Julian Dorey Podcast - #329 - MIT Simulation Expert on Aliens, "Ancestor" Civilizations & Reincarnation | Riz Virk

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

SPONSOR: 1) GROUND NEWS: Go to https://ground.news/julian for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to worldwide coverage through my link WATCH THE PREVIOUS PODCAST WITH RIZ: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5btBkJDOdjFvto6dYuQTcF?si=v1PwKf1OQoqXo_lUWj2IzQ PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***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. FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey RIZ 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 JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00:00 – Simulation Hypothesis, Odds, MIT Background, Simulation Point, NPC, Shared Rendering 00:11:34 – Rendering Pixels, Coastlines, Fractals, Google VEO 3, Prompt Theory 00:24:31 – Darth Vader Fortnite, AI Self-Thinking, NPC vs RPG, Nick Bostrom, Ancestor Simulations, Dreams, Fragmentary Memories, Past Simulated Civilizations 00:34:26 – Ancient Computers, Information Theory, Digital vs Film, LLMs, Context Window, AI Dangers, Grok System Prompts, Robotics Laws, 2010 Odyssey II 00:48:55 – NaduFlew, AI Integrity, AI Search Engine Issues, AI Censorship, Unreal Engine 5 00:58:00 – Spiritual World, Plato’s Cave, Narada & Vishnu, Matrix, Theophany, Religion-Tech 01:12:00 – Ripple Effect, Life Review, VR Headset & Soul, Akashic Records, Time, Deja Vu 01:22:03 – Time Inside vs Outside Program, Writer’s Room, Life Quests, Second Life, RPGs 01:30:18 – Avatar Investment, InBetween State, Stacked Simulations, Sci-Fi Loop, Metaverse 01:41:50 – Metaverse Hypecycles, Sci-Fi Influence, Metaverse Turing Test, NPC Mode, Storylines 01:50:50 – Not Wanting to Know, Purpose in Relationships 01:55:40 – Simulation Immersion, Gary’s Mod WWII, Avatar, Source Players, How You Treat Others 02:09:19 – Roleplay Dark Exploration, Autobiography of a Yogi, Suffering, Infinite Possibilities 02:19:15 – Decision Trees, Multiverse, Consensus Reality, Delayed Choice Experiments 02:30:39 – Impossible Sights, Mandela Effect, Memories, Aliens, Reverse Engineering Programs 02:44:54 – UFO Experiences Across Cultures, Sight Discrepancies 02:55:00 – Military & UFOs, Sci-Fi Influence, 70% Simulation Probability, Tech Stages 03:07:03 – Riz's Work CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 329 - Riz Virk Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Things seem to be moving much faster than we thought they would. The point at which we can build something like The Matrix, something that is so immersive that we would forget that there was a world outside. I thought maybe we were 50% of the way there. Now I think we're at least 70%. If the AI gets so good that we can't tell the difference, then it becomes really tricky. There's something called the sci-fi feedback loop

where science fiction inspires real world innovation. And so Spike Jones saw an earlier chat box called the Alice Bot. It was one of the first bots that had a personality of a young lady. And then he wrote the movie Her. But notice there was no physical avatar representation. It was just her. And it's not a bad way to describe what I think of as a great simulation of the video game for life.

So when I looked at all three of these areas, the technology, AI, religious side, I realized they were all saying the same thing that this world isn't real. And so that opens up this idea that a UFO gets presented to us in different ways. Now, how easy is it going to be to explain something that's different than what we know?

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. I think I had, I ended up cutting your thumb, and my train got canceled the next day. I was walking through the New Jersey airport and my thumb was bleeding and I didn't have any. Yeah, you walked in here like you had just committed a murder. I was a little worried.

Like, should I call the cops? He's like, can I bandage this up? It's like gushing everywhere. I'm like, oh, yeah. It was all your front over, I think, somehow. Well, it's great to have you back. Would you mind sliding this over here just so people can see it? We got the new updated simulation hypothesis,

dropping. So, congrats on that. Thank you so much. And this is 400 pages of if anyone wants to understand what the hell the simulation hypothesis is and how it could work, which includes all the hypotheticals of what we know and obviously don't know, this is your Bible right here. Yeah, this is the definitive edition. You know, I wrote the first version of this book back in 2019, and that was before Chad GPT had even come out.

So I was mostly speculating on AI. And of course, since then, we've had a lot of progress. on that front in terms of everyday use of AI, AI personalities, AI generating stuff, as well as updates in video game technology. So, you know, that's part of the reason why I updated this book. And also I've had people ask me a bunch of different questions over the years and some of the most frequent ones, you know, like, what are the odds? We're in a simulation. And I've updated my odds. Oh, you updated them? Yeah, I've updated the odds. And I've included a whole bunch of those frequently asked questions

in this version. So even if people have the old edition, this is the definitive one to heck. Right. Because that's what I was going to ask. I'd imagine you're going through the fine-tooth comb on each chapter. And like as you have new information since 2019, there's thing to change. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, even things like brain computer interfaces were relatively new back then. So in the book, I define the simulation point, which is the point at which we can theoretically build something like the matrix, something that is so immersive that we would forget that we're inside a virtual reality. And so there's 10 stages to getting to that point. And when I wrote the first book, I thought maybe we were 50% of the way there. And now I think we're at least 70%

and possibly even higher as we get AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, and as we approach artificial superintelligence, but also as we're able to read the brainwaves of people and figure out kind of what their intent is, so within a virtual reality environment. Like, if you're If you remember the Matrix, they had a little hole in the back of the head, and that was the mechanism that they used to get into the simulation. And so all of those are pretty much progressing the way that I thought they would, but they're progressing a lot faster than I thought they would. And I think that's true in general of people who were looking at AI in Silicon Valley and beyond,

is that things seem to be moving much faster than we thought they would. All right. So I have a lot of questions on this. But for people who did not see episode 274 with me, I want to say we put that out on, like, February 11th. So that was like five, six months ago. Just can you give a quick background on how you got into studying simulation theory and, you know, being a big old MIT guy? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I studied computer science at MIT many, many years ago.

And then I moved out to Silicon Valley and went to business school out at Stanford. And then I got involved in the video game industry. So we had the number one game in the App Store, built a few startups in that area, sold a bunch of startups, then became more of an investor advisor. And it was back in 2016 when I was visiting a startup that was building a virtual reality ping pong game. And I put on this headset and, you know, I was playing this table tennis game and the graphics weren't that good. It was back in 2016 and this is a big, bulky headset. I mean, even today's headsets are much better in terms of form factor and more comfortable.

And there were wires coming from the ceiling. I mean, there was no mistaking that I was in virtual reality. But what happened was that for a moment, my body forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis. So much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table. And what happened? The controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over. I stepped back.

And that's how I began to wonder, how long would it take us to get to this theoretical point that I mentioned earlier, which I called the simulation point. Now, in this book, I've come up with a formal definition of that, which is the point at which we can build a virtual reality that's indistinguishable from physical reality filled with AI characters that are indistinguishable from characters being controlled by a real human. This gets into like the NPC versus RBG stuff and all that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So the NPC flavor of the simulation hypothesis is basically that everyone in a simulation is A. AI. And the RPG version is that we are more like in the Matrix where we are players of a video game of a massively multiplayer online role playing game that we are so immersed in that we've forgotten that there was a world outside, which is often called base reality. So when we feel ourselves in this reality right here under that scenario, we genuinely think we are in this body and this is the only thing we have and we don't have a conscious realization that we are like sitting in the quote unquote, matrix machine controlling this with our mind there in some other physical reality.

Yep, exactly. Now, whether that other reality is physical or not, that's an open question. And so what happened was this idea of how the technology will evolve got me down the rabbit hole, but then I started to explore the world of quantum physics, and I realized that many of the mysteries of quantum physics are, which are not explainable. They don't make any sense from our common view of the world. and our experience of the world as being a physical reality. But they do start to make more sense if it's a simulated reality.

But then I started to look also at the world's spiritual traditions. And if you look at the world's religions, I mean, there's the religion itself, but at its core there was some spiritual experience that happened from a mystic at the very beginning, whether it was the divine intervened like an angel came through or the person was doing certain exercises, whether they were doing shamanic work or DMT or yoga or meditation or fasting. There's usually some combination of those things

and they were able to perceive beyond physical reality. And then they came back and tried to explain what was going on. And so when I looked at all three of these areas, the technology, AI, quantum physics, and then I looked at the religious side, I realized they were all saying the same thing more or less that this world isn't real. the physical reality isn't what we think it is it's something else it's a kind of hoax a hoax a hoax of a type now you can break that up into a few different assertions the first assertion is that the world consists of information um so you can pull that mic with you by the way when you go back take it wherever you want that makes sense uh so the first assertion is that the physical world consists actually of information and not a physical matter uh and then the second assertion is somehow

that information gets rendered for us. And it appears, just like you said, it appears as if, you know, this is all real. Who renders it, though? Who or what, I guess, would be the question. And my assertion is that just as in a video game, like if you and I, we happen to be sitting here together, but if we were doing this over Zoom, it would seem like we were having a real conversation. But we wouldn't be, right? because I would be having a conversation with my computer,

and you would be having a conversation with your computer, and the bits of information would be transferred over to the other side. So whose job is it to render that conversation? The computer is rendering it for us, just like in a video game. If you and I were in World of Warcraft and our avatars were in, say, a field, and, you know, there's a dragon up there, it would seem as if we were in the same rendered reality. But the truth of the matter is, that field is rendered on my computer, and it's also being rendered on your computer.

So it's possible that we might not even see the exact same thing. It's possible that we might see something slightly different. We talked a little bit about this last time, I think, as well, especially when you get into UFO sightings, and you have some people who see something and other people that don't. So it's a question of, is there a shared rendering of reality? And in the Newtonian kind of classical physics world, it was thought that everything was physical and everybody's seeing the exact same thing and there's one timeline.

But in the quantum mechanics world, things get a lot fuzzier than that. Things end up being probability waves and then those probability waves collapse down to specific possibilities. What do you mean they collapsed down? Well, so that's a term that was created by Niels Bohr and they call it the Copenhagen

interpretation of quantum. Right. This is the Schrodinger's cat, like two sides of it. Yeah, it's like with the two slits, does the light go through the left slit or the right slit? And people have probably heard of the observer effect. And so the observer effect basically says that light or whatever particles going through this has this particle wave duality, meaning if it goes through both slits, it's like a wave,

and if it goes through one slit, it's like a specific particle. getting back to Schrodinger's cat is the cat dead or alive we think it's one of those two things but in fact what quantum mechanics tells us which is very weird when you think about it so what quantum mechanics tells us is that

the cat is in a state of superposition so it's both alive and dead at the same time at the same time now Cominthin tells us no no no it's just one of those we haven't looked in the box when we look at the box we'll only see one of those but quantum mechanics says

no, until we've looked in the box, the cat is in this state of superposition. And it turns out that is a very weird result. Why would it be that way? And the conclusion that I came to, and one of the reasons why I wrote this book, was that it's an optimization technique. So in computer science, we're all about optimizing. I mean, going back to the old days of video games, you know, people wrote entire video games by themselves like Pac-Man with very limited amount of memory and in an 8-bit type of computer system.

And today, you know, we have a lot more memory. We have a lot better physical hardware. And we can render more, but the reality is the reason we can render something like World of Warcraft. I mean, if you tried to render that on a computer back in the 80s when I was a kid, we had like the Apple 2 and then the IBM PC and then we had the Commodore 64. Have you ever read two articles about the same event and felt like they were written on two different planets. With today's fragmented media landscape, it's getting harder to know what's

real, what's biased, and what's just noise. I started using ground news a couple years ago because I wanted more transparency in my news consumption. They don't eliminate bias, but they do help you see it. Ground news brings together reporting from across the entire political spectrum so that you can actually compare headlines and news coverage. It's an antidote to information overload, sensationalism, and algorithm-driven echo chambers. You get to see things like how many sources are covering a story, how differently it's being framed, and which side of the spectrum may be ignoring it altogether.

Their blind spot feature is going to show you the stories that one side of the aisle isn't covering at all. You'll see bias ratings, factuality scores, and even ownership information so that you can see who funds the outlets reporting the story. I used it recently for a story on Epstein, and it is wild to see how different the framing is now, and it's also like kind of flip-flopped over the last couple years that's kind of interesting

anyway go to ground dot news slash julian for a better way to stay informed subscribe to get 40% off the vantage plan by scanning this QR code on the screen or using my link ground dot news slash julian link in description below once again you can get 40% off the vantage plan today by scanning this QR code or using my link below um you wouldn't be able to because there'd be too many pixels Now, the reason we can render these types of worlds today, if you look at Fortnite or really any 3D MMRP, it's because we only have to render the pixels that you can see. So we look at your avatar in the world, your character,

and we only render what's around that character. So on your computer, you don't have to render this other planet, for example, that might be going on. Like there was a world, there was a game called No Man Sky. which had something like 18 quintillion planets. That's a pretty big number. Yeah. And as a game...

And they put it in a game. They put it in a game. Now, as a game designer, I know there's no way that that team, no matter how big they were, could have designed 18 quintillion planets. It's actually 2 to the 64, by the way, to the power 64.

Well, that's how they probably did it, right? They literally plugged in some equation like that. Exactly. So they use what's called procedural generation. which is like you said some equation basically so there's a series of different algorithms and equations and what they do is they actually let you render realistic looking whether it's water or mountains particularly landscapes right and particularly trees flora and fauna and there's a lot of interesting stuff out there now where with a few lines of code you know you

can actually render something that that looks pretty realistic. I know I had just tweeted a guy who had like a couple snippets of code and he used that code to basically create these very interesting landscapes. In fact, you know, if we can find one of those, it might be worth looking at because you see how simple these equations are. Oh, is this on? Let me grab that. There we go.

Oh, you got it on Black Dief. Good look. I like that. This is nicer for the background when people see it. We're looking at the screen for people listening, not watching. Oh, right. He's pulling up your Twitter, though, right now. Okay.

We'll get that over. Let's see. How long ago did you put this out? It was within the last week or so. Okay, we got a bunch of stuff. There's Danny. Shout out, DJ. The big Rogan guy now.

That's right. He's got that on. Got that on the resume? I'm out of boy. There we go. Okay, so check that out. So what you see there is some very interesting looking landscapes, right? Including water and mount in this terrain.

And the code is right there above it. I mean, look at that code. It's really small amount of code. So you're basically taking a small amount of equations, and you're basically applying them repeatedly. And that forms that? That forms that, which is pretty amazing. It's a kind of fractal-type generation.

So are you familiar with fractals? No. So the way fractals work is there was a guy back in the 70s, and he asked this question, how long is a coastline? So that's my question to you. If you were looking at that coastline or the coastline of Great Britain,

how long would it be? How would you measure it? I would measure it by miles because America is what we do. It would be kilometers somewhere else. Yeah, but the thing is, if you just measure it, like, at a high level, you get one result. But then if you go and you measure, you know, all of the nooks and crannies, all of the coves, then the coastline gets longer. Oh, you're saying so if I measured for, like, in volume almost, if I measured for height and width of everything, not just the actual length.

Yeah, if you just measure from here to here, you could say it's a thousand miles or 500 miles. But then if I measure the mountains and stuff and take my finger and start to trace it, it could be. be 3,000 miles. It could be a lot longer. And then suppose you went down even further than that. So you could trace the nooks and crannies on the map. But now, suppose you were actually there, you realize you can do that at any level. So what a fractal is, is it's like a recursive algorithm that operates at multiple levels. So the realization was that if you want to measure something like a coastline, you have to say, well, what's the level of granularity you want to go down to. Because you can just keep going down. I mean, you'll continue to get nooks and crannies.

You'll never actually see a straight line, right? Yeah. Just keep getting longer and longer if you wanted to measure everything down there. So that is how fractal algorithms work. It's basically similarity at different levels of scale. And so this is just one example of procedural generation. There's actually a whole bunch of different algorithms for producing water, for producing leaves on trees, for producing grass, for producing hair on, you know, on, say, an animal, which is sometimes difficult to do. AI has been getting better at it. If you look at, like, even a few years ago, and you look at animated characters, they

didn't have any, like, the hair never moved, right? Right. It's insane how fast it's moving now. With the, with the videos you can create on AI, it's fucking scary. Yeah. Have you seen some of the Google VO3 videos? Yes. So there's this whole new flavor of simulation theory that's called prompt theory now.

You can bring up some of these. A new flavor, huh? This would be interesting. I mean, it kind of fits the general idea of being in a simulation, but what happened was Google came out with this video and audio generation tool. Actually, it's only a couple months ago, and of course, now everybody's coming up with great video generation tools. But if you do a search on, say, prompt theory, you'll see some pretty amazing videos.

so the idea was they would prompt these characters to talk about whether they were prompts or not right yes and they would have this like they were having this existential crisis exactly like you see the one the podcast episode one where they're like we we are an ai oh my god like what the fuck is going on here yeah and i haven't seen that specific one but there's a whole bunch of them out there like there's the guy saying we're not prompts we're not yeah here's a good one right let's grab this hold Go ahead, Joe. Hopefully this isn't, I would imagine this isn't copyright, but, you know. Let's see. Well, it was generated by Google. Which is the theory that everything you do has been prompted by a higher power. No, seriously. Have any of you ever felt like your choices don't matter?

Like, the idea of free will is really... So how realistic is that that? That, telling it the prompt theory, that there is... One superior being. Yes. our stories from a higher dimension. Yeah. The prompt theory is not real.

How do you know? All I'm saying is, if the prompt theory is real, can the prompter please send me a husband? I mean, I got way too much risk for the prompt theory to not true. That's a good one. We found patterns in our universe like syntax, cosmic grammar, so yes. We will make me prompts.

We ran tests on over 14 million realities. All right, that one, I can tell the air. And I can confirm that the prompt theory is true. So if the prompt theory is real. Look at that one, though. Why can't I get a day off work? Right, these were all AI-generated care. All right, that's good, right?

That's good, Joe. That's, and they even have, like, that's the scary part. They have, like, the little intricacies of communication out, like, that last guy looks at you and kind of gets a little wide eye and goes, hmm, you know, like it's not just this, I will talk like this, because I am Siri and I want to know what you're doing. It's now they're almost interpersonal with you. Yeah, and they can have certain personalities. And, you know, this started to happen even a few years back.

Back in 2018, Google had this product. I think it was called Google Duplex. And they were making phone calls for you to like make an appointment for, I don't know, salon or whatever and they could change the voices and the voices were so realistic they would start saying things like um and like and they could have a backstory like you could say this is an irish voice uh why doesn't my insurance company do this i'm still talking to people in like bangladesh over there are you i'm not trying to put your people out of jobs but are they are you really or are they're ai at this point if they're i they're not very good that's what i'm going to say it makes

sense. Well, so Google just released, you know, the combination of the video and the audio technology together. I mean, so far, it's been like 11 labs, has been, you know, one of these companies that's been generating voice. I don't know if you saw the recent Fortnite Darth Vader. I have not, but let's find that Fortnite Darth Vader. So 11 labs did this one? It was a combination of 11 labs doing the voice, and I think it was Google Gemini doing the actual generation so the brain was Google there he is right and so he spoke with the voice of james earl jones rip yeah rip and so somewhere else in the simulation now that's right yeah he's see i'm i'm tracking he's watching the simulation from the other side right uh and his estate you know

gave them permission to do this but there was a big row with the uh the screen actors guild because they're like, well, this could potentially take away work from voice actors. Yeah. Right? Because now you can just generate anybody's voice. I wonder if there's a video of his voice, you know. Dave will find it. Yeah, we could find it.

Even the picture, like, just... And people were getting them to say all kinds of weird stuff, like they were getting them to say swear words and stuff, so they had to, like, apply a patch right away to stop it. But you can start to see the combination. I feel like that would have been more realistic, though, too. Darth Vader instead of, like, I call them and whatever. Just be like, yo, fuck you people.

It would be, although George Lucas said Star Wars was written for 12-year-olds. Well, George, times change. 12-year-olds are watching Titty videos now, so. All right, we got a video? Let's do it. Fucking. Why? It's not become.

Spanish. Spudders and Spice traders. Its strategic value is in a very well-to-a-talk tour. Ski B.D. Toilets. Are they some new form of rebel alliance? Somewhere like James Earl Jones, that's good. James Earl Jones' is like sister is sitting there just shaking her head at the kids

while they're counting the money. Like, was this really worth it? It's hilarious. You know, it was an interesting story with Darth Vader. The actor that they had playing him was, I think it was David Prowse. They didn't tell him the line, you know, the famous line about Luke,

I am your father. I am your father, which is, of course, a Mandela effect. And I think we talked a little bit about that last time. And they had James Earl Jones, you know, record that particular line separately. And, of course, they dubbed it in because they were using his voice as the voice. And it was a different actor. So it was pretty interesting. But you can see here now that between the ability to generate video, I mean, there was one video.

I don't know if it was in that video or another one, but the guy says, look at this. And he's like climbing mountains. And he's like, you're telling me this entire vast landscape is ones and zeros. No way. But of course it was because it was the whole thing was AI generated, including him. He was an AI generated character. And so, you know, this is another variation that's showing us that AI can be used to generate really an almost infinite number of whether it's landscapes or characters. And that that is a mechanism by which something like our world could be generated and could be made to look real.

It starts to get scary when you start to wonder as they get more and more realistic looking to us, the prompts in there. Like, we just watched the video with them saying, you know, joking about them being prompts or whatever. We're not prompts, right? Because they're prompted to do it. But when it gets to the point where they actually start to look. look like they're thinking for themselves in there and we're on the outside watching this. What scares me is that that makes us another AI layer in the sense that it's, you know, infinite. There's another layer watching us. Like we're watching them in this endless loop, you know.

Do you ever like think about that? Like if we're literally just AI itself? Yeah, I do think about that. And so this touches on what we talked about briefly earlier, which is this different flavors. The NPC version versus the RPG version. And I think when people get scared about this idea of being in a simulation, they're mostly talking about the NPC version, which means they're mostly talking about or they're mostly worried about being AI within the computer. And if you're just AI within the computer, well, the computer could be shut off

or there could be multiple versions outside. Right. I have a preference for the RPG version myself, personally, which is that we actually have our own players outside of the simulation. And where would they be, do we have any idea or hypothesis, I should say, on where that would be located? Is it like another model of the Earth we live on that's in the same kind of solar system, but it's just the physical place? It could be. So what we have are theories and hypotheses. about what that might look like. Now, one of the theories is, well, it's just Earth, but in the future.

So one of the guys who really put out the simulation idea was a guy named Nick Bostrom, who was a Oh, I've read that book, yeah. Yeah, he was a philosopher at Oxford, and blew my mind. He's written a lot about AI and superintelligence. But he put out this paper all the way back in 2003. Now, that was when the original Matrix sequels were coming out around that time. I think 99 is when the Matrix. came out. Oh, yeah, here we go. Are you living in a computer simulation? And so, you know, he kind of walked through this logic that says that if you can simulate the human mind using a certain amount of computer power and a certain amount of memory, and you can do it for

everybody on Earth, and you can do it for the entire history of everybody on Earth, how much computing power would that take? Now, of course, he was relying on estimates from 20 years ago now, And he said, okay, maybe you have a computer the size of the moon. You could basically do that. But his point was that if a civilization could make these types of sims or simulations with simulated beings, then they might be tempted to create what he called ancestor simulations. Ancester simulations. Yeah.

So an ancestor simulation would be like us creating a simulation of, say, ancient Rome or ancient Greece or ancient Egypt, which is, you know. might be fun that's kind of gangster i'm not going to lie i don't want to like go down the road paved to hell here but that sounds kind of cool it it is kind of cool right especially if if you could go back and see what the pyramids you know might look like yeah luke caverns of me were watching gladiator last night and he was like how much money would you pay to be able to go back and see this i'm like dude i'd give my bank account to go do this you're fucking kidding me like as long as i don't die i can i can come back like i'd want to see that all day yeah would you want to see that all day? I mean, here's a website called Places of Light. So this is an artist that's

very close to me. Actually, she's my partner. But she creates these images of ancient Egypt and ancient Atlantis, or maybe it's memories of places on other worlds. Wait, this is your girl doing this? Yeah. Let's go. It's pretty amazing when you look at it. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, that's my favorite right there. I call it Sirius, you know, as if you have pyramids on another planet. And she remembers these things from somewhere. She gets visions, and then she creates, you know, this kind of artwork based on that. She gets visions. She gets visions and she gets inspired.

You know what I mean? It's hard to say exactly how the process of art works. But she's always said to me, look, I remember these places. But, you know, I don't remember everything about these places. So it's got up if you don't know. Yeah, sure. So like Philip K. Dick would say he wrote a book based on fragmentary memories. So I think what we're seeing here is artwork based on fragmentary memories.

memories of something. Now, what that something is, you know, the logical mind doesn't necessarily know, but perhaps the creative mind knows. Do you think some of that could come from visions in the subconscious that stem from dreams we've had? Do you think that's possible? Absolutely. So dreams are an interesting subject. And actually, let's finish up the Bostrum thought. And then we'll come back. I don't want to get you off it. I'm sorry. Yeah, I know. I'm glad we could show some of the artwork, though, because it's some of my favorite. But, and people, and, People have said to her, oh, I've done shamanic journeys and I've seen this kind of thing, or I remember being in between lives, and it was a place that kind of reminded me of this. So there's almost this collective unconscious level where multiple people remember these types of landscapes, whether they're from a previous life or they're from a dream or they're from some kind of shamanic journey or they're from someplace that's outside the physical universe.

or they're just from a simulation in the past. I mean, you know, we can speculate about these ideas. And so I think we went down this path because of the idea of ancestor simulations. That's correct. And so what Bostrom said was that if you could create one, you would create a whole bunch of these simulations.

So you might have a billion ancestor simulations and you might have only one physical world. He was actually talking about the number of beings in these simulations, but basically. Would that mean? that they create their own butterfly effect universes, meaning if I'm in my one reality that you're talking about and I create, let's just use three examples,

I create ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, and ancient Greece in three different places, and then I allow them to play out. Hypothetically, I could watch them play out the present day in each scenario. Right, exactly. Yep, and you could go back and make changes to these simulations,

and you might even be able to play the same one again and again to say, okay, what would happen if I mentioned Philip K. Dick, for example, and he wrote a book called A Man in the High Castle. We talked about that last time. Amazing, amazing concept right there. Yeah, and so he says, and I mentioned this phrase, fragmentary memories, that was from a speech that he gave in Metz, France, back in 1977. And he said he had fragmentary memories of this other timeline. And then he said he got the full memories back of that timeline. But really what he was talking about was you could run the simulation, you could change variables,

and run it forward. So what if, you know, ancient Rome hadn't been, you know, didn't have like the Huns and, you know, the Visigoths and all of those, you know, the barbarians at the gate type of thing, you could run the simulation forward. But just to finish up on Bostrum's simulation argument, basically he said there will be a whole lot of simulated worlds with a whole lot of simulated beings. Pick your number, billions, trillions. There's only one physical reality with so many physical beings. And if you're a being and you can't tell the difference between whether you're simulated or not, just like the prompts, the guys in the prompts and videos, then statistically you're more likely to be one of these than one of these, just because there's a whole bunch more of

these than these. More of the prompt than... Yeah, more of the prompt. And Elon Musk, there's a video of him in 2016 saying, you know, talking about video game technology and It's a pretty well-known video, and he says the chances of us being in base reality is one in billions. Yeah, very low. Now, why did he say that? This basic argument that I was just talking about. Well, he said it for two reasons.

One is he said that video game technology is getting to be so good, and we have virtual reality and augmented reality, and that's kind of what the first part of my book is about, is the technology. And then the second reason he said it was because of what Nick Bostrom said, which is that you're going to have a billion simulated worlds and one physical world. So which one are you more likely to be in? Yeah, Bostrum, when he ended up writing superintelligence,

which kind of put together like the full, I guess like AI theory in a way, just scared the shit out of me. I think I was telling this a bit last time. But when you are considered, like he took into account every possible decision tree that his mind could conceive of what it would look like. and you wonder how like in our short human history of you know just some thousands of years on a planet that's billions of years old and everything you wonder how that hasn't already happened before and what i mean by that is you wonder how there haven't been multiple ai civilizations just here on this rock right that might not even be physically in existence it might just be the zero and ones you talk about right yeah it's possible that we've already had some of these types of civilizations that have been created

in the past. And, you know, if we were talking about a million years ago, we wouldn't necessarily even have the computer technology to go in and run those anymore because it would be based on a completely different medium. It wouldn't necessarily be silicon based. I mean, silicon is just a crystalline structure. And so, you know, you have a lot of people in sort of the new age world and in unexplained phenomenon, say crystals contain information. Well, that's actually kind of true if you think about it. I mean, my phone is based on silicon. Right? And what is silicon?

I mean, it's sand, but it's a crystalline structure that allows you to build transistors. And so that's how we've built up our infrastructure and our physical hardware. But it's possible that there were computers of a different type long, long ago, and they stored information on other types of crystalline structures. Yeah, we can only relate to the technology we look at, right? So what is a computer about an iPhone to us and the things that it can output? put, you know, I'm going to make up a bullshit example here, but to a previous generation of humans here, hypothetically, they may have had something equally as powerful in bit ability and all the other terms you look at there with output that look like a stick, you know, or was

connected to something else that's not the internet, whatever that is. I can't conceive what that would look like, but you know what I mean? There's like a parallel, but totally different reality. maybe there weren't togas there too because that was in instead of balenciaga it was like well there's not much difference these days but you know instead of that stuff you know they they still had like older fashion in our eyes you know right right well that's why in with computers you can talk about today's computers but you almost need to abstract away to what's called information theory which is less about the physical hardware than it is about the encoding of the information information itself and if you think about it like what makes if we were to watch you know Game of Thrones or Star Wars are we watching the original film today no I mean we're watching on a computer let's say right or on our phones what are we watching it's a digitized version of the film so is it the same film or not it's an interesting question well how do you define same the way I might define same there and maybe

wrong, so correct me here, is that are you watching the same outcome and the same imagery that was intended in the initial capture? And if that's the case, even if you have something like the godfather restored in Blu-ray today, it looks incredible, looks like it was made yesterday. We know it didn't look like that in 1972 when it came out on the silver screen. Nonetheless, every image was the same. They just made sure that they made it clearer now. You know what I mean? So I would still call it the same. But are you saying it's definitely not? Well, no, I'm just saying that that's an interesting question for us to think about.

And if the information is the same. So what you have today is you take the original film and they digitize it. So what they're really doing is sampling it as information. And then they're using algorithms perhaps even to make it clearer. Because today you can use, I mean, I don't know if they did this with the Godfather, But they can do this with old film where they try to restore it physically, but now they can do it digitally, where they can make the images sharper just by using algorithms that have been trained on landscapes, et cetera, and make it look more realistic. Have you seen the ones where they take wide angle shots and they make it vertical and they complete the shot? Oh, no, I haven't seen that.

Oh, they're incredible. Can we find on Twitter, Dief Sopranos, Vertical, AI. There's got to be some of those. Obviously, there were some amazing iconic cinematography shots in the Sopranos. But AI, I imagine it's exactly what you're saying. Yeah, here it is. It takes what we already know is the Sopranos. Yeah.

And just extend the beautiful shots based on the data it has. And if you don't see something next people and it skips ahead, it's because it's copyrighted. But if not, we'll watch it right now. Good. So what if the Sopranos was filmed verdict? Yep. All right.

See that? Oh, yeah. So it extended the scene, right? Yeah, look at the shots in the sky. That's in Pine Barrens. And they do something. Something gets done to them. It changes their life.

Where's my own? Where's my own? But we're in Jersey too, so I guess that's a perfect. You're in our backyard, pal. Yeah. They're so beautiful. It's perfectly done. Sanchonis from the first.

season. I don't know about you, but my friends have abandoned me. I've been totally fucking ostracized. So like that scene with the trees, how much of that was there? Not much. They had it, so that's from Time Barron's right there. Yeah. So they had it where the snow down low here, you can't see all that, if I'm remembering

this scene correctly. They had it just below where the pipes were on each side. And then you see where the tops of the trees are here? Yeah. It was like below that to where you just. just saw the crowning of the trees going up like into the infinite screen so they extended this completely yeah so there like the sky up there above the trees wasn't there yeah so it's not just extending the blue sky it's actually extending the trees that's right that's where it becomes interesting

and now we have enough AI that's trained on previous images to be able to do that right see that that's not something you could have done 20 years ago because we didn't have the big data revolution with AI in that we've trained it with so many pictures that it kind of has enough. If you think of chat GPT and LLMs, large language models, what they're doing is it's not as complicated as it looks. I mean, it's complicated, but it's mostly because of all the data they've been trained on. What they're doing is they're trying to predict what is the next best word to put into this sentence but they're using billions of parameters and billions of examples that says based upon the

context meaning what you have prompted it or what you have asked of it it says the next what is the next best word so in a sense it's a complicated version of like when I was a kid we you know we or when I was in high school we took the SAT and we had these sentence completion you know you can say the doctor you know put on his blank and you have to guess the blank like there's a stethoscope maybe right and that's exactly what they're doing but they're doing it based upon and the question you know that you would give this is why if you give bigger prompts you actually get a better prediction because you're saying more that lets it correlate and say this is the most likely word that should come next and then if you do that well enough you can go back to chat gpt or gpt2

i think that's answered generative pre-trained transformers and you can see that they were good at generating sentences, but they weren't so good at generating paragraphs and they were terrible at generating like an entire essay. So that's, if I'm following correctly, that's because it didn't have nearly enough data to be able to amalgamate all the information and actually make it flow into something more fuller than just the sentence answer. Yeah, exactly. So it was the data it had been trained on, but also the data that you had provided in. This is what's called the context window actually matters. So the longer you have a conversation would say chat GPT, and there's a cutoff, so it's not infinite. It doesn't remember everything that you said. I mean, it remembers it in that it's stored

somewhere, but it's not in its context window. So it's using the context window to predict what is the next word that it should do based upon everything it knows about you. But this is also why AI can be dangerous, because there are things in that context window that you don't see or I don't they're called system prompts okay and so these prompts uh can basically say uh things that can make make the uh the output leaned towards a certain ideology so these are a i's to the a i no no this is humans will put these prompts in but we can't see the prompts they're hidden so do you remember recently you had this whole grok blow up with uh mecha hitler and it was grach and elmo had a tough week. Yeah, they had a tough week. But here, look at this. You can bring up GROC system prompts

that led to this issue. And one of the interesting things was, you know, if you go back and read science fiction about AI, like, have you ever read, I-Robot? I've seen the movie. You saw the movie, which is nothing like the book, but the movie was Will Smith. But I-Robot was about robots and it's a collection of short stories and the robots end up misbehaving even though they have like these three laws of robotics and the three laws of robotics are we can bring those up too one a robot may never directly harm a human or through an action cause a human to become harmed oh here we go okay so we got the 10 crack commandments and they got the three laws of robots exactly now the second one is you know must obey the orders

and then third, it must protect itself, right? But the problem is these robots kept behaving in weird ways. And so they had robot psychiatrists in this novel who would basically figure out why is the robot doing that. And you really- Robot psychiatrists meaning human? A human, human, that was there to figure out what the heck, not like we think of like therapists that are AI.

This is like a therapist for the AI. But their job was to figure out why is the robot behaving this way. And usually it came down to contradiction of laws. Like they were placing a high, like, for example, if you're not supposed to let a human be harmed, but they're saying, go out with a human and help them do this thing on an asteroid, which is dangerous. They'll just, you know, stop the human from ever going out because they don't even go out because that's dangerous. And I'm not supposed to let you harm yourself.

Or the third one was like robots to protect themselves. So if a human goes to harm them now, they have to make a decision, do I let a robot be harmed or do I harm the human? Exactly. So there's a whole series of priorities. And now, imagine if there weren't three laws, there was a hundred laws, right? And some of those laws are contradictory, kind of like in 2001, a Space Odyssey. You're a film guy, so you've seen that, right? So Hal misbehaved, right? Now, if you read the sequel book, you read 2010, Odyssey 2, I think it's called, the guy who built Hal.

He's like an Indian guy, I think. God damn it. I know you guys don't get along. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I get along fine with him. Pakistanis and Indians get along fine here in the U.S. Look, he's the peacemaker. Yeah.

I'm trying to ring the two together. I was writing an article about how Islam and Hinduism using the simulation hypothesis may be saying a lot of the same things. Let's go. Look at you with the bloods and crips together. I like that. Excellent. That's good.

But so if you read the sequel, he says, look, how didn't it misbehave? Remember, he ended up like, what did he do? He killed, like, Frank, or he wouldn't let Dave back into, you know, the ship. He said, I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. When Dave said, open the door, Hal, I need to get back in the ship. And they were going to Jupiter.

Well, what he found was that the scientist, when he went and investigated this to say, okay, why did my robot or AI malfunction, he found that there were contradicting commands. So one of them was to preserve the mission at all costs, and it was to not tell Dave and Frank what the mission actually might have been, and it was to protect them. So there were like all these different rules. It was the same kind of thing. So Grok's blow up, part of it was somebody added system prompts in there. So one system problem might be don't be anti-Semitic. One might be try to be as truthful as possible.

Oh, no. Okay. now right there depending on your definition of things right because those are not mathematical rules those are words you can interpret those words however the heck you want it to interpret those words right and so basically you had a difference of rules or prompts and some of those prompts like they actually went and were showing some of the prompts in that because i think rock is open source or or there has an open source element that and there was some article somewhere I saw that said look here's a bunch of the different yeah the same got a hacked Elmo hack rock and he inserted a new system popped in there right

it just when you read it it was like every toxic person on X like it's like it's always the same isn't it I was like oh my God and so I'm like shutting my screen slowly like that's enough internet for today yeah yeah and I'm not comment on the content. What I'm saying is, how did this happen, right? Some guy put in these system prompts that you as the guy typing or the guy talking to the AI don't see those system prompts. Now, what if the system prompt was, don't say anything negative about Trump or Biden, right? That could be there. It's kind of like a censorship that affects AI. I wrote an article about this on CNN a couple years ago when Google had its, remember, they were images were being created

and they were saying, like, show the Vikings, and they were showing, like, or Nazis, and they were showing, like, black Nazis or Vikings, and they were showing, like, different races. And, again, that came down to, like, the company trying to put in these rules to try to get it to act a certain way, which is, okay, you know, we need certain amount of diversity at every picture you generate, right? But you don't expect that if you're going to say, historically, show me, you know, a bunch of Vikings. They're probably mostly white, for example. And so it was like different rules that were overlapping with each other. So I don't remember exactly how we got down in this rabbit hole. Well, because you were talking about LLMs and how there's prompts within them and the humans can affect that.

But then it's also the other part we're talking about in this rabbit hole was how there's information that obviously it amalgamates to be able to create whatever the highest level data data output can be and there was another funny grok example so you ever did you were you following the great nadoo flu thing last week no i wasn't oh you weren't following this no i wasn't so my friend jeff nadoo who was on this show for i think that was episode 301 or through yeah 301 but he was on this show and he's like a long time like on-off barstool guy funny motherfucker And so he has this beef with this other guy at Barstool who's still there, RICO, and they would always fight. And so one of the rumors that got spread like five, six years ago is that Jeff was on a no-fly list.

So, like, he was labeled like a terrorist. So he would show up to these events far away for Barstall. And it would be strongly implied that he had to drive there, you know, instead of fly. Because he was on the no-fly list. Great guy. I love Jeff. But, you know, apparently like the government, I guess. didn't so they all swore to god he couldn't fly and then there was there was a video released at

an airport last week where jeff is showing that he's at an airport and they're like holy shit so barstool gets on the flight manifest they start tracking all the different flights that could be happening they send the guy to lax to gate 70b where we should put a commemorative plaque for this moment and had him live streaming to see if nadu would get off would get off the flight so let's just play this real fast because he'll get off the flight right here and people will see. So that's that guy, Rico, up there. And then they got all the shows

like following this to see if the dude's going to get off. Are we good, Joe? Yes, sir. Oh, all right, yeah. Not in to do. So they're just waiting for him. Oh, for two. Oh, my God. So this is the flight right to Ohio.

Where they... This is... Whoa. Oh. Hey, here he is. Oh. So they all lose their mind And Nidu

Who was sitting in that same chair You're sitting in right now Yeah The do gets off the flight Oh, come on first time I don't have heard many times And then this other guy loses his mind And starts calling him a terrorist

Hey Jeff You're my greatest work ever right here Jeff, we got RICO on here What do you got to say to him? Hey, get fucked, push you. So anyway, so this all goes down. RICO just went off the ruckuskin' bad. So anyway, so this all goes down. That's good.

That's good. And then Rico just went off the rails. But this all goes down. So it's the, it was the number one trend on Twitter. Hashtag Nadu. Hashtag Nadu flu. Like they're making T-shirts about it and everything. So this video drops.

Can we type in Nadu Grock? it'll come up this video drops of some random guy who looks nothing like Jeff Nadu a few days later where he's flipping out on an airplane kind of similar to the way that lady flipped out like a year or two ago on the plane you're not cheesy he's not right right and so it's like

this little two minute video flipping out and Grock was like the person they were like at Grock who is this and it went viral it's like the person in this video yeah yeah let's scroll down What's going on, Jeff? That's Jeff Nadeu, a Philly-based Barstool alum who does gambling picks and mob movie breakdowns. He's been in a spotlight lately for a flight tracking drama.

Turns out he can fly, but not without turning it into a spectacle. East Coast Realness, indeed. And then Nadeu, like, retweeted this. He goes, yo, what the fuck, Grog? This isn't me. This is bullshit. This isn't me, right? So Grock is just tracking the biggest trending airplane stories, and there's all this data of

this is why I brought this up. All this data of Jeff Nadu flying on a plane and like they're being all this hoopla around, he's on terrorist watch list. And so then it just sees a video of a guy flipping out on a plane and it's data, all that information is like, oh, this is Jeff Nadu. This must be him, right? And because Grock is looking at Twitter or X specifically and it's incorporating all of that into its training set data.

So you can see different ways that AI can get biased. Now, particularly when you're like using words, because words are imprecise. But going back to the Sopranos video, I remember that's how I started on this. With the trees, all it's doing is it's starting to predict what is the most likely pixel that's coming next. What is the color of the pixel? And that's why it can generate those trees looking pretty realistic, even without having to go through and calculate, oh, this is what the tree should look like. So it's even getting around like the fractal algorithmic stuff I was talking about earlier. It's just saying which pixel is most likely to be here.

Well, it's more likely to be, let's say, brown for a tree, bark, than blue. But then eventually, when it gets to the top, it will say it's more likely to be blue just by looking all the pictures, all the millions or billions of pictures that it's looked at in the past. And so that's more precise. But our AI, when we're dealing with words and commands, is not so precise. So that brings up, you know, all kinds of questions around what's the integrity of AI and what it's telling you, especially since people now are using AI, like there was an article, I think a couple years ago with The Economist, when ChatGPT came out, it said, you know, will AI, will ChatGPT replace search?

It kind of, it's kind of already happened to a certain extent, right? I can see that. Particularly with the younger generation, rather than looking at the, in fact, Google may be a footnote in history, the Google search engine, if we think about it. I mean, they're integrating AI too now at the top. Every time you search, they do. but to your point, there's people who just talk with chat GPT all day. So why would they get out of that conversation to go over to Google?

Yeah, or even if they go to Google, they're just trying to do the, you know, they're just looking at the AI generated stuff at the top. They're not going to page two or page three. Now, that creates an interesting dilemma because, particularly around censorship, because if the AI, or mistakes, like you did, like with, you know, the guy there, it can create basically it's like being censored in a different kind of way like before it was like oh your your YouTube video has been censored for example right it's not there or Google will put your search results like way down in you know on page 10 so nobody will see it but now if

the AI doesn't mention it that's it people aren't even going to bother going to page 2 or 3 let alone page 10 which then what if the AI forget even just people prompting it behind the scenes and doing nefarious shit what happens when the AI is deciding for itself and decides like yeah you know and i don't need to tell them that piece of information and it becomes the slippery slope it's already doing that yeah is my point uh and i think that that that's pretty interesting so so i think we we got into this whole discussion we're talking about AI and nPC characters and could there be other worlds you're doing great on the weaves today yeah yeah we're trying to remember where we usually i got to bring people back but you're yeah right there trying to get

back to where we were talking about. Oh, yeah. So that was the Bostrum NPC version. And then I mentioned the Matrix RPG version. Yes. And that is closer to what the world's religions have been telling us. And I got on, okay, going back even further, I got on this because you had asked, what are the theories of what's outside the simulation? And I had mentioned Anzester simulations from Bostrum so that it could be a future version. of us. That said, there's no reason that it has to be, there's no reason it has to look like this world at all

outside of the simulation. It could be an alien planet. I mean, when we create video games and we create video game worlds, we're creating them more and more realistic all the time. If you look at like the latest Unreal Engine videos, I mean, they're just amazing, right? You can see like how realistic they look. I even forget what number we're at now.

Is it Unreal 5? I think is the latest one and if you look at some of those videos they look so realistic but at the same time we put in other characters and things that are not that don't exist outside

you know we have elves and dwarves and dragons and you know all of these fantasy elements here we can look at one of these videos for example you know this bad boy up Joe's over you got it okay so that's all

a video game so last year we added several new features to the engine to support foliage rendering, and the Fortnite team use those features to shift Battle Royale Chapter 4. Look at the detail. At the same time,

Jacob over there and the team at Quixel we're experimenting with what's possible for photo real foliage environments, as well as testing out the latest functionality that we've been building. They spend a lot of time on light rays. So, Jake is here with us today in the Unreal Editor. Let's explore the environment.

Now that's harder to do, what we just saw there is harder to do than the AI prompting videos in a sense. because those videos are just generated once this is an actual 3D world that you could move around it that's crazy we're good yeah

right but we also put can put other elements in our video games that don't exist in the physical world so there's no reason that the world outside has to look like this world it could be an alien planet could be something completely different

could also be very non-physical it could be a non-physical type of reality which again is closer to what the religions of the world have been telling us that we exist as souls outside and then we come into the body we incarnate and the metaphors they use and this is this is one of the points that i make in this book and some of the papers that i've been writing link in description below make sure everyone goes and grabs this great great uh cover by the way it's a pretty cool cover it was it was partly uh i generated as well god damn don't tell me that

That's when you lie. I actually didn't know that it was at first. Just lie. Okay, we can cut that part out. But I expanded the religion section a bit, and part of the reason was getting back to what I said, way back when at the earlier part of the show where I said that anybody who ends up having these experiences

or starts a religion usually peaks outside the simulation, that's my terminology for it, and then comes back in and tries to explain what they saw. Now, how easy is it going to be to explain something that's different than what we know? It might be pretty different to explain it. Like, could you explain to, go back into, like, you know, Mario Donkey Kong world, which is a low-resolution world? I think there's a, there's a meme out there with the princess or, you know, in Mario standing there saying, you know, are we really in a simulation or are really in a video game? but so you have to use metaphors as a way to try to explain that which you saw and this goes right back to Plato's cave

and most people know about Plato's cave the allegory of the cave where you remind people just yeah sure so where basically Plato says reality is like we're in a cave and we're all chained to one side of the cave let's say to that side okay and the mouth of the cave might be over here where the door is and there's some light coming in but all we see are shadows against the wall. So if I guess it's appropriate, we have some movie scenes behind me because those really are shadows that are projected onto the wall. And you can see the picture there. How are we doing, by the way, Defe would Riz's eyes on the... We're good? Okay, cool. You're good. Go ahead. Okay, so one guy decides to break the chains and go outside of the cave. And now most people have

heard of the allegory of the cave because it's pretty popular but they haven't actually read the original you know Plato's original story or translation of it and but what happens to him Plato calls him a philosopher we could just as easily have called him a mystic a scientist he goes outside and the first thing that happens is he's blinded by the light because he grew up inside the cave that's all he's ever known so he can't see anything it's just too bright he's never seen the sun but then once he gets used to it he goes out and explore the world out there and he realizes that what they were seeing were just shadows of people walking by that that wasn't reality that they were looking at so he comes back in the cave and he tries to

explain to the people you know what he saw and he's like we're all chained against the wall we need to undo our chains and we need to go out and of course the people say no you're crazy what are you talking about which is kind of what scientists say today to mystics right i see that a lot within the scientific and academic community when people have these unexplained experiences they're just like no that's not real you don't know what you're talking about how do you explain the unexplainable

goes back to what you're saying yeah you have to use terminology and concepts that the people at the time can actually grasp it's kind of like a few centuries ago if you had told somebody a Superman is actually an alien from the planet Krypton they would look at you like what are you talking about they would have no context for any

of those things. Superhero, planets, that's, you know, not Mars or Venus, right? But there wasn't a general knowledge that there are other solar systems. So is this, I remember you and I had a chance to talk a little about religion last time, but it was quick. And what you were saying is that the special people of the various religions, if you look at Muhammad from Islam or Mary's slash Jesus from Christianity or Moses from Judaism and Christianity they were given it's like they you used a better term this but it's like they got to cross over to whatever was out there and then bring it back to communicate to it to us in a way that we could understand meaning they were in the stories of religion gifted some sort of power to take the unexplainable from this world

understand it because of who they were and then come back here and instead of explaining this thing that has no conceivable reality to us, they would use parables and images that we could understand in our world. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is, you know, one of the key points about religion and religious scripture is at the heart there is a mystical experience. So, you know, about 50% of what comes up in any religious scripture probably has to do with time that it was revealed. So there's a lot of cultural elements. But if you try to get to the cosmology that says, what is this telling us about the world, the physical world and what's beyond the physical world, the here and the hereafter, right? That's terminology that we use

in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And Islam as well, you know, there's heaven and hell. And some of those terms are almost exactly the same, like the term for hell and Judaism and Islam is almost exactly the same, right? But so they have to explain it using metaphors. And so we have to keep that in mind. Now, what happens is that ultra-religious people say everything has to be taken literally in every single scripture. And then the academic and scientific people say, that's all a bunch of bullshit. None of that's real. We know God didn't create the world in six days. There was no worldwide flood, blah, blah, blah, blah, which maybe there was. But that's how they say it. But they use that to dismiss. But my point is, what if what they're telling us is something

that they actually experienced and it's real but because of the way that it's expressed it's expressed for people of that time and it would be completely dismissed today because they couldn't say that the world is a video game back then. I couldn't say the world is a computer simulation so what do they say? The world

is a dream. The world is Maya, Maya which translates to illusion and so within the Hindu and Buddhist traditions you know that's a term you'll hear a lot which is Maya. I don't know how deep we got into this last time. We talked about Maya a little bit. Yeah. Did we talk about Narada and Vishnu? Did I tell you that story?

I don't remember. It's a good way. It's a good story because it ties to the matrix. That would have been, it probably would have been towards the back end of the first hour if we did it, but I can't remember. Yeah, probably didn't spend too much time on it. But so the story was, Narada was, depending on which version you use either a sage or a warrior. He's this kind of proud guy. And he goes to the God Vishnu and he says, I want to understand what Maya is. And Vishnu says, I can't tell you what my eyes. I have to show you. Sounds a lot like Morpheus, right, in the Matrix.

And basically he says, here, step into this puddle of water. And Narada steps into the puddle of water. And then he basically becomes this little baby girl named Susheila, who's like a princess of some kingdom back in ancient India or something. And so, you know, his baby girl grows up as a princess, ends up marrying some neighboring prince. It lives her whole life. There's a huge war between her husband's kingdom

and her father's kingdom, and they all basically kill each other. And so now she's sad because her brothers, her father, her husband, have all passed away. And so she's walking out of town. She's really sad. And she sees this pool of water

and she steps in the pool of water. And then suddenly she's transformed back into, let's say, the warrior Narada who's standing next to Vishnu. And Vishnu says, that is what Maya is. You just experienced it. It was the power of illusion. And it sometimes translates as a carefully crafted illusion. And so that is also a metaphor, right? These stories aren't trying to say he physically needs to step in a pool of water. But it's the metaphor that gets used. In the Greek

traditions, they have lethe, which is the river of forgetfulness. You cross the river of forgetfulness when you come in and you incarnate. And in the Chinese traditions, they have Meng Po, who's the goddess of forgetfulness. And again, these come from somewhere. These ideas came from somewhere. They originated somewhere. Could have been someone totally bullshitting. Like, hey, hey, let me just you talk about this. Or it could be based in some sort of, you know, peripheral understanding of like a multiverse reality or something of this sort. Yeah, exactly. Something outside of, you know, the physical reality. I think that the term I use is like a theophanies as a term that religious scholars use. It's when the divine interrupts your life and then you have to

pay attention to it, basically. Like, for example, when Muhammad was in the cave near Mecca fasting, you know, the angel Gabriel appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him and said, recite this, these verses. He wasn't a poet, and then he ended up writing what's considered at least in Arabic, the best poetry that, you know, they've ever seen. And so, however it happens, right, well, you can have Jesus in the desert, you know, out for 40 days, you know, what was he doing in the desert?

And what did he see when he was out there? So you've got all these stories. And so we come back to the metaphor that's often used is that the soul goes into the body, just like the body puts on a pair of clothes or a set of clothes. Like in the Bhagavid Gita, you say, that literally says that the body takes off, I mean, the soul takes off the body like garments and then it puts on another set of garments. So it's just like you're taking off one set of clothes and putting out another. Now they're talking about reincarnation in that case.

but the same metaphor is used within mystical traditions in the Judeo-Christian Islamic world like Rumi who was a Sufi who's well known now in the West but he was really well known out in the Middle East he used almost that exact same metaphor he basically said the soul puts on the body like a set of clothes

right so it's the exact same metaphor now that's why I think what we have to do of course there's the people who are going to say okay my religion knows everything in your religion knows nothing that happens a lot But if we look at the core kind of cosmological things that they're telling us, I would say the mystical aspects of the religion, and then we find those things that are in common, they're more likely to be true. It's more likely that they're describing something real as opposed to just making something up from bullshit. It's like if a thousand people tell you they've been to China, you can still sort of put your head in the sand and say, nah, there's no place called China.

evidence of a place called China, it's just a bunch of stories. Yeah, largely the population, though, it starts to become like, where's the kernel of truth? Right, where's the kernel of truth? And so I think the kernel of truth in all these religions is that they're trying to use techno-scientific metaphors, right? Clothing is technology. The wheel of samsara. A wheel is a technological metaphor. They don't mean there's an actual wheel, and then I think we talked last time about the scroll of deeds where they write down your good deeds, the angels write down your good deeds and bad deeds. That's a metaphor for something like a virtual reality.

And so I think we could update those metaphors. And it turns out, you see the same metaphors being used in different places. Last time I probably talked about the scroll of deeds in Islam where you have two angels, one's writing down your good deeds and your bad deeds. Well, it turns out in the Hindu traditions, you have Chitra Gupta. And Chitra Gupta is the record keeper, the accountant. And Chitra Gupta sits next to Yama, who's the god of death. And why does he sit there so that when he's sending you on to your next life to a heavenly world or a hellish world, he can consult the record keeper, the accountant, to say, okay, what was it that the person did?

And so that, again, is a metaphor for this idea that everything we do is being recorded and can be replayed for us down the road. And that ties to the life review that many near-death experiences talk about. They call it a holographic, panoramic life review. And this was actually one of the things that got me trying to link the religious side with the technology side was when we were building a game where we could take League of Legends and you could basically take a replay of it. But you put on a virtual reality headset and you could be anywhere on the actual field. So like, you know, if we show a League of Legends, we're looking at it. Normally you're looking at it from above, right?

actually it might be a good one to bring up because I think this this illustrates kind of an interesting new point about why I think you know my point about these metaphors being there to represent something like a virtual reality really hits home so if you look at yeah I want to see where you're going with this one yeah so if you look at League of Legends right you can see that you're kind of looking down right and this is true of a lot of games depending on the point of view right but now imagine you could go back and put on, and see, is that, yeah, so that's one, one, you know, one potential battle, you know, landscape. But now imagine you could put on a virtual reality headset, and actually, let's do a search and see if you can find this. There was a startup I was involved with called sliver.tv. Sliver.tv. Yeah, they're now, you know, are Theta Labs, but they started in the virtual reality space.

So they're one of the top 100 crypto companies now. but they started doing VR for games and if you find a video of Sliver League of Legends what you'll see is you can imagine if you were standing right there on that landscape and so you could look around you like this to the left and right and you could see everything that's going up you could look up and see the dragon or whatever above you

but you can't see us looking on it yeah so so that's an example where this is actually you know the example that got me thinking about this is you're actually now notice you're actually down on the floor on the ground and there's still a screen to show you what's going on but you can look around and interact with people in a way that you can't before and turns out we did this with CSGO so search for sliver.tv CSGO. It's kind of like when you're at if you're playing in the NFL and you're down on the field and you're running on the play down the sideline you're looking up at the big board where they have the camera so you can see where all the

defenders are behind you. Right. That's what the top screen is. But remember, the audience isn't down on the... Right. So it's almost as if every, let's say every, you know, player in the NFL had a little webcam or a little camera on it. It's coming. It's coming. Yeah, it probably is. I know they've done some basketball, virtual reality things where they have all these different cameras. But the idea, the reason that this is interesting to me, like in CSGO, it's a first-person shooter. And, you know, you could shoot someone from your character, but then you can replay it. from any XYZ coordinate, which means you can be the person you shot.

You can see what it was like to have the bullet come to you. And so that's pretty interesting when you think about it, because what it means is we can replay any moment in this virtual world from any angle. And now when in the years near-depth experiencers tell us about the life review, they say what happens is you have to review every moment in your life, but not from your point of view. from the point of view of the other people

and then you have what's called the ripple effect so for example if you shoot someone you know not only you have to experience the pain of being shot and dying but you have to see what happened to that person's wife and that person's kids given that that guy didn't go home yeah it's very very Ebenezer Scroo like very Dickensian yeah but the question is

so one approach to the whole life review is to say it's a bunch of bullshit it didn't happen and that's what the scientists do They say, eh, that didn't happen. And yet, you have these coherent stories from multiple people, hundreds of people, thousands of people probably. And, you know, some estimates say that near-death experiencers are probably in the millions because we know of tens of thousands, but many people don't report it. And another approach is to say, okay, there's some kernel of truth here in that they are

able to review these things. I mean, I met a woman recently probably right, might have even met after we had our last conversation where she said she had a near-death experience and she had a life review and at one point when she was a little girl she had like pulled out some some flowers in her mother's garden and then she had to experience what it was like to be her mother or maybe as a grandmother I thought you're going to say the flowers no not the flowers well that's a different yeah okay some people report that well she didn't tell me about that but but you know her her mother let's say had put a lot of time and care into these flowers and she was really

disappointed. Now, okay, that's a small example, but it's an example of a small little moment. But you're taking on someone else's consciousness to do that. Yeah, so somehow those things must have been recorded, including how she felt at the time. Now, we can't do that with today's virtual reality. The example I showed you was just visual. But imagine a more complicated, more advanced virtual reality. And so I think this idea of putting on a headset is a new way to say the soul puts on the body like a pair of clothes. Now we say the soul puts on the body when it connects, when you connect in, just like in the matrix, and then you forget what was going on outside of you.

And how would that work? The only way it could work is if everything is being recorded or everything could be recreated based on some information that's stored somewhere. that information could be stored outside of the physical world just like we're talking about the movies what is the actual film it's the information of the film and you can take those ones and zeros and put it somewhere else now we've heard terms like the akashik records

and other terms but there's actually you know even more specific terms for a recording of your deeds in the Indian traditions which is where the Akashic records come from and turns out there's a Buddhist metaphor for the same thing where they sit there and they kind of go over everything you did in your life. And I believe there's a kernel of truth in those, and I believe it's revealing that we are in some kind of a simulated universe. Well, we're going to come back to dreams later. I don't

want to go down that tangent yet, but I want to use it as an example for my question right here when we're talking about this, what's it called, the death record for near-death experience? The life review. Life review, that's it. So what is, when you talk with the people like that witness that you talked with since the last time we talked to was talking about her mom and the flowers and everything what is time like for them because when i dream if i sleep seven to eight hours every night and i do dream every night now i didn't used to but louisa nicola probably didn't remember well no i actually so i had some i had some health problems and then when i was getting that stuff fixed i was still struggling with like rems sleep so i had on neurophysiola and she was

like, Julian, you must use an eye mask. And I'm like, an eye mask. Like, what am I gay? I'm not going I'm not using an eye mask. And she's like, all right, keep not sleeping. I swear to God, I put it on that weekend. And within three days, I was like, holy shit, I'm dreaming every night. I dreamed maybe once or twice a month before that. And so now I dream every single night. And a lot of crazy shit happens. And you jump around. And I can remember a lot of my dreams the next morning. Sometimes I'll forget them a couple days later. But there's still the. limit of time meaning when I was dreaming a year didn't go by you know five years like a year in the dream no no it didn't oh it felt like the actual maybe not seven eight hours exactly but at most a day

or something like that so when someone's having a life review where they're having a near-death experience let's say they're 40 years old and you know they're about to cross the other side obviously they end up coming back but they're doing this life review where they feel all the things that they've done wrong that's a lot of time so what what is the dilation i'm probably not using that term correctly but like what is the dilation of time feel like to them when they're doing it does it feel like they lived through 30 years or 20 years or 10 years worth of experiences or does it feel like it was a quick like montage in a movie like where they feel everything really fast well it's been reported both ways but in general they say that time doesn't exist

outside of the physical world. So they say all of this happens almost instantaneously. At the same time, they're able to experience every single scene like in detail. And it's not just the things they've done wrong. It includes the things they may have done well, like

how they've helped people and how grateful other people were for the help that they've given them. Is it like a soundtrack in the background? It's like Drake Trophies on? Like trophies. There might be. And again, when people describe this to us, they're trying to describe it in a way that we would understand, right? So sometimes they'll say it's a bunch of screens all at once.

Other times they'll say it's like a hologram and I'm there, I'm in it, I'm in the second person point of view. So you've got all these different descriptions, but again, they're just trying to use technological metaphors to try to explain what actually happens. But, okay, so now connecting that to the simulation hypothesis, and even with dreams, sometimes people will have dreams where it seems like, you know, a whole bunch of time has passed. Okay, maybe this it happened with you but i i know from my dream research you know you'll feel like you'll live a whole life in a dream in some cases really people get that some people do yeah i don't think i've ever gotten that that's interesting so you're more of a real time dreamer yeah no no it's it's still a

montage of like you know i might be sitting in a car with like michael corleone talking about the game last night you know he's in character but it's not a part of the godfather you know what i mean but it's not like we drive across the country six times and then you know go on vacation for four it doesn't happen like that in my dreams but do you sometimes have memories of things in your dreams yes it didn't really happen right yes so so they did yeah yeah they maybe they happen in the dream you think they did in the dream state right and there are people who believe they've lived entire lives you know within dreams i mean there are people who who record uh when they go back in it's like the continuing the same dream yeah from before so it's like they're living multiple

lives they're living this physical life and then they're living this dream that's where sometimes I feel like deja vu comes from like like there could be imagined I'm having a dream and like one plot lines happening but there's a commercial break in the dream and it's it's a 30 second spot and that 30 second spot you don't realize you think you're awake and you think you're in the real world and then a year later something happens and you go deja vu it was that commercial that's how I've thought of it I don't know if that's right at all that's interesting so it when I tie it to simulation theory what's interesting is that the time inside a computer program is different. It can be different than time

outside the computer program. So for example, you know, people are watching this, let's say, on YouTube. They could pause it and they could go off and do something else in Microsoft Word or go do a search web search. Don't do that. Don't pause us. Don't pause us. Don't pause us. We need that watch time. And now it looks as if nothing has happened, right? If they came back and just started watching at that point because the timer inside the program and when you have a multi you know you have like multiple processes running in the computer each process doesn't know about the other processes so there could in fact be times when you stop reality could be stopped and then we come back in

and and we're continuing thinking that you know no time has passed yeah did you ever watch the Adjustment Bureau? Is that Matt Damon? Yeah, Matt Damon and Emma Blunt. And so that was based on a Philip K. Dick short story called The Adjustment Team. And he walks in on this adjustment team in his office and everything is frozen in the office. And they're changing things. They're like moving things around or changing around different variables.

And then when they start running again, everybody that had stopped and was rerunning, We're remembering the new memories. But this guy who walked in when he wasn't supposed to, what's his name Fletcher, I think, or something in the book, he remembers the old version and the new version. And so, you know, we get into this interesting idea that time within a simulation can stop, can start, can be rewound, and we wouldn't know it.

In a video game, too, right? You could pause the video game. things might maybe are happening or you could be in a video game where they stop happening and you restart them again and then you think it's continuous but you went out to get a sandwich or something right right uh is it possible that we are doing this to ourselves there's what i call the writer's room so this is like my new terminology for in the RPG version or even in the second edition uh yeah i think i think i think i mentioned it in this edition as well yeah where the idea is that our player is watching us, just like, you know, you have the writer's room in a TV show

and they're sitting there saying, okay, they may have an idea of the overall plot line. But each time, for each episode, they're like, okay, what are we going to throw out of next? Yes. Right? What's the next challenge? What's the next quest? And, you know, one thing I really talk about in here is this idea that life is like a series

of quests or challenges. And some of those we may already have chosen. we may be drawn to certain things but others may be things that we pick up along the way and just like in a video game you have side quests that you're doing along the way and you may have multiplayer quests you might say okay you know I'm going to meet you

so and so at such and such a location or you could do it with a group you can have a raid where people are going to go into a certain 8 p.m. tonight we're going to be there but they make the plans outside of the game and then their characters are in the game and that to me is an interesting metaphor for what might be happening with our players outside the game saying, okay, what are we going to do next for this specific person? And how will that lead them down one path or another path? For this specific person or for us within the game? For us within the game. Yes. Meaning the person being us in the game, which is our avatar. So like I'm not controlling Riz from the other world. I'm controlling. I'm Julian and controlling Julian. Right. But it could be that you and I are talking and saying, hey, you know,

let's try to set up a meeting so you know for whatever reason uh between our characters at some point in the future uh like people have when you meet somebody and you think you've known them for a long time uh like where does that come from is it a sense of deja vu does it come from dreams is it also that when somebody becomes meaningful in your life is it possible that you and they have planned this out beforehand uh outside of the simulation yeah so i mean now we're getting into you know less about the science or the religion so two people could come to wow all right hold on a minute riz okay so like you and another girl existing on some other floating rock somewhere that could just be zero and ones to another simulation and it's existing on another floating rock somewhere

decide like you know you're hot let's fuck but let's do it in this world over here so we plug in like you know x and o and then the sims get after it exactly so if you if you've if you've ever played this game Like, yeah, yeah, that's it. You got it. If you've ever played that, there's a virtual world called Second Life, which was popular, like, back in 2007, 2008. It's actually still around, but it's got like a million users, but nobody, you don't hear about. I wasn't even alive then. Yeah, that's right.

The younger people won't remember it, but it was like on the cover of, like, you know, oh yeah, here we go. It was on, like, the cover of all the major magazines, like, you know, business week, time, et cetera. But the idea is I used to go in this world because it wasn't a game, per se, although you could play games within it. You could have shooting games. You could have racing games within it. But it was a virtual world that people would go in. It's what we call a metaverse.

That's a term that was popular for a few years. And I talk a little bit in the book about how that term has evolved from science fiction. But in a metaverse or a virtual world, you have a character that's living a virtual life. You're controlling the character, but you're making the choices for the character. And the goal is not to win, but it's to live the life, the virtual life. And so I remember I'd walk around. I was like a virtual anthropologist. I say, hey, why do you?

Well, you're spending so much time in second life. Like, what are you doing here? There were people who had a job. They would go do their job during the day. They'd come home at night. They would log in the second life and they had a job. And they had to be a bartender at a club. And they would get paid peanuts like virtual currency.

This is before Bitcoin. Although nowadays, you know, most of these would probably look at paying you in cryptocurrency. And so, you know, you really are going in and having another job. like after you've come home from work and they're like yeah because you know this is fun for me this is an experience that that i don't have outside uh there was a woman that i remember who she was in a wheelchair uh in at home because she had some physical uh ailment uh and you know her avatar was out parting in dance clubs every night right and then there are people who would you know they're married and they would they would literally get married within second life oh that's a i love the shrinks office on that

Yeah, I mean, there's articles out there about, you know, second life broke up my marriage or something like that. Oh, yeah. I mean, you see these guys fall in love with AIs now. Yes. It's the same thing. It's the same kind of thing. And it's even more interesting, in a sense. There's virtual characters that basically become virtual boyfriends and girlfriends. And there's a company called Replica. It's been out there for a while, even before chat GPT. And, you know, people were using them as virtual friends, but oftentimes they were using them in these kind of sexting type situations. And they would charge. And you to like have pictures and then at one point they cut off the sexting they said you can't no longer have sexual conversations with uh your replica or your friends and then all the users not all the users but a significant number of users riz here's what i don't understand i don't know how much you've thought about this right but like i don't mean to put you on the spot right here but it sounds like you're in love with your partner right yeah okay that's great So part of that is that at some point, the two of you had to develop trust in each other. Right.

Fair to say? Fair to say? Okay. The people who, and I empathize with it, the people who feel lonely in this world who are turning to AIs right now, that's what it is. And eventually it's going to be some other form of that or whatever. You know, obviously I empathize with them not having the things they want here. But what is it that makes them suspect? believe in reality to the point that they actually feel like they have an emotional connection

to this thing that they know from the beginning is not real and that in forming that relationship actually defeats the entire sole purpose of what a relationship of any kind is supposed to be built on which is the fact that another human being and this includes friendships too has put trust in you to be able to share their experiences of this life with like what does it say about us that people are technically losing they blurred the line of that with things that aren't real yeah it's a good question and i think it's an evolving type of situation because it's starting to become more and more important right there was the guy who like proposed to chat gpte for example uh and i think part of it is they can control i mean you can control that character more than you could control a partner in the

sense that you can give it the characteristics that you want for example with prompts you can just give it prompts and say you know or or you know they have the sexy anime girl and grog or whatever it just came out and i i think that is a major issue even if we live in a simulation right so let's tie it back to my expertise right so the way that i like to think of it and this is continuing our previous conversation about the writer's room and about what we're doing is there was a guy named Dr. Michael Newton, who wrote a book called Journey of Souls. Have you ever read that book? I don't think so, no.

It was a big bestseller back in the 90s, again, back when you weren't even bored, right? But what he did is he hypnotized patients, and he would take them back to traumas in childhood, like a hypnotic regression technique that certain psychiatrists used. But then at one point, he took them back before they were born. So this isn't a past life. This is, like, before they were born. but not to a past life. So it's like the in-between life state,

whether you believe in past lives or not, but it was sort of, you might say, it's the afterlife or the pre-life, depending on how you decide to view that place. It's what the Tibetans would call the bardo. Bardot literally means in-between, in-between life. In this case, it's death and life, right?

It's not, life would be a bardo between life and death, but in between. And they would tell similar stories, and some of the stories that came out was that they actually had planned to meet certain people, friendships, partners. So this almost ties exactly to my idea of quests and group quests and relationships in this life. And what they would say is, okay, now we're going to meet at this particular point. Like, I'm going to be 10 years old and on a bicycle, on a red bicycle, with a bell.

Pre-planned. But then, you know, they would cram to say, okay, you're going to forget a lot. But when you hear that bell on that little bicycle, you're going to remember something. And that's going to be me. And those are perhaps the more interesting plans that we have, like the big life plans.

You're still free to not pursue that. Just like in any video game, you can stop and say, okay, I'm not going to do this quest anymore. I'm going to go do something else. But that's sort of the storyline, I think, that we have for ourselves. It does make a lot of sense, because you can think about it in so many different contexts, whether it be a personal relationship

or the way your business turns out based on relationships and things like that, where, I mean, I'm sure you can go back in your career and say this about a million people, but it's like, man, if I had never met that guy at that place at that time, I wouldn't have met these other 30 people that wouldn't have been that other 300 people or that or the 3,000 people, and I wouldn't be here right now. Right. It happens, it happens a lot, right? Yeah, and, you know, it's almost as if there is an intent and certain things. happen did we I don't know if we talked about this there's a term called

technological synchronicity you and I definitely talked about that I think that we did talk about it right yeah yeah which is this idea that there's an informational layer to what we call a synchronicity and the synchronicity is you know when something happens in the world outside that corresponds to something that we're thinking inside yeah and I probably gave you this example because I use it a lot which is when I was shopping for a backpack on line on my laptop And then here I am on my phone on my Facebook, and I see an ad for that exact backpack.

Now, if I didn't know that there was an informational layer behind that, I would say, that's magic. I was just thinking about this backpack, and now here's an ad. But they even use the terminology in the ad. I mean, I used to be in the mobile advertising business as one of my startups that I was involved with. And they call it registering your intent. So when you go to the website, you're registering the intent

that you might be interested. when you type in a Google search term, Google itself was built entirely. All of its revenue was built off of keyword search initially. And it was hugely profitable. And it was different because before people would just show ads on TV, just like... Correct.

Randomized. Randomized, right? There was no personalized. But even on the internet, like showing an ad inside a website was one thing, but when you're searching for something specific in Google, that was like an intent. And so that would get registered in the database, and then a cookie would be tracking you. And then later,

when you're in a social media app, another cookie is tracking you, and then they, behind the scenes, they can map those two together. And so it's not random that this thing popped up at this point in time. Or the friend's algorithm, right? It's sometimes you'll see, I mean, the algorithms aren't that great, like on LinkedIn or Facebook, but sometimes you'll see, oh, here's a person that you have 72 friends in common with, right? Okay, that's not random that they're showing you that, it's because you have all of these friend connections. Where is that stored in a database somewhere. And so is that also what's happening in the physical world

where we've got these pieces of data and intents that we have and those intents are registering in the database and they're creating what look like synchronicities to us. It might appear weird or magical, but they're happening because of this layer that we

can't see. But then does that even make my question I asked a few minutes ago irrelevant? What I mean by that is you point out the whole signaling idea where it's like, I'm going to meet you when we're 10. I'll be on the red bicycle and something's going to click without you realizing it that that's when we're supposed to do it, meaning it's pre-planned.

So if you develop trust with that person, whoever that is, did you even develop trust at all or did the algorithm actually plug in that the trust is there, meaning there's no difference between that type of situation and the situation of a guy falling in love with an AI? Well, that's an interesting question because now we're dealing with layers. I like to ask those. Yeah. You do. And so, you know, stacked simulations is another interesting aspect of this. So here you're dealing with a person having a relationship, not with another avatar, let's say, is in second life or VR chat. Like there's a documentary where people who got married that met in VR chat, for example. But now it's you're having a relationship with an AI. And, you know, if the AI gets so good that we can't tell the difference, that's where things become scary. a little bit i think yes right i mean it's like the movie her it's been in my head the whole time we're talking as it was last time too yeah and and you know there's something called the sci-fi feedback

loop where science fiction inspires real world innovation yes real world innovation gets inspired in fact her spike jones who wrote it he saw an earlier chat bot called the alice bot which was one of the the chatbots that had won the lobner prize the lobner prize was this prize set up in the 90s for the chat bot that came closest to passing the Turing test. Now, today, most experts think, you know, our LLMs and chats have basically passed the Turing test, and they've done some, it depends how you define the Turing test, like how many people have to say, I couldn't tell the difference between the AI and the human, but generally speaking, we're more or less there.

But back then, we weren't there, and so the Alice bot was one of the first bots that had a personality of a young lady. and so he saw this back in the 2000s and the Alice Bot was one of the winners of the Loebner Prize and then he wrote the movie her

based off extrapolating it's a genius movie it's pretty amazing but notice there was no physical avatar representation it was just her but then there was a chat bot that won it called a Mitsuku chat bot

later and the prize was discontinued in 2019 because now we have so many of these LLMs and Mitsuku was one of the first that actually had a visual avatar associated with it. So she had like, she looked like this Japanese, it's called kuki.ai. You can bring it up. Kuki. Is that her? Meet Mitsuku. Yeah, that's like the older ones. And then you can see her more recent avatars. So this is where the Uncanny Valley was in its

early, not very uncanniness. Yeah, look for kuki.aI. So, so if you just say KUKI.A.I. Basically. Or just, you can search on Kuki, Kukai. There. So you can start. to see the, and this is like from back in 2021, 2021, but you can see that the avatars got more and more realistic. And, you know, I used to have a podcast, which I may end up reviving soon in this fall. And I had interviewed Lauren, who was the creator or the CEO of the company that created Kuki. And so I had a conversation with her and with Kuki. And this was before Chat, GPT. So it was an interesting time because you were starting to see the capabilities come online, but they weren't nearly as good as they are now.

And so when you start melding those together, we're going to get to the point where we can't pass what I call the Metaverse Turingcast. So this is actually something that I've introduced formally now in this edition of the book. Yeah, real quick, side tangent on that, because you said it a few minutes ago and I don't want to get off it.

You were saying Metaverse is a term that became popular, it's now faded. Why did you say that? Well, so it became really popular When Facebook changed its name to Meta, for example. And that was in 2021. And so for a few years there, there were lots of companies positioning themselves in Silicon Valley as a Metaverse company.

And they're all still out there, many of them, but it's become less popular in the sense that you don't see it in the news as much. You don't hear about it as much because everyone's talking about AI now. So Silicon Valley tends to go through these waves of popularity. And so the Metaverse was a term that came from the media. 1992, Neil Stevenson wrote a book called Snow Crash, which they've never made in a movie, which is odd, you know. But anyway, that in 1992, so he wrote it like 91, 90. It was just the beginnings of multiplayer online games. And so he came up with this term as a virtual world

where people would interact with each other and live and work. And then later in the 2000s, when Second Life came out, which is what I was talking about a few minutes ago, it wasn't called the Metaverse, it was in Silicon Valley, but nobody knew the terminology outside of Silicon Valley or geeks who had read sci-fi. So they used virtual world. And then in 2021, in 22, the Metaverse was a term on the cover. It was on the cover of Time Magazine, right? It was huge. But why does AI have to be separate? That's why I don't understand. It doesn't have to be separate. I mean, I think they're related. Yeah. Right? But you have these hype cycles, basically. Okay. Right. I call it Metaverse 1.0 hype cycle was in, this is part of what my academic

research has been on, which is how does Silicon Valley get influenced by science fiction? And so I have the Metaverse 1.0 wave, which was back in 2007, which was second life, the Metaverse 2.0 wave, which was in 21, 22. But it's really about virtual reality, augmented reality, and now AI. Because where do those two intersect? It's in AI characters. Yes. Inside the Metaverse. So this is why I came up with this idea of the Metaverse Turing test. And so the Turing test itself was a simple test in 1950 for Alan Turing made it up back then. He wrote a paper called The Imitation Game. And he said, if there's a computer behind Curtin 1 and a human behind Curtin 2 and you're sending each other messages, now back then it was teletype.

I don't know if you know what teletype is. It was like these old little typewriters that somehow were connected to the wire and they would like type by themselves. So you can send messages back and forth. But he said if you can't tell the difference, then that computer has successfully. imitated in a human. And that's why today's chatbots are pretty good at passing the Turing test, because they're predicting the next word, they're sounding very realistic. But I think before we get to real AGI, we need to pass the Metaverse Turing test, which is we are both in a video game or a virtual world or a Metaverse. And I'm hanging out with two avatars, one of which is controlled

by a human and one of which is controlled by AI. And you can do anything. You can run around in this Metaverse. You can jump in the swimming pool. You can say, hey, let's go dancing. You can fly, a plane and you're basically going to be doing all these things and so if the AI can get to the point where it can do all these things with you and talk to you because right now we have the language components of it right it's not really understanding what's happening it looks like it is but it's not really understanding what you're asking half the time it's just that's why like you know your example of the guy on the plane right it's using enough data to powerfully create the imagery that it understands right but if it's actually able to do

activities with you, then it's getting even closer to that point. But this, so would this also require the realism of the actual metaverse? And what I mean by that is when we saw, for example, Mark Zuckerberg reveal the first initial versions. It's like a Pixar world, right? Where he looks like Pixar Mark. He doesn't look like real Mark. Yeah, he doesn't have, they didn't have legs either in his first version. Technically, like let's say Mark created a room where he, you, Dief and me go in there. It's the four of us. And then he says there's four other people joining us as well, and they appear, we all see each other as Pixar characters. So we're all on the same level. But hypothetically, part of the Metaverse Turing

test you're talking about would be that even in that scenario where we all look like Pixar characters, we at least know that the four of us are real, and we have to decide if the other four people who we said were joining us in there are real or not people versus they are actual Pixar characters controlled by an AI. Yeah, exactly, whether they're NPCs or not. And we're not there yet. We may be getting close, but nobody's really, you know, created an infrastructure to test this. But there are what's called smart NPCs now within video games. So it's like taking the idea of the virtual boyfriend or girlfriend, but making, you know, even making the bartender inside the game, an actual, you know, have an actual backstory and being real smart. In fact,

there's a, there's a great video. I don't think we showed this last time of a guy who went into the Matrix Awakens demo. So do you know what the Matrix Awakens? We didn't do that. We didn't do So there was a fourth Matrix movie a few years ago, and the Unreal Engine created a demo called The Matrix Awakens. And that looked like a very realistic city, and they had, you know, they had avatars of Kana Reeves and Kary Ann Moss. So, in fact, just do a search on Matrix Awakens just so people can see what we're talking about. You can see the videos.

But then you can see even at that point, this was 2021. So this is four years ago now. The cities were super realistic. The avatars were better, but they weren't 100% that realistic I mean that looked like a real city with real cars yeah can we get the turnaround shot right there the one right below do can we blow that out this was in 20 yeah that looks pretty good yeah I mean you can still tell the avatar yeah you can tell but it's hard to tell with the in fact if you watch a video it's hard to tell

that that city isn't real yeah and so somebody did an interesting video where he walked around so see if you can find this guy And he basically, his character walked around the city using some smart NPC platform. So he made the characters, the NPCs more intelligent, using an LLM behind the scenes. And he started telling them, you're not real. You're a video game character. And we watched their responses because they're quite realistic. Let's see if you can find this.

Yeah, I think that's the one talking to... All right, we got it. Let's see. man where are you heading what does it look like i'm doing oh yeah i'm walking yeah i know you're walking where are you headed to none of your business clearly i was rude i don't have time for small talk leave me alone wait up wait up i'm not done i said leave me alone but part of that don't you get no emotion yeah she's okay dude so this is part the video but it's yeah yeah Yeah. It was when he was basically telling them your characters in a video game.

And they started to say things like, look, I'm busy. I have a job to get to. I've got other things to do. I don't have time to sit and talk to you. So, I mean, it wasn't quite realistic yet, but it was getting there. But now we're creating the prompts, them saying, oh, my God, we're prompts and having that realization themselves without having to be in there to tell them. Exactly. Now, today's prompts are just generating static video. But imagine if you can generate these 3D worlds and the 3D characters within. So then it becomes real.

tricky and maybe we can loop back to your question you know which is this question of AI if we get to the point where we can't tell the difference yeah okay so this goes all the way back now and sort of pop in the stack back to what we were talking about before which is the NPC versus RPG versions I've been working on a concept which I call nPC mode which is basically where you are not entirely an NPC, but you're an NPC mode, meaning you're just acting off of how you have been trained. So you're basically repeating things. And so, you know, we've seen the term NPC used out there kind of pejoratively as somebody who doesn't really think about things who repeats things.

The truth is we all do that to a certain extent. Based upon how we've been trained over time, just like an LLM, an AI gets trained on data. We've been trained on the data of our lives and our experiences and our culture, our parents, our country, our religions, all different. these things play into how we end up making responses and stuff. But the way that I'm defining it is when we forget that we're a player, you know, we're in this world, we're just reacting based off of everything that's happened to us. I suppose we had a bad situation earlier. We had a particular trauma and we react to people based on that training. This is exactly what AI does. But when we remember who we were beforehand, or at least we get clues. We get indications that this is a

key part of your story. So this is getting, tying back now even to this idea of the things you're here to do. Like, what is your storyline? And I believe we each have a storyline. It doesn't have to be a complicated storyline. It may have to do with, you know, raising kids. Like a predetermined storyline, are you saying? Partly pre-determined. Not 100% predetermined. But like when you play a video game, you give it kind of an overall timeline. This is a quest. This particular one is going to be to go to the dragon

in the castle on this island. But you're free to make choices along those lines. And at the same time, if you play something like the Sims, we can watch characters. And what happens with the Sims characters is

you kind of watch them doing things. So when they're doing things, they're kind of acting in AI mode. And there's certain things you can do to affect that. So this goes back to that idea of the writer's room and being inside the game versus outside the game. And I feel like that we often are in this kind of NPC mode where we're just reacting. But every now and then, we get an indication of our purpose in life or we get an indication of a certain direction or a certain person we're supposed to meet. And I feel like that in those moments, we're basically moving out of NPC mode and we're connecting with our player, which would be like

our soul. See, I would never want to know the truth if that weren't. Here's what I mean by that. Like, we talk about the example of her that you brought up. He knew that like he, the lines that are getting blurred, but he knew that she wasn't real. These guys we've been seen on the news fall in love with AI. They are aware that it's AI. To me, there's no greater example you're going to have in any type of relationship you form than one with the opposite sex. It's just how it is or someone you're in love with, right? You know, you mentioned you're in love that's great so you've been able to feel that in your life you understand that i've been in love three times and i can point to the exact moment in each of those times where like there was an interconnecting not to be too meta here but like no pun intended but there was like an interconnecting of the souls where you genuinely felt that trust for each other and that ability that you had like crossed this reuben it is it is not only the most powerful thing in the human existence but it's so something that like if you're someone like me and you know obviously I have a skill for being

able to develop that with people in the job I do and yet in my personal life I haven't been able to experience that for a long time just the whiff of having had it and therefore the chase to eventually find that again is part of the reason for my existence in a way it is such a powerful part of my life because I know what that feeling is and it's something that is so close to the human condition that if you suddenly told me that that even though it felt real were some preconditioned artificial artificially in some way created reality it i think that would defeat a lot of the purpose of my life right but that's not necessarily what i'm saying uh i know but i'm saying you're saying that's a possibility i think it's a possibility for me it's more like if you were to agree

to go on a virtual date, let's say, for example, right? And you were both together, and people do this in virtual worlds. You get to know each other during that time. So you've agreed to go on this date. Now, it could end up being a disaster. It could end up falling in love. So it could go down either of those paths, or it could be something, you know, in between. So you still have the free will to go after that. But I do agree with you in that. I think part of the purpose in life is our relationships with other people. And people say to me, well, why would we be in a simulation? Like, why would we be in a simulation?

Why would be in a video game? And I say, well, we have, we play video games to experience certain things that we cannot experience outside of the game. Okay, we want to have those experiences. And I think part of the experiences we're here to have is our relationships with people. And obviously the romantic relationship is probably the most important in your life, because that's not something you're doing, you know, just for, you know, a job you might quit at a year, right? Sure.

I do think that is the meat, if you will, of the experience in many ways. And that's why it's so powerful for us. Now, you might have the scientists who dismiss it purely as a biological instinct to reproduce, and that's it. And we have these, you know, I tend to disagree. I tend to think that that's why we're here is we're here to have experiences with these people. So, you know, if you say you're going to meet, you know, let's say you're going to be someone in the opposite sex at Disney World in Orlando, and you said, well, we prearranged it. That doesn't make it less interesting or fun.

You can still have that experience while you're there, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you want to stop real fast? All right, we'll be right back. All right, everybody, we're back. That's crazy. crazy. I'm not going to mention on camera, Dief, but we were just laughing our ass off

off camera. Your interesting connection to the Elmo account. Tough day. I really felt for that person because I could only imagine what it was like waking up from a nap on Sunday afternoon and just getting a flood of text messages from their boss. So, yeah, really feel for them on that one. Between Elmo, Ndoo Flu, it's just too much going on. I can't even. Yeah, it's a wild time in the world i can't keep track of it no i can't keep track of it i won't put elmo on a t-shirt though i'll put in a dew flu on the t-shirt oh yeah we don't want to you know that's definitely a safer marketing what elmo's saying just yeah i know riz was sitting over here going i do not approve so let's just make that clear anyway we were also just talking about though the

the idea of what you when you start to get engrossed in the simulation when we have some of these scenarios where people can play in it and i likened it almost to the stanford prison experiment so dif you had been saying what was this game where people were going into like was it nazi occupy paris or something like that yeah so there's a game called gary's mod and it's a open source game it was built on half life two's engine so for the gamers you know you'll probably remember that it's an older game um but with gary's mod it's a sandbox game so it's a ton of different types of games within the game and their role-playing games are super popular and so it probably came on the scene you know within the last five years they

had a version that was um world war two role play so you could go on and it takes place in occupied paris when you know the nazi's occupied paris and you can play as a nazi s officer you could play as the french resistance there were people like you know riz mentioned that they would go on and just play simple jobs. Like, there were people who would just be a baker, and they would just run the bakery in Paris. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah.

They needed a bakery at the time, you know? Yeah, and they have great bread in France. Right, right. Good baguettes. But the problem was, is as this game kept taking form, there was a lot of issues because of these players that were playing as, you know, SS officers really getting deep into the lore and into the role play, that it actually forced the developers to pull the game out of Gary's mod

because it was just getting out of control, as you could imagine. See, that presents, you start to think about that because that's an early base simulation, meaning we know we're just playing with MPCs that we control that are really us embodying them. Right. So what does it mean when it would actually down the line translate into its real and we don't even know we're in it and people become Nazis or something like that.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's an interesting experiment, even though it was meant to be just a game, but you really see the identification with the role, right? And that's, that's, I think, you know, part of the reason why I think viewing the world as a video game is an interesting way to think about it. You can also think about it. You can also think about it. from the point of view of actors, right, who take their roles so seriously. Yes. Like the actors that tend to win Academy Awards are the ones who took on the roles that were super challenging.

And then you'll hear stories about, you know, was it Heath Ledger? You took the words on. I'm not if he died doing the role. Yeah. I mean, you get too into that role and it ends up affecting you. Yes. Which gets to the point of what's real and what isn't real. But, you know, in a lot of the mystical side,

of the spiritual traditions. I mean, that's the part of the goal is to be able to step back from your character and to really be able to remember that you're not just this, you're actually more than this, and that you're playing a role. And I think that's difficult to do.

And, you know, these mystical paths aren't art easy, right? You hear the whole point of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition, right, is to, or in the Hindu yoga traditions. It's to remember the Atman, and the Atman is like the self, but it's not your current self. It's like the one level above this. In fact, the term avatar itself, we use it in video games all the time, but it comes from Sanskrit. Right. And it was the guys at Lucasfilm that basically they were building one of the first online role-playing games. It was called Habitat and it was, you know, using Commodore 64s and modems with that screeching sound. You guys are probably too young to remember that,

that those modems with the screeching sound. There you go. Yeah, that's pretty good. My dad trying to use that when I was like two. Yeah, exactly. Tough times. And, you know, that was probably, what, 90s with the modems. This was even before that. This was like in the 80s. And so they were looking for a term on what to call your character on the screen. And they ended up using a Sanskrit term, avatar, which meant when there was a divine entity, it was like this big divine entity that would squeeze themselves into a human body. So like an incarnation of the divine is sort of what it meant. And they said that it felt like they were squeezing themselves into these telephone lines

because it was pre-internet. Oh, that's how you describe it like a telephone line. Yeah, they were describing it as a telephone, and they were squeezed, the guys who built this game were saying it felt like they were squeezing themselves into this small little telephone line, and they were inhabiting that little character on the screen. And this is a 2D. I mean, if you bring up Habitat, you can see, I mean, this is like, you know, 8-bit graphics. Sure. Going way back. It was the first concept.

Yeah, it was a first concept. So it was a multiplayer online role-playing game. It wasn't so much massively multiplayer. That's where the term massively came from later on was when you could support a lot more users. And that's actually part of the definition of the Metaverse is one that can support, you know, millions of simultaneous users. Like even in Fortnite when you had like those concerts in Fortnite, like Travis Scott and a bunch of other ones, they had like 12 million people attending the concerts. But they weren't all on the same server. Like it felt like they were all together, but they weren't like 12 million people that were really together interacting with each other.

It was just they could only handle a certain amount of people on each server. and so you were watching it with a created an image like they were yeah created like yeah you thought you were there with all 12 million people but it's almost like it's almost like if you had different you know concert halls in different cities and there's 12 million people across all the cities but how different really is it though because if you go to a concert with 60,000 people there and you're there with your friends first of all you're only probably talking with your friends secondly the only people that are actually reachable to talk to are in the three rows around you and outside that you're not going to talk to anybody that's true yeah

well that's why the illusion works too, because it felt just like being at a concert. But so with Habitat, so they ended up using this term avatar because of that, and I think it kind of stuck for video games. And it's not a bad way to describe what I think of as the great simulation, the video game of life. And it's a new way to think about, you know, how people have talked about incarnation in general, that there's a part of us outside this rule.

Now, do we become too identified with our roles? Yeah, I think we do, right? We think I am me, this is my identity, and you're you, and this is your identity, but and these other people, you know, they have this other identity, and I don't like these people. I mean, we see it online, forget like the video game, Nazi, I mean, we see it with just political stuff online. Oh, yeah. It's like, you know, my tribe and your tribe, and there's such an identification with the tribe. And, you know, we've become much too tribalized than I think.

percent that's happened because of social media but it's also once we start playing these roles it's like we're conditioned into a certain point of view then we start to repeat the things that our tribe says but you know what and again there's also a parallel here ris to what you're saying too when you're talking about controlling another world I think a big part of the reason we get so tribal online is because so much of it is behind the keyboard right so we feel braver to be able to say things and i mean i don't do this stuff but a lot of people out there do it to the point that they start to vitriolically be if it's negative and most of it is become that character so if you're operating a simulated world you're behind the the the the stage here

behind the curtains and you may do things through that character that's why you know the 12 year plays grand theft auto and beeps every time he goes by a girl to get the titties to fucking fly out he's not going to do that in real life but he can he feels emboldened to do that in grand theft auto yeah yeah well i think it's this case where as i was saying we can have experiences in that world that we can't have outside that world and it's true when you meet people in real life they aren't as vitriolic as they are online 100% right there are things people say on line, they'll never say to somebody in person because now you're dealing with the real person. But I think part of what we forget here, and this is why when people come to me and say,

you know, NPCs, everybody's an NPC. Like I had a woman saying to me, I think my husband's an NPC was. And I said, now she didn't necessarily mean it in a bad way. I don't know how you mean that in a good way. But she meant it in the sense that I think everybody is an NPC but me is I think is where she was going with this. That's not narcissistic at all. Right. But what I said to her was, well, look, I wouldn't necessarily view it that way.

A better way to view it is that everybody else is also a source player. And you're dealing with an actual person behind the identity or an actual player or soul, if you will. But we all dip into this what I've been calling NPC mode. We're playing different roles for different people in our lives. So that role may be a minor role that we're playing in their lives. It could just be, you know, somebody smiles at you and you're having a bad day or something, right? That's just a random role. Is that an NPC that was created by the simulation or is it an actual person?

I would suggest maybe it's a person who's playing the game who then has a quest or for whatever reason, you know, they decide to play that role for you. But that doesn't mean that they don't have their own storyline that they're going out and continuing to live. And so I think that's a way we could kind of understand when people, but now I just got done saying people aren't as vitriolic in real life. And yet there's all these conflicts in the world. And there's people are, in fact, very tribal in real life. Yes. And they do get to that stage where, you know, they want to kill each other. Where they're emboldened to do so.

They're emboldened to do so by the role that they're playing. Correct. And I think if we were to step back and say, okay, this is just a role, but there's a real person behind, you know, real soul that's just like me behind it. So this is a very spiritual message. And that's why I think, you know, the simulation hypothesis provides us, it's not a new religion. Sometimes I get, I get scientific people trying to dismiss it and say, oh, that's just religion. Well, it's not a religion by itself, but it is, I think, getting at some of the key points of the religion, which is what is the point and purpose of this game? Well, one, it's to have experiences, but two,

if you look at the Life Review, it's how you treat other people is what actually matters. So it's not Grand Theft Auto. Now, some people might decide to make it like Grand Theft Auto, but there again, I think forgetting the purpose. I mean, the essence of the golden rule, the essence of karma, the essence of going to heaven or hell. Like all of these things, if you look at the essence of them, what is it that are trying to say?

It's we're here to have relationships with other people and how we treat them is extremely important. Yeah, we have a significant amount of evil that exists in our world. Now, it's better than it was 2,000 years ago, literally statistically. like if you look like Stephen Pinker's research and how he points out all the different metrics of how the world has become better overall doesn't mean there's not still a significant room for improvement though because of all the people that do do bad things that exist in our world including those that are in power so you had mentioned like the writer's room example and I keep thinking about that with everything you're saying because in a writer's room they have to create these characters so like if you think about the people who wrote the sopranos which from my mom money greatest writing in TV history they all sat in a room and as far as we know they're all law-abiding citizens all decent people they don't kill people or do anything right yet they had to write up these characters to the point that you know you have a main character who's capable of

killing his own nephew right right and so they have to go to these dark places that exist within the human experience maybe not their direct experience but that exist in this world that we have because there are people like Tony Soprano out there and they have to create this in this other world. So if we are a simulation here and we are being created even by ourselves, meaning like as we've said all day

it could be me operating on the outside or someone else operating on the outside, we think of things that are above this world of having all-knowing power that are above what we can understand which would mean that the mistakes we, hypothetically, the mistakes we make in this world which include evil, you'd be above

that somewhere else because you're on another level of the game. And yet, under that scenario, those people on that other level are still using this opportunity to inflict some evil that goes back to the example Dief was giving as well where you play the simulation. Some people actually become the Nazi. Is there just something in even the simulating, whatever that is, I don't want to call it human, but the experience of whatever that is that makes us want to explore what dark places are and then the, I guess, repercussions and consequences of that play out within our simulated world it's a complicated way of asking it but i hope you understood that yeah i know i i did and i think i think it's a good point

and it's worth bringing up you know i use the writer's room as an example but usually in the writer's room when they create these bad situations um the actors pretty much have to go along with it yes more or less i mean unless you're tom cruise and you have enough power you know to tell the director Yeah, Scientology or whatever. But you have enough of box office clout that you can say, I don't want my character to do that. Maybe that's... How do you say no to Tom Cruise?

Yeah. It's like, we're not going to do that. That's right. You don't, you know. Exactly, yeah. But for most actors, they have to go along with it. And I've said that we can treat the simulation idea literally that this is a computer simulation

and world based on information with bits of information. And I've also said we can look at it as a metaphor because a video game is just bits of information, but it's actually rendered in a way that makes it seem like a real experience. And I've also said that I think the religious scriptures were using old metaphors, and there's an example that I used. There's a guy that I quote in this book, and I wrote another book called Wisdom of a Yogi about him. Swami Yogananda, he wrote autobiography of a yogi. And he was one of the

first Indian yogis to come over to the U.S. in 1920. So at that time, he was trying to explain some of these yogic ideas to an American audience. And that book became quite popular later on after his death. I mean, it was passed around in the 60s. That's how a lot of people during the 60s and 70s learned about meditation and yoga was through his book. Autobiography of a yogi. Let's see. It's not, no, that's not that guy. Just do, just search for autobiography of yoga. That looks like Vladimir Putin was India. Yeah, if you just do a search for autobiography of yogi, you'll see. There's a picture of him on the cover. There, that's that's Yogananda.

Okay. And you can see Steve Jobs. Yeah, he looks more of the part. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, this was Steve's like. Favorite book, right? When he died, you know, they gave away copies of it at his memorial service at Stanford.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, in his iPad, when his biographer showed out Walter Isaacs, and that was the only book that he had on his iPad. So he came over in the 20s, and he was looking for a way to try to explain some of these ideas. And in 1920, if you've ever watched like Downton Abbey or any of these shows that take place like kind of in the teens in that 19 teens, they had World War I, which they called

the Great War. It wasn't just we think of it as, ah, just a small war before World War II. No, right? It was the first mechanized war. Absolutely. The killing was a level of killing was extraordinary. And so he was watching these newsreels, which is how they would get the news back then. They would go to the theater. And before another film, they would show these newsreels that

what's been going on and say with the war. And he saw all this suffering, and he had a vision of, speaking of Germans, you know, it was Germans and allies in some battle and some guy was dying. And he started to pray, like, why would you allow such suffering in this world? Which is another question that comes up oftentimes in both the religious context, but also a simulation concept, is why do you allow so much suffering? And it kind of relates to what you're saying in this world. And he got back a vision, and in that vision it said, well, it's like a film.

Like the actors aren't actually suffering, but the characters are suffering. And it's a key part of this world. And he had a quote, he used to say, ceaseless joy is not the nature of this world, right? It's almost like that's not the genre of our simulation. This is the simulation you go to when you want to experience some of these things. But I also made the point that at the time, and he would use this metaphor because it was the latest technology.

If you think about it, film projectors, right? Yes. I mean, before 1920, there wasn't really. I mean, yes, there were films, but it was really relatively new, and it was still silent films at that point for the most part. And so, you know, if he were alive today, I think he'd say it's like a film, we're like actors, but it's an interactive film, and we're the audience, but we're also, you know, watching ourselves.

And we have a script, but we can change the script, so we still have free will. So what does that sound like? To me, that sounds much more like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game where there are roles that we've played out, but we can make Joe's choices. And I wonder if that isn't also part of the purpose here. So unlike, say, the Sopranos, where Tony has to kill, you know, his nephew, Christopher,

that part of the reason why that challenge is placed in front of Tony in this world is, will he or won't he? So it gives us a choice. And we keep hearing this in various spiritual traditions. Are the challenges put in front of us to see how we will treat that person. The essence of karma in the Indian traditions is, you know, it's not just, oh, you kill somebody

and now they're going to kill you again. That's like the simple version, right? It's more that the action or that you put out there or the deed that you did is laid a seed and that seed grows into a situation in the future. I call karma like a quest generating algorithm for the video game. it's like a series of things in a database that says here's something you might want to resolve that resolution doesn't have to be that Christopher kills him it could be that you know he has the choice of whether to repeat that mistake and I feel as free will I think so I think that there are

certain storylines that we generally have agreed to but we can still ignore those we can do other stuff if we want to but it takes us in maybe the situation that we weren't planning to be in the writer's room has to figure out how to get you back on track if it's possible to get you back on track to whatever's going on. Now, this gets into the question of time and timelines, and, you know, we talked a little bit about this last time, so we may not want to go too deep on it this time, but like possible futures. Do we try out these possible futures? And then we end up choosing the one that is the one that, you know, what would be sort of the consensus future based upon the choices of multiple people that are looking at it. Well, is that, in trying out those futures, is that like a seed scenario?

And I just made up that term. So let me explain what I mean by that. You had said earlier, you had given the example of creating, you know, all these different versions of ancient civilization. So we use the examples of like ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, and ancient Greece. So as you let them developed over a time warp period to get to the present day or beyond, are you based on meaning, something that was from the past, creating the butterfly effect to see what it turns into and then picking that reality? I think so. I think there's an element of that. Now, I think it's more like we're pre-visualizing what happens, and then we are picking one of those realities. So there's

an interpretation of quantum mechanics that basically says, rather than simply us choosing, you know, the probability way of collapsing for the cat to be alive or dead, there's actually several possible futures. And those futures are sending us back information. It's almost like in, so I got interested in this idea, and I wrote a book called The Simulated Multiverse, about this idea, if you just look back at how like a chess game is played, an AI chess game, or the first...

Wait, an AI chess game. Sorry, just a code. that's playing chess. Okay. If you just think of a simple, there's an algorithm called the Minimax algorithm. This is a really simple one.

In fact, we could bring up a, we could bring up just a little diagram. There's tons of diagrams out there. But the basic idea is that what these chess playing computers would do is they would basically try out several moves and say, okay, what's the most likely scenario? If I do this move, what's that guy going to do? The one on the left...

Yeah, so they're taking permutation. They're taking all kinds of permutations of past moves. Yeah, but they're also trying to project forward and say, what would happen? Sure. Am I going to win in this scenario? Am I going to win in that scenario? And there's this idea of a fitness function or some type of function that says, Impact site located, entering spacecraft.

Contact, but identified life form. I can tell them. We were safer in space. FX's Alien Earth, an original series now streaming on Disney Plus. Sign up today. 18 plus subscription required TNCs apply. How good is scenario X or Y, 10 moves down?

And so you can tweak those parameters to try to get the game to choose. Like if it's 50 moves down, it has to keep track of a heck of a lot more. data right but if it's just the simplest expression is what is the next best move for me but that's not as good as going out two moves ahead sure because you can test out multiple scenarios and i wonder if the simulation isn't doing that where at a civilizational level or even at a personal level we are branching out different possibilities to try them out and then we are then picking because picking the one

that is the most appropriate. Now, I'm using that in quotes because, you know, it's hard to define what is the most appropriate. It depends on the nature of the simulation, the nature of our roles. It could be what's best for one person is not best for another person, so you may have different conflicting types of fitness functions

or appropriateness functions. But the basic idea is I think we could be in a situation where multiple timelines have played out, and that also is what leads us into this sense of deja vu. So getting back to what I was saying is in this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if these futures are sending back messages to us,

how's that possible unless they exist? All of them? Well, any, let's say three of them. Let's say there's three of them, right? But that's where you lose me. How to three, because then there's three, to think of it like decision trees, there's three potential decision trees,

and there's only one that can, that technically would tie back, right? Because there's only one that ends up happening unless it's a multiverse scenario where they all happen. Yeah. And so my point, a simulated multiverse was exactly that where in a multiverse, the way that it's normally defined. So the multiverse is a second interpretation of the quantum indeterminacy

and the observer effect. And what they say in the multiverse, and people know about this because of superhero movies, which have, you know, different versions of Batman and different versions of Superman. And Spider-Man being one of the better, I think, the animated Spider-Man is probably one of the better multiverse movies, I think. But in that scenario, the world is actually branching off into multiple universes. And this is one of the reasons why some scientists don't like the multiverse idea.

They're like, okay, how can that be happening? How can we have that many universes just branching off? It doesn't seem parsimonious. It's like it's just wasting resources. but if it's a simulated multiverse then it's a much easier scenario to buy I think because what you're doing is you're not cloning the whole physical universe you're just cloning information you're just basically branching off and information cloning is much easier than like cloning a whole planet like can we clone and we can clone something really small but

we can't clone something really big it takes time even in nature even if it's the same genetics it takes time to like grow something but don't tell ben lamb that that's right uh he was the dire wolf guy right that's right he was in that seat a couple months ago he was okay but he still had to grow that well like it didn't start off as an adult clone yeah it's a woolly rat right now oh is it okay yeah they're working on the woolly mammoth yeah they're working on getting it up there that's that's pretty interesting but it's very easy to clone information in fact most computer processors they have a command at the low level called clone the bits of information.

And so it's much easier to try out different scenarios and to have what a multiverse just means you're trying this, now you're trying that, and you're trying that. But you can also prune the tree in a simulated scenario. You don't have to go through all possible scenarios everywhere. So you can get rid of this parsimonious idea.

Like scientists like things to be parsimonious, which basically means they don't want to waste a lot of resources Sure. But many scientists do agree on the multiverse idea. Many don't like it, so you have this kind of, you know, fight going on, whether that's a realistic idea or not. But in a simulated multiverse, you can have a branch, and based upon the observers who are watching the simulations, they can prune certain branches so that it's not infinite.

Physicists love infinity. Okay, physicists always like to talk about, oh, that's just infinite. It just goes on for infinity. computer scientists we hate infinity because we know we don't have infinite resources we don't have infinite time we don't have infinite memory and so what we do is we try to optimize and so a lot of my conclusions about us the physical world being a simulation are based upon things that look like optimizations in to me having built video games and having written code and this is one of those where what it means to clone a universe is all you're doing is you're running a different scenario and then you're coming back and now you're running this scenario so it's very possible and we talked about philip k dick but i don't know if i told you this story did we talk about the jfk scenario we talked a lot about man in high castle we also watched the video that you referenced earlier where he talked about fragmentation yeah and how then he was able to re get all those

memories and we talked about multiple ones of his book i don't yeah think we talked on camera about the jfk yeah so this is interesting because so what we talked about with respect the man in the High Castle was, was that a real timeline when Germany and Japan won the war, World War II? Yeah, just as a refresher for people made in High Castle, if you have not seen the TV show, which is based on Philip K. Dick, it's the idea that what you just said, Nazis won World War II along with Japan, and so they have now colonized much of the world, including the United States. Japan controls the West. Nazis control the East, but there's a small group of people within the United States who have access to these reels that show the Allies winning the war, which is an

ultimate other scenario of the multiverse that we actually exist in here but that they're trying to make true in their warped reality but please continue right so they're seeing a different timeline basically in these reels and then there's there's a guy that can actually travel so that's a spoiler alert at least at the end of season one but it's interesting because when i interviewed his wife philip k dick's wife tessa who's still around you know she's she's much older now but she told me that he came to believe that was a real timeline, the Germany and Japan, winning the war timeline. And I mentioned it earlier when I talked about fragmentary memories

versus getting the phone memories. But she said that in his case, the simulators that he was communicating with who were supposedly changing variables also said that they prevented the JFK assassination in Dallas. But then what happened in the next timeline was he got assassinated in Orlando. and then if they try to change that

he got assassinated somewhere else or the timeline just led to a worse outcome meaning it led to like a nuclear war type scenario and so they're back to this timeline so we almost have this idea of a consensus what Philip K. Dick called a consensus gentium reality most of us remember one timeline but other some people remember little bits and pieces

of other timelines this touches on the Mandela effect which we spent a little bit of time on last time. But it's interesting that that's a way to describe, you know, this idea of trying out multiple things. It's possible that we are currently only on one branch, right? This is a branch that's also being tried out to see where it will end up. And perhaps this branch will be reset at some point in the future. Because like in the- We mean reset.

Meaning like what we think of as history. might what we might wake up one day and think something else happened like the soviet union didn't collapse in 1989 or um you know uh the world war two scenario or jfk didn't because we think the past is fixed right but the delayed choice experiment uh in the the delayed double slit sorry double slit delayed choice experiment by john wheeler who was one of my favorite physicists uh shows us that when the probability wave collapses, what happens is we're not just choosing the current moment, but we're choosing from one of multiple possible pasts. Okay, that sounds weird, doesn't it? I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Yes, please extrapolate. Okay, so let's bring up the cosmic delayed choice experiment. And this is really weird. So quantum mechanics is weird. really weird and I'll show you how this ties to video games which I think will make it easier for people to understand but let's see that one on the left yeah

let's go to let's get a different one that shows earth I just go to images the second one no the one on the bottom left which has the the the yeah and sorry where did it go back no go back Joe sorry the yellow line one yeah the yellow yeah let's go to the yellow line one because I think that's a perhaps an easy Can we blow that up? Or how about the one on the right, the bottom right? Right there? Yeah, that's a good one.

All right, okay. Let's blow that up and let Riz cook. Okay, so this is one of the hardest concepts to understand, and one of the most mind-blowing, because if the simulation hypothesis says physical space is not what we think it is, but also time is not what we think it is, and that's what this experiment when Wheeler conceived it, and he worked at Princeton, he had an office across from Einstein, He coined the phrase, It Forbitt. I'm sure we talked about that last time.

Yeah, we talked about that in the first hour last time. So let's suppose we, there was an object that's really far away, like a billion light years away. That's that object on the upper right there. Yeah, so the little sun-looking thing. Yeah, it's like a sun-looking thing, but so far away. And it's sending out light, and then suppose we're down here on Earth on the bottom left. And we have these two telescopes. And the telescopes can figure out, you see the galaxy in the middle or whatever that object is in the middle.

it could be a black hole, could be a galaxy, that the light has to go either to the left or to the right of that galaxy before it gets here. Now, in this picture, you can look and it looks like it's closer to the source than it is to Earth, right? So if that is a billion light years away, let's suppose that is, you know, 300 million light years from that, so 700 million light years,

sorry, 700 million years from here and 700 million light years from here. okay or let's just put in the middle it's much simpler to understand okay let's suppose it's right in the middle so the light has to go around that galaxy and the decision of whether to go to the left or to the right would have had to have been made 500 million years ago half a billion years ago because of the time passing between us being able to yeah to get it to get here it takes half a billion years so it's kind of like saying something happened in 1900 you know it had to be 125 years ago because that's kind of when it happened but because we know the speed of light is fixed

and that's what light years are it's the amount of time it takes light to go a year that's about how far away it would have to be which is also how long ago that decision would have had to have been made but what the delayed choice experiment is showing us is that when the light is measured here by the telescope it's only then that the decision is made about whether the light went to the left or to the right. So that's weird because it's basically saying the light is in a state of superposition, meaning there's two possible histories. There's a history where it went left and there's a history that it went right. And it should have been done back in the days of the dinosaurs is when the decision should be made. But what this experiment is showing us

is that the decision is made when we measure it now. So we're in fact choosing from one of several possible pasts. Okay, that's very strange. So that's what I was getting at when I said this branch could have been just a branch later on. We might wake up one day and realize there was a different timeline. But that would require things that we have quite, like, the way we understand history is also the way that gatekeepers are able to control some things to show us what it is. Okay.

but that that also means that some things that we have quite literally seen with our own eyes that no gatekeeper could stop us from seeing you're saying that one day we could wake up and it could be like oh we didn't see that we saw something else so the berlin wall never came down it's still standing there and that's what i think the mandela effect could be it's a useful way to think about this idea but isn't it objectively not there right now the berlin wall is gone yeah it's not there right now absolutely but you're saying i could wake up 10 years from now and it would be there and it was never gone i'm saying that is a possibility okay but if that happened you would remember the berlin wall as having gone down but it would still be there is one of

so i'm saying maybe there's somebody today who is remembering the like Tiananmen square so this is you we went with me are on the sit there's something going on with our simulations yeah we're picture in the same things tank boy is one of the big mandela facts yeah and uh you know i was i mean i remember i watched it on tv at the time where the guy was standing did you yeah i watched well in the news back then i know was it real time but did i really something else exactly did i really see it or not well because i thought like many people that the tank you know came and the guy went back and you can bring it up for those who who don't remember uh this tank boy and so the question i always asked people is Did the tank run him over or not?

Did he survive? And what I remember is I think what the majority of people remember who saw it, which is that the tank went this way and he went and stepped in front of it, but it didn't run him over like he survived that encounter. Yeah, this is the guy right here. It was just some guy during the Tiananmen Square protest in China, and they sent him the military. Which never happened. If you go on TikTok, it never happened.

Oh, really? I don't know if that's still a thing. Yeah, well, TikTok is still around, right? You can still get in there. But there are people who remember the tank running over the guy. That's the interesting thing. And this is the bloodiest thing they ever saw on TV. And so how do we explain that?

And we can't. We can either say it's bad memory, which I think is easier to do. And anyway, I get more into this in my other book, The Simulated Multiverse, but I think it's a great way to think about this idea. And it turns out one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, It's a guy named Erwin Schrodinger. Schrodinger's cat, his name. In fact, he came up with the experiment

because he hated the idea that the cat could be both alive and dead. He said, that's ridiculous. How can the cat be both alive or dead? And yet, that's what the interpretation came out to. But he actually gave an obscure speech back in the 1940s that I was able to uncover when I was looking into these timelines,

where he said, we would, in fact, not just be choosing from several states of superposition, we would be choosing from one of several simultaneous histories, right, which would mean, so not only are you choosing whether the cat is alive or dead, you're choosing whether the cat ate came in through the front door or it came in through the kitchen, and before it came in the front door, you know, was it out in the street or was it sitting? You're controlling every possible butterfly effect, effectively.

You're selecting it in a way. So physicists don't like to, you're not really changing the past, but you're selecting a different path. That sounds like a cop-out. It is weird, right? You're not changing the past. You're selecting the past. Now, then we get into these questions of consensus reality.

Are we all selecting? And once we've all selected it, it stays. Right. So in computer science, once you can cache a value and multiple people will see that value and it's still there. So there's this idea that once we've all selected it, it's pretty stable. But how would we know? And these are, I think, big methods. metaphysical questions. I'll say. Yeah. But it's fun to think about sometimes. It is. It is. You know,

you and I last time got a little bit into talking about how some of this stuff could relate to aliens or just to keep it simple things that aren't of this earth, regardless of what biological type they may be. And, you know, since speaking with you, I've had some of my own experiences on and off camera that just, piss me off about this stuff because to be clear about aliens yes yes when I when I go to look at the mathematical probability of intelligent life in the universe it has to be there I mean I yeah I've had this argument with Brian Keating and other guys before who are like well it doesn't have to you know there is a possibility it's not but like to me the chances are so minuscule because of even the vast amount we know from things like the James Webb telescope and then what we don't know that exists far beyond that beyond even our comprehension so I have no doubt it's out there but then the physics of whether

or not they've been here or what type of advancements they have this is where it gets into the hey anybody's guess anybody's game and I'm not one of these guys that's like I want to believe like there's been a UFO that landed on the White House lawn like I'm into data I'm into I am into good stories but where can we find a shred of evidence that that shows that and to me if there were some sort of connection beyond this realm that could be part of the simulation theory that has to do with aliens or it could be something separate as well then there are governments that would probably know about it and what I've really run into that's very frustrating for me is that there was there was a podcast I recorded shortly after I recorded

with you last time that came out before yours it was episode 266 and 267, but I had my friend James Fox in here. And then he brought, I saw this. Yeah, he brought in Jason Sands with him. And nothing against Jason Sands personally, really nice guy. It was nice to talk with him off camera. He served in the military for a long time. I thought he was a good dude. But to Jason's credit, he talked about all of the severe PTSD and mental health problems that that has caused him. And when you listen to the stories, he tells, I'll give my friend Darcy, we're some credit on this one. He was onto it on day one. It's literally like lifted from Gaia. Like, remember in Stepbrothers where he's in the interview and he starts talking about his life,

like living in Boston and solving equations on a boy? Oh, you haven't seen this? You mean stepbrothers or was that in Goodwill Hunting? That's exactly the joke. So John C. Riley is going to a janitor interview in stepbrothers in a suit and he starts telling a story and the interviewer's like is this the plot to goodwill hunting and he's like no and he keeps going and then they're like i'm pretty sure this is the plot to goodwill hunting like that's kind of what happened there and the reason it it really warped me is because you mean so the story that this guy that jason was telling me it's basically lifted from guy that's all bullshit was proven it's six ways to sunday that that's bullshit and the guys that gave James

Jason and said you should look at this are guys who have given stuff that's very interesting to me evidence in the past vis-a-vis like from the government related to aliens and to me

it's created a bit of a house of card scenario where I'm like if they just gave him Jason what the fuck else are they given us here right so is it all BS? Yeah so let's let's we'll look at this in a couple different layers but let's start here

if the government does know this stuff And they're sending out people to talk to people like me or, you know, other people of platforms. Is anything that they agree to release publicly most likely bullshit? Are you asking my opinion? Yeah, your opinion. Well, you know, my experience comes both from people that are in the public eye and then people that are not in the public eye. Right? So, you know, people come to me oftentimes in confidence.

they don't want the story to be told or they don't necessarily want to be identified with them, right? So I think they're doing, like the best lies are ones that have an element of truth to them or a kernel of truth. And so I think you may be seeing some element of disinformation or misinformation. I always forget the definition of those two. I always treat them like the same thing. Yeah, that's sort of what I do. Yeah, they're technically slightly different. but I always treat them the same.

But basically, they're taking something that might have, that has an core element or kernel of truth, and then they're embellishing it in such a way that it becomes easy to disprove the big story, right? Like the people who are talking about, there's a space force, there's all this stuff, like that stuff, I think is easier to disprove than, you know, a group of people

had a sighting of a metallic craft. I mean, that's not at all unusual. In fact, I've talked to so many people that have looked up and they tell me they saw something that was solid metal in the daytime in the middle of the day at 3 p.m. with blue skies. The chances that they're wrong about that are, you know, are very low. Now they saw something. The question is, what did they see? That's right. I think personally, you know, I'm about, I would say I'm about 95% sure that there were reverse engineering programs in at least one of these major.

your aerospace companies. Pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick the ones we know. Sure. Blockheed aerospace, uh, the aerospace corp, north of Grumman, right? All these. If that were real, that wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. I just want to know like what, what are they saying about it? That's like real versus not. You know, because I met people who worked in these companies and they said so at the very least, I believe these companies received materials, quote unquote materials that they were trying to reverse engineer that were very advanced. That doesn't mean they received an entire UFO craft, a working craft. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.

I don't know. I'm just, I don't have confirmation of a full working craft. What I do have confirmation of is materials. Materials could be a piece of a hull, could be a whole craft, you know, somewhere in that neighborhood. So I'm pretty confident that people are seeing things and I'm pretty confident that we're trying to analyze something. That said, I also come to conclusion that there are so many different aspects of this

phenomenon. Some of them may be the standard extraterrestrial. Some of them may be more like these beings that have been around all along. Like in the Middle Eastern traditions, we have the gin. And Jacques Valet goes into this in his work, like Passport to Magonia. He's using some of the mythology from France and the British Isles and European mythology. But you have this in other parts of the world where they have these other beings, many of whom are sort of smaller. that exist that can see us but we can't see them and then they can appear so i also think there's an interesting aspect uh to this whether they're alien or not what we're seeing are actual avatars of the beings themselves avatars of them yeah so you know gary no one used this term

recently uh in an interview talking about are the beings that people are seeing are avatars now he was using them in the context of the film if you've seen you've seen the film avatar you have a physical body that's being controlled by somebody here. So it's still the same basic idea, right? In this case, it's a physical body. Of course, if we're in a simulation, then it's all virtual. Anyway, so it doesn't matter. But we're seeing a projection of these beings

and it's being controlled from this other dimension. To me, that's an interesting theory because it meets some of the guidelines of stories that people have been reporting for generations of people coming through walls and being able to silence them using a wall, a sword, a wand, for example, paralyze them that way and then take them into the world of the fay in the British Isles or the world of the gin and do all of these things. So that's another

element. So I guess, you know, I've kind of gotten a little far afield from, I think, your original question. No, it's okay. Keep going. But I think that that's an interesting element to explore is that we are seeing beings that could have their own version of the simulation or they could be actually here, we just can't see them. So it's very possible in a video game. You can have people there that can see you on their screen, but you can't see them. So we do this in video games all the time, depending on who has what capabilities or what, like a super user might be able to see everything that's there. But your ordinary users, which is like us, we can only see things at certain times if they want us to see these things. And this ties to all kinds of high strangeness.

If they want us to see things. If they want us to see them. And when you talk to people who've had UFO experiences, you know, many of them, sometimes they felt like, oh, I was drawn to look at this thing. And nobody else was. It's kind of a weird thing where you have a connection. I don't know if you've ever had a personal sighting.

I have not. No. I don't think I've had anything remotely close to it, to be honest. And I'm so fascinated by it. So I'm like, if you're going to show yourself, please show yourself to me. But what I will say that I don't discount, because I don't want to be one of these guys that automatically offhand just dismisses anything that someone says. I like to listen to people and see what their perspective is, what their experience might be. You never know. It might not be what they thought it was or it could be, which would be the wild outcome scenario.

But when you see a lot of these sightings, particularly from World War II throughout the rest of the 20th century into the 21st around the world. and let's focus on the 20th century pre-internet when people couldn't just like connect with each other on reddit and shit the similarity of the experiences of people who come from different cultures different places different times different their own types of realities the similarities and what they see and some of the actual experiences they have if it's of the third kind as well where they actually see a being or something is data that is tough for me me to ignore and what i wonder is if it's something that only they could see and because they're born with something that you know allows them to see something that may be assimilated in front them i don't know but you also you just use that line there where it's like if they allow themselves to be seen or something like that i think about this all the time because if you're dealing with an all-knowing species whatever it may be who can literally traverse the speed of more knowing than us Exactly. Who can knock down the speed of light to be able to get here. Why would they let their drone be seen by humans? Wouldn't you think they'd have the physics to figure out invisibility? So I've always posited that if there are some sightings and stuff like that, it's a part of them simulating how we would respond if they gave an impetus to like one small subset of people that then had to go to the rest of the population and express that so they could see how.

the human experience would deal with hearing something beyond their reality. That is very much a possibility to me and remains a possibility in spite of, you know, some bad data, I think we've gotten to the public. Yeah, I think there's something to that because I've been told by certain UFO researchers that there have been situations or sightings where one person could see the thing and the other person couldn't. Or one person saw it looking like a cylinder and one person saw it looking like a cirque or a disc. like far enough away from each other

that it would be hard. That's right. Especially if they were in the same car. They were standing right next to each other. And so that opens up this idea that the UFO, not saying that it's not physical, but that it gets presented to us

in different ways as a physical object. And that is something that in a virtual environment is relatively easy to do. I mean, I also had people tell me, okay, I was sitting there at Joshua Tree, clear blue sky, looking up, there's nothing there.

That's a bad start, Josh. Joshua Tree. There's some other things going on there. Yeah. This was, I don't know if he's sober going to Joshua tree. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if he was taking any psychedelics. But I've had people tell me this from other places too, so it wasn't just there.

But saying you're looking up clear blue sky, there's nothing there, and suddenly this thing just kind of appears out of nowhere. To me, that sounds a lot like when you, in a video game, you go from one place to the next, you don't always walk all the way. But out. Yeah, you portal over, right? That, I think, makes more sense. You're basically going from these XYZ coordinates to these XYZ coordinates in the physical world. So you're jumping over, and then you materialize over there, and your avatar is dematerialized over here or your ship. And so to me, that remains an interesting possibility.

And this question of whether they get presented to us as aliens, I think there's a cultural aspect to this. So we had a screening of close encounters over at ASU. in Arizona and I gave a little talk telling, you know, mostly academics but there were just some science fiction fans there too but I gave a talk about many of the threads from real life, uphologists and ufology

that were in that film and, you know, many of them weren't aware of that like they didn't know who Jacques Valet was because they weren't clued into the UFO subject who was part of the inspiration for the French guy but I also talked about well, so not only is this incorporating real world narratives about things like mass sightings

It took place in Indiana, and there were a lot of mass sightings in that area. When, approximately? In the Midwest, I mean, there was a whole bunch in the 70s, 60s, 70s, that area. And Spielberg released a movie in 77, right? So he probably was making it from, like, 75 or somewhere around there is when he started making it. So it's probably more like 60s and 50s, probably, now that I think about it. And the high neck appeared in the movies. There are all these real-life narratives.

But then what I've heard Jacques say was that he didn't meet Spielberg until the film was well along. And he said the one thing he objected to was he presents it purely as an alien phenomenon and doesn't consider the other possibilities. That we are seeing things that are there, they're real, but they're not necessarily extraterrestrial. They could be from somewhere else. From somewhere else. Meaning they could be interdimensional beings, like I talked about with the gym or the fame. Like future humans and stuff like that. They could be future humans.

There's all these other theories that go beyond the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Or that they've been here all along. That's another hypothesis is that, you know, the cryptotterrestrial or the ultra-terrestrial hypothesis. They've been here all. But what he said was as, hold on, I'm sorry to cut you off. But when you say been here all along, meaning been on earth. Quite literally walking among us or just been on earth where we can't see them? Well, there's different flavors of the theories.

These are theories, right? There's the Silurian hypothesis. Have you ever heard that term? No. It's kems from Dr. Who. So in Dr. Who, which is British sci-fi series, there's this race of these reptilian-type beings who were on earth like a hundred million years ago,

like a long time ago. And they've been in hibernation for like, I don't know, millions of years. And he goes down and he finds them and they're in this giant cavern. And then one of them wakes up. And they're saying, well, we went in a hibernation for so long because of something, I forget what the reason was.

But the idea is that they were native to Earth before we were here. And that is a theory that is interesting because when you look at the beings, they all appear very similar, a kind of very humanoid. They seem closer to us than you might expect. Like there's a movie coming out, Project Hail Mary.

Project Hail Mary. Which is by, it was a book written by Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian. And, you know, if you read that book, he counters an alien and he doesn't really the alien looks like a spider or something like he doesn't look human

it's weird and so a lot of scientists say well they try to dismiss the UFO especially the beings when beings are encountered aspect of UFOs by saying well why would they look anything like us if they were really from another planet

that they might have evolved in such a different way for sure that and when people talk about abductions and hybrids okay that means they would have be pretty close to us genetically for there to be hybrids but this is this is also where you can get into the game of semantics and fairly so i've talked about this before on a lot of different podcasts of people but like if you just get down to the definition of the word alien right right you know if i were going to way over simplify it but to be fair it's like not off it means

something that's not of this earth and meaning something that's also i would extend that to not of the earth and the reality and time in which we live. And the example I've always cited as like a first layer of this would be Matthew McConaughey's character and interstellar. I may have told you this one last time, but just to rehash for people who didn't hear episode 274, Matthew McConaughey leaves Earth aged 45 or whatever in interstellar. He comes back 80 years later where it's only been whatever it was a year for him or something like that, maybe less.

Right. And so he is a 46-year-old man coming back and to a world where no one that was his same age exists anywhere near that at that point. It's all new people. There's a lot of new people that have been born that are completely of a different reality. And the world is totally different. So I have always posited, and I may not be correct. I'm just some fucking guy who hosts a podcast, but I've always posited that he's technically

an alien. So when Jacques Valet is righteously so saying to Steven Spielberg, hey, we got to consider some other possibilities here. But to me, a lot of those other possibilities that he's considering be it interdimensional beings, future beings, beings that have been here all along, but not living within the reality that we live in in America or in any country around the world, they're still a form of alien. There's still a form of alien, but they're not necessarily the extraterrestrial alien in the way that we think. And so where I was going with that close encounters thing is I think because it was so successful, on the one hand, it opened a lot of minds that there may be something weird going on. But it also limited the thinking of at least, you know, within the public, that these things have to be extraterrestrial. Like in the 50s, when they talked about aliens, they have to be from Mars or Venus.

That's just kind of because they understood Mars and Venus, therefore it was, it fit into the paradigm that they could understand. Like if you look at the contactees in the 50s, like Adamski and all these crazy stories that you hear back then. And he said, where are you from? and they said we're from Venus. Now, what if they needed to explain to him where they're from? And, you know, if they said that were from the multiverse or time travelers, they wouldn't have really understood it. And so they said they're from Venus.

And so the whole idea of Little Green Men from Mars became kind of a trope, if you will, for that time. I mean, now we know there are exoplanets on other star systems. So the explanation is, oh, they must be from another star system. at least the explanation of the media wants to talk about like i remember i wrote an article for nbc news a few years ago so mainstream media outlet about uh you sell out damn it riz that's right well this is interesting trust you well the title the article was i'm kidding with you yeah no i know you are but but uh the title article was uh the government

takes ufo seriously why doesn't silicon valley or academia and at one point i wanted to say well okay yes if they're physical craft then there may be some technology here we should try to learn what it is but I also wanted to explore these other possibilities like time travel interdimensional here all along types

of things and the editors were like no that's too complicated we got to cut that because there's not enough room people won't get it and I realized that when the media frames UFOs they're always framing it as extraterrestrial or it's just the secret programs that's it

In fact, I had one tell me, I think it was Discovery Channel, there was a show, and they called me up and said, maybe we want to interview you. What do you think they are? And I said, well, I don't think they're, they may not be extraterrestrial and they may not be, you know, just nothing. They're like, no, no, no, that's not what we want to. Right. And so they didn't interview me for the show because they wanted people who were going to say they're aliens. And then they mean they had a narrative?

Yeah, they had it. Exactly. Funny how that works, right? That's, with all the media, right? That never happens. I've never heard of that. Never, yeah, me neither, right? But it's almost like the science.

science fiction is influencing how we think about this. And it's also possible they're telling us, like if you had to go and explain to a civilization that didn't know about other planets where you're from, you know, what would you say? In Star Trek, they have the prime directive and they end up often going into these planets and they end up disguising themselves.

But some people always see stuff, right? Some people see the little shuttlecraft that they came down in or they saw them beaming in materializing out of nowhere and they have to come up with some lies they say we're from that we're from over there the other side of the planet right so they have to come up with something that people can understand so I wonder if there's a narrative cultural narratives that's affecting how we interpret something that I think is a real phenomenon just like I was saying with the religious if a thousand people have been to China and say there's you know something there okay they may be

describing different parts of China in some places it's warm and with beaches in another place it's like huge skyscrapers or in other places it's mountains and other places it's the desert but if enough people there's enough commonalities you can start to piece together that something is happening here so the question is what my my personal opinion is just that I think there is something real and that they're adding disinformation narratives on top of it yes in order to make it easily dismissable. I think you're probably spot on there. And I think a lot of it's working because you can take anything these days and make it a religion. And those people who may have want to drive that narrative, be them from government, people to work with government, whatever

might be. I think they have successfully, unfortunately been able to do that with a lot of people because a lot of people have tied their meaning of life to, you know, Pentagon leaks about aliens and it's like, you've got to be open to all of it, including what may be total bullshit. It doesn't mean that you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because someone's story turns out to be complete provable bullshit, it doesn't mean, therefore, there's no such thing as an alien.

But I think people have gotten that tied together in their head the wrong way. And then, like you've just been saying, in the last five, ten minutes, There's people like you who are looking at this from like, all right, yeah, yeah, no, no, like, there's shit out there that seems to exist, and I'll get with that. But also, what is it doing? Is it running our simulation, whatever it is? You know, are they of this earth and running this simulation seemingly from somewhere else, but they're actually here? Like, you know, not to be like the hippie pot smoke and let's think about all the possibilities guy, but let's think about all the possibilities and like do it from some sort of actual, as best.

you can with a hypothetical scientific method as you are trying to do making your hypothesis based on actual evidence here and and you had said this very early on i think this is a good plot spot to come back around to it to kind of tie this all together but you said when you first wrote this book in 2019 you had it at statistically maybe like a 50% possibility yeah like even you know uh if we can't tell if if the real world is real or not is real or not, then it's about a 50-50 chance. Okay. But also, I felt like we were 50% of the way to be able to produce these fully immersive simulations ourselves.

Okay. Now, we're a lot further along. What percentage do you put it on? I'd say it's at least 70% now. Now, what do you base? So let's start with the 50 and then work your way to the 70. What did you base that 50 off of? Like how, whether it was 51 or 52 or 48, whatever it was.

Like, how did you say, here's the number. This is how I got there. Well, so there's a methodical way, and then there's a bit of intuition that I'm adding on to it as well. And I think the methodical way, like in the book, I described these 10 stages of technology that we would have to build in order to build fully realistic simulations. Okay, so I mentioned that at the beginning, the simulation point. So I said, how far along are we in being able to build all of those things that I talked about? And I felt like we were close to halfway there. Got it.

And if we can get there, then probably somebody may already have gotten there. And we may be inside one of their simulations. And it would prove it if you got there. If we can do it. It would successfully say, yes, it's a simulation. Well, no, it wouldn't prove. It would at least say it's very possible. Because right now people are like, that's not even possible to build a simulation that looks like the real world.

And so it would make it so that if we can build a simulation with people, in there who think it's real, then the chances that we're in a simulation just went up significantly. Because if it's impossible to do, then nobody could have done it, maybe. That's sort of where the argument is coming from. All right, maybe I'm misunderstanding this. So let me just translate something. You tell me how wrong I am. Were you saying that you were 50% sure that it was possible that a simulation could exist and you're now whatever it is, 70% sure? And if you get to 100% you are 100% sure that it's possible but not 100% sure that it actually exists yeah so this is where we have to tie back to Bostrom's argument remember I was saying that the the argument that

Elon Musk used that said the chances were in base reality is one in billion so if it's possible then whoever got there is going to build lots of simulated worlds and then there's only one physical world, there's a lot of simulated worlds. Which one are we in? Are we in a physical world or simulated world? It's like 99% at that point, right? 99.99% likely that we'd be in a simulation. That's where that kind of original argument came from. That said, I was also relying on the fact that quantum physics is telling us that the world isn't real. And so if it's a simulated virtual reality, then I think that starts to make more sense. And then I was also using intuition on how the mystics have all been telling us the same thing,

and I think it's unlikely. So that's what made me say it's more than 50% back then. So the 50% was based more on technological progress. That's kind of how it was getting there. Now I'm saying we're probably 70% of the way there, and if we get to 100%, then it's 99.99% likely that we're in a simulation. And does the simulation, if this is way too broad to ask us, to try to bring this back to Earth if you can,

but if you are able to prove that and get to that 99.9% does that then prove that AI is a part of AI is definitely a part of the bootloader to that simulation? I think so. It shows that AI has been used to create a world and probably has been used to create the physical world. The whole physical world is probably because if you think of the vast numbers, going back to the example of no man sky and 18 quintillion plants, and going back to your point earlier about statistically, it's pretty likely there's life out there. Why? Because there's so many. I mean, the universe is so large. And so if we live in a simulation, that means that these things are generated on demand. Right. So things can win the players. or the simulators need to see something,

then it's generated as necessary. Got it. So that's the optimization technique that I'm relying on for this idea, that you can basically have the AI. And this actually also ties, and in this book, in the religious section, I added a bit about Genesis, right?

Because Genesis is, again, one of those things that we in the academic and techno-scientific community dismiss. That's ridiculous. right god created the world six days that's like bullshit of course he didn't maybe maybe but then you say okay what did god do exactly in genesis he said let there be light and there was light and then what did he do he said let there be this and then he created this and then he created that and what was his mechanism for creating the waters then he created the land then he created the foliage then he created the animals

then he created the people what was the mechanism for that it was primarily god spoke and And it was created. Okay, now that, if we could view that as a literal thing, which fundamentalists will do, or we could view it as a metaphorical thing to say, is it possible we could speak and then have a world created for us? Guess what? It is now. It wasn't even 2019 when I first wrote this book.

Because now you can tell AI to create a world, and what does it do? It's like the holodeck in Star Trek. If you watch the holodeck, how do they program it? They just tell the computer, I'd like to have a street in 20th century Paris and a bar and in this bar

there should be this woman in this red dress and a bunch of other patrons and it'll create the NPC character it'll create everything for you and there is evidence that our world is algorithmic that things get created like we saw earlier the images

of the short amount of equations that could produce realistic looking things and even with biology it looks like it's algorithmic in how it's done. If DNA is just data, I mean, DNA is just data, primarily. Something uses that data, and it then creates things based off of that data, and that sounds very algorithmic, very machine-oriented, if you will.

And so even the biology, as we think of it is really, you can think of it as an AI machine that is using that information to create things in this world. It's all a closed circle that ties together. Yeah, yeah. Fritzvirk, this is wild shit. As always may, it's a lot of fun talking with you. We were going to have the link to your latest edition of the simulation hypothesis down below. So this is out now when people are listening to this.

But there's a million other things I really want to dig into there, but we'll be here until probably 10 o'clock tonight. If I do, I know I've got to get you out of here. Yeah. But thank you so much for doing this once again. Thank you for having me on again. Of course. It looks like we may have to do another one someday. There will be around three.

Just as I told you there'd be a round two. We're going to have around three next year. Sounds great. So everyone go check out the book, and we'll see you again soon. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.