#317 - Ancient Texts Confirm Simulation Hypothesis | Rizwan Virk

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Rizwan Virk is a video game pioneer, MIT computer scientist, and author of several books such as "The Simulation Hypothesis" and "The Simulated Multiverse." SPONSORS https://ground.news/dannyj - Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to worldwide coverage. https://huel.com/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://a.co/d/9XXGwjL https://www.zenentrepreneur.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - layers of the simulation hypothesis 07:11 - are we living in a "Matrix" video game? 18:10 - why do paranormal phenomena mostly affect kids? 22:45 - the analogy of the dream 27:44 - precognition are glitches in the matrix? 34:07 - free will vs. simulation theory 45:12 - the problem with multi-verse theory 53:13 - information entropy 01:00:12 - statistical evidence we're living in a simulation 01:11:07 - life review 01:23:23 - evolution of information science 01:32:05 - why UAP technology is lagging 01:47:51 - Rizwan's analysis of Bob Lazar 01:59:45 - does simulation theory agree with alien life? 02:13:26 - cosmic delayed choice experiment 02:19:53 - Mandela Effect is proof of a simulation 02:34:28 - AI is hallucinating our reality 02:41:56 - religious allegories in the Matrix 02:50:24 - experiment to prove the simulation theory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Danny Jones?

  Rizwan. Is it Rizwan? Is that how you pronounce it?

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Rizwan or Riz for short.

• 1:08Danny Jones?

  So, uh, this is your latest and greatest book. MIT computer scientists shows why AI, quantum physics, and eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is sort of the brand new edition of this general topic that I've been working on for many years now. And it's basically updated to include all the latest developments in artificial intelligence and then virtual reality, augmented reality.

• 1:36Danny Jones?

  So I just watched this movie last night called The Thirteenth Floor.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, great movie.

• 1:41Danny Jones?

  Wild movie. Like, it's a, basically the hypothesis, I mean, the, the summary of it is they find out they're a simulation that's created a simulation, but they're already in a simulation.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52Danny Jones?

  So it's like this nesting doll of simulations they're in.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55Danny Jones?

  And it, and it's like when people die, they get shuttled to the, the higher simulation. So it's kind of like going to heaven.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, you can think of it more like stacked series of realities, if you will. And so that movie I use as the second film that I have my students watch.

• 2:13Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Cause I taught a class on the simulation hypothesis at Arizona State University recently. And the first movie is The Matrix. And turns out they both came out in the same year.

• 2:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, did they really? Nineteen ninety-nine?

• 2:24Speaker 03

  They both came out in nineteen ninety-nine and in fact, I think The Thirteenth Floor came out a month or two after The Matrix. And it was vastly overshadowed by The Matrix.

• 2:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  So it's really an underappreciated film, but I think it's one of the better representations of a lot of the issues of being inside a simulation. Uh, because of what you just mentioned, which is the stacked simulation aspect that's going on. Uh, but also because it brings up one of the core issues, I think, when you think about uh, The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor or uh, any of these other science fiction works that are related to this idea. It's what I call the NPC versus RPG versions or flavors of the simulation hypothesis. And in the NPC version, everyone is AI. So you're really just running inside a simulation and you're living your life. Uh, but you don't exist outside of that reality.

• 3:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  And then in the RPG version, which is closer to The Matrix version. Uh, just as Morpheus and Neo and Trinity, you know, they existed sort of as players of the game.

• 3:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Outside the simulation and they had that brain computer interface that was plugged into the back of their head.

• 3:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Uh, and then they got immersed into their character inside the simulation.

• 3:41Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  And what's interesting about The Thirteenth Floor is that the simulation they created starts off as kind of an NPC simulation.

• 3:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, because they have their own, their own bodies are already existing inside of this lower simulation.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:56Danny Jones?

  So they're like jacking in like, like as if, as if there's an NPC version of me that exists inside the simulation that's just walking around, doing its thing, and then all of a sudden I emerge into its consciousness.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Right, so what you see there is something in between what I think of as an NPC and a PC or a player character, or which is typically called an avatar in a video game, which is your character. And so they're living their lives and there's this one line where, you know, the main character, Douglas Hall, goes in and he comes out and he says, you know, these people are as real as you or me. But when he goes in, it's like he's taking over the body of that NPC. So it's like he's turning it into more of an avatar that he's controlling from outside. So for me, this is kind of a in-between these two versions, because it's you get to control the avatar and play the avatar, but then it sort of runs on AI, kind of like The Sims.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  You know, if you've ever played The Sims, you know, The Sims kind of do their own little things, but you're there still able to direct them to a certain extent. And I think that is an interesting model for the idea that we live inside a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which is, you know, my general contention with this book and with with other works that I've had, is that we could be avatars of our players. And we have a character, just like if you played Dungeons and Dragons, for example. Never played that. Never played? I used to play as a kid. And what you do is you'd have a character sheet and you would choose your race, you know, you'd say elf or dwarf or human, and you choose your profession, like what are you going to do?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Are you a thief? Are you a warrior? Are you a wizard or, you know, whatever options they have? And then you have different attributes of that character, which you'd roll the dice for is how we would do it back in the day, but you'd have like different intelligence, charisma, strength, you know, physical strength, all of these types of things. And then you would take that character on an adventure. You would have like a storyline that you're about to embark on.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And I think that's a good way to describe at least the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis. Which is now in both The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, their avatars looked exactly like them. Of course, that made it easy to make the movie because you can use the same actors. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I mean, when our player, if you and I are the characters, like our players don't have to physically look like us. They could be aliens, they could be future humans, they could be just more consciousness type beings than are non-physical beings. So there's a lot of options, I think, that we open up when we look at this perspective on the world itself.

• 6:45Danny Jones?

  How did you initially get so wrapped up in this stuff and researching this stuff? And like, what was the spark of all of this for you?

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Well, there were several, but I started off as an entrepreneur and a computer scientist. And during the time I was running my first company, I would, during the day, I do all the things that an entrepreneur would do, and I was dealing with investors and employees, and we had Fortune 1000 customers and all those things. But in the evenings and the weekends, I would be exploring different aspects of consciousness. So I might fly off to a place like the Monroe Institute, for example, where they use, you know, hemisync things to try to get you into an out-of-body state, or shamanic drumming, shamanic journeying using drumming, not so much psychedelics, but using, you know, different rhythmic breathing, different yogic techniques,

• 7:36Speaker 03

  different energy healing techniques. And so I was living this double life for a long time. And then I moved to Silicon Valley, and there I ended up starting a game company, video game company. And I got into the video game industry. And we ended up selling our company to a big Japanese company, and then I became an investor and advisor to a whole bunch of different video game companies. And so that's kind of what I was doing when the spark for this was lit. I was running a program at MIT called PlayLabs, which is where I had gone to undergraduate and studied computer science. And we were basically getting startups that were doing the latest virtual reality or augmented reality or video game technologies, and we were guiding them through a process. But around that time,

• 8:19Speaker 03

  I I had visited a startup in Marin County where I had put on a virtual reality headset and I had played a VR ping pong game. And what happened was when I was playing this game, that the responsiveness of the game was so good. And if you looked at the actual like picture of this game, it's not, it wasn't even photorealistic. It wasn't as good as our AI can generate today. But the physics engine was so good that I felt like I was really hitting a ball

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  with a real paddle. And if I, you know, moved around a little bit, the ball would go different places. And it fooled my body for a moment into thinking that I was playing a real game of table tennis. And so 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. The controller fell to the floor. I had to do a double take and stop myself from falling. And then I began to wonder, how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix? Where it was so immersive that we would forget that we were in a virtual reality. Not like I did for a second, but we would forget for much longer periods of time. And so I laid out the stages of technology. That's how I started to explore this idea. But then I went back to my studies in consciousness and looked at what different religions were saying.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  And I realized, you know what? They're all saying the same kinds of things. They just use different language from a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years ago. They're all saying that reality is some kind of a hoax, uh, which is put forward and we forget that we're playing the game. And then I looked at quantum physics and I realized so many things within quantum mechanics are just so strange. They don't make sense if this is a purely physical universe. Like, why would you ever do things in that way? And for me, being a video game developer designer at that point, uh, I looked at how we build video games and how we optimize to build these games. And I realized that a lot of what quantum mechanics was saying and what Physics was leading towards was this idea that the world is actually information.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  It's not physical, right? And if you're able to take that to its logical conclusion, you said that information has to get presented to us in such a way that this table looks like it's a real table. It feels like it's a real table. That's kind of what we do with video games. We take the information and then we render different objects based upon where you are. So I realized that even quantum mechanics was telling us, telling us that the world isn't really real. Uh, and that's how I kind of wrapped it together. And I realized that simulation theory in general is a good way to bridge the gap between these different ways of looking at the world. Yeah, so that's kind of how I got into it.

• 10:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is that, you know, how you can't really quantify or measure stuff. Uh, this, this kind of like squishy physics type stuff, like stuff like parapsychology or telepathy or ESP or remote viewing, any like these things reconcile very well with the simulation hypothesis. More so than they do with like the physical universe and these, you know, these dead, uh, dead matter like, you know, particles and neurons and all these things.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, I delve into that in, in the book in terms of different, uh, unexplained phenomenon, unexplained by our scientific process, mostly because they don't believe them, first of all. But, you know, uh, remote viewing, for example, is, you know, where you're given either a set of coordinates or some other information in an envelope. And Hal Pudoff and those guys, uh, pioneered it back at Stanford Research Institute. And I think it was Jacques Vallée that had suggested to him using coordinates as the way, uh, you know, to get people to focus in on a specific area. Uh, and so that from a normal materialistic point of view, it seems like something that's impossible.

• 12:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  How could you see that? But in a video game, we have what's called a virtual camera. And so you can place that virtual, usually the virtual camera is fixed either first person in your avatar. Mm hmm. Or, you know, set kind of up here. Yeah. Where you're looking down on the avatar. That's pretty much the very common for a lot of games. Or, you know, top down, kind of a third person point of view. Right. But you can place that virtual camera anywhere in the virtual world. You give it an X, Y, Z set of coordinates. Mm hmm. Uh, and T for time. And you can see what's happening there without your physical avatar having to be there. And so at least we have a framework or a way to think about how these things might actually work. Mm hmm.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  And you also have, you have the rendered world, which in this case would be like, you know, the table, my chair, this microphone. Mm hmm. Uh, our bodies, but within a video game, you have that, but you also have all these other things around, uh, which they kind of refer to as a HUD or heads up display, which are all the other things, stats about your. Right. Your character. Your health. Your health, your level, what quest you're undertaking, but you also have a friends list. And you can like send messages to friends that are not there with you in the scene. Right? And so when you think of telepathy and how does that work? Well, oftentimes, you know, telepathy ends up coming from people that we're close to, like, uh, like our, our parents, or, uh, you know, if something happens to your mom,

• 13:30Speaker 03

  your mom always seems to know what, what's going on with you often, right? Uh, or if you look at the telepathy tapes, uh, recently, which was. Yeah. Pretty popular. So, uh, Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who was the, uh, the researcher, uh, uh, you know, who did the original work on autistic savants, she contacted me a few years ago, before the telepathy tapes, and she said, oh, I'd like you to, to speak at a conference that we're putting on about autistic savants and the simulation theory. And she said, because she was with all her work and finding, for those people who don't know, that these are, uh, this is a, uh, cases where you have these autistic non-verbal kids. Yeah. Who generally don't speak. Mm hmm. Uh, but they're, and, and they have, they don't have fine motor skills, but they,

• 14:13Speaker 03

  you know, but they have kind of gross motor skills. And so they can point to on an iPad letter. And that becomes a way for them to communicate. But oftentimes, there's somebody like their mom or their dad, who, according to the telepathy tapes and according to, you know, what Diane has found, they're able to communicate and see, for example, what their mom is seeing and whether it's a number or a color or a word that they're pointing at when they aren't able to see it necessarily. And so that becomes a kind of ability to either send messages or better yet, to receive messages and to look at the other person's character. Now, I, I think Diane came to the conclusion

• 14:56Speaker 03

  that a simulated universe where everything is information would make more sense for something like that to work. So if we say, if we take the assumption that that, that actually happens, and there, there's a lot of people in academia who are like, nah, none of that stuff is real. But if we assume some of that, and most of, many of us have experienced this kind of thing, what's the mechanism that would allow these kinds of things to happen? And in information-based reality where you can like, look at the information somewhere else, you can render it, is one way. And, you know, I, I came up with this idea that it's kind of like being in a full-body suit, VR suit.

• 15:35Danny Jones?

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• 16:20Danny Jones?

  Trump blames the Dems for Epstein's backlash, new scam. Jeffrey Epstein was recorded talking about Trump before his arrest. Now, let's go up. And see what the right has to say about this. Two articles. Explain the Epstein files, conspiracy theories and what's next. Democrats seize on MAGA rift over the Epstein case. So there's a clear bias. There's only two reportings on the right calling the left conspiracy theorists. And on the left, we have 15 articles covering the whole thing. And you can see right here, the weight distribution of bias, depending on left, right, or center, and where they come from. And right here, if you click on this button, it will give you a brief summary and breakdown all about the news source reporting on the story, their historical bias ratings, how

• 17:03Danny Jones?

  factual they are, and the ownership, who actually owns this media outlet? Which is really useful when you want to digest this information and really determine what the probability of truth is and what type of narrative they're trying to paint. I found this to be the perfect antidote to sensationalism and algorithm driven echo chambers. It's entirely subscriber funded and with my link, you can save 40% off their subscription. Just go to ground.news/dannyj for a better way to stay informed. Subscribe to get 40% off of the Vantage Plan by scanning this QR code or just use my link, ground.news/dannyj. And big thank you to Ground News for sponsoring this episode. Back to the show.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Like if you've seen Ready Player One, I don't know if you saw that movie.

• 17:48Danny Jones?

  I don't think I have.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Steven Spielberg movie based on a book by Ernest Cline, but it's a virtual, or there's a virtual reality and he puts on like this full body suit. And so he can control the character, you know, very well. He has a little treadmill he can run on. So in that case, you're fully in the suit and every one of your actions is going to be mirrored in your avatar. So he feels like he's immersed inside the virtual reality. And I think of it that most of us are like that, even though it's not necessarily a physical suit or a physical VR headset, but it's like that because we're fully immersed and we have control fully over our bodies. But if you're half in and half out of the suit. But you can still see the screen as to what's happening.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  You can see things that are going on around you without having to be in that first person perspective. But you can't necessarily control the fingers because you're not fully inside the suit. And that's what happens with a lot of these autistic kids. Is, you know, they don't have the skills to like ride and control. But it's like they're frustrated because they can't control their bodies. But they can see what that person is thinking. Again, if you believe that this stuff is real. They can see other things that are going on in other parts of the simulation, if you will. So I think the simulation theory gives us a way and a framework to think about these things.

• 19:08Danny Jones?

  Why do you think there specifically with kids, there's more of these cases? Because I mean, there's definitely, it seems to be with children, more of this sixth sense, if you will. Or ability to experience paranormal phenomena. There's more correlations with children experiencing UFO phenomena. There's even cases of children experiencing or remembering past lives. Like lots of those cases, I think there was a study done on this. Jeffrey Kreipel talked about it when he came in here.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:44Danny Jones?

  And I think-

• 19:45Speaker 03

  University of Virginia study, maybe.

• 19:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And one of the weird things about the kids who are remembering their past lives is they were predominantly male past lives. And the reason he thinks that is because he believes that trauma is directly tied to this connection. And he thinks, I mean, in the past, males died more horrific deaths in general than females did. There was more trauma involved. So he thinks there's some sort of connection there with being able to, children, you know, if they do have this higher connection to whatever it is, if their antennas are stronger for some reason because they haven't been conditioned by society, that they can, through trauma in a past life,

• 20:29Danny Jones?

  they somehow can see through a window for a brief period of time into that world. What do you think that is?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's a very interesting phenomenon, and I know in at least that Virginia study, they also had cases where some of the children remembered, you know, specific things they could track down. Hmm. Uh, but they also had a couple of instances where the kids remembered being outside before they were born, and they said they were like floating over their parents, like before they were born. So it's almost like they were watching, you know, them inside a video game, if you will. That's my way of thinking about it, like they're able to tune in to any part, but because they're gonna be their parents. Now, I think you're right in that it is first because they're not conditioned to think

• 21:19Speaker 03

  of the world fully materially, uh, as only a material world. Hmm. Like, most of the religions of the world tell us that we go through a phase of forgetfulness. Really? To get into when we come into the body. We forget who we were, what our soul was, and what plans we might have had while we're here. So, and in Islam, for example, they talk about the veils of forgetfulness. So, yeah, there's like seventy thousand veils between ultimate reality, and as you incarnate, you're actually putting on these veils. And in Buddhism and Hinduism, they talk about Maya, and that the world is an illusion. But Maya also means sort of, uh, there's a subtlety to the meaning.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  So it means it's like a carefully crafted illusion. Like, if you go to a magic show, you know the guy's not really sawing that woman in half. But part of the fun is to go there and say, "Oh, my God, that's crazy." Uh, and you can think of it in that way. It seems to be that forgetting is a key part of incarnating. And in the Greek legends and Greek mythology, you have Lethe, which is the river of forgetfulness. And the soul, as it incarnates, it goes across Lethe, and so it forgets about stuff, and then it crosses back. And in the Chinese traditions, you have Mengpo. Who is the goddess of forgetfulness and what does she do? She she brews the tea of forgetfulness.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  So I like to say these are all metaphors that are trying to describe some insight about reality that somebody has had. That's how most religions get started. It's by a mystic who saw something, an angel, or they did yoga, or they did fasting in the desert. You know, Jesus went on the desert and they realized that this is not the real world and that there's more behind it. And so most of these mystical processes are about trying to burn off the veils of forgetfulness, trying to remember who you are. And I like to think of that as, if you were to think of it as you put on the VR headset and then you forget what happened before.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  But if there's really strong imprints of memories, say a traumatic experience or something that you just had, you're less likely to forget that. Like if you have a nightmare for a dream, you're less likely to forget that the next day.

• 23:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  And the dream metaphor is used all the time. I mean Buddha literally means awake. And so, you know, a woman asked him, what are you? He said, I am awake. And so, well, what does that mean? It means he was asleep before. And they use the analogy of the dream. And so where Swami Yogananda, who wrote autobiography of a yogi, which was Steve Jobs' favorite book, and it was kind of one of these books, you know, the hippie generation would pass out. Like I actually met a guy recently. He's like, yeah, I was at H Ashbury and somebody just gave me a copy of this book. And he gave a copy to somebody else when he was done.

• 24:15Danny Jones?

  Charles Manson loved that book.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Oh, did he? Oh, I didn't know that one.

• 24:18Danny Jones?

  I made that up.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  I know Elvis Presley did. I doubt Charles Manson would have. You never know, though.

• 24:25Danny Jones?

  You never know. I don't know. It depends on when it was published.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  It was published in like the 40s or so.

• 24:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay. That's possible.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Before the whole thing. But but that's how a lot, that was the introduction to Eastern mysticism for a lot of people. And so Yogananda said, it's like a dream coming into this incarnation is like going into a dream. And then when you die, it's like coming out of the dream. And so we have so many references and stories, and there's the whole near death experience we can talk about as well. But you have so many stories that we're entering into this kind of dream like state. And what happens if you've ever studied dreaming? I don't know if you've ever tried lucid dreaming.

• 25:00Danny Jones?

  Uh, I've never tried it, but it's actually, it's happened to me like two times in the past year. And it was crazy. I took this drug that somebody gave me that helps you lucid dream.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Okay, in, in real life, in physical life, you took a drug?

• 25:14Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  And then you, okay.

• 25:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. So I took this powder, um, before I went to sleep and this thing is supposed to help you have, um, crazy REM sleep. And, um, I guess people have more, you could have more lucid dreams when you take this stuff and I did it and I had, um, a couple lucid dreams on, on different nights. It was crazy.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Interesting. What was that? Do you remember what the, the powder was or?

• 25:35Danny Jones?

  I don't remember off the top of my head. It was like a complicated name. Um, but I got it off Amazon. It was like a very, you know, basic type of powder that you can use to, um, enhance your REM sleep.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:48Danny Jones?

  You could, if you just Google like, uh, like go to, go to, or go to Amazon and type in like, REM sleep powder and probably be one of like the top three results.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, so with lucid dreaming, you realize in the middle of a dream, somehow you realize that, oh my God, this isn't actually real. It's a dream. Which means there's a part of you that's outside the reality and it's sleeping. And there's a whole branch of Tibetan yoga called dream yoga. And it's kind of like lucid dreaming. They, they teach you to basically remember while you're dreaming that the world is, you know, that world, the dream world is a fake world, but there's another world outside of that world. And the point is if you can do it while you're asleep, you should be able to also realize when you're awake that maybe this world

• 26:41Speaker 03

  isn't the real world. And one of the tests, one of the ways that people, you know, there are many techniques for lucid dreaming. You mentioned the powder. Uh, I know there were some South American plants and tea I, I came across once that was supposed to help you. But the basic technique is to remind yourself. During the day and look around and say, is this a dream? And if you remind yourself to ask that during the day, you will remember to ask yourself sometime during the night, during the dream state, and then you can have what's called a lucidity test. And the lucidity test is something you can do in a dream that you can't do in waking life. So, or you have some, if you, did you ever watch Inception?

• 27:23Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Remember he had the little totem?

• 27:25Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Which was the little top, I think he had. So for me, I used to do more of this. I haven't done a lot of it lately. But it was a, it was a flying, a floating thing where I would say, is this real? I don't know. Let me see if I can float up out of my chair. Cause I happen to remember that I can fly in my dreams. But I can't really do it in this physical life. And there were so many times, I'll tell you, where I looked around, I said, I'm not even gonna do the test cause this is obviously real. I mean, this is like a real restaurant. This is a real waiter. And then suddenly I started floating up out of my chair.

• 27:59Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  And so there's almost like this wall of area haze of forgetfulness between waking and dreaming.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  That if you can train yourself to remember, that's why we forget dreams and we say you should write down the dreams.

• 28:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Like right when you wake up, or at least give a title to it.

• 28:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Because then you're more likely to remember it later. And I think part of being incarnated is similar to that.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Where we will forget things. But again, if there's something, you know, tragic or that happened, maybe it's more likely to have an impact.

• 28:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  You know, on where you're going next and remember, you'd remember something, even if you don't remember the specifics, you might remember, have a feeling.

• 28:42Danny Jones?

  There's also this weird phenomena where people can predict the future in dreams. And where there's been cases, multiple cases of where, of people simultaneously having dreams on one night about one big event that's gonna happen. And then the event happening like shortly after. One of those examples is nine 11. Another one was the Titanic sinking. Where in fact, there was a whole entire book written about the Titanic sinking. It was called Titan.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yes, I heard about that.

• 29:10Danny Jones?

  Before it sunk.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

• 29:13Danny Jones?

  Based on dreams.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  And, and so that, you know, brings up this interesting question of, of, of what I call glitches in the matrix. Like, you know, we are perceiving things that might happen in the future. I mean, it's happened to me, actually. I, I mentioned that I was doing my startup. This is my first startup back in the nineties during the day. And I, there was a precognitive dream that really kind of woke me up that something weird is going on. And it wasn't profound, but it was, it was strange enough that it made me realize that there's something wrong here. That the maturest view of the universe isn't right. So one day I woke up and I had a dream that morning about this competitor of ours.

• 29:53Danny Jones?

  Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Who I literally had not seen in or heard from in a year. And I had never had a dream with this competitor. Let's say his name was Mark and his company was called like Edge Research or something back in the day. And, you know, they were competing with us and then they disappeared. So a year later, maybe a year and a half, I don't remember exactly how long, but it was far enough that I had completely forgotten about him. And I woke up and I said, that's odd. Why am I having a dream with this guy and talking to each other? It was just the oddest thing. And so then I went into the office and the first thing that happened when I got the office that morning was I got a call from somebody at IBM, which was our business partner. So we were making, this is before my video game days, we were making enterprise software. And they said, oh, I wanted to tell you about this new product. We're going to announce it today. It kind of competes with your product.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  And so, you know, we might crush your product, but you've been a good partner for us. So we want to let you know beforehand. And I was like, okay, well, that sucks one. But two, how could I never have not have heard of this product? I mean, IBM is a huge company and these things leak all the time and people know each other. And they said, oh, well, because we bought that competitor of yours last year. Do you remember this guy Mark from Edge Research? And they had been working on this product in secret in New Hampshire. So nobody else knew about it. And so it was like, oh, it's the, you know, my dream happened before the phone call, but the phone call was reflecting the dream.

• 31:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  It's clearly showing us that there is some way of sending information that we don't know about. And for me, it's almost like a technological synchronicity.

• 31:28Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Have you heard this term?

• 31:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's happened to me. I've described this before on the podcast, but there was a recent, a couple, maybe it was like a year ago. There was a moment where I was driving in my car. You know, when you're driving, sometimes you'll sometimes,

• 31:42Danny Jones?

  you'll like simulate interactions with people in your head before they happen. Like, you'll know you're gonna see this person in the next month or two week or week or whatever it is, and you'll kind of like simulate what, what is that interaction gonna be like, right? I was doing that while I was driving, just mind, just daydreaming, right? I was just driving and thinking about an interaction I knew I was gonna have with this guy in a few weeks. This guy was a friend of my dad's, was like a golf buddy of my dad's or whatever. And a guy that I literally, I've talked to on the phone twice in my life. I've known the guy for 25 years.

• 32:16Danny Jones?

  And as I'm replaying this in my head, driving, the guy calls me. The third time in my life in 25 years he's ever called me. For some random question about something completely, completely unrelated to anything. Like, and it was just like, how? How did this fucking happen? I told everybody about this, like, how did this fucking happen? You know, and it's just like, yeah, it's one of those synchronicities.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:37Danny Jones?

  That you can't really explain. And, you know, if, if all of the air around us is some computational cloud that's all connected through morphic resonance and all this stuff, then that's, that's, that's the best explanation for me to comprehend.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 32:51Danny Jones?

  This kind of stuff.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  I think so. And so there's a term like called technological synchronicity. And the best example is, here, I'll tell you a quick story. I was shopping for a backpack. Because the synchronicity is some, what it is, is usually it's some correlation between an inner event, in this case, you were daydreaming, and an outer event where the guy calls you. Or similarly, if you had a dream about someone and they call you or. But, so I was shopping for a backpack online on my laptop. And there was a specific company whose backpack I was looking at. And so I forgot about it. And then a few days later, I was on my phone, and I was in like Facebook or some, some social media app. And suddenly I see. An ad and what is the ad for?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  It's for the exact same backpack. Now, if I didn't know anything about

• 33:40Danny Jones?

  It's the simulation.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Right, I would have said

• 33:43Danny Jones?

  Facebook spying on you.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what it actually is. But if you didn't know about cookies and databases. And what happened was I had registered my intent by visiting that website in some database.

• 33:54Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  And there was a cookie associated with that that got linked to my profile. And then my profile on my phone was linked back to that specific cookie. And they said, what is his intent?

• 34:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Now let's create an ad from the possible ads that we have.

• 34:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  And I think that's also how synchronicity could be working. It, but if you didn't know that, you'd think it's magic.

• 34:15Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Because Jung defined it as a meaningful coincidence, but also as an a causal connection. A synchronicity is like, there's two things that are connected, but you can't, you can't figure out what caused what.

• 34:26Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  You know, or like, did the daydream cause that guy to call you? Or was the, you know, the guy going to call you anyway? And you, you got the information about it beforehand.

• 34:35Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  What caused what? But you just know there's a connection. And so similarly, I think we're registering intent in databases that we can't see. That is part of the simulation. Uh, and that also includes things like our quests and our challenges and achievements and storylines.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  But then sometimes the simulation will create situations that relate to that for us. And they seem like, how did this happen?

• 35:04Danny Jones?

  And are our stories already written? Like, do we have free will? Or is like, if there is some sort of God, right? And he's all omnipotent and all knowing. Well, that would mean that he knows the future, right? That means he can see a million years in the future. He knows everything that's going to happen. So even in the simulation, like, like is, and to explain these synchronicities and these precognitive dreams. Is the future already written for us? Do we, is, is where we end up at the end of our lives already predetermined? And is that somehow echoing back? And then like, for example, making you more motivated to write these books?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Right. Well, I think that it's actually a combination where we have a storyline, like a general storyline.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  That has some major points that are almost predetermined. But we have some free will along the way in terms of what decisions we make at any given time. And whether we go down this path or that path or not. And so I think that there are multiple possible futures. And that if you think of it from a simulation point of view, you can actually run these scenarios. Like maybe there's a part of us that's outside the simulation, the player. And you know, my latest metaphor for this now is the writer's room. So you know, like in a, in a TV show, they'll have a writer's room. And they'll say, okay, we know what this character is going to do throughout the season. You know, this is their arc.

• 36:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  This is kind of where they're going to end up. But let's figure out what we're going to do in each episode.

• 36:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  And as, as they're writing, they'll make up new challenges or new jokes. If it's a comedy or something along the way. And I feel like each of us has our own little writer's room.

• 36:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Which is watching what we do. Uh, but they have an overall storyline. Now, I've mentioned this before, but when I was in high school, if you had asked me, what are you going to do with your life? I would have said, oh, I'm going to become a software entrepreneur and then I'm going to become a writer. And I just kind of knew that, like it was this weird intuitive sense. Now, my, my siblings, I've, you know, we had four, four siblings to all total. None of them wanted to be a writer. Uh, we had similar genetics. We grew up in similar environment, uh, but it was just something that I felt I would always do. And I, I did become an entrepreneur in the software industry and, uh, you know, sold my company. I thought I was going to become a writer at the old age of 28. That was when I was in high school or in college.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  But what happened was after I sold, you know, one or two companies, I, I kept doing the Silicon Valley thing. And I wrote a little bit on the side, but it wasn't like, it was more like a hobby that I did every now and then. And I was trying to do basically what you do. I think we get a little brainwashed in whatever social environment we're in. And we take on the desires and goals and wants of those around us. Like it happens on Wall Street, you know, happens in entertainment industry in LA. And it definitely happens in Silicon Valley where you're like, okay, the next thing is I gotta, you know, start a bigger company. You gotta get, start a company that, that goes to a billion dollars in valuation, or I gotta start a venture capital fund. And that's kind of what was laid out. But at the same time, I knew intuitively that I wanted to write,

• 38:14Speaker 03

  but I was just delaying it. And it wasn't until I was much older than I thought. It was 48 at the time when I had a big, I had a big health crisis. And I ended up having to have heart surgery. And during that time, I had a number of visions while I was recovering that basically told me that you had this plan. You were supposed to do this and this, but you're still doing this. Like, okay, you achieved that part of your plan. You need to move on to this other part of your plan. And that this health crisis was because we know what's going to happen if you keep doing what you're doing. But we want to find a way to get you to go over here to do this other thing. And then what happened was every time in the next nine months,

• 38:59Speaker 03

  because it took me about nine months to recover. I could barely go for a walk during that time. But what I could do was I could get in an Uber and go to the Starbucks and write for a few hours. And I finished two books in those nine months, including the first edition of the simulation hypothesis. But during that time, whenever I would try to jump back into the business world, oh, I'm going to start another video game company, or I'm going to start another venture capital fund to fund video game companies, I would end up back in the hospital. And it was almost as if there was a unseen force guiding me. And so going back to your original question of free will versus predetermined, I think some paths are predetermined, but we have free will to choose. Just like in a video game.

• 39:44Danny Jones?

  You can improvise?

• 39:45Speaker 03

  You can improvise along the way. You can choose not to accept a certain quest. Even though you had agreed beforehand, you're like, okay, I'm going to do that quest. And that quest is going to unlock these more difficult quests, for example. So quests, there's usually a quest tree, for example, within video games. But I think there's a dynamic element and I think there's a storyline element. And I think that's one of the aspects of simulation theory that actually can help us to deal with challenging situations.

• 40:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, I think you're right about that. The idea that we are able to.

• 40:24Danny Jones?

  Have one decision split off into another universe. And that decision and the next decision split off into another universe. And before you know it, you have this chaotic mess of tree branches that lead off into different directions that are different universes. How do you reconcile this idea with simulation there? Are these all, these all turn into new simulations?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:50Danny Jones?

  Is that?

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Sort of, yeah. That, that's one way to think of it. Because you're almost hitting on the, the idea of the multiverse.

• 40:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Right? In quantum mechanics with the observer effect is sort of one way of explaining this weird phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy. Where you have, say, a cat with two states. It's alive or it's dead.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  And then when you observe it, what happens is the probability wave collapses to just one of those possibilities. And that's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Where you have a probability wave of all the things that are possible. And one of those, when it gets observed. So the cat, we would say, after an hour, I mean, are you familiar with Schrödinger's cat? Oh, yeah. So after an hour, you know, there's some poison that might be released and there's a 50% chance it might be released and a 50% chance it isn't. So we think the cat is just alive or it's dead. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box.

• 41:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  What quantum physics is telling us is no, the cat is both alive and dead until somebody observes it. So both of those possibilities exist. And now another interpretation.

• 41:54Danny Jones?

  But the reality is the cat's either alive or dead. We just don't know yet because we haven't lifted the lid on it.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Right. But what, but that's what it would, that's what common sense tells us.

• 42:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  That, but this is why quantum mechanics is so weird. And this is why Niels Bohr, you know, one of the, one of the, the founders of the field said that if you are not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it. Because it's telling us that until the observation happens, the decision about whether it's alive or dead, hasn't really been made. It gets made at the time that the measurement or the observation happens. This is why it's weird. Otherwise, it would be not that weird if it was just one of those states. That's kind of normal how we would think about it.

• 42:38Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Now, some people don't like that. Some scientists didn't like that because they said, well, that requires an observer. Now, I think the observer is the player, if you will, that is watching the game, and there are different possible branches.

• 42:51Danny Jones?

  And if this is some sort of a video game that we are in, then hypothetically, if we don't see the reality of what, if we don't see the alive cat or the dead cat, the reason for that is because that this simulation is trying to conserve processing power, because you don't need to know that until you actually look at it. Just like when you're playing Fortnite, you can be at, what's the place called? Twisted Towers or Tilted Towers, and you don't need to see snobby shores, which is on the other side of the map at the same time. There's not rendered because it's only seeing your view, your wide-angle POV of that character and whatever players are in your proximity.

• 43:33Danny Jones?

  If it rendered the whole thing at once, the servers would melt, probably. It probably wouldn't be able to handle it.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so what you find in an MMORPG like Fortnite or say World of Warcraft, like, we couldn't have built that back in the 80s, when I was playing like Atari games, and you know, Pac-Man, Space Invaders. And the reason was, there was no way for us to render all those pixels. And so what happened was, we came up with optimization techniques, which include 3D modeling, but also, if you've ever seen the game Doom, which was like one of the first popular first-person shooter games.

• 44:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  And you're just seeing what the guy's gun is looking at, and that's it, right? That's all of the world that you need to...

• 44:14Danny Jones?

  Quake was similar to that, I think.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so that is sort of optimizing to render only that which your character observes. Now, what's happening with these video games is, you're right in that there is no shared rendering of the entire world. But what's happening is, your computer is rendering what your avatar sees, and my computer is rendering what my avatar sees.

• 44:36Danny Jones?

  But they're both pulling from the same server, right?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  They are. Yeah, they're pulling information from the same server. But it leaves open the possibility that we're seeing slightly different things. Because we do this in video games all the time. I mean, let's say you play Fortnite a lot. Uh, I don't play Fortnite. I have a lower level. I don't have the ability to see the dragon or whatever the case is.

• 44:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  And you do. And, and sometimes you'll see this where some people will see a weird phenomenon like a ghost or a UFO and other people don't, you know? Uh, and I think it, it, this idea of conditional rendering based upon, you know, where you are, you, you think you're seeing the same thing, but you're not. Each of us is rendering it on our own device.

• 45:13Danny Jones?

  Hmm, right.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  But, but that optimization is a key part of why I came to write this book because as I looked at it, I said, well, if it was a simulated world, then that makes sense because that's how we do video games.

• 45:24Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  You render only that which you can observe.

• 45:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Now, the, getting back to your earlier question about, uh, branching off and stuff.

• 45:33Danny Jones?

  I need one of these. We're talking about, we're going deep. I need to get one of my secret weapon drinks.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 45:41Danny Jones?

  If you need to get a, if you need to get turned up a little bit higher, you can have one.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. What, what's in it?

• 45:48Danny Jones?

  Uh, it's got all kinds of good stuff in it. It's, um, it's like a nootropic drink. It just makes your mind sharper and makes you, it's like calm energy.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 45:55Danny Jones?

  It's great. It's got like all kinds of like herbs and, uh, nootropic stuff, mushrooms, focus mushrooms.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. Okay. Look, looks interesting. Uh.

• 46:04Danny Jones?

  Magic Mind.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Magic Mind.

• 46:06Danny Jones?

  Shout out to Magic Mind.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Great. Well, so, so let's jump into this multiverse idea then. Uh, so the other interpretation that people came up with, like scientists from the physics world was, well, maybe the, the universe is branching into two different universes. Uh, the cat is alive in one universe.

• 46:24Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  And the cat is dead in another universe. And so that became, that, that was, came to be called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was put forth by, uh, Hugh Everett, who was a student of John Wheeler at Princeton, who's one of my favorite physicists of the 20th century. We'll, we'll talk about him probably at some point in some more. Uh, but. Now that would imply that you're basically spinning off a universe like all the time.

• 46:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Every time there's a quantum decision, so not even like a big decision, like it's easy to think I go to Boston, I go to New York, I go to Atlanta, you know, those are different futures, possible futures. But this is saying every time there's a quantum event which happens, you know, you know, at the fractions of a second type thing.

• 47:09Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  And so that is actually a very popular interpretation and of course it's made its way into the superhero movies.

• 47:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Where you've got like the Spider-Man, you know,

• 47:19Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  movie where you have the three different versions of Spider-Man.

• 47:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, this is like, it's like an exponential thing, right?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:25Danny Jones?

  This would mean there's like a hundred trillion billion of you.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:29Danny Jones?

  Doing the same thing right now.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:31Danny Jones?

  But maybe you decided to say something different on this podcast and they're all branching off simultaneously every, every second.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:38Danny Jones?

  It would be incalculable, incalculable amount of universes.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, now physicists love infin- infinity. They're like, oh, that's infinite, no big deal. Computer scientists hate infinity because we always have limited resources. So we're always thinking about how do you optimize things?

• 47:53Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  And turns out the problem with the multiverse theory for some scientists don't like it because it's not parsimonious. It requires infinite number of physical universes and there's nothing in nature that big that can clone itself. Okay, like a whole universe can clone itself. Like there are, you know, you can clone a cell, you can clone information. Information is easy to clone, it turns out. Uh, so if it was a simulated multiverse, that would make more sense than a physical multiverse. Because in a simulated universe, what does it mean to have another universe? It just means you're running the same program with slightly different parameters and you're seeing where it goes.

• 48:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  And then you're running it with these parameters. In fact, that's why we run simulations is to see what might happen. Uh, now I interviewed Philip K. Dix, you know, the sci-fi author who wrote Blade Runner and Minority Report. Uh, his wife, when I was writing this book originally and she pointed out his speech that he gave in Metz, France in 1977.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  And there's a famous quote from that. And he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. Now, that's the quote, the famous quote. And you can see the videos online. It's available on YouTube and you can, they pan to the audience and everybody's like, what the hell is this guy talking about? This was back in 1977. But she told me, well, you might want to read the rest of that speech. And I did, and it turns out what he was talking about was that you would change a variable and rerun the simulation. Like you would run it to see what would happen under different scenarios. And he wrote a book called The Man in the High Castle, which became an Amazon series.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  I don't know if you've seen it.

• 49:46Danny Jones?

  I've seen it. One of my favorite series of all time.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Oh, it's great, isn't it? Very well done.

• 49:50Danny Jones?

  Incredible.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  And for people who don't know, it's about a timeline where Germany and Japan won World War II. And then they broke up America, you know, between them. And then there's this Japanese guy, in the series anyway, who is able to jump to the other timeline.

• 50:11Danny Jones?

  Yes. Right, jump back into New York City, like in like the seventies or something like that.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, in our timeline, where the Allies.

• 50:18Danny Jones?

  There's like big Coke billboards everywhere and, you know, American flags and, you know, people running around smoking cigarettes. What the fuck? And they're able to go back and forth in between it.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 50:28Danny Jones?

  It's wild.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  It's wild. But what Tessa, you know, his wife told me was that he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened, but that the simulators decided to unwind it. And now they're running this timeline because that timeline led to someplace they didn't want to. Now, the only reason I bring that up is, and I wrote about this in my book, The Simulated Multiverse, this idea that we can perhaps run forward the simulation to see what might happen and then come back and then take the path that we think is the most likely or the most interesting path for us. So it's possible that you can run multiple branches, but that you can, you can trim the branches, so it's not infinite.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  So this gets a little weird, I know. But I think if you, if you think of reality as a computer simulation, then it's not so weird to be able to spawn off new processes. It's relatively easy to do on a server.

• 51:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, it makes sense, like copying data on a hard drive, right? You can just copy and paste it. And you can make little alterations. It doesn't make sense like, how would you do that with an entire universe or a planet even?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 51:41Danny Jones?

  There's no, there's no conventional way to wrap your mind around how you would do that right now. And, um, you know, another interesting thing is like, so the idea of a hard drive, right? So if you have a hard drive and you put data on it, it becomes more chaotic. You're adding entropy to the hard drive, right? So before you put data on the hard drive, a brand new hard drive out of the box, it's going to be all ones or all zeros on it, right? Very low entropy. And one of the laws of thermodynamics is that in a closed system, entropy cannot decrease. It stays the same or it increases. So when you're adding data to a hard drive, it's adding entropy.

• 52:24Danny Jones?

  So it's going from all ones or all zeros to 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, making a chaotic mess of ones and zeros and data on the hard drive, right?

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:32Danny Jones?

  So what happens when you erase that hard drive? You're putting it back to ones and zeros. So that means you have to take energy, energy, that energy has to, if that's mass, I think it's been proven that when you store data on a hard drive, if we had sophisticated enough measuring devices to weigh them, they would weigh more when you put the data on them. In fact, I heard that if you weighed all the data, if you weighed all the data that's on every single server farm and data center and hard drive in the world, it would be like, I don't know, a kilogram. So that's how minute it is, but there is, there's a measurable amount of mass that's added to a hard drive. Once you store data on it, right?

• 53:15Danny Jones?

  So like theoretically, if you could weigh it before and after, it would weigh a little bit more after you put the data on it. So if it's mass, when the data's on the hard drive and you erase the hard drive, that mass has to go to energy, right? That's E equals mc squared, but it's data. And if you crack open that, if you crack open that hard drive, you're not going to see anything.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:35Danny Jones?

  It's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, what is the only other form of mass that we can't detect electromagnetically? Dark matter.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:46Danny Jones?

  So it's theoretically, so if energy equals mass,

• 53:52Danny Jones?

  and you store this mass on a hard drive as data, that would mean energy equals mass equals data, which would theoretically, you could, you could say that dark matter is a computational cloud that's projecting our simulation.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Potentially, that, that would be one way to look at it. That said, I, I know many people have proposed this idea that if you put information into something, it should increase the mass. Like, there's a guy named Melvin Vopson in the UK, computer scientist, and he came up with, you know, this idea of information mass equivalence, and also his second law of their info dynamics, which was meant to sort of counter the second law of thermodynamics. And what he said was that entropy generally increases, but in certain systems, like they studied like evolution of the viruses and a few other things, they said it actually decreases in some cases

• 54:48Speaker 03

  because you're adding some order. I mean, yes, it, it definitely increases from if everything is blank or everything is one. So what you're talking about is information entropy.

• 54:57Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Which is quite interesting, because there's a guy named Claude Shannon.

• 55:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Who was considered the father of information theory.

• 55:05Danny Jones?

  He's the guy who, who came up with the whole concept of transmitting data, right?

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Right, of, of how to measure the amount of information

• 55:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  in a piece of data. So getting back to your earlier point, if there was like 64,000 ones in a row, is that really 64, you know, K bits of data? Not really. You can just say it's one and 64,000, repeat it this many times. So you don't need actually 64,000 bits to transmit that information, because there's low information entropy.

• 55:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  And, or if you know that half of it is ones and half of it is zero. Okay, again, you don't need a whole 64,000 bits to do that. And so that became the basis of how we transmit information digitally and why we can watch, why people can watch this podcast on YouTube is because of that.

• 55:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  And, and so I, I think this idea that the universe consists of information is quite interesting. And there's a whole area of digital physics where they're trying to measure. They're trying to come up with a new way to think about the world, not in terms of energy or mass, but in terms of the amount of information that is contained within it.

• 56:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  And so they'll say that it has to be conservation of that information, just like you said, there has to be conservation of energy, like you were talking about with the equivalence of, you know, in this case, the mass or the energy. But in this case, they're trying to measure, you know, what happens to this information? Does it get lost? How much information can be stored inside a black hole, for example?

• 56:40Danny Jones?

  That's a good question.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  And it's defined by the surface area of the black hole, which is what has led some people to think that the universe must be some kind of a hologram that looks three dimensional, but it's not actually three dimensional, because the amount of information that can be stored is defined more by the surface area and, you know, of the whole thing. So that's like the holographic principle. There's a whole thing around holography, which is quite interesting. There was a book called The Holographic Universe that came out back in the 90s, I think it was, or late 80s or so. And I kind of view, you know, my book is looking, taking another look at this idea that the world is some kind of projection, but using video games and computer technology, because now we've come much further

• 57:26Speaker 03

  on that side. You know, our video games are getting very good. Our AI is getting very good.

• 57:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Have you seen this recent prompt theory videos that have come out?

• 57:34Danny Jones?

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• 58:19Danny Jones?

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• 58:56Speaker 03

  So Google came out with their VO3 video engine, which can

• 59:01Danny Jones?

  I saw this yesterday.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, you probably saw it because they're amazing videos that people are putting out. Now, before that, you could create videos, but there was no audio. You'd have to go to a separate. And so what some people did was they used prompts, like that's how we create. We generate AI, we give it a prompt and we tell it what to do. And so they created a whole series of videos that are basically people saying, look, we're not prompts. You know, I'm not a prompt. Clearly, look around at this beautiful mountain landscape. You're saying that's all zeros and ones? Obviously, it's not.

• 59:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Okay, here.

• 59:35Danny Jones?

  This is prompt theory?

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, we could probably bring up some videos around prompt theory.

• 59:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we'll get, we'll get copyrighted probably by this channel.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah, well, they're sharing, they're being pretty shared widely on social media.

• 59:48Danny Jones?

  Are they really?

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I showed some at a conference recently I was at in Palm Springs. And I showed the videos and I told people, okay, these are AI characters. They've been generated completely by AI. And, you know, you have like a guy politician saying, we will ban teaching the prompt theory, you know, from, from our schools, for example. And at the end, people came up to me and said, wait, are you saying those weren't real? Like actors?

• 1:00:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  No, no, tho- those were completely generated by AI. And so it's a, it's a variation of simulation theory.

• 1:00:22Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Which is, uh, going back to how I originally got into this idea, which was, how, when will we get to the point that we could create a perfect simulation? That, uh, reaches what I call the simulation point. And the simulation point is a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from physical reality, because it's so realistic. And two, it has AI characters in there that are indistinguishable from characters that might be controlled by a real person. Uh, and we're getting closer and closer to that point. And if we've gotten to that point, then, you know, how would we know if we're in a simulation or not?

• 1:01:01Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Uh, the chances suddenly go up to at least 50/50. Because if you can't tell the difference.

• 1:01:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  If you're in a simulated world or not.

• 1:01:08Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  You know, and, and this is the logic that led, uh, Nick Bostrom, who, who, uh, is a philosopher at Oxford. He wrote a paper all the way back in 2003 called, "Are You Living in a Simulation?"

• 1:01:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what were the, uh, there was like four basic principles of this, right?

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, there were three possibilities, he said.

• 1:01:24Danny Jones?

  Okay, three.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  He said, "If you take a technological civilization," now, he was concerned primarily with AI, and how much information would it take to simulate the brain? And how much information would it take to basically simulate the history of a person? And all the processing power of a brain? And he said, "Well, it's not that much in the scheme of things." So therefore, it's possible a technological civilization could get to the point where, he called it post-human, uh, which is very similar to what I'm calling the simulation point, without so much the virtual reality part. But, he said, "If it could get to that point, there's, there's three, well, first of all, there's three possibilities, uh, which we kind of call Bostrom's Trilemma now."

• 1:02:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  The first possibility is it's not possible, or nobody gets there. And a- anywhere, no civilization ever gets there. So then the chances we're in a simulation are zero, because

• 1:02:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  it's either not possible, or every civilization blows themselves up.

• 1:02:17Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Before they get to that point.

• 1:02:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  The second possibility, uh, which I think is unlikely, uh, is, he says, "They get to that point, but they don't create any simulations."

• 1:02:26Danny Jones?

  Because of moral reasons or something like this?

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, moral reasons, or they have some laws, maybe they don't want to cause suffering, or, or there's just other reasons why.

• 1:02:34Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  And they're banned. So it's a possibility, but personally, uh, if, if that were true... Then the chances we're in a simulation are low, according to Bostrom's simulation argument is what it's called, because there's not going to be many simulations. And then he said, the third possibility is we are most likely in a simulation. Okay, now how do you get to that from that? Because the third possibility is that civilization creates a bunch of simulated beings. And then it runs another server and it creates a whole another trillion simulated beings. And then it runs another server and it creates a whole another trillion. So he, so he came up with a statistical argument. He said, if there are this many simulated beings, and there's only this many, smaller

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  number, of biological beings that are in base reality, and actually, probably simpler to use Elon Musk's version. So what Elon Musk said in 2016 was, assume there's a billion simulated worlds, and there's only one physical world. So what are the odds that you're in?

• 1:03:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, right. One in a billion.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  One in a billion, right? That's exactly what he said. He said, the chances that we're in base reality is one in billions in that scenario.

• 1:03:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's so crazy to think about.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, that is, remember, that was only one of three possibilities.

• 1:03:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  So, you know, Bostrom himself didn't know where to put the probabilities for each of these three possibilities. But if we can get there, to that point, where we can create these AI simulated worlds, then you suddenly find yourself in either possibility two or possibility three.

• 1:04:09Danny Jones?

  And that was- That's one of the big questions. One of the things that I can't wrap my mind around, that I always think about is like, the way, it was eloquently stated in the 13th Floor movie, where he's like, what happens when one of these guys crawls up the extension cord and finds a way to kill its god?

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Right. So, so this is an interesting question, too, because can you escape the simulation?

• 1:04:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  And that's kind of what it's asking. And in fact, you know, it's something that there have been rumors that, uh, you know, a couple of billionaires have funded research to try to figure out, you know, is there a way to hack the simulation? Uh, there's, there's a few guys out there that have written papers on can we hack the simulation in some way?

• 1:04:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I had this dude Danny Gohler on here. I think he's the one. Yeah, you know, Danny. Yeah, I know Danny. Danny connected us. Of course. Duh. So he's doing this, the experiment with the laser and the DMT code.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Right. He told me about that.

• 1:05:01Danny Jones?

  Fascinating stuff.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, originally he was saying it kind of looks like Catacana, but

• 1:05:06Danny Jones?

  It looks like Sanskrit to me. It looks like, if you look at

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Have you tried it then?

• 1:05:10Danny Jones?

  Pull up, um, yeah, I've tried. I've done it twice. Pull up the, uh, Lord of the Rings, the ring from Lord of the Rings, and you can see the text on the ring.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:19Danny Jones?

  To, that's what it looks closest to, to me. Um, so the first time I did it, I didn't see it. I didn't see the code.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  You didn't see the code.

• 1:05:28Danny Jones?

  I saw just like crazy patterns rotating in the laser.

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:31Danny Jones?

  And I could see like a pocket of space. So that's what the, the code looked like to me. Similar to that.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  That's really interesting. And I've heard, you know, from him, uh, and I've heard from others. I know they're trying to work on, are there ways to see this without taking DMT, for example?

• 1:05:47Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. And, um, the second time I did it, I, I, when I saw it, it was crazy because I, I mean, I saw it through the laser. Um, but it was like, I, I tried going back into it. So I like, I did the DMT three or four times. And like the fourth time I did it, all I saw was, um, dicks covered in this code everywhere, surrounding me. And I was like, I don't, I think, uh, something is telling me that, uh, I'm pushing my limits here. They're telling me to fuck off.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 1:06:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it was hilarious. Danny filmed the whole thing.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Oh, that's hilarious. Well, I think it's an interesting question. I mean, many people have told me that the first time they took DMT or, or sometime they took it, maybe not the first time, but they started to see the grid lines. Of the simulation. And I know Danny himself talks about these characters. Is it the insectoid characters? I forget which ones they are, but these beings that he said are like, they're more like admins or managers. You know, they're like bureaucratic people who are just kind of supporting.

• 1:06:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  The simulation or whatever you call it, whatever you would call that world, right?

• 1:06:59Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Like if you're jumping, like either you're, you're jumping over to another simulation or, or you're, you're breaking down the, there's this brain filter hypothesis. I'm sure you're aware of where it's like, all of our senses are basically like vision and smell and touch and taste. That's all just filters. It's filtering out all the stuff that's potentially all around us right now. Right? So that we can basically survive and get to the day, eat, sleep, reproduce, drive to work. Um, and you know, if there are, and this is like, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 1:07:32Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. It's amazing.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  The fart hypothesis.

• 1:07:34Danny Jones?

  The fart hypothesis is great. It's one of my favorites. It's basically like, if somebody farts around you and you don't have the sense of smell or a nose, you're just going to be sitting there in their fart and you have no clue. So how many, so I mean, obviously we've evolved to, um, we evolved to gain the sense of smell in our noses to detect enemies or prey. Or, you know, if there's a gas leak or something like this, it's a very relevant sense to us so we can survive. But if we didn't have a nose, we would have no clue that there's these smells and there's these fart odors that are like surrounding us or whatever. So how many senses? Or how, how many things that are similar to that are all around us all the time that we just haven't evolved the sensory organs to detect, you know?

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Danny Jones?

  So that's like, kind of like that brain filter hypothesis that the DMT is breaking down these filters in your brain. And somehow you're able to see more of, of what this really is.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Right. And I, I think there's relativity to that because I've heard it from now enough people. Uh, and you know, I get into the same discussions about this that I might about things like near death experiences or, uh, people who do yogic techniques or shamanic journey. Like, are they seeing something real? Are they seeing just an interpretation of what's real? And for me,

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  The interesting thing about the simulation hypothesis is it's really a collection of two or three different assertions. And the first of those assertions is that the physical universe is based on information. It's not really physical. And going back to John Wheeler, he had a phrase called it from bit.

• 1:09:06Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And he basically said that when you get right down to it, if everything is 99% empty space, you go down to the atom, it's this weird electron cloud and you keep going down. At the bottom level, what is a particle? If the world consists of particles, what is a particle?

• 1:09:22Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  And nobody really knows exactly what it is. And he said it comes down to a series of properties that define that particle. It's a series of yes, no questions. And that, those are bits. A bit is a one or a zero, a yes, no question. And so he said, anything that's physical actually consists of bits of information, you know, down at the bottom level. Now, the second assertion is that that information gets rendered for us as a kind of reality that we perceive through our senses somehow. And the first part is not really controversial, even with physicists. Like, I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist at the University of Cambridge. And, you know, we were talking about this, and he goes,

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  "Oh, yeah, that's not controversial anymore. The universe basically consists of information."

• 1:10:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  That's what he said to me. It used to be controversial. If you go back like 30, 40 years in the 70s, they'll be like, "No, it's not information. It's energy. It's this, it's that." They'll say, you know, that that's a valid view of the universe. But, you know, whether it's rendered as a video game or not, or how that happens, that's a big mystery. Nobody knows why it goes from that to what we're actually perceiving. And you get into, you know, neuropsychology. But also, I think the video game metaphor works pretty well. And then, the last part of that is that the whole thing is a kind of hoax. You know, that this whole thing isn't real, that it's set up for us in some way, and we're limited

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  to perceiving what's outside of it. And that's where these experiences, whether it's DMT, whether it's certain yogic techniques, mystical techniques, that allow you to perceive other beings that are here with us.

• 1:11:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  And in all the world's, you know, mystical traditions and religious traditions, there's all kinds of stories about other beings that are here with us.

• 1:11:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  Like the jinn, for example, in the Middle East. Uh, you know, that's a very common thing where they say that there are gin here. We can't see them all the time, but they can make themselves visible to us at different times. And same with near death experiences, the first thing they report uh is floating out of their body. And then they're looking down at their body and they're saying they have, you know, three sixty degree vision. And sometimes they'll see people in the room and sometimes other relatives will perceive those people in the room. Before the person dies and they'll be like two, like a brother and sister sitting with their parent who's dying. And just, did you just see dad? They said, yeah, if it's their mom dying, you know. And their dad has already passed on the other side. So they'll have shared death experiences.

• 1:11:57Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  At that point in time, which are pretty fascinating. Uh, and then, you know, they report going through a light. Uh, seeing a, a being there. And then many of them report a life review. Um, are you familiar with the concept of the life review?

• 1:12:11Danny Jones?

  I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of the life review.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  So I learned about it from a guy named Daniel Brinkley. He wrote a book called Saved by the Light back in the nineties. And he was struck by lightning, like I think it was nineteen seventy five.

• 1:12:23Danny Jones?

  Jeffrey Kreppel wrote a book about a lady who was struck by lightning.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, I don't remember her name, but I.

• 1:12:27Danny Jones?

  Neither do I. I remember the story though. It's a fucking wild story.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  It's wild, right? And but so what the life review is about twenty percent of people who have had near death experiences. Report uh the life and what they say is it's like going back. And reviewing every part of your life, like everything you've done. But not just watching it, it's like you're re-experiencing it from the point of view of other people. So like in Daniel's case, he literally shot people because he was in the military and in Vietnam. And he said, he had to feel what it was like to have the bullet come and, and you know, what happened to that guy. And earlier he was a bully and he used to beat up kids when he was in. Uh, and he had to feel what it was like to be beat up by himself. But more than that, there's something called the ripple effect.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  And the ripple effect is where you see what happened to, let's say you killed somebody. You see what happened to their family because that guy's not around anymore. Uh, so you see the ripple effects of your actions. And so. Uh, Daniel called it a holographic panoramic three hundred and sixty degree review of your life. And I remember thinking about that and thinking, okay, well, if. If we say, if we take that at face value, uh, and this is where I get into a lot of arguments with scientists, because I say, look, if a thousand people, if one person says they've been to China, it's okay to say China probably doesn't, you wouldn't know if China exists or not. But if a thousand people have been to China, and even if some of them have slight differences, there's probably something like China out there if

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  these people are reporting it to you. Now, they may describe it slightly differently, they may have gone to different parts of China, you know, one might say it's mountainous, one might say it's a beach by the ocean, uh, but there's something there. And that's with near-death experiences and life reviews, there must be something there. And so I said, well, how would you implement that? Uh, like, what's the mechanism? Right. Techno scientifically. Well, a few years ago, uh, around the same time that I was doing the, the VR story with the ping pong, uh, I was involved in a startup that was taking a game like, let's say Fortnite. At the time, we were using League of Legends. And so if you've played League of Legends, you know, you're playing it on a, on a 2D screen, and you're seeing, you know, the, the different characters fight with each other, and you're kind of looking down on it. And he said, you could put on a virtual

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  reality headset, and you could basically put yourself into the game at any XYZ coordinate. Wow. And so there was a game called, uh, uh, CS:GO, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which was a first-person shooter and took place in like, I don't know, the desert in Iraq or something. It's probably during those years when, when it came out. And we would replay that game session, but you could see your character shooting the other character, but you would be at the point of view of the other person. So you'd see, you know, kind of your character shooting them. Now, we didn't, we didn't record any feelings, because it's just VR. Right. But to me, that brings up an interesting possibility. The reason you, you can have

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  a life review is because we're in a virtual reality and every, the entire 3D world is being, uh, recorded in a way, and you can replay it from any XYZ coordinate within the game. And you can experience it from any person's point of view from the game, just like we could go to any time within the recording of a game and we could figure out how to redraw or replay. What happened at the time.

• 1:15:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  And just like, there's a lot of content on YouTube, that's just video game sessions, right? People just recorded themselves. Twitch, obviously, is live streaming. But on YouTube, the most popular content for a while was, in fact, just these video gamers.

• 1:16:04Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, I remember.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  And it's interesting, because I remember my nephew was like three or four years old, and he would say to his father, my brother, he would say, "Oh, I want to watch Star Wars." And my brother would say, "Oh, you want to watch the Star Wars movie?" He goes, "No, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star Wars game."

• 1:16:19Danny Jones?

  That's so wild.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  Isn't that wild? But a life review is sort of like that. We can use that as an analogy, to say, we are looking back at our gameplay session. And what these near-death experiencers say is they themselves are doing the judging. Like, the being of light is there, but they're like, "Oh, man, I shouldn't have done that. Why? Because when I said that to my mom, I met a woman recently who had a life review, and I think she like pulled out all the flowers that her mom had taken so much time to put in the garden. And now she saw, she was able to experience how sad her mom was, because she had put all that effort into the flowers.

• 1:16:55Danny Jones?

  Now, what is the difference between one of these life, because so these life reviews happen when somebody is unconscious, right? Like, when you get struck by lightning, I remember the woman who Jeffrey Kriper wrote about, she was unconscious for a couple minutes, maybe 10 minutes or something like this?

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:09Danny Jones?

  And she described being, she described like two or three weeks worth of time going by, and like, sitting in this garden.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:16Danny Jones?

  And, and talking to these universal god-like beings or something like this, and having conversations and meeting her grandfather, I think, all kinds of crazy stuff. But like, I'm always curious, like, what's the difference between that and getting very close to like dying? Like, where you see like, you could very easily die right here, because this happened to me before, where I almost drowned a couple, one time in particular. And I had my life flashing before, you know, the people say my life flashed before my eyes. Right? And that it wasn't like a, a very in-depth, three-dimensional projection of everything in my life from other people's perspectives like you talked about.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Danny Jones?

  But it's more just like all your, your most fond, loving memories of your life. Kind of just like all of a sudden pop into your head. And you're like, oh my God, I have to make peace with this before I'm dead, before I'm gone.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:10Danny Jones?

  Which is a, you know, it's a bizarre phenomenon that I've experienced.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's very interesting. And like I said, only about 20% of people who've had near-death experiences report life reviews, but that doesn't mean it's, could also mean they didn't go far enough.

• 1:18:23Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  They weren't close enough to, you know, a death experience, if you will, right?

• 1:18:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Uh, and some people report gardens in particular, some people report crystal cities that they've visited.

• 1:18:36Danny Jones?

  I wonder, does it, does it line up with their religious ideologies, their pre-existing religious views?

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  In some cases it does, but in other cases it doesn't. It's interesting that, uh, you know, some people will see Jesus, for example, uh, as, uh, the being of light is, would be presented as Jesus. Some people see just their relatives, uh, who are taking them along and then the being of light is just a being of light. Some people see an angel. Some people say it's God. So I personally think that even what we see after we die is another kind of simulation. That's kind of created for us, like in the sense of like the garden. Okay, this garden is created for us because it's a peaceful scene. It's kind of what we would need, uh, to recover a little bit from everything that's come along.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Uh, and, but there are actual beings there. They just present themselves differently depending on your, uh, predisposition. Whether it's, you know, particular religious disposition, et cetera. But they're remarkably similar. I mean, there have been studies of, uh, of, uh, near-death experiences in the Islamic world, for example, and there's less of people reporting it. It's interesting. But the ones that do report them report very similar things.

• 1:19:52Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  Uh, now I went into, so that, you know, in my book, there's a whole section dedicated to religion. So I went back to the different religions to see, okay, is there something related to this life review? Uh, which relates to me to the idea of being in a virtual reality because it can be replayed. Or at least recorded if it can be replayed. Uh, and it turns out there is, but they use different metaphors. Because they had to explain it to people, you know, 2,000 years ago. So like in, in the Bible and in Judaism and Christianity, there are the recording angels. Who, and you can find, you know, pictures of statues in Washington DC with the recording angels. Where, you know, it's an angel with a book in the book of life. And they're writing down who gets into heaven and who doesn't get into heaven.

• 1:20:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Or Saint Peter.

• 1:20:38Danny Jones?

  Like Santa's elves.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Like Santa's elves, right. They're actually looking at the, uh.

• 1:20:43Danny Jones?

  Who's naughty or nice.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Who's naughty or nice. And so some people say like Saint Peter is actually looking at your actual deeds. But yeah, here, here's like an image that, that's very popular. Of a recording angel. Now, they don't get into a lot of detail in it. But in the Quran, they actually do get into much more detail. They have something called the scroll of deeds. Okay, scroll is, you know, long Santa's list, right?

• 1:21:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  Uh, and they say there's two angels. They're called the recording angels. And what they do is they write down all your good deeds and they write down all your bad deeds. And then when you die, there's actually a verse in the Quran that says that what judgment day really is. Right. Cause we think of judgment day as God saying you get to go to heaven or you get to, you know, you get to go to hell. Uh, in at least the Western Abrahamic, you know, religions or purgatory say. But there's actually a verse that says, on the day of reckoning, your book will be open. Read your book and you yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner. Meaning now again, they were using a book metaphor. Which is a technology, it's a technological metaphor.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  But, and they were using angels. But if you think about it, what they're really saying is that you're gonna have a life review, that it's a virtual reality of some kind. You're gonna replay everything that you did, cuz they don't, they don't mean literally there's angels sitting there with feather pens writing down, you know, "He got up today and he went to work and he got into a car crash," right? They're just saying it's being recorded somehow. And so today, we can use an updated technological metaphor for that, which is that we're recording the whole scene and we're gonna replay it for you and you are gonna look at it and say, "Oh damn, I shouldn't have done that." Or, "I had agreed in this life I was gonna work on my, you know, aggression or my greed or whatever, or my compassion and look what happened I forgot to do at that time,

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  so let me do better next time." And then it turns out, you know, so we've talked about kinda the Western religions, but even within, like say Hinduism, they actually have a god, a minor god, called Chitra Gupta, and who is he? He's the record keeper. And he sits next to Yama, the god of death. And what is he doing? He's like recording all the things that you do to try to determine where your karma will take you to like a heavenly realm or not. Now, again, the angels and these minor gods, they're not really meant to be, in my opinion, you know, actual entities per se. Right. They're just functions, like a recording angels. Doesn't mean you and I really have these, you know, two little angels on our shoulder. Right.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  Uh, it's a record, it's a function, and the function is to record what happens and how are you gonna explain that to somebody a couple thousand years ago? You're gonna say, "Well, maybe there's a book and there's an angel." And there's an infinite number of angels, so they're all doing this kinda stuff. And so, I believe that most religions have come about by using technological metaphors or other metaphors to try to explain this process that may be ineffable, right? Which is a term that's used a lot with like near-death experiencers, which means it can't be put into words. Right. That there's something profound, but they need to put it in words that we can understand. Uh, and I think the simulation hypothesis is an evolution of those metaphors.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  So you can think of it on a continuum, you can think of it as literally a computer simulation. Or you can think of it as a metaphor for something like a simulation that's very advanced and complex. It's a good way for us to be able to understand it because we are now getting to the point where we understand information science. Right. Is, I like to say, information science is eating all the other sciences, right? Hmm, right. Because most of what you do and work in these other sciences now is just run these computer simulations on things and you try to simulate what might happen. Right. Uh, and like even genetics and biology, you know, it comes down to the DNA and what is DNA? It's a series of bits of information that are packed, you know, tightly.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  It's a very, i- it's been, it's been described as a very efficient, uh, mechanism to record a whole bunch of information, basically. Right. And then there's a process running that reads that and then transcribes and does things on it. And so, you know, you can kind of describe that from an informational point of view. In fact, I think the guy who came up with the term gene was actually von Neumann. I don't know if you know. Yeah, John von Neumann? Yeah, John von Neumann, because he was looking at it in terms of information and how do you, he said, can I duplicate life, which means I would need to reproduce this bit of information. And so he's trying to come up with algorithms and he came up with this idea of cellular automata.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  And von Neumann machines that could basically, you know, they function and they recreate themselves. Created the first computers, right? Like the Iliac and the, the maniac. I don't know if he created the, the actual, the ENIAC computer, but he, he was heavily involved. In fact, the architecture all computers use now is the von Neumann architecture. Yes. Which is, you know, you have memory and you've got a CPU. Now, of course, we have multiple CPUs and we have GPUs and all these other things as well, but it's basically the same architecture that he defined way back when. And the guy, the guy was a genius, right? Oh yeah, he was one of the like, one of the smartest dudes in history. He was, yeah. And he, he came up with this idea of the von Neumann machine, which are probes that you send out to the universe with, with a whole bunch of instructions.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Remember, they didn't really have full computers back then. So he was, he, he said you would have a long tape of instructions and that these probes would be robots that would read this instructions and they would grab some, you know, raw material and then they would recreate themselves, right? And he said, this is a way to colonize the galaxies. You send out these AI or robot probes, if you will. And those are called von Neumann machines, which is interesting. So this ties to the UFO subject.

• 1:26:35Danny Jones?

  And this was all conceptual stuff.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  This is all conceptual stuff back then. And NASA eventually, I think, put together some studies. If you've ever read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama?

• 1:26:46Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  So they find this alien space probe in the solar system and it looks like a big cylinder. Incidentally, I pointed out to Avi Loeb, because I'm involved with the Galileo Project, that that was almost the exact size they think Omu Omu was.

• 1:26:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  It was very similar in size. But when they, in the novel, when they went to the cylinder, it was like there was nobody there, but there was a bunch of raw material in a kind of an ocean. And then turns out there were these little robots that were basically using that raw material to recreate themselves. It was basically a von Neumann machine.

• 1:27:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's crazy.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  It's pretty wild.

• 1:27:20Danny Jones?

  Von Neumann, I think he was the guy who calculated the exact, he calculated the exact height in the atmosphere that they needed to detonate Fat Man and Little Boy to create, to kill the most people.

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:27:40Danny Jones?

  So he had to, he had to basically reverse engineer the math with those bombs and to, to basically figure out at what altitude to detonate those things so they could kill the most people.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, I know he was involved in the Manhattan Project and there

• 1:27:56Danny Jones?

  What a crazy way to harness somebody's intellect.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  It was pretty, pretty nuts. Actually, you know, my favorite movie on that subject, on the Manhattan Project, is actually not the Oppenheimer movie, which, which I thought was good, but it's a movie called Day One, which came out like back in the eighties, I think.

• 1:28:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  Brian Dennehy plays General Groves and

• 1:28:15Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he looks like General Groves, because Groves, you know, they called him the, in the Pentagon, they called him the biggest son of a bitch I ever met. Like this big guy would go in there and just bulldoze things. And then I forget the actor who played Oppenheimer, but the guy who actually thought of the idea of the atomic bomb was a guy named Leo Sylard, who was another Hungarian, along with von Neumann. There was this group of Hungarian scientists that came over from Europe. Good thing they did. Um, but you know, he thought of this idea of a chain reaction that could be kicked off. Uh, where you would shoot a neutron out at like an atom and it would basically uh have nuclear fission. It would break off into two pieces and then they would release more neutrons and they would break off more atoms into pieces.

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  And the energy released by that was the chain reaction. It got to the point where it it became sort of an uncontrolled chain reaction and it used up all the energy. And that got converted into the bomb. So that was like the basic idea of the bomb. They didn't know which material to use.

• 1:29:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  But see, but he came up with that, that whole thing. And there's a great scene in uh in day one where, you know, he like tries to explain it to Lord Rutherford. Rutherford was a, I don't know, Cambridge or Oxford, but he was the guy who discovered the nucleus of the atom.

• 1:29:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  And and Lord Rutherford says, that's ridiculous. That's moonshine. You can never harness the energy of the atom.

• 1:29:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  So he writes it up in a patent and then he tries to get the British War Office to, you know.

• 1:29:40Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  He's like, here, I want to give this to you because what has, what's happening in Germany. Cause you know, he had studied in Germany with Einstein.

• 1:29:46Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  And they were like, oh, you know, in their polite British way, oh, yes, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Cause they had no idea what to do with it.

• 1:29:54Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  And then, you know, him along with Enrico Fermi and another guy, uh, uh, Wigner basically convinced uh Einstein to write a letter to Roosevelt that this could be turned into some kind of weapon and the Germans were working on it.

• 1:30:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  We better work on it. And that got him going. I've studied a bit of the innovation, you know, history around that. Because part of what I do in in my doctoral research is is how to, how does science and technology evolve over time?

• 1:30:23Danny Jones?

  It's interesting that how that evolution happened. We went from, um, what year was the Civil War again?

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Eighteen sixty?

• 1:30:30Danny Jones?

  Eighteen sixty, right, eighteen sixty. So, uh, between the Civil War, using muskets and cannons, to dropping atomic bombs out of airplanes.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:30:43Danny Jones?

  Was less than a hundred years.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you're right.

• 1:30:47Danny Jones?

  And how long has it been since we did that? It's been almost another hundred years? So it's been like, what, seventy, eighty years?

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  Seventy, eighty years or so.

• 1:30:56Danny Jones?

  Something like that?

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, since the end of World War II.

• 1:30:58Danny Jones?

  Like, what do we have now? Right? Has it evolved? You would think the way technology evolves, it's exponential, right? Or the way everything technological is typically exponential growth. So if we went from muskets to atomic bombs in less than a hundred years, what, like, how far have we gotten since then?

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you'll notice that a lot of like the aerospace innovation, you know, has slowed down, at least in terms of-

• 1:31:24Danny Jones?

  The moon? Look at the moon!

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Danny Jones?

  We went to the moon over the course of like sixty-nine to, what, seventy-two? Something like that?

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Danny Jones?

  And then we just, we just

• 1:31:36Danny Jones?

  just washed our hands of that technology, threw it away. Now, you know, we're pushing back every moon mission ever since. It's weird.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and now, you know, people think China may get to the moon before we do, or India may before we do, because we're like, we've already done it, right?

• 1:31:50Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Uh, but, but, but that whole process is interesting. And we've seen a lot of investment in Silicon Valley, for example, in AI and in computer technology. And only now are they starting to invest more in deep tech, uh, which are like more hardware type things. Um, you know, there's a company called Boom Supersonic, for example, that's trying to have a supersonic commercial plane, because the Concorde too, right? That was another one that they stopped making.

• 1:32:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, the Concorde, yes, yes.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was Britain and France, right? British Airways and Air France.

• 1:32:20Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  And, you know, you'd think we'd have something better than the Concorde by now.

• 1:32:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we're still flying the same exact airplanes, basically.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  More or less, right? They're just trying to make it more efficient.

• 1:32:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, this is interesting, because this is what happens with startups when they grow big, is they start off completely innovating, creating new products, and then over time, they just end up like trying to optimize.

• 1:32:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, version two, version three, version six hundred.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  You look at Apple, and they haven't had a great breakthrough in a long time, since Steve Jobs, because you haven't had-

• 1:32:47Danny Jones?

  Since two thousand and six, since they created the iPhone. There's been nothing like that.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, not, not at that level, right?

• 1:32:52Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Uh, and so, you know, I wrote a paper for the Seoul Foundation, uh, you know, with Gary Nolan out of Stanford, and Peter Skaifish, you know, co-founded that. And I wrote a paper called, "How would we build a UFO or UAP innovation ecosystem, where we figure out how this technology might actually work, and get the private sector involved in building this?" Because right now- It's the whole thing is locked up and there there aren't enough bright minds trying to figure out how to do this. And for me, for some people. You gotta keep a secret. You got well, the question is, do you got to keep it all secret? And that's an interesting question, because that's what they say. We got to keep it all secret. But if you look

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  at the amount of innovation that could be unlocked by getting, you know, the brightest minds and entrepreneurs to try to use this stuff. Because for me, disclosure wouldn't be about, yeah, just the the US government saying, we are not alone, right? For me, it would be, okay, can I now step into like a craft that uses anti-gravity technology and go up to the other side of the earth, you know, quickly, or go up to the moon and come back without having to use rockets, which are, again, another outdated technology and dangerous technology, right? I mean, even with Elon Musk's starship, it keeps keeps burning up. I mean, they've done amazing things on the engineering side, but they're still working in that that paradigm. Yes.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  And it's because of geopolitical concerns. It's amazing how much of this stuff, like the reason we went to the moon was as much because of geopolitical concerns. It's why everybody was pushing to get there, because we were competing with Russia. And now I was talking to, you know, some folks in the UAP task force. And, you know, they were basically saying, every other, every other word out of their mouth was China, China, China, right? And so they said, we can't send this stuff to MIT. We can't send this stuff to Harvard. We can't send this stuff anywhere, because then Chinese will have it. And so they're keeping like this lock on it, because they're thinking of it in terms of tribes of humans,

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  which is what we do. And they're not thinking of it as we, the human race, right? It's kind of like reminds me of. Not necessarily saying that the UFO phenomenon is necessarily evil or trying to take over the earth, but it reminds me a little bit of what happened with the colonization of North America by the Europeans, where the tribes were competing against each other to get a hold of the, you know, the guns and the technology, and they didn't cooperate with each other, and what happened to them? You know, eventually, there was a guy named Tecumseh who tried to unite from the Shawnee, trying to unite all of these different tribes together. But, you know, the older people didn't really listen. You had these old rivalries and stuff. And I think that's by trying to-

• 1:35:48Danny Jones?

  That's interesting.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  Personally, and again, I'm not saying necessarily that I don't necessarily buy the threat narrative, but by trying to use the technology against each other-

• 1:35:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  And dominance, we're missing out on where we could go as a species. And that's unfortunate, I think.

• 1:36:04Danny Jones?

  Well, of course, they want to use this stuff for war. I mean, as weapons, that's the first, that's the first thing they would go to if there's some sort of crazy technology that defies physics and gravity and stuff like this, is how do we weaponize it to make ourselves the most powerful superpower in the world? I mean, if you look at, just look at, look at the, look at the budget of, look at where all the money is in the United States, right? There's a $21 trillion hole in the Department of Defense. Vanished, unaccounted for money. It's most likely that $21 trillion went to some of this dark black stuff that they cannot talk about or disclose to anybody. It's in the private sector, completely disconnected from the military, completely disconnected from the US government, and probably completely autonomous.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Very likely. I think you had someone on recently-

• 1:36:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Catherine Fitz.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  Catherine Fitz.

• 1:36:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  She was in a film called Thrive, which was put out by Foster Gamble back in 2011. And that's how I first, you know-

• 1:36:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  -came across her, because I was involved in helping them-

• 1:36:58Danny Jones?

  Thrive.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Uh, make them, it's Thrive, What I'll Take. It was kind of a conspiracy movie. I got involved because there was an element of UFO technology and black projects in there that I thought was kind of fun. And at the time, I remember thinking, okay, this UFO stuff is interesting, but man, these guys are out there with their conspiracies.

• 1:37:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:16Speaker 03

  And one time, we went to a meeting, I think it was 2011. I don't know if Catherine Fitz was there, but like Danny Sheehan was there, do you know Danny?

• 1:37:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  He was there, and a few others were there, and they're like, okay, we're going to talk about, you know, this film and this technology. Turn your phones off. And I thought, okay, no big deal, I'll turn my phones off. You know, they said, we want you to turn your phone off- And leave it outside the door in a basket. And I thought, okay, these guys are crazy. They're paranoid.

• 1:37:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  And then, of course, Snowden came out later with the leaks. And it turns out they can listen to your microphone.

• 1:37:46Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  Even if the phone is off. And so that's when I started to think, okay, well, maybe some of this other conspiracy stuff is actually potentially true. Like, there's stuff that I was conditioned to think was not true. So that's interesting. But if you think the aviation industry, like, it took a while for it to get to where we ended up, say, with World War II. And there were prizes, innovation prizes, like Charles Lindbergh actually was was competing to win a prize. Like, I forget how much it was, like $20,000 or something.

• 1:38:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  For going across. And there were a whole number of people. It wasn't, I mean, the Wright Brothers, you know, discovered the flying machine, but then there was a whole group of people trying to figure out how to take that basic innovation and turn it into real companies. And the aviation industry almost died. And the postal service kept it alive in the 1920s. Yeah, because there wasn't, commercial aviation was not a thing in the 1920s. It wasn't until like the 30s and later that it became a real thing. People still went on boats, for the most part, back then. And

• 1:38:50Danny Jones?

  And so the postal service was utilizing it?

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  Was utilizing. And Ford themselves, Ford Motor Company, had an aerospace division because they thought airplanes were going to be the next big thing, but it failed. And they said, ah, it's too much money. Nobody wants these things. Nobody's using them. We got to shut it down. We got to focus on our core business. And that's the problem with having big companies, like these big aerospace companies, working with the government only, is they've got their existing, you know, budgets and technologies, and they have one customer, the government.

• 1:39:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  But there's no way we're going to get the kind of progress that you made in aviation over time without having different entrepreneurial, you know, activities and companies.

• 1:39:27Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Trying to figure out how to put this stuff to

• 1:39:29Danny Jones?

  That's why, like, with this dude, Robert Bigelow, this aerospace guy, he's putting on all these competitions for people to, like, write essays on near-death experiences, or these, you know, these, these different realms of par- exploring these realms of parapsychology. You know, we had one of the guys on here, we had two people, actually. One person was Jeffrey Mishlove, I think, who worked with him.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  Right. He wrote the essay, I think.

• 1:39:51Danny Jones?

  He wrote the essay. Well, there was another guy who wrote, Jeffrey Long.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jeffrey Long wrote a book about near-death experiences, right?

• 1:39:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then both of those things were funded by John Bigelow, who's an aerospace guy. You know, it's fascinating that that guy would be dedicating, putting so much time and energy and money into researching this kind of sci fi stuff.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's kind of how it's happening right now. You've got like these really wealthy guys who maybe will put in a little bit of money and then they'll move on to put a little bit of money into something else, or you've got these secret government black programs.

• 1:40:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  But what you don't have, so for example, I was in Silicon Valley for, you know, over a decade.

• 1:40:29Speaker 00

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• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  And I was involved in the venture capital industry and people came to me all the time and they said, hey, I've got this free energy device, you know. In fact, with Thrive, Foster Gamble, you know, that, that grew, he was one of the direct descendants of the founders of Procter and Gamble.

• 1:41:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's really interesting. I mean, film, and they used to show the film at Occupy Wall Street back in the day. You know, they would like project it up on the, on the, on the wall. But we went around and looked at some of these devices and part of the problem is, you know, if you go and you say, look, I've got, you know, UFO technology or I've got this, as an investor, you're going to look at it and say, Okay, how do I know if this is works or not? How do I know if this is like legit science? As opposed to just a bunch of bunk? Well, you're gonna bring in some legit scientists, right? To look at it for you. And what are they gonna say? They're gonna say, eh, that doesn't really agree with what we know about physics or, you know, that's just probably a bunch of bunk. Because there's a stigma around this topic.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  Uh, and there aren't enough actual scientists in universities looking into the UFO technology topic. And that's what I think partly will need to change in order to unlock investment in some of these garage inventors who think they have figured out pieces of this. Uh, but because we keep it so locked up and we keep it so stigmatized, like even within academia, you know, I, I was told and Gary Nolan was told this, don't, don't, don't talk about UFOs, you know? What's gonna happen with your career, you know, if you do that? This is when, you know, a while ago.

• 1:42:59Danny Jones?

  Well, the, the convenient thing for the people that wanna keep the US, UFO stuff secret is that the internet exists. And people can go on the internet and make a great living talking and writing about their theories on UFOs. Which makes this more of just a messy, chaotic soup of information. Where there's so much out there. It's like that percentage that is the truth, whether it's a huge percentage or a small percentage, I don't know what it is. Some people say it's like 80% is true and 20% is bullshit. But like you can never, you can never-

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  I think it's 50/50.

• 1:43:37Danny Jones?

  You can never figure out, you'll never know what's real or not. Because like the incentive, the incentive to talk about this stuff for people on the internet because they can monetize it with videos, podcasts, movies, documentaries, books and all this stuff. It's just, it's made the whole topic more convoluted. You know, so it doesn't have to be there. It doesn't even have to be stigma. There's an industry. There's like fucking industry around it.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  Right. That's true, but then

• 1:44:04Danny Jones?

  Which does not, which, which, which being accurate has nothing to do with how much money you can make.

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think that's very true. And, you know, I've, I've listened to people in, you know, from various aspects of this. And I'm like, I don't think what he's, you know, some of what he's saying sounds reasonable, but the rest of it doesn't. And then I'll ask somebody, you know, who knows them and he'll say, oh yeah, he made up about 50% of it. And, you know, that's, that's a reasonable number that I've heard now from a few different people at about half of what they say they know for sure. But the problem is they also bring in the other half. They don't know for sure. And they say it as if, as if they know a hundred percent that it's true.

• 1:44:37Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  But now, speaking from an academic point of view, though, it's easy to dismiss all of that because you're like, well, they're just a bunch of grifters online making money.

• 1:44:46Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  Uh, from TV.

• 1:44:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  And, and that stops the serious scientists. I mean, even, even

• 1:44:51Danny Jones?

  And then, then you have the human ego, where you have people in academics who go through, you know, working at the universities their whole lives, studying and teaching stuff. And they, you know, I've seen this multiple times, even with Avi Loeb, where he's described how his colleagues are resentful of him being a public facing person who's getting all this attention, writing these books. And they creates this sort of tribal clash between people.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:45:19Danny Jones?

  Perfect example of that is Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, the whole archaeological.

• 1:45:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's crazy, man. It's everywhere.

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even Avi has said, you know, he was attacked for

• 1:45:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, doing this stuff. And I mean, I've had physicists. So I, I did an academic study. Cause again, I'm studying how science and technology evolves and its effects on society. And so I did like a, a formal academic study where I interviewed like 20 professors. Uh, who actually are studying UFOs openly, you know, people you would probably recognize, uh, like Avi, like Gary Nolan, a bunch of other guys.

• 1:45:53Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  And, uh,

• 1:45:54Danny Jones?

  Didn't you talk to Jacques Vallée?

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I talked to Jacques as well, not for this study, but

• 1:45:58Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  I've talked to Jacques. Jacques was nice enough to write the, the foreword for the French edition of simulation hypothesis. Uh, and he and I talked a little bit about these theories and, and I, I can tell you where some of the overlap, I think, is between the simulation.

• 1:46:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:13Speaker 03

  Hypothesis and UFOs. But I was going to say on this, this topic of stigma, you know, there are People that I talked to and they're like, oh yeah, you know, they're cuckoo for, you know, they're cuckoo for studying this. And the other said to me, they didn't talk about it openly until they got tenure.

• 1:46:30Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  So the way it works in academia is, you know, you start off as a assistant professor or associate professor, and then you get tenure after like seven years. And then you eventually become a full professor. And some of them, they didn't even wait till after tenure. They waited until they were full professors before they're like, like Michael Masters, who has the idea of the UFOs being time traveling devices.

• 1:46:56Danny Jones?

  Saucers are time machines.

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, saucers are time machines, which is a very interesting model. But and others, it depends on which field you're in, like the more, if you're more in physics, there's a bigger stigma to this. Like, like Jeff Kreipel says, you know, he, he, he didn't mind talking about this stuff because as long as he had a job, he didn't care. In, in, in like the religious studies, it's a little less.

• 1:47:20Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  It's still stigmatized, but it's not, it's less stigmatized. And so what it is, is you have a socialization that happens. There's this identity thing that goes on. And, and I, and I definitely found this in my research that they, I said, did anybody tell you not to study UFOs? They said, no, nobody ever actually said that. But you know, you're not supposed to study them. I said, well, how do you know? He goes, well, you get socialized over time in groups of academics who make fun of people who believe in that weird stuff. And they lump in UFOs and Bigfoot and psychic phenomenon is in that is in that bucket now. All these things in that bucket. And they say, you basically build your identity

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  on we, the experts and the scientists are the ones who make fun of those people.

• 1:48:06Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:48:06Speaker 03

  And I think that's a lot of what's going on with, with Graham Hancock and all these guys as well. So there's the fame element that you mentioned earlier.

• 1:48:13Danny Jones?

  It's a group think.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

  It's a group think, yeah. And it becomes an identity thing. Like, do you know, in, in Texas? They had a tough time getting people to not litter. And then they ended up using a slogan, which turned it around. It was like, don't mess with Texas. Like, they were trying to use the identity as Texans.

• 1:48:33Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  To get people to socially use that social identity.

• 1:48:38Danny Jones?

  To not litter.

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  To not litter. And that was a very successful campaign. So it's how we build identities, I think, in groups. That is actually still affecting. Now, it's less stigmatized than it was before.

• 1:48:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  In fact, some people were afraid of the stigma, but then they, after they went public with what they were doing, they, they didn't have any repercussions for them.

• 1:49:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  But other people do believe that they had repercussions.

• 1:49:04Danny Jones?

  So, so how does this? Do you think that these accounts that people have of alien sightings or alien abductions? Do you think that something in their mind is happening where they're able to somehow experience the maintenance workers of the simulation? Are these things, are these things like the janitors of our simulation that are coming in and cleaning stuff up or fixing stuff?

• 1:49:37Speaker 03

  Well, let's, uh, maybe we can do a quick, quick break.

• 1:49:40Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:49:41Speaker 03

  Uh, and then we can jump into that. It's a really interesting.

• 1:49:43Danny Jones?

  Perfect cliffhanger.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:44Danny Jones?

  We'll be right back. Yeah, find out what that is. Find out what's the latest Bob Lazar movie? I think it might already be out, actually. The newest Bob Lazar project is part of Project.

• 1:49:56Danny Jones?

  So when is this movie coming out?

• 1:49:58Speaker 04

  It's a VR experience.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a VR experience. Oh, they're trying to say this is what it looks like in S4 and stuff?

• 1:50:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's a documentary titled S4: The Bob Lazar Story, a VR experience and book aimed at presenting Lazar's story. Holy shit. That's crazy. It's coming out this month? Oh, no, no, no. The documentary, which was in development as of June 2025, seeks to clarify and expand upon Lazar's controversial claims. So they're starting it this month? I thought they were close to finishing. Can you scroll down more and see what else comes up?

• 1:50:33Danny Jones?

  We created, click on that, that video, that YouTube video.

• 1:50:37Speaker 04

  So they, they have the Gravitar project and then they've doc, they're documenting it as well. So I think there's a accompanying documentary. Yeah, this guy right here, he's, he's basically the documentary guy.

• 1:50:50Speaker 05

  Invested a tremendous amount of time and resources in the past three years. This was initially not supposed to be a documentary film. Neither was it supposed to be a VR experience, but it certainly has become that. And since we made that decision, we're all in.

• 1:51:09Speaker 06

  So what really excited me about working on this project is when we're talking about the documentary space, you know, there's not a lot of innovations in the VFX department and how the stories are being told. We really wanted to push the envelope in the documentary space and make this like something very unique. I mean, what better way than to completely recreate something that you're not able to go to or see. You may think it's easy to do a military facility, but it's not because there's so many little tiny things that Bob remembers. Colors of the wall and what the walls look like and the little grit, you know, how much dirt and is there dirt or not? I mean, I feel terrible for Bob because this happened 35 years ago for him.

• 1:51:48Danny Jones?

  So they're building a simulated reality based on, of S4, based on what Bob Lazar talks about. And they're making a documentary about, about building this simulated reality. I had no idea that was what they were doing. That's wild.

• 1:52:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:12Speaker 04

  Did you ever meet John Lehrer?

• 1:52:14Danny Jones?

  Have I ever met him?

• 1:52:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, he's passed now, but.

• 1:52:17Danny Jones?

  No, I mean, I've read a lot about him and I've heard, I've heard a lot of stories about him. He was close with Bob.

• 1:52:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they were close. I think he introduced Bob to George Knapp and that's how the story came out.

• 1:52:25Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Back in the day.

• 1:52:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, my theory on Bob now, it's, it's, uh, you know, a lot of people, yeah, we are recording, fuck it.

• 1:52:36Danny Jones?

  So yeah, my theory on him now is, is, uh, you know, essentially, I think he was super useful for the CIA. And this, the, the projects that was, the project that was going on at Air 51 or S4. To, uh, try to figure out how to reverse engineer this stuff and figure out what it was like he's, it's, it's, it makes sense to bring people outsiders in to try to crack, crack problems and, and solve some of the stuff that like their typical, uh, scientists that are already there can't figure out. So if you want to bring in somebody, you want to find somebody that's easily deniable if they try to like blow the whistle on it, right? So like he was running a brothel, he had a, he divorced his wife. Uh, there was all kinds of crazy shit he was doing at night, you know, with, with, you know, his group, his friend group.

• 1:53:19Danny Jones?

  He was friends with John Lear, who was like CIA pilot or something like this. So like if he, it would be, he would be very easily dismissible. If, uh, anything ever got out about him. So I, I think it's probably likely that he was there.

• 1:53:36Danny Jones?

  Doing this stuff.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I've talked to different people with different opinions on, on Bob Lazar. And they run the gamut from, you know, I trust everything he says to some of what he says makes sense. And I was talking to a guy the other day who, you know, was really into Lazar's story, but then as he became a scientist himself and started to work in aerospace, you know, he started to say, he goes, well, it doesn't, it sounds like somebody who's kind of making stuff up, like, you know, in the way that he's talking about things. And so, so it's interesting to me, like, this one person I was talking to went through different phases of like thinking, okay, he really liked everything he was saying.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  And, but then when he became a physicist, he realized, okay, well, that's not exactly how people who, you know, work in those fields would be talking about this stuff. That said, you know, the fact that he said he saw these different models, like the sport model, et cetera. I mean, I think though, that that seems reasonable from what other people have told us, uh, that they have seen, you know, various, either it's craft or specific technology or pieces of craft and things that have.

• 1:54:45Danny Jones?

  I also think his, the part of his story where he says he walked by a window and saw an alien. I think that could have been a strategic deceptive move on the government's part.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  To convince him that there was an alien there.

• 1:54:57Danny Jones?

  To base, so if he was to tell his story, that's the thing that could just, you know, that could be a step too far for people listening to it. Oh, okay. You saw a fucking alien in there? Sure. Right. It's similar to what Andy Jacobson writes about in her Area 51 book. When the CIA pilots were first test flying the jet airplanes out of Nevada for the first time, the CIA pilots would bring gorilla masks in the cockpit with them in case they got within visual distance of a civilian airplane, they would wear the gorilla masks. So that way, when the civilian pilot goes, dude, I saw this jet airplane flying around the other day, and there was a gorilla in the cockpit. You know what I mean? It just poisons the, it poisons the story and makes it unbelievable.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, for me, you know, one of the areas of credibility for Bob that I think would help his credibility quite a bit is, you know, he said he was sent to MIT to study physics for a while and supposedly he went to Caltech as well. And when people searched, they couldn't find much of a record of that. And so, you know, I, I, basically having spent time at MIT during my undergraduate years in the eighties, he was there, I think, late seventies, early eighties, somewhere around then.

• 1:56:08Speaker 03

  I, if, if you meet somebody who spent a decent amount of time in that environment, it's a very unique culture at MIT. I mean, maybe this is true about the universities as well. But MIT in particular has kind of a unique culture and language that people use. And I, I would have come across people in the physics department probably, or that either knew him or were there at the same time.

• 1:56:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  Uh, and

• 1:56:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's when you were there?

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  I was there later, but I'm saying there, there would still be people that were around because they're like, it's kind of this environment where you have people in the faculty and researchers who hang around for years. But some of the people that I know would have That I interacted with would probably have been around in the early eighties and late seventies.

• 1:56:51Danny Jones?

  Could they have sent him in under like a pseudonymous name to keep him secret?

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  They could have. I mean, it's all possible. So that's, but what I'm saying is, even if I could spend like a lunch with him, and I, you know.

• 1:57:03Danny Jones?

  You would be able to sniff it out.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  I think I could sniff it out whether he'd really been there or not. Now, if he'd only been there for like, you know, one class that he sat in on on Thursday nights, and that's it, then he's not gonna be acclimated to the culture. But if he was really there for a couple of years and actually studying, like in physics classes, he would have had to interact with other students and professors.

• 1:57:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  Right? People leave a trace. They would have had to live somewhere nearby in Cambridge at one of the dorms or one of the other things. And you can look up some of that information, but you sometimes you get a sense that when somebody's, like, they don't know the details of something. They know how to say it at a high level, but they don't know, you know, the specific details underneath that. And so I'm very open to the Bob Lazar story, just because, one, it's interesting. Two, he's been consistent with it. And, and three, some of what he says is consistent with what other people said, say. And I always take the approach that, well, let's, you know, let's look at what different people are saying, and then we can triangulate and say, the things that they agree on are probably kind of true. The things they disagree on could be that they're looking at different,

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

  you know, they're looking at different parts of crafts, or they're in different parts of the government. They've got different,

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  you know, they've got different priorities, et cetera. Depending on if they're coming from intelligence, or they were part of a research lab,

• 1:58:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  or they were part of an aerospace company, you're gonna have very different perspectives on, on all of these things. I mean, I've heard other people say that.

• 1:58:30Danny Jones?

  Ooh.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Wow. Thunderstorm?

• 1:58:34Danny Jones?

  Last time we had thunder like this on the podcast, there was a satanic person sitting in your seat, conjuring the devil.

• 1:58:42Speaker 03

  There you go. I didn't actually expect thunderstorms. Here in Florida, but every.

• 1:58:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, what?

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  I've only been here a couple of days. I didn't know.

• 1:58:50Danny Jones?

  We get so many thunderstorms during the summer. It's a daily thing.

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it starts in June, huh?

• 1:58:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So every day there's been one, but then it'll go away.

• 1:58:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  After like fifteen minutes or something like that.

• 1:58:59Danny Jones?

  Usually they're afternoon, early morning and afternoon thunderstorms and crazy thunder.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:59:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's been, actually, the last couple of years has been like more than, it's been like really abnormally active. Like the thunder and the lightning has been crazy the last two years.

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  It's interesting. I've been living in Phoenix during the school year, the last few years, and they have a monsoon season in like August, September, when you get these huge storms rolling in and you get flooding and then, then they're gone and then

• 1:59:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  the rest of the year is very dry.

• 1:59:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:31Speaker 03

  And so we don't, we don't see much else.

• 1:59:33Danny Jones?

  The simulators have a good sense of humor.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  I think so. Different parts of the simulation have been, you know, have their own little percentage likelihood of getting different things, but

• 1:59:45Danny Jones?

  What were you saying before the thunder interrupted us?

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  Uh, so we were talking about Bob.

• 1:59:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Oh, and I said, you know, there, it's true. Maybe I shouldn't say this now. If that thunder came just at that moment. No, I was just talking that there are other people I've met who either them or their close family members, you know, have claimed to have gone down into

• 2:00:04Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  underground bases.

• 2:00:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:00:06Speaker 03

  Where they actually saw quote unquote aliens. Uh, so even that part of his story.

• 2:00:13Danny Jones?

  People have told you this all like, like off the record privately?

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Completely off the record. Yeah. Uh, that, or like they've told me they have a family member, you know, for example, who has no reason to lie to them. Uh, for example. And there's other people that have said stuff like that, but I, I don't know, you know, where this falls. Uh, for me, the more people that I hear say something that you, you assess the credibility of those people and the closer they are to it, whether they've seen it themselves, or they've just heard about it from other people.

• 2:00:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's the double edged sword of, of that. Like more people like when it becomes more popular in the zeitgeist, the Bob Lazar story, like the more people can start talking about it and elaborating on it and making up stories and constructing these fake realities in their head.

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could be. But again, I think going back to what we were saying about near death experiencers before, I mean, enough people have had this experience that we should take it as a legitimate thing that happens as opposed to, eh, it's just a bunch of random chemicals firing and that's it. Uh, similarly here, enough people have come forward to say that we have reverse engineering programs or non-human technology that I think we should take it seriously that there's something there. Now, what that is, I mean, this comes back to your earlier question to me. About abductions, for example.

• 2:01:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what we started, I was asking you about before we went on the break. How does the UFO and alien abduction stuff square with the simulation hypothesis?

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's a couple areas of overlap with the simulation hypothesis. And the first is this idea of presenting how these non-human entities present themselves. And so, again, going to the work of Jacques Vallée, who I've spent a little bit of time with, you know, he has talked about how in, say, the Celtic folklore, you know, there are these fey, or what we call fairies, they're entities that have been around for a while. And sometimes they would take somebody from our world into their world. And time would pass differently inside this world and they'd come back. And, you know, they're presented a certain way.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  And similarly, I mentioned earlier, like in the Islamic traditions, there are many stories of other entities that live on Earth with us. And they call them the jinn, for example, that's like kind of a catch-all term. There's actually subsets and you can get into, you know, very, very complicated classification of different types of entities. But the idea is that what we're seeing could be something that is presented to us like an avatar. So like in a video game, you can change your avatar. So you can present yourself, you know, I could be, you know, a tall Viking guy, like if I wanted to be here.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  And it seems like they have this ability to present themselves in, inside what we think of as a physical reality. And to me, it reminds me of the stories from these other traditions. So I think at least part of it, with the abduction phenomenon and the way that people are viewing it as aliens, or a particular image of the aliens, there's an element of interpretation of the being. Now, I'm not saying the beings aren't there, I think they are, there are non-human intelligences that are here. But I think some of those have the ability to change shape. And so it's presented to us as a technological phenomena and a spaceship.

• 2:03:51Speaker 03

  Just like if you go back to the 1940s or 30s and they talk about aliens, they always talk about Martians. Why? Because they know there's Mars or Venus. If you look at the contactees in the 50s, like they took, they say these entities told me they're from Venus. Now, we know they're probably not from Venus, I mean, maybe. But as far as we know, Venus and Mars don't have humanoid life on them. Unless it's like way underground and hiding or something. But it's almost as if they presented themselves as Venusians or as Martians because that would fit into the mind frame of the observer.

• 2:04:27Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  So the observer could actually make sense of that. If they said, oh, we're from another solar system or the galaxy, I mean, then most people didn't even know about galaxies. Back then, it just wasn't in the consciousness. And so I think there is an element of interpretation, but also presentation that goes on where they change their form. Now I heard a story recently about with, uh, Whitley Strieber told this story recently where, uh, he said he met a young man who met a young woman. Who, you know, they had sex and she got pregnant. And so he thought they were going to get married and she calls him over one day and says, uh, well, I'm not really human. I'm actually a gray alien. And she changes her form and he literally sees her change her form and change back.

• 2:05:12Speaker 03

  And she says, and I'm going to take, you know, the baby and we're going to go back to the, the gray alien world or wherever it was. And you'll never see us again. Now that sounds, I mean, you tell that story to anybody and like, you know, kind of the mainstream, certainly academic.

• 2:05:26Danny Jones?

  There's lots of stories like that.

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's lots of stories like that, but they're going to think you're batshit crazy, right?

• 2:05:30Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of David Huggins?

• 2:05:32Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 2:05:32Danny Jones?

  There's a beautiful documentary called Love and Saucers about this guy named David Huggins, who's now, I think he's in his like nineties. He's really old. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. And he lost his virginity to an alien.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:05:43Danny Jones?

  And he draws pictures of this big, beautiful alien woman with long hair and voluptuous breasts. And draws pictures of her, him and the alien fornicating in the woods. And he gets kidnapped by these little gray aliens, these typical looking gray, uh, grays. And brought up to the woods to meet her, uh, his baby mama. And she came back a couple of times and showed him their, their child. Their alien, their alien, human child hybrid. Right there, there it is.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:14Danny Jones?

  Uh, there, there's David on the left. He, that is my favorite alien abduction story is his story. The documentary is great. My friend Brad Abrahams. I highly recommend it, Love and Saucers.

• 2:06:26Speaker 03

  Interesting, cool.

• 2:06:27Danny Jones?

  But yeah, so there's a lot of stories like this.

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:28Danny Jones?

  People, people fornicating with aliens and, and, or the aliens extracting eggs and semen from humans.

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  Right. But what I found was when I went back and I was researching, say Islamic literature, I saw stories of the djinn that were almost, you know, eerily similar to these stories today. And so, for example, there was the story of a man who supposedly married a djinn woman. Okay, and, you know, married is, is the terminology they would use. And they had at least one child, maybe it was even two children. And one day, she said, okay, I'm going back to the djinn world. And she took the kids and she, she immediately vanished and they never saw her again. And that, that wasn't an uncommon story. And so it, I think it begs the question, well, some people would just dismiss it, oh, those are just bad breakups, right?

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  And they can't get over them, so they're saying they're an alien. But let's suppose we take them at, at face value, and take them more seriously than that, then they've been happening for a long time. And is it possible these entities can present themselves to look human or to look like a particular race of aliens, but they may or may not actually be aliens? Not to say that some of the extraterrestrial hypothesis may not be true, but it seems to me there's a broader phenomenon here going where these people come into and out of our realities. It's almost like they can render in our simulation. Now, I've heard many tales of saucers that would render, you know, you look up and there's nothing there and then suddenly there's a disk there that gets rendered.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  And, you know, Jacques told me about some cases where one person sees the saucer and the next person next to them doesn't see it. Or from Gary Nolan where there are like people sitting in a car like family members and looking up and and they they both saw something. The kids saw the parents didn't, right? Yeah, the kids saw it. Maybe, maybe I forget which one that was, but one saw like a donut shape. And one saw a cylindrical shape. Oh, really? The shapes were different enough that to me, that almost seems as if there's an element of conditional rendering going on. Okay, and what what I mean by that is in video games, we can, we can say, okay, you're level thirty. I'm level two.

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  We're both rend- we think we're rendering it in the same place, but we're actually not like I'm rendering it on my computer or in my VR headset or in my brain computer interface and you're doing the same thing. And is it possible that from the server, we say, that guy should be able to see it because he's level thirty. That guy, you know, he's a little too left brain. He's only level one or whatever. He's not going to be able to see it. And that to me brings up this idea of there's subjective and objective, but maybe there's something in between. Which is that they're, they're, they are actually there for some people. And they may not be there for other people. So is it possible that these things can, you know, be rendered subj- uh, subjectively or conditionally, maybe because subjectively sounds like I'm saying they're not there. Yeah.

• 2:09:32Speaker 03

  Conditionally means they're, they're there for the people that are able to perceive it. Hmm. And this gets back to your point about DMT or other techniques that you can use to open up your, your vision. And so I've heard of this from the ghost perspective as well. Where certain ghosts supposedly, um, there's a, there's a book by Leslie Kane called Surviving Death. And uh, uh, she wrote, uh, there was another investigator who wrote this chapter, but it was a story about a family in Oakland and they moved in and every now and then the parents would catch sight of a woman, but the kid could like see this woman all the time. Yeah. And he could talk to her and turns out it was the same name as the woman that

• 2:10:16Speaker 03

  used to live there and she was wearing these funny old clothes and the kid would describe it. And the kid says that she told him that she could present herself more easily to some people than other people. Right. Which is why like the parents would only catch a little glimpse of it or something. Yeah. And so is this, is there an element of conditional rendering going on, I think? And that's, I think, one a- aspect of overlap as well as this, this idea that maybe there's other beings here that we can't see, but they can see us, they're here all along. That's the second aspect. And then there was a really interesting case that Jacques told me about where he said there was a UFO that supposedly landed somewhere in like Northern California or Southern Oregon. If you've been out there, you, you know, they have a lot of tall redwood trees.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  And he said that it, they said, the witnesses said that it came down at a 45 degree angle and then left some marks or something and they were trying to point out where it landed. And he said he went back to the site with them after, you know, other investigators had left and he said, wait, you said 45 degree angle. That would have mean, that would mean it would have to go through the trees. Like it would have had to cut through the redwood trees. Yeah. And they said, yeah, that's exactly what it did. It went right through, but we didn't want to say that because we're going to sound crazy. Yeah. Now that to me, sounds like, like when you're rez-ing something in a game, you know, there's that period where it's not fully rez'd and you can actually walk through walls and stuff until it gets locked into the 3D world.

• 2:11:42Speaker 03

  So there's almost this ability to like holographically, uh, kinda, you materialize something, but while it's materializing, it's not fully in the world. It's more like a, a shape or if you think of like a game, the mesh, we have these things called meshes, which is like the outline of a, like a, of a person or an object. And then eventually you put the skin on, uh, which, which makes it look like, um, you know, what, what it actually looks like as an object. Otherwise it's just like, you know, lines basically. So is it possible that the UFOs are being rendered into our reality along with the beings? And we're interacting with them and for whatever reason, they're being presented to us as technology that looks like it's from another planet.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  But maybe that's just the latest, you know, if you go back to the, we talked about Diana Pasulka and religion and other stuff where, you know, you have the chariots in the sky. You have all these descriptions of things. And is this just the latest description? And being in a simulated world would make that more likely. There's another possibility that I think is interesting, which is I talked about how in a simulation, you can run it forward and you can run different timelines forward. And this gets back to Michael Masters and the time travel idea. Is it possible that, because many people have reported getting information that we're

• 2:13:09Speaker 03

  ruining our planet, at least this was true of, you know, contact experiences in the eighties, I think seventies, eighties and maybe nineties as well. I don't know if that's still true today. But they're from a future timeline where they know what's going to happen to our planet. And they're somehow projecting themselves back. And you can do that in a simulation. You can go back and say, hey, let's try to make these people, let's try to influence these people to act differently. Seems like a strange way to do that, but.

• 2:13:37Danny Jones?

  The weird thing though, like it's hard to wrap your head around though with video games, right? Video games, there's really no linear timeline in a video game, right? Like there's not like, like the way we think of, of our world is we can go back and think about the dinosaurs, antiquity, the times of Christ and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And we have this linear history of, of our humanity that we understand through text and paintings and archaeology and all this stuff. But like in video games, it's not really like that. It's just kind of like you're in, you're right now in the present. Like your character doesn't necessarily have a history or a future.

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  Or does it?

• 2:14:20Danny Jones?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:14:20Speaker 03

  Well, in the real world too. So I would say, I would suggest what you're saying is right. What happens with video games is they fill in the past. Right? So if you've ever played like Farmville, do you remember that Facebook game?

• 2:14:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I remember. I never played it.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Or Minecraft, they do the same thing, I think, where you have crops.

• 2:14:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Speaker 03

  And you plant the crops.

• 2:14:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  Now, what happens is you log in, let's say, the next day, and supposedly in the, in the world, it's been,

• 2:14:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Speaker 03

  Whatever. It's been like a year, or it's been whatever, a season.

• 2:14:49Danny Jones?

  Right. So you're born essentially the first time you log on.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then when you log on the next time, it's not like the game has been running the whole time. What happens is that it fills in what happened to the crops since the last time you logged in.

• 2:15:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  So it basically says there's a 50% chance that your locusts will come. Also, since it's supposed to have been, you know, a season, they should grow this big by now. And you log in and it seems as if time has passed. But really, there's just the present time that you've logged in and it fills in the past. Now, this is where time gets really weird. So, most people think of the simulation hypothesis as saying, physical space is not real, it's virtual.

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  But, there's an element of quantum mechanics that is really confusing, but I, I find it kind of compelling, which says that time is not what we think it is either. And so there's something called the cosmic delayed choice experiment. Maybe we can try to find a...

• 2:15:45Danny Jones?

  The cosmic delayed choice experiment, okay.

• 2:15:48Speaker 03

  And so what it is, is John Wheeler, who I mentioned earlier, he proposed this experiment. And they couldn't really do it at the time. So if we do a search on, and look for in an image, there's a few different images that are good ones that we can use.

• 2:16:07Speaker 03

  And what it's saying essentially is, if we go back to Schrodinger's cat being in superposition, and what we choose is when, when we, when we observe.

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, how about that one in the middle there? Yeah, that one.

• 2:16:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's a good one. But to get back to Schrödinger's cat and then we'll talk about this diagram.

• 2:16:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  Basically, we're saying we're choosing the state by observing it, whether it's alive or dead.

• 2:16:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Speaker 03

  And until then, it's in both states. But what if we're choosing not just the state, but also what happened to the cat before it came in the box?

• 2:16:46Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  Like, did it come in through the kitchen or did it come in through the living room?

• 2:16:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  And before that, did it come in from outside or was it, you know, sleeping or whatever?

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  Right. How do you know if you never observed it?

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, how do you know?

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the past. This raises this interesting question about the past. Now, this, this, I think, shows us that the past may not be what we think it is. So this is the cosmic delayed choice experiment. It's, I mean, it's never been done at this level, but they've done smaller versions of it. So suppose there's a light at the top right there from a quasar, let's say, or some object that's really big and really far away. It's a billion light years away.

• 2:17:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  So the light is gonna come from there and suppose down here, we're on Earth and we have telescopes. And it's gonna take how long to get here? Billion years. It's not, it's not a trick question. It's just billion, billion light years away. It's gonna take a billion years. So that means when the light started, you know, it was back in before the dinosaurs even, right?

• 2:17:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  Now, suppose there's an object in the middle, like this little galaxy you see there, or a black hole. It's a big object gravitationally. And it turns out the light has to go either to the right or to the left of that object. And our telescopes here today can pick up whether it went to the right or to the left. That's like the equivalent of two slits in the double slit experiment, but it's much easier to understand like this. So if that galaxy is a million light years away from us, or half a billion light years away, it's far away from us, but not as far away as the, that thing. Let's say it's a million light years away from us, or let's say a hundred million, because that's still kind of dinosaur age, isn't it?

• 2:18:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  So the, the light would have had to go around the galaxy a hundred million years ago at the time of the dinosaur. Now, what this experiment is proposing is that it's not until we measure

• 2:18:39Speaker 03

  The polarity of the light in the telescope, that's when the decision gets made of whether it went to the left or the right. From a hundred million years ago, so from the time of the dinosaurs, we're used to thinking that is fixed. Like that already happened, right? But it's saying that in fact, the past may be in a state of superposition. Meaning it can be in multiple states and we are selecting one of the past. We're not changing the past per se, we're just choosing a past.

• 2:19:11Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  It's nuts and they've done a version of this where they sent the light to a satellite that was like a thousand miles up. So it's obviously not as big, but they said the decision of which slit it goes through, which is analogous to. They said that's not actually made until it's measured, even if it's measured up near the satellite. But it would have taken like a fraction of a second, right? But it would have had to happen before because the slits are down here. The two slits or the two, you know, and so they've measured it. There's an Italian team that did this and they actually found that the past may not be as fixed as we think it is. Now that, that is just strange, right? It's a Saint Augustine, you know, had a quote where he goes, what is time?

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  If no one asks me, I know, but if someone asks me, then I do not know.

• 2:20:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  If someone asks me to explain it to him, I do not know.

• 2:20:05Danny Jones?

  You cannot put it into words, right? It's similar to DMD, it's like it's a, it's a 124 bit experience that you can only put into four bit

• 2:20:17Danny Jones?

  translations, you can only talk about it in like a four bit, you can explain it in like four bits, but it's the experience itself is like hundreds of bits.

• 2:20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's, that's a good way to think about it because you know, people who've, whether it's DMT or people who've had near death experiences say, that experience was more real than this experience. And there are colors and sounds there that I can't, we can't have here. They're just too complex now to me, that sounds like exactly what you said, which is, you know, we're living in like an Atari eight bit world. But you know, 64 bit systems can have many more colors than we're able to have here. And you got to take that analogy out into, you know, sounds and other things as well.

• 2:20:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:58Speaker 03

  But that, but, but this past thing raises a weird question is, has the past actually occurred this way or are we on one of these timelines?

• 2:21:09Speaker 03

  For the moment where the US and the Allies won World War II, getting back to Philip K. Dick, right? And so he came to believe that was another timeline that happened. And are we possibly projecting out to the future? And we're trying different things, but we're only on a branch. Like, we're used to thinking, this is it. Like the Japanese guy in The Man in the High Castle. And are people sometimes maybe catching glimpses in their dreams? Are they remembering different runs of the simulation? And that's where the Mandela Effect comes into play.

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• 2:22:13Speaker 03

  Where people remember, some subset of people remember things happening differently than they did.

• 2:22:18Danny Jones?

  Right, right. And the Mandela Effect, can you explain what that is for people that aren't familiar with it? It's basically something about people remembering him dying when he didn't die.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's about a subset of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s or early 90s or so. But in our reality, he didn't. He got out of prison, he became president of South Africa, and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, etc., etc. And he died in like, I think it was 2013, we can look it up. But, so, there was this blogger named Fiona Broome, and she coined this. But she actually coined it because she was at a Star Trek convention. It was like a Comic Con type convention. And they had some of the actors from the original Star Trek. You know, we're talking like, you know, the William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock days.

• 2:23:09Speaker 03

  And if you know hardcore fans of Trek, you know, whether you call them Trekkies or Trekkers, they know their episodes. And there were people in the audience telling the actors, saying, well, do you remember this episode when, you know, you did this and Dr. McCoy did that? And they're like, no, we never recorded that episode. And multiple people in the audience remembered it. And she just thought that was so weird. And so then she went online to see if there were other things that people remembered. And that's what the Mandela thing came up. And so now they call it Mandela effect. Now, I dismissed it like most mainstream scientists do as just bad memory.

• 2:23:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  But then I began to take it more seriously when a friend of mine, who was from another MIT grad, who came by and said, well, simulation hypothesis could be an interesting explanation or the best explanation for that because it means what you're changing variables and you're running things again. And then I'd started to go down the rabbit hole a little more. And if nothing else, it's a great way to think about this idea that there might be multiple possible pasts. Just like it's easy to think about multiple possible futures, right? Like, like I said earlier, I could go to California, I can move to Florida. Those are two different futures and I can think about what that might mean, the multiverse timeline. But it's hard to think about, you know, there, there was one where I didn't go to school at MIT.

• 2:24:29Speaker 03

  I went to University of Michigan or wherever else in the past. And we can get into this idea of parallel lives as well. But the Mandela effect is interesting because I found there are instances where there's a proximity or significance to the event, such that the person would probably remember it.

• 2:24:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:48Speaker 03

  As opposed to, okay, it was Fruit Loops with an OOT versus a UIT. So there's a lot of these logos.

• 2:24:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  The Bernstein Bears is the most famous one, which if you look it up, you know, you can see that it says it's Bernstein.

• 2:25:03Danny Jones?

  Bernstein.

• 2:25:04Speaker 03

  S T A I N.

• 2:25:05Danny Jones?

  That everyone calls it the Berenstein.

• 2:25:06Speaker 03

  Berenstein, which sounds like it's just could be a little air, except people will swear that they had discussions with their parents or their Jewish friends on why are these bears Jews?

• 2:25:18Danny Jones?

  Why are these bears Jews?

• 2:25:19Speaker 03

  And, and why would you have that discussion if, if it was spelled Bernstein?

• 2:25:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:23Speaker 03

  Uh, I, where it gets really interesting to me is when there's either physical artifacts or like major events, like even with Nelson Mandela. I mean, people remember it was his wife Winnie gave the speech at the funeral and so and so was there, like maybe it was the early nineties and Bill Clinton was there. I mean, they get very specific. Um, and there's another one with the Reverend Billy Graham, which he died, I forget what year he died, but there are like people who are hardcore Christian evangelicals. One guy was saying how his parents used to get magazines with him and they remember getting a magazine when he died. And then they found out a year or two later, that's when he died and. It's just weird when you have that significance or you're close to something.

• 2:26:04Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:05Speaker 03

  There was one blogger who was a journalism student. She claims she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela in the eighties. And they told her he was too sick. And so she wasn't able to interview him, so she had to fly back and she graduated and went to work for NPR. So she was in the news business.

• 2:26:21Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:21Speaker 03

  And then later she heard he died during that time period. Now, are you likely to have gotten that the wrong person if you had just gone to South Africa?

• 2:26:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably not. Now, some random person might just think Nelson Mandela, black leader in South Africa. Oh, Stephen Biko was also a black leader in South Africa and he died in the eighties in prison.

• 2:26:40Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:41Speaker 03

  Maybe they missed it, maybe they just made a mistake.

• 2:26:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, but when you get into scripture, and there's a lot of movie stuff too, that you've probably heard of like, uh, Empire Strikes Back where the line of, you know, what's the line when, when Darth Vader tells Lucas his, his father? Are you familiar, are you a Star Wars fan?

• 2:26:57Danny Jones?

  Uh, Luke, I'm your father.

• 2:26:59Speaker 03

  Right, that's how most of us remember it.

• 2:27:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  Supposedly, if you watch it again, it just says, no, I am your father.

• 2:27:05Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:27:05Speaker 03

  And I just saw an article.

• 2:27:06Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, you're right about that.

• 2:27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just saw a little video, which somebody could have doctored, for all I know, but they, they said they recorded it at the movie theater somehow.

• 2:27:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:15Speaker 03

  While they were there, where he says, no, Luke, I am your father, which is like a whole nother, a third possibility.

• 2:27:20Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:27:21Speaker 03

  Uh, but, but again, those are smaller things, but when you get to scripture, that's where it becomes really interesting, because there's a whole sub, uh, there's a whole factor of Mandela effect.

• 2:27:32Danny Jones?

  Uh, religious stuff?

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  Bibles, Bible verses.

• 2:27:35Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:27:36Speaker 03

  There, there are websites that, like, like Isaiah.

• 2:27:39Danny Jones?

  This is, yeah.

• 2:27:40Speaker 03

  Which is the lion and the lamb. You may have heard, yeah, there's some, there, there's this phrase, we can look up the exact phrase, but if you look at it, there's nothing about the lion and the lamb. It's the wolf will lay with the lamb, is what it is now. And there are people who swear, well, one, there are physical artifacts where they've got like pictures of a lion and a lamb and they've got Isaiah. I forget the number one and eleven or I, I forget the exact number.

• 2:28:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, and then there are other people who, you know, you think, well, maybe it's another translation.

• 2:28:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:09Speaker 03

  You know, and they're like, no, I have the physical Bible that I had when I was a kid.

• 2:28:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  The King James Bible, and this is where I memorized it.

• 2:28:15Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  Um, uh, and so then I started to wonder. Is it possible that there are other scriptures like the Quran? You know, other religions scriptures that have changed? And in the Quran, in Islam, they actually memorize the Quran word for word. It's a big, it's a big book. It'd be like memorizing the Bible word for word. And they have a whole class of like priests who can, you know, it's like they graduate, so they have a designation called a Hafiz that says they can read the Quran. Like from their memory, word for word, exactly in Arabic. I always thought that's kind of dumb. Why would they need to do that? We got books, right?

• 2:28:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  And so I looked into it and I said, I wonder if there's been anybody who claims that any of the verses have changed. And there was one Sufi Imam who says that one of the reasons why they memorize the Quran word for word is supposedly there is a class of entities who exist outside of our space and time, but who can modify objects in our timeline, they can go back and modify objects. But they're not allowed to modify our memories. And so, and those are called the Jin. So this is another example of the Jin coming out. And he said, part of the reason why we still memorize the Quran word for word

• 2:29:36Speaker 03

  is because these Jin can change objects, like the physical objects, but they can't change our memory, or they're not allowed to change our memory. So we will remember it, allowed by God, I guess in this case, I'm not, you know. But, but that was interesting to me because it's like, oh, there's an aspect of this that I hadn't thought about. But if it's scripture, people will take it more seriously.

• 2:29:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And the problem with scripture too is not only is there, you know, multiple versions of scriptures that were things, where things are omitted or added to it. But the biggest problem is that there's now different.

• 2:30:15Danny Jones?

  Uh, there's different dictionaries that are created that different sects of religions will use exclusively. Because they want certain words to mean different things according to their belief.

• 2:30:33Speaker 03

  And their interpretation.

• 2:30:34Danny Jones?

  So it's like, okay, let me look up the, the traditional Greek dictionary, what this word means. Oh, no, no, that's not, that's not what that guy was. Hold on, we need to make our own dictionary and change the meaning of that word. So it lines up with our beliefs and our teachings and all this stuff.

• 2:30:49Speaker 03

  Yep, that's true. Yeah. And, and there's different, you know, translations along the way. I mean, for example, the, uh, you know, the, uh, the prayer where they say, forgive us our trespasses. I mean, uh, some people claim that has changed, that that's not what it was. But that may just be a translation issue.

• 2:31:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  Because the original word might've meant debts, not trespasses or.

• 2:31:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:12Speaker 03

  Uh, so there's stuff like that, but at the same time, there are people who claim that there are specific, you know, verses they've memorized in English and that the English translation has changed. And that's bizarre to me.

• 2:31:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  And I take that more seriously than Luke, I am your father, or no, I'm not your father.

• 2:31:30Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  Uh, or since I am a big Star Wars fan, like if Harrison Ford died, I would know it, right? I, if there was a funeral for George Lucas or Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. 10 years ago, I'm unlikely to get that wrong because I'm a big Star Wars fan. So I call that proximity or significance.

• 2:31:46Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:31:46Speaker 03

  To you. But one of my, one of my favorite ones is the Tiananmen Square. Do you remember, did you ever see the video of the guy with a tank standing in front of the tank? Maybe we can bring it up.

• 2:31:57Danny Jones?

  Didn't the tank go around him?

• 2:31:59Speaker 03

  Well, that's the, that's the, the Mandela effect. So most, the majority remembers the tank went around him or, or he moved and the tank went this way.

• 2:32:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:07Speaker 03

  And he went and stood in front of it and it came back that way. So, uh, so they call him Tank Boy online.

• 2:32:13Danny Jones?

  Tank Boy.

• 2:32:14Speaker 03

  Tank Boy. But a subset of people say that they actually saw the tank run him over. And they say it was the bloodiest thing they ever saw on TV.

• 2:32:23Speaker 03

  Now, most of the videos you'll see will not show that. They'll show that the tank, you know, is kind of moving around him.

• 2:32:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, maybe something happened to him afterwards. But I did a little poll. I was on a panel at Contact in the Desert and we had a few different people on the panel like Paul Hynek and a few other people and there were like five or six of us. And sure enough, one person insisted, one of the speakers on the panel insisted that they saw the guy get run over and TV was 20% in this case. Now, that's an informal poll, but to me, that's an interesting.

• 2:32:57Danny Jones?

  Hmm, that is interesting.

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  Now, I'm not saying all these Mandela effects are true, but it is a phenomenon. People do remember things differently.

• 2:33:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:33:07Speaker 03

  And so we could say it's all bad memory. Okay, here's the video, right? We're watching now.

• 2:33:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:13Danny Jones?

  So he's standing there, the tank's stopped.

• 2:33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then I think the tank, as I recall it, and I think as you recall it, the tank tries to go around him and then he moves in front of the tank.

• 2:33:22Danny Jones?

  Okay, now it cut and it's, okay, nothing happened, just cut.

• 2:33:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, now he climbed up the tank.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  He climbed up the tank. Okay, that's, that's interesting.

• 2:33:31Danny Jones?

  What the?

• 2:33:33Speaker 03

  Now, I don't remember that. Now, that's.

• 2:33:34Danny Jones?

  I don't remember this either.

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just remember the tank, like him standing in front of the tank.

• 2:33:44Danny Jones?

  Now he's like messing with the cannon on the tank?

• 2:33:49Danny Jones?

  Now, there's two guys there.

• 2:33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:51Danny Jones?

  A bunch of guys running out there. Now, they're grabbing him and they're moving him.

• 2:33:54Speaker 03

  Maybe this is later in the video than the scene that they broadcast.

• 2:33:58Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm old enough that I did watch that on TV at the time.

• 2:34:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:03Speaker 03

  In 1989. Oh, yeah, it was this scene where he's standing with the parcels.

• 2:34:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Danny Jones?

  I don't remember him climbing up the tank. That's the first time I've seen that.

• 2:34:10Speaker 03

  I don't remember that either. Now, is it just because they didn't broadcast it? Is it because we're remembering? But it's a useful way to think about the possibility that there could be multiple timelines running in the simulation. And that if you change variables. So the rest of Philip K. Dick's speech, I told you that line, the famous line, which is, "We are living in a computer program reality. The only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality." And we would be having the sense of reliving the same events again.

• 2:34:42Danny Jones?

  Like deja vu.

• 2:34:42Speaker 03

  Like deja. He literally said, "Like deja vu." And he goes, "That feeling of deja vu is a clue." That at some point in the past, some variable was changed and they reran the simulation. Now, I find it interesting. Tessa also told me that he came to believe that he was communicating with some people that were outside the simulation. So

• 2:35:04Danny Jones?

  He was doing a lot of drugs.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  He was doing a lot of drugs, but according to her, he was not around that time. So however you want to, but, but again, were the drugs doing something like DMT?

• 2:35:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15Speaker 03

  And, and I asked her-

• 2:35:16Danny Jones?

  He was doing a lot of cocaine, I think.

• 2:35:17Speaker 03

  Oh, was he? So I asked her, well, what did you see when he was communicating? She goes, it was kind of like a blur or something like, like there was like something in the living room or wherever. And he, he claimed that they told him that they, uh, they made it so JFK didn't get assassinated in Dallas.

• 2:35:34Danny Jones?

  Ooh.

• 2:35:35Speaker 03

  And that what happened was then it went into a timeline where JFK got assassinated in Orlando. And then they changed that and then something else bad happened. And every time they changed it, they ended up with a bad outcome. Uh, including a nuclear war in one of these instances.

• 2:35:50Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:35:51Speaker 03

  And then they said, well, let's just go back to the original timeline, which was him being assassinated in Dallas.

• 2:35:55Danny Jones?

  Philip K. Dick said this?

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  Well, he said it to his wife, who said it to me. Yeah, I, I didn't find that like documented, but I mean, she told me directly.

• 2:36:03Danny Jones?

  Holy crap.

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So again, I, I, I can't validate that. I, that's not a Mandela effect that I've heard other people talk about, although there are Mandela effects related to.

• 2:36:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  But what he said at the end of that was we would have to find a group of people who like him remembered either an alternate past or an alternate present. Uh, and that's what with the internet now, cause I mean, that was back in the seventies.

• 2:36:26Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:36:26Speaker 03

  So the internet, uh, you couldn't really have something like the Mandela effect because people wouldn't be able to communicate with each other so much about it.

• 2:36:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:34Speaker 03

  So now people can say that they remember things. So anyway, that's just a way of saying, I think it's interesting to explore this idea of multiple timelines and it's, it's a kind of an offshoot of simulation theory. I don't get into it as much in this, this new book, the simulation hypothesis, but I do get, did get into it in the simulated multiverse.

• 2:36:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah. The, um, the idea of multiple timelines is way easier to comprehend when you think of it in, uh, this idea that we're in this data universe, this informational cosmos. Um, but like, so one of the- One of the perplexing things when you're looking at this whole thing from a physical perspective is using physics to explain consciousness is impossible.

• 2:37:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:37:23Danny Jones?

  You can't start from protons and neutrons and dead particles and work your way up to consciousness. But if you're looking at it from a simulation perspective, if we're living in a informational cosmos and this, this, this universe created of bits, you need consciousness to interact with that data, right? Because this chaotic data means nothing. It's, it's absolutely meaningless unless you can ascribe meaning to it. So you need consciousness to project meaning. I think people have called us meaning machines, humans beings. Consciousness is like a meaning machine.

• 2:38:07Danny Jones?

  So, so if our consciousness is turning this chaotic, um, slurry of bits into meaning for us, that would at least explain consciousness. But where, but still it doesn't really explain where consciousness comes from.

• 2:38:27Speaker 03

  Right. So this, this even gets back to this question of free will. Can you have free will within a system? Or do you need to step outside of that system?

• 2:38:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  Because if you have just NPCs that are just AI, can they really have free will if they're just code? Well, they can be unpredictable, like with LLMs today, like they, they'll hallucinate stuff and they, they won't know, you won't know exactly what they're saying.

• 2:38:52Danny Jones?

  They can hallucinate?

• 2:38:53Speaker 03

  Well, they create, they make stuff up.

• 2:38:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:38:56Speaker 03

  So they call it those hallucinations.

• 2:38:58Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  Like I first came across this with one of my students, um, you know, had a little, uh, a little assignment and they had the references at the end and it was kind of like generic, he, his answers were kind of generic and I thought, yes, it sounds like chat GPT or something. But then he had some references near the end and I thought, well, at least let me check the references because I mean, the first reference was Bostrom. It's a real reference. Second reference was my buck. That's a real reference. Third reference was something about simulation and religion. And I thought, I've never heard of this reference. Like, I'm an expert on this topic. I designed the course. I wrote my book. Why have I never heard of this article? It looks, you know, like a cool article. I clicked on it. And so you have URLs and for academic articles, they have URLs that are like DOIs.

• 2:39:42Speaker 03

  Digital Object Identifier. So it's just like a URL, but it's like a number. And it clicks into a database and usually all the academic articles and journals have these DOIs. Right. And so I clicked on it and turns out it was fake, like that that URL didn't exist. So then we looked at the the names of the authors of the article. They were real professors. So we emailed them in the UK. One of them was in the UK. And and the journal, I'd never heard of the journal, but it sounded like a real academic journal. So did you guys write an article about simulation and religion in this article? They're like, no, we never wrote anything like that. So literally, they they got real name.

• 2:40:24Speaker 03

  What an LLM does is it basically uses statistics to predict what the next word should be. And so somehow it said, you know, it got like a pretty decent title of the article too, something like simulation and religion, because it was an article, you know, the assignment was about the simulation hypothesis. So it was able to do that, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to predict that that's what it was going to do. So sometimes you have to run a process to see what's going to be the outcome, even if it's deterministic. I mean, LLMs are deterministic. They're based on code, right? So you can, if you have the exact data and the exact code, if you run it, you know, you can reproduce what they they said. It's just that there's so much data and it's it gets so unpredictable

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  based on the prompt, you know, can be different. And what they call the context window, which can include all kinds of hidden prompts, system prompts, things you don't know about that they put into the system. But a lot of physicists will say, well, free will is just randomness in in in the simulation, like, does the particle go through slot one or slot two? That's free will. And I'm like, that's not really free will. Free will would be more like an entity choosing to do something within the simulation. And I think you almost have to step out of the the the context and say that consciousness is the player looking at the game. And the free will, just like if I'm playing a video game, I have the free will to choose whether my character is going to go down this path or that path, but

• 2:41:52Speaker 03

  It may not be completely open. I mean, there are only certain choices that might be available

• 2:41:56Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:41:57Speaker 03

  in the game to me. So I think the NPC versus RPG versions hit at the same same issue that physicists and philosophers have been debating for some time.

• 2:42:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  Which is, does consciousness exist outside of the body? Or as Max Plank says, consciousness is fundamental, material world is derivative. Or is it the opposite? The material world is the real world and consciousness just emerges from putting the neurons together.

• 2:42:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:21Speaker 03

  In the right way. So that's kind of like the the more materialist scientific.

• 2:42:25Danny Jones?

  What was the one before that? Consciousness is fundamental?

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  It's fundamental and the material universe is derivative. So meaning consciousness makes the the the physical universe in some kind of like it exists outside of the physical universe. And which would be the idea of

• 2:42:41Danny Jones?

  Which would work with with simulation.

• 2:42:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, which would be like the player watching the game and it's

• 2:42:47Danny Jones?

  So if it's fundamental, who where did it start?

• 2:42:50Speaker 03

  Well, that's a big question, right? I don't take a strong view of what's outside the simulation. I like to say I can give you theories.

• 2:43:00Danny Jones?

  Firetruck.

• 2:43:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And assumptions, but in terms of, you know, the world that we're in seems like it's built on information. And even like you were describing, there's a guy named Donald Hoffman. I don't know if you've ever

• 2:43:15Danny Jones?

  Yes, I've heard of him.

• 2:43:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he wrote a book, I forget the name of the book now, but you know, he basically came up with this, what he called a user interface idea, which is, he says, if you look at a desktop and you see an icon of a file folder, there's no file folder in the bits, right? That's just a visual representation of the bits.

• 2:43:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a Word file.

• 2:43:38Danny Jones?

  We're putting meaning to it.

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're putting meaning to it.

• 2:43:40Danny Jones?

  Our consciousness creates meaning out of that.

• 2:43:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I think that's very true in simulation hypothesis as well, in the player version. We are taking that information or in the matrix. If you remember in the matrix, there were the guys who were in the matrix and to them, everything seemed real while they were in it. And then remember there was the guy, I think it was Cypher.

• 2:43:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:59Speaker 03

  Was sitting, he was just looking at the the green, you know, the green text and he's saying, I can tell, okay, that's a lady in a red dress. That's this, that's that. Because he's just looking at the raw information and it hasn't yet been rendered. And that's what video games are. I mean, video games are just, we're just sending data down from the server where and then you're using that data to create what looks like an actual virtual world.

• 2:44:21Danny Jones?

  Have you seen, so there's a lot of ties from The Matrix directly to religion. Like the writers of that, like a lot of that stuff is based on biblical stories and like ancient Greek texts and stuff like this.

• 2:44:37Speaker 03

  Well, I know it's based a lot on philosophy, you know, like Plato's cave or.

• 2:44:41Danny Jones?

  So like, there was an interview with the guy who plays Morpheus.

• 2:44:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:44:44Danny Jones?

  And he was talking about how all of the scenes like are directly correlated with like religion.

• 2:44:50Speaker 03

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:44:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's crazy. And like Morpheus is, or not, I'm sorry. I think Neo is supposed to be like Jesus.

• 2:44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they call him the one, right?

• 2:45:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's the one. And Cypher is supposed to be Judas.

• 2:45:05Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:45:07Danny Jones?

  He betrays him, right? And there was a point in that, find the, we should just play this clip because it's really good. It's of Morpheus being interviewed by, oh my God, what's his name?

• 2:45:23Speaker 03

  Neil deGrasse.

• 2:45:24Danny Jones?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, that's who it is.

• 2:45:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:45:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And he, he talks about like, there's a scene where they're walking through a sex club.

• 2:45:32Speaker 03

  In The Matrix.

• 2:45:33Danny Jones?

  In The Matrix, yeah. And he's like, he's like, what?

• 2:45:37Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there have been so many interesting theories about The Matrix.

• 2:45:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:41Speaker 03

  It's a trans allegory. I talk about the AI stuff. Like if you go to that scene where Morpheus explains what happened with AI. He says, we mastered AI in the early 21st century, you know, which is exactly where we are now. And I asked, the Wachowskis were inspired by Philip K. Dick supposedly and his work. So I asked Tessa, his wife, what, what would he think of The Matrix?

• 2:46:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:04Speaker 03

  She said, well, number one, he'd love it because, you know, he likes that. Secondly, he would call his agent to see if he can sue these guys. These are the prophets because so much of his work is about what is real.

• 2:46:16Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:46:16Speaker 03

  Or what is not real. And Morpheus is named after the Greek god of dreams. And I'll tell you a synchronicity story with Morpheus and Jeffrey Kripo and my book.

• 2:46:25Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, find them. Can you find the Matrix part? Yeah, I think I found it. Alright, play it.

• 2:46:30Speaker 07

  Okay, you're my savior. You're my regular Jesus Christ. Yeah, you're my own personal Jesus Christ. That's a script line. That's right there. Okay. Yeah, it's right there. Right there. Okay, but let's not stop there. Mm-hmm. Alright, so, we keep going. There's the part where he gets brought into the Nebuchadnezzar for the first time. He's still rafting, looking around. And there's Joe Joe Pants. Joey Pants. Yeah, Joey Pants, yeah. Uh, Petaliono? Petaliono. Petaliono. And he's there, and he's just looking, and then that character, Cypher, is startled. And he says, "Oh, you scared the bejesus out of me." Yep, that's true. Okay, so hang on. Yeah, that's true, yeah. Oh, hang on. Yeah. Who betrays the group? Cypher. Cypher! Yes. He betrayed? He's the Judas. Who? He's Judas? Yeah, he's the Judas. He's Judas? Yeah. After the bejesus were scared at him. Yeah, yeah. He doesn't have Jesus in him? Doesn't have Jesus in him. Okay, alright, but let me keep going. Keep going. Okay? If you can.

• 2:47:16Speaker 07

  Because you think you know the movie better than I do, and you might. I, I don't know. You might, let's go. Here's the difference. It's my favorite movie, and you've made a hundred movies. Right. So... Right. So... Okay. Okay, alright. So then, everyone sort of decides that he's the one. He's the one. Right, when he's like pulling Trinity up. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. As it comes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is the one. I told you, he is the one. He is the one. Do you believe it now, Trinity?

• 2:47:38Speaker 07

  I don't know what it means to compliment you on exactly imitating what you were paid to do in a movie. And I would say, "Hey, you should be that character." Too late, or even the- No, but the weird thing is, you're not imitating that charac- you were that character. Yes. Even that! Yes. Yes, yes. Um, so, let's fast forward towards the end. Mm-hmm. He gets shot, point blank. Right. By Smith. Yes. Poo-poo, yes. Poo-poo, yes. Then he drops. Drops. He keeps firing into him. Yes. Okay, look, just, alright, do you know how many bullets he put in him? I don't. You don't? I don't. I'll tell you. Tell me. Okay, it requires a little bit of extrapolation. Okay. Okay, the bullets you see, it's like four bullets, point blank to the chest. Okay. At that point, we go back to the Nebuchadnezzar. Mm-hmm. And you see his body responding. Right. Okay, but what if you track the rate that bullets are being fired? Yeah.

• 2:48:23Speaker 07

  And continue them into that scene? Mm-hmm. Then we come out of the scene, and there's a few more bullets that you observe. Right. That's fourteen bullets. Okay. Okay? Okay. There are fourteen stations of the cross.

• 2:48:32Speaker 08

  I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

• 2:48:34Speaker 07

  Now, for the non-Catholics out there, in every church, Catholic church, in the typically in the pillars that surround the main open area from the side areas, mounted facing inward, are fourteen drawings, paintings, relief maps of the fourteen, they're called stages of the cross, okay?

• 2:48:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:48:47Speaker 07

  And they're key moments in Jesus's life. And it's an early movie, really.

• 2:48:52Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 2:48:52Speaker 07

  The word movie doesn't even exist, right?

• 2:48:54Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:48:54Speaker 07

  But a sequence, it's a visual sequence, okay?

• 2:48:56Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 2:48:56Speaker 07

  And it's all of it, and it's, he's tried under Punch's Pilot, he carries the cross, he's put up on the cross, he dies on the cross.

• 2:49:02Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.

• 2:49:03Speaker 07

  So it's all, you can look it up on any, you know.

• 2:49:04Speaker 08

  Okay, fourteen stages of the cross.

• 2:49:05Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:49:05Speaker 08

  Fourteen bullets.

• 2:49:07Speaker 07

  Now.

• 2:49:07Speaker 08

  Interesting.

• 2:49:07Speaker 07

  And he dies.

• 2:49:08Speaker 08

  Right.

• 2:49:08Speaker 07

  Then he's resurrected.

• 2:49:09Speaker 08

  Resurrected, right there.

• 2:49:10Speaker 07

  It comes back more powerful than ever before.

• 2:49:12Speaker 08

  That's right.

• 2:49:13Speaker 07

  Is that not Jesus?

• 2:49:13Speaker 08

  That's Jesus all the time.

• 2:49:14Speaker 07

  Joining the side of God.

• 2:49:15Speaker 08

  That's Jesus all day.

• 2:49:16Speaker 07

  All day.

• 2:49:17Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:49:17Speaker 07

  All day, all night.

• 2:49:18Speaker 08

  So who's Trinity?

• 2:49:20Speaker 07

  Well, okay, so we got it like.

• 2:49:21Speaker 08

  In the Catholic.

• 2:49:22Speaker 07

  That would have to be Mary Magdalene.

• 2:49:24Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 2:49:24Speaker 07

  But I'm thinking.

• 2:49:26Speaker 08

  Let's not go that far. They go to a sex club. That's where they meet.

• 2:49:28Speaker 07

  Was that a sex club?

• 2:49:29Speaker 08

  That's a sex club.

• 2:49:30Speaker 07

  No.

• 2:49:30Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:49:31Speaker 07

  They were just dancing.

• 2:49:31Speaker 08

  No, it's a sex club.

• 2:49:32Speaker 07

  I mean.

• 2:49:32Speaker 08

  Look behind and you're looking deep in the background. They didn't allow them to show all of that, but it's a sex club.

• 2:49:36Speaker 07

  Really?

• 2:49:36Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:49:37Speaker 07

  Okay, Mary Magdalene, right there.

• 2:49:38Speaker 08

  And who's Morpheus?

• 2:49:40Speaker 07

  Uh.

• 2:49:41Speaker 08

  In the, in the Christ mythology.

• 2:49:42Speaker 07

  I know, I'm trying to.

• 2:49:43Speaker 03

  He's John the Baptist, right?

• 2:49:44Speaker 07

  John the Baptist?

• 2:49:44Speaker 08

  He's John the Baptist.

• 2:49:45Speaker 07

  Oh, because John the Baptist knows Jesus is coming.

• 2:49:47Speaker 08

  Yes, he knows who he is.

• 2:49:48Speaker 07

  And sets everything up.

• 2:49:48Speaker 08

  And he's been looking for him.

• 2:49:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, he's been looking for him.

• 2:49:50Speaker 08

  And when he meets him, he goes, "I'm supposed to be baptized by you."

• 2:49:54Speaker 08

  So that's who Morpheus is, in the Christ mythology.

• 2:49:56Speaker 07

  In the Christ.

• 2:49:56Speaker 08

  But there's also mythology, Greek mythology.

• 2:49:59Speaker 07

  Tell me, tell me.

• 2:50:00Speaker 08

  There's, well, Morpheus is the lord of dream. He's the god of dream.

• 2:50:04Speaker 07

  All right.

• 2:50:04Speaker 08

  From Greek mythology, right? Persephone, who's in the second or third movie, who's played by Monica Bellucci.

• 2:50:08Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50:09Speaker 08

  The oracle is Greek.

• 2:50:10Speaker 07

  That's an actual oracle.

• 2:50:11Speaker 08

  The oracle is Greek.

• 2:50:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, I bet we lost her before the second film.

• 2:50:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:14Speaker 07

  She was really a strong character.

• 2:50:15Speaker 08

  Niobe.

• 2:50:16Speaker 07

  There's an element on the periodic table called Niobium.

• 2:50:17Speaker 08

  Is there?

• 2:50:18Speaker 07

  Yes, there is.

• 2:50:18Speaker 03

  Crazy. Well, it's great, because there are so many different aspects of religion and mythology that are wrapped into The Matrix.

• 2:50:26Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:50:26Speaker 03

  Uh, and in fact, this summer, I'm going to be doing a series of screenings of The Matrix in different cities.

• 2:50:32Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50:32Speaker 03

  Uh, with the new, you know, with the new book, The Simulation Hypothesis, comes out. Like, in Boston and Phoenix right now, we have scheduled, and there may be, we're probably gonna do one in L.A.

• 2:50:41Speaker 08

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50:42Speaker 03

  At some point as well. Uh, but there are so many angles you can take on this film, and how people interpret it, and also how they interwove, you know, so many different themes around A.I., around virtual reality.

• 2:50:54Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:50:54Speaker 03

  I mean, the betrayal scene itself is interesting. Uh, and that's one of my favorite scenes, where your cipher. You know, is with Agent Smith and he's sitting there eating the uh was the meat or the steak that he's eating and he goes, Look, I know this isn't real, but man, it feels so good and I don't want to remember nothing, right? I want to just be in this reality because it's great. But I was gonna tell you about a synchronicity related to Morpheus.

• 2:51:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 03

  So when the first edition of my book came out, it was back in like 2019. And but back before we had ChatGPT and so Jeff Kreipel and others put on this uh, Put on this seminar at Esalen every year. It's like an invite only seminar. And that year, and I had released it on the 20th anniversary of The Matrix. Now we're at the 25th anniversary of The Matrix. And so I I mentioned I had talked to Jacques Vallée about it. He gave me a nice blurb. And so I heard this from several people that were there. I actually wasn't there. So they were basically giving Jacques was giving a presentation and it was just before lunch. And so he gives a set of slides and the last slide has my book on there.

• 2:52:07Speaker 03

  And he's like, this guy Rizwan Burke just wrote a book about The Matrix and simulation hypothesis. And he talks about reality being a matrix. And so that was the slide that was up there that everybody's kind of looking at. And then they they end and go outside and they walk to the cafeteria and look, who do they who do they see in the cafeteria? But Morpheus. So Laurence Fishburne was actually sitting there.

• 2:52:27Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:52:28Speaker 03

  And I I heard the story from Jeff Kreipel initially. Uh, and we always joke about it as a synchronicity about me that I wasn't actually present for.

• 2:52:37Danny Jones?

  My gosh, that's so wild.

• 2:52:39Speaker 03

  It was really wild. Yeah. And then I heard it from other people as well. And so.

• 2:52:43Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:52:44Speaker 03

  It was pretty wild.

• 2:52:45Danny Jones?

  That is pretty insane, man. What is your like? Have you ever tried to like contemplate with the with the craziest sort of experiment? That we could do now or in the future to like really test? The simulation theory, like, is there anything like even like, even if it's super speculative, hypothetical, futuristic? Like, what would be?

• 2:53:11Danny Jones?

  The optimal way to test it.

• 2:53:13Speaker 03

  Well, it's an interesting question because the first question is, is it possible to test if we're in a simulation? And then the second question is, should we test if we're in a simulation? And there's been different theories on all of these fronts. Now, one guy is a philosopher named David Chalmers, who's pretty well known. He also wrote about matrix hypothesis back in 2003, it's a year that Bostrom did. And he says that basically if the simulation was perfect, or the virtual reality was perfect, there would be no way to tell. But that's if it was perfect. I mean, any of us who build computer programs know that it's rarely perfect. There's always glitches that come up in there.

• 2:53:57Speaker 03

  And I think a lot of these glitches that we've talked about, whether it's synchronicity, whether it's near death experience, whether it's telepathy, are showing us that we are more likely to be in a simulated world than not. But just because you can't prove we're not in the matrix or in a simulation doesn't mean you can't find evidence that we're in a simulation. So different people have proposed, you know, looking at like the geometry of the simulation. And they found that there was a geometry that makes it looks almost as if the world is built of some kind of a pixel, pixelated structure, like they called lattices, but they go one way versus the other way. So there's that class of looking for pixelated things.

• 2:54:39Speaker 03

  There's also groups of people that are trying to test out if we're, is it, do you need a conscious observer for the collapse of the probability wave?

• 2:54:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:54:51Speaker 03

  And if so, then that's more akin to a video game rendering. So Tom Campbell and a guy at Caltech, Hooman Omadi, I think, you have to look up that name. But and a few other people wrote an article on that. And there's a group trying to perform those experiments at UCal, sorry, at Cal Poly. And I met those guys and it's interesting, they're moving along very slowly. So that's another angle is to test.

• 2:55:23Speaker 03

  You know, do things happen at the moment of observation? Or do you just need measurements? Another group says, well, we should be able to. Another group of experiments is, can we actually overload the system in some ways? Can we overload the computation? Now, where I think it's difficult to devise these tests is if we're thinking about it from a classical computing point of view. I don't think we're running on a Pentium processor. I think it's more likely to be something like a quantum computer. And in a quantum computer, you have bits, but you have qubits.

• 2:56:06Speaker 03

  And these qubits take on multiple values at the same time. So instead of, like, normally a bit is either 1 or 0. Yes. So we only have one of those values. Right. So a qubit, which is what quantum computing is based off of, they have both of those values, 0 or 1, until a certain measurement occurs, which is like an observation from our perspective. So what it means is that the bit is in superposition. Okay, now this is really weird too, but there are quantum computers that companies, Google, Amazon, Microsoft have built. And if you have 2 bits, if you think about it, and both of them have, you know, are in superposition,

• 2:56:47Speaker 03

  that means there's 4 possible values that they can have. And then, you know, if you have 3 bits, it's 8, 2 to the third, and then 16, and, you know, so on from there. And what quantum computers can theoretically do is explore all of these different possibilities and come up with an answer. But.

• 2:57:13Speaker 03

  That's very strange because some of these problems, they grow so big. If they grow exponentially, they grow really big. To the point where it would take a classical computer thousands of years, and in some cases, millions of years, to go through every possibility. Yet, quantum computing can theoretically, and in some cases, it's already been demonstrated, they can solve problems which would take thousands of years. And one of those problems is encryption, which, you know, you might have 64-bit encryption, or you might have different algorithms. Like Bitcoin runs off of SHA 256, but they run it twice. So that's like 512 bits, which is 2 to the 512. Possibilities of values you would have to search.

• 2:57:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:57:58Speaker 03

  The problem is that's more particles than are in the physical universe. So, some people have tried to use this as an argument against simulation to say, "Well, it would take a computer as big as the universe to keep track of all that information." But they're counting on if you have to compute everything, and they're not counting on optimization. Getting right back to our original discussion about the reason there's this collapse is so you only have to render the part that's actually being observed at that point in time. So that's without optimization. But I think quantum computing itself might show us there's something really weird going on here. Now, by itself, it doesn't prove or in a simulation, but it does show that some guys, like David Deutsch, who's a quantum computing physicist at Oxford,

• 2:58:41Speaker 03

  who says he modified Wheeler's phrase, "it from bit", and called it "it from qubit", because basically, the universe seems to be computing. And that's what particles are. They are like bits of information that... But because they're in superposition, and there's all this quantum weirdness, it's almost like the physical universe is a kind of quantum computer in itself.

• 2:59:04Danny Jones?

  Right. But like even the idea of morphic resonance, right? Like a problem being solved on one side of the world, and then simultaneously being solved on the other side of the world. It makes sense, because if you're a computer program trying to conserve energy and processing power, you would just automatically make that... If the problem is solved in one space, it's automatically solved in another space, right?

• 2:59:26Speaker 03

  Right. It's almost like it's caching the solution.

• 2:59:28Danny Jones?

  It's caching the solution in the whatever it is, in this dark matter computational cloud, if you will.

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the computational cloud. Yeah. No, I like that. And it's also possible, like, you know, Native Americans, certain tribes have a saying that like a story stalks the storyteller. And similarly, meaning like, it's like trying to get to you. And similarly with inventors. So maybe there's actually someone outside the simulation that's trying to influence the people inside and trying to send it to multiple people. And one of them gets it. And now it's cached. And now the other people can get access to it.

• 3:00:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:00:05Speaker 03

  Much more easy because now it's in the database, right? Before they were, and it's only when somebody actually intentionally, you know, figures it out here, that it gets into the database that we can access more easily, maybe. Anyway, those are really interesting ideas, I think.

• 3:00:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, definitely. Rizwan, thank you for doing this, man. This has been a mind bending conversation.

• 3:00:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, this has been great. I really enjoyed it. And I'm really happy to be able to be here in person with you.

• 3:00:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Here, hold your book up so people can see the cover.

• 3:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So.

• 3:00:40Danny Jones?

  Hold it up a little bit higher towards this camera.

• 3:00:42Speaker 03

  Oh, this camera. Here we go. So it's the simulation hypothesis. An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and eastern mystics agree we're in a video game. And even if you've seen the old edition, this one is 400 pages and completely new in a lot of places.

• 3:00:57Danny Jones?

  Can people order it now? Or can you preorder it?

• 3:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, they can preorder. By the time this comes out, we may be close to already it being released, but they can preorder it even while now while we're recording it.

• 3:01:06Danny Jones?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks again, man. I really appreciate it. This has been super fun.

• 3:01:10Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:01:11Danny Jones?

  I'll link all the stuff below for everyone. And that's it. Good night, everybody.

• 3:01:44Speaker 01

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