now every he's on every show you can't get away from him i heard people referring to it and i was like what the heck are you talking about you got the better riz though you're the original riz i'm the original yeah we got the first in the building you know they uh did i think it was the oxford that had Riz as the word of the year last year. Oh, yeah.

Dictionary. That makes sense. And, you know, I had never heard that particular usage until a barista at Starbucks in Phoenix. She goes, oh, that's a cool name. You know, my younger brother's in high school and they say Riz all the time. Really? Well, you got a whole different kind of simulation Riz going on yeah we're gonna we're gonna get deep into it today so first of all thank you for being here we're recording this like a couple

days before christmas i really appreciate you making the time but i had seen you come on my radar when you went on joe rogan i think like eight or nine months ago and i was pretty mesmerized by that podcast and also like all the different i I mean, there were a million things where, you know, you could just ask 40 questions about one thing you just said and what the possibilities are. But, you know, how did you, how did you initially start getting into, for people that didn't hear that podcast, getting into like the idea that like we could be in a simulation? Well, you know, it happened in stages, but probably the most significant event that really got me thinking about this was when I was in Silicon Valley.

This is about seven years ago now in 2016. And I had been running a couple of video game startups. And we sold my last video game startup and I ended up visiting a startup in Marin County, which is just across the bay from San Francisco. And they had an amazing view of the San Francisco Bay and the skyline, but they had also developed a virtual reality ping pong game. And so I said, okay, forget the view. Let me put on this headset. And I started to play this virtual reality table tennis game. And it was what you would call room scale at the time.

So that's when you set aside probably the size of this room and you'd let people move around. But there was no mistaking that I was in virtual reality because there were wires coming down from the ceiling into the headset itself. And what happened though, was as I started to play and the graphics weren't great. I mean, the graphics were fairly primitive, but the physics engine was so good that I started to feel as if I was really hitting a ping pong ball. And so much so that at the end of the game, I almost forgot for a moment that I was in VR and I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table, just like you might do at the end of a regular table tennis game.

And it wasn't there. It wasn't there. There was no table. The controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over. So I had to do a double take. And then I said, oh yeah, it's just VR. It wasn't there. There was no table. The controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over, so I had to do a double take. And then I said, oh, yeah, it's just VR. And so I started to think at that point, because my background's in technology, software startups. And I started to think, well, how long would it take us to build something that was so immersive that we would basically forget? Not just for a moment like I did, but we would forget that we were inside a virtual world. And at that point, we could build something like the matrix.

And so I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which I like to call a kind of technological singularity. So most people know the term singularity from AI and superintelligence. Oh, yeah. It was actually coined by a computer scientist who became a science fiction writer named Werner Wenge, who actually just passed away recently. He had some great novels, though. But in that paper where he defined it, he said there were many different ways of reaching

what he called a technological singularity. And super intelligent AI was one of them, merging of different computers, human biology and computers, which is Ray Kurzweil talks a lot about that as the singularity. But the basic idea is that technology expands exponentially to the point where everything would be different for the human race. And so I use that term in that sense that everything would be different once we can have a virtual world that is so real that we would really forget about our physical lives at that point.

And so I figured how long would it take us to get there? And that's really how I started getting deep into the technology side of simulation theory. How long do you think it was from accidentally leaning against a table that wasn't there to kind of putting together the basis of what would be your theory? Like how long did that take? This wasn't like an overnight thing, obviously. Like did your mind, I guess what I'm asking is, did your mind start to wrestle with the meaning of life like as you're going along and making this

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Yeah. And what happened was, I mean, that was one event, but before that I had done a lot of exploration of different types of consciousness. And in fact, my first book is called Zen Entrepreneurship, which was about my first startup. We were chatting a little bit about it before the show where we started it in our apartment in Boston. And at the same time, I was learning about meditation. I was learning about altered states of consciousness our apartment in Boston. And at the same time, I was learning about meditation. I was learning about altered states of consciousness, lucid dreaming. And so during the day, I would be a regular entrepreneur. And then in the evenings and weekends, I would go off to different places like the Monroe Institute down in Virginia, where they try to use some type of

binaural beats, different rhythms. Binaural beats? Binaural beats. So they try to use different frequencies, one in each ear, in order to get you into a certain state of mind or state of consciousness. And they specialize in trying to get you out of the body. I found that wasn't as effective for me as doing things like shamanic drumming. So I would be exploring all these different things like shamanic dream work. And so I was kind of leading this double life for many years. And it was after I really started to think about this technological simulation idea that that part of my explorations started to merge with my day-to-day job of being an entrepreneur and an investor, because I started to see that, well, really religion and mystics are trying

to figure out what is the nature of the universe. And so are scientists. They're trying to figure out what the truth really is. They're just different paths to try to get there. And so then I started to do a lot more research into quantum physics. And the more research I did into quantum physics, the more I found that there really is no such thing as a physical universe. What's the evidence for it? Like this table.

It seems physical, right? But it's 99% empty space, really. And if you go into the atoms, the atoms are mostly this electron cloud. So it's mostly empty space and you have the nucleus, right, which is where the matter is supposed to be. And then you go in the nucleus and you say, well, there's these subatomic particles and they're kind of small and they're not really that solid. And so there was a physicist named John Wheeler who was at Princeton and he worked with Einstein and Niels Bohr. In fact, it was his student that came up with the multiverse theory, which we can talk about later. Oh, we will.

Yeah. And Wheeler played a big role in my own explorations. And he came up with a phrase that was kind of appropriate here. And that phrase was, it from bit. And so what he was saying is if there's anything that's a physical object, like let's say this coffee cup, it actually consists not of matter, but of bits of information. Because when you go right down to it, if you think of those Russian dolls, what are they called, like babushka or something like that? You go down and there's nothing there.

And he said that basically at the core are what are called properties of particle. What distinguishes one particle from another are just these properties. And the properties are answers to yes-no questions. And that is the basic unit of information. That's the bit, right? One bit is just a zero or a one. So that's pretty much information theory is all about bits and how do you move bits?

What happens to these bits? And so he said that basically particles can be defined as bits of information. And then you build up that information into something physical. And so the more I looked into quantum physics and things like the observer effect... The observer effect? Yeah. So the observer effect is one that has been talked about a lot where a particle of light could

be a wave or a particle and you have this double slit experiment. I'm sure we could probably bring up some diagrams of it. But I think it's better described through Schrodinger's cat, which is something I think most people have heard of, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about that with Michio Kaku and Brian Keating and Lawrence Krauss. A lot of people talked about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can see different versions of the double slit experiment.

But the basic idea is that if it's a particle, it should go through one slit or the other, right? It can't go through both. But if it's a wave, then it can go through both and you see an interference pattern. And it's not until someone measures or observes the particle on the other side that you really find out which slit it went through. And when that happens, it looks as if it just went through one slit. But if nobody is observing that specific particle, you look at this interference pattern, it looks like it went through both slits.

And so it's this particle wave duality that's at the core of this problem. And similarly with Schrodinger's cat, the idea is you have a box, it has some poison in there and a cat, and after an hour, there's a 50% chance the poison gets released, the cat dies. There's a 50% chance the poison doesn't get released and the cat is alive. So we say that the cat has two possible values. It's in what's called a state of superposition. And that's a term we use in quantum computing, which we can talk about a little bit later. But the basic idea is that there are two possible values for this, the property of the cat called aliveness, right? Or

is it alive? And what quantum physics is telling us is that both of those properties exist until somebody observes it or somebody measures it. And that's just really bizarre because it's counterintuitive. I mean, think about it. If there's a cat in a box with some poison, it should be either alive or dead. It can't be both. But quantum mechanics is telling us it's both. And so that just never made any sense to me. Not so much that it hasn't been confirmed. It's been confirmed by experiments. But the point is why would it work this way and that's something nobody has a good answer for and so there's

different interpretations there's the copenhagen interpretation which is that there's a probability wave so you have these probabilities and it collapses into a single uh state let's say the cat is alive or the multiverse idea where you've got one universe where the cat is alive and one universe where the cat is dead but one universe where the cat is dead. But to me, the whole idea of the collapse of the probability wave sounded a lot like what we did in video games. And the reason we can have fully interactive 3D worlds, and you've probably seen or played various games,

Fortnite, World of Warcraft, all of these three-dimensional MMORPGs, massively multiplayer online role-playing games. And the reason we can render that is we only need to render the part of the world that you are observing or your character, your avatar, as it's called, in the game is in one part of the world. So we don't have to render the whole world on our computers. And that was an important breakthrough because before that, if you think of games back in the 80s, I grew up in the 80s and I played classic games like Pac-Man

or Space Invaders and these types of games. And if you look at those games, there isn't the 3D perspective, but also in those games, they've basically got pretty much the world laid out. You can move to the left or right right it's procedurally generated that eventually became side scrollers but more or less the bits are there but with these more 3d games what happens is that the rendering engine actually and the physics engine work together to figure out what part of the world can you observe and only those pixels are shown and when you go to the right or to the left, you can kind of bring, you can bring the next set, but you calculate those pixels. So you don't have to design all of them. Like there was a game called No Man's Sky. I don't know if you ever heard of it. No. Some people didn't like the game. It was kind of boring, they said. But what was interesting about it was the graphics

were amazing. And it had like 18 quintillion planets that you could explore. 18 quintillion. Yeah. So that's a hell of a lot of planets. Yeah. There's no way any video game company, design team, could have built all of those, right? No. So they relied on, and this is before the recent AI burst that we've had. Now we can generate using AI all kinds of worlds. But back then, that wasn't that common.

And so they used procedural generation to create all these worlds. What does that mean? It means it uses different algorithms, like fractal algorithms or different statistical algorithms, a bunch of algorithms and complexity theory and cellular automata that you can use to try to make something look like real water. But the point of that was it would render that when you got to that part of the world. It didn't have to render all the pixels for 18 quintillion worlds. And it turns out 18 quintillion is 2 to the power of 64. So it was 64 bits.

And that's why we have that specific number. So that was a clue. But my larger point was the rule of video games, at least three-dimensional video games, is we render only that part of the world which you can observe and which you can see. There's a lot of complexities around this. We cache things on the server so that we don't have to re-render. So multiple people will see the same types of things. But that's the basic rule.

And that seems to be one of the basic rules of quantum mechanics, which is only that which is observed or measured, right, needs to actually have a definite state. Until then, it's just information in this kind of weird quantum foam, if you will, or cloud that's out there. The thing that kind of confuses me on the video game example versus like an actual simulation theory that we would be a part of is the concept of free will though. Because when we're playing a video game, like if I'm playing Grand Theft Auto and I want to go run over some chick and then rob some bank or whatever, I'm making the character do this. And the character is completely unfeeling and unknowing to what's going on as far as we know. And then you look at our world right here where there are all these concepts of good and evil and beauty and ugliness and happiness and sadness and emotion versus lack of emotion, whatever it may be. And if I decide to take this right now and throw that up there against the curtain, that's a completely ridiculous thing that makes no sense to do. But I just decided to do it. Are you saying that, that something is controlling me that

just made me do that? And I've convinced myself that I actually decided to do that myself. Well, this is where we get into another aspect of simulation theory that, that I like to call the NPC versus RPG axis. And so I like to say there's two flavors of simulation theory. But really, they're not different flavors. They're more of an axis. And at one end, we have the NPC version, where everyone is a non-player character. In that case, it's just for most of your audience

probably knows, but NPCs are just controlled by the computer code. On the other end, you have the RPG or role-playing game version. And in that case, you, the rpg or role-playing game version and in that case you the player exist outside of the game and the in the game you have a character the pc the player character if you will which is called an avatar uh that you control all all along the way now those two are not mutually exclusive because you can have npcs and player characters in an online game

you can have them both together but the latter is like the Matrix kind of. Yes, that's more like the Matrix, exactly. So in the Matrix, if you look at Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, they all had their existence outside the physical world and they looked exactly the same. So that was sort of a conceit that they made in the Matrix was that their avatar looked pretty much like them except for the holes in the back of the head and the hair. There was a famous scene where Morpheus goes,

where did your hair come from? When Neo says, is this real? He goes, is this so hard to believe? Do you think that's air you're breathing there? So that's more like the Matrix version of it. But in that version, I like to draw this distinction because it changes a lot of the answers to a lot of the questions that people have around simulation theory. And that's why when I – like I teach a class at ASU, Arizona State University, about this subject. And it's called Science Fiction, Religion, Philosophy, and Technology, right? So it's about as – That's loaded. Yeah, but it's about as interdisciplinary

as you can get. Yes. So we're touching all kinds of things, unexplained phenomenon, we're touching skepticism, idealism, all of these different things. And you can kind of map this out where if you think of free will,

if it's just code, then the NPC doesn't really have free will, does it? If the NPC is just running on the code. Now, it depends a little bit how you define free will. Like some physicists try to define it as it's just randomness. That's free will. And it turns out the only true randomness within the physical world

and within computers is quantum randomness. So like if you generate a random number on your computer, it's not really random. What's happening is there's an algorithm behind the scenes that's taking some key value, like the current time, and it's doing some algorithm on that. And the fact that you press that button at different times, different milliseconds, means you get a different result each time. And then they have different algorithms to try to scramble all of that. But I would say true free will

would be like the Matrix version where you have a player that's outside of the game and they can make that decision on whether to throw the thing or to go and rob someone or to do something else. And so true free will may only be possible if it comes from outside the system but it's us doing it meaning it's not you know some random alien playing the actual video game right there and deciding for us it's

like it's me but i'm i'll just use the matrix example to keep this easy for people i'm laying in a machine somewhere in my physical state and here where i feel like it's my physical state is just what's being controlled as an avatar where it's not real matter and as you said everything is just you know yeah space that's exactly right so in that scenario uh you know where individuals are players uh they have the ability to control the character now there's something in the middle between these two that i've been playing with lately which i call npc mode okay npc mode yeah which is i mean you know the term npc is used online very disparaging these days right you say oh that guy's an npc because they're not thinking for themselves but if you think of an npc let's suppose it's built on

some neural net algorithm right so today So today we have smart NPCs. In video games, we used to have dumb NPCs if you go all the way back. There were only like so many things that they could do really or they could say. And in fact, if you've ever played games by a company called Telltale Games, which I was an investor in many, many years ago, they're not around in the format they were. But they had like a Walking Dead game or Game of Thrones games that were really popular. They were like graphical adventures. But when you speak to the characters,

you would have to make a choice, right? This is the response I want to give. And then the character would speak to you. And then you would... So it was a very limited set of... It's like a dialogue trees, what really was going on there behind the scenes. But today's NPCs are becoming smart NPCs, which means they're using pretty much like

a chat GPT, LLM, large language model behind the scenes, which means you can't always predict exactly what they're going to say. It's not just a simple dialogue tree. And many people think we've passed the Turing test. And just recently, some people think we're at AGI. I don't think we're there yet but behind the scenes we might be behind the scenes maybe but in terms of what's been released publicly

but so but the idea is that if an NPC is just responding based off of how it's been trained and the data that it's been trained on that's kind of like our character in a video game

if we're an avatar it has a trained on, that's kind of like our character in a video game. If we're an avatar, it has a certain race, certain background. Like when I was a kid, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons and we would choose our characters. We would say like, okay, I want to be an elf and I'm going to be a wizard as my profession. And then you would roll the dice and you would get like strength, agility, charisma. Like you would have all these little attributes right and to be honest most rpgs still do some variation of that they let you choose certain things and then they then they have these attributes behind the scenes but if we are choosing our avatar let's step away from the matrix idea where it's exactly the same outside

and inside like you're the exact same person. And this is where we overlap with the spiritual side. Because in pretty much all the world's religions, or most of the world's religions, you have this idea of a soul, and then you have this idea of a body. And so the more I looked at the different religions of the world, and I looked at the scriptures and looked at what they're actually saying, you'll see they used techno-scientific metaphors to try to explain something that is very mysterious. So, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, which comes from the Hindu tradition many thousands of years ago, probably one of the oldest texts, religious texts that are out there,

they use a metaphor that says that the soul puts on the body just like the body puts on garments, puts on clothes, and then they take them off again, and then they come back, and they go back and forth, right? So you're taking off one set of clothes, you're putting on another set of clothes. And then it turns out in the Islamic traditions, you know, Rumi, who has become popular in the West because of his poetry, he was a Sufi mystic, he used the exact same analogy. He said the soul puts on the body like a set of clothes. Now, they don't necessarily have

reincarnation like in the Indian traditions, but the basic metaphor they're using, it turns out it's a technology. Clothing is a technology, right? That's how we understand things. In Buddhism, we have the wheel of samsara. The wheel is probably one of the most important technological inventions of all time it's up there top three yeah definitely right so we use these technological metaphors to explain something that is very mysterious and i like to say i think most religions were founded when somebody peeked outside the simulation right they saw what it was like they saw what their actual character was like and so where i was going with this was... How would they have done that? I'm sorry to cut

you off, but like, what do you mean they peeked outside? Well, so one way or another, most religions are founded by somebody that has what's sometimes called a theophany, which is when the divine makes an appearance in physical form inside the physical world, or they reach some kind of enlightenment using, let's say, yoga techniques, fasting, psychedelics, right? There are all these different ways that people might have an enlightenment experience. I mean, if you look at the Buddha, you know, he studied for seven years as an ascetic, and then he was sitting under the Bodhi tree, and finally he realized, oh, this is what it's all about. So he had an enlightenment experience.

Whereas if you look at, say, in Islam, the Prophet Muhammad was in a cave in the month of Ramadan fasting and suddenly the angel Gabriel appears to him and he grabs his head and he says, recite, repeat after me. That's a theophany. That's when something just, you know, makes its way. Maybe a little DMT too, but yeah. Possibly a little DMT, or it sounds a lot like some of these other contact experiences. I don't know if you ever had Diana Pazolka on your show. I haven't had her on.

She was on my buddy Danny's show and then she was on also Jesse's and she'd been on Joe Rogan too. She's been on like everything now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's been on quite a few. She's very fascinating. Yeah, and so she talks about the similarity

of modern contact experiences with different religious traditions back then and so my point is that what happens is that somebody has one of these experiences and these experiences are still going on near-death experiences people have i mean people aren't starting new religion so much these days or maybe they are but they're i can find a few i'm sure yeah they take a while to become popular enough to be called a religion, right? They start off as cults. That's right. Like early Christianity, I'm sure it was, you know, the cult of Jesus.

And then eventually it became the state-sponsored religion of the Roman Empire. Right, right. So these things take time, usually. That one took like 300 years. Yeah, it took a while, right? And then, you know, transformations happen along the way. And, you know, with Hinduism and Buddhism, like with Buddhism, you can trace it back to a single person. But really, it grew up within the Hindu traditions, which, I mean, there are so many different what they call the rishis, who are like these ancient sages who wrote the different Vedas.

So it's hard to pinpoint exactly. But they all point to the same idea that they were able to realize the truth. And so I think where I was going with this was the true nature of the world may be what's called ineffable by scholars. So ineffable means unable to be put into words. And we hear this sometimes from near-death experiencers. I don't know if you had a near-death experience. I haven't had one, but there's a guy I'm going to have in who talks with a bunch of them, I think. Okay. Well, there's a guy named Daniel Brinkley who wrote Saved by the Light back in the 90s, and that was my introduction.

And he got struck by lightning. He was like dead for like 28 minutes. 28 minutes? Some number in that range. I don't remember the exact number, but it was over 20 minutes. How did your brain stay alive for that? Well, that's the big mystery with near-death experiences right but then he also had many of the stages that people report in near-death experience which is you know floating over your body is one stage going through

a tunnel and seeing the light you're met by a being of light uh you could call them that person an angel you could say that's god. People have different interpretations, but they almost always are met by either being of light and or somebody that's from their family, maybe that has passed on that's meeting them on the other side. And so he went through a bunch of these different experiences. And the most important that when I learned about this from Danion, and then Raymond Moody was the guy who actually classified all of this uh and he's the one who got daniel to you know start talking about his experiences publicly uh back in 1975 raymond moody wrote the book life after life which is where the the modern term near-death experience comes from but the life review what he calls the panoramic holographic life review

to me shows us the meaning of the game that we're in, the meaning of the simulation. Like, how are we scored? What is it we're looking to do? And there's great overlap between the life review and what you read in the different religious scriptures. They just use different terminology for the same thing. They had to use terminology that people would have understood,

you know a couple thousand years sure right are you saying well are you saying like linguistically speaking as linguistically and metaphorically speaking okay like like so for example i'll give you an example of a metaphor but i got on the near-death experience at this point by saying that you know they talk about you know the music they've seen the love they And they say, I can't put it in words, right? And so they have to use some terminology. And so in the Quran, there's something called the scroll of deeds. And in the Bible, there's the book of life. So there's this idea of who gets into heaven or who doesn't get into heaven. So in Islam, in the Quran, they get much more specific and they say

the scroll of deeds is a book. Okay, what is a book? It's a technology. It's a technological metaphor. And they say there's two angels. One maybe. Have you probably seen the images of like, you know, the devil and the angel? That comes from the Islamic traditions.

But basically they said there's two angels. One writes down your good deeds. One writes down your bad deeds. And they write them down where in this scroll of deeds i say when you die your book will be open to you and you alone will be sufficient to be the reckoner or to be the judge right you get to judge yourself you get to judge yourself i'm going right the fuck in. But that's exactly what the near-death experiencers report, except they use up-to-date metaphors. So what the near-death experiencers say in the life review is that basically they see a holographic three-dimensional version of reality. And you replay every single event in your life.

And you replay it from the other person's point of view right so like you know instead of throwing that against the curtain if you had thrown that and hit me you would get to experience what it was like uh for me oh oh shit from the other person so you see so if i were like a murderer and i shot someone i'd get to experience what it's like to get shot in the face absolutely and daniel was in vietnam and and he shot people and he had to get to experience what it's like to get shot in the face. Absolutely. And Daniel was in Vietnam and he shot people and he had to experience what it was like to have, but it's more than that. He said, you can then see what's called the ripple effects. Like a butterfly effect.

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That kind of deal? A little bit, but of that action. So what happens to that guy's wife and kids now that you shot him? Now, if you experience that, that changes your whole perspective. You're like, oh crap, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Maybe that wasn't such a great thing for me to do

when you're reviewing your life. Because now you get to see the actual consequences of your action in ways that might not be possible before. To me, that sounded a lot like reviewing a video game or like on Twitch or YouTube. Like among the most popular content on YouTube, of course, podcasts. But video game replays are like up there. For a while, they were like the number one content.

Yeah, I kind of thought they still were. Maybe I'm wrong. They might still be. I remember when my nephew was like three years old he would say to my his father my brother he'd say i want to watch star wars yeah oh you want to watch the movie no no i want to watch that man and that woman playing the star wars video game right he wanted to watch the youtube of them it was never it was never my thing but it's huge it's huge yeah and so to me this life review sounded a lot like that but but blown up. And a couple years ago, I was in Silicon Valley. So around that same time, 2016, when I was playing the ping pong game, I was working with a startup. And we figured out a way to take a game like League of Legends, if you've ever seen that game. It's like one of the top esports games, at least it was at the time. Or Counter-Strike Global Offensive, which is a first-person shooter.

In fact, this is almost a better example. And what we could do is we could take you back to any point within the CSGO gameplay. Because it's a three-dimensional world that you only render the parts of it that you need to. And so you could go to any XYZ coordinate and xyz t meaning time so you could go to any point in the game and you could see what it was like to be shot by yourself and we'd put on a virtual reality headset and we could replay league of legends or kind of strike global offensive and we could basically have you experience visually only of course but the life review sounds a lot more uh kinesthetic immersive, right? You actually feel,

like I talked to a woman not that long ago who said that, you know, she said something to her mom when she was young and that upset her mom. And then, you know, when she had a near-death experience, she got to experience what it was like to be her mom in that situation. So you get to see the effects. Now, going back to how they describe the scroll of deeds. So I was invited to an Islamic conference in the UK last year. And there was Islamic scholars from like Cairo, London, Germany. There was an Ayatollah from Iran. Literally, there was an Ayatollah from Iran sitting there.

You're like, you got this all wrong, pal. Yeah. I'm like talking about NPCs and video games. You could tell he was like turning to the young guy next to him. What is he talking about? What's a video game? What's an NPC? But what I said to them, which actually did resonate with that group, was that the scroll of deeds doesn't mean there's a physical book with 7 billion times two angels writing down with a feather pen.

And Riz went to new york today and then he went and saw julian right that's just a metaphor uh today we would say what's happening is everything is being recorded in the three-dimensional world and it can be replayed and the angels are just ai recordings in this case ai recording the recording angels in this case you know the two angels that write down everything. I mean, you don't need conscious entities to write down everything. You can just record everything that's happening, but they needed a way to describe that a couple thousand years ago or 1600 years ago when say the Quran was written, you couldn't say, oh, that's a video recording and you can replay the video recording from, you know, that, that just, it wouldn't make

any sense. So they said, here's a book book there's some angels who write down everything that happens because that was something that that that they could they could do so it's a case of taking something mysterious and amazing perhaps even ineffable like this life review coming up with a way to describe it uh and using that so that's how most religions get started, in my opinion, is they take some ultimate reality, which is often how it's referred to by religious scholars, and then they create a scripture or a set of metaphors or a set of stories that try to express what that is really all about and come back with some lessons. And for me, the life review basically tells you the meaning of life. Is this grand theft auto? Well, that means, you know, if you're going to steal somebody's car, you're going to, you know, let's say shoot them in the leg. You're going to have to experience what it's like to get shot in the leg.

And you're going to say, you know, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Maybe that wasn't the purpose of the game after all. Maybe I did it the wrong way. Yeah. So. God, there's so many directions yeah we've gone far afield i think from uh no no this is this is really really good with religion though when you talk about they and they create the stories around it that kind of uphold whatever the idea that it was supposed to be deformed are you do you think based on your studies of all these different religions that a lot in your opinion like a lot of stories are fictional and they just set it to to try to

wrap around the main idea or do you think that there is also historical truth built into some of these incredible ancient texts well i think there there is also historical truth built into some of these incredible ancient texts? Well, I think there's definitely some historical truth built into these things. I mean it's obviously hard to know because these things happened so long ago. But a few years ago – so just before I was asked to do this presentation on Islam and the simulation hypothesis, I was by harper collins india he's a big publisher there oh yeah and they said you know it's the 75th anniversary of a book called autobiography of a yogi i don't know if you've ever heard of it i have heard of that book actually it was by swami yogananda okay yeah but it was a huge book in the 60s in the west it was written

in america for americans even so swami yogananda came from india but he was only like 20 something when he moved to the u.s in 1920 uh he took the first boat out after world war one really from india to the u.s og og right he was one of the first swamis to really live in the in the world and so what happened was in the 60s when his book his book became really popular i mean that's how most of the hippie generation learned about meditation and stories in In fact, I met a guy the other day, he said, Oh, yeah, I was in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 60s, like 69 or something, 68. And he goes, somebody gave me a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. And then I read it, and I gave it back, I gave it to somebody else. Like, that's how they passed around these paperbacks. And so for a lot of people, that was their

introduction to like these ancient Indian stories. And if you've ever read that book, it's chock full of miracles, right? It's like guys, swamis who have two bodies, you know, the saint with two bodies. You have like levitating swamis, people who go up. You have swamis appearing before you that aren't really there. You've got a case of a guy who can control an entity and the entity can make things disappear. So I might say, oh, you know, I really like Julian's coffee cup. I'd say, Hazarat, go get that. Hazarat was the name of the entity, which I interpret as a jinn because this was a Muslim

fakir. But so you've got all these things going on. You've got guys dying, coming back to life, right? You have a guy in the Himalayas who supposedly has lived at least 500 years, if not more. Wait, right now? Who's still living there, supposedly. A guy named Babaji. I want a DNA test. Right. If you can find him, you can do that, right? So there are all these crazy stories. And so the question is, and this is more recent. This is from, he wrote the book in 1946. And so the question becomes, okay, at least that's not so long ago

compared to the other scriptures. But even Yogananda had to reinterpret the things the ancients were saying for Americans in the 1900s. And so he used a new metaphor. Instead of saying that the world is an illusion, which is what the term maya is. So maya means illusion.

It's not exactly illusion. It's more like the power of illusion or a carefully crafted illusion. Is that tied directly to like the ancient Mayas, like the word itself? It could be. I mean, it's a Sanskrit word. So it goes all the way back to that. But most people translate it in English as an illusion. Right. uh to that but most people translate it in english as an illusion right and uh i think more recently

the best analogy i found was that if you go to a magic show you know the guy on stage is not really sawing that woman in half yes right but but you want to believe it like you're like wow that's amazing you're like suspended in your disbelief of something that you think actually might be real in the moment like you've convinced yourself but you know it's not subconsciously yeah but you've allowed yourself almost to enjoy and so the idea is that maya itself is like we have decided to immerse ourselves in maya in order to have these experiences and there's an old there's an old hindu story that's that's pretty interesting it was uh the god vishnu is approached by this warrior named Narada. He's a proud warrior.

He says, I want to understand Maya. Tell me what Maya is. Vishnu says, this might sound a little bit like the Matrix. I can't tell you what Maya is. I have to show you. He goes, okay, walk into this pool of water. This is the analogy they used. It was a metaphor.

He walks into a pool of water, and suddenly he's a little girl who was born as a princess to some ancient king in India named Sushila. And so Sushila grows up as this princess. Eventually she marries like a prince from a neighboring kingdom. She goes to live there, and suddenly the kingdoms go to war. Her brothers and father from the first kingdom kill her husband and her husband's army kills her father and brothers. And suddenly she's really sad because now her whole family's pretty much gone. And she walks

out of town, starts crying and sees a pool of water and steps into the pool of water. And suddenly she's back to being Narada, the warrior with the god Vishnu. Vishnu says, now you understand what Maya is, right? Because that's Maya. Now, more recently, we have like TV shows like – what's that? Rick and Morty. Have you ever seen Rick and Morty? I haven't really seen it, but I'm familiar.

Yeah. I mean they have a very similar storyline where there's a video game, but they use virtual reality. So they use a technological metaphor. It's's called Roy, a life well-lived. So one of them, I forget the young guy puts on the headset and suddenly he's Roy. He goes through school, gets married, you know, works at his wife's father's, you know, carpet shop or something. And at the age of 52, he's up getting something from one of the top shelves and he falls over and he dies. And suddenly it says over you made it to age 52 and he takes off his headset and he's like wait what's going on where's my wife where's my kids what's going on right it's the same kind of thing it was he immersed himself so much in the game that he forgot about his life uh and it was like

he had to re-remember everything that was going on outside and so so swami yogananda used a metaphor in the 1920s he said it's like a movie or a film projector and that was uh the latest technology 1920s we're talking about and he said the characters on the screen might die but the actors don't actually die and so they're suffering and so he used that to rephrase maya he said look away from the screen and look at the light and then you'll see what's outside of maya which is the real you or the player is the analogy that i'm using so i so they approached me about writing this book called wisdom of a yogi which i ended up writing about lessons from the all these crazy stories of these miracles uh from the 1800s and 1900s so most

of them happened at that point in time. But I believe if he were alive today, he would use an updated metaphor. He would say, it's like a movie, but we're the actors and we have scripts, but we can change the scripts. And we're also the audience. So we're kind of watching ourselves play. What does that sound like? It sounds a bit like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. So I think he would use a new technological metaphor. And so from the religious perspective, you can have simulations on top of infinite simulations, meaning that the beings that are us that are watching you and I right now on this screen, like if I'm watching me and you're watching you and we're in this other place where we actually

really exist, that could actually just be another layer of where there's a screen behind that, where there's more people observing that. It could be. And that's one of the objections that sometimes people have to the simulation hypothesis. They're like, well, how do we know it's not infinite? And I say, well, because if it's a computer simulation, then it can't be infinite. Because there's not necessarily infinite computing power. So physicists love infinity, right? They like to say, oh, everything's just infinite. But computer scientists, you know, as computer scientists, we hate infinity because we never have infinite resources.

In this world that we know. In this world. So as we know of computers, what we end up doing is we end up using limiting resources. And so sometimes the best way to talk about this stuff is to talk about science fiction. Okay. We've talked about The Matrix, but The Matrix was released in 1999. This year is the 25th anniversary of The Matrix. But there was another simulation movie released in 1999. This year is the 25th anniversary of Matrix. But there was another simulation movie released in 1999.

What was that? There were two others, but the one that I'm thinking of is called The 13th Floor. Did you ever see that? No, I have not. It's worth bringing up. Yeah, who was in that? I don't even remember the names of the actors or actresses. That's not good.

Well, none of them were famous or became famous. And what happened was it was released, I think, a month after The Matrix, for two months, and it kind of got swallowed. Here, you can bring it up. 13th floor. Who's in it? Greg Berko. Oh, Gretchen Moll.

I know her. Okay, there you go. So there's at least one person you know there. And so the idea was it was set in – Oh, Vincent D'Onofrio. Okay. All right. There's some people one person you know there. And so the idea was it was set in – Oh, Vincent Donofrio. Okay. All right. There's some people.

Go ahead. Yeah. So it was set in 1999. And what happens is they create a simulation of Los Angeles, which is where it's based, in like 1937, I think it was, or 47. It was a little while in the past. And it's a very realistic simulation. And the main character, Douglas Hall hall he goes in and he starts meeting these people in the simulation and normally they're just living their lives and you

know as kind of like npcs but then he goes in as the player and takes over one of them uh and who looks just like him so we have the same thing as the matrix where you mean he takes him over meaning he becomes the player and starts controlling him. Okay, from the outside. From the outside. Got it. Whereas before, it was just an NPC living his life. And so now he has all the memories that he has from outside the simulation. Now, what happens, and I'll give away the ending here because, I mean, it's a-

Spoiler alert. 25-year-old movie. If you haven't seen it and you don't want to know what happens, pause now. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go forward. So basically what happens is he does this in the world of 1937. There's a side story about a character from there who pops out. There's a whole interesting story about can you pop out to the next level, to 1999.

But then there's this woman that appears in 1999 that's the daughter of the guy who helped him who was his boss who got murdered so it's like a noir film noir right sci-fi movie uh and turns out he sees the woman again and she doesn't remember him she's just a clerk in a you know grocery store and he doesn't know what's going on And then suddenly the woman appears back like she was. And it turns out she is from the world outside of 1999. Okay, so the world of 1999 is a simulation. And within it, they created a simulation of 1937. Okay. I think, correct me if I'm wrong here,

I think you're getting to the tributaries of time example. It's very similar to what Michikaku talks about. Similar, but I'm doing more nested simulations at the moment, which is... More nested simulations. Yeah. Like what you were just asking about, is it an infinite number of simulations on the way up? So let me finish this, then we can talk more about that. So the 1999 is a simulation, and she's from the year 2024, this year, 25 years in the future. And they had created the simulation of 1999 as what's called sometimes an ancestor simulation is nick bostrom's term for it and we can talk more about bostrom's oh yeah super intel i read that in 2019 that blew my mind forever yeah but so she says to him we have to

shut you down we're shutting down your simulation and he's like why she goes well we created thousands of simulations. So there are more parallel simulations, but thousands of them, but you're the only one that created a nested simulation inside your simulation. And so you're using too much computing power. I mean, I don't remember all the details of the plot here, but the basic idea was they had to shut it down. So just because there's a simulation outside of this one and there might be one more doesn't mean that there isn't a place where it stops, right? Just in the same way that people who experience these things when they die, they might experience a beautiful garden. They might experience a crystal city with near-death experiences.

They come back reporting these things. There's a guy named Dr. Eben Alexander who talks about these natural landscapes. It's very common to have these natural landscapes where the being of light takes them. That is a kind of simulation outside of this one, perhaps. But it doesn't mean that it's infinite. You can basically limit based on computing power

or some other reason. But time is also totally relative here because to us, like a lot of time might be the length of time an old person lives. Like if you live to 100 years old, that's a lot of time. Or if you look at it more like you should in the context of the history of Earth and we go, okay, well, we can point to human civilization 100,000 years ago, years ago 250 000 years ago whatever it is and like that's a lot but in another in another dimension that may be just a blip of what they have which means if you look at moore's law on our end where technology increases at this exponential rate which isn't going to happen forever but it's happened to this point like who's to say that along that exponential curve and even when it topped out to not being quite exponential, these other areas that would be operating a simulation are so far beyond what we can even conceive in computing power that it's like this would be a joke for them to be able to compute.

You know what I mean? Yeah, very much. So first of all, I think the first point you made is an important one, which is that time inside a simulation or inside a computer program is different from time outside the computer program. And that's true because within any computational process, the shortest amount of time that you can measure is actually by the clock speed. The clock speed. The clock speed um the clock speed the clock speed of the processor so you've probably heard like there's so many megahertz that a particular you know chip uh semiconductor chip can do that actually means cycles per second so how many millions of cycles that's right each cycle has you can think of it more or less as an operation a computing operation when i was a kid i remember trying to learn to program in basicASIC, and then I was looking

in these old magazines like Byte Magazine, and they had all this assembly code. I don't know if you've ever heard that term, assembly code, but it's like getting down to the level of the processor and giving it commands by using hexadecimal. And the hexadecimal commands basically are doing very low-level things that the processor can do. But so each of those happens within one cycle of operation. Now that doesn't mean that that has anything necessarily to do with what's going on outside the simulation.

So one way for us to potentially figure out if we're in a simulation is to figure out if time is quantized. Quantized. Quantized. So the whole idea of quantum physics comes from Max Planck who realized that certain particles, when he bombarded them with energy, they could only have certain values. So meaning they're discrete, meaning 1, 2, 3, and you couldn't do anything in between. You couldn't go 1.75, 6, 3, 2, 2. Like there's a limit at which you have to jump from one to the other, and that's called a quantum leap. And so it's almost like nothing happens to the particle until it goes to the next level.

So you can think of a pixel in a video game, and you could say, well, I want to change the RGB color from 251 to 251.333, nothing will happen because the color won't actually necessarily change until you get to 252 or 253. So you can think of it as that's what quantize means. So most people think there is an element of quantization to space, to physical space. Like there's actually a smallest amount we can measure we can't measure anything less than that amount and that's called the plonk length for max plonk and basically anything below that it's almost like a pixel that's the analogy that i like to use so it's like it's what we have the

capability of being able to measure right now meaning we in the future maybe could be able to measure something smaller they're saying, according to quantum physicists, and I'm kind of relying on them at this point, they're saying you can't measure it less than that. We don't know why, but that's like the smallest amount you can possibly measure. Doesn't that go against the infinite loop of math, though? It does.

And so this is a big problem. Quantum mechanics is about quantums. Yes. And mathematics is continuous right and computer science is not necessarily continuous it deals with discrete bits which go up and so that's one of the big issues right with this idea of reality and we don't know that reality is continuous but in fact we know there is a minimum pixel distance, which is this long length. We also don't know yet if there is a minimum time. Like, can we not measure below that time? And if

it's below that, it means time is happening discreetly, which is what happens in a computer program. Wait a minute. You lost me for a second. The minimum time? Yeah, the minimum amount of time between which we can't really measure anything. Meaning like a nanosecond or whatever's lower. If you go down, it's like 10 to the minus. It's like way smaller than a nanosecond. Gotcha. I was thinking of something different. Sorry.

Go ahead. Yeah. So it's like the minimum amount. Like in a program, in a computer program, I mentioned the clock speed. I did that for a reason. That is the minimum amount of time the processor can actually run something and do. You can't do something in half a clock speed because the processor is not running. You can mathematically say clock speed divided by two.

You can get a number, men, math. But that doesn't necessarily correspond to anything that you can physically measure inside the computer program. So similarly here, in physical space, getting back to the it-from-bit idea, so not only are particles just bits, but there's a minimum length, which is kind of like a pixel. Why would space be quantized? Why wouldn't it be continuous, like mathematics?

So it shows that mathematics may not be the ultimate way to understand all of reality. What would be then? Well, so there's a guy named Stephen Wolfram. I don't know if you ever heard of him. Oh, I know Stephen Wolfram. Yeah. So he invented-

I don't know him personally. I just know him. Mathematica, which is a software that's used by many engineers. And he got interested in cellular automata back in the 70s. He was one of the pioneers of this space, along with a few other people like Ed Fredkin, who taught Richard Feynman how to program computers. And Feynman came up with this idea of quantum computers, partly because of his work with Fredkin, who was at MIT, who was talking about cellular automata. So cellular automata, most people have probably seen images of the game of life. We can probably bring it up.

It's called Conway's Game of of life conway's game of life yeah it's just a set of squares okay and you have rules uh on which square should light up and which square should so if you just look at like yeah you can see like some of the images there um you want the fourth one that one uh no let's go to the one before that. Right there? Yeah. So these are showing basically if you follow these little rules, each of the cells, which is like a square in the grid. Ah, yeah. Let's see if you can find a video of it running because I think that's a better way for people to understand it.

Is that a video? Yeah. So this is probably the most famous cellular automata. And so if you watch it, like weird. It's like the fucking drones up in the sky right now. There you go, right? But the idea is that it's just following these rules, but by following these rules,

it sometimes does weird things that we can't always predict. Now, in this case. When you say weird things, what do you mean by that specifically? So what I mean is that some of these are predictable, right? So what they're showing you here are mostly predictable, stable patterns. Right, like in the middle there, especially where you have all the little arrow-like

structures going to each other. But see if you can find one. So there's patterns which also become more chaotic. So this is like the birth of chaos theory. Like this? Yeah, where you can't predict what's going to happen so easily. They're not stable. Ah, okay.

By stable, I mean it goes into the stable point where, let's say, two squares light up next to each other and it goes on to infinity. Like this. This is pretty stable. It's pretty much doing more or less the same thing. Yeah, all these are what they call stable. And then you get into complex behavior and chaotic behavior. And so the whole field of complexity was born with using different types of cellular automata. Okay, now let's look at Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata, which are even simpler.

Maybe you can do a search for elementary cellular automata or Wolfram cellular automata. But all that's happening there is that each cell is looking at the cells next to it and saying you want the second one i'm sorry let's see yeah yeah that's a good one okay but go ahead riz sorry yeah so while he brings this up you can see there's a little formula there right that he's showing you behind there but the basic idea is that based on what your neighbors are doing in this case it's just not a see there's a little formula there that he's showing you behind there. But the basic idea is that based on what your neighbors are doing, in this case, it's just not a grid, it's a line of cells. And so if your neighbor to the right is lit up and your neighbor to the left is lit up, then you should light up. And if the two cells next to you are empty, they're black, they're not lit up, then you should light up. These are the types of rules. And you can have any number of rules that are defined for this number of

how many ever cells that you have. But they end up creating some really interesting patterns. So Wolfram came up with this idea using elementary cellular automata. You can see some of the patterns. Let's maybe just go to an image then that shows the patterns that result. Let's go back.

You want an image then that shows the patterns that result let's go back you want an image yeah yeah just do uh cellular autom elementary cellular automata and look yeah you can look at these different images you can see how if you repeat the same pattern over and over again some of them get into patterns and they draw nice pictures that are symmetric and some of them don't and that's the idea of chaos theory what chaos theory. What chaos theory says, and this is getting back to what you were talking about earlier, the butterfly effect, which is that if you make a small change in an initial condition, it ends up causing a huge change down the road. Like a butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and the stock market crashes in London. That's right.

Because it said that that is a complex or chaotic process. And you can't predict what one small thing is going to do unless you run the program, meaning you go through and you do all of these. So in the case of cellular automata, when they get complex, you say, well, I want to predict exactly what it's going to look like at step 2 million. And turns out, if it's stable, you can. But if it's not stable, good luck. Good luck. It's like the three-body problem is a famous example of a problem that we know.

Can you explain that to people? So the three-body problem is when you have three – well, first of all, it's the title of a well-known science fiction novel from China and a Netflix series that was based on it. But the basic idea is you have three bodies, let's say planets or stars, and they're all kind of revolving around each other. And the question is, eventually, will it be stable? Or will one of the stars or one of the planets just shoot off into space? And it turns out we don't have a solution for that yet. We don't know, unless you just keep calculating and keep going. You can't just do a shortcut of an equation.

So Wolfram came up with this term called computational irreducibility. And what he says is that that means the only way to find out what's going to happen in step 2 million is to go to step 1,999,999. Meaning we can't solve for it. You can't solve for it quickly. You have to run the program. You have to let it run. And you can solve for it. You can't solve for it quickly. You have to run the program. You have to let it run. And you can simulate for it.

So computation becomes, rather than math, computation becomes the process by which reality evolves. And so he's got a whole physics project now called the Wolfram Physics Project where he says you can derive some of the rules of relativity from these types of very simple rules. And these are really simple rules. So he'll say every point in spacetime is, think of it as a point, a node in a graph. It's called a hypergraph. And I get into this a lot in my second simulation book, The Simulated Multiverse.

Cellular automata, complexity theory. And because I kind of tied it to this idea that there might be multiple timelines going on and stuff. That's going to be multiverse, obviously. Yeah, that's going to be multiverse, exactly. But if we think of the universe as a computer program, that's a different way to think of it than using standard physical equations.

And if the world is, in fact, pixelated, quantized, and if time is quantized, then I think it's more likely that we would be in a simulated universe than not. Now, the physicists, the first part, they kind of agree, yeah, there's a minimum distance. We can't really measure anything below it. The second part is still an open question. Like, is there a minimum time we can measure? And so is still an open question. Like is, is time, is there a minimum time we can measure? Uh, and so, so that's an open question, but if it was, that would be a clue

that in fact, we are in some kind of a simulated type of universe. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. But if we're in a simulated type of universe, this is where it ties my brain up a little bit sometimes when I'm thinking about the multiverse and I'm thinking about like simulation. These two things can exist together, essentially, you're saying.

Because the multiverse is just a bunch of layers of the types of simulations that happen that all may be emanating from one place that's simulating all of them. Is that reasonable to say? Yeah. So, you know, what happened was during – when I was writing my first simulation book, The Simulation Hypothesis, the basic idea was that space, physical space,

is not what we think it is, that it's actually a virtual reality, the matrix idea. And during that process, I interviewed the wife of Philip K. Dick. Oh, shit. Yeah. So she's still alive and she's you know today even today even i mean she's older she was i think his fourth wife i think in the 70s well he didn't get her on on the first rate sorry right but uh so and she wrote a book about his life and so i interviewed her as part of my research because there's so there's a famous clip

in fact let's see if we can find that that famous clip of philip k dick saying we live in a computer programmed reality yeah i love that that you're really into the man in the high castle by the way because i always ask people about that and they're like no i haven't seen it oh they haven't seen it that show was like a little bit ahead of its time based on the philip k dick novel but it was what a mind fuck yeah anyway okay let's get this on. Let's see if we can get it. Is a topic which has been discovered recently. Well, this is sort of a long clip, right? How long is it? It's like four minutes. Okay, there's a point at which he starts talking about,

see if you can find maybe a shorter version where he's just talking about the computer program reality. The 114, a glitch in the matrix? Yeah, this one might be. Okay, right there, yeah. Here we go. The title of my address is If You Find This World Bad,

You Should See Some of the Others. The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore, I'm free to say everything or nothing. We are living in a computer-programmed reality. Okay, it stopped there. And this was actually, I think...

And by the way, if that was copyrighted and you guys didn't just see it, we just watched Philip K. Dick essentially get real dramatic and then look out at people and say, you're living in a computer generated program reality now what he actually said if you listen to the rest of that clip so 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 and then he goes on to say and i interviewed tessa his wife because

you know that's a famous line that he put out there but she said well look at the rest of his speech so i went and looked at the rest of his speech and his next thing he says after that is you would have the sense of re of kind of replaying the same scene over and over again. Deja vu. And he actually uses deja vu in the term. He says, deja vu could be a sense that I've said these same words before, I've been in the same place before. And if you read the rest of the speech, he actually says what he believes is happening

is that there are some people outside of the simulation who are fiddling with variables. And they will rerun the variable. Like they will change something in the past. And they will rerun the timeline to see what would happen. And the most famous example of this is what you just mentioned, the man in the high castle. Yeah. So for those who haven't seen it. Yeah, please explain the outline for people.

It's such an insane plot. I can't believe people didn't get into this. Yeah, well, you know, when he was alive, that was his most well-received novel. It won all the science fiction awards. But he really became famous when Blade Runner came out shortly after his death in 1982, I think it was, or 84 is when the movie finally came out. But in The Man in the High Castle, it's about an alternate timeline where Germany and Japan, the Axis powers, won World War II. And so they divided America between them.

And so when he wrote it, he said he did it based on fragmentary memories of this alternate police state. And if you watch it, you can he did it based on fragmentary memories of this alternate police state. And if you watch it, you can see like the Nazis rule New York. Oh, yeah. It's wild. And the West Coast is ruled by the Empire of Japan. Yet it's a crazy alternate reality. They nuked DC in like 1945, like crazy shit.

That's right. There's this entire timeline that it's based on, right? And the H-bomb is actually the Heisenberg device. So there's a lot of really interesting things in that series, which by the way, Tesla said, she thought, as an aside, she thought he would really like it. Oh, really? And I asked her, what would he think of the Matrix? Because he died in the 80s. And she said, well, two things. First, he would like it. He would say, I love that. This is great. And the second thing he would do is call his agent to see if he could sue these guys for stealing his ideas.

That's probably fair. Yeah. He was a – I mean, the shit he could come up with. Yeah. He was way ahead of his time, right? Yeah. Because back then, most science fiction was just outer space, colonization, all the famous sci-fi writers of that era were talking about planets. And he's talking about things that happen to us and usually he was concerned with two big topics one of which is what is real and

what is not is this real yeah that's right well your cup says right there your mug and the second is what it doesn't mean to be a human versus say an android or something else and so in that speech he he talks about that his novels have these multiple counterfeit realities and so eventually he came to believe that the man in the high castle timeline and for people that haven't seen it there's a guy who can jump timelines in in that show it's worth watching if they haven't seen it yeah um but philip k dick came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened like meaning within the context of a multiverse yeah meaning the context of a simulated multiverse yes meaning that they let that run and they didn't like the outcome in this case they meaning the simulators And then they changed the variables and reran it again. And we are now in the other timeline, one of the other timelines.

But they exist simultaneously. Well, what does simultaneously mean in the context of a computer simulation? we win versus nazis when you create two tributaries off the river now that move and on the same you know time value of space but on a different timeline so to speak yes exactly but now consider that if they're actually simulated it could seem as if they're simultaneous but really one could run they could decide if they like the outcome and then they could decide if they like the outcome, and then they could run the other one, because it would still be t equals 1, t equals 2, 1945, 1946, 1947. It would be the same. So time loses its meaning once you consider yourself

outside of the simulation. Time only exists within the simulation. Yes, yes. And so that's what really got me thinking about this idea of the multiverse as a simulated multiverse, because what it means is we could be exploring different versions of reality and then come back and then decide, just like Philip K. Dick's simulators did. We could decide, you know what, that one didn't lead to an optimal outcome. Let's let this one run further. Wait a minute, though.

Let's back up for a sec, because I'm trying to line this up with the actual plot point and for people who haven't seen it we'll we'll try to keep you in the loop here so you can follow but within that show you have i forget her name now but you have the main character who can see these films they're like time period exactly what they're supposed to be they're black and white as if they were filmed during world war ii and now it's 18 years later it's like 1964 she's living in in japanese occupied san francisco and she has access to these films that show the films we know in this reality that we have which is the allies winning the war and she's like holy shit there's another reality where they could do this and like you said there's people within the show who can go between these dimensions the one guy was like the japanese cop who could do it or

whatever and the the where i get a little held up though to make sure i'm following along here though is you also had the nazis at the time fucking around with this technology and creating a portal where they could go in between dimensions so they are in meaning those guys were in this simulated game but they were within the simulated game trying to go into another dimension of the simulated game so they could make every outcome a nazi victory right right so that and that i think was not in the original novel. In fact, the original novel, it wasn't films. It was a book that somebody wrote. In the novel, Man in the High Castle, somebody wrote a book about this alternate timeline, which is our timeline. But what happened to him, to Philip K. Dick, was he had some weird experiences. Some people say he was on too much drugs, but he took some soda and pentothal or something.

And he said that he got full memories of this particular alternate timeline. So in fact, he was going to write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle. Tesla told me that he was working on it. Damn it. And he decided he didn't really need to at some point once he got the full memories. And he also said it was a little too, not necessarily violent but it was like disturbing for him to to revisit that timeline because it was america was such a police state in that timeline so he ended up just you know forgetting about that project and going on his kind of his later novels are a little

different they go into valis and they go into you know all these ideas all these other ideas about reality so he had a lot of different aspects of his ideas. He was constantly refining his ideas. Yeah, he was tapped into some. He was definitely tapped into something, I think. But for me, that speech was the one that really gave me this idea that, oh, if you could just change a few variables, some things might be the same, but other things might not be the same, but other things might not be the same. And Tesla said that he actually claimed that he was communicating with somebody that could be like part of the simulators.

Did she say how he said he was doing that? Not really, but I said, well, what do they look like? And she goes, well, it was hard for her to see. Sometimes it looked like a blur was there. Like he was actually communicating with somebody or something, but she couldn't actually see what they looked like. Because I was asking her, are they kind of like these aliens or what do they look like?

And she didn't really see what they looked like necessarily, but she said there was something weird. But she said he also came to believe that like the kennedy assassination was one where they decided to fiddle with the timelines a bit and they decided to not have him assassinated in dallas right which is where he was assassinated yes in our timeline but then he got assassinated in orlando so it's like the conspiracy or whatever that was working on assassinating him right they just changed location they just yeah they just changed the conspiracy or whatever that was working on assassinating him. They just changed the location.

Yeah, they just changed the location. Or in another version, something else would happen that led to a worse outcome than this particular timeline. Now, speculating here, could that have been, for instance, like nuclear war? Yeah, I think it was. I think that was the worst outcome where maybe Kennedy wasn't assassinated or something. I don't remember all the details now and she didn't necessarily get into exactly what these outcomes were, but the idea was that there were these programmers who could change things in the past. And then he also said, we would have to find a group of people like him that remembered an alternate present an

alternate timeline of the present uh and or past or an alternate past okay and back then it was very difficult to to find those people but then with the internet it became a lot easier and now we have this thing called the mandela effect which you know yes can you please explain this yeah so the mandela effect is when a certain group of people remember a event or a object or a movie that is different from what it the way that it is today and so it was coined by a blogger named Fiona Broom. And it's named after Nelson Mandela. Because some people believe that Mandela got, instead of getting out of prison, he died.

In prison. In prison, in the 80s or early 90s. Whereas in our timeline, that didn't happen, right? He actually got out of prison, became the president of, the leader of the party, and became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize. And then he died in, I forget what year it was. I think it was 2013 or something. Something like that, yeah.

Yeah. And so a subset of people remember this alternate timeline. And then she started to find other instances of this. I think it was at one of these Comic-Con type conventions, like Dragon Con, I think it was called, the one they have in Atlanta, where there were a bunch of fans with Star Trek actors from the original Star Trek series were on stage. And the fans remembered this episode.

And the guys on stage are like, we never filmed this episode. What are you talking about? And they insisted they could quote never filmed this episode. What are you talking about? And they insisted they could like quote dialogue from this episode. Whoa. And you know Star Trek fans. Some of them are pretty intense. They know their shit.

They know their shit, right? And so I always dismissed the Mandela fact as, well, it's just a bunch of faulty memory. The famous ones are like the Bernstein Bears versus the Bernstein. Like if you bring it up, you can see that it's actually Bernstein bear. If you just search for Mandela effect. Mandela effect Bernstein. Not even Bernstein. You'll probably see a bunch of them.

If you just search for Mandela effect, you'll see images. Okay. Yeah, let's pull that up. All right. Images. Beautiful. Okay. all right images beautiful okay the bernstein bears the bernstein bears yeah and so the way it is today is that they're the bernstein bears and yet many people remember them as the bernstein bears the s-t-e-i-n you know what's crazy yeah i vaguely remember them as the bernstein bears you do yeah yeah it's in there floating

somewhere around yeah it's kind of weird yeah it's kind of weird and then you know another famous one is the line from um uh the empire strikes back where everyone thinks darth vader said luke i am your father but he actually doesn't say that he says no i am your father instead of luke i am your father that's something that got i see that one i feel like could have been changed in pop culture because so many people just said it like maybe what it's like the butterfly effect someone says it one way one time and that's such a memorable line it's personal you're calling out a name then people start repeating it then suddenly becomes a pop culture phenomenon and the rest is history i could see that yeah yeah but what you're talking about with the mandela effect

is fascinating yeah it's and so you know i dismissed most of these as like a little memory lapse or a pop culture thing but then you get into what I call proximity and significance. So meaning if you were close to a particular event or had some significance in your life, then you're more likely to remember it correctly. And so I've divided them into categories. And some of these that are just like one or two letters different or a movie line that's different, I think they could very much just be people misremembering them from pop culture.

But if it's more significant for you like the star trek episode right that you've seen or you know many people remember the movie kazam and shazam right uh with simbad so people insist there was a movie in fact let's look it up i even forget which one is the real movie so people thought there was a movie in the 90s uh with Sinbad in there about a genie called, I think it was supposed to be called Shazam. And people are like, no, I insist. I had the VHS tape and I watched it like many times. Like a lot of people? Like a decent, I mean, still a subset.

It's not a majority, but it's a subset. And so if you look at the images, you can kind of see that there was actually a movie called Kazam, I think, if I'm at the images you can kind of see that there was actually a movie called kazam i think if i'm getting the two right oddly enough sometimes it seems like there's weird mendel effects going on with this yeah kazam with shack i've seen that movie with shack right but people insist no this was a separate movie from kazam with jack so if you go to the images you'll see people have drawn you know uh images of simbad and this got to the point where simbad actually recorded a scene from this movie that people had described to him

in 2017 just for fun just to fuck with them just to fuck with them to say people say i was in this movie but i actually wasn't oh that's great yeah yeah it's it's it's crazy because like also thinking about it on a on a more micro scale you have – when you look at like trial testimony and what's useful and what's not, they always talk about how eyewitness testimony is actually often the least useful because stories change in our mind and we actually believe we saw things over time, whether it was we were coached to believe that or we had some traumatic event that we witnessed and you're in such shock that then you play it back and you start to reason your way through it and you start to see things that maybe you didn't. And this to me could be a part of a very similar type phenomenon, no? Some of them could be. And so again, that's kind of what I assumed originally. And then I had a friend of mine from MIT who was visiting Google. He worked for Google and was visiting me in Mountain View. And he goes, you ever heard of this Mandela effect?

Yeah, I heard of it. You know, people with false memories or faulty memories. He goes, well, the best explanation is, you know, some kind of simulated reality. Because if you rerun the simulation, little things will change along the way. And so it gets back to proximity and significance. So if something is significant for you and multiple people remember it that way, then you're more likely to have gotten it right and less likely to have gotten it wrong. So for example, Nelson Mandela, there was this one blogger, I don't remember her name now, but on YouTube where she said that she was a

journalism student and she was supposed to go visit Nelson Mandela in South Africa. And she actually went there, but they said he was too ill for her to actually visit him. And so she came back and she started working for NPR and then she heard he died and saw his funeral and his wife Winnie. And so this is somebody that actually went to South Africa to meet with him. So it was much closer, much more significant. So the Star Trek example

is another one. I mean, there are folks whose parents are like evangelical Christians and they really followed the Reverend Billy Graham. And I don't know what year he died, but there's a whole group of people that say that he died. They remember getting the magazine in the mail, like Billy Graham, this is the year year he died many years before he actually died and so they feel like it's changed and that's where we get into some real more significant items like scripture people remember their scripture exactly right so if you look at isaiah in scripture and there's a whole website's dedicated to biblical changes uh and if you look at isaiah there's that line about the lion and the lamb.

If you look at it now, if you look up Isaiah, lion and the lamb, you'll see there's no actual line about the lion and the lamb. It's just the wolf will lay with the lamb or something like that. So this is another... Okay. In the Bible, Isaiah 11, 6, 7 describes a time when the lion and the lamb

will live together in peace along with other animals and a child will lead them. The wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid. The calf and the lion and the fatling together and a little child shall lead them. Right. But most people remember the line of the lion and the lamb. But they're not together.

But they're not together but they're not together and you know when you get to scripture you're in a place where people do memorize things exactly uh in different religions and so so this is what really got me thinking okay is there a possible explanation and whether you believe in the mandela effect or not i think it's a useful way to think about rerunning multiple timelines and that's where i came up with this idea of the simulated multiverse, that if you rerun the events, some things will be different, just like with the butterfly effect. If you change a few variables, and that really was what Philip K. Dick was talking about, and that got me thinking about what would it mean in a computational multiverse?

Could we have memories of a previous run of the simulation, for example, where you remember things happening differently. When you say computational multiverse, though, versus in my head I'm just thinking of a multiverse where it wouldn't necessarily be a simulation on the other end, what would be the main differences in how the multiverse behaves if one's computational and another theory says it's not? Well, that's a very interesting question.

And before we get into that, let me just do one more Mandela effect. Sure, sure. We'll get into what it means to be in a computational multiverse and how is it possible some people might remember something that's done differently. So another one that was most significant, that was very significant, I thought, was the Tiananmen Square. I don't know if you remember that, but there was the guy in front of the tank. They called him Tank Boy. So if we look at – if we look that up now real quick and we look up a picture of Tank Boy. Where he's just standing in front of the tank. And what the tank tries tries to move around him right so do you remember him being run over by the tank or not no i think they got him out of the way right that's what i remember

and that's what the main timeline says but there are a number of people who actually remember that he was run over and they said it was the bloodiest thing they ever saw on tv by the tank and that is one of those weird interesting memories that for some people has more significance than other people and so when we get into scripture or we get into events that might have more significance is it possible that these people are actually remembering something that was significant to them? So perhaps it's not just faulty memory in some cases. And so I came up with this idea. Could it be that those memories are still there?

So when we run a computational – so every program, like if you're running a computer right now, people are probably watching this on their phone or on a computer. There's actually multiple processes running at the same time. But they don't run exactly the same. If there's an actual CPU, what happens is the CPU will run, say, Microsoft Word for a little bit. And then it'll go and it'll run some other program like Zoom or YouTube for a number of cycles. And it'll go back and forth. other program like Zoom or YouTube for a number of cycles. And it'll go back and forth, but it does it quickly enough that it seems like it's all happening simultaneously. But what happens in computer science, there's this thing called garbage cleaning.

So if you're rerunning a process, you may be using the same memory that a garbage collection that you ran before. But what happens is that sometimes the previous values are still there in memory. And so what garbage collection does is it goes and it cleans up those values and sets them to zero. But it only runs every so often. And so it's possible that you still have values there in memory of a previous run of that same program.

And so that's one of the differences when you think of a computational multiverse. If it's using the same kinds of computation, then it's very possible that that's what's going on. Now, Philip K. Dick also wrote a story that was turned into a movie called The Adjustment Bureau. That was Matt Damon, right? Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. And that was based on a story called the Adjustment Team, in which case there's a guy, he goes to work, I think Fletcher was his name, and suddenly he sees that everything's frozen at work

and the Adjustment Team is like changing things. And then when they start up again, everyone just remembers things as they've been adjusted. They don't remember how it was before. Everyone in his office. But he remembers before because he wasn't he wasn't part of the adjustment he remembers exactly what the office looked like and how people were dressed and everything was different and so i mean the movie's a little bit different from the book but it's a basic idea and so what happened was tessa said uh that he went into bathroom to turn on the light and he was like trying to

pull a chain if you remember there's the old chain light but instead it was an actual switch he said this is weird I've been here a hundred times I've done this this is our apartment I've done this many times it wasn't a light switch it was a chain or maybe it was the other way around it was a chain not a light switch

it was a switch not a chain and she said that's what gave him the idea to write that particular story is maybe what if somebody is actually adjusting things in the world around us. Like you were saying. Like stop and then rerun it. And so that's what – the way I think of a computational multiverse. Now, there's a whole area of quantum computing. So just recently, Google announced a new quantum computing chip. Yes.

Willow, I think, for example. Yeah, it was a little scary, that press release. Yeah. It should do a lot. Yeah, and in that press release, one of the folks at Google, I think, said, well, the reason we're able to do this particular computation so fast is because we're using the multiverse and we're actually computing in all these different multiverses. Now, the basic idea is that in a quantum computer,

you can do things much more quickly than you would be able to do them using a standard computer. Certain problems that grow exponentially are very hard for computers to do. And, you know, exponential growth is when a number grows based on the exponent growing, it just grows really fast. And probably the best story or example of a problem like that is the king from India and the sage and the chess, the chess game. And so what happens, the king loved to play chess, but nobody wanted to play with him anymore. And there was this sort of wise man,

and he said, well, if you play chess with me, I'll give you anything you want if you win. And the wise sage says, okay, how about this? If I win, you'll give me one grain of rice for the first chess square at the bottom of the board. And then in the next square, you'll give me one grain of rice for the first chess square at the bottom of the board. And then in the next square, you'll put two grains of rice. And then four grains of rice. And then eight. And 16. So he's doubling it each time.

So it's like two to the power of X. And the king is like, sure. I mean, why not? That's pretty simple. But it turns out that if you keep doing that, you get to a very large number. You get to 2 to the 64. And it was like more grains of rice than you could fit in all of India, for example. So that's an example of a computational problem that grows exponentially.

And so quantum computing, theoretically, the idea is that it can have qubits instead of regular bits. So regular bit has a value of zero or one, like we talked about earlier. Yep. Just the simplest unit of information, yes or no, zero or one. A qubit is a bit that is in superposition. So we go back to what we were talking about earlier, Schrodinger's cat. Yes. We said the cat was in superpositionposition meaning it was both alive and dead

so it occupied both states a superset of the states that's where that term comes from in mathematics superposition so the idea is if you have let's say you know two bits right next to each other usually the the possible number of values is two to to the power of two it's just four or three if if you have three bits the number of possible values is 2 to the power of 2. It's just 4. Or 3, if you have 3 bits, the number of possible values is 2 to the power of 3. Or 8 or 16 for 4 bits, right? So those are all now – it's pretty easy for a computer to look at 16 different possibilities and figure out which one works. That happens very quickly.

But when you get to these large numbers like 2 to the power of 64 or 2 to the power of 128 bits or 512 bits, that takes thousands of years basically for the computer to explore every single one of those possibilities. Does that change if we get to quantum computing, if you can basically put the bits into superposition, they're called qubits, Q-U-B-I-T-S, then you can explore all the values at the same time inside different parallel universes. What in the technology allows us to do that? Can you explain that mechanism? Well, the mechanism is one that's like, it's a little weird because different companies are doing it differently.

But the way they're doing it is that they're trying to put a particle or a molecule or some very small item, a photon, an electron. They're trying to put that into superposition because we know, I mean, that's what the double slit experiment was about. It was about sending through electrons initially and then photons. And then later, they believe that even larger molecules actually exist in a state of superposition as well with probability waves. So it's really weird. Once you get into this, none of this stuff makes any sense from a common sense perspective. And so the basic idea of quantum computing is that theoretically you should be able to explore all the possible values.

Now, theoretically is one thing. Doing it in practice is very hard. And so quantum computing is still like back at where we were in the 50s and 60s, right? It requires room-sized computers. And one of the problems is that particles get entangled. And when they get entangled, they cohere and they decohere, which means there are errors that pop up. And so if you just try to put one little qubit into a 0 or 1 superposition,

and then it comes back to a 1, you could have it basically flip. It's kind of like when I was at MIT, we built computers ourselves from the ground up. What a flex. When I was at MIT, we built computers. You know, another Tuesday. Yeah, it was a whole semester thing it took. And it was like this big board, and we were putting wires in things. But what happened was at one point, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong.

Why wasn't it giving me the right answer? And it turns out there was just some physical problem where some wire got crossed and the value got changed. And so this happens over the internet. Like if people are watching this over the internet, they've got the bits from the server on their computer. How do they know they got the right bits? Because it turns out physical wires are actually error prone. And because if you look at it, if you go way down to the bottom level, a 1 is represented as like 5 volts or 10 volts or some number of volts,

and a 0 means like 0 to one volt or something like that. So you've got these values, but they can get easily messed up in the physical world, and that's what happens with quantum computing. So there's a whole series of error codes, correction codes that get put into place. And there was a guy named Huffman, and then there was a guy named Claude Shannon, who's like the father of information theory, who was at Bell Labs and MIT back in the 50s and 40s. And they came up with all these different ideas for how do you minimize the number of errors.

And the basic way you minimize errors is you duplicate some information. And you say, OK, here's a string of, let's say, 10 bits. And you just count the number of ones. Let's say there's three ones in there. And then you add the number three at the end of the transmission. So when you get it, you look at those 10 bits, but you look at the little thing at the end

that says there should be three ones. And if there's more than three ones, you know something's wrong. And if there's something less than three ones, you know there's something wrong. So then you ask for the bits again. It means something went wrong. And so this has been the problem

with qubits in quantum computers is the physical way they implement the bits has made it very error prone so you end up having to run like a thousand times the same procedure to make sure it comes out correct because then if you actually run like a quantum computer you can do people can do this like the ibm you can like actually go up and literally upload your quantum computing code and have it run and it'll tell you i ran it 90 yeah ran like a hundred times and uh 97 times this is the value i got and three times this is the value i got so therefore the 97 is the correct value the three were errors

basically isn't there and this might be a little bit of a side point here but it is fascinating to me because we're coming into this brave new world as as we see it with technology but isn't there some serious implications of if certain countries whether it be us or someone else got a quantum computer before anyone else it could it they could effectively take over the world silently without anyone knowing it and you wouldn't they could set it a set of standards such that other places couldn't get to the power of quantum computing that they have well i think the worry is not so much that the worry is more that it's not that there aren't quantum computers the problem is that the number of qubits in those quantum computers is so small that it's hard to do anything useful with them so okay like if you think of like uh the apple 2 computer and it was an 8-bit computer

so the microprocessor only you know dealt with 8 bits at a time and so today's qubits the reason this google announcement willow was i think it had 100 error-corrected qubits, which is the most that anyone has ever been able to achieve. We should probably look that up. I don't remember the exact number, but it was in that range. Willow, 100 qubits or whatever. Yeah, yeah. If you just look at the Willow announcement, and the basic idea is that they were able

to run one particular problem like significantly faster yes like uh exponentially faster uh and then the problem is people think you can break encryption with a quantum computer once you have enough qubits basically every secret that's out there has been transmitted more or less digitally yeah banking bitcoin that's what i'm saying the blockchain is fucked with it well it is eventually but the way the blockchain protocol works yeah so let's see how many qubits was it oh we have it up on the screen yeah uh 10 to 25 the fastest number of supercomputers 10 septillion years well that's how long it would take to solve this particular this problem is not a useful

problem this is just like some problem they made up that they can show their quantum computer runs uh so much faster than a regular computer so it would literally have taken like 10 septillion years for a supercomputer to solve that problem that yeah i just keep seeing that number in here i don't i don't see the qubits but the point is somewhere else yeah the point's taken yeah wait what's that chart years that's more years but so the problem has been like to get a hundred error corrected qubits you need something like a thousand actual qubits one under five qubits 105 okay there it is okay so that's the actual number that they were able to so that it was significant because before you had like four qubits eight qubits now if it gets to 512, 1028, which is not that far away, you could theoretically start to break some of the encryption that's out there. But well before Bitcoin broke, you would end up – I mean you could just go to any banking site, right?

You could basically break any encrypted message that's ever been sent. How do you defend against this ahead of time? Well, what happens is you change the encryption algorithm. And there are certain algorithms that are more quantum safe than others. And so I wrote an article back in 2017 that kind of went viral at the time. This was during the last Bitcoin boom. And I titled it, How I Cornered the Market for Bitcoin Mining Using Quantum Computer. And it was just a theoretical article.

It wasn't an actual – You glue balls everyone. Okay. But I discussed how the Bitcoin mining algorithm works. What happens is you get like the transactions and you put them in a block and you create a block header. And then you have to come up with this random four bytes. And that is the hard part of the problem. So the reason – the way Bitcoin mining works – And you didn't figure that out. No, I didn't. and you create a block header. And then you have to come up with this random four bytes. And that is the hard part of the problem. So the reason the way Bitcoin works- And you didn't figure that out.

No, I didn't. I didn't figure it out fully. You can tell me. You can tell me. No one's listening. Yeah. That's right. No one's listening. I laid out a framework for how you might think about solving that kind of a problem where you have some regular bits and some qubits. Now, there are certain algorithms that they think are more quantum safe than others. And one of the algorithms used in Bitcoin mining, some of them say, well, you need a million qubits to do it. But that turns out that's not true because you need a million if they were unerror corrected.

But if they're corrected, you need a much smaller number than that. And when I say algorithm, there are these guys who have figured out these algorithms for how to use a quantum computer to do X, Y, or Z. And so eventually, what can happen though with the Bitcoin protocol is they can change that encryption algorithm to make it harder.

Like they've already done this several times. If you go back to the 90s, all the encryption was using a particular algorithm. I forget what it was this is way pre-bitcoin obviously yeah this is pre-bitcoin but then later they started using one with more bits uh you know there's like shaw 256 it could keep trying to get ahead of the curve yeah and there are there are algorithms that are quantum safe so but the problem is then you need to uh you know i'm actually a big fan of bitcoin so i'm not at all predicting that this would be a problem. I was actually involved in helping create some tokens out there, including one called Beta, which is I think in the top 50 or so back in 2017, 2018.

Wow. When we're doing it, it's sort of a distributed network that lets you process AI and videos and other things. Did you do the Hawk to a coin too? Or no, no, that wasn't me. And I didn't invest in it. Okay. Good. Uh, you know, people were like, perhaps you shouldn't take your financial advice from, from a girl called Hawk. Look, I'm probably not the best, you know, I'm not exonerating her, but I mean, if you invested in that, darwinism yeah i mean what you need to do is figure out is there a utility you know for specific coins versus other coins and if it's just a meme i mean that's basically it's a meme coin and meme coins go up and they come that's right

and and that's the difference i think between bitcoin and also some alt coins that have some some actual utility like Ethereum. And I mentioned Theta. There's a bunch of Solana. There's a bunch that do have some serious utility. And you were helping build Theta, you were saying. Yeah, back when it first got started. It was originally a distributed video streaming network.

And then later it became just a distributed processing network. So you can run AI and other things on. There were all these gamers, basically basically who were donating their GPU time. So what do you need to run games? You need good GPU. What do you need to run AI? GPUs, right? It's the same processor that's used like in each of those things.

Where does – I had mentioned this earlier but a book that really just blew my mind and changed how I looked at things was super intelligence by bostrom where effectively that was that was one of the hardest books i ever read in the sense that it wasn't enjoyable and it wasn't meant to be enjoyable it was like he's a genius i'd love to talk with that guy sometime but he essentially laid out every possible that he could conceive of extrapolation of let's say like the decision trees of the directions that ai could go effectively yep and obviously he worked in some other concepts as well but like you know where does that where does ai marry into like the multiverse or are these two separate

things that happen to exist on a similar playing field or are they tied to the multiverse or are these two separate things that happen to exist on a similar playing field or are they tied to the same person or entity holding the strings up here well you can look at it a few different ways so i i got interested in bostrom because he wrote a paper even before his book super intelligence he wrote a paper in 2003 called are you living in a computer simulation yeah and so he pretty much invented what's called the modern simulation argument. And that argument is actually about AI, it turns out. And so when I mentioned the NPC versus RPG versions of the simulation hypothesis, there's the matrix version. There's a guy named David Chalmers who's also a philosopher.

Nick Bostrom is also a philosopher. So philosophers clearly like to think about this stuff more than the rest of us. And Chalmers coined the term the matrix hypothesis back in 2003. When I was talking to him, he said, well, everybody ended up using the simulation hypothesis, which Bostrom coined first. But his basic idea was that if a technological civilization could get to a certain point, and that point was where they could create AI versions of conscious beings, and you could create millions of those beings, billions of those beings inside a simulation. That aren't technically conscious. Depends on how you define consciousness. But basically he was saying if you add up all the amount of neurons

and the amount of information a person has in their entire life, he was kind of estimating you could have a big computer. He wasn't even getting a quantum computer. This was back in 2003. So he was just estimating that if you can have these AI beings, well, then you can have a billion or trillion of them in one simulation very easily, and you can fire up another simulation

when you need more server space. If Moore's Law, which we mentioned earlier, continues to hold, you're going to get better and better computational process. Cost of compute keeps coming down as well, but also the amount of computation you can do keeps coming down. I think at the time, Bostrom estimated something like an advanced civilization might take a whole planet

and use all the mass of that planet for computation, and they could create lots of simulations. In fact, they could create millions of simulations, and each of those simulations could have basically billions of simulated beings inside them. And so his point was that if any civilization ever got to that point, that they could create all these AI beings and all these civilizations, and these simulated civilizations, then he said if you are a being and you can't tell the difference

whether you're simulated or not, which are you more likely to be in? There's one base reality, let's say X number of beings. There's a billion simulations, each with billions of beings. There's a hell of a lot more of these AI simulated beings than there are people in the base reality. Right, because they were extrapolated upon.

Okay. Extrapolated. Or the simplified version, and there's a clip of Elon Musk in 2016, actually the same year that I was playing ping pong, where he talks about this too. He said he said basically if there's one base reality and there's a billion simulated worlds then the chances that you're in base reality is one in billions right which means if you flip it around where the chances that you're in a simulation very high very high right a billion i think about this often yeah yeah so from that that perspective, this is where Bostrom's AI work and simulation theory intersect, right? Because – and most people don't realize that he was talking about the NPC version, not the Matrix version.

Oh, like you were explaining earlier. Yeah. Because his logic was built primarily on the number of simulated beings. Well, you can't be playing that many simulated beings necessarily. They would have to be AI, right? So they would have to be like running in a simulation. On their own without you controlling them. Without you controlling them because in base reality, you can really control unless you had AI doing it for you in which case it's the same thing.

That's what i'm saying like are there things that we can't even conceive here that could possibly make that like a have a god-like ability on the other end of the simulation to control a you know a billion or a trillion things at once and for us it's the same thing as controlling one thing right but what would that be at that point it would basically be another ai probably right or might be yeah yeah and Yeah. And so I think one of the reasons why I'm interested in simulation theory is because it opens up other possibilities. And so even Bostrom, you know, kind of talks about this.

He said that people who are staunch atheists, once they consider simulation theory, they'll say, well, you know, any being that's outside the simulation would appear supernatural to us, right? Maybe they can control a million people. Maybe they can have their avatar walk on water, right? There's all kinds of things that could come up that you start to think about differently when you think of an actual simulated reality. And I think that's very interesting because it opens up possibilities

that otherwise aren't there in a purely materialistic world which ties back to you know this idea of uh you know did these miracles actually happen right were people are there people who can be in more than two one place uh can be at two places at once that could happen in a simulation right i can have my avatar potentially if the code allows it in two different places but it may be a skill or a level you may have to be at a level uh in order to be able to do those types of things and that also gets weird when you start putting into into terminology like that because that's that's all you can do because we only know what happens here and what we know as humans on this whatever it is planet or existence of the simulation but

when we talk about like levels and stuff and use like video game terms who's to say that that that's even how they did how they whoever they are determine it because they may have an entirely different set of principles as to how this is getting a little weird how i asked this but like you understand what i'm saying like they have a different set of principles as to how this is getting a little weird how i asked this but like you understand what i'm saying like they have a different set of principles as how they measure anything that's true and and that's what you know for us uh i'm doing the same thing that say the religions did 2 000 years ago i'm using the latest techno scientific metaphors the latest technology in order to explain something that could be very complicated and could be even more complicated than we can even imagine.

Jesus Virk has a good ring to it. Well, you know, I was at this Islamic conference and they were talking about insolvent. When does insolvent occur? Same debate we have here about abortion, right? When does the soul go into the fetus? Is it at conception? Is it at conception? Is it at birth?

Is it somewhere in between? The last trimester. And I said, well, I'd like to give a different analogy for what ensoulment means, which is basically it's the time when you put on the headset that you forget about what happens outside. You forget. happens outside you forget so all many ancient traditions not just the religions we have today but many ancient traditions actually describe this process of forgetfulness right this is a something that happens when we incarnate in the greek traditions they they say that the soul crosses uh lethe the river of forgetfulness river sticks is rome right yeah no it's greek as well but it's one of the the the rivers that you have in the underworld sticks is the one you know you cross

to go back but lethe is is the forgetfulness one got it and in the chinese traditions you have ming po who's the goddess of forgetfulness and she brews this tea of forgetfulness and and you drink it you know when you when you die to like forget about everything but also when you when you're born as well and then i mentioned maya earlier right with the story we tell illusion illusion but also it's kind of like voluntarily forgetting right agreeing to forget what's in the outside world and so we've got this this thing that happens where we become attached to our body, our character, our avatar. The word avatar itself, by the way, comes from ancient Sanskrit.

It does? Yeah. So the guys – James Cameron didn't tell me that. He didn't tell you that, right? No. So a lot of the technology around movies and video games, CGI goes back to Lucasfilm and George Lucas.

Oh, yeah, yeah. So at Lucasfilm, they built one of the first MMORPGs. I wouldn't call it MMO. It wasn't really massively multiplayer, but it was definitely a multiplayer online role-playing game called Habitat. And this was back in like the 80s that they came out with this.

And you had these 2D characters on the screen and they were trying to come up with a word to say that this character on the screen represents me, the player. And so what they said were the guys who were in charge of building Habitat. Afterwards, they said this. They said, well, it felt like, by the way, they were using Commodore 64s. They were using dial-up lines. So it's pretty amazing.

They actually got a full graphic. It wasn't sophisticated graphics. We can even look at the graphics of Habitat if we bring it up it's just these 2d graphics type in like habitat yeah habitat lucasfilm yeah you'll see it yeah it's amazing like when you look at graphics now even from like 07 to today on like nba 2k or something right where they're at oh my god yeah they're pretty different all the way back there so now we're going back to you know the 19 late 1980s do you want the second one right there yeah the second one would show you like the graphics okay can we blow that up alessi can we blow that

up by any chance i mean for the 1980s it's not the worst thing i've ever seen yeah it's actually pretty good i mean those are pretty that looks better honestly that looks that looks better than some of the game boy color we were using in like 05 or whatever yeah it was in many ways it was ahead of its time it didn't quite have the 3d perspective but but they said it felt like it was a they were a person who's a big person let's say our human size where they were squeezing themselves into the phone line and then they were squeezing themselves into the phone line. And then they were squeezing themselves into this little 2D character on the screen. And they were looking for a term for that. And in Sanskrit, avatar means a divine entity that's very big. Let's say an infinite divine entity that squeezes itself into a human body.

So it's like an incarnation of a divine entity. And so they used that term to be the term. And then Neil Stevenson came out with a cyberpunk novel called Snow Crash in 1992. And he used the term avatar in there for his definition of the metaverse, which was your character. And that basically popularized it. And so now we all – within the entire video game industry, that term is pretty common. Yeah, very, very widely used. Even after – like obviously the movies blew up and everything.

But that's something like when Michikaku was in here and was talking about like if there were half biological entities that existed on earth, it could be an avatar. And now it gets weird because you're like so it's half real but half not. But they're still using that term. Right. It blows my mind a little bit yeah the term is being used a lot now for projections or like in the movie avatar right it was he was lying down inside the pod and he was controlling the the physical in this case it was a physical entity of the navi the blue uh the blue alien now what if if we're going to talk about how avatars could exist in our reality some of this i might be wrong on because you think about this a lot more than i do as far

as like what the possibilities of that are but obviously something that a lot of these things come back to is like nhi things that are not from this planet that could potentially visit here or are here or whatever you want to say and one of my favorite things i don't know if i should say favorite but like one of my things like mind fuck things to think about is if you go through the ufo phenomenon and assume that some of these things did happen there's people who definitely claim stuff and that's not real but across you know let's even just look at the 20th century and some of the claims be it 94 in zimbabwe the late late 40s and early 50s on nuclear bases stuff like that you know if some of these things are real the question becomes how

could a species so advanced that has obviously been able to tame time and space reality beyond what we know, who in that scenario, I would assume at a minimum would have invisibility capabilities and stuff like that to not be seen, you know, or an ability to, you know, wipe your memory instantly if they decided they were seen by you, why then would they allow themselves potentially to be seen? And part of it to me is that that is a part of their, like they are simulating, I've always used this word, they are potentially simulating a data set of, okay, we show craft in this town and 10 people see it. That a data set for us we want to see this is an impetus how do they respond to that impetus and how does that butterfly effect

affect the rest of humanity based on how these stories are told and how it's extrapolated over time do you think something like that is possible number one and b could that play into your theory in some capacity, simulation theory? Yeah, so there's an overlap between the UFO phenomenon and simulation theory. And that's, I think it gets into this area that you're talking about here. I mean, there's different theories of NHI, right? Are they extraterrestrial? Are they time travelers?

Are they cryptotrapsidials? Are they a species that's been on Earth for a long time and they're not really extraterrestrial at all but where the overlap between simulation theory and ufo phenomenon comes is in this idea of being able to project into physical reality and so you know as i started to think about the ufo phenomenon i i met jacques valet legend yeah who you know was one of the first to come up, along with a few others, to talk about this idea that maybe they're not extraterrestrial after all. And he called it their messengers of deception. Maybe they're deceiving us in some way and making it look as if they're extraterrestrials. Or maybe they've been here all along.

Perhaps it's, if you go back to the stories of the Fae in the British Islands, or you go through some of the mythological creatures in France or the Djinn, which I've spent more time looking into. It's quite interesting. But coming back to this idea of the overlap in simulation, he told me about a couple of cases that really got me thinking. And one of them, he said, there are cases where one person can see the UFO and the next person can't. Yes. And that's kind of what you're getting at here. Like if 10 people see it.

And he said they could be standing next to each other. And then, you know, Gary Nolan told me of a case later where he said people were in the same car and they saw completely different shapes. But it was, you know, was some object in the sky. I forget the exact one. It was a cylinder. It was a donut. But they were right next to each other when they were looking at it.

And so this gets to this idea that are they projecting into our reality? So the case that Jacques told me about that was really interesting to me was in northern California or Oregon, like in the Pacific Northwest. If you've been there, there's all these tall trees, the redwood trees, those types of trees. That's where he's from, Santa Cruz. Oh, yeah, Santa Cruz. Okay. Yeah.

And so he said he went to investigate this case where the witnesses claimed that a UFO had landed in this kind of clearing in the woods. And they also said that it had come down at a 45 degree angle. And so I guess move on and other people were investigating it and jock was there and he likes jock likes to spend some time with the witnesses usually over multiple days if possible uh and get to know them a little bit as any good alien overlord should right just kidding uh but so you know he after the other investigators has left he goes there's one thing i don't quite understand about what you've said.

Is that you said it came down at a 45 degree angle. It would have had to go through stuff. It would have had to go through the trees, the redwood trees in this case. And yet you said it was a physical thing that landed here. And so I started to think about it. And they said to him, they said, yes, that's true. But we don't want to say that because we'll sound crazy. So if you take a purely materialistic view, that shouldn't happen.

You shouldn't be able to go through trees and walls necessarily without cutting them up. But if you take more of a projection approach, it's very easy. Like in a video game, you're resing something. You're rendering it. And while you're rendering it, you can de-render, you can go through objects, but then when you render it, it becomes very physical from the point of view of the people in that world. You can't walk through walls at that point once your avatar is rendered

there because now the physics engine kicks in. But there are ways to have states which let you go through the walls and do all of these different things. There's also what we call conditional rendering. Conditional rendering. Yeah. So this is very common in video games let's suppose you and i are standing in a field okay and you're level say i'm level two because i just started and you're level 25 because you've been playing the game for a while and you'll look up and say oh my god look at that dragon that's so cool and i'll say i look up and i don't see a dragon there's nothing there. Because perhaps you acquired the ability, the spell,

to perceive magical beings, let's say. And my character doesn't have that yet. The fact is we think we're looking at the same thing, but we're not. Each of us is rendering the game on our own quote-unquote device. Okay, we're doing this in person, but if we were doing this on Zoom, we wouldn't actually be talking to each other. I would have been talking to my computer. That's right.

And the bits would go to your computer, and then it would basically play my voice for you. But it would feel like we were talking to each other. A little. A little, right? But similarly, if we're both in the same field, it feels like we're in the same place, but we're not. The rendering is actually happening in a distributed way.

And what does that mean? Meaning on your computer and my computer separately. So we're not necessarily seeing the same things. We don't know that. We think we're seeing the same things because I see your avatar and you see my avatar. But you may see a UFO and I may not see a UFO. So conditional rendering means the ability to say on the server,

okay, this person has the ability to see this. So render it on their device. Just like if I had a virtual background in Zoom. That could get rendered for you on your computer but it doesn't have to be rendered. I could have different virtual backgrounds for every person who's who see me is this like genetics in this case no no if we're relating it to what we do so i let me extrapolate i may genetically have something in my brain that allows me i don't know i have a third eye and i can see this stuff whereas you may not and that

may make me level 25 versus you being level yeah well i'm not saying what that is that could be could be from genetics it could be your character That could be. It could be from genetics. It could be your character. It could be a skill. It could be somebody who's had a near-death experience who suddenly has all these strange psychic abilities. There's this podcast out there. You've probably heard of it called Telepathy Tapes.

I have heard of that. It's about these autistic, non-community, non-verbal autistics who can't talk, but they can point to letters and how they're all actually telepathic with each other. They're telepathic. Yeah, they are. It's like an open secret in this community, according to this podcast. I actually met the researcher a few years ago. Diane Powell was the researcher and then another person put together the podcast but she organized a conference on savant and the simulation hypothesis because that was the best explanation that she could have why did she have that explanation for

it and she was saying like okay if they are the reason they're non-verbal is they don't have fine motor skills but they they can still like point to letters and start communicating that's kind of what happened is that's how they started communicating and telling people that oh yeah we're telepathic we all hang out with each other in these kind of simulated worlds uh like like a playground or something that's not physically here like we can communicate like my friends at school we can communicate with each other when we're not at school and so you know there may be different reasons. And they also say that they are sometimes out of their body and they're not fully in their body like the rest of us. Like we're fully embodied. To me, that sounds a lot like when you put on, say, a suit, a haptic suit.

But if you don't have it on, then you're trying to control it with a mouse where everybody else has the haptic suit on and they can control their avatar fully by moving their arms and stuff. But if you don't have a haptic suit, for whatever reason, you're trying to control it with a mouse. You're stuck internal essentially. You're stuck, yeah. But you can still see what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. You can still send messages to people. You can do all these things that might be perceived as being supernatural in a way.

And so that's where I think each of us may be rendering this world. We think we're in the same world, but we're not necessarily. We're rendering it on our quote-unquote devices. And in computer science, you can easily send different data to different people from the server. I mean that's what personalization is. But if you and I fist bump right now, right? So you feel that? Yeah. You felt felt that i just felt that yeah so you're saying that in that nano micro millo whatever second it could have been like we are in our haptic suits and we were

able to feel that in this believe we feel that in this reality but we're technically not in the same place it's a computer yeah that technically you know these are our avatars and we are getting the so i tend to lean more towards the rpg version of yes rather than npc yeah not i'm not saying that there aren't npcs i'm saying what what happens is we go into npc mode and we started talking about this earlier but we didn't finish it where basically an npc is relying on its programming. And so I think when we go into NPC mode, it's kind of like The Sims, if you've ever played The Sims. You can watch your Sim doing things, right?

It's got some level of AI or some level of code control. But I feel like with 13th Floor, your avatar is doing things based on only things it is learned within that lifetime. So you're Julian in this lifetime, there are certain things you've learned that I haven't learned. But it could be that the player outside knows a lot more than that. And so I like to say NPC mode is when we are disconnected from our player. We're just operating off of the conditioning. And if you've ever been like in Hollywood or in Silicon Valley or in New York in the finance district, you see all these people start to think alike.

Yes. They're all like – it's sort of like NPCs in a way. Everyone starts to have the same goals. Like part of the reason I left Silicon Valley was it was just all about money, money, money. That's right. They have an incentivization structure to have that same goal and idea. Yeah, and who raised $20 million in their Series A versus who raised $1 million? And I just got tired of this same thinking and this game,

and I wanted to step back from it. So I ended up re-entering academia and working on my books and saying, okay, enough of that. I've done well in that space. But it's almost like you get programmed within that context. And so I think NPC mode is when you're relying on the programming from your environment, your genetics, and your particular life. But when you're not in NPC mode is when you feel more connected to a larger purpose. You kind of remember why you're here. And you realize there are perhaps things that you were meant to do while you were here. I mean, why did you become a podcaster?

Life kind of pushed me in that direction. It was something people would buy. I'm not going to tell the whole story and bore people right now, but it was something people would bother me to do for a long time. I was at a crossroads in my career. And then I had a little side hobby of, well, if I did a podcast, I'd do it right. So let me learn how to do the whole studio and everything. And I was getting all that.

And then the pandemic hit. And it was like everything kind of lined up all my job opportunities dried up in in a day because i was trying to switch industries at the time and like it was like my my calling i don't know yeah exactly it was your calling so i believe we have a general storyline and sometimes we have things that happen in our lives that push us in certain directions and they can cause a course correction right and what you said is not that uncommon where people say well this dried up right and i felt like this was the right thing for me to do and i had wanted to be a writer you know since i was in high school like if you had asked me i would have said i'm going to be a

computer entrepreneur and then i'm going to be a writer. And that was kind of, how did I know that? And that's kind of what I've done. But it was almost like a storyline, if you will, for a character that may have already been preselected, but then we get so caught up with what we're doing here that we forget about that. We forget about the bigger storyline. But isn't that based on your experiences and your environment and the way you interact with that in this case growing up and if so are you also saying that that was predetermined such that you would be that person who interacts with that environment

in that way to be able to get these thoughts that you were going to be like a writer all these things well i view it more like the player and the avatar so the avatars in the environment but like none of my siblings became writers we had the exact same so the avatars in the environment but like none of my siblings became writers we had the exact same i mean we grew up in the exact same space right more or less did a lot of the same things and had very similar experiences up to certainly through high school right now when we went off but there's not one outlet you can have for the same environment there's multiple let's just say let me but what's the difference between different people? Like why is this? I mean, look at the term you use. You said it's a calling. Okay. So what does that mean? It's almost like something is calling you to be.

I think my life kind of lined up that way. I never even thought about this, but like one of my buddies who always bothered me to do this talked about like when I was in middle school and our English teacher had me do speech competitions and I used to win those. I never thought about them again. Right. But when you look at that and, and kind of that skill I built doing that, and now you fast forward to now it, it translates, but it's not like, like that English teacher came to me and asked me to do that. I wasn't like, Ooh, I want to go do this. And then I did it. I was pretty good at it. And then it happened to line up with what i do now but it didn't feel like there was i hadn't thought about that before i went to do this you know what i mean yeah well and and sometimes so

there's this theory uh within um quantum mechanics so you can take a more spiritual view of this kinds of things let's do it or you can take a more scientific view let's kinds of things. Ooh, let's do it. Or you can take a more scientific view of these kinds of things. Let's do both. And there's a physicist named Fred Allen Wolfe who was part of this group at Berkeley in the 70s that was doing all these, like Fritjof Capra, who wrote The Tao of Physics. There was this whole group that was trying to wrestle with the big questions of what does quantum mechanics mean when most of the physicists said, okay,

we're not going to worry about what it means. We're just going to do the calculations. It was a period where people stopped thinking the big picture. You might say that's still true of physicists today. They're not thinking about the big picture. They're just trying to figure out specific theories and things. But basically, one of the ideas that he writes about is perhaps there are multiple possible futures and the futures are sending back messages to us, to the present. And so when we talk about these different possibilities, it's perhaps they have already occurred. So time may not exist in the way that we think it is, we think it does. And that information is coming. So perhaps there was a future you, this one is doing a podcast, or in my case, a future me that has become a writer that was sending back messages and having you notice the clues. And so one theory of the, how does the probability wave collapse is it depends on what you decide to observe

consciously. And consciousness is playing some role in which of those futures you end up going towards. Now, normally we think of present to future, cause and effect. What we did yesterday causes today. But what's weird is within quantum mechanics, it's not formally true. The equations make it so that the future can possibly affect the past. Okay, this gets really weird. Probably the best way to think about this is the cosmic delayed choice double-slit experiment. Let's bring this up.

Cosmic delayed choice double-slit experiment. And I've talked about it on another podcast, but I think it's much easier if you have a diagram. So this is another one of John Wheeler's thought experiments. And basically what he's saying is, so if you look for a cosmic delayed choice experiment, see if you can find with like a galaxy. Yeah, do you see the one in the middle there with a galaxy or the one at the top? Yeah, actually that one's fine. That one's fine. Let's zoom in on that one.

Perfect. Okay. So what this is saying is, let's suppose there's a distant quasar quasar uh quasar is like this object we don't really know what it is we call it a quasar because it's like emits so much light but let's say there's a very distant object like i don't know if it says how far away it is but let's say it's a billion light years away from us like very very distant object uh and it's sending light to the earth so how long is it going to take to reach us depends on the distance yeah let's say it's a

billion light years away it'll take a billion years yes it takes light a billion years yeah yeah it's one one it's one to one with the light years so when did that light leave the quasar? A billion years ago in the past. So normally we think the past happened, it's fixed, it's arrived today, that's it, right? But what if there's a black hole or a galaxy, in this case, this picture, they use a galaxy in the middle, that is a very strong gravitational object and the light that left the quasar a billion years ago can go to the left or to the right or to the top or to the bottom. Because it's like a lens reflecting. Yeah, it's like a lens.

Yeah, exactly. It's also like the double slit experiment, by the way, which is it goes through one slit or the other. Now, let's suppose that galaxy, in this picture, it looks like it's about halfway. So let's say it's a halfway fine that means it's 500 million light years away right half of a billion and so when would the light have to make the decision about whether to go left or right at the 500 million mark right yeah

so 500 million years ago what was going on back then the dinosaurs right yeah or whatever right it was a long time but pre-human for the most part, right? Even I think if you get into ancient civilizations, it's still, ancient aliens, it's still pretty far. But what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is when we measure the light when it reaches Earth, that that decision is made, the decision of whether to go left or right

okay so the the thing that should have happened a half a billion years ago one way or the other is not actually decided until today until we measure it and so the light is in superposition so there's actually multiple possible pasts decided or known that's where you're holding me well it's the same issue with schrodinger's cat you could say well i just don't know if it's alive or dead it's only one or the other right okay yeah but that's not what quantum this is why it's counterintuitive i mean richard feinman nobel prize winning physicist nobel prize winning physicist says nobody understands quantum mechanics because common sense tells us it's one. Yeah.

And we just don't know which one yet because we haven't measured it. But quantum mechanics is telling us, no, no, it's living in a state of superposition, which means that there are multiple possible pasts. And what happens is when we make the choice, when we observe or measure, is what the physicists will say, but more commonly it's called the observer effect. But the observer effect also applies to time. So it's not just deciding whether the cat moves from a superposition to alive or dead. It's what did the cat do before it went in the box? Did it come from the kitchen or did it come from the back door? Right. It's deductive reasoning all the way back. All the way back. But it opens up this weird possibility that time is not what we think it is, that we are, in fact, choosing the past. We're choosing it?

Well, meaning when we measure it, we're picking one of these pasts, right? When it gets measured. Until then, it's in the state of both. It's like in a state of superposition. And we're picking it… When we observe it. Meaning we can say it went left or right. Yeah. Definitively. it was until that moment it hadn't gone either left or right okay the cat wasn't alive or dead it's not like it was alive and you looked and you said okay yep it's a lot meaning it didn't do it 500 million years ago we only say that afterwards we only knew that it happened we're picking that

past okay and so i this was so weird to me uh when i first heard about it yeah it's strange and and i went and researched it. And it turns out they haven't done this experiment cosmically, but they've done it in the smaller amounts of space where they send something to the satellite, which is, say, 1,000 miles away. So it takes less than a second, obviously, to get there. But we're talking very small time frames. And they try to send it through two slits or go around something to get to there. And they said they've basically validated that

it's when the satellite measures the light that it decides whether it went left or right. It's the exact same thing as this, but in a much smaller scale. And so I looked around and I said, okay, this can't be right. What did the fathers of quantum mechanics think about this? Like Schrodinger came up with the example of the cat because the whole thing sounded absurd. You can't have a cat that's both alive or dead. It turns out now they're saying you can. But so there's an obscure speech by Schrodinger in the 40s that I was able to track down. And he said that when the probability wave collapses or when the observation is made or when the measurement is made, that you are choosing from one of multiple simultaneous

histories. So this is like straight from the mouth of Schrodinger himself. So it's like a multiverse, but in reverse, right? A multiverse is, we think of it as going this way. But what if there's more than one possible past? This is why I got into like the Mandela effect and say, how do you tie it to quantum mechanics? Maybe there are multiple possible paths. Wait, back up for one second. So if there's multiple possible paths, you're saying that there would be in this scenario, there's multiple possible paths that exist within the same plane we're in right now. Well, it depends on what you mean by plane.

So you and I, unless you're sitting in this in right now well it depends on what you mean by plane so you and i unless you're sitting in this room right now however many people are listening are sitting in the room listening let's assume this was live it's not let's assume it was live we are all in the time space 2024 end of 2024 that we all exist in but in your your example here, if I'm understanding this correctly, there could simultaneously be two paths, one in which President Kennedy dies in Orlando and another in which he dies in Dallas. Right, and one in which the Axis wins the World War II, etc.

So you could do that at a macro level. Now most physicists say, okay, we only know this for particles. We don't know this at the macro level yet most physicists say okay we only know this for particles we don't know this at the big at the macro level yet so they'll argue with you but but the idea and the concept is there and it's been validated that in fact there may be multiple possible paths that we're choosing from so like in a video game your character could have you know different memories you could change the memories based upon where you are you could save the game state and you could rerun it and take it in a different direction and it would go in different directions. So let's tie this back to what we were talking about before with Fred Allen

Wolf. And there are these multiple possible futures that are affecting you right now. It's possible that the future you that is doing this podcast is choosing the past that included all of these little things along the way that led you through coincidence, synchronicity, circumstances, ability, right? All of these things to this particular point in time. So there's like these weird observations going on between the past, the present, and the future. It's not necessarily what we think it is. And I think that is part of our calling or our story. I like to call it a storyline.

And then we have individual quests and achievements within that storyline, which we maybe before we jumped into the game, we thought these are things we might do. You know, like, oh, maybe I'll, you know, explore this goblin cave. Maybe I'll do this. But in our case, in my case, it was be an entrepreneur, be an academic, be a writer, maybe choose one or two of the three. All right. And I feel like we have we're always drawn to certain things. And sometimes the universe just rearranges itself to put us in a situation where we might have to do X, or it seems like the best option at the time.

It does feel that way. I think about this often. There's like little, little pings in the universe that happen that make no sense. Like there's a funny story with Alessi and I, right? So one night early on in me doing this podcast, I smoked a little bit too much weed. I was chilling i happen to see an account that was actually faceless because it was named after your old podcast that you did in college the social league comment in a lex friedman comment section lex can you share what equipment you have or whatever i fucking knew lex was never going to answer this so in the moment i was like oh i'll fucking tell this kid so i like dm him and i'd

take pictures of like a bunch of different things, then send some online stuff of other equipment and say, hey, this is this is Lex's studio. Turns out he and I become friends through that. He starts following along as this thing builds. He and I have the same birthday, which is kind of funny. That's interesting. He's from the opposite coast, but there's like some similar curiosities as far as like in our personality. And there's just like these weird things that line up. And now he's sitting here and he's been sitting in here in New Jersey with me

in a new place, not my parents' house though. He sat there too, back when we were doing that as well. And it's like the universe kind of lined that up. Cause unless he's got his own YouTube channel and as a content creator, he's just younger than I am and I'm coming and he's coming up at a faster rate than I did as well.

And I think about this often. I'm like, damn, like that really, there's a lot of weird lineups right there. Or you could even think of it more simply, like if you, if you date a girl and you're really in love with her, and then in the future in a totally different place, you know, that didn't work out and you meet another girl and she happened, you don't realize it at the time, but she happens to look the same way and talk the same way and have a lot of the same things. It's like you have a type or did the type find you? Right, right. And all these things kind of line up in strange ways.

And so earlier I talked about the life review, which is like going back and reliving the moments of your life. I also believe we have a life preview or life selection when we are choosing which storyline. Like in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, you're like, okay, this is the adventure and these are the quests or difficult things that I'm going to do. And these are the party that I want to play with. These are the other characters that I want to include in my guild or include, et cetera.

There was a guy named Michael Newton. I don't know if you ever read his book called Journey of Souls. Nope. It was an interesting book. It was one of these kind of bestsellers back in the 90s as well. And he was a hypnotherapist and he basically would regress his patients.

And by mistake, one patient, he ended up regressing them in childhood and then he went back before childhood. But it wasn't a past life thing. It was what they called the in-between state. What the Tibetans called the bardo, which literally means in-between. In-between lives in the Eastern traditions. Or you could say it's heaven if you're looking at it from a Western perspective. Or could that be like a purgatory kind of thing?

It could be a purgatory thing. It could be a place before you were incarnated. Right. And some of these folks said they remembered uh like you know looking at a video of their parents choosing the life selection life preview and life selection is what i like to call that phase and they're like sort of deciding what kinds of things they might want to do they're actually watching them and then that with their their people that are going to be significant in their lives, they recall setting up clues or certain things that will let them recognize

that this person is important to me. What kinds of things? And they'll cram and say, don't forget, I'm going to be the little girl in the red bicycle. Or a certain laughter or something that, if you've ever met somebody and you know, or a certain, you know, laughter or something that if you've ever met somebody and you had this weird set of circumstances with them and there's something about them that you recognize, but you can't consciously say what it is.

There's something familiar about them. It could be that that was a clue that set up and then you were supposed to remember because the whole idea is when you jump into the game, you have to, first of all, forget a lot of stuff. But certain things still come through. Certain pieces still come through. And I think that that is part of the process of life is not just our story, but our storyline and the people who are the other actors, if you will, within our stories. And you can choose to ignore those clues.

Yes, absolutely. And you can choose not to follow the path Yes, absolutely. And you can choose not to follow the path, but sometimes life makes you go on a certain path, you know? And that's like the downstream of relationships too. I think about this all the time. It's like the days where, because I built my whole life on building relationships. It's part of why I'm able to do what I do right here, right? Things constantly turn into other things. We're really fortunate, pretty much almost all the guests we get are through people I know and stuff like that, you know? And I think about the days where like, I'm really tired and maybe I don't make the connections I'm supposed to. And then what does

that do down the line for other connections I missed because of that people I could have met, you know, like I'll look at people that I'm best friends with now. And I'll think of all the different layers that it took to get to them that might have started you know in fucking 2011 and it's like oh if i didn't meet that guy in 2011 i wouldn't you know forget all these people in the middle i would have never met this dude now you know it's such a weird thing and it does fuck with my head yeah and it's like it's almost like a pattern over time yes if you think of it right because there could have been different possibilities that you followed and i i call this the multiverse graph in that it's like a pattern over time yes if you think of it right because there could have been different possibilities that you followed and i i call this the multiverse graph in that it's like different paths that you

could have followed through all the possibilities of your life uh or through all the possibilities of the physical world if you draw a line through them if you think of all these different places you could be uh how are we choosing that and i think that there's this weird element um you know whether you call it so in the eastern traditions they have karma uh which basically i like to interpret as a series of tasks or achievements or quests that you might want to to deal with or you may want to you know have a certain kind of relationship and so in my book the simulation hypothesis which actually isn't for sale at the moment because there's a second edition coming out so we had to pull penguin random house is coming out with a second edition

so currently you have to buy that one you literally can't buy the book today uh new maybe you can buy it used somewhere um i think the audiobook is still up for a few more weeks but by the time this airs i'm sure yeah we're. We're going to air this in like three weeks, I think. Yeah. But the new book is up for pre-order. It's the second edition. Got it. Anything that is for sale, we'll have in the description link below for you. Absolutely. Yeah. But the basic idea of the second book was that there are all these different possibilities and we set them up for ourselves, but you can see a pattern over time. This links to this, links to this.

And sometimes they're just inexplicable synchronicities or clues that we have that cause us to go a certain way. So, for example, I'll tell you a story of this young man, Steve, who was in college in Oregon. And he decided to quit all his classes and he's walking around and he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. And he sees a flyer for a calligraphy class. And he says, okay, I'll take the calligraphy class. And he gets to know all about fonts and, you know, the serifs and stuff. Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs, right? And so when he was making the Macintosh in 1984, which was, what, 15 probably years later? If he hadn't taken that class, like the first GUI, as we think of it, at least the first popular GUI, which is a Macintosh, would not have had fonts upon release. I mean, he insisted almost unreasonably, if you think of all the shit they had to do to actually build that computer. Oh, he was a Nazi about fonts, man. He was. But it went back to that experience yes right if he hadn't taken that class and if he hadn't dropped his other classes like there's this whole cascade of things and if he hadn't

done mushrooms in the desert all these yeah absolutely no seriously yeah there there are a lot of things you look at anyone great it's a i'd love that you just gave that example but you look at anyone great there are so many things that had to not only happen to them, but they're like, I imagine like these doors that open and they have to have the curiosity to walk through. Yes, absolutely. And I think that's a great way to think about it is that we have these different doorways. By the way, his favorite book was Autobiography of a Yogi. Yes. It was the only book he had on his iPad when his biographer, Walter Isaacson, visited him back in 2011. And then after he died, at his memorial service at Stanford, they gave out a little brown box to everybody. And it turns out what was in that book, in that brown box, was Autobiography of a Yogi.

Full circle right there. It came full circle. And he went to India trying to look for some yogi that could perform miracles and do all that. He went to find this guy that Ram Dass went and saw.

Do you know who Ram Dass was? He was like a Harvard professor who was giving LSD to some kids and then they got kicked out of Harvard. And he went to India and wrote a book called Be Here Now back in the 70s so this is like oh so he's part of mk ultra no he wasn't necessarily part of mk ultra as far as i

know okay but at one point he went and met this this guru and he like they had lsd pills and the guru was like okay give me all those pills they're like wait all of them yeah all of them he was like wait this guy's crazy we're're not going to do this. He goes, no, no, no, give them to me. No problem. And they're like, OK, what's going to happen? So the guru sits there and takes all these pills. And Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, he's looking at them. And they're all like, this guy is going to freak out.

And suddenly, the guy starts going, ah! And then he starts laughing. He goes, kujine ho goes, which means nothing happened. And that's how he ended up converting to be a yogi himself. Because he saw this effect that the mind-altering substance didn't have on a guy who was more advanced. So Steve Jobs went to India looking for this guy. But he had already passed on the Neem Kaurali Baba. And so primarily what he did in India was read Autobiography of a Yogi, which was written

in California, right, by Yogananda. By an Indian guy. By an Indian guy. Let's give it to him. Come on. Absolutely, yeah. But all these weird things happen along the way. So that was interesting for me that, you know,

eventually I wrote this book about Yogananda and I had to look at these different stories to try to figure out, okay, what's going on? What's real? What wasn't? And yeah, and it turns out that was his favorite book. Did you, when you were growing up, were you religious at all? No, not particularly. Did you ever think about the meaning of it all or where we came from or what controlled us? Yeah. I mean, you know, I grew up in a Islamic tradition because I was born in a Pakistani family, but grew up mostly in the US.

And so you get the basic heaven, hell, God, judgment, very similar probably to how you have it in Christianity, et cetera. But it wasn't until I really got into college and then started exploring different things on my own after college that I started to really look at these different traditions and then started to think about the bigger picture. And this is long before 2016 when you play the ping pong and VR and you start to come up with this. So what were you thinking about? Did you have a theory on what it all was at the time? I'm going to bring this back to your simulation theory.

Well, no, I didn't necessarily have a theory, but I think many of us get into something because we think, okay, what can this do for me? And so at the time, I had just graduated. I was a computer programmer. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. And I wanted to start a company. So I was like, well, maybe meditation can help me be a better programmer, a better entrepreneur. And that's how I got into some of the Eastern traditions. But then when you start getting into the traditions, you realize that

it's not really about that, right? It's more about learning to perceive there may be a greater part of you than you can physically see. And so that eventually tied into my ideas of simulation theory to think of myself as a character, but there was another part of me which I call the player now you know meaning our player that is behind our avatar in the in the Indian traditions you call it the odd man or the individual soul which is part of the bigger soul and then in the Western traditions we call it the soul but I think new metaphors are necessary for us to really consider these ideas. What I like about the simulation hypothesis is you can use it to talk about many ideas that normally, at least within like academia and techno-scientific circles, they won't talk about, right?

Why won't they talk about it? Well, because it's a very materialist paradigm, right? That says if it's not measurable and it's not physical, it's not real. But you say to them, okay, well, if it's a very materialist paradigm that says if it's not measurable and it's not physical, it's not real. But you say to them, okay, well, if it's a computer simulation, this telepathy isn't so weird. I mean you send messages to your friends inside the game, but they don't appear. They're not physical messages in the grass that you're walking on. They happen out of the rendered world. And you have all this metadata.

And then they start to realize, oh, yeah, well, if it's a simulation, then some people may have the keys to be able to have superpowers and do other things that other people couldn't do. And I can talk about it with scientists. I mean, they don't all agree, but I can talk about it with them. And at the same time, you can talk about it with religious people, right? Religious fundamentalists. I mean, I was on a show in the Bible Belt a few years ago, them it's it's and the same time you can talk about it with religious people right religious fundamentalists i mean i i was on a show in the bible belt a few years ago and one guy called in

and you know he had a thick southern accent he goes come on jesus didn't say that this is all some damn video game you know yeah but then when i explained the idea of the soul the body the avatar and the player then he was like okay i can kind of see where you're going with that so you can talk about it with religious fundamentalists you can talk about it with buddhist monks you can talk about it with because you're saying both can exist at the same time and correct me if i'm wrong here but you were saying earlier a lot of these religious figures be it jesus muhammad buddha it's like they could look into whatever the other side is and the other side is a part of potentially your simulation theory and therefore they are divinely inspired

because they're inspired by something that is not of this earth and maybe they reflect that in a way to teach people how to be better here within this simulation yeah exactly i think that's that that's exactly where where i've ended up right was it necessarily where i started and the simulation theory i started more with the technology but in the end when you think about what does this mean because some people say okay well if it's a simulation then why don't i just kill everybody like what is it like the grand theft auto right yeah and i say well that's like saying if the religions are saying the world isn't real it's okay to kill everyone well no they don't say that all right they say you know look at how you treat other people that actually matters but do the religions even consider in their texts that the world isn't real?

Yeah, they all have terminology that basically says that the world is either a Maya or an illusion. In the Quran, they say it is a enjoyable delusion that we have set up for you. It is a sport. It is a pastime. It is a game. I mean, they literally use these terms. delusion that we have set up for you it is a sport it is a pastime it is a game i mean they literally use these terms but in in the context of the whole book like in this case the whole quran yeah is there some sort of metaphorical teaching that says that and it's just one thing out of

context whereas the rest of the book refers to in this case and i'm saying this as someone who is not saying one way or the other i'm'm just wondering, like the rest of the book is referring to it as the real world where you live. Well, they refer to it as the here and the hereafter. And they say this world is not the real world, that the eternal world is the hereafter, okay, what we might call heaven. Yeah. And so that's pretty consistent across at least within the Islamic, Judaism, Christian traditions that the physical world is sort of a training ground, if you will, to have these experiences. But in the Quran, they get very explicit just like in Buddhism and Hinduism. They get very explicit about this idea that the whole world is in delusion. So in the Quran, they literally use one term and they've used it multiple times.

So it's not like just one random quote where they say it's El Gururi Matau. And so I looked at it and I said, well, what is that? And it means it's a delusion, but it's an enjoyable delusion. Now, enjoyable doesn't mean it's all great, right? If you play a video game, what makes it interesting? When you die and then you got to start over on the level and you got to try to be successful. Exactly. It's the strife, the challenge.

Yes. And that's why I think we can take this metaphor to heart and say, well, perhaps sometimes, you know, we're taking on quests of different difficulty levels. Perhaps somebody that was born with a disability chose to have a harder difficulty level, like a physical disability. Oh, they chose to be disabled. Perhaps they chose to have a much harder.

Why? Well, why do you choose to replay a game with a higher difficulty level? They or the person playing them. The person playing them may have chosen. Who's them? Who's them as well, but they have forgotten, right? Because of this veil of forgetfulness.

I mentioned the Greek Latte River forgetfulness, the Chinese traditions. You have Maya in the Indian traditions. In the Sufi traditions, you have these veils, 70,000 veils between you and God. And when you incarnate, it's like the veils are going up. And then as you become a mystic, you're trying to lift the veil so you can remember what was actually going on. Alessi, would you mind pulling up in the Merriam-Webster's dictionary the definition of alien real quick?

I want to see something. I don't think we've pulled this up on the show, but I'm going to tie this back to this idea real quick and i want to see something so i don't think we've pulled this up on the show but i'm going to tie this back to this idea real quick i just want to read what this says so that we can go off it officially all right first one just go to hit the first link down there where it says alien definition perfect all right belonging or relating to another person place or thing relating belonging or owing allegiance to another country or government so that would be as we use it in the modern term a person who is not of a particular group or place a foreign-born resident and then under extraterrestrial go up

a movie about invasion of earth by monstrous all right go up this is the better one which one over here okay so exotic different in nature strange extraterrestrial coming from another world so i want to look at it in that context where it says it's coming from another world the movie interstellar where i've said this before but where matthew mcconaughey leaves earth Earth, and in his time reality, I think he's gone for, I forget what it is, but it's not a long time. Like, maybe it's a year, might be less. Yeah. Time dilation, right?

Right. But when he leaves the planet Earth that he's on, his daughter's 13 years old, and his son's like 15, and when he comes back, I think think his son's dead and his daughter's an elderly woman and the earth has changed and so in the time that he left that 85 years whatever it was 90 years he only lived one and so when i look at that i say effectively in my book if i look at that definition he's an alien because he is not from the planet that he returned to. He's not returning, like, if he went as an astronaut to space for two years and came back and was exactly two years later, he'd still be on the same time scale.

But if he's coming back on a different personal time scale, then he's an alien. So bringing that back to your theory, just looking at how do we define an alien, do you think that in the scenario where it's the matrix scenario, not the NPC scenario, where we are checking in, in perhaps a physical form in another reality to be an avatar in this reality, would you define the physical form in that other reality as an alien then? Well, I mean, I would think it could be defined as an alien,

but not necessarily an extraterrestrial alien, right? But as alien to this world, meaning that unlike in The Matrix where people look exactly the same inside and outside. And this is a conceit that's used in all kinds of movies, right? 13th Floor, Free Guy. More or less, you get your avatar to look exactly like ready player one your avatar looks exactly like you that's not necessarily the case right you can when you play a video game you could take on you could be you know uh you could be i don't know an elf or a dwarf or that flies on a dragon for example so that sounds cool yeah it does right

so what i always ask people always ask me what's a point simulation i say well let me ask you two two questions why do you play video games and why do we run computer simulations you play video games for the entertainment and you run this is just my answer yeah and you run simulations to try to make the best determination of what outcome is most preferable right exactly so but the first one is in entertainment enjoyable and it's also to have experiences that you can't have outside the game that's part of what makes it enjoyable in some sense like i can't fly on a dragon in this physical, quote unquote, physical reality, but I can do it inside a Lord of the Rings game or, well, maybe not Lord of the Rings

game, but some fantasy medieval fantasy role-playing game. I can fly a spaceship, you know, in a space type game. And so I can have these experiences. And so in that sense, I could be an alien from the world that I'm coming in, but then I place myself in that world in whatever form I could be there. And then the simulations, I think you got it exactly right. I say it's either to find out what is the most likely outcome or what is the most preferable outcome, right?

So getting back to this idea of computational irreducibility, you want to run the simulation to see what would happen. And then you never run just what. You change the variables and you run it again yeah and then you try to figure out what is the most the best outcome what's the most likely outcome and then maybe you say this is more desirable than that let's see if we can get

change the variables to end up in this one versus that one and so at a societal level this you know this thing could be going on at that at that. But at the individual level, I think very much is so that we can have these experiences and perhaps even play someone that is different from us in some ways. Different from us? Yeah. Well, like you used the term alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it could be a different race, meaning a family.

Or you make them disabled, like you said earlier. Or you make them disabled. Or people like having virtual lives. So I used to spend a lot of time in a virtual world called Second Life, which is still around, actually. Is this like a metaverse? Yes, like a metaverse. I call it Metaverse 1.0. And it came out in 2004.

It was really popular, like 2007, 2008. It wasn't with goggles. It was just on your computer. was like an mmorpg but the point of second life wasn't to go and you know level up necessarily it was you lived a virtual life so you chose your avatar the physical characteristics the clothes some people chose to be furry some people chose to be humans but people would spend so much time in this that they would like they would have a job inside Second Life. So they would go to their regular job and then they come home and they have to be a bartender in a club in Second Life and they get paid in Linden dollars, which was – this was kind of pre-Bitcoin.

So there's a reality to it, yeah. Yeah, it was a reality. It was a reality that they took very seriously and people got married, right? In there. In there, even though they were already married you know in in real life so i used to like oh so the same people did no not necessarily married with somebody else in second okay uh versus their actual life right little swingers got it yeah or you know in the case of like i remember talking to some people that were they were actually physically disabled

and they couldn't really go out and do certain things and then they they played second life for being like somebody that wasn't disabled and they had this you know whole kind of fantasy world and fantasy life role-playing life that they built up for themselves uh people did all kinds of weird things within it but but i found it interesting that this secondary world became very interesting to them and you know became part of their their actual lives and how yeah so they felt like they felt like they they were living two lives in a way yeah that's why they called it a second life and that is very much the metaverse idea um you know which is this this three-dimensional world where you have an

avatar that's has its own existence um so the term metaverse came from as i mentioned earlier snow crash uh which was the novel by neil stevenson and you know in in the real world that the the main character was a guy named hero h-i-r-o hero protagonist and he said you know in the real world the hero lived in uh a u-haul it trailer or something like that 20 20 by 20. But in the metaverse, he was a warrior prince, right? He had his katana sword and that was his virtual life that he chose to live. What is – if your theory is correct and we are a part of a simulation, how do you define consciousness then? What is that?

Well, again, I think it depends on if you go the RPG route or the NPC route. Let's go the RPG route because that's what you seem to more believe. Yeah, I tend to lean in that direction. But there's a lot about AI and the other side. But in that side, I would say consciousness then stems from outside the physical body. So if in the NPC world, it's closer to what the materialists view is that consciousness stems from the physical body from the neurons if you just put together enough neurons you'll have a conscious entity and in the NPC

world that's it there's no outside existence if it looks conscious it's just the code running in In the RPG world, consciousness exists fundamentally outside the body but gets attached to the body. So the awareness is actually coming from the player, less so from the avatar itself. But meaning though, because of that extension, we therefore live in this world, this reality, whatever this is, where we have free will, like we talked about earlier with me tossing that, it's just controlled by us from another place physically. And therefore, there is also this concept of good versus evil. It's not just free man's game. It is what it is. It's like you talked about with the near-death experiencers where they have to experience all the things they did to other people, meaning there is this emotional understanding of agree and uh and i think that the life review is the best example of that right and i feel like all the religions were trying to express that

in the golden rule and karma uh and the scroll of deeds and judgment day all all these religions were trying to express it in a way that it could that it could be understood so i believe perhaps some people do come in and they have a choice. They have a choice whether to do something that's more evil or good. And they, they end up choosing the wrong thing. And that ends up being disastrous for certain other people inside the simulation.

But if you think about what makes an interesting movie, I mean, there has to be somebody doing that in the movie. Otherwise it ends up being not as exciting, not as interesting. There's no happiness. That's the, that's the doing that in the movie. Otherwise, it ends up being not as exciting, not as interesting. There's no happiness. That's the shitty thing about the world. Like there's no happiness without evil existing in the world.

You don't know what euphoria is if you don't know the lowest of the lows. You know what I mean? One, it's the yin and the yang. It does have to exist. And I hate to say that. Like I don't want to see wars and genocide and shit happening. But there is the phoenix that can rise from the ashes of those things that makes life beautiful. Yeah, and you wonder if that's part of the design of the game itself. I mean I talked about Swami Yogananda earlier and he used to say ceaseless joy is not the nature of this world.

We're not always in this divine state and everything's great. He said, you know, you have to get ready for the beatings and batterings of the world basically every day. And maybe that's what makes this place special too, is that there is some of that, but we're still able to make choices. We're still able to do what we might consider to be good things. And I think that's part of the experience that we choose. We choose to have these situations where we can play different types of roles.

And then we can make choices and then we have to review those choices later. And then there are consequences, whether it's depending on who you believe, whether it's go back in and you have to do another life and you have to experience what it's like, or from the life review, you can basically decide what happens afterwards so it really does bring this idea of the the not just philosophy and science but also religion into play if it is a multiverse do you think that there is i don't even want to use the word karma here because i i don't know that that i don't want to put any religious context on it. I just want to put like I guess the physical world context. But someone could die in this multiverse and be reborn in another dimension of the multiverse or exist – still exist in another plane.

So two different things there. It could either be they die and they're reborn somewhere else as the same person or someone else on a different time plane, either one, or they die in this. Maybe I got cancer in this multiverse or in this dimension, and in the other multiverse, I just kept living. Right. Well, that is an aspect of the multiverse itself, which is that every time there's a choice or a decision, it branches off a whole nother universe. And so there've been lots of great stories about this, right? In science fiction, where, you know, one person has died in one reality, but they're still around, you know, in another reality. Or if you look at the Spider-Man movies, right across the Spider-Verse, where, you know, you have a different person is Spider-Man. Rather than Peter Parker, it's Miles Morales is it? And versus Uncle Ben versus somebody else being alive.

And so where I came out with it was closer to this Philip K. Dick idea of the multiverse where what we're doing is we're actually trying out these different things and then we're continuing on. It's like a tree, but rather than being an infinite tree the tree gets trimmed based upon these different possibilities and then we go forward and then we do it again so maybe we're constantly sampling these these possible futures perhaps one where you die and one where you don't and then we choose to go through the experience you know in in that one yeah there was the other concept that that mitchy okaku talks about where he's like you could be in this room

and it's like a finely tuned radio right if you just you and i are sitting here right now but if if it was just tuned ever so slightly to the right there could just be dinosaurs walking around on the ground right now and that would be an element of a different version of this multiverse do you think that that makes sense with what you theorize well i think there's an element of it that that could make sense which is that we have multiple versions of reality running at the same time and so this is where we tie the multiverse idea of the quantum computing right in quantum, you don't necessarily run things in serial one after the other. You can run them in parallel. So these things could all, there could be multiple versions of the earth running on

the same computational system, if you will. And these are the other possibilities. But then the question comes into play, which one are you tuned into? Yes. Why are we tuned into this one and not that one? And I think that's where you again have to get back to this question of what is reality, but also what is consciousness? I mean, some folks think consciousness is the thing that chooses. I mean, that's what Max Planck, people like John von Neumann, and Wigner, Eugene Wigner, who has a lot of interesting physics experiments.

But he was with Leo Szilard when they went to Einstein to get him to write a letter to Roosevelt about the atomic bomb. But a lot of these guys thought that consciousness was playing some fundamental role. So is it that we are choosing to tune into a particular version of events or and then there's this question of are we all choosing to be in the same version or not and so in in computer science we have this thing called caching wait we're all choosing to be in the same yeah like like are we both in the same version of of the multiverse and we are at the moment. It seems like we are, right? At the moment. But if you tune to another version of yourself, it's doing something else. So why are we tuned in here right now

at this moment in time? I guess, I mean, my only thought would be that if I'm experiencing the same thing you are, this goes back to your level two verse 25 thing though. Yeah. Because it's like maybe we are seeing different things. But if can agree right now we're seeing the same things there's a tv there with like the earth on it over here we got two pictures and then one in the middle right there yeah right like if we can agree on that then i guess we are can you is that enough to be able to say we have our avatars are chosen to be in the same spot yeah i would say there's

enough commonality there so the way it works with video games is you have a synchronization going on at the server and the server is synchronizing what different people are seeing and if they're in the same space they generally see the same thing except for in these weird cases where you have there's also something called the anthropic principle i don't know if mitchy okaku talked with you about that he may have chosen though the basic idea is that there are so many parameters in science like constants that seem like they're fine-tuned for life and for life in the universe like our kind of life yeah like if the parameters were off by like two percent or three percent or one percent in some cases, the planets would fly apart. Yes, yes.

Galaxies would never. And so what are the possible reasons for that? And the possible reasons for that are intelligent design, that it was designed, or the multiverse idea, which is that many different universes were tried out. And this gets back to my – this is why I like a computational multiverse. Like what we do in computer science is because we assume things aren't infinite we have to prune the tree so that it doesn't go infinite and so that whatever this simulation is about all the

versions where there you couldn't have life were trimmed so those are no longer running that basically the versions that run are the versions where life could be so we're constantly pruning the tree uh in order to get that now if you look at the two most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics the copenhagen interpretation which is probability wave it collapses down to one and that's why we're seeing the one where the cat is alive or dead. And then you have the multiverse idea, which is that the cat is alive in one universe and the cat is dead in another universe. Now, there's problems with both of these from a physics point of view. This is why they haven't been able to agree on what's really going on.

And the problem with the first one is nobody knows how this collapse actually happens. It's like magic, right? It goes from multiple possibilities to one possibility. There's no mathematical way to define that, unless you bring in some kind of outside observer or consciousness or something. Physicists don't like to do that, if they can avoid it. And on the other side, the problem with the multiverse is it's considered to not be parsimonious okay meaning it's not efficient why because you're creating a new physical universe every i mean not every time i snap my fingers every like million nanosecond or every time there's a quantum decision there's a new universe found out. So it ends up being very inefficient,

and you're just creating an infinite number of universes all along the way. And that goes back to your computational problem. Yeah, so a computational universe solves this problem in the sense that what does it mean for there to be a multiverse? It just means you run the simulation over and over again. What does it mean to say there's a probability wave and we're in one of those uh there was a physicist named amit goswami who wrote a book called i think conscious universe and i remember him talking about this so this years ago he said well the reason there's a probability wave of all the things that might happen he goes it's not a real probability wave it what it's

saying is if you ran the process multiple times, this is what would happen. Because you can't have a probability if you run something only once. That's right. In fact, the probability itself comes from one of these French mathematicians, I forget which one, they were looking at dice. And they were trying to predict what's the outcome of this game. And he said, well, if you roll the dice, there's six possible futures.

And that's what he called them, possible futures of the die. And then therefore we have one of six possibilities, right? So it all came from this game playing idea of saying that there are these possible futures that are out there. But the only way you can know that is by running – is by rolling the dice a number of times before you're able to do that. And so with a computer, you can do that. You can run the same thing multiple times. And so it provides, in my opinion, a middle ground between the Copenhagen Interpret interpretation and the multiverse idea because you don't need infinite.

You can prune the tree as you go in the multiverse idea and you can solve some of these different problems. And it gets back to what does it mean for there to be a probability wave in the first place. And for it to collapse, it means that you're rendering one of those possibilities at the current moment. So it provides a bridge between the two, I think. I mean, not a mathematical one, but more of a conceptual. I understand. Yeah. How do you explain dreams? Do you think dreams are like a simulation within our simulation potentially? Because we're, we obviously knock out every night because we have to, I guess, in your video game interpretations, be like, you got to get your energy back, right? So you got to rest up and give your body time to

heal. But when we do that, we're totally suspended from reality at the time. We don't know what's going on. And we, if we get REM sleep, we get into this deep place where suddenly strange things that are even outside the realms of physics, in some cases in our mind, and certainly outside the realms of reality occur that we don't have control over what it is but it comes into us somehow yeah so i do write a little bit about this so dreams are a fascinating subject and in fact they're one of the oldest subjects that people have written books about there's probably more books written about dreams in human history than really any other subject just because everybody dreams and everybody has been dreaming as long as we know. So dreams are like mini simulations.

And in fact, so in my book, I laid out the 10 stages to get to the simulation point, which are technological stages. And I said, at the end of this, we would be able to have build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality. It would have beings that appear to be real, whether they are or not. In some cases, you may be a multiplayer universe. We would forget that there's a world outside of this world. And so all of these conditions are actually met by dreams for the most part every night. So they are like mini simulations.

And there are some psychological theories that say what are the purpose of dreams and dreaming is a subject that there's a term that people use called over determined where all these people have put out these ideas of why we dream and many of them are actually probably true so it's not like just one of them is true is it recycling stuff that we did during the day well yeah i mean you can observe that and you can actually see something you saw during the day that shows up. Is it, do we sometimes talk to our dead relatives? Sure. Yes. Sometimes we do. Is it efficient?

Is it needed for rest? Yes. Right. Some people have psychic experiences in dreams. Some people do lucid dreaming where they're, you know, in the tibetan traditions uh there's a whole there's a whole yoga called dream yoga and the idea is you learn to wake up within your dream what we call lucid dreaming today but it was done in a spiritual context and once you do that you realize there's a part of you asleep in the bed and this is not the real world this is a dream

world and so that metaphor then gets used to realize when you're awake, that there's a part of us that's kind of asleep, if you will, a bigger part of us. And so that's an actual spiritual practice that they do. And the Buddha used the analogy of the dream for the world. In fact, Buddha means one who is awake. A woman asked him, who are you? What are you? He said, I am but. I am awake. That's what it meant at the time. If you can be awake, that means the rest of us are probably sleeping.

The dream idea goes back many thousands of years as a metaphor. Emotionally speaking, as human beings, I got a couple more things for you. We've really covered the gamut today. This has been great. Emotion emotionally speaking, as human beings, I got a couple more things for you. And we've really covered the gamut today. This has been great.

But emotionally speaking, you know, the beauty of life, like we were saying earlier, it's the back and forth of the euphoria after being knocked down and things like that. But it's also the emotions that come with that. You know, you look at the most powerful ones like love. If we are the RPG version, you version, are we really feeling that? Can we have the real capacity in this reality to feel true love with another individual? Well, I think so because to me it doesn't – in the RPG version, you're not really ruling out that the emotion is experienced by the player and the avatar together right so uh you know and you're playing with another person right so you actually are experiencing so i i referenced the metaverse earlier and

you did too and we talked about second life and there there's a movie that came out. We met in VR. So it was about romantic relationships that started in VR chat, which is kind of another metaverse type environment, but one that uses actual virtual reality headsets. And so many people meet in these virtual environments and they go on dates within the virtual world because they're in different physical locations. And they get to know each other and they develop a real relation. Then later they meet in real life and then they get married. I remember meeting several people like that who actually got married. And it happens not just in metaverse, it happens in video games too.

And so I think the experiences we have are still important experiences that become a part of us as we go. So there was a Star Trek The Next Generation episode a long time ago. I don't know if you're a fan of that show. I wasn't, no. Oh, you weren't. Okay. Well, there's one called The Inner Light.

And in it, Picard gets like some probe. Captain Picard of the Enterprise gets some probe uh that sends some light into his into his forehead and the next thing he knows he's this guy on this planet with the wife and kids and he thinks he's a starship captain but you know he's really living on this planet and he lives this entire life uh you know in this world and then he comes back at the end of it he's back on the Enterprise and almost no time has passed. But he has those experiences. He can play the flute. He creates the flute that he had on that planet.

He remembers. A different version of Matthew McConaughey Interstellar, in a way. In a way, yeah. There's a different version of that. So I think that the experiences we have are important. That's why we're here. And those experiences include emotions. I think that the experiences we have are important. That's why we're here. And those experiences include emotions. I think that's a key part.

And when people report near-death experiences, they talk about love on a more impersonal level and a higher level. But the love we experience here – I remember some folks online were like, oh, if it's all a simulation, that means nobody is real. And therefore know none of this means anything and i said well that's if you take the npc approach yeah but if you take the rpg version i remember when somebody said to me i think my husband's an npc i said no let's assume that your husband is also a source player and you are too and you have both agreed to be here together to have these now but then i come up with this idea of npc mode where it's more when people aren't thinking right they go into npc mode

i think is something that happens where they're just reacting off their programming gotcha okay so there's there's mode levels to it yeah so that's – when you talk about God, it's difficult to talk about it because it's such an all-encompassing concept. And I think, once again, I get back to that word ineffable. Do I think there's a creator that created the simulation? Yes. I think that there is some element of it. Like if you go back to, there's a Persian philosopher named El Ghazali who, I don't know, hundreds of years ago said, if you look at the arguments for God, and he gave like three or four arguments for God,

he said, well, there must be a prime mover of the universe. Therefore, then that prime mover you can just call God. Or he said, there must be a cause, and therefore you can just call that cause God if you want. But I go back to Yogananda's example of the film projector. And he says, this is the film, but he said, look back at the light that's projecting. Like, what is the source? What is the projector?

And is it, you can view the simulation hypothesis as purely a metaphor as a way to describe something that cannot be described very easily or you can view it more literally and say that the world is composed of information and that information is getting rendered both of those I think are correct actually you can view it either way that you want to

but whether it's like a physical computer the way that we think of it i would have to say it's the computational system is so advanced that it's more like a world of a quantum computer and then you start coming into who programmed the quantum computer and you get into the mind of god so i think in a very impersonal way definitely there is something that could be the prime mover uh whether it's god the way that we in the west tend to portray it uh you know i i don't know that i would personalize god in that way but you can have uh individual entities who come from that you know it starts somewhere yeah

it starts somewhere it's almost like going back several levels. Yes. If you will. If we are outside of the simulation as players, maybe you only go back one more level beyond that, and that is we are all part of something that is called God. Well, Riz, you blew my mind today, man. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for doing this. Your work is, I mean, it's deep to say the least.

So I look forward to hearing more about it. I know you have more projects you're working on. So when you do come through here, let's do some more podcasts. Yeah, I would love to. Thanks so much for having me on. This has been a lot of fun. Of course, man. We'll do it again. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our

latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.