0:01

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The

0:04

Joe Rogan Experience. Train

0:06

by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night,

0:08

all day! By

0:13

the way, Diana Posuca says hi. Oh,

0:15

cool. You know her? Yeah, I know her pretty well, actually.

0:18

Boy, her theories are very, very,

0:20

very interesting. Yeah. She's a

0:22

strange person to talk to because you start like,

0:25

you start really considering some of the things she's

0:27

saying. It's just all the UFO stuff. I

0:30

go back and forth on the UFO stuff

0:32

from it being complete bullshit to like, maybe

0:34

there's something there. I fluctuate

0:36

throughout the day. Yeah. Well, we can talk

0:38

about that. You know, I'm peripherally involved with...

0:40

Jamie, you're making noise over there. Shake

0:43

my mic off. You're

0:45

peripherally involved with... The Galileo Project at Harvard

0:48

and the Soil Foundation at Stanford, which are

0:50

like the two academic UFO

0:52

research groups that are out there. You

0:55

know, Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard and

0:57

Gary Nolan is running... You had Gary

0:59

on your show, right? I have not, but I'm in

1:01

communication with him. Okay. Talked to him quite

1:03

a bit. Yeah. I'm very fascinated

1:05

by his work. I'm happy to talk about UFO

1:07

stuff, where it overlaps with simulation theory. So how

1:09

did you get involved in this whole theory in

1:12

the first place, simulation? Explain

1:14

to people your position, if

1:16

you don't mind, on simulation

1:18

theory. What do you think is going on?

1:21

Yeah, well, so first question, how did I get involved in

1:23

this, right? So, you know, I

1:25

was a video game developer in Silicon

1:28

Valley, and then I became an investor in the

1:31

video game industry in my backgrounds in computer science. And

1:34

what happened was after I sold my last video game

1:36

company back in 2016, so

1:38

we're talking like, you know, seven years ago

1:41

now, eight years ago now, and

1:43

I put on a virtual reality headset and started

1:46

playing a VR ping pong game. Now,

1:48

these headsets were even bigger than they are

1:50

now, and they were wired, so there's no

1:52

mistaking you're in virtual reality. But

1:54

what happened was that the

1:57

ping pong game was so realistic that

1:59

for a moment, my brain forgot that this wasn't a

2:01

real game of table tennis, so much so that

2:03

I tried to put the paddle down on the

2:05

table and I tried to lean against the table.

2:08

But of course, there was no table, so the controller

2:10

fell to the floor and I almost fell over. I

2:12

had to do one of these double takes like, oh,

2:14

wait, I'm just in VR. So

2:17

I started to think about how

2:19

long would it take us to build something

2:21

like the matrix, something that's so

2:24

immersive that you would forget that you were

2:26

inside a video game. And so that led

2:28

me to this idea of the simulation

2:30

point, which is a kind of technological

2:32

singularity. But then I started

2:35

to research things like quantum physics

2:37

and some of the mysteries around

2:39

the observer effect and quantum mechanics.

2:42

And then I started to look at all the world's

2:44

religions and I realized that they're all kind of saying

2:46

the same thing, which is that there is no physical

2:48

universe. And so

2:50

that led me to the conclusion that we

2:53

are most likely inside some

2:55

kind of a computer simulation

2:58

or a massively multiplayer video game, depending

3:00

on how you look at it. But

3:03

where did that computer game, where did

3:06

that simulation come from if

3:08

we were inside of it? Well,

3:11

that's the big question, right? And

3:14

there's two versions of simulation theory. And

3:16

I teach a class on this at Arizona

3:19

State University. It's probably the first college level

3:21

class about simulation theory and it kind of

3:23

pulls in science fiction, religion, philosophy and technology.

3:25

But one of the key distinctions I tell

3:27

my students to make, because it's not talked

3:29

about a lot with simulation theory, is

3:32

what I call the NPC versus

3:34

the RPG versions of simulation

3:36

theory. So NPC, as

3:38

you probably know, means non-player

3:41

characters within video games. So

3:43

those are the AIs in the video game, the

3:46

bartenders, the people you're beating up, the opponents, all

3:48

of that stuff. But basically, they're just code

3:50

and they're AI. And there's

3:52

the RPG version, which is that we

3:55

are actually doing a role-playing

3:57

game, right? So you exist

3:59

outside the game. game, and then you

4:01

have a character or avatar inside the

4:03

game. So it's just like what we

4:05

would consider an MMORPG today, right, except

4:07

with more sophisticated technology. And

4:09

so in that case, you know, you

4:11

get a little bit of a different answer than if

4:14

you talk about an NPC-only

4:16

type of simulation, right, because that's just

4:18

running on a computer, and

4:20

we're all AI in that case. Now

4:22

the two aren't mutually exclusive, right, in a

4:24

video game like Fortnite or whatever, in Warcraft,

4:27

you have NPCs and you

4:29

have PCs or player characters, right? So

4:31

you've got both of those things going

4:33

on. And so depending on

4:35

how you look at it, you might come to

4:37

different, you know, different

4:39

answers about who's outside the simulation,

4:43

which would answer the question of who made

4:45

the simulation, right? Yeah. So in

4:47

the first case, you

4:50

basically say that if we can

4:52

get to the point where we

4:54

can build these simulations, what

4:57

I call the simulation point, so I call

4:59

that a kind of technological singularity. Now

5:02

we've heard the term singularity mostly because

5:04

of like AI and

5:06

super intelligent AI, right?

5:08

And you know, AI is going to take over

5:10

the world. But the guy who defined the term

5:12

was actually a computer scientist who became a science

5:14

fiction writer named Verner Vinge. In fact, he just

5:17

passed away like a month ago or something. He

5:19

was a real pioneer in like science fiction

5:21

and the cyberpunk kind

5:23

of sub genre or so. And

5:25

so he said the singularity happens when

5:28

technology increases exponentially to the point where

5:30

everything will be different for humans after

5:32

that point. Now he gave like four

5:34

different ways we could reach the singularity.

5:36

Most of us talk about only one,

5:38

which is AI starts to

5:40

become super intelligent and it grows

5:43

exponentially and everything will be different.

5:46

But I think this idea of the simulation

5:48

point where we can create simulations that are

5:50

indistinguishable from reality. And I lay

5:52

out like 10 stages in my book of all the technology

5:54

we would need, including brain computer

5:57

interfaces like In the

5:59

Matrix, right? More neuro it or

6:01

neurally great. we're getting there. I were

6:03

were very close we're we're at the

6:05

beginning of that whole year and so

6:08

that stage eight states seven and stayed

6:10

on the way to the simulation points.

6:12

And you know, being able to read

6:14

but also than be able to write

6:17

memories as well and then have So

6:19

the definition. the symbolism point is be

6:21

able to create a virtual reality that

6:23

is indistinguishable from physical reality with a

6:26

I characters that are indistinguishable from biological

6:28

characters. so you wouldn't be able to

6:30

tell you're talking to an Npc. By

6:32

right, we're getting closer to that already.

6:35

Or yes, yeah, I mean there's like

6:37

companies out there doing smart and he

6:39

sees now inside of video games are

6:41

right. But what would be the difference

6:44

between looking at what is possible in

6:46

the future and making. Either

6:49

a hypothesis or suggesting that that has

6:51

already taken place, right? So that's kind

6:53

of the lead bright that? Yeah, right.

6:55

Which is to say that if we

6:57

can do it now, let's imagine a

7:00

civilization that was a million years ahead

7:02

of us. A thousand years

7:04

ahead of us. Yeah, I'm even two hundred

7:06

years ahead of us by. but certainly a

7:08

thousand years ahead of us. Aware, Will computers

7:10

been a thousand years? They would already have

7:13

created these types of simulations, right? Right? As

7:15

if we can do it now. Sixty years

7:17

ago, we don't know if we could do

7:19

it with enough computers could get to that

7:21

point isn't right Today, It's we're pretty sure

7:23

we can get there. In fact, I'd say

7:25

that I'm seventy percent sure that we will

7:28

get to the simulation point. Which means I

7:30

think there's a seventy percent chance were living

7:32

inside a simulations. And so

7:34

the point is if they already got

7:36

their sacred a whole bunch of simulations.

7:39

And you can't tell the difference whether

7:42

you're in the real world. Or.

7:44

Simulated World Rights others. Ninety Nine

7:46

of These is one of these.

7:49

Me: You can't tell the difference. So which one are

7:51

you more likely and. Just.

7:53

As heuristically speak, Now we're not even. Projecting

7:56

the technology folder. Just saying. it's

7:58

more likely you're in one the 99 than the

8:01

one because there's so many more of these. Sort

8:04

of. If you can't tell the difference. If you

8:06

can't tell the difference. But

8:10

there's so many things you have to think about. There's

8:12

so many things you have to take into consideration. One

8:14

of them is we

8:18

don't have a straight linear line

8:20

from the moment that we're born

8:23

to the moment that we exist

8:25

in currently. The reason being is

8:27

that we go to sleep every night. Right.

8:29

It's a weird thing. We

8:32

shut off every night and

8:34

we wake up intermittently and you go back

8:36

to bed. Maybe you have to pee. Maybe

8:38

you're thirsty. You go back to bed and

8:42

then you wake up again. But when you wake

8:44

up, you are just waking up. You're like, when

8:46

I woke up this morning, I don't know if

8:49

this is the life I've always lived. Right.

8:51

I'm assuming it is because I

8:54

have all these detailed memories of

8:56

the past. I see my dog.

8:59

He reacts the exact same way he always

9:01

does. I see my wife.

9:03

I see my kids. I see my house. It's

9:05

the same house that I remember. But

9:08

I'm not sure. I just woke

9:10

up. Right. I'm a little

9:12

foggy already. It just exists in your memory at

9:14

that point. It just exists in your memory. This

9:17

might be the first day of my life. If,

9:20

suppose that you can implant false

9:22

memories, right? Right. This

9:24

was a popular topic for Philip K. Dick, right? Yes. He

9:27

was a total recall, even in Blade Runner. I

9:30

interviewed his wife while I was researching

9:32

my book. He was a wild boy. He

9:35

was an interesting guy, right? Yes.

9:37

He said some interesting things. In fact, all the

9:39

way back in 1977 in Metz, France

9:42

at a sci-fi convention, he said, there's

9:44

a pretty famous quote. He said,

9:47

we are living in a computer-programmed reality.

9:50

The only clue we have to it is

9:52

if some variable is changed, some

9:55

alteration occurs in our reality. Right.

9:58

And that's become kind of a famous quote in the... simulation

10:00

world. But if you listen to the

10:02

rest of the quote, he says, well,

10:04

we would basically rerun the same events

10:06

and we would change some variables, right?

10:09

And we would have a sense of deja vu,

10:11

like maybe we've already done this, right? Maybe I've

10:13

talked to you before in

10:15

a different run of the simulation, right?

10:18

And this idea, like after I

10:21

wrote my first book on this topic, Simulation

10:23

Hypothesis, this idea wouldn't

10:25

leave me that, well, if you can run one

10:27

simulation, you can certainly run it multiple

10:30

times. In fact, that's what we would do. If

10:32

we were running a simulation of the weather, we

10:34

wouldn't just run it once. We

10:36

would run it multiple times. And if we're

10:38

doing a simulation of whatever, right, pandemic, anything,

10:41

name it, we would change the variables and

10:44

we would go forward. And so, you

10:46

know, when I interviewed Tessa, you know,

10:48

Phil K. Dick's last wife, she said

10:51

that he came to believe this was

10:53

really happening, right? That someone was altering

10:55

with our reality and they would change

10:58

a few variables and rerun

11:00

the simulation forward. So now we're getting pretty

11:02

deep in the rabbit hole. This is the

11:04

topic of my second book, which is called

11:06

The Simulated Multiverse, this idea that

11:09

each of these timelines could

11:11

be like a different run of the

11:13

simulation itself. So

11:17

that gets a little weird at that

11:19

point, right? Because now we're saying that

11:21

time isn't the same thing,

11:23

right, that we think it is. So with

11:26

the simulation hypothesis, we're saying

11:28

that space doesn't really exist.

11:31

It basically gets rendered for us

11:33

like a video game. And then with

11:36

this second idea, we're saying that time doesn't

11:39

really exist because what you

11:41

remember could have been either

11:43

implanted memories or it could be a specific

11:46

run of the simulation, right? So

11:48

if you run it again, maybe things are

11:50

slightly different the second time you run it.

11:54

So Philip K. Dick came to believe that

11:57

his novel, The Man in the High Castle,

11:59

which. Return in a pretty

12:01

cool series. That and a fever I

12:03

know seen it's he was on Amazon

12:05

as years go by in that, in

12:08

the novel and in the series Germany

12:10

and Japan One World War Two. Ah,

12:12

and so you see in America that's

12:14

been divided like the east coast is

12:16

run by the Germans, the west Coast

12:18

is run by the Japanese and you

12:21

see this kind of dashes type two

12:23

worlds and so you know. He later

12:25

came to believe that. This actually

12:27

happened and somehow the simulators we ran

12:29

it again and the current timeline as

12:32

one that was allowed to go forward.

12:35

Further forward than were that one might have

12:37

ended. And so he says that at some

12:39

point. All. These memories came flooding

12:42

back to him of this other timeline.

12:45

He called it used as

12:47

greek word it's called and

12:49

and m nieces which means

12:51

of loss of forgetfulness. Rightly

12:54

said. We. Might be able to

12:56

remember these other runs of the

12:58

simulation. So

13:00

to it that gets us into you

13:02

know this whole idea of is the

13:04

past what we think it is right

13:07

That's I think with the question you're

13:09

asking us because you're like if I

13:11

just remember. X

13:13

Y Z is that what actually happened

13:15

or is it just a representation of

13:17

the past in the presence you know?

13:19

And so when I started looking into

13:22

the quantum physics side of it a

13:24

sound, something really weird and will talk

13:26

we can talk about the observer of

13:28

fact that this is like even weirder

13:30

than and a it was something proposed

13:33

by John Wheeler who was at Princeton

13:35

with Einstein and yeah he was a

13:37

bit younger than in of Niels Bohr

13:39

and Einstein and all these kind of

13:41

our forefathers. Of Quantum Mechanics and he

13:44

came up with several things that are

13:46

were talking about. One of them is

13:48

the Delayed Choice Experiments or or the

13:50

Cosmic Delayed Choice experiment which puts into

13:52

doubt this idea of the past. And

13:54

since we're talking about the past, let

13:57

let's go into this. Now I see

13:59

it on. So

14:01

imagine there's something

14:03

like a quasar and that's a billion light

14:05

years away from us, and the

14:07

light is coming from that quasar to here. So it's going

14:09

to take a billion years

14:11

to get here because it's a billion light years away. And

14:15

then suppose there's something in the middle like

14:17

a black hole that's in

14:19

the middle or a galaxy, something that's

14:22

very gravitationally big. And so

14:24

suppose the light has to go to the left or to

14:26

the right of that object. And

14:28

suppose that object is like a million light

14:30

years away from us. So it's a lot

14:32

closer, but it's still a million

14:34

light years away. So the decision

14:36

about when the light goes to the left

14:39

or to the right would

14:41

have to be made when? It

14:44

would have to be made in the past about a

14:47

million years ago because it takes light from that –

14:49

let's say it's a black hole. It's

14:51

a million light years away, so it takes a million years for

14:53

the light to reach Earth, and we can

14:55

measure whether it went to the left or to the

14:57

right. Well,

15:00

it turns out that decision is in the

15:02

past, as we think of it, but

15:04

what the delayed choice experiment tells us

15:07

is that that decision is made now

15:09

when we measure that

15:11

light, that little telescope. Suppose we have

15:13

two telescopes. One picks up on the

15:16

left, one picks up on the right, and

15:18

it's when we do the measurement. And

15:20

until we do that measurement, both of

15:22

those possibilities still exist.

15:25

So we have these two possible paths

15:28

a million years ago, right? The light went to the left or

15:30

to the right. But which

15:32

one happened isn't decided

15:35

until the measurement is done today. So

15:37

this is like Schrodinger's cat on steroids, right?

15:40

I'm not sure I totally understand this. Why

15:43

is the decision made when

15:45

you measure it? Well, that's what the

15:47

experiment kind of showed with

15:49

quantum mechanics, just like – okay, let's

15:51

start with Schrodinger's cat because it's a

15:53

simpler version. So Schrodinger's cat is this

15:56

experiment where there's a cat in a

15:58

box theoretical experiment. Nobody's got it. killing

16:00

any cats. And there's some

16:02

poison in there and there's some

16:04

radioactive material that has a 50% chance of

16:07

setting off the poison and 50%

16:09

chance that it won't. Let's say after

16:11

an hour or so. And so after

16:15

an hour the chances that the cat

16:17

is dead or alive is

16:19

50% right because the 50% chance. But what the observer

16:23

effect and what quantum mechanics is telling us

16:26

is that both of those

16:28

possibilities exist. The cat is both

16:30

alive and dead until

16:32

somebody looks at that

16:35

box, the observer in this case. And

16:38

so until then the cat is in the

16:40

state of superposition. Okay and

16:42

this is what makes quantum mechanics so weird. Right

16:45

this is why you know Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner

16:47

said nobody understands quantum

16:50

mechanics. And Niels Bohr said if you're not shocked

16:52

by this then you haven't understood it. Okay

16:54

because to us the cat has to be alive or

16:58

it has to be dead. And we don't know until

17:00

we see. We don't know until we see but it's

17:02

only one in common sense. It's one of those right.

17:04

But quantum mechanics and

17:06

put through the double slit experiment and the observer effect

17:09

says both of those

17:11

possibilities exist in the present until

17:14

the time when someone

17:16

looks and someone measures

17:18

that result. So then we say the

17:20

superposition which is two states comes

17:23

down to one state. So the cat is both alive

17:25

and dead and then when somebody measures

17:28

it it's either alive or dead and

17:30

we're in one of those states. Right

17:33

I kind of understand what you're saying but

17:36

isn't it really just that we don't know

17:38

until we open the box and it's not

17:40

that the cat is both alive and dead.

17:42

The cat is either alive or dead. We

17:44

just haven't figured it out yet until we

17:46

open the box. That's what it would seem

17:48

like right. That would be like

17:50

common sense point of view right. But what

17:52

all the physicists have been telling us now

17:55

for almost a hundred years

17:57

right going back to the 1920s. when

18:00

quantum mechanics first started to get formalized, is

18:03

that that's not actually the case. That

18:05

what happens is you have this probability wave

18:08

and that there are different probabilities

18:11

of the cat being alive or dead. Now,

18:13

of course, they weren't talking about cats.

18:15

The cat is maybe too simplistic. It's

18:17

like a placeholder. You know

18:20

what I'm saying? Yeah. It's

18:22

a way for somebody to think about

18:24

this at a high level. Schrodinger, who

18:27

was one of the founders of quantum mechanics

18:30

through his wave equation, he basically came up with

18:32

this because he thought the whole idea was ridiculous.

18:34

He's like, look, you can't have a cat that's

18:36

both alive and dead. Right. So

18:39

this is a ridiculous experiment except it's

18:41

become the way in which

18:43

we explain this weird effect about quantum

18:45

mechanics. The weird effect of quantum mechanics

18:47

is things can be both moving and

18:50

still at the same time, which is

18:52

superposition, right? Right. Or

18:54

they can be in two different states. Right. Which

18:56

could be moving and still, could be alive or

18:58

dead, or they're really talking about

19:00

particles. So then it could be

19:02

like left rotated or right located or right rotated.

19:04

So you've got all these properties, but

19:07

they can be in different states. And

19:10

this is the basis for quantum computing, by the way. You've

19:13

probably heard about new quantum computers that are coming

19:15

up. I have, but I totally don't

19:17

understand it. So it's the same thing

19:19

as Schrodinger's cat, whereas we have a bit of

19:21

information, right? So what are the values that a

19:24

bit can have? Zero

19:26

or one. That's it.

19:28

That's like the basic unit of information. And

19:31

the bit can only have one of those values,

19:33

like on my iPhone or my laptop. If

19:36

you look down all the way down in the hardware,

19:38

you can look at the registers. Like

19:40

when I was at MIT, we actually built a

19:42

computer in class from scratch. You'll

19:44

see there's some voltage that says this is a one

19:46

or this is a zero. Right. That's

19:49

it. All the computing, everything we're doing with video

19:51

streaming, like all that stuff. It

19:53

comes down to having a bit that can be either a zero or

19:56

a one. It has to be one or the other. It

19:58

can't be both. Right. Quantum

20:00

computing has these things called

20:02

qubits, Q-U-B-I-T-S,

20:05

qubits, which a

20:07

qubit is like Schrodinger's cat. It

20:10

doesn't just have a value of a 1 or a 0. It

20:13

is in superposition. Superposition

20:16

means a superset of all the positions that

20:18

are possible. So how many

20:20

possibilities are there in a bit, too, right?

20:22

0 and 1. So a

20:24

qubit is a superposition of a bit, which

20:26

means it has both values, 0 and

20:29

1. Until someone

20:31

measures that bit. And

20:34

so theoretically, that's what allows

20:36

quantum computers to solve

20:38

problems that grow exponentially

20:40

that are really big. And we're still in the

20:43

early stages, but if you

20:45

think of an exponential growth problem, like

20:47

cracking encryption, it

20:49

can be done by a regular computer. You can

20:51

set up your laptop to crack. It'll

20:54

take like a thousand years or something, right? Because

20:57

you have to go through every single

20:59

possible value. So if you have 64

21:01

bits, that's like, who are the 64 values,

21:04

which is huge? In

21:07

fact, there's an old story about the Indian king

21:09

and the wise man who played chess

21:11

that illustrates the story of how big that number gets

21:13

when you have exponential growth. So there was a king

21:15

who liked to play chess, and no one wanted to

21:18

play chess with him anymore because he kept waiting. And

21:20

finally, there's this wise man. He's like, please play chess

21:22

with me. And the wise man says, okay, I'll

21:24

play chess with you. If

21:27

I win, for the first square on the chessboard, you give

21:29

me one grain of rice. And then the

21:31

second square in the chessboard, you double

21:33

that, two grains of rice, and you double that

21:35

to four grains of rice and six grains of

21:37

rice. So we're doubling in each square, right? King's

21:40

like, okay, sure. You know, no big deal. There's just a

21:43

bunch of rice. And so it turns

21:45

out when the wise man won, by the time you get

21:47

to two to the 64, because there's

21:50

64 squares on

21:52

the chessboard, that basically it was more rice

21:54

than would fit in all of India, right?

21:57

That's an exponential problem. It

22:00

just grows so fast and the reason it grows

22:02

is there are too many possibilities. But

22:06

now this new thing called a qubit is

22:08

coming along and the qubit has both

22:10

possibilities at the same time. So

22:13

if you have 64 bits and

22:15

you take all the possible values of those 64

22:17

bits, you've got the

22:19

same number of possibilities as the grains of rice

22:22

we talked about. It's 2 to the 64. It's

22:24

a very big number. It's

22:27

18 quintillion is the number. There's

22:30

a game called No Man's Sky. I don't know if you ever played

22:32

it. No. So

22:34

it became famous because it was one of the

22:36

first games to have an almost infinite number of

22:38

planets. Oh, is this the

22:40

game where it just creates a universe? Yeah, it does. It's

22:42

kind of boring I heard. Yeah, it was kind of boring

22:44

at first. I mean, I haven't played it in a while.

22:46

I just kind of looked at it. But

22:48

it procedurally generates everything for you because

22:51

there's no way a team

22:53

of like I was in the video game industry, right? There's no

22:55

way a team could create 18 quintillion

22:58

worlds. And it turns out that's exactly the

23:00

number of worlds they have in

23:02

that game because that is what, 64 bits.

23:05

That's the biggest number you can get if

23:07

you use 64 bits. All

23:09

right. Okay, so come

23:11

back to exponential growth. It's

23:13

too big. And so

23:16

with a quantum computer, theoretically, and these are pretty

23:19

new right now, right? Amazon has

23:21

one. Microsoft has one. IBM has one

23:23

that you can actually program online. Google

23:25

has their own. Amazon is trying to

23:27

figure out how to make these qubits

23:30

stable and work. But the basic idea, and I don't

23:32

know what number we're up to for a while, it

23:34

was like you could only have four bits, qubits.

23:36

Kind of like going back to the old – when

23:39

we were young, the Apple

23:42

II or whatever came out and before

23:45

that there were these small 8-bit

23:47

processor-based kits

23:49

that people would assemble. And they just couldn't have a

23:51

lot of data because they just couldn't keep track of

23:53

that many bits. And that's where quantum

23:56

computers are today. But the idea is if

23:58

you can have 64 qubits – You

24:01

can instantaneously solve a

24:04

problem that is exponential because you can explore

24:06

all of those at the

24:08

same time and then when you measure

24:10

the result. Now,

24:14

nobody knows exactly how this works, but

24:16

the two explanations – coming back,

24:18

sorry, I know I'm kind of – I was wondering a bit. Coming

24:21

back to Schrodinger's cat, we say

24:23

there's two possibilities, right? So with 64

24:25

qubits, there's 2 to the 64 possibilities

24:28

if they're all in superposition. They

24:31

have all the possible values of

24:33

it. And so basically,

24:36

when you measure that, it

24:39

brings it back. And so physicists call

24:41

this the collapse of the

24:43

probability wave. So there's a probability of all

24:45

these possibilities, and then it comes down to

24:48

1. And that's sort of

24:50

the best – one

24:52

of the accepted ways that people think this whole

24:54

thing works. But nobody totally

24:56

knows. So another guy

24:58

who was John Wheeler's grad student

25:01

at Princeton came up with another idea.

25:04

And we've heard about this idea from the superhero movies,

25:06

right? And this is the multiverse idea,

25:08

right? And so

25:10

basically, he said that if

25:12

you've got Schrodinger's cat, what happens

25:15

is you're splitting the universe into two different

25:17

universes. In one of them, the

25:19

cat is alive. And in another

25:21

one, the cat is dead, right?

25:23

So that's the multiverse idea, is that

25:25

when we measure it, we only see

25:27

one of those two because we're in

25:29

this universe. But if we happen to be

25:32

in this other universe, the

25:34

cat would have been dead, right? The cat is alive here.

25:38

And so that creates a whole series of possibilities, which

25:40

are being used now in superhero stories

25:43

all the time. You've got

25:45

your different versions of Batman, your different

25:47

versions of Superman. Spider-Man, yeah. Yeah,

25:50

the famous Spider-Man meme where you

25:52

have, like, the Spider-Men all kind of pointing

25:54

at each other. And they have the

25:56

different actors. So that idea has

25:58

started to catch on now. It's

26:01

what I like to call, it's past the

26:03

10-year-old test. And the

26:05

10-year-old test is when a scientific idea gets

26:07

out there so much that even

26:10

10-year-olds can kind of understand it because

26:12

of superhero movies. Like

26:15

in the 1930s, when people were

26:17

trying to explain Superman,

26:19

like how does Superman get

26:21

his powers? You say, oh, he came from another

26:23

planet. He came from a planet called Krypton, right?

26:25

So even a 10-year-old in the 1930s could have

26:27

understood that. But in the

26:30

1730s, like you couldn't say that.

26:32

No one would know what the heck you're talking about, right? And

26:35

so that idea kind of diffused through society.

26:37

And so that's happening now with

26:39

the multiverse idea too. It's

26:41

kind of diffusing through society in

26:43

this way through popular culture and

26:45

media narratives

26:48

and stuff. So that's the

26:50

other explanation for how all this weirdness, quantum

26:53

weirdness works, which is it's the multiverse. And

26:57

so people said, how can a quantum computer theoretically

27:00

solve a problem that would take thousands

27:02

of years for a regular computer to solve?

27:05

And one explanation, a guy named David Deutsch out

27:07

at Oxford says, well, because

27:09

it's looking at all the possible values of

27:12

the bits, there's that many

27:14

different universes, right? And it's

27:16

computing in all of those universes

27:18

instantaneously. And then it's bringing

27:20

back the value that you want at the end. And

27:23

that becomes your answer. So

27:27

I think we've gotten a little bit

27:29

away from the original question. It

27:33

seems like that's inevitable, the subject. Yeah,

27:37

the subject does tend to take you down many,

27:39

many different rabbit holes. And

27:42

I think the original question was about

27:44

memory, right? And how

27:47

do we know that the memory. So the

27:49

reason I went down this rabbit hole on

27:51

the quantum physics stuff in the multiverse, which

27:54

by the way, that's the subject of the, I wrote a whole

27:56

second book on simulation theory just for

27:58

that, which is simulated multi- multiverse because

28:01

the reason scientists like

28:04

this multiverse idea is

28:06

that mathematically you can figure out how

28:08

the equations work in all these

28:10

different worlds, you know, whereas

28:13

with the first idea, which is

28:15

the Copenhagen interpretation, you

28:17

have all

28:19

these possibilities, you have a probability wave, and then suddenly

28:21

you're down to one and nobody

28:23

can explain that mathematically. Nobody can say,

28:25

how does the collapse occur? Like

28:28

there's no little equation you can pop into. And

28:30

so that's why it's called the observer

28:33

effect and it's considered a big mystery, like is

28:35

it the act of observation? Is

28:37

it the act of measurement? Right? So all

28:39

these physicists are debating with each other, right? So

28:42

they don't like Copenhagen interpretation because it seems

28:44

to rely on consciousness or some kind of

28:46

an observer and scientists kind of hate that,

28:48

right? They hate to talk about consciousness being

28:50

real and we'll get into the whole religious aspects

28:53

of the simulation hypothesis in a

28:55

little bit. So they're like,

28:57

well, this one's nice because it's the mathematics homework,

28:59

the multiverse idea. But

29:02

the problem with the multiverse idea is

29:04

that it's not what scientists like to

29:06

call parsimonious, which means that

29:08

what's happening is there's a new universe

29:11

splitting off like all the time, right?

29:13

Every time there's a quantum, we're talking about

29:15

quantum decisions, right? We're not really

29:17

talking about big things like cats. We're talking

29:20

about little decisions that occur within a nanosecond,

29:22

right? And so every time

29:24

there's a decision, you're splitting off to

29:26

a new physical universe.

29:29

So think about now we're talking exponential

29:31

growth but on steroids, right? Because it's

29:33

just infinite. It just keeps going, right?

29:37

And that's kind of a weird

29:39

concept that there would be so many

29:41

physical universes being created. And

29:44

so where I came out on this subject is, well,

29:46

guess what? The human

29:48

hypothesis gives you a way

29:51

to look at both of these, a framework that

29:54

makes it make sense, right? I mean, this is what

29:56

people say when you look at quantum mechanics, they say,

29:58

make it make it makes sense, right?

30:00

Because the cats should be alive or dead. How can

30:02

it be both, right? And so when

30:05

you think of information

30:08

and you think of the simulation idea, the

30:10

core of it is that the

30:12

world is not physical. This

30:15

table seems pretty physical, right? But

30:17

if you go and

30:19

you look inside, it's mostly empty

30:21

space, something like 90-some percent, maybe

30:24

99 percent. And then you go to the atoms

30:27

and you look inside those and it's mostly empty

30:29

space, right? And those

30:31

are these electron clouds and stuff, but

30:34

except for the nucleus, it's mostly empty

30:36

space. And the problem is, like these

30:38

Russian dolls, if you

30:40

keep looking inside, they keep looking for this

30:42

thing called physical matter and

30:44

they can't find it. Like, it's not really there.

30:46

It's like you go to the very smallest of

30:48

the Russian dolls and the only

30:51

thing they can find is information.

30:54

And so John Wheeler, who I talked about

30:57

earlier, he plays an

30:59

outsized role in at least my

31:01

explorations of simulation theory.

31:03

He came up with a phrase and

31:06

his phrase was, it from

31:08

bit. So if there's

31:10

something that's an it, physical object like this

31:12

cup or this table,

31:15

that if you just keep looking

31:17

down, you have a microscope that just keeps

31:19

going down, he goes, in the end, the

31:21

only thing you find are particles, but

31:24

what the heck are particles? He said,

31:26

well, the only thing that particles really are

31:28

is a series of answers to

31:31

yes, no questions. So

31:33

it's like, does the particle spin up? Does it

31:35

spin down? It's got like,

31:37

you know, various different polarities and things.

31:40

But so he said, in the

31:42

end, the only thing you have are bits

31:44

of information because that's a bit, right? Every

31:46

single decision is a bit, yes or no,

31:48

one or zero. That's like

31:50

the fundamental unit of computation and that's

31:53

how we, you know, like I said,

31:55

stream video, everything else. And so

31:57

he said, everything that's an it is actually

32:00

actually from bits of information. And

32:05

there's a whole new kind of

32:07

field within physics, which is

32:09

called digital physics. So

32:11

in the past, physics was

32:13

about physical objects moving around. And

32:16

so digital physics is about information,

32:18

like what happens to information in

32:21

the universe? Does it get

32:23

destroyed in a black hole? Does it get

32:25

created? So you have, instead of conservation of

32:27

momentum and conservation of

32:29

energy, you have conservation of

32:31

information. So it's like a

32:34

different way of looking

32:36

at the physical world. You

32:38

look at it as a computation rather

32:40

than looking at it as physical objects moving around,

32:42

like in classical physics. Right.

32:45

The problem is like we

32:49

do live in a physical world as far as

32:51

we can tell. But

32:53

then if you

32:55

measure the actual things

32:57

in the physical world, then

33:00

you get to this weirdness. Right,

33:02

exactly. You get to this weirdness down at the

33:04

bottom level. The very core of it all, like

33:06

what is going on as

33:08

far as we can measure? Right.

33:11

And there's a limit. Like we can only

33:13

measure up to the smallest unit, which is

33:15

called like the Planck. But as

33:17

we go deeper, we get less answers. And

33:19

it gets more weird. It gets more weird.

33:21

And it starts to look less

33:24

like the physical world exists and

33:26

more like it's a bunch of

33:29

information that gets rendered as we

33:31

observe the world or as groups

33:33

of people observe the world.

33:36

Have you ever taken this back as far as you can and tried

33:39

to figure out what created this or

33:43

what possibilities could have created this? Or

33:45

was there ever a physical world? Well

33:48

that's a good question. So where I ended up with

33:50

this was looking at how the

33:52

world gets rendered as you observe it.

33:55

Like for me, my background is, as I said, a

33:57

computer scientist and a video game designer and developer. is

34:00

that that's pretty much how we render

34:03

video games, right? So if you and I are

34:05

in the same, our avatars are in the same

34:07

field or the same room about to

34:09

shoot each other in a video game, we're

34:12

not really in the same room, are we? You're

34:15

rendering it on your

34:17

screen and I'm rendering it

34:20

on my screen, right? And

34:22

so there's information that's coming from the server.

34:25

And then what happens is we render

34:27

only the part that we can see, right?

34:30

Only that view

34:32

around your avatar, you

34:35

could be first person point of view or you could be

34:37

like kind of hovering over your character or like many video

34:39

games do that these days, like a

34:41

kind of a third person or second person point of view. But

34:44

the only pixels you need to render on my

34:47

computer are the ones that my avatar can

34:49

see. And the only ones you need

34:51

to render on your computer are the ones

34:53

your avatar can see and those get

34:55

cached on the server and so they get

34:58

sent out. And so it's an optimization technique,

35:00

right? There's no way in the 1980s, like when

35:03

I was growing up, we had, you know, the

35:05

Apple II computers or whatever. There's no way you

35:07

could render like a full

35:09

3D, you know, world or

35:11

a full 3D game like we play

35:13

today. And so what happened was

35:15

we learned not only did the computers get faster, but

35:18

we learned optimization techniques. So everything

35:21

in computer science comes

35:23

down to optimization usually. Like

35:25

physicists are happy to say, yeah, it's infinite, but

35:27

without really wondering what the heck that means. But

35:30

with computer science, you only have limited resources

35:32

typically. And so you need to figure out how

35:34

to compute something with those limited

35:37

resources. And so video game rendering,

35:39

to me, is a

35:41

case of optimizing so that it

35:43

looks like there's a shared physical

35:46

world, but there really isn't, right,

35:48

because it's being rendered on each of our own

35:50

computer. And so, but the rule is

35:53

only render that which you can see. Now,

35:55

when I started to look at this weirdness in

35:57

quantum mechanics, which is saying render Only

36:00

that which is observed or

36:02

measured, depending on how you look at it. But even

36:04

if you measure it, somebody's got to look at that

36:06

measurement before you know it was actually measured. So

36:09

it's the same kind of thing

36:11

going on. In my opinion, quantum mechanics

36:14

ends up being an optimization

36:17

technique for rendering of

36:19

the physical world from

36:21

the information that lives

36:23

below. So that's kind of the

36:25

one big implication of simulation

36:28

theory that I think is

36:30

very important. And actually, the idea of

36:32

the universe as information is not

36:34

that controversial. So just I was in London

36:36

this summer over at the Cambridge

36:38

University, spending a little bit of time doing some

36:40

AI research, and I ran into

36:42

this Nobel Prize winner, physicist, from like the

36:44

70s. And so

36:47

we were talking simulation theory, of course. And

36:49

I said, well, one of the key assumptions here is

36:51

that the world is information. And

36:53

he said, yeah, that's not controversial in

36:56

physics at all anymore. Like it

36:58

might have been once upon a time. But

37:00

then the second part, the second assumption that

37:03

comes up in simulation theory is

37:05

that the world is rendered

37:07

like a video game and that the world is a hoax.

37:10

It's some kind of a hoax, like it's not

37:12

really real, right? That's the other

37:15

assumption that physicists don't necessarily agree with.

37:17

But that's the other part of simulation

37:19

theory. What's the argument against it? In

37:23

simulation theory? Against the fit that

37:25

it doesn't physically exist. They

37:28

disagree. Well, they don't disagree necessarily

37:30

that it doesn't physically exist. They

37:32

just disagree that how

37:34

does it that this thing that

37:36

is information gets rendered for us,

37:38

right? Right. It's like we're

37:41

talking different languages for them, right? Even though

37:43

quantum mechanics is telling us all this weird

37:45

stuff, they're still, I think,

37:47

making classical view, classical mechanical

37:49

view of the world of physical objects moving

37:52

around and that's all it is, right? So

37:57

there's arguments that people make.

37:59

against the idea that we live in a

38:01

simulation. And the first is the

38:04

same argument that, you know, there was a famous

38:06

guy named Bishop Berkeley, the city of Berkeley is

38:08

named after him. I

38:11

think it was George Berkeley or something. He was a

38:13

bishop in the UK. And he came

38:15

up with this idea of idealism, this philosophical

38:17

idea that the world doesn't really exist. It's

38:19

only in the mind. And

38:22

there was this other guy, I think it was Johnson,

38:24

who said, how do you refute

38:26

that? And he kicks a rock. And he goes, that's how I refute

38:28

it. And you see, it's physical. It's

38:30

there. Right? And so that's, you

38:33

know, the first common sense way people try to refute

38:35

the idea. But of course, that's not what the physicists

38:37

are saying. The physicists are the one telling us that

38:40

the world doesn't really exist, that it

38:42

consists of information and space-time

38:44

gets constructed out of that

38:46

information. Right? So that's like

38:48

one of the biggest, I

38:51

think, issues that another way that

38:53

people try to push back on

38:55

the idea of simulation theory is they

38:57

say, well, it's not really

38:59

falsifiable. Right? So

39:02

I can't design an experiment

39:05

that proves we

39:07

are not in a simulation. So

39:10

this touches on the boundary issues of

39:13

science. Where does science end? Right?

39:16

And where does philosophy begin? Where

39:18

does metaphysics begin? Where

39:20

does religion begin? And

39:22

those lines are actually fuzzier than you might think. Right?

39:25

Because there's been a debate over that for

39:28

a long time now, for hundreds

39:30

of years, about what is scientific and what

39:32

isn't. Right? And things

39:34

like, you know, UFOs and paranormal phenomena and all this stuff,

39:36

you know, gets kind of pushed out beyond

39:39

that boundary. But

39:41

so one definition that a

39:43

guy named Popper came up with was, if

39:46

it's not falsifiable, it's not scientific. Right?

39:49

Meaning if you can't prove that it's false. The

39:51

problem with that is there are lots

39:53

of things that we can't prove that

39:56

they're false, but

39:58

we can find some evidence. that

40:00

these things actually happen or

40:02

that these things exist. Like a

40:04

couple hundred years ago, there were stories of rocks

40:06

falling from the sky. And

40:09

all the scientists like in Paris said, oh,

40:11

that's just bullshit, right? That's just a

40:13

bunch of peasants out in the countryside. We

40:16

know there's no rocks falling from the sky. Why?

40:18

Because we know there's no rocks in the sky,

40:20

our science tells us. There's no rocks

40:23

up there, so how the hell could they be falling from the

40:25

sky? So that's kind of

40:27

not really a falsifiable thing. How can you

40:29

prove there's no rocks in the sky? You

40:32

really can't, but you

40:35

can prove, and eventually they did because

40:37

they got a whole, there was some

40:39

huge meteor storm outside

40:41

of Paris and some guys went out

40:43

to investigate and there were thousands of

40:45

witnesses that saw this thing. And

40:48

then eventually they looked at some of

40:50

the artifacts, some of the physical evidence,

40:52

and then eventually they changed their model,

40:54

their cosmological model about the universe. And

40:57

so I think it's the same thing with simulation theory. Even

41:00

though you can't prove we're not in

41:02

a simulation because the simulation could be

41:04

so good, like

41:07

the matrix was pretty convincing at first, right?

41:10

But the simulation could be so good that you

41:12

can't necessarily tell. But

41:14

at the same time, you can design experiments which

41:17

might indicate to you that

41:19

there's something going on like this

41:22

video game rendering idea. And

41:25

there are folks out there trying to

41:27

run experiments to try to

41:29

show that this

41:32

is really what's happening with quantum mechanics is that like

41:34

a video game, this whole world is

41:36

being rendered for us, information

41:39

being rendered just like a video game. And

41:43

the effect that consciousness has on

41:45

this world. So consciousness

41:47

is the

41:49

thing that we're using to measure or

41:52

the thing that we're using to interact

41:55

with whatever possibilities

41:58

exist. Right.

42:00

And so that in the RPG version, right,

42:03

this is why I like to make the

42:05

distinction between the RPG

42:07

version and the NPC version. So

42:09

in the RPG version, we

42:12

are plugged in, right, like Neo in the back

42:14

of the head or with a

42:16

virtual reality headset or some technology yet to

42:18

be developed, right? And

42:20

so when you play a video game, it's

42:23

not enough that the pixels are there. And

42:27

you basically are watching that game, right,

42:29

as the player. And

42:31

when you're not watching, what happens? You

42:33

just turn it off, right? You turn off your computer, what

42:35

happens? Well, there's still the

42:38

information going on on the server. Maybe other people are

42:40

playing, right? But it doesn't need to render it at

42:42

that point. It's just the server can keep track of

42:44

where everything is. So what we did when we created

42:46

video games, we would, you know, send

42:49

down information. And

42:51

in fact, you can then

42:53

turn around and do something very interesting.

42:56

Like if you're a level 30 player,

42:59

right, and I'm a level two player, our

43:01

avatars could be standing right next to each other. One

43:04

could see the dragon and one might not be able to

43:07

see the dragon because maybe we don't have that ability in

43:09

the game. We're not at a high enough level. But

43:11

the server logic is deciding that.

43:13

So consciousness then becomes the player

43:17

in that model of simulation

43:19

theory. And it renders

43:21

the world for us. And it turns out

43:24

that is very similar to

43:27

what the world's religions have been

43:29

telling us, right? Not just one

43:31

or two of the world's religions. Like when

43:33

I wrote my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, I gave

43:35

it a subtitle of why AI, quantum

43:38

physics, and Eastern mystics agree we're

43:40

in a video game. And I

43:42

was thinking primarily of the Eastern mystics, like, you know,

43:44

in the Hindu and Buddhist

43:46

traditions and the Yogis. And

43:49

they talk about the term Maya. Most

43:52

people have probably heard that term in karma and

43:55

all these different terms. But Maya means

43:57

illusion, right? That's how it gets

43:59

translated. It's like an ancient Sanskrit

44:01

word. These

44:05

mystics are telling us that the world isn't

44:07

really real. It's a kind of illusion. But

44:11

if you really look at the definition of that

44:13

word maya, it means

44:15

something more like a carefully crafted

44:18

illusion. It's almost

44:20

like if you go to a magic show, you

44:24

know the guy's not really sawing that woman

44:26

in half. But

44:28

you kind of agree to suspend your disbelief

44:30

because that's what makes the whole thing fun.

44:34

Watching a magic show or watching a special effects, you know

44:37

Blade Runner 2049, the car is not really

44:39

flying. Those are just CGI. But

44:42

we agree to that to a certain extent

44:44

as we go into that world and

44:47

we become immersed in that world. And

44:49

so what the mystics in the Eastern

44:51

traditions have been telling us is that

44:54

we agree to basically

44:56

go into this illusory world in

44:59

order to have these experiences. Sometimes

45:02

people say, well, what's the purpose of the

45:04

simulation? And I say, well, why do you

45:06

play video games? And

45:09

why do you play video games? Fun. Fun

45:11

is one. Two is to try

45:13

to have experiences that you probably can't have

45:16

outside of the game. Like even Grand Theft Auto, right?

45:18

You're not going to go out there and do all

45:20

that crazy stuff in the real world. Some people might,

45:22

but most people wouldn't. And you're not going to, I

45:24

can't fly on a dragon and kill orcs as

45:27

much as I might want to. Especially with no

45:29

real world consequences. Right. Right. With

45:31

no real world. Exactly. So

45:34

that's one of the reasons why. But there are consequences

45:36

within the game, right? And

45:38

for the characters in the game, for the

45:40

NPCs that you're killing, those are all real consequences

45:42

within the game. But when you look at it from

45:44

outside the game. And so

45:47

like the Eastern mystics have been telling

45:49

us this and turns out in

45:51

the Judeo-Christian Islamic traditions, the

45:53

Abrahamic religions, they've also been

45:55

telling us this. That The

45:58

world is Maya. And They use. Metaphors.

46:00

Math. math I suppose You know all

46:02

these religions came about couple thousand years

46:04

ago and to the had to use

46:07

metaphors. That. Were.

46:09

Understood by the people back then

46:11

right? and so that they use

46:13

whatever med. The metaphor the dream

46:15

was was a key metaphor that

46:17

the world is like a dream

46:19

or that the sole. Puts

46:22

on the body, Like.

46:24

Set of clothes and that when you

46:27

die. You. Take off his

46:29

clothes. And then you're back to. The.

46:31

So whatever that happens to be, they

46:33

don't really differ somewhat. that is, in

46:35

fact, they use the exact same metaphor

46:37

like in the Bhagavad Gita. They use

46:39

this clothing metaphor and and roomy who's

46:41

become popular in the West and was

46:43

a oh was an Islamic sufi. You

46:47

know a poet but also a mystic

46:49

he you the exact same phrase right

46:52

he said you put on the body

46:54

you put like that like a series

46:56

of closed and so the you that

46:58

metaphor to try to describe something which

47:00

is the second. Part of the idea

47:02

of assimilation I passes. The first idea was

47:04

the world as information that is rendered and

47:06

the second part of the world a some

47:08

kind of a hoax that we are a

47:10

part of for whatever reason. And

47:13

so in in the. In

47:16

the traditions overtime they try to update

47:18

is metaphors. And

47:20

they try to use new technology to described

47:22

metaphors because that's how we can. As modern

47:24

people we can understand it. So about one

47:26

hundred years ago there was guy named Swami

47:28

Yogananda. He came over from India. He was

47:31

like one of the first Indian yogi swami

47:33

to really live in the Us. and he

47:35

wrote a book called autobiography of a Yogi

47:37

Or have you ever as could read it

47:39

while you're at it over? Yeah yeah in

47:41

the it was like the but one of

47:43

those books that everybody passed around. Yeah and

47:45

Steve. Jobs you know it was his favorite

47:47

book. At his funeral he gave everybody or

47:49

his memorial service he gave everybody a little

47:51

brown box. They went home and opened the

47:54

box and this on a copy of autobiography

47:56

or Yogi in their hands with soap. Yogananda

47:58

came over about a hundred years ago. And

48:00

he tried to update this old

48:02

metaphor and. What? Was new

48:04

technology back in the nineteen twenties.

48:07

his movies movie projectors where he

48:09

said. The. World is

48:11

like a movie projector, right? You're

48:13

playing these parts. The actors are

48:16

playing the parts on the screen

48:18

and things are happening to them.

48:20

But really, the actors aren't necessarily

48:23

doing. it's the characters that are

48:25

suffering. In. A within the game,

48:27

within the movie itself. and so he

48:29

use that metaphor. As a

48:31

way to try to explain this, this

48:33

ancient religious idea that set the course

48:35

of every single religion. which is that

48:38

the world as we see it, is

48:40

not really real and there's a real

48:42

or real world beyond this world. Him.

48:44

and so he updated the metaphor to

48:46

use movie projectors and you know if

48:48

you've ever been and we've all been

48:50

a movie theaters If you look away

48:52

from that, the screen. yeah, you can

48:54

tennessee the flickering lights right? And you

48:56

can tennessee everybody so engrossed in it

48:58

that they're not looking around that I

49:00

know what's. Going on of month, you

49:02

know, maybe I haven't some popcorn or

49:05

something and so today I think we

49:07

need update those metaphors right politically for

49:09

younger generation who spent like as much

49:11

of their time And you know things

49:14

like fortnight roadblocks when they were younger

49:16

were as avatars if we use the

49:18

the metaphor of a massively multiplayer online

49:20

game and I think Yogananda if he

49:23

were alive today. in fact my latest

49:25

book which I wrote after the simulation

49:27

bucks. Ah, because it was the seventy

49:29

fifth anniversary of Up autobiography. the yogi

49:31

a couple years ago and our harper collins

49:34

india ask me to write this book about

49:36

what can you learn from autobiography of yogi

49:38

and there's all these weird stories in there

49:41

have like you know some guy materializing a

49:43

palace in the himalayas outta nowhere rights you've

49:45

got levitating saints you've got guys by locating

49:47

disappearing all kinds of crazy shit going on

49:50

spreads air and i said well you sure

49:52

you want me to write this book you

49:54

know i'm an entrepreneur and assets and a

49:56

computer scientist a city yeah because we want

49:59

you to your technology metaphors

50:01

like the simulation hypothesis to

50:03

explain this stuff. And so if Yogananda were alive

50:05

today, and I wrote this in my

50:07

new book called Wisdom of Yogi, what

50:10

he would say is it's like a movie, but

50:13

we're the actors and

50:15

we're also the audience, and we

50:17

have a script and we're kind of playing the script, but we can

50:19

change the script if we want. What

50:21

does that sound like? It sounds like a massively

50:24

multiplayer online role-playing

50:26

game. So

50:28

I think that metaphor is a great

50:30

way to try to explain this

50:33

idea of the soul and the body within

50:35

the religious traditions. That's the RPG version

50:38

of the simulation hypothesis. And

50:42

how do you go through

50:45

life with this information?

50:48

Does this information affect the way

50:50

you feel about things on a

50:52

day-to-day basis? If you have

50:54

these theories and you have this concept in

50:57

your mind of the true nature of the

50:59

universe, of reality itself, how

51:04

does that work with

51:06

the physical carbon tissue?

51:13

How do you deal with that? Well, so

51:15

the way that I like to think of it, and

51:18

originally I was just kind of putting

51:20

these concepts- You seem very happy. It

51:23

seems like something that would freak people out to the

51:25

point where they would kind of get so much existential

51:28

angst and it's so

51:31

bizarre that it

51:33

would be hard to just be present.

51:36

But you seem very present. Right,

51:38

because it gets back to how you think about

51:41

if it's an NPC game, it would

51:43

freak people out, right? Right. This

51:46

is like the materialist kind of view. Right,

51:48

right. Which is while the computer's on, you're

51:50

here, the computer gets shut off. Excuse

51:53

me, everybody's gone. But in

51:55

the RPG version, it's a

51:57

little bit different, right? So when you- When

52:00

you play a game, you know,

52:02

when I was a kid we used to play Dungeons and Dragons when

52:04

I was a teenager. And you have

52:07

a character sheet and you'd like roll your dice

52:09

and you'd say, I'm going to be an elf

52:11

or I'm going to be human and my occupation

52:14

is a wizard or a barbarian, right? And

52:16

then you roll the dice and you get

52:18

all these like different attributes like charisma,

52:20

intelligence, whatever, whatever they were. I don't

52:22

even remember all of them now, right?

52:24

Dexterity, all of these things that help you

52:26

in some way. And it's like

52:28

you're choosing to play this game in this

52:31

illusory world. And I believe that this is

52:33

similar to what happens to us when

52:36

we come into this world if in

52:38

the RPG version, right, that

52:40

we end up choosing a character with

52:43

a set of parents, right, and a

52:45

set of strengths and

52:47

weaknesses and more than that, like

52:50

a storyline, things that we might

52:52

want to do. And we're free

52:54

when we play the game, we're free to

52:56

make different choices if we want within the

52:58

game. But you've got

53:01

kind of these challenges or quests, right?

53:03

What makes a video game interesting or fun? So

53:07

there's a guy who was the founder of Atari, I don't

53:09

know if you ever met him, Nolan Bushnell, but

53:12

he was pretty much the grandfather of

53:14

the video game industry. You

53:16

know, he created Pong, you know, back in the day

53:18

and then created Atari. And he

53:20

said there was a rule for how to make a

53:22

game interesting. He said make it easy to play, but

53:25

difficult to master, right? Because if it's not

53:27

easy to play, people are going to just

53:29

throw it away. But

53:32

if it's easy to master, they're going to play for a little while and then they're

53:34

going to go. Right. But

53:36

if you make it easy to play, but difficult to master, that

53:38

keeps people playing the game. And

53:40

so I think if you take this view,

53:44

you can view the whole

53:47

world, particularly your life and your story, as

53:50

a series of quests and

53:52

challenges, things that come up for

53:54

you that you may or may not

53:56

be able to, you know, achieve

53:58

the first time around. because

54:01

we have difficulty levels, don't we, in games?

54:04

Right? Some people have an easier, you know,

54:06

they want to play the game where life's easy, other

54:08

people want to play the game

54:10

where life is really tough. Like

54:12

actors, when do they win Academy Awards? Tough

54:15

roles. Exactly, tough roles,

54:17

right? The ones that really suffer

54:19

typically, too. Yeah. Right? And you

54:21

know, Swami Yogananda and a lot of

54:23

the Eastern mystics will, you know, say that suffering

54:26

is the nature of this world,

54:28

right? That's why we're here, is

54:30

to experience this. But

54:32

even in the Western traditions, there's

54:34

a similar idea. So I

54:37

started to look up, you know,

54:39

different traditions in Islam. In

54:42

the Quran, there's like a whole series of

54:44

verses, and they say, we have

54:46

set up this world as a pastime, as

54:48

a game for you, as a sport, you

54:51

know. This world is really, they

54:53

use this Arabic word, el-gururi, which

54:55

means a delusion, but

54:58

it means like an enjoyable delusion, sort

55:00

of. Enjoyable in

55:02

quotes, because depends on what you

55:04

enjoy, right? Like getting in and

55:06

playing a really tough role, maybe

55:09

what you enjoy, but that's not fun for the

55:11

character to go through all that crap that they

55:13

have to go through. Right? And so I think

55:15

we can view the world as

55:17

a series of questions and challenges.

55:19

Now, the next question is, well,

55:21

what's the nature of the game, right? I

55:23

don't believe the game is Grand Theft Auto, or that's not

55:25

the type of game we're playing. So

55:27

I think we can turn to, you know,

55:30

people that have died, near-death

55:32

experiencers. I don't know if you

55:34

had any on your show, you may have over the years.

55:37

But there was a guy named Danyan Brinkley, who

55:40

wrote a book called Saved by the Light back

55:43

in the 90s. He got struck by lightning.

55:46

And this is how I first heard about this thing, which

55:48

is called the Life Review. And they, you know,

55:50

a lot of near-death experiencers, they report

55:54

these series of stages of things that happen to

55:56

them, like they're floating above their body. They go

55:58

through a tunnel of light. We we heard all

56:00

of this but. The most

56:03

important part for me in in these

56:05

stories And you know thousands of people

56:07

right? You got on you tube and

56:09

listen to this insanity near that exposures.

56:11

but what would. Then and call this

56:13

this thing. Called the Lifers you are

56:16

was he call it a holographic panoramic

56:18

review of your life. And

56:20

and what that means and other near death.

56:22

Experiences report of this big about twenty percent of

56:24

them. That you go through

56:26

every single moment. That. You Ever

56:28

Lived. In. Like this

56:31

virtual reality you know three dimensional

56:33

panorama but you see it from

56:35

the point of view of everybody

56:37

else right? So if you were

56:39

mean to someone if he stabbed

56:42

someone or Indianians case he was

56:44

in special forces in Vietnam and

56:46

he actually killed people at he

56:48

said he had experience what it

56:50

was like. To. Get

56:53

the bullet and then more than that

56:55

experience. What happened after that guy died

56:58

his wife. You're the guy who died

57:00

his wife and children, what kind of

57:02

suffering they experienced. So it's like your

57:05

your resume like after a football game

57:07

writer. After a man, you might sit

57:09

there and review on the screen what

57:12

happened Friday Sept. This green is like

57:14

you know, fully immersive. the best Vr

57:16

you could ever have. It's like you're

57:18

realising the moment. So couple years ago

57:21

I was involved. start. Up and in

57:23

Silicon Valley and we took a game like

57:25

League of Legends he probably her legal I

57:27

didn't like the most popular Lisa was a

57:30

sports game rights and you've got all these

57:32

guys are sealed the pretty much you play

57:34

on a to the screen and so we

57:36

made it's a you could replay the game

57:38

but you would put on a virtual reality

57:41

headset and it would seem like you were

57:43

on you know on the field and League

57:45

of Legends and you should replay. From

57:48

any point of view. same with Can't

57:50

Counter Strike Global Offensive as. one that's

57:53

you know i was thinking of because he

57:55

in that game your he is the first

57:57

person shooter so you like shooting people And

58:00

so literally you could go back and

58:02

replay that game from the point of view

58:04

of the person you shot, right?

58:07

And so when I was experiencing this,

58:09

it was reminding me of all

58:13

these things these near-death experiencers have been

58:15

telling us about this life review.

58:18

And as an engineer and computer scientist, my

58:20

question is always, well, how

58:22

does that work? I mean,

58:24

if you could replay every single moment in your life,

58:27

even the moments when you weren't there, including

58:29

like what happened to this guy's wife and what

58:31

happened to their children, somebody

58:33

has to record all that stuff. Because how

58:35

are you going to replay it if it's

58:38

not being recorded? So

58:40

perhaps this whole

58:42

game is being recorded, just like we do,

58:46

in fact, on YouTube, the most popular content other

58:48

than the Joe Rogan experience is

58:50

video games content. It's like the

58:53

replay. I remember my nephew when

58:55

he was like three years old, like before he was

58:57

even going to school, he would say to his father

58:59

and my brother, I want to watch

59:01

Star Wars. My brother was like, you want to watch the

59:03

movie? No, I want to watch that man

59:05

and that woman play the Star Wars game on YouTube.

59:08

It was like he was just watching them

59:10

replay a recording of the

59:13

video game on YouTube. And

59:15

so this life review thing, which is at

59:17

the crux of near-death experiences, I

59:20

think gives us a clue and an

59:22

interesting clue, which ties

59:24

back to your question to me, which is how do

59:27

you live with this stuff? And I say, well, what

59:29

if all of this is being

59:32

recorded and you're making choices and you're going to have

59:34

to review it afterwards? Like

59:36

the concept of when

59:38

you die. Exactly. St. Peter

59:41

reviews your life. That's

59:43

right. So in the Christian traditions, you have St. Peter,

59:45

you have the Book of Life, right? Which

59:47

theoretically, depending on who you ask,

59:50

the recording angel has written down whether

59:53

you get into heaven or not, reviewing

59:55

your life. Well it turns out

59:57

in the Islamic traditions, they get much more

59:59

explicit. about what that is. They call

1:00:01

it the scroll of deeds. Now

1:00:04

of course remember, two thousand years ago they had to call

1:00:06

it something people would understand. The

1:00:08

scroll of deeds, there's two angels. And you've

1:00:10

probably seen like in the movies, in the

1:00:12

animated movies, they'll have like the angel and

1:00:14

the devil. That comes out of the Islamic

1:00:17

traditions. And so there's these

1:00:19

two angels, they're called the kiraman katabin, and

1:00:21

they're sitting down and writing down, one's writing

1:00:23

down all your good deeds and

1:00:25

one's writing down all your bad deeds. And

1:00:28

what it says in the tradition, and when

1:00:32

I delve into these different traditions, it's not so

1:00:34

much to say, okay, this religion is right and that

1:00:36

one isn't, but to say what's in common across

1:00:39

all these religions. Because that

1:00:41

part is probably right. If

1:00:43

these guys are coming to that independently, all

1:00:45

the other stuff maybe, I won't criticize for

1:00:48

you believing the other stuff,

1:00:50

that's up to you. But that stuff

1:00:52

is probably at the core of this thing

1:00:54

called life and what happens after life. And

1:00:56

so what it says in Islamic traditions is

1:00:59

your book will be laid open for you

1:01:01

after you die. And you

1:01:03

will be the reckoner, right? So we think of

1:01:06

Judgment Day and we think of all this

1:01:08

stuff. But what it's actually saying, now that's

1:01:10

a metaphor. It doesn't mean there's like

1:01:12

angels with a feather pen writing down

1:01:14

what in Chinese, you know, this is

1:01:16

what happened this day or in Arabic.

1:01:19

The only thing that makes sense is you would basically

1:01:21

just record the entire 3D scene

1:01:24

and you would play it back

1:01:26

for yourself, which is exactly what

1:01:28

near-death experiencers describe when they talk

1:01:30

about the life review. It's like this, they're sitting there,

1:01:33

there's a screen, and then suddenly they get pulled into

1:01:35

the screen and they replay all of this stuff. And

1:01:37

there's usually an angel or they might call him God

1:01:39

or they might say it's Jesus or they might say

1:01:41

it's a being of light. Different

1:01:44

experiencers say different things, but they

1:01:46

say that guy doesn't judge you. You're

1:01:48

looking at it saying, oh crap, you know,

1:01:50

I was going to try to be a

1:01:52

better person to my wife this time around.

1:01:55

And I wasn't, you know, and I did this or I

1:01:57

did that over my kids or, you know.

1:02:00

And they tell us that the moments that

1:02:02

matter are the small moments in

1:02:04

how you treat other people. Like that's the thing

1:02:07

you're most proud of or you're like, damn, I

1:02:09

treated that person in grade school. You know, we

1:02:11

all made fun of her and I should have

1:02:14

been her friend. Like those are the things that really

1:02:16

matter. So

1:02:18

if that's the game, right, you always think

1:02:20

what's the objective of the game, right? And

1:02:24

I think it gives us a very different

1:02:26

perspective and a way to

1:02:28

think about life. So that's

1:02:30

one kind of big

1:02:32

answer for me. The other is we go

1:02:35

through lots of difficulties in life, right? Go

1:02:38

through financial difficulties, go through

1:02:40

health difficulties, right? And

1:02:43

these can seem pretty tough. But

1:02:45

if we just think of them as a quest

1:02:48

with a difficulty level, right, that's

1:02:50

higher, that we might

1:02:52

have to get through, there might be

1:02:54

some purpose to that. And that ties

1:02:57

to the idea of karma, particularly

1:02:59

within the Eastern traditions, right?

1:03:01

Where if you think of karma as a – most

1:03:04

people think of karma as, hey, you shot me. I'm

1:03:06

going to shoot you in this life, right? That's

1:03:08

a very simplistic view of karma. What

1:03:11

karma is actually about is

1:03:13

about your thoughts, your desires

1:03:15

and your actions, which

1:03:17

then create situations in the

1:03:20

future, whether

1:03:22

in this life or a future life. So

1:03:24

of course, in the Eastern traditions, you have

1:03:26

the reincarnation idea, which you don't necessarily have

1:03:28

in the Western traditions. But

1:03:31

that karma is about basically

1:03:33

a list of information that follows

1:03:36

you around from life

1:03:38

to life, right? So you

1:03:40

might have a different body in the next life, but

1:03:42

that information is still there. Where does it live?

1:03:45

I'm from Silicon Valley. I like to say it's

1:03:47

in the cloud, right? That's where

1:03:49

we store all our information. It's in

1:03:51

the database in the cloud. Which is also a

1:03:53

bizarre thought because it's not a cloud. Yeah, it's

1:03:55

not really a cloud. Why are we even saying

1:03:57

that? Why is that so ubiquitous? I

1:04:00

know it's such a stupid term. It's got

1:04:02

a first time. I heard it the cloud.

1:04:04

I was scratching my head What what does

1:04:07

that even mean? It's such a stupid way

1:04:09

to describe something that's really complex and you

1:04:11

could actually trace where it is Right

1:04:14

exactly and and so I like to think

1:04:16

of it as the reason we call it

1:04:18

the cloud is because you don't

1:04:20

know Exactly where the server is right? It

1:04:22

could be one of a million servers

1:04:24

right there Amazon has a

1:04:27

huge warehouse right which is AWS and all

1:04:29

the servers are running there So

1:04:31

you don't in the past like I used to

1:04:33

do software before the cloud You would

1:04:35

set up your own servers or you'd have your own

1:04:37

data center and everything you would say this is

1:04:39

how many? 386 is we have to write

1:04:41

how many now it's like it's just

1:04:43

out there somewhere, right? I don't know where the heck

1:04:45

it is out there. And so I like to think of

1:04:48

the cloud as In

1:04:50

a video game we have the rendered world, right? So you're

1:04:52

watching the video game you can see

1:04:54

the the greenery and everything But you also

1:04:56

got all that other information there right right

1:04:58

like you got the HUD the heads-up display

1:05:01

You got your inventory your level, you know,

1:05:03

you got all this stuff You got your

1:05:05

list of quests and so

1:05:07

where is that information? It's not in the physical

1:05:09

world, right? But it's there somewhere. It's on a

1:05:11

server somewhere, right? Right and so I like to

1:05:14

think of karma as a

1:05:16

kind of database of quests or

1:05:19

achievements or experiences, you

1:05:21

know that we still need to have And

1:05:24

what happens is you know, this database just keeps getting

1:05:27

bigger and bigger as

1:05:29

we create more desires and situations

1:05:32

and Actions and

1:05:34

things that we do with people and then sometimes

1:05:36

you have karma to resolve with somebody right? There's

1:05:38

the there's the old the old

1:05:40

idea of you meet somebody you feel like

1:05:42

you've known them for a while, right? You're

1:05:44

irresistibly drawn to someone and you don't know

1:05:47

why you have some particular experience Whatever that

1:05:49

experience is and so,

1:05:51

you know within certain traditions They view that as

1:05:53

perhaps when you were planning it. It's like a

1:05:55

I like to think of it as like a

1:05:57

raid or a gild in

1:05:59

a video game game, right? You say, OK, here's some

1:06:01

other people. We're going to

1:06:03

do this together, you know, later on in

1:06:06

some point while we're playing the game, we're

1:06:08

going to have this particular experience of being

1:06:10

business partners or lovers or enemies

1:06:13

or whatever the case, you know, whatever

1:06:15

the situation is. But

1:06:17

this idea that these experiences could

1:06:20

be there for a reason, you

1:06:23

know, when we have tough experiences is I think something

1:06:25

that can be comforting. I know

1:06:27

it was for me, like when I went through certain health

1:06:29

crises, for example, that, you

1:06:32

know, we are here to

1:06:34

experience some of these things. And

1:06:37

so if you look at karma more

1:06:39

deeply, there's a story from autobiography of

1:06:42

Yogi that sounds unbelievable to

1:06:44

people that I think is worth maybe

1:06:46

just, you know, telling the story because people read that

1:06:49

book and they say, did this guy just make this

1:06:51

shit up? Did this stuff really happen?

1:06:54

Or is this from the Arabian Nights? So

1:06:56

there's a story of this guy named Babaji,

1:06:58

who supposedly lived for hundreds of years in

1:07:00

the Himalayas and supposedly still there. OK, so

1:07:02

that's pretty weird to begin with. But

1:07:04

there's a story of Yogananda's Guru's Guru,

1:07:06

a guy named Lahiri, who went

1:07:09

up into the mountains and meets this Babaji,

1:07:12

right? And Babaji says,

1:07:14

Lahiri, you have found me. Finally,

1:07:16

I summoned you to me. I've been watching you

1:07:18

your whole life. And now I'm going to reinitiate

1:07:20

you. Don't you remember? You used to sit in

1:07:22

this cave and you used to meditate with me

1:07:25

and there's your blanket. And Lahiri's like, I don't

1:07:27

remember any of this stuff. He

1:07:29

was like 30 years old. He's like,

1:07:31

you know, I just called out here

1:07:33

for some government position. And

1:07:36

he says, well, we need to initiate you in this

1:07:38

yoga technique. And maybe you'll remember then. And

1:07:40

so he initiates him and he starts

1:07:42

to remember all this stuff. And

1:07:45

then he says, OK, we're going to initiate you over there. And

1:07:47

Lahiri looks and there's this golden

1:07:50

palace that came out of nowhere,

1:07:52

you know, right in the middle of the

1:07:54

Himalayas. And he says, we're

1:07:56

going to initiate you in this palace. And it just

1:07:58

came from nowhere. So

1:08:01

Yogananda is talking about the

1:08:03

dream nature of the world and how yogis can

1:08:05

manipulate it. But then Lahiri says,

1:08:08

well, one, how did you create this out of nothing,

1:08:10

but two, why in this golden palace? And

1:08:12

so this kind of immortal figure in the story

1:08:14

says, well,

1:08:16

in a previous life, you expressed an

1:08:19

interest, a real

1:08:21

strong desire to live in

1:08:23

a palace in a future life. And

1:08:26

so I've created this dream palace for you. Not

1:08:29

really real, but you're seeing it in

1:08:31

order to resolve that karma so

1:08:33

that you don't have to go live a whole life in a

1:08:36

palace like that karma is done now. Take

1:08:38

that off the database. So I use

1:08:40

that to kind of show that sometimes we

1:08:42

put things into the database of karma

1:08:44

based upon our strong desires. And

1:08:47

that becomes part of our script in life. You know,

1:08:49

like, how did I know I wanted to be a

1:08:51

computer programmer? I don't know. Right. Why

1:08:54

do some people want to become

1:08:56

podcasters, right? Or fighters

1:08:58

or comedians? It's like we

1:09:01

have these things inside of us that sometimes feel

1:09:03

they're like something we're just drawn to.

1:09:06

Right. Yeah. It's just

1:09:08

something we're meant to do now. Yeah. Malcolm

1:09:10

Gladwell wrote that book. I think it's called Outliers, which is if

1:09:12

you spend 10,000 hours doing

1:09:14

something, you become an expert. My

1:09:16

question is more what

1:09:18

drives somebody to spend 10,000 hours doing

1:09:20

this versus that?

1:09:22

Right. I have friends who are rock

1:09:25

climbers. They probably spent 10,000 hours climbing

1:09:27

rock. I don't

1:09:29

have any desire to spend 10,000 hours. But

1:09:32

I probably spent 10,000 hours programming when I was

1:09:34

younger. It was just something I was nationally

1:09:36

drawn to. I was good at. Right. And

1:09:38

I feel like these are part of the

1:09:41

quests or achievements that

1:09:43

we have in life. And I think the most

1:09:45

interesting people that I've ever met have gone through

1:09:47

quests. Rarely

1:09:49

do I find interesting people that

1:09:52

haven't experienced something difficult. Yeah.

1:09:55

I mean, in fact, it was partly for me going

1:09:57

through some difficulty that got me to write this book,

1:09:59

finally. because I've been thinking about it for years.

1:10:01

So I ended up – I was kind

1:10:04

of at the height of my entrepreneurial career,

1:10:06

had sold my video game company, the Japanese

1:10:08

to a Japanese company. I was

1:10:10

at MIT running a startup program called

1:10:13

PlayLabs for video game companies. And

1:10:16

then I ended up having heart

1:10:18

issues and I ended up

1:10:20

having to get heart surgery, which if

1:10:22

anybody has seen that, you can see it's pretty

1:10:24

much the biggest cut, one of

1:10:26

the biggest cuts you can make. And they kept

1:10:29

saying, oh yeah, a few months, it'll be fine. And

1:10:31

what happened was after the heart surgery, I

1:10:34

couldn't do anything for a while. I

1:10:36

had this long recovery. It was probably

1:10:38

the most difficult period in

1:10:40

my life. And during that time, I

1:10:42

would start to get better and I would try to jump back

1:10:44

into the business world, back into

1:10:47

Silicon Valley. I was going to raise this big VC fund

1:10:49

and do all this stuff. And I would –

1:10:51

my health would deteriorate again. From

1:10:53

the pressure, the stress? You

1:10:56

know, it's a good question, right? Just the amount of

1:10:58

energy that you need to do these things? Yeah. How

1:11:01

your body didn't use that energy to recover? It

1:11:03

could be that, right? But what I found was

1:11:05

that I did have enough energy because every time

1:11:08

I tried to do that, I didn't have back

1:11:10

in the hospital for another procedure, right? It's

1:11:12

no fun having heart procedures, let me tell you. But

1:11:15

when I – I did have enough energy to

1:11:18

do this other thing that I'd been wanting to do

1:11:20

my whole life, which was to write more books. And

1:11:24

so I had just enough energy to go to

1:11:26

Starbucks and write – you

1:11:28

know, work for an hour or two on

1:11:30

the simulation hypothesis, which for me was a

1:11:32

way to bring together all the threads of

1:11:35

my life. Like I'd been a computer scientist,

1:11:37

I'd been a video game designer. I spent

1:11:39

a lot of time investigating different mystical traditions,

1:11:42

shamanic stuff, you know,

1:11:45

without drugs, you know, more of the shamanic

1:11:47

journey. And I spent time with

1:11:49

people who had been investigating UFOs and religious people

1:11:51

and academics who were complete materialists and

1:11:53

don't believe in any of this stuff. And

1:11:56

it was a way to bring this all together. And suddenly I

1:11:58

found I had more energy. when

1:12:00

I did that. Every time I tried

1:12:02

to do something else, my health would start to deteriorate

1:12:05

again. And so eventually I got the

1:12:07

message, so for the next couple years, I just focused

1:12:09

on writing, right? And that led to this

1:12:11

book, The Simulation, my father's, and I feel like it

1:12:14

was part of my life plan.

1:12:16

If you had asked me in high school, what are you

1:12:18

gonna do for your life? I would

1:12:20

have said, I'm gonna be a computer programmer,

1:12:23

an entrepreneur, sell my company, and become

1:12:25

a writer. But I

1:12:27

always thought I was gonna do that, become a writer

1:12:29

in my 20s. When

1:12:32

this happened, I was already 48, so I

1:12:34

had already, I was still

1:12:36

in Silicon Valley, right? Still playing the game. Trying

1:12:39

to build the next billion dollar company, which is what

1:12:41

everybody tries to do. The next

1:12:43

unicorn, they call it, in Silicon Valley. And

1:12:46

it was like I got this message that there was another

1:12:49

part of the story that I was neglecting. I

1:12:52

had written some books, but it was like a hobby. I

1:12:54

was doing it on the side. Then when I

1:12:57

focused on it, suddenly, it

1:13:00

was like I got the message pretty clearly.

1:13:02

During that time, this is

1:13:05

sort of a mystical experience. I was going in and

1:13:07

out of consciousness and not a lot while I was

1:13:09

recovering. And I would just get the message. You're

1:13:13

supposed to be writing. You're supposed to be writing. What the

1:13:15

heck are you doing? Still out there trying to make money.

1:13:18

That wasn't what we agreed to. This is what you were

1:13:20

supposed to do. And when

1:13:22

I did that, things just flowed. Much

1:13:25

more easily. And the book went

1:13:27

on to be quite successful, and I was able

1:13:30

to write another book. And then, as my health

1:13:32

recovered, I realized there was another thing that

1:13:34

I'd always wanted to do, which was be a

1:13:36

professor in academia. And that's kind

1:13:38

of what I'm doing now. So I went back

1:13:40

for a PhD after many years, and

1:13:43

now I'm teaching classes on the simulation hypothesis,

1:13:45

doing research on AI. So it was like

1:13:47

these things that I kind of wanted to do before and

1:13:50

I never got to, but they were

1:13:52

optional parts of the story. And

1:13:55

we still have the ability to make

1:13:57

choices. But sometimes a quest hits us.

1:13:59

or a situation

1:14:02

hits us with a lot of difficulty and

1:14:04

maybe there's a bigger purpose to that, right?

1:14:06

Maybe it has something to do with

1:14:10

how we set up our character in the

1:14:12

game and the choices that we're

1:14:14

making. And so now

1:14:16

we're getting into like the personal philosophy side

1:14:18

of simulation, which I think is quite valid.

1:14:20

That's probably the second, you know,

1:14:22

probably the biggest questions I get asked are, are

1:14:25

we in a simulation? What's the percentage? And then,

1:14:27

you know, what would it matter if

1:14:31

we're in a simulation or not? And I think it can

1:14:33

be a positive experience

1:14:37

and for I think people who

1:14:39

grew up in a modern world with modern technology, it

1:14:42

gives us a way to say, you know what, maybe

1:14:44

what all those religions were saying wasn't bullshit, right? It

1:14:46

wasn't just stories that people made up,

1:14:48

but they just didn't have the language to express

1:14:52

something that a

1:14:54

lot of people who have had near-to-death experiences, they

1:14:56

use the word ineffable, right? Which means

1:14:58

unable to be put into words. And

1:15:01

so they can't really tell you what's out there, but

1:15:04

they use these metaphors to try to describe

1:15:06

it. And so I think whether

1:15:08

you view simulation theory as a, you

1:15:11

know, hardcore physics thing or

1:15:13

you view it as a metaphor for what

1:15:16

this world is all about and how

1:15:18

we go through our lives, I

1:15:20

think there's value in looking at

1:15:23

both of those angles. And the metaphor side

1:15:25

is what I think, actually for me personally,

1:15:27

and that was your question, how does this

1:15:29

change the way that I view the world?

1:15:31

It actually has changed the way that

1:15:33

I view the world so that when I go through difficult situations,

1:15:36

I kind of step back. They don't bother

1:15:38

me as much. I mean they still bother me physically,

1:15:40

but they don't bother me as much

1:15:42

in other ways. So you view

1:15:44

them as challenges in this thing

1:15:46

that you're doing. So

1:15:49

instead of woe is me, oh my God, how

1:15:51

is this happening to me, which is the way

1:15:53

a lot of people interface with problems, you

1:15:56

go, okay, this is the challenge that I'm

1:15:58

presented with. How do I- overcome this challenge

1:16:00

and what feels like the thing to do. Right,

1:16:03

and why this challenge now? Right,

1:16:05

why this challenge now? If there's

1:16:08

a part of me that's outside

1:16:10

watching this, maybe

1:16:12

when I go to sleep or wherever, whenever,

1:16:15

why would it choose this particular challenge

1:16:18

at this point in my life? What

1:16:21

is it that it's meant to

1:16:24

impact, and what is it that I need to learn?

1:16:26

But yeah, I view it as a challenge rather than,

1:16:29

this is just a bad thing that's happened in

1:16:31

me. And that seems like the right way to

1:16:33

play the game, if it's game. Yeah,

1:16:37

not only does it seem like the right way, I think that is

1:16:40

part of the purpose, right? So get back to

1:16:42

the idea of

1:16:44

maya or illusion, right? So

1:16:46

it's like we are agreeing to

1:16:49

forget, right? The

1:16:51

Greeks talked about the river of forgetfulness,

1:16:53

lete. It's one of the five

1:16:56

rivers, but when you incarnate, Plato talked

1:16:58

about this. You cross the river and

1:17:00

you forget everything

1:17:03

outside of this physical world. And in

1:17:05

the Chinese traditions, you have the same thing. You

1:17:08

have Meng Po, excuse

1:17:11

me, who's a goddess of forgetfulness. And

1:17:14

she brews the tea of forgetfulness, and

1:17:16

you drink it and you forget what

1:17:18

was going on before. And so getting

1:17:21

back to this idea of everything being

1:17:23

an illusion, you

1:17:25

kind of agree to forget in my

1:17:28

view, and I think within this way of viewing the

1:17:30

world as a video game, in

1:17:32

order to enjoy, and I put enjoy in

1:17:34

quotes, because that doesn't necessarily mean it's

1:17:37

all fun and games, right? Right. Maybe

1:17:40

experience is a better

1:17:42

word to use. To experience

1:17:45

these things in life in a way that

1:17:47

we forget, but it's okay sometimes, I think,

1:17:49

to step out, and

1:17:51

maybe we remember a little bit of

1:17:54

the storyline, or we recognize

1:17:56

someone, right? There

1:17:59

was a hypnotherapist

1:18:03

who wrote a book called Journey of Souls, Dr. Michael

1:18:05

Newton. I don't know if you ever have heard of

1:18:07

it or not. So he started

1:18:09

with regression hypnosis, taking people back

1:18:11

to their childhood. And every now

1:18:13

and then, they ended up somewhere

1:18:16

before their childhood, meaning before they

1:18:18

were born, right? And so

1:18:20

he had a bunch of patients, and

1:18:22

he started to do this more and more.

1:18:24

And they all kind of described a similar

1:18:27

type of thing, like

1:18:30

where they existed before they were

1:18:32

born. So these are sometimes

1:18:35

called pre-birth memories now. And

1:18:37

they talk about this time

1:18:39

when they were choosing what

1:18:42

kind of a life they were going to have. And

1:18:44

they would see on a screen, like

1:18:47

a screen, again, metaphors, like,

1:18:49

you know, timelines, and say at this point,

1:18:51

if you choose, you know, you choose to

1:18:53

go to Austin or stay in Los Angeles

1:18:55

or whatever, right? That takes you on this

1:18:58

path, this takes you on that path. That

1:19:00

you see, like, this graph of

1:19:03

possibilities out there for

1:19:05

your life. And then some

1:19:07

of them described, like, having friends,

1:19:09

like your friends list in a game. And

1:19:12

that they would say, okay, this is how you're going

1:19:14

to recognize me in the game, because

1:19:17

I'm going to have on this avatar, this, I'm using

1:19:19

the term avatar because I talk about video games, they

1:19:21

didn't necessarily use that. But they said, this is how

1:19:23

you're going to recognize me, the first time you encounter

1:19:25

me, I'm going to be on

1:19:28

a red bicycle or something, right, in childhood, or

1:19:30

I'm going to be wearing this dress at this,

1:19:32

you know, at this dance or whatever the case

1:19:35

is. So they had these little clues for

1:19:37

how they would recognize some of the people

1:19:40

that they really wanted to have

1:19:42

certain quests or experiences or achievements

1:19:45

within the game, group quests, if you will,

1:19:48

which is a little bit different than the kind of

1:19:50

quest as the difficult experience we're talking about, but they're

1:19:52

all different kinds of quests, I would say. And

1:19:55

so I think, you know, we

1:19:57

can take that as an interesting, as an interesting, interesting,

1:19:59

interesting interesting way, again another metaphor for

1:20:02

how we think about life is that

1:20:04

perhaps we've had some of these things

1:20:06

laid out for us, but we're still

1:20:08

free to make our choices along the

1:20:10

way. And I think it

1:20:12

gives us a richer experience of

1:20:15

life as we go through the game. Well,

1:20:20

that's certainly the most beneficial way to interact

1:20:22

with it, to

1:20:24

just think of this whole thing as a

1:20:26

game and to think of this whole game

1:20:28

as like this game will give you clues

1:20:30

as to how to play it and

1:20:33

you'll have experiences that you

1:20:35

can engage with and you could

1:20:37

say that you're enjoying them or

1:20:40

that you're getting pleasure out

1:20:42

of that or you're getting excitement out of that

1:20:44

or you're getting some sort of fulfillment out of

1:20:47

that. But you

1:20:50

still have to play the game. So you're

1:20:52

here. Right you're here. What

1:20:54

are you going to do? One way

1:20:56

or the other. How are you going to deal with

1:20:59

it? What's the beneficial way to go through this where

1:21:01

you feel harmonious? I know if

1:21:03

I feel like I'm wasting time or I'm doing

1:21:05

nothing, I have this feeling like what

1:21:08

did you do with your day? It's

1:21:11

a terrible feeling versus if

1:21:14

I work and I get

1:21:16

things done at the end I'm like,

1:21:18

oh I did it. I feel good. Like

1:21:21

okay, the universe, the game is telling

1:21:23

me you're on the right path. That's the

1:21:25

way to do it. Right.

1:21:27

And I think that's the key is we

1:21:30

all get different messages for

1:21:32

when we're on the right path and

1:21:35

when we're not. And

1:21:37

I think we sometimes sense that. Sometimes

1:21:39

things just kind of flow easily and

1:21:41

other times they don't necessarily. But

1:21:44

yeah, I agree. I think viewing the

1:21:46

game in that way

1:21:48

based on your own signals in

1:21:51

your brain, in your body, that are

1:21:53

intuition. You're intuition, right? And

1:21:56

there's different ways to think about that. Some

1:21:59

people have suggested. suggested, like some physicists

1:22:01

have suggested, that there

1:22:04

are these possible futures and

1:22:07

that they are sending back information

1:22:10

from the future to the present, right? Because

1:22:12

time doesn't really exist the same way. Again,

1:22:14

when we get back into quantum mechanics, it

1:22:16

starts to be weird. But

1:22:19

like there's a guy named Fred Allen Wolf who

1:22:21

was one of these Berkeley physicists in that book,

1:22:24

How the Hippies Save Physics. I don't know if you've

1:22:26

ever heard of that book. It's an interesting book about

1:22:28

how people in quantum mechanics stop thinking

1:22:30

about what the heck does this mean because it was

1:22:32

too complicated back in the 60s. And

1:22:35

in the 70s, a group of hippie

1:22:37

physicists, all PhD physicists in Berkeley, used

1:22:40

to have this group and talk about what

1:22:42

does this all mean. One of the guys

1:22:44

was Fritz Joff Capra who wrote the Dow of Physics.

1:22:47

Another I think was Gary Zukokoff. But a bunch of these

1:22:49

guys ended up looking at what

1:22:52

does this all mean as opposed to just calculating,

1:22:54

which is what physics were doing at the time.

1:22:57

But so one of these guys talks about these

1:23:00

futures are sending us information. And sometimes what

1:23:02

we get are clues, right,

1:23:04

saying that, oh, this is a possibility. Maybe

1:23:06

I should choose this over that. It's

1:23:09

almost like the futures are sending back these

1:23:12

messages to the past. And I think of that as different

1:23:15

runs of the game, right? And

1:23:18

it's possible there's a part of us that

1:23:20

might be running the game forward as

1:23:23

a simulation to try to see what might happen

1:23:25

and then come back and then you make a choice based

1:23:28

on this idea. There

1:23:32

was some guys who wrote a paper recently

1:23:34

about dreams as a sort

1:23:36

of way to simulate weird, bad experiences,

1:23:39

traumatic experiences, maybe preparing you for

1:23:42

things in life. But

1:23:44

when you start to think about the world

1:23:46

as a simulation, again,

1:23:49

you can simulate more than once, right? You

1:23:51

can try out what might happen

1:23:53

if you did X, what might happen if you do Y,

1:23:56

kind of like you

1:23:58

watched the Lord of the Rings movies, right? And if

1:24:01

you look at what

1:24:04

they did was before, Peter Jackson, what they did

1:24:06

was before they actually filmed the scene, they

1:24:08

would create a pre-vis, pre-visualization,

1:24:10

right, using like crude graphics and

1:24:13

stuff. And you can see

1:24:15

they played out what it might look like before they

1:24:18

got around and did the act, because it's so expensive,

1:24:20

right, in a movie to shoot a

1:24:22

particular scene. So they would do this pre-visualization.

1:24:24

And so, you know, perhaps there's a part

1:24:26

of us that's watching the

1:24:28

game that's doing this pre-visualization and

1:24:31

they're sending us clues about

1:24:33

what might happen if we

1:24:35

do X or what might happen,

1:24:38

you know, if we do Y. And

1:24:41

so that, you know, that takes us even back to

1:24:43

what I was talking about earlier with Philip K. Dick,

1:24:46

right, and his idea that

1:24:49

the universe, what happens

1:24:51

is we actually go and we change

1:24:53

variables and we run it, and we

1:24:57

might have the sense that we're running

1:24:59

the same scene, we're saying the same

1:25:01

things, but something could be different. And

1:25:03

usually something is different when

1:25:05

you run the simulation. You

1:25:07

know, and that's what got me into a whole other rabbit

1:25:09

hole, which I covered in my second book, which is the

1:25:12

Mandela Effect. I don't know if you've heard

1:25:14

about the Mandela Effect. I

1:25:16

have, but I don't necessarily totally understand

1:25:18

it. Yeah. I

1:25:20

kind of dismissed the whole thing earlier, you know,

1:25:23

and the Mandela Effect is when a small

1:25:25

group of people remember

1:25:27

something happening differently in the

1:25:30

past than what is

1:25:32

the majority consensus opinion. And

1:25:35

it's about Mandela being dead, right? Well, that was

1:25:37

the first thing that kind of

1:25:39

kicked off this blogger who actually coined the term,

1:25:41

I think her name was Fiona Broom. Some

1:25:44

people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison

1:25:46

in the 80s, but

1:25:48

of course he didn't die in prison, right? You

1:25:51

can look it up, right? He got

1:25:53

out of prison, became president of South

1:25:55

Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and

1:25:57

died in whatever it was, like more

1:25:59

recently. like 2013 or something like that.

1:26:03

But the people who remember this,

1:26:06

they remember it with just like

1:26:08

a whole bunch of specific details,

1:26:10

right? His wife Winnie spoke

1:26:13

at the funeral. There

1:26:15

were certain US politicians or presidents

1:26:17

there. And so what happened

1:26:20

was that was one Mandela effect, if

1:26:22

you will. And then

1:26:24

there started to be all these other things that

1:26:26

people remembered that were

1:26:29

different. And some of these were relatively minor things

1:26:31

like the spelling of fruit loops or- Barons

1:26:33

and bears. That's the most

1:26:35

famous one, right? The Berenstein bears, right?

1:26:37

Everybody, in fact, here, we can see

1:26:40

it there, right? If

1:26:42

you ask people, most people remember it

1:26:44

as the Berenstein bears. Right. But when

1:26:46

you look at it, it's actually the

1:26:48

Berenstain bears, okay? It's

1:26:50

a relatively small change, but it's

1:26:53

one that people are really like

1:26:55

confused about. Then there's

1:26:57

the movies, right? The movie lines, like

1:27:00

in Star Wars, did he say, Luke,

1:27:03

I am your father? Did Darth Vader actually say

1:27:05

that, right? And

1:27:07

then there were entire episodes of Star Trek

1:27:11

where the

1:27:13

Trekkies in the audience remembered

1:27:15

this episode and they're talking to the cast

1:27:17

members of the original Star Trek. And

1:27:20

the cast members are like, we never shot this episode. What

1:27:22

are you talking about? They're like, no, no, no, we saw

1:27:24

it. This is what happened in the

1:27:26

episode. And then you got the whole Sinbad

1:27:28

thing, which was a movie that he supposedly

1:27:30

made called, was

1:27:32

it Kazam or Shazam? It

1:27:35

was all called Kazam, but there was actually a

1:27:37

movie with Shaq called Shazam. Anyway, there's a whole

1:27:39

bunch of these movie-related ones, right? And

1:27:42

there's a bunch of these logo ones, like

1:27:45

the Berenstain bears. But the

1:27:47

more interesting ones come, I think, with

1:27:49

events like Mandela. Like,

1:27:54

you remember Tiananmen Square? What

1:27:57

happened to that guy in front of the tank? He

1:28:01

stood in front of the tank and they

1:28:03

removed him, right? They didn't run him over.

1:28:06

Right. That's what I remember too, right? But there's a

1:28:08

group of people who remember the

1:28:12

tank running him over instead of the bloodiest

1:28:15

thing they ever saw on television, right? Like

1:28:18

this vivid memory of this thing, right? Or

1:28:21

like the Reverend Billy Graham, like I don't know

1:28:23

when he died, but you know, there are like

1:28:25

these evangelical Christians who say that

1:28:27

my parents follow this guy and they got

1:28:30

a magazine with him on the cover saying

1:28:32

he died many

1:28:34

years earlier than he actually

1:28:36

died, right? And

1:28:38

they remember it vividly. And so those

1:28:41

events start to become interesting. But

1:28:44

the ones that I find really interesting are

1:28:46

the ones where there's some

1:28:49

interesting evidence like scripture, right? So people

1:28:52

take their scripture pretty seriously, right?

1:28:55

Like do you know the line in Isaiah about the

1:28:57

lion and the lamb? I don't

1:28:59

remember it. Yeah, but you remember there was a line, right?

1:29:01

About a lion and a lamb. Well, it turns out there

1:29:03

isn't, right? It

1:29:06

has something that the wolf shall lie with a

1:29:08

lamb or something like that, right? And

1:29:10

what's weird is that people have like, you

1:29:13

know, like little wall clocks and things with

1:29:15

a picture of a lion and a lamb.

1:29:17

But it's not even in the scripture. It's not

1:29:19

in the scripture, right? And

1:29:21

I thought, okay, well, maybe it's a translation thing, you

1:29:24

know, maybe one version of the King

1:29:26

James Bible has it in the other one. And people are like,

1:29:29

no, I have my same physical copy from when

1:29:31

I was a kid and

1:29:33

I memorized this particular line, you

1:29:36

know? And so, you know, and there's

1:29:38

a whole, there are websites that track these

1:29:40

different lines, different things that maybe have

1:29:42

changed. And what do you think these things are? Well,

1:29:46

so I started to wonder, you know,

1:29:49

does this happen in other scriptures? You know,

1:29:51

is it only in like the Bible, like this

1:29:54

is going on? And

1:29:56

so I started looking around at Islam

1:29:58

and the Quran because they... memorize the

1:30:00

Quran word for word. I mean that is like the

1:30:03

first thing you have to do to become a priest, right? You

1:30:05

have to like be able to say the whole damn thing. I

1:30:07

always wondered why do you need to memorize it? It seems kind

1:30:09

of stupid. Nowadays you can just look it up.

1:30:12

So I found this one Sufi Imam

1:30:14

online who was talking about this and he

1:30:16

says that in the Islamic

1:30:18

traditions in the Middle East there

1:30:21

are these beings that are allowed to

1:30:23

go back in time and change things,

1:30:25

physical things, but they're not

1:30:27

allowed to change your memory, okay?

1:30:29

And these beings are called

1:30:31

the jinn, right? We've heard of them

1:30:34

from Aladdin, right? The genie. The

1:30:36

genie is singular for jinn. But

1:30:38

that the jinn don't exist in space

1:30:41

and time in the same

1:30:43

way that we exist in space and time. And

1:30:45

so the reason that they still memorize it

1:30:47

word for word, I don't know if this

1:30:50

is something in the full orthodoxy, but this

1:30:52

is his explanation was that because

1:30:54

the jinn are allowed to change physical objects but they're

1:30:56

not allowed to change our memory, that's

1:30:58

why it's memorized word for word so that

1:31:01

nobody can mess with

1:31:03

the scripture. And

1:31:05

so I found that really fascinating, but there

1:31:08

are other physical objects like

1:31:10

the thinker, okay? Do you know the

1:31:13

thinker? The statue?

1:31:15

Yeah, the statue. Okay, so where is

1:31:17

the guy's hand in that? Isn't

1:31:23

he like, doesn't his hand on his chin?

1:31:25

Yeah, it's kind of under his chin like this,

1:31:27

right? We could even bring it up, right? If

1:31:29

we find it, right? But there's

1:31:32

a there's a there's right. And so there's

1:31:34

several bronze casts of this. There

1:31:36

was one at Stanford that I went and looked at recently.

1:31:39

But what you find is there's a bunch of people with

1:31:43

their hand at the top of

1:31:46

their forehead, right? Standing next to

1:31:48

the statue, right? And okay,

1:31:50

you might think there's a bunch of crazy tourists

1:31:52

just doing it for fun, but it's

1:31:55

really weird. So there's actually a

1:31:57

picture that I found from the

1:31:59

London Unviewed. mailing of Rodin's

1:32:02

The Thinker, which

1:32:04

was George Bernard Shaw, G.B.

1:32:06

Shaw, in the pose of

1:32:08

the thinker. We'll see if we can find this

1:32:10

picture. And so this was just

1:32:12

the night before this was being rolled

1:32:15

out to the public in London for the first time, I forget

1:32:17

what year, like 1902 or something. Okay,

1:32:20

so there's G.B. Shaw, this is like a famous

1:32:22

picture now, in the pose

1:32:24

of the thinker, and where is his hand? On his

1:32:26

head. On his forehead, and he

1:32:28

was probably standing right next to where

1:32:31

the statue was unveiled. And

1:32:34

so you have to start to wonder, why would

1:32:36

people do that? Those hands are

1:32:38

in a different position too. Yeah,

1:32:40

yeah, it's interesting, right? Yeah, his hands on his

1:32:42

left knee, the other guy's got his hand all

1:32:44

the way across onto the other side. Yeah,

1:32:47

exactly. And it's a different hand that

1:32:49

he's got on his head as well. Right,

1:32:51

and if you read, even Rodin- Left hand

1:32:53

versus right hand. Right, and

1:32:55

so there's like, there's almost three

1:32:57

versions of this. There's the

1:33:00

hand under the chin- Well, maybe these images

1:33:02

are reversed, because I'm seeing some with the

1:33:04

right hand on his chin. So that one

1:33:06

down there, Jamie, the one below that, yeah,

1:33:08

the right hand's on the chin. So

1:33:12

there's different versions of the thinker. Right,

1:33:14

right. So let's go back to the one

1:33:16

that I saw was the one at Stanford,

1:33:18

for example, right? In

1:33:20

these poses, in the statues, the

1:33:23

hand is always under the chin, but

1:33:25

in the images where people are imitating it, the

1:33:27

hand is on the head. The

1:33:29

hand is on the head, and you

1:33:31

find references to either it

1:33:34

being a fist under the chin or

1:33:36

slightly under the chin, which is what

1:33:38

it is now, right? It's kind of very lightly.

1:33:41

Or on the forehead. And so,

1:33:43

now, I'm not necessarily saying that all of

1:33:45

this stuff happens. I dismissed a lot

1:33:47

of this as just faulty memory, and that's the currently

1:33:51

accepted explanation for

1:33:53

the Mendel Effect. It's, oh, a bunch of people got it wrong, right?

1:33:55

But what you find is that the

1:33:58

more significance that something has

1:34:01

to you, the less

1:34:03

likely you are to get it wrong, right?

1:34:05

So if you're Jewish and you asked your

1:34:07

parents, why are these bears Jewish,

1:34:09

right? And your parents didn't say,

1:34:12

oh, it's not really

1:34:14

Bernstein, it's Bernstein, right? You

1:34:17

know, that's proximity to that

1:34:19

subject, right? There was a

1:34:22

blogger online, I'm forgetting her name now, she

1:34:24

was a journalism student in Chicago, and she

1:34:26

said she went to South Africa to interview

1:34:28

Nelson Mandela in prison and was told that

1:34:31

he was too ill. So she literally came

1:34:33

back and then she started working for NPR, and

1:34:36

then she says, well, I remember him dying

1:34:38

shortly after. Now, if you just went to

1:34:40

South Africa to interview

1:34:42

Nelson Mandela and then you remember him dying,

1:34:45

that's proximity and significance, you're

1:34:47

less likely to get it wrong

1:34:50

than just some random guy who

1:34:52

just thought Mandela died. Or if

1:34:54

you're heavy duty Christian

1:34:56

and you're more likely to memorize

1:34:59

certain passages from the Bible. Right.

1:35:02

So again, I just missed it.

1:35:04

And then what happened was after I had written

1:35:07

the simulation hypothesis about this idea that the whole

1:35:09

world is computation, a friend

1:35:11

of mine from MIT who was working at Google

1:35:14

came to me and said, hey, have you

1:35:16

heard of the Mandela effect? I was like, yeah,

1:35:18

I heard about it, but a bunch of people

1:35:20

are remembering different stuff, no big deal. And

1:35:23

he goes, well, the simulation hypothesis is one

1:35:25

of the best explanations for this, that

1:35:28

the world is a simulation. Now, I was surprised

1:35:30

for two reasons. One, most

1:35:32

guys who work at like

1:35:35

MIT or Google, they tend to be

1:35:37

very left-brained. So the Mandela

1:35:39

effect is not something that they generally

1:35:42

pay attention to or UFOs or like any

1:35:44

of this kind of weird stuff. But

1:35:47

the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if

1:35:50

you're writing a simulation and

1:35:52

you go back and you change some variables and you

1:35:54

rerun the simulation, lots of little

1:35:56

things could be different along

1:35:59

the way. And if you think

1:36:01

of all the Mandela facts, and

1:36:04

I like to use the Mandela fact as

1:36:06

a way of illustrating this idea that a

1:36:08

simulation can run multiple timelines, right? Whether you

1:36:10

believe it actually happened is up to you,

1:36:12

right? But

1:36:14

if, let's say, the thinker has three different

1:36:17

possibilities, then you got, let's say, the

1:36:19

Bernstein Bears. Let's say you have Curious George. Does he

1:36:21

have a tail? Or does he not have a tail?

1:36:24

Right? That's actually a good one. I don't remember which

1:36:26

one it is. But if you look it up. I

1:36:29

don't think he has a tail. You don't think so? No.

1:36:32

I don't know. Let's see if we can bring it up.

1:36:34

But all monkeys have tails. And Curious

1:36:36

George is a monkey, right? Right? Yeah.

1:36:39

Do all monkeys have tails? Right.

1:36:43

All apes are monkeys, but not all monkeys

1:36:46

are apes. Right. That's more of

1:36:48

a superset. Right. Subset type of

1:36:50

thing, right? But with Curious George, it's a particular

1:36:52

drawing, right? Yeah. That would be great.

1:36:54

Just Curious George over two. Does he have a tail? He

1:36:56

does have a tail. He's got a tail. Wow.

1:36:59

Sometimes he doesn't. Or has never had a tail.

1:37:02

Curious George never had a tail. No.

1:37:05

So I think the way you remember it, which is

1:37:08

without the tail, is the current consensus reality

1:37:11

view of

1:37:13

what it is. But so

1:37:16

let's go back to my point about these

1:37:19

different possibilities, right? Okay. So

1:37:21

imagine each of these is different possibilities. You

1:37:24

got like 50 of these effects or

1:37:26

100 of these effects. Now you basically

1:37:28

have this huge graph, right? In this one,

1:37:30

Dr. later said this, but

1:37:32

Curious George had a tail. In this

1:37:34

one, he didn't. What you have is this

1:37:37

network graph of possibilities of the path, right?

1:37:40

You have many different possible paths. You have

1:37:42

glitches in the matrix. Exactly. So

1:37:44

now you're sitting on this idea that maybe these

1:37:46

are glitches in the matrix, that something

1:37:49

weird has happened. But

1:37:51

it could also be that we switched, right?

1:37:54

You're now on this timeline, but you remember.

1:37:56

You have like a deja vu or you

1:37:58

have like a weird. memory. Right. So

1:38:01

even though you can Google, no

1:38:03

I was wrong about Mandela, in

1:38:06

your mind and in your memory, you're

1:38:08

like, no, no, no, no, no, no,

1:38:10

he died in prison. Right. Or, you

1:38:12

know, I, you know, for me...

1:38:14

I know he died in prison. I remember

1:38:16

it. I remember being sad. I remember the

1:38:19

news stories. Right. I remember

1:38:21

talking about it with friends. Or Bill Clinton

1:38:23

spoke at the funeral or whoever, right? Right.

1:38:25

I mean people get that specific with

1:38:28

their memories. And so I think it becomes harder

1:38:30

to just dismiss some of, some

1:38:32

of these, you know, um, fruit loops, fruit

1:38:34

loops you can probably find. Right. There's some

1:38:36

faulty memory. Yeah, there's some faulty memory going

1:38:39

on here, but at the same time... Some

1:38:41

weirdness. Some weirdness. It's not, cuz it's not

1:38:43

just a movie line. It's like entire movies,

1:38:45

right? That people claim to have had on

1:38:47

VHS. Like let's look at the one that

1:38:49

was, the Simbad one, I think, right? So

1:38:52

supposedly there was this movie by Simbad.

1:38:55

Simbad the comedian. Yeah, the comedian.

1:38:57

Mm-hmm. Right. In the 90s. That

1:38:59

people remember having, you know, with their VHS

1:39:01

tapes. Mm-hmm. And they were sitting there and they were

1:39:04

rewinding it. They were talking about specific scenes from it,

1:39:06

right? And Simbad was like, well, of course I've never

1:39:08

made that movie. I think, I think it was called

1:39:11

Kazam. Right. Shazam. Shazam. Yeah, Kazam is the

1:39:13

real movie. Yeah, that's right. So it's called

1:39:15

Shazam was the one that people remember, right?

1:39:17

Mm-hmm. So, but Shazam was

1:39:19

the actual movie with Shaq. Right. In

1:39:22

the 90s. Mm-hmm. So most people say,

1:39:24

you know, this, okay, that was the