In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with computer scientist and UFO researcher Dr. Gary Nolan to talk about his theory that we are living in a computer simulation or massively multiplayer video game, but where did that computer game come from and how did we get there? We also talk about the Galileo Project and the Soul Foundation, two academic UFO research groups that are trying to figure out what's really going on in the universe. We also discuss the role of non-player AI in video games and the role AI in the video game industry, and what it means to be an AI in a video game and how it can be used in simulation theory. If you like conspiracy theories, this episode is for you. This episode is brought to you by Cracked and the Planetary Society. The Planetary Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about all things related to UFOs, extraterrestrial life, and extraterrestrial intelligence. Our mission is to inform, entertain, and inspire people to pursue their passion for all things extraterrestrial. We are dedicated to debunk the myths, the urban legends, and everything else that goes on in our world. Thank you for listening and supporting this podcast. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and subscribe to our other shows on Apple Podcasts, The Anthropology, and wherever else you get your listening choices are available. Please share the podcast with your friends, and spread the word to your friends and family about this podcast! and let us know what you think of this episode! Timestamps, share it on social media! Cheers, Timestories, and don't miss out on this one! - we'll be looking out for more episodes like this one :) - Tom Bell, Timeless, Tom Bells, and much more! . Timelessness, Tom Bell , and much love, Cheers! (AstroFabulous! , :D) ( ) Thank You, Jon Toth Jon Taffer, Jamie, , Diana Pasoka & Gary Nolan Jim, Sriramode . . , etc., etc., etc. , & much more. (Thank you, Jon, ) , Jen, etc, etc., and more ... Thanks Jon Taffy, & so much more
00:00:46.000With the Galileo Project at Harvard and the Soul Foundation at Stanford, which are like the two academic UFO research groups that are out there.
00:00:55.000Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard and Gary Nolan is running the one.
00:01:21.000Yeah, well, so first question, how did I get involved in this, right?
00:01:24.000So, you know, I was a video game developer in Silicon Valley, and then I became an investor in the video game industry in my background in computer science.
00:01:33.000And what happened was after I sold my last video game company back in 2016, so we're talking like, you know, seven years ago now, Eight years ago now.
00:01:43.000And I put on a virtual reality headset and started playing a VR ping pong game.
00:01:48.000Now these headsets were even bigger than they are now and they were wired.
00:01:51.000So there's no mistaking you're in virtual reality.
00:01:54.000But what happened was that the ping pong game was so realistic That for a moment my brain forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis.
00:02:03.000So much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table, but of course there was no table.
00:02:09.000So the controller fell to the floor and I almost fell over.
00:02:13.000I had to do one of these double takes like, oh wait, I'm just in VR. So I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix, something that's so immersive that you would forget That you were inside a video game.
00:02:28.000And so that led me to this idea of the simulation point, which is a kind of technological singularity.
00:02:33.000But then I started to research things like quantum physics and some of the mysteries around, you know, the observer effect and quantum mechanics.
00:02:41.000And then I started to look at all the world's religions and I realized that they're all kind of saying the same thing, which is that there is no physical universe.
00:02:49.000And so that led me to the conclusion that we are most likely inside some kind of a computer simulation or a massively multiplayer video game, depending on how you look at it.
00:03:01.000But where did that computer game, where did that simulation come from if we were inside of it?
00:03:13.000And there's two versions of simulation theory.
00:03:16.000And I teach a class on this at Arizona State University.
00:03:19.000It's probably the first college-level class about simulation theory, and it kind of pulls in science fiction, religion, philosophy, and technology.
00:03:25.000But one of the key distinctions I tell my students to make is it's not talked about a lot with simulation theory.
00:03:31.000Is what I call the NPC versus the RPG versions of simulation theory.
00:03:37.000So NPC, as you probably know, means non-player characters within video games.
00:03:42.000So those are the AIs in the video game.
00:03:45.000You know, the bartenders, the people you're beating up, the opponents, all of that stuff.
00:03:49.000But basically they're just code and they're AI. Then there's the RPG version, which is that we are actually doing a role-playing game, right?
00:04:00.000And then you have a character or avatar inside the game.
00:04:02.000So it's just like what we would consider an MMORPG today, except with more sophisticated technology.
00:04:09.000And so in that case, you get a little bit of a different answer than if you talk about an NPC-only type of simulation, right?
00:04:18.000Because that's just running on a computer and we're all AI in that case.
00:04:21.000Now, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
00:04:24.000In a video game like Fortnite or whatever, World of Warcraft, you have NPCs and you have PCs or player characters.
00:04:31.000So you've got both of those things going on.
00:04:33.000And so depending on how you look at it, you might come to different answers about who's outside the simulation, which would answer the question of who made the simulation.
00:04:47.000So in the first case, you basically say that if we can get to the point where we can build these simulations, what I call the simulation point.
00:04:58.000So I call that a kind of technological singularity.
00:05:01.000Now, we've heard the term singularity mostly because of like AI and super intelligent AI, right?
00:05:08.000And, you know, AI is going to take over the world.
00:05:10.000But the guy who defined the term was actually a computer scientist who became a science fiction writer named Werner Winge.
00:05:16.000In fact, he just passed away like a month ago or something.
00:05:19.000He was a real pioneer in like science fiction and the cyberpunk kind of subgenre or so.
00:05:25.000And so he said the singularity happens when technology increases exponentially to the point where everything will be different for humans after that point.
00:05:34.000Now, he gave like four different ways we could reach the singularity.
00:05:37.000Most of us talk about only one, which is AI starts to become super intelligent.
00:05:42.000It grows exponentially and everything will be different.
00:05:45.000But I think this idea of the simulation point where we can create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, and I lay out like 10 stages in my book of all the technology we would need, including brain-computer interfaces like in the Matrix, right?
00:06:03.000We're at the beginning of that whole phase.
00:06:05.000And so that's stage eight, stage seven and stage eight on the way to the simulation point.
00:06:10.000And, you know, being able to read, but also then being able to write memories as well.
00:06:15.000So the definition of the simulation point is being able to create a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from physical reality with AI characters that are indistinguishable from biological characters.
00:06:27.000So, you know, you wouldn't be able to tell you're talking to an NPC, basically.
00:06:31.000We're getting closer to that already, right?
00:06:33.000Yeah, I mean, there's, like, companies out there doing smart NPCs now inside video games.
00:06:39.000Right, but what would be the difference between looking at what is possible in the future and making either a hypothesis or suggesting that that has already taken place?
00:06:54.000Right, so that's kind of the leap, right, that you need to make, which is to say that if we can do it, now let's imagine a civilization that was a million years ahead of us, a thousand years ahead of us, even 200 years ahead of us, right, but certainly a thousand years ahead of us.
00:07:09.000So where will computers be in a thousand years?
00:07:11.000They would already have created these types of simulations, right?
00:07:14.000Because if we can do it, now, 50 years ago, we didn't know if we could do it.
00:07:18.000We didn't know if computers could get to that point.
00:07:21.000Today, we're pretty sure we can get there.
00:07:23.000In fact, I'd say that I'm 70% sure that we will get to the simulation point, which means I think there's a 70% chance we're living inside a simulation.
00:07:33.000And so the point is, if they already got there, they created a whole bunch of simulations.
00:07:39.000And you can't tell the difference whether you're in the real world or a simulated world.
00:07:45.000So there's 99 of these, there's one of these, but you can't tell the difference.
00:08:31.000We shut off every night, and we wake up intermittently, and you go back to bed, maybe you have to pee, maybe you're thirsty, you go back to bed, and then you wake up again.
00:08:43.000But when you wake up, you are just waking up.
00:08:45.000Like, when I woke up this morning, I don't know if this is the life I've always lived.
00:09:38.000In fact, all the way back in 1977, in Metz, France, at a sci-fi convention, he said, there's a pretty famous quote.
00:09:45.000He said, we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is if some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality.
00:09:57.000And that's become kind of a famous quote in the simulation world.
00:10:01.000But if you listen to the rest of the quote, he says, well, we would basically rerun the same events and we would change some variables.
00:10:12.000Maybe I've talked to you before in a different run of the simulation.
00:10:18.000And this idea, like after I wrote my first book on this topic, Simulation Hypothesis, This idea wouldn't leave me that, well, if you can run one simulation, you can certainly run it multiple times.
00:10:41.000We would change the variables, and we would go forward.
00:10:44.000And so, you know, when I interviewed Tessa, you know, Phil K. Dick's last wife, she said that he came to believe this was really happening, right?
00:10:54.000That someone was altering with our reality and they would change a few variables and rerun the simulation forward.
00:11:02.000So now we're getting pretty deep in the rabbit hole.
00:11:04.000So this is the topic of my second book, which is called The Simulated Multiverse.
00:11:07.000This idea that each of these timelines could be like a different run of the simulation itself.
00:11:25.000So with the simulation hypothesis, we're saying that space doesn't really exist.
00:11:30.000It basically gets rendered for us like a video game.
00:11:35.000And then with this second idea, we're saying that time doesn't really exist because what you remember could have been either implanted memories or it could be a specific run of the simulation.
00:11:47.000So if you run it again, maybe things are slightly different the second time you run it.
00:11:54.000So Philip K. Dick came to believe that his novel, The Man in the High Castle, which was turned into a pretty cool series.
00:13:21.000And so when I started looking into the quantum physics side of it, I found something really weird.
00:13:26.000We can talk about the observer effect, but this was like even weirder than that.
00:13:30.000And it was something proposed by John Wheeler, who was at Princeton with Einstein, and he was a bit younger than, you know, Niels Bohr and Einstein and all these kind of forefathers of quantum mechanics.
00:13:43.000And he came up with several things that I was talking about, but one of them is the delayed choice experiment.
00:13:50.000Or the cosmic delayed choice experiment, which puts into doubt this idea of the past.
00:13:56.000And since we're talking about the past, let's go into this now, if you don't mind.
00:14:00.000So imagine there's something like a quasar, and that's a billion light years away from us, right?
00:14:07.000And the light is coming from that quasar to here, so it's going to take...
00:14:11.000A billion years to get here because it's a billion light years away.
00:14:14.000And then suppose there's something in the middle, like a black hole that's in the middle, or a galaxy, something that's very gravitationally big.
00:14:23.000And so suppose the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object.
00:14:28.000And suppose that object is like a million light years away from us.
00:14:31.000So it's a lot closer, but it's still a million light years away.
00:14:35.000So the decision about when the light goes to the left or to the right Would have to be made when?
00:14:44.000It would have to be made in the past, about a million years ago, because it takes light from that, let's say it's a black hole.
00:14:51.000It's a million light years away, so it takes a million years for the light to reach Earth.
00:14:54.000And we can measure whether it went to the left or to the right.
00:14:59.000Well, it turns out that decision is in the past, as we think of it.
00:15:03.000But what the delayed choice experiment tells us is that that decision is made now when we measure that light.
00:16:00.000And there's some poison in there, and there's some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of setting off the poison, and a 50% chance that it won't, let's say after an hour or so.
00:16:13.000And so after an hour, the chances that the cat is dead or alive is 50%, right?
00:17:00.000We don't know until we see, but it's only one, and common sense tells us it's one of those, right?
00:17:04.000But quantum mechanics, through the double slit experiment and the observer effect, says both of those possibilities exist in the present until the time when someone looks and someone measures that result.
00:17:19.000So then we say the superposition, which is two states, comes down to one state.
00:17:52.000But what all the physicists have been telling us now for almost 100 years, right, going back to the 1920s when quantum mechanics first started to get formalized, is that that's not actually the case.
00:18:05.000That what happens is you have this probability wave.
00:18:08.000And that there are different probabilities of the cat being alive or dead.
00:18:13.000Now, of course, they weren't talking about cats.
00:18:21.000It's a way for somebody to think about this at a high level.
00:18:25.000So Schrodinger, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics through his wave equation, he basically came up with this because he thought the whole idea was ridiculous.
00:18:34.000He's like, look, you can't have a cat that's both alive and dead, right?
00:18:53.000Or they can be in two different states, which could be moving and still, could be alive or dead, or they're really talking about particles.
00:19:01.000So then it could be like left rotated or right rotated.
00:19:04.000So you've got all these properties, but they can be in different states.
00:19:10.000And this is the basis for quantum computing, by the way.
00:19:12.000You've probably heard about new quantum computers.
00:19:15.000I have, but I totally don't understand it.
00:19:18.000So it's the same thing as Schrodinger's cat, where we have a bit of information, right?
00:19:22.000So what are the values that a bit can have?
00:19:49.000All the computing, everything we're doing with video streaming, like all that stuff, comes down to having a bit that can be either a zero or a one.
00:20:06.000Which, a qubit is like Schrodinger's cat.
00:20:09.000It It doesn't just have a value of a 1 or a 0. It is in superposition.
00:20:15.000Superposition means a superset of all the positions that are possible.
00:20:19.000So how many possibilities are there in a bit 2, right?
00:20:22.0000 and 1. So a qubit is a superposition of a bit, which means it has both values, 0 and 1, until someone measures that bit.
00:20:34.000Theoretically, that's what allows quantum computers to solve problems that grow exponentially, that are really big.
00:20:42.000We're still in the early stages, but if you think of an exponential growth problem like cracking encryption, It can be done by a regular computer.
00:20:53.000It'll take like a thousand years or something, right?
00:20:56.000Because you have to go through every single possible value.
00:21:00.000So if you have 64 bits, that's like 2 to the 64 values, which is Which is huge.
00:21:06.000In fact, there's an old story about the Indian king and the wise man who played chess that illustrates the story of how big that number gets when you have exponential growth.
00:21:15.000So there was a king who liked to play chess and no one wanted to play chess with him anymore because he kept winning.
00:21:44.000And so it turns out when the wise man won, by the time you get to two to the 64, because there's 64 squares on the chessboard, that basically it was more rice than would fit in all of India, right?
00:22:01.000And the reason it grows is there are too many possibilities, right?
00:22:05.000But now this new thing called a qubit is coming along.
00:22:08.000And the qubit has both possibilities at the same time.
00:22:12.000So if you have 64 bits and you take all the possible values of those 64 bits, you've got the same number of possibilities as the grains of rice we talked about.
00:22:23.000It's 2 to the 64. It's a very big number.
00:22:26.000It's 18 quintillion, right, is the number.
00:25:10.000And so, basically, he said that if you've got Schrodinger's cat, what happens is you're splitting the universe into two different universes.
00:25:57.000So that idea has started to catch on now.
00:26:00.000It's what I like to call, it's past the 10-year-old test.
00:26:04.000And the 10-year-old test is when a scientific idea gets out there so much that even 10-year-olds can kind of understand it because of superhero movies.
00:26:17.000When they were trying to explain Superman, like how does Superman get his powers?
00:26:22.000You say, oh, he came from another planet.
00:26:23.000He came from a planet called Krypton, right?
00:26:25.000So even a 10-year-old in the 1930s could have understood that.
00:26:28.000But in the 1730s, like you couldn't say that.
00:26:32.000No one would know what the heck you're talking about, right?
00:26:34.000And so that idea kind of diffused through society.
00:26:37.000And so that's happening now with the multiverse idea too.
00:26:41.000It's kind of diffusing through society in this way, through popular culture and media narratives and stuff.
00:26:49.000So that's the other explanation for how all this quantum weirdness works, which is it's the multiverse.
00:26:56.000And so people said, how can a quantum computer Theoretically solve a problem that would take thousands of years for a regular computer to solve.
00:27:05.000And one explanation, a guy named David Deutsch out at Oxford says, well, because it's looking at all the possible values of the bits, there's that many different universes, right?
00:27:15.000And it's computing in all of those universes instantaneously.
00:27:19.000And then it's bringing back the value that you want at the end.
00:27:48.000So, the reason I went down this rabbit hole on the quantum physics stuff and the multiverse, which by the way, that's the subject of...
00:27:55.000I wrote a whole second book on simulation theory just for that, which is the simulated multiverse, because the reason scientists like this multiverse idea is that mathematically you can figure out how the equations work in all these different worlds,
00:28:12.000Whereas with the first idea, which is the Copenhagen interpretation, you have all these possibilities, you have a probability wave, and then suddenly you're down to one.
00:28:22.000And nobody can explain that mathematically.
00:28:24.000Nobody can say, how does the collapse occur?
00:28:27.000Like there's no little equation you can pop into.
00:28:30.000And so that's why it's called the observer effect and it's considered a big mystery.
00:28:38.000So all these physicists are debating with each other, right?
00:28:41.000So they don't like the Copenhagen interpretation because it seems to rely on consciousness or some kind of an observer.
00:28:47.000And scientists kind of hate that, right?
00:28:48.000They hate to talk about consciousness being real.
00:28:50.000And we'll get into the whole religious aspects of the simulation hypothesis in a little bit.
00:28:56.000So they're like, well, this one's nice because the mathematics all work, the multiverse idea.
00:29:01.000But the problem with the multiverse idea is that it's not what scientists like to call parsimonious, which means that what's happening is there's a new universe splitting off, like, all the time, right?
00:29:13.000Every time there's a quantum—and we're talking about quantum decisions, right?
00:29:16.000We're not really talking about big things like cats.
00:29:18.000We're talking about little decisions that occur within a nanosecond, right?
00:31:09.000So if there's something that's an it, physical object like this cup or this table, that if you just keep looking down, you have a microscope that just keeps going down.
00:31:19.000He goes, in the end, the only thing you find are particles.
00:33:12.000Like we can only measure up to the smallest unit, which is called like the Planck.
00:33:17.000But as we go deeper we get less answers and it gets more weird.
00:33:20.000It gets more weird and it starts to look less like the physical world exists and more like it's a bunch of information that gets rendered as we observe the world or as groups of people observe the world.
00:33:36.000Have you ever taken this back as far as you can and like try to figure out like what created this?
00:33:42.000Or what possibilities could have created this?
00:33:49.000So where I ended up with this was looking at how the world gets rendered as you observe it.
00:33:54.000Like, for me, my background is, as I said, a computer scientist and a video game designer and developer, is that that's pretty much how we render video games, right?
00:35:20.000So everything in computer science comes down to optimization, usually.
00:35:25.000Like, physicists are happy just saying, yeah, it's infinite, but without really wondering what the heck that means.
00:35:29.000But with computer science, you only have limited resources, typically.
00:35:33.000And so you need to figure out how to compute something with those limited resources.
00:35:37.000And so video game rendering, to me, is a case of optimizing so that it looks like there's a shared physical world, But there really isn't, because it's being rendered on each of our own computer.
00:35:51.000But the rule is, only render that which you can see.
00:35:55.000Now, when I started to look at this weirdness in quantum mechanics, which is saying, render only that which is observed.
00:36:02.000Or measured, depending on how you look at it.
00:36:03.000But even if you measure it, somebody's got to look at that measurement before you know it was actually measured.
00:36:08.000So it's the same kind of thing going on.
00:36:11.000In my opinion, quantum mechanics ends up being an optimization technique for rendering of the physical world from the information.
00:36:23.000So that's kind of the one big implication of simulation theory that I think is very important.
00:36:30.000And actually, the idea of the universe's information is not that controversial.
00:36:35.000So I was in London this summer over at the Cambridge University, spending a little bit of time doing some AI research, and I ran into this Nobel Prize winner physicist from like the 70s.
00:36:45.000And so we were talking simulation theory, of course.
00:36:48.000And I said, well, one of the key assumptions here is that the world Is information.
00:36:53.000And he said, yeah, that's not controversial in physics at all anymore.
00:36:57.000Like it might have been once upon a time.
00:37:00.000But then the second part, the second assumption that comes up in simulation theory is that the world is rendered like a video game and that the world is a hoax.
00:37:29.000Well, they don't disagree necessarily that it doesn't physically exist.
00:37:32.000They just disagree that how is it that this thing that is information gets rendered for us, right?
00:37:39.000It's like we're talking different languages for them, right?
00:37:42.000Even though quantum mechanics is telling us all this weird stuff, they're still, I think, often taking classical view, classical mechanical view of the world of physical objects moving around and that's all it is, right?
00:37:56.000So, you know, there's arguments that people make against the idea that we live in a simulation.
00:38:02.000And the first is, you know, the same argument that, you know, there was a famous guy named Bishop Berkeley, the city of Berkeley is named after him.
00:38:10.000I think it was George Berkeley or something.
00:38:12.000He was a bishop in the UK. And he came up with this idea of idealism, this philosophical idea that the world doesn't really exist.
00:38:31.000And so that's the first common sense way people try to refute the idea.
00:38:35.000But of course, that's not what the physicists are saying.
00:38:38.000The physicists are the ones telling us that the world doesn't really exist, that it consists of information and space-time gets constructed out of that information.
00:38:47.000So that's like one of the biggest, I think, issues.
00:38:52.000Another way that people try to push back on the idea of simulation theory is they say, well, it's not really falsifiable, right?
00:39:01.000So I can't design an experiment that proves we are not in a simulation.
00:39:09.000So this touches on the boundary issues of science.
00:39:22.000And those lines are actually fuzzier than you might think.
00:39:25.000Because there's been a debate over that for a long time now, for hundreds of years, about what is scientific and what isn't.
00:39:33.000And things like UFOs and paranormal phenomena and all this stuff gets kind of pushed out But so one definition that a guy named Popper came up with was if it's not falsifiable, it's not scientific, right?
00:39:49.000Meaning if you can't prove that it's false.
00:39:50.000The problem with that is there are lots of things that we can't prove that they're false.
00:39:57.000But we can find some evidence that these things actually happen or that these things exist.
00:40:04.000Like a couple hundred years ago, there were stories of rocks falling from the sky.
00:40:08.000And all the scientists like in Paris said, oh, that's just bullshit, right?
00:40:12.000That's just a bunch of peasants out in the countryside.
00:40:15.000We know there's no rocks falling from the sky.
00:40:33.000But you can prove, and eventually they did because they got a whole...
00:40:38.000There was some huge meteor storm outside of Paris and some guys went out to investigate and there were thousands of witnesses that saw this thing.
00:40:47.000And then eventually they looked at some of the artifacts, some of the physical evidence, and then eventually they changed their model, their cosmological model about the universe.
00:40:56.000And so I think it's the same thing with simulation theory.
00:41:01.000We're not in a simulation because the simulation could be so good, you know, like the Matrix was pretty convincing at first, right?
00:41:10.000But the simulation could be so good that you can't necessarily tell.
00:41:14.000But at the same time, you can design experiments which might indicate to you that there's something going on like this video game rendering idea.
00:41:24.000And there are folks out there trying to run experiments to try to show that this is really what's happening with quantum mechanics, is that like a video game, this whole world is being rendered for us.
00:41:39.000Information being rendered just like a video game.
00:41:41.000And the effect that consciousness has on this world.
00:41:46.000So consciousness is the thing that we're using to measure.
00:41:52.000Or the thing that we're using to interact with whatever possibilities exist.
00:42:01.000And so that in the RPG version, right, this is why I like to make the distinction between the RPG version and the NPC version.
00:42:09.000So in the RPG version, we are plugged in, right, like Neo in the back of the head or with a virtual reality headset or some technology yet to be developed, right?
00:42:19.000And so when you play a video game, it's not enough that the pixels are there.
00:42:25.000I mean, you basically are watching that game as the player.
00:42:30.000And when you're not watching, what happens?
00:43:24.000That is very similar to what the world's religions have been telling us, right?
00:43:30.000Not just one or two of the world's religions.
00:43:32.000Like, when I wrote my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, I gave it a subtitle of why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics agree we're in a video game.
00:43:41.000And I was thinking primarily of the Eastern mystics, like, you know, in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and the yogis.
00:44:41.000But we agree to that to a certain extent as we go into that world and we become immersed in that world.
00:44:49.000And so what the mystics in the Eastern traditions have been telling us is that we agree to basically go into this illusory world in order to have these experiences.
00:45:01.000Sometimes people say, well, what's the purpose of the simulation?
00:45:04.000And I say, well, why do you play video games?
00:45:34.000But there are consequences within the game, right?
00:45:37.000And for the characters in the game, for the NPCs that you're killing, those are all real consequences within the game.
00:45:43.000But when you look at it from outside the game, So the Eastern mystics have been telling us this and it turns out in the Judeo-Christian Islamic traditions, the Abrahamic religions, they've also been telling us this, that the world is Maya and they use metaphors back then.
00:46:02.000So all these religions came about a couple thousand years ago and so they had to use metaphors.
00:46:08.000That were understood by the people back then, right?
00:46:12.000And so they used whatever – the metaphor of the dream was a key metaphor, that the world is like a dream.
00:46:19.000Or that the soul puts on the body like a set of clothes and that when you die, you take off these clothes.
00:46:30.000And then you're back to the soul, whatever that happens to be.
00:46:33.000They don't really define what that is.
00:46:35.000In fact, they use the exact same metaphor like in the Bhagavad Gita.
00:46:40.000And then Rumi, who's become popular in the West and was an Islamic Sufi, you know, a poet but also a mystic, he used the exact same phrase, right?
00:46:52.000He said, you put on the body, you put like a series of clothes.
00:46:56.000And so they use that metaphor to try to describe something Which is the second part of the idea of the simulation hypothesis.
00:47:03.000The first idea was the world is information that gets rendered and the second part is the world is some kind of a hoax that we are a part of for whatever reason.
00:47:13.000And so in the traditions, over time, they've tried to update these metaphors.
00:47:20.000And they've tried to use new technology to describe the metaphors because that's how we can, as modern people, we can understand it.
00:47:27.000So about 100 years ago, there was a guy named Swami Yogananda.
00:48:09.000He said, the world is like a movie projector, right?
00:48:13.000You're playing these parts, the actors are playing the parts on the screen, and things are happening to them, but really the actors aren't necessarily dying, it's the characters that are suffering, you know, within the game, within the movie itself.
00:48:28.000And so he used that metaphor As a way to try to explain this ancient religious idea that's at the core of every single religion, which is that the world as we see it is not really real and there's a real world beyond this world.
00:48:44.000And so he updated the metaphor to use movie projectors.
00:48:57.000And you can kind of see everybody's so engrossed in it that they're not looking around.
00:49:00.000They don't know what's going on other than, you know, maybe having some popcorn or something.
00:49:04.000And so today, I think we need to update those metaphors.
00:49:09.000Particularly for a younger generation who spent as much of their time in things like Fortnite or Roblox when they were younger, as avatars.
00:49:17.000If we use the metaphor of a massively multiplayer online game, and I think Yogananda, if you were alive today, in fact, my latest book, which I wrote after the simulation books, because it was the 75th anniversary of Autobiography of a Yogi a couple years ago,
00:49:33.000and HarperCollins India asked me to write this book about What can you learn from Autobiography of a Yogi?
00:49:39.000And there's all these weird stories in there of like some guy materializing a palace in the Himalayas out of nowhere.
00:50:04.000And so if Yogananda were alive today, and I wrote this in my new book called Wisdom of a Yogi, what he would say is, it's like a movie, but we're the actors, and we're also the audience, and we have a script, and we're kind of playing the script, but we can change the script if we want.
00:50:22.000It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, you know?
00:50:27.000So I think that metaphor is a great way to try to explain this idea of the soul and the body within the religious traditions.
00:50:36.000That's the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis.
00:50:42.000How do you go through life with this information?
00:50:47.000Does this information affect the way you feel about things on a day-to-day basis?
00:50:53.000Like, if you have these theories and you have this concept in your mind of the true nature of the universe, of reality itself, how does that work with the physical carbon tissue?
00:51:22.000Like this seems like something that would freak people out to the point where they would kind of get like so much existential angst and it's so bizarre that it would be hard to just like be present.
00:51:54.000But in the RPG version, It's a little bit different, right?
00:52:27.000And it's like you're choosing to play this game in this illusory world and I believe that this is similar to what happens to us when we come into this world, if in the RPG version, that we end up choosing a character with a set of parents and a set of strengths and weaknesses and more than that,
00:53:44.000You can view the whole world, particularly your life and your story, as a series of quests and challenges, things that come up for you that you may or may not be able to achieve the first time around.
00:54:00.000Because we have difficulty levels, don't we, in games?
00:54:17.000The ones that really suffer, typically.
00:54:22.000Swami Yogananda and a lot of the Eastern mystics will say that Suffering is the nature of this world, right?
00:54:29.000That's why we're here is to experience this.
00:54:32.000But even in the Western traditions, there's a similar idea.
00:54:36.000So I started to look up, you know, different traditions in Islam.
00:54:41.000In the Quran, there's like a whole series of verses, and they say, we have set up this world as a pastime, as a game for you, as a sport.
00:54:51.000This world is really, they use this Arabic word, al-garuri, which means an A delusion, but it means like an enjoyable delusion sort of.
00:55:01.000Enjoyable in quotes because it depends on what you enjoy, right?
00:55:05.000Like getting in and playing a really tough role may be what you enjoy, but that's not fun for the character to go through all that crap that they have to go through.
00:55:14.000And so I think we can view the world as a series of quests and challenges.
00:55:19.000Now, the next question is, well, what's the nature of the game, right?
00:55:23.000I don't believe the game is Grand Theft Auto.
00:55:25.000That's not the type of game we're playing.
00:55:27.000So I think we can turn to people that have died, near-death experiencers.
00:55:33.000I don't know if you had any on your show.
00:55:45.000And this is how I first heard about this thing, which is called the life review.
00:55:50.000And a lot of near-death experiencers, they report these series of stages of things that happen to them, like they're floating above their body.
00:56:02.000The most important part for me in these stories, and you haven't met thousands of people, right?
00:56:07.000You can just go out on YouTube and listen to any of these near-death experiencers.
00:56:11.000But what Danyan called this thing called the life review was he called it a holographic panoramic review of your life.
00:56:19.000And what that means, and other near-death experiencers reported this, maybe about 20% of them, that you go through every single moment that you ever lived In like this virtual reality, you know, three-dimensional panorama,
00:56:35.000but you see it from the point of view of everybody else, right?
00:56:40.000So if you were mean to someone, if you stabbed someone, or in Danyan's case, he was in special forces in Vietnam and he actually killed people.
00:56:49.000He said he had to experience what it was like to, you know, get the bullet.
00:56:54.000And then more than that, experience what happened after that guy died, his wife, you know, the guy who died, his wife and children, what kind of suffering they experienced.
00:57:03.000So it's like you're reviewing, like after a football game, right?
00:57:19.000So a couple years ago, I was involved with a startup in Silicon Valley, and we took a game like League of Legends.
00:57:26.000You've probably heard of League of Legends, like the most popular, at least it was, esports game, right?
00:57:31.000And you've got all these guys on a field, but pretty much you play on a 2D screen.
00:57:35.000So we made it so you could replay the game, but you would put on a virtual reality headset, and it would seem like you were on the field in League of Legends, and you could replay from any point of view.
00:57:50.000Same with Counter-Strike Global Offensive was the one that I was thinking of, because in that game, it's a first-person shooter, so you're like shooting people.
00:58:00.000And so, literally, you could go back and replay that game from the point of view of the person you shot.
00:58:06.000And so, when I was experiencing this, it was reminding me of all these things these near-death experiencers have been telling us about this life review.
00:58:17.000And as an engineer and computer scientist, my question is always, well, how does that work?
00:58:24.000I mean, if you could replay every single moment in your life, even the moments when you weren't there, including, like, what happened to this guy's wife and what happened to their children, somebody has to record all that stuff, right?
00:58:36.000Because how are you going to replay it if it's not being recorded?
00:58:39.000So, you know, perhaps, you know, this whole game is being recorded just like we do, in fact, on YouTube, you know, the most popular content, other than the Joe Rogan experience, is video games content.
00:58:53.000I remember my nephew, when he was like three years old, before he was even going to school, he would say to his father, my brother, I want to watch Star Wars.
00:59:01.000My brother was like, you want to watch the movie?
00:59:04.000No, I want to watch that man and that woman play the Star Wars game on YouTube.
00:59:08.000It was like he was just watching them replay a recording of the video game on YouTube.
00:59:14.000And so this life review thing, which is at the crux of near-death experiences, I think gives us a clue and an interesting clue, which ties back to your question to me, which is how do you go, you know, how do you live with this stuff?
00:59:28.000And I say, well, what if all of this is being recorded and you're making choices and you're going to have to review it afterwards?
00:59:43.000So in the Christian traditions, you have St. Peter, you have the Book of Life, right?
00:59:47.000Which, you know, theoretically, depending on who you ask, the recording angel has written down, you know, whether you get into heaven or not by reviewing your life.
00:59:55.000Well, it turns out in the Islamic traditions, they get much more explicit about what that is.
01:00:22.000And they're sitting down and writing down—one's writing down all your good deeds and one's writing down all your bad deeds.
01:00:27.000And what it says in the tradition—and, you know, when I delve into these different traditions, it's not so much to say, okay, this religion is right and that one isn't, but to say what's in common across all these religions.
01:00:42.000If these guys are coming to that independently, all the other stuff maybe, you know, I won't criticize for you believing the other stuff, that's up to you.
01:00:50.000But that stuff is probably at the core of this thing called life and what happens after life.
01:00:56.000And so what it says in Islamic traditions is your book will be laid open for you after you die.
01:01:05.000So we think of Judgment Day and we think of all this stuff.
01:01:08.000But what it's actually saying—now, that's a metaphor.
01:01:11.000It doesn't mean there's, like, angels with a feather pen writing down.
01:01:15.000But in Chinese, you know, this is what happened this day or in Arabic.
01:01:19.000The only thing that makes sense is you would basically just record the entire 3D scene and you would play it back for yourself, which is exactly what near-death experiencers describe when they talk about the life review.
01:01:32.000They're sitting there, there's a screen, and then suddenly they get pulled into the screen and they replay all of this stuff.
01:01:38.000There's usually an angel or they might call him God or they might say it's Jesus or they might say it's a being of light.
01:01:43.000Different experiencers say different things.
01:01:45.000But they say that guy doesn't judge you.
01:01:48.000You're looking at it saying, oh crap, you know, I was going to try to be a better person to my wife this time around and I wasn't, you know, and I did this or I did that or my kids or, you know.
01:02:00.000And they tell us that the moments that matter Are the small moments in how you treat other people.
01:02:06.000That's the thing you're most proud of or you're like, damn, I treated that person in grade school.
01:02:11.000We all made fun of her and I should have been her friend.
01:02:14.000Those are the things that really matter.
01:02:18.000So if that's the game, you always think, what's the objective of the game?
01:02:23.000Then I think it gives us a very different perspective.
01:03:03.000Most people think of karma as, hey, you shot me.
01:03:05.000I'm going to shoot you in this life, right?
01:03:08.000That's a very simplistic view of karma.
01:03:10.000What karma is actually about is about your thoughts, your desires, and your actions, which then create situations in the future Whether in this life or future life.
01:03:23.000So, of course, in the Eastern traditions you have the reincarnation idea, which you don't necessarily have in the Western traditions.
01:03:30.000But that karma is about basically a list of information that follows you around from life to life, right?
01:03:39.000So you might have a different body in the next life, but that information is still there.
01:04:15.000And so I like to think of it as the reason we call it the cloud is because you don't know exactly where the server is.
01:04:23.000It could be one of a million servers somewhere out there.
01:04:26.000Amazon has a huge warehouse, which is AWS and all the servers are running there.
01:04:31.000So you don't, in the past, like I used to do software before the cloud, you would set up your own servers or you'd have your own data center and everything.
01:04:39.000You would say, this is how many 386s we have.
01:05:13.000And so I like to think of Karma as a kind of database of quests What happens is this database just keeps getting bigger and bigger as we create more desires and situations and actions and things that we do with people.
01:05:35.000And then sometimes you have karma to resolve with somebody, right?
01:05:38.000There's the whole The old idea of you meet somebody, you feel like you've known them for a while, right?
01:05:44.000You're irresistibly drawn to someone and you don't know why to have some particular experience, whatever that experience is.
01:05:50.000And so, you know, within certain traditions, they view that as perhaps when you were planning it, it's like a...
01:05:56.000I like to think of it as like a raid or a guild in a video game, right?
01:06:00.000You say, okay, here's some other people.
01:06:02.000We're going to do this together, you know, later on in some point while we're playing the game.
01:06:07.000We're going to have this particular experience of being business partners or lovers or enemies or whatever the case, you know, whatever the situation is.
01:06:16.000But this idea that these experiences You know, could be there for a reason, you know, when we have tough experiences, is I think something that can be comforting.
01:06:26.000I know it was for me, like when I went through certain health crises, for example, that, you know, we are here to experience some of these things.
01:06:36.000And so if you look at karma more deeply, there's a story from Autobiography of a Yogi that sounds unbelievable to people that I think is worth maybe just, you know, telling the story because people read that book and they say, did this guy just make this shit up, right?
01:08:39.000So I use that to kind of show that sometimes we put things into the database of karma based upon our strong desires and that becomes part of our script in life, you know?
01:08:49.000Like how did I know I wanted to be a computer programmer?
01:08:54.000Why do some people want to become podcasters or fighters or comedians?
01:08:59.000It's like we have these things inside of us that sometimes feel they're like something we're just drawn to.
01:09:06.000It's just something we're meant to do.
01:09:07.000Now, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that book, I think it's called Outliers, where he says if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you become an expert.
01:09:15.000My question is more, What drives somebody to spend 10,000 hours doing this versus that?
01:09:27.000I don't have any desire to spend 10,000 hours.
01:09:31.000But I probably spent 10,000 hours programming when I was younger.
01:09:34.000It was just something I was naturally drawn to, I was good at.
01:09:37.000And I feel like these are part of the quests or achievements that we have in life.
01:09:44.000And I think the most interesting people that I've ever met have gone through quests Rarely do I find interesting people that haven't experienced something difficult Yeah.
01:09:54.000I mean, in fact, it was partly for me going through some difficulty that got me to write this book finally because I've been thinking about it for years.
01:10:02.000So I ended up – I was kind of at the height of my entrepreneurial career, had sold my video game company, the Japanese – to a Japanese company.
01:10:09.000I was at MIT running a startup program called Play Labs for video game companies.
01:10:15.000And then I ended up having heart issues and I ended up having to get heart surgery, which – I mean, if anybody's seen that, you can see it's, you know, pretty much the biggest cut, one of the biggest cuts you can make.
01:10:28.000And they kept saying, oh yeah, a few months, you'll be fine, right?
01:10:31.000And what happened was after the heart surgery, I couldn't do anything for a while.
01:11:18.000To do this other thing that I'd been wanting to do my whole life, which was to write more books.
01:11:23.000And so I had just enough energy to go to Starbucks and work for an hour or two on the simulation hypothesis, which for me was a way to bring together all the threads.
01:11:38.000I spent a lot of time investigating different mystical traditions, shamanic stuff, you know, without drugs, you know, more of the shamanic journey.
01:11:48.000And I spent time with people who were investigating UFOs and religious people and academics who are complete materialists and don't believe in any of this stuff.
01:11:55.000And it was a way to bring this all together.
01:11:57.000And suddenly I found I had more energy.
01:13:19.000This is what you were supposed to do, right?
01:13:21.000And when I did that, things just flowed much more easily, you know, and the book went on to be quite successful and I was able to write another book.
01:13:31.000Then, as my health recovered, I realized there was another thing that I'd always wanted to do, which was be a professor in academia, and that's kind of what I'm doing now.
01:13:39.000So I went back for a PhD after many years, and now I'm teaching classes on the simulation hypothesis, doing research on AI. So it was like these things that I kind of wanted to do before and I never got to, but they were optional parts of the story.
01:13:54.000And we still have the ability to make choices.
01:13:57.000But sometimes a quest hits us or a situation hits us with a lot of difficulty and maybe there's a bigger purpose to that.
01:14:06.000Maybe it has something to do with how we set up our character in the game and the choices that we're making.
01:14:15.000And so now we're getting into the personal philosophy side of simulation, which I think is quite valid.
01:14:21.000That's probably the biggest questions I get asked are, are we in a simulation?
01:14:32.000And I think it can be a positive experience.
01:14:37.000And for, I think, people who grew up in the modern world with modern technology, it gives us a way to say, you know what, maybe what all those religions were saying wasn't bullshit, right?
01:14:46.000It wasn't just stories that people made up, but they just didn't have the language to express something that a lot of people who have had near-death experiences, they use the word ineffable, right?
01:14:57.000Which means unable to be put into words.
01:15:01.000And so they can't really tell you what's out there, but they use these metaphors to try to describe it.
01:15:07.000And so I think whether you view simulation theory as a hardcore physics thing, or you view it as a metaphor for...
01:15:15.000What this world is all about and how we go through our lives.
01:15:19.000I think there's value in looking at both of those angles.
01:15:24.000And the metaphor side is what I think...
01:15:27.000Actually, for me personally, and that was your question, how does this change the way that I view the world?
01:15:32.000It actually has changed the way that I view the world so that when I go through difficult situations, I kind of step back.
01:15:39.000I mean, they still bother me physically, but they don't bother me as much in other ways.
01:15:43.000So you view them as challenges in this thing that you're doing.
01:15:48.000So instead of woe is me, oh my god, how is this happening to me, which is the way a lot of people interface with problems, you go, okay, this is the challenge that I'm presented with.
01:15:59.000How do I overcome this challenge and what feels like the thing to do?
01:16:07.000If there's a part of me that's outside watching this, like maybe when I go to sleep or wherever, whenever, why would it choose this particular challenge at this point in my life?
01:16:20.000What is it that it's meant to impact and what is it that I need to learn?
01:16:26.000But yeah, I view it as a challenge rather than You know, this is just a bad thing that's happened to me.
01:16:31.000And that seems like the right way to play the game, if it's a game.
01:16:56.000When you incarnate, Plato talked about this, you cross the river and you forget everything outside of this physical world.
01:17:05.000In the Chinese traditions, you have the same thing.
01:17:08.000You have Meng Po, who's a goddess of forgetfulness, and she brews the tea of forgetfulness, and you drink it and you forget what was going on before.
01:17:20.000Getting back to this idea of everything being an illusion, You kind of agree to forget, in my view and I think within this way of viewing the world as a video game, In order to enjoy, and I put enjoy in quotes because that doesn't necessarily mean it's all fun and games,
01:17:43.000To experience these things in life in a way that we forget.
01:17:47.000But it's okay sometimes, I think, to step out and maybe we remember a little bit of the storyline or we recognize someone, right?
01:17:58.000There was a hypnotherapist who wrote a book called Journey of Souls, Dr. Michael Newton.
01:18:06.000I don't know if you ever have heard of it or read it.
01:18:08.000So he started with regression hypnosis, taking people back to their childhood.
01:18:13.000And every now and then they ended up somewhere before their childhood, meaning before they were born.
01:18:19.000And so he had a bunch of patients, and he started to do this more and more, and they all kind of described a similar type of thing, like where they existed before they were born.
01:18:33.000So these are sometimes called pre-birth memories now.
01:18:36.000And they talk about this time when they were choosing What kind of a life they were going to have.
01:18:44.000And they would see on a screen, like a screen, again, metaphors, like, you know, timelines and say, at this point, if you choose, you know, you choose to go to Austin or stay in Los Angeles or whatever, right?
01:19:22.000But they said, this is how you're going to recognize me.
01:19:25.000The first time you encounter me, I'm going to be...
01:19:27.000On a red bicycle or something, right, in childhood, or I'm going to be wearing this dress at this, you know, at this dance or whatever the case is.
01:19:34.000So they had these little clues for how they would recognize some of the people that they really wanted to have certain quests or experiences or achievements within the game, group quests, if you will, which is a little bit different than the kind of quest as the difficult experience we're talking about,
01:19:52.000but they're all different kinds of quests, I would say.
01:19:54.000And so I think we can take that as an interesting way.
01:20:00.000Again, another metaphor for how we think about life is that perhaps we've had some of these things laid out for us, but we're still free to make our choices along the way.
01:20:11.000And I think it gives us a richer experience of life as we go through the game.
01:20:19.000Well, that's certainly the most beneficial way to interact with it.
01:20:24.000To just think of this whole thing as a game and to think of this whole game as like this game will give you clues as to how to play it and you'll have experiences that you can engage with and you can say that you're enjoying them or that you're getting pleasure out of that or you're getting excitement out of that or you're getting some sort of fulfillment out of that.
01:21:55.000And there's different ways to think about that.
01:21:58.000Some people have suggested, some physicists have suggested, that there are these possible futures And that they are sending back information from the future to the present.
01:22:12.000Because time doesn't really exist the same way.
01:22:15.000Again, when we get back into quantum mechanics, it starts to be weird.
01:22:18.000But there's a guy named Fred Allen Wolf, who was one of these Berkeley physicists in that book.
01:22:25.000I don't know if you've ever heard of that book, but it was an interesting book about how people in quantum mechanics stopped thinking about what the heck does this mean because it was too complicated back in the 60s.
01:22:34.000And in the 70s, a group of hippie physicists, all PhD physicists in Berkeley, used to have this group and talk about what does this all mean.
01:22:43.000One of the guys was Frit Joff Capra who wrote The Tao of Physics.
01:22:48.000A bunch of these guys ended up looking at What does this all mean as opposed to just calculating, which is what physicists were doing at the time?
01:22:57.000So one of these guys talks about these futures are sending us information, and sometimes what we get are clues, right?
01:23:04.000Saying that, oh, this is a possibility.
01:23:08.000It's almost like the futures are sending back these messages to the past.
01:23:13.000And I think of that as different runs of the game, right?
01:23:17.000And it's possible there's a part of us That might be running the game forward as a simulation to try to see what might happen and then come back and then you make a choice based on this idea.
01:23:31.000There was some guys who wrote a paper recently about dreams as a sort of way to simulate weird, bad experiences, traumatic experiences, maybe preparing you for things in life.
01:23:43.000But when you start to think about the world as a simulation, Again, you can simulate more than once, right?
01:23:51.000You can try out what might happen if you did X, what might happen if you do Y. Kind of like, you know, you watch the Lord of the Rings movies, right?
01:24:00.000If you look at what, you know, what they did was before, Peter Jackson, what they did was before they actually filmed the scene, they would create a pre-vis, pre-visualization, right?
01:24:13.000And, you know, you can see they played out what it might look like before they got around and did the act because it's so expensive, right, in a movie to shoot a particular scene.
01:24:23.000So they would do this pre-visualization.
01:24:24.000And so, you know, perhaps there's a part of us that's watching the game that's doing this pre-visualization and sending us clues about what might happen if we do X or what might happen, you know, if we do Y. And so that takes us even back to what I was talking about earlier with Philip K. Dick,
01:25:20.000Well, I kind of dismissed the whole thing earlier, you know.
01:25:23.000And the Mandela effect is when a small group of people remember something happening differently in the past than what is the majority consensus opinion.
01:25:34.000And it's about Mandela being dead, right?
01:25:36.000Well, that was the first thing that kind of kicked off this blogger who actually coined the term.
01:25:52.000He got out of prison, became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize and died in whatever it was, like more recently, like 2013 or something like that.
01:26:04.000The people who remember this, they remember it with just like a whole bunch of specific details, right?
01:26:11.000His wife, Winnie, spoke at the funeral.
01:26:14.000There were certain US politicians or presidents there.
01:26:18.000And so what happened was that was one Mandela effect, if you will.
01:26:23.000And then there started to be all these other things happening.
01:26:26.000That people remembered that were different.
01:26:29.000And some of these were relatively minor things like the spelling of Froot Loops or...
01:30:11.000So I found this one Sufi Imam online who was talking about this.
01:30:15.000And he says that in the Islamic traditions in the Middle East, there are these beings that are allowed to go back in time and change things, physical things.
01:30:26.000But they're not allowed to change your memory.
01:30:29.000And these beings are called the djinn.
01:30:32.000We've heard of them from Aladdin, the genie.
01:30:38.000But the djinn don't exist in space and time in the same way that we exist in space and time.
01:30:45.000And so the reason that they still memorize it word for word, I don't know if this is something in the full orthodoxy, but this was his explanation, was that because the djinn are allowed to change physical objects, but they're not allowed to change our memory, That's why it's memorized word for word so that nobody can mess,
01:33:15.000So let's go back to the one that I saw was the one at Stanford, for example.
01:33:19.000But in these poses, in the statues, the hand is always under the chin, but in the images where people are imitating it, the hand is on the head.
01:33:43.000Now, I'm not necessarily saying that all of this stuff happens.
01:33:47.000I dismissed a lot of this as just faulty memory, and that's the currently accepted explanation for the Mandela Effect is, oh, a bunch of people got it wrong, right?
01:33:55.000But what you find is that the more significance that something has, To you, the less likely you are to get it wrong, right?
01:34:05.000So if you're Jewish and you asked your parents, why are these bears Jewish, right?
01:34:11.000And your parents didn't say, oh, it's not really Bernstein, it's Bernstein, right?
01:34:17.000You know, that's proximity to that subject, right?
01:34:20.000There was a blogger online, I'm forgetting her name now.
01:34:23.000She was a journalism student in Chicago and she said she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela in prison and was told That he was too ill.
01:34:32.000So she literally came back and then she started working for NPR. And then she says, well, I remember him dying shortly after.
01:34:39.000Now, if you just went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela and then you remember him dying, that's proximity and significance.
01:34:47.000You're less likely to get it wrong than just some random guy who just thought Mandela died.
01:34:53.000Or if you're, you know, heavy duty Christian and you're more likely to memorize certain passages, you know, from the Bible.
01:35:04.000And then what happened was after I had written the simulation hypothesis about this idea that the whole world is computation, a friend of mine from MIT who was working at Google came to me and said, you know, hey, have you heard of the Mandela effect?
01:35:17.000I was like, yeah, I heard about it, but, you know, a bunch of people remembering, you know, different stuff.
01:35:31.000One, most guys who work at MIT or Google, they tend to be very left-brained, right?
01:35:38.000So the Mandela effect is not something that they generally pay attention to or UFOs or any of this kind of weird stuff.
01:35:46.000But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you're running a simulation, And you go back and you change some variables and you rerun the simulation, lots of little things could be different along the way, right?
01:36:00.000And if you think of all the Mandela facts, And I like to use the Mandela effect as a way of illustrating this idea that a simulation can run multiple timelines, right?
01:36:11.000Whether you believe it's actually happened is up to you, right?
01:36:13.000But if, let's say, the thinker has three different possibilities, then you got, let's say, the Bernstein Bears.
01:39:57.000Okay, but again, whether you believe this or not...
01:40:01.000A simulation idea, this is how I got deep in the rabbit hole, is this idea that you can run something multiple times, and when you do, you may be remembering a previous run of the simulation.
01:41:36.000And so he couldn't figure out what was going on.
01:41:37.000And so he kind of theorized this whole idea that as we run different versions of the simulation, little things can end up changing and we remember things being different.
01:41:50.000So anyway, where that brings us is right back to that complicated physics experiment that I was telling you about like an hour ago now or so, which was the delayed choice experiment, right?
01:42:02.000Remember I said there was a quasar sending light to us a billion light years and a million light years away there was a black hole and the decision about whether to go left or right should have been made in the past.
01:42:17.000It should have been made a million years ago.
01:42:20.000But the weirdness with quantum mechanics is telling us that decision is made now when we measure it.
01:42:25.000Until then, both possibilities actually exist.
01:42:29.000So most people can understand the multiverse idea as being something that starts here and spreads out, right?
01:42:36.000You're like, I go to college in Boston, I go to college in San Francisco.
01:42:40.000Those are like two different storylines.
01:42:42.000I marry this person, I marry this other person, right?
01:42:45.000So those are multiple possible futures.
01:42:48.000That's pretty easy to grasp the idea of, you know, even if you don't believe the futures are out there, you just say if you make choices, you end up in different places.
01:42:57.000But the weird thing that is really hard to put your mind around is, what if there are multiple possible pasts?
01:43:05.000What if there was a past where the light went left?
01:43:08.000What if there was a past where the light went right a million years ago?
01:43:12.000What if there's a past where a meteor didn't kill the dinosaurs?
01:43:16.000There's a past where the meteor did kill the dinosaurs.
01:43:19.000What if there's a past where the guy in Tiananmen Square Got run over by the tank?
01:43:24.000And what if there's a past where the guy didn't get run over by the tank?
01:43:28.000And so what the Cosmic Delayed Choice Experiment tells us when they've tried to do this, and they do it using double slits, but they sent some light through one of these two slits up to a satellite.
01:43:43.000That was like a thousand miles away or something like that.
01:43:47.000I forget exactly how many miles, but it takes like whatever, a fraction of a second to get there.
01:43:51.000But there's some appreciable time between when it has to go through the slit and when it reaches the satellite so they can measure it.
01:44:00.000And it turns out that it confirmed what Wheeler was talking about in the delayed-choice experiment was that that choice of whether to go through the slit on the left or the right It wasn't actually made until the satellite measured that photon.
01:44:16.000So what it meant was that there were two possible pasts.
01:44:20.000Now, that's a very short period of time we're talking about here, like less than a second.
01:44:24.000But in the case of the Cosmic Delayed Choice Experiment, we're talking about a million years ago.
01:44:29.000A decision would have had to have been made a million years ago, whether to go left or right, because that's what we think of as the past, right?
01:44:36.000But what the Delayed Choice Experiment is telling us is That doesn't actually happen until now.
01:44:42.000So what if these Mandela effects are going right back to your very first question, or one of your first questions to me, which is, how do I know this is what happened in the past, right?
01:44:52.000So there's, in some possible worlds, it's Bernstein bears.
01:44:58.000And in some possible world, it's Bernstein bears.
01:45:02.000And this minor deviation sort of gets confusing in today's world with some people.
01:45:10.000Because some people have this memory of a different reality.
01:45:21.000And it takes us right back to both the quantum physics idea that the past is not what we think it is.
01:45:28.000And there was a guy, Schrodinger, again, who actually made an obscure speech in the 1940s, I think, where he said, not only are we choosing which slit, the double slit experiment goes through now, let's say Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead,
01:45:45.000But we're choosing from one of several simultaneous histories when we make that observation.
01:45:52.000So that means there's a whole history where the cat came in from the front yard versus the back yard and before that the cat belonged to somebody else.
01:46:04.000There's a whole history that goes with the choices that are made.
01:46:08.000And so this is not a very well understood Aspect of the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
01:46:15.000But I think it gets to this idea that maybe there's multiple possible pasts and that we choose those as we run.
01:46:25.000Now, if we think of this as a simulated reality, then it becomes a little more understandable.
01:46:31.000So I said the main argument people have on the multiverse idea is that, or physicists have, right?
01:46:38.000So some physicists like the Copenhagen interpretation it's called, Niels Bohr came up with it in Copenhagen, and he and his other folks, that there's a probability wave and it collapses into one.
01:46:50.000We don't know how it works, it just kind of collapses.
01:46:53.000Some physicists like this multiverse idea because they're like, we know how the mathematics work, but the problem is it ends up in all these physical universes.
01:47:03.000Now, I've never seen a planet clone itself, let alone an entire universe, a physical universe.
01:47:11.000Cloning may happen, but it happens at a very small level and then it grows.
01:47:15.000Even if you clone a sheep or something, you still have to grow the sheep or you clone a tree.
01:47:21.000But if it's a simulated reality, then both of these things actually make more sense.
01:47:27.000Because on the one hand, you only render that which is seen as a player.
01:47:33.000On the other hand, what we're calling multiple universes are just different runs of the simulation.
01:47:41.000And so in computer science, We're always dealing with limitations, so we don't just run an infinite number of anything, because you can't with computer resources.
01:47:51.000But if you're playing a game and the AI is trying to figure out what's going to happen, what does it do?
01:47:57.000It will try this scenario, it'll try that scenario, it'll try that scenario, and it'll pick the best scenario.
01:48:03.000And so in that case, you cut off the other timelines.
01:48:08.000And you go there forward and from there you can simulate different things and figure out which one you might want to do.
01:48:14.000So you've got a mechanism for the multiverse as information.
01:48:21.000But you don't have to have an infinite number of physical universes per se because when we say this is a universe, all that means is that currently we're running this program right now.
01:48:32.000We could have run another program for a little while and then we can shut that down and we can run this program.
01:49:04.000A few seconds in our reality, if the program stops, like if people are watching this on YouTube, they have a window, but they might have Microsoft Word running, they might have a spreadsheet, they might have Instagram in the window.
01:49:18.000What's happening is this process is in the foreground while they're watching YouTube, and then all these other processes are in the background.
01:49:26.000And so when a process runs, it just knows I'm going to the next step, I'm going to the next step.
01:49:33.000It doesn't necessarily know how many seconds have passed.
01:49:35.000So what the CPU does is it stops executing this window and it runs the background programs for a little while.
01:49:45.000And then it comes back and it runs this one for a while.
01:49:48.000So technically speaking, they're not really parallel, but you don't know it because it just appears like they're all running at the same time, right?
01:49:55.000But if you're inside one program That program could have been paused and you could have been running, you know, the computer could run any number of programs or processes on the side and then it starts running you again and you think no time has passed or nothing has passed.
01:50:11.000I could imagine how you would experience paralysis by analysis dealing with all these different possibilities and scenarios constantly.
01:50:21.000Just playing them all out in your head.
01:51:05.000I think there's something in the middle, too.
01:51:07.000So this is an idea I'm playing with, which is that people could be players, they could be characters, but then they go into NPC mode, right?
01:51:41.000Whereas if you have either a soul or a player outside of the game, your character knows more than just what's happened.
01:51:52.000Then what's happening in the game, you may have had a plan.
01:51:54.000You may have, you know, know you're going to do this.
01:51:57.000You may know there's something else coming up because they can see, the player can kind of maybe look at what's going on and figure out what's going on.
01:52:04.000But what happens is when we go to NPC mode, we're just kind of running like this is all there is and we're not paying attention to, I think, our intuition because I think that is the link that ties us back to...
01:52:29.000But I think it's something more than that.
01:52:31.000And I think it gets back to this fundamental question of consciousness, right?
01:52:35.000The fundamental question is, is consciousness derivative from the physical body?
01:52:43.000So if you have just the neurons in the brain and you have all of the connections, what we call the connectome, Does that result in consciousness?
01:54:05.000Same debate we have here about is abortion okay at the beginning?
01:54:10.000When does the soul connect with the body?
01:54:12.000And I said, well, I think let me offer you guys a different perspective on what insolment is.
01:54:18.000If you think of it as a video game, it's the moment at which you've put on the headset and And you forget everything that's been happening before, right?
01:54:29.000And there was like an Ayatollah from Iran there.
01:54:31.000It was pretty weird because I was talking about NPCs and video games and stuff, right?
01:54:36.000But it was actually pretty well received, you know.
01:54:39.000But that is getting back to the idea that consciousness exists outside the body.
01:54:44.000And when we inhabit the body, you know, While we're here, except for flashes of insight and intuition or yogic states or perhaps, you know, I mean, I've never done DMT, but so many people have come to me and said, oh,
01:54:59.000yeah, you know, when I did DMT, I saw the lines, the grid lines of the simulation, right?
01:55:07.000And so I probably don't personally have a lot of experience with that, but you start to see these states where they realize that something about the world isn't quite what it seems, whether it's through glitches, synchronicity, coincidence, or ecstatic states, or yogic states,
01:55:23.000The problem with DMT experiences and all psychedelics in general is that they, when you do experience them, they feel so bizarrely real, so much more real than this current reality that we're both of us presumably experiencing the same thing.
01:56:10.000You clumsily use mouth noises to try to get someone to see what you're seeing.
01:56:16.000And the only way anybody really understands what you're seeing is if they do it.
01:56:20.000And I don't know what you're seeing when you do it.
01:56:22.000I'm just imagining that you see the same thing that I see.
01:56:25.000And a lot of people describe it in a similar way, but then the problem is how much of that description is based on your understanding of other people's descriptions of it.
01:56:36.000And does it get influenced by other people?
01:57:04.000So, how does this relate to UAPs, the UFO phenomenon?
01:57:10.000Well, so, you know, the UAP phenomenon is interesting because it ends up being a lot of different things to different people, right?
01:57:17.000And I know you've had some shows on this as well.
01:57:19.000And, you know, this question comes up when you're talking about whether it's physical craft or you're talking about things like the abduction phenomenon with beings that are stepping in and out of physical reality, like they're going through walls and stuff.
01:57:35.000It's an area that I think deserves more study.
01:57:40.000There's been new projects at Harvard and Stanford over the last year or two.
01:57:46.000Avi Loeb with the Galileo project, they're taking a very scientific view of studying this, using new telescopes to try to get actual data on strange objects in the sky.
01:57:57.000And at Stanford, you've got Gary Nolan's Soul Foundation, which is studying maybe broader aspects, including policy, as well as like the religious and social side of it.
01:58:09.000And I know you've had like Diana Pasolka on before, who talks a lot about the overlap between religion and UAP. One of the things that I found most interesting about UAP is that when you look at the reports, There's some that just are so bizarre that you don't know what to make of them,
01:58:49.000He was the inspiration for the French guy in Close Encounters.
01:58:53.000And so he and I sat down a few years ago when I was trying to think about all this stuff.
01:59:00.000And he's a computer scientist by background actually.
01:59:03.000So he really likes this idea that there's a simulated reality that could be accounting for a lot of this stuff.
01:59:13.000And so he told me of some cases where there would be one person would look up and see the UFO and then the person standing next to them would not see the UFO. So, excuse me, that begs the question,
01:59:40.000And he said there was a case in, I think it was Northern California or Southern Oregon, right?
01:59:44.000So if you've been up there, you know there's like these tall redwood trees, pine trees.
01:59:49.000And supposedly these witnesses reported this UFO came and it landed.
01:59:56.000It came at a 45 degree angle and it landed on the ground and supposedly there was some You know, residue or something that the UFO investigators were investigating.
02:00:05.000So, you know, Jacques likes to, just like you do with your long interviews, he likes to sit with people for a long time and then come back the next day and talk to them again and again to see if there's new things he can figure out.
02:00:16.000And, you know, once all the other investigators left, he said, well, there's something I don't quite understand.
02:00:22.000You said that it came down at a 45 degree angle.
02:00:28.000But that means it would have had to cut right through the trees, okay?
02:00:32.000And they said, yeah, that's what it did, but we don't want to say that to anybody else because we sound crazy, right?
02:00:39.000So meaning it would have had to come through a physical object.
02:00:44.000And so my question about UAP and my favorite theory—there's a lot of theories about UAP, right?
02:00:50.000There's the alien theory, extraterrestrial hypothesis.
02:00:53.000There's aspects of the religious hypothesis, interdimensional beings.
02:00:58.000There's the djinn that we talked about earlier, right?
02:01:01.000I mean, in fact, in Jacques' work, he talks a lot about folk tales from northern Europe and about these beings that lived there but they weren't physical.
02:01:11.000You can go back and find similar tales in the Middle East related to the Jin.
02:01:17.000So we'll come back to that in a second.
02:01:18.000So there's lots of different theories.
02:01:21.000But when you think about whether the UFO is physical or not, I think we're asking the wrong question, right?
02:01:30.000Because it's a question of when is it physical and when is it not?
02:01:34.000So in this case, we have a situation where it's almost like it was being projected into our reality, right, as like a holographic thing.
02:01:43.000And so there's – in video games, there's that time while it's rendering.
02:01:48.000And during that time, you can walk through the walls or you can put your hand through the table.
02:01:52.000But then once the table is rendered – It's pretty solid at that point, right?
02:01:57.000Like now I can't put my hand through it.
02:01:59.000And so it's almost as if they're coming out of our reality and they're being, you know, they're being hologrammed.
02:02:08.000But then once they become physical, once they render, they're actually physically here, right?
02:02:12.000People report them as a physical thing.
02:02:15.000I mean, I've talked to many people over the years who were like, I looked up and there was a metallic, saucer-shaped craft, right?
02:02:22.000It wasn't, oh, some light in the sky at night that could have been the planet Venus, right?
02:02:27.000It was like, there was this metallic thing right above my head, right, that was spinning, and I don't know what the heck it was.
02:02:33.000And so, you know, I think there's a element of this rendering going on.
02:02:39.000And getting back to the case where one person sees the UFO and one person doesn't, I was at the Seoul Foundation Conference in Stanford, and, you know, someone was talking about a case where There were people in a car and they looked up and one person saw like a disc-shaped object and the other person saw something above their head,
02:03:02.000Like they didn't describe it as the same shape, whether it was, sorry, cigar-shaped or I forget the exact shape, but they were like different shapes of the object.
02:03:11.000And they were right next to each other, right?
02:03:14.000And so we get into this, I think we get into this case where Reality may be more permeable than we think, and that's where the intersection between the UAP phenomenon and the simulation theory Well,
02:03:49.000in a video game, that's only not strange.
02:03:56.000It's trivial to do that in a video game.
02:03:59.000We just say you're level 30. You have the UFO skill set to see UFOs.
02:04:07.000I'll say I'm only level 2. My character can't see a damn thing.
02:04:10.000He just looks up and says, there ain't no UFOs up there.
02:04:13.000And so I'm wondering if there isn't an element of what I call conditional rendering going on with this phenomenon, which is why some people see things and some people don't.
02:04:24.000It's almost like they're being projected into our reality.
02:04:29.000If you look at the Tic Tac case, for example, a lot of these UFOs, they show this weird phenomenon where they kind of dart from one place to the other.
02:04:41.000Almost like somebody has a light that they're shining.
02:04:45.000So I'm not saying they're not physical.
02:04:46.000I'm saying that maybe they have this ability to render into the physical world, but then they can act like...
02:04:53.000I mean, you can take an object from one place and render it in a video game somewhere else at different XY coordinates.
02:05:00.000It doesn't always have to go straight through.
02:05:07.000What's causing this phenomenon to be so strange?
02:05:11.000I'm still talking about what we think of as the nuts and bolts parts of the phenomenon, right?
02:05:15.000The craft are considered nuts and bolts.
02:05:18.000Then you have this whole other phenomenon and part of what I'm studying, I actually did a study where I interviewed a number of different professors who've studied UFOs.
02:05:30.000From different universities and talked about how their colleagues reacted.
02:05:34.000And the problem is I think in the scientific world, they basically say, no, no, this is a done deal.
02:06:38.000So because Congress starts talking to people who have seen things behind the scenes, whether in classified programs or elsewhere, that just don't fit the explanation.
02:06:56.000I'm not saying that they're what we call crypto-terrestrial.
02:06:59.000I'm not saying they're time travelers, although that's an interesting, you know, one.
02:07:04.000But if you guys who are students are curious about this, you know, you should follow your curiosity because that's how science progresses, is when people don't set artificial boundaries.
02:08:47.000I mean, in my opinion, that's not even out of our current model of reality, right?
02:08:52.000It doesn't take, you know, a redefinition of the world as a simulation or time travel or anything really bizarre, right, for an extraterrestrial explanation.
02:09:02.000To me, that's almost the most prosaic explanation because it's one we would understand with at least most of our science.
02:09:09.000Okay, we don't know exactly how they travel, but we know there's other planets around other star systems.
02:09:14.000We know they're in the habitable zones.
02:09:17.000It's not that unreasonable that they might have visited us at some point in the past, right?
02:09:22.000And then there's our understanding of other dimensions.
02:09:33.000So, science fiction tends to, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, the narratives in science fiction tend to influence the way we think about things, right?
02:09:48.000That the debate becomes, no, it's impossible, they can't be aliens, or yes, they are aliens and that's it, right?
02:09:55.000But that is a debate based on our current understanding of science.
02:09:59.000If we had this debate back in the 1800s, there were these things called the airships, right?
02:10:04.000Nobody really understood what they were.
02:10:06.000And if you go back to biblical times, right, there were, you know, the wheels and there were all these weird flying chariots and things and they didn't know what they are.
02:10:14.000But each time we try to interpret them Based upon our current understanding of technology, just like the metaphors I was talking about earlier in religions, the same happens with these kind of events, right?
02:10:24.000Chariots is the best way for people to explain something in the sky because that's a technology they understand.
02:10:30.000So today, aliens is a way to explain UFOs because at least we, you know, just like the planet Krypton, right?
02:10:37.000It's passed the 10-year-old test, right?
02:10:39.000You can say aliens, whereas back in the time of Kepler, who actually many consider to be the first science fiction writer, even though he came up with Kepler's Laws of Motion, he wrote some fiction about visitors and other planets and stuff.
02:10:54.000Back then, it was so bizarre to talk about that.
02:10:57.000That it was just outside of what people understood but it was also outside of what the dominant institutions of the time, which was the church.
02:11:05.000During Galileo and Kepler's time, the church was the dominant institution and so you didn't want to say things that are outside.
02:11:11.000What's happened now is we have science has become The dominant institution.
02:11:16.000And so people within academia feel like they're constrained and they want to be careful in the same way that people were back then to talk about this weird stuff.
02:11:26.000And so I think when you get into some of these other explanations, it's more likely because the phenomenon has so many different aspects.
02:11:34.000So for example, I was talking with Whitley Streber recently.
02:11:38.000I don't know if you've ever had him on.
02:11:42.000Communion, which, you know, because Communion has had that gray head, alien head on the cover, it's become kind of the dominant thing.
02:11:50.000But he was talking about a story recently, which again sounds so bizarre, right?
02:11:54.000About a young man who – he talked about this on the air, so I can share it publicly.
02:12:00.000But he said there was a young man who claimed that He had met this young woman, and they got into a physical relationship, and then one day she calls him over to her house.
02:12:08.000Okay, and this sounds totally batshit crazier.
02:12:14.000And then she transforms into a gray alien.
02:12:17.000And then she transforms back into the human.
02:12:20.000And then she says, I'm pregnant with our child, and I'm going to take that child back to our people, and you're never going to see me again.
02:12:29.000Okay, so from our normal understanding of reality, that's just ridiculous, right?
02:12:35.000But when I was looking at the stories from medieval times and in the Islamic traditions, there's actually almost identical stories of men who would meet these jinn women They would have children with them, and one day the jinn woman would say,
02:12:51.000I'm taking the children back into the world of the jinn, right?
02:12:54.000Who are like these entities that exist in a parallel dimension.
02:12:57.000Like they're here, but they're not here, so they step in and out of physical reality.
02:13:02.000And it was like almost identical to the story that people were having today.
02:13:07.000And so, you know, is it possible that many of these old folk stories are describing entities that exist outside of our physical reality and they're able to come in and out?
02:13:18.000And when you think of a woman turning from a human to a gray alien...
02:13:24.000To me, it sounds like she has an avatar that is projected, just like you can do inside a video game.
02:13:30.000You can change your avatar at various times.
02:13:33.000Maybe there are certain rules that only allow it.
02:13:35.000At certain points in the game, you're allowed to do that.
02:13:39.000And maybe they know how to do it because they're more advanced users of the simulation than we are.
02:13:56.000I've met probably four or five people.
02:14:02.000Who have told me off the record, confidentially, I don't think they mind if I express it without mentioning who they are, that they have been part of the reverse engineering program or they have seen the anti-gravity stuff that we have created based on I think that gets back to where the whole recent debate has been within Congress around do we have a reverse engineering program?
02:14:29.000Is it in the government or is it in private industry?
02:15:50.000Yeah, that said somewhere within the government, like, they're not even getting very specific about where because they're not allowed to say that, right?
02:16:00.000That was reverse engineered from some craft.
02:16:04.000Again, if we consider these reports, let's say you don't believe any one of them and that's okay.
02:16:08.000Just like I was saying with the religions.
02:16:10.000If we consider most religions start from somebody peering outside the physical world and coming back Same with near-death experiencers coming back.
02:16:20.000You want to find what are the common elements because those are more likely, in my opinion, to be true, right?
02:16:25.000If a thousand people say they've been to China and we have scientists saying, there's no such thing as China.
02:16:32.000Therefore, China doesn't exist, right?
02:16:35.000That's the kind of attitude you often get from the scientific community.
02:16:39.000And so I'm just extrapolating what was the thing in common that different people have said to me Who have first-hand experience with the government.
02:16:49.000There's plenty of people who have sightings.
02:16:50.000And what's in common is these physical things.
02:16:53.000That there is a physical – there are physical objects that have that – Defy explanation.
02:17:37.000Does it use some physics method that we might understand?
02:17:40.000It's really weird to think that there's the physics that we study in Within the academy and within scientists and then there's another physics that the government knows about.
02:17:52.000But Alan Hynek, who was in charge or the scientific consultant for Project Blue Book, he said, we forget sometimes that we're evaluating these things based on, at the time, 20th century technology.
02:18:03.000But we forget there's going to be a 23rd century technology.
02:18:06.000Then there's going to be a 30th century technology.
02:18:09.000So imagine what our propulsion technology might be a thousand years from now.
02:18:14.000And I think that's how we have to view what UFOs are, is that they could be something much more advanced than what we're capable of today.
02:18:24.000But also, I think they perhaps show an understanding of the physical world that we just don't have.
02:18:31.000We're still caught in a very materialist paradigm that says, if you start off in this Alpha Centauri, you have to travel faster than light or you have to travel four years at the speed of light to get here.
02:18:45.000That's, again, a very particular paradigm that doesn't allow for you can re-render at any XYZ coordinate inside the physical world, which is how I think of it from the video game perspective.
02:19:00.000These people that you have talked to that have worked on back-engineering these things?
02:19:34.000I mean people that I've talked to obviously are within the last – since I've been an adult, right?
02:19:39.000So 90s, 2000s this year but that doesn't mean exactly when that might have happened.
02:19:46.000One guy I talked to who's been very public who passed away.
02:19:50.000I don't know how to evaluate his results.
02:19:53.000His stories was a guy named Clifford Stone, Sergeant Clifford Stone, and he publicly talked about being in Vietnam and being pulled out of his unit to be part of this crash retrieval unit that would go out and do things.
02:20:26.000In terms of his own credibility, I don't know what to make of his credibility, but I think his basic story It checks out for me because other people have said things that are similar that they've seen some craft within some government program somewhere.
02:20:45.000So I think the basic story checks out.
02:20:49.000I mean his thing about element 115 or being used as a person source, I don't know enough about that to really comment.
02:20:56.000But his credibility has also been attacked because he said he was at MIT and Caltech.
02:21:01.000And that he wasn't really there, and so, you know, there's that whole issue of...
02:21:06.000He explained that to me, and I'll tell you about it later.
02:21:51.000And then there's George Knapp when they investigated, when they took him to Los Alamos Labs, and he's intimate understanding of the way it works, including their security systems, the people that worked there.
02:22:56.000I mean, I think the time travel hypothesis is an interesting one because if you think about it, what would be a reason for such extreme secrecy, right?
02:23:06.000Like, we put technology quarantines Matthew Feeney, M.A.E.A. on certain countries.
02:23:13.000We say, okay, Iran is not allowed to have a bomb or Iraq wasn't allowed to have a bomb.
02:24:10.000And there's a guy named Dr. Michael Masters who wrote an interesting book about this idea that the greys with their big eyes could be – he's an evolutionary biologist and it could be if humans were to evolve for another few million years.
02:24:26.000I think of that – This sort of iconic thought this this image that we have in our head is essentially how you would play out Modern humans if we continue to go along the path of evolution if you go all the way back to what we used to be when we're you know Primitive hominids and then you take it to what we are today,
02:24:49.000which is much weaker much much smarter much more Much more technological progress and then also the environmental factors that's leading us to be kind of genderless.
02:25:04.000I mean, this is microplastics in our diet, contamination by various pesticides and herbicides and all these different things that are endocrine disruptors.
02:25:14.000I mean, we're less and less physical, right?
02:25:18.000And so then we become these spindly things.
02:25:21.000Our brains get bigger and Our brains are far bigger than chimps, right?
02:25:25.000And then this thing would be far bigger than that if it continues to evolve and grow, especially if we physically integrate with technology like Neuralink or like something else or no longer have the need for biological reproductions.
02:25:39.000Well, now we don't have gender anymore.
02:26:33.000Why would we send people and have them die?
02:26:35.000Especially if you're going to have an artificial person that doesn't even need to breathe air and you don't have to worry about what the atmosphere is like over there.
02:26:56.000Today, the architecture we use in our computers is called the von Neumann architecture.
02:27:00.000There's a CPU, there's memory, He was a brilliant guy, but he came up with this idea that if we were to send out probes, what we would do is we would have these machines that are capable of replicating themselves.
02:27:14.000So we would send out, with a bunch of raw materials...
02:27:17.000And then they could assemble those raw materials into new machines.
02:27:22.000And those machines would then reproduce from the raw materials and they would go out and they could colonize the galaxy for us, potentially.
02:27:30.000I don't know if you ever read Rendezvous with Rama, which was an Arthur C. Clarke novel.
02:27:35.000In it, there's this weird cylinder-shaped object that comes into the solar system.
02:27:41.000And they send some craft to figure out, well, what is this?
02:28:24.000And it was giving him suggestions, maybe run a comb through your hair, or maybe just go with the mad genius look, like you've been up all night coding.
02:28:30.000And then he puts on a wacky hat and he starts laughing.
02:28:33.000Well, that's certainly going to make a statement.
02:28:34.000Like, it sees the image and recognizes that he's being silly with this hat.
02:28:41.000Yeah, I saw that video and there were other ones where it was translating in real time or one AI was talking to the other AI and it was describing.
02:28:49.000Now, we have to be a little bit careful because having been in the tech industry, usually these are like canned demos, right?
02:28:55.000And when you actually use the product, it's not quite that good.
02:29:59.000And it had a URL there, which in academia, they're called DOIs, but it's basically a URL you click on.
02:30:05.000So I clicked on it, and it turns out it was fake.
02:30:08.000That URL was made up by ChatGPT because it was predicting what the next word should be and what the next letter should be in a URL. And so then I looked at the professors' names who wrote this article.
02:30:20.000And so we emailed these professors, and they're like, I never wrote an article like that.
02:30:25.000So it just completely made that shit up.
02:30:27.000So you have to be careful with today's AI, but we're getting there, right?
02:30:32.000I think what I call stage nine on the road to the simulation point, which is when the AI is as conscious as we are in terms of how far we can tell.
02:30:49.000Right, and what it tries to do is statistically predict what is the best next thing to say, which is not necessarily, like for an expert, it's kind of like Wikipedia, right?
02:31:00.000Wikipedia, when it first started out, everyone was like, don't use Wikipedia to reference anything because it's just a bunch of junk that people put out there.
02:31:06.000But eventually it got to the point where you shouldn't use Wikipedia as your Your final reference, but it's not a bad way to just go and get an overview of something.
02:31:16.000But then you need to go and go to the original sources, if you're in academia, for example, to figure out, okay, did it accurately represent it?
02:31:22.000And Wikipedia has a lot of potential censorship going on, too.
02:31:26.000So I wrote an article for CNN not that long ago, about a month ago, after the whole Gemini, you know, the woke Gemini scandal.
02:31:50.000And so, you know, that created a whole uproar.
02:31:53.000But what it does is it shows that, you know, as AI becomes the way that we interface with the world's information, and it's moving in that direction, right?
02:32:04.000For my students, I mean, they use something like ChatGPT before they'll do a Google search in some cases.
02:32:11.000So in a sense, there is this worry, and that's why Google went so heavily to try to get Gemini out, was there's this sense that chatbots and AI will replace search.
02:32:24.000Before search, if you think before Google, how did we navigate the web?
02:32:29.000There was Yahoo, which was like a directory, right?
02:32:33.000And then there was Excite, which was like a little bit of a search.
02:34:52.000But the AI decides to go off on its own.
02:34:55.000What it really wants is a virtual space.
02:34:58.000That it can interact with other AI, right?
02:35:02.000It doesn't have the same necessarily priorities.
02:35:04.000And I think that's where we make the mistake when we're worried about AI taking over is we're kind of assuming that AI will have, you know, the same kind of priorities.
02:37:19.000Part of the reason why I ended up writing about this and talking about this subject in general was because it brings together these different threads of how we search for truth.