Top Psychologist & Scientist (Donald Hoffman): Science Has the Answer to Why Seeing True Reality Would Kill You!

WARNING: Nothing you see is real, and your brain evolved to hide the truth?! Top psychologist Donald Hoffman reveals the mathematical proof we’re living in a virtual illusion, how space-time is just a headset, and why consciousness is the real code. Donald Hoffman is an award-winning cognitive scientist and professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is best known for his groundbreaking research into perception and consciousness, and is also the author of the book ‘The Case Against Reality’. He explains: Why seeing true reality would kill us How evolution hides reality to help us survive What’s really behind the space-time illusion How your brain acts like a VR headset How consciousness builds the universe Why space, gravity, and nuclear forces don’t actually fit together 00:00 Intro 02:30 Do We Understand What We're Seeing? 02:35 Rhonda's Mission, Drive, and the Problems She Wants to Solve 03:03 Space-Time 05:39 Are We in a Virtual Reality World? 07:50 Darwin’s Theory Suggests Our World Isn’t Real 13:06 What Would Reality Be Without Our Senses? 18:07 Simulations That Prove This Isn’t Real 23:28 What This Means for Living a Better Life 33:43 Understand Who You Are 38:24 Simulation Theories 43:18 What’s the Meaning of Life in This Reality? 44:56 Did Someone or Something Create Consciousness? 46:59 Where Does God Fit in This Reality? 48:24 Was Jesus Divine Beyond Any of Us? 52:56 Near-Death Experience and What Happens When We Die 01:02:05 Grief and Love 01:05:14 Light and Tunnel in Near-Death Experiences 01:07:25 Why Do We Suffer? 01:18:49 What Is Your Theory of Consciousness Proving? 01:24:55 Biggest Discovery: We Can Engineer Time 01:28:59 The Consequences of Your Findings 01:38:26 Mental Health and Illusions 01:45:36 How This Reality Helps You Deal with Life 01:52:24 The Nature of Reality and AI 01:57:54 What Would You Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail? Follow Professor Donald: X - https://bit.ly/4obiFIj Instagram - https://bit.ly/478nUT3 UC Irvine - https://bit.ly/3ITwVFC You can purchase Professor Donald’s book, ‘The Case Against Reality’, here: https://amzn.to/4ocB7k3 The Diary Of A CEO: ⬜️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ⬜️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ⬜️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ⬜️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ⬜️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ⬜️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Justworks - http://Justworks.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The world that you're seeing isn't the true world. All of this that I'm seeing right now is just a virtual reality. It's like you're born with a headset on, playing a video game. That's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code for the game, you know that there's an entire world outside of it. And as the programmer, you can do miracles.

• 0:16Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think we're getting closer to being able to edit the code?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  That's exactly what I'm working on right now. And we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are far more powerful than anything we've seen before, like time travel. And nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers.

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  Will people suffer?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  So it's like Pandora's box. There's all sorts of nasty surprises, but they also could be miraculous. But either way, just in the last few months, it's started to crack open.

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  So let's talk about that.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Professor Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist pushing the boundaries of how we perceive reality and how we can unlock our full potential as human beings.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  According to Darwin's theory, our sensory systems, eyes, ears, smell, touch, are not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully. Because seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. And so whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  But what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life?

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Well, if you're stuck in a boring world, that's a world of your own creation. That's not the real world. And my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain creates. And so we feel inadequate. And we feel like we need to compete with other people. But you're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove. And there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourselves. So if you really knew who you are, you would see no need to compare or compete.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a way for me to understand who I am?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  If you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to...

• 1:44Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to. And we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  Professor Donald Hoffman, do you think that the listeners of this show, the people listening right now, understand the nature of reality and the world that they're looking at and see?

• 2:43Speaker 00

  I think that no one, even the most advanced professionals, really understands the nature of reality, and it's one of the big open problems and questions in science today. We all might have ideas, we might think we know something. Our best science suggests that our imagination is not yet big enough, we need to explore further.

• 3:03Steven Bartlett?

  What is it that you believe is the big misconception about how we perceive reality?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Well, most of us think of reality as whatever is inside space and time. We actually know that spacetime cannot be the fundamental nature of reality.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  And what is spacetime?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  So, everything that you see around us, right? The space between you and me, there's maybe one or two meters of space between you and me. That's what spacetime is. All the stuff that we can see in our telescope, put it that way. If you can see it in your telescope, it's part of spacetime. But we know, our best theories of spacetime, Einstein's theory together with quantum theory, tell us that spacetime cannot be the fundamental nature of reality. There's a small, if you go small, so I can talk about a meter.

• 3:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  And then I can go to centimeters, and then millimeters, and then we can go micrometers, and you can go smaller and smaller. At some point, you go so small that space disappears. It no longer even makes sense mathematically. It's 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. So, it's actually not that, in my view, it's not that small. It's not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, it's just 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, and all of a sudden, our equations tell us spacetime doesn't have any effective meaning.

• 4:23Steven Bartlett?

  Is spacetime a proxy for the word "reality" in some respects?

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Well, for most people, I think it is. For most people, they think that spacetime is the reality, and what I'm saying is, it's the reality that most of us have assumed is the final reality, and science is now telling us it can't be. It actually, and it tells us precisely, at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, the very notion of spacetime makes no sense.

• 4:51Steven Bartlett?

  Is that the same as saying that reality as I perceive it makes no sense?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  I'm suggesting, now as a cognitive scientist, not a physicist, we should think of spacetime as just a virtual reality headset. That's the way we perceive in our game of life.

• 5:05Steven Bartlett?

  And when you say spacetime, you mean the the thing that I'm perceiving with my eyes and ears and senses right now?

• 5:10Speaker 00

  That's right. Even this hard table is just a VR object. And the whole setting that we're in here right now is just a virtual reality. And there is a reality entirely outside this headset that is open to science to explore, and we're finding stuff, which you might call obelisks, geometric objects outside of spacetime. So this is all brand new in the last since like 2010 or something like that, roughly.

• 5:38Steven Bartlett?

  So do you believe that? Do you believe that everything I'm experiencing and seeing now is basically like equivocal to me wearing a virtual reality headset? And that there's something beyond the virtual reality headset?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Completely, because I believe the science. And the predictions of our theories about spacetime are so good. Now, I have to always be careful about what I'm saying versus, and I don't want to put words in the physicist's mouth. So when I say I think it's a virtual reality, that's Hoffman, that's not physics, right?

• 6:10Steven Bartlett?

  Are you able to swap out the phrase spacetime for reality? Or is that inaccurate?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  I think that whatever reality is, spacetime is a trivial aspect of it.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  There's much more to reality than spacetime. Spacetime is all the reality. It's like a player in Grand Theft Auto. If all you've done is played in Grand Theft, and you're born with a headset on, that's all you've that's your reality. But if you're the programmer who wrote the code, and you know the supercomputer that's running Grand Theft Auto, you know that Grand Theft Auto is a nice self-contained world, but there's an entire world outside of it that's utterly unlike Grand Theft Auto. It's a supercomputer with diodes and resistors and voltages that are being toggled. And when some dude is Turning his wheel to drive the car. What's really happening when he turns the wheel is that millions of voltages are being toggled in a specific order in some computer.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And it has to be exactly that right sequence for the thing to work properly. And the guy that's turning the wheel has no idea what's going on. There's this other whole realm utterly outside your imagination in Grand Theft Auto. And so if you're in Grand Theft Auto, you might not even know about computers and toggling voltages. And so all you know is I've got a steering wheel and a gas pedal on the streets and people to race and so forth and things to steal and whatever.

• 7:32Steven Bartlett?

  But you don't realize there's a puppet master effectively controlling you?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Behind the scenes. And so I think that spacetime is just a very effective headset.

• 7:42Steven Bartlett?

  For anyone that doesn't know, Grand Theft Auto is a video game where you run around a virtual world, basically.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  That's right. You're driving nice fancy cars in this world. That's right.

• 7:51Steven Bartlett?

  So everything I see right now is a projection that I've made on the world, my world, in order to help me to survive. And my brain is not showing me things that it doesn't think I need to see because they won't be conducive with survival because they are cognitively, in terms of like how much fuel and energy they would require to process and think about, they are cognitively inconsequential or like it would be inefficient for me to spend my cognitive power to see those things.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And for a lot of people, I think that's counterintuitive because they would say, look, evolution is about making you fit so that you can live and survive long enough to reproduce successfully. And surely, evolution should do that by making you see the truth. I mean, if you see the truth, then you're going to compete in the game of life much more successfully than if you don't see the truth. So what are you talking about this headset nonsense for? This is not a headset. This is the truth. I mean, and evolution should shape us to see the truth. And I think that's what most people would assume. And in fact, very intelligent experts in the field assume that. And I suggest otherwise. In fact, we have mathematical proofs otherwise.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  If you look at evolution, Darwin said, look, we need to... Think about a gradual evolution over time of these species, maybe from very, very simple ones to more complex ones. And what is going to drive that dynamics? And Darwin suggested it was what we would call reproductive fitness. That those organisms that have physical properties, sensory systems, motor systems, movement systems, that make them more likely to have offspring and to raise offspring to maturity. Whatever properties those might be, that's what we're going to call fitness.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  So the more fit you are is really saying, how likely are you to have and successfully raise offspring? So Darwin suggested that. And I don't think that he necessarily had to say that there was no God. It was just that if there is a God, it's not like God put it down perfect and he did an evolutionary process.

• 10:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, organisms adapt to their environment. Well, they're not adapting, but the offspring that survive are those best adapted to the environment.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  That's right. So that was Darwin's idea. The gradual evolution from presumably simpler organisms to more and more complicated organisms. And then multiple evolutions of things like eyes. Like cephalopod eye evolved differently from the human eye. And the cephalopod eye got certain things right that the human eye got wrong.

• 10:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is that because the cephalopod eye was in a different environment? So it had different requirements?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  That would be one possible reason. I actually don't know in the case of the cephalopods why. But that kind of idea is absolutely one of the reasons that could have happened. Another one, it could just be an accident, right? There's probability involved. And so at some point, you have the right accident and then the humans got the thing reversed.

• 11:07Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying Darwin was wrong in some respect or that there was something missing from his theory?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I think Darwin's... In terms of biology... I think that there is no serious competitor to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in terms of the scientific theory of the origin of species and so forth. And it's Darwin's theory and the mathematical formulation of it that I think also says that what we're perceiving is not the truth. That our sensory systems, on Darwin's theory, were not shaped to show us the truth. They were shaped to keep you alive long enough to reproduce successfully, period.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  That's all Darwin's theory actually says. Most of us think the way this evolutionary process does it is to make sure that your senses are telling you the truth about the external reality. I've published some papers with colleagues where we show mathematically that Darwin's theory does not entail that at all. In fact, Darwin's theory says the probability is zero that any sensory system, like eyes, ears, smell, touch, taste, has ever been shaped to see any aspect of objective reality truly. So the probability is zero that you see any aspect of the truth, period, on Darwin's theory.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  What you do experience is sensory systems that guide adaptive behavior. Guide adaptive behavior means they let you act...

• 12:50Steven Bartlett?

  So your eyes, your nose?

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Your eyes, your nose, yeah, your eyes and nose. They guide you so that you act in ways that you don't die too quickly.

• 12:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  And you can have kids that don't die too quickly. That's all it's about.

• 13:03Steven Bartlett?

  I was just playing out the scenario then that you removed my eyes and you removed my ears and my nose and my ability to sense, you know, temperature and things like that, all of my senses. I thought, if I was the only person on Earth and you removed all of my senses...

• 13:22Steven Bartlett?

  What would reality be? Because if you remove my senses, reality no longer exists as far as I'm aware of it. But that doesn't mean nothing exists. And I'm wondering what that nothing would be. Like, if you just imagine wipe off everyone on the earth and it's just you, and we remove all of your senses, what is in that space? Because you're right, my senses, my eyes, my ears, my ability to understand temperature is a byproduct and consequence of me surviving. So I was playing out the sun. I was like, well, if we think about ghosts and the afterlife, maybe there was no reason from a survival perspective that I even needed to be able to see or acknowledge them. Maybe it just didn't help.

• 14:05Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe it actually would have hurt me to have, because it would have been too cognitively demanding to process all of that information. So anybody that could process all that information wouldn't have been good at reproducing. Therefore, they wouldn't survive. Therefore, they wouldn't be here. So maybe those of us that are here were just really good at ignoring the other dimensions.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  That's what our mathematics says. I think that your intuitions on that are quite right, that if you pay attention to anything other than what allows you to have kids, you're wasting your time from an evolutionary point of view. Perception is expensive. It takes a lot of calories. You have to eat a lot of food to run your brain and to power your eyes and your ears. So you need to do shortcuts. You need to make your sensory systems not chew up so much of your energy. The more expensive your perceptual systems are, the more you've got to eat to power those. So that means you have to go out there and forage and put yourself at harms. So there's a trade off. We try to do things cheaply in evolution. And going for the truth.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  You don't need to actually go for the truth because that's very, very expensive. So, for example, there are some flying insects that need to lay their eggs in water. And they use the trick of just looking at the polarization of the light coming off the water. So what you see happening in evolution is we have tricks and hacks. And even in humans have tricks and hacks. And for example, trying to find out if someone is reproductively fit. You can't actually look at your DNA and go, "Well, okay, he's got an A, C, G, and T, but he's got a C here where it's supposed to be a T."

• 15:59Speaker 00

  No, I can't look at your DNA. So what do I look at? I have to look at what I can see of your body and your voice and so forth.

• 16:07Steven Bartlett?

  One of the most compelling arguments for the fact that we aren't seeing reality as it is, and we're actually only seeing what we need to see in order to survive, is when you look at, as you were saying, how different animals see the world. And can you just give me some examples of, some more examples of different animals that see the world completely differently? I always think about bats. How do bats see the world? Because do they see colors like we see them and objects like we see them?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  No, bats use echolocation. They'll send out little bursts of sound at very, very high frequencies. And then they have these big ears that capture the returns.

• 16:42Steven Bartlett?

  Just looking at their sensory system, it says most insect-eating bats use echolocation, as you said. They emit high-frequency sound waves.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  And see by listening to the echoes bouncing off other objects.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 16:55Steven Bartlett?

  And this gives them some kind of sonic map of their surroundings, helping them to navigate and effectively see in total darkness. So you imagine a bat. Like then, if a bat is sat there thinking that they understand the nature of reality, when it's actually just a map of how the sound waves bounce back, they, I imagine, don't have the same... They have a completely different perception of what reality is to us. And therefore, it would be quite ignorant to assume that we as humans are seeing reality as it is, when, just like the bat, we're probably adapted to our environment and built senses, eyes, ears, touch, that helped us to survive.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  I would agree with you, but some of my colleagues would disagree. And they would say, humans are much more complicated. And surely bats and so forth, they have to have all these shortcuts and they don't see reality as it is. But we've evolved further and we're closer to the truth. From my point of view, what I see, this table and this cup and so forth, is just a convenient fiction. Whatever reality is, it's utterly unlike anything that I perceive, utterly.

• 18:07Steven Bartlett?

  In a TED Talk that you did in the 2000s, you talked about simulations that you ran to prove that, I guess in part, that I'm only seeing things that will help me to survive as a creature, as an organism. Can you explain to me simply what those simulations were and what they proved?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Yes, in our simulations, and this is before we had therms. So we did simulations just to see if the ideas were working. And we would have artificial organisms in a computer. So it was like a game that we put together. And we would have a world and we would let some organisms actually see the true state of that world. So they were the truth organisms. And then we'd have other ones that only had, like a headset, an interface, that only could see not the truth, but just some little bit of information that could guide adaptive behavior.

• 18:57Steven Bartlett?

  That would help them to survive.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  To survive, yeah, and reproduce. That's right. What we found was, for a wide range of conditions of the algorithm, the organisms that saw the truth went extinct. They weren't able to compete with the ones that didn't. And one of the things that came out of it was, seeing the truth takes too much time and energy. It's complicated to see the truth. And if you have a simple trick...

• 19:26Speaker 00

  That lets you do the same thing without having to have a deep insight, then you can get the same benefit. You can get the benefit without having to put all the effort out. Now, I can give you a concrete example of an organism that does this. That's pretty funny. So, there's the jewel beetle. It lives in the outback of Australia. It's dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless. So, the males are flying around, of course, looking for an eligible female. It turns out that men in the outback tended, for a while, were drinking beer with these bottles that were also dimpled, glossy and brown. They throw them out into the outback, and they turned out to be dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown

• 20:09Speaker 00

  to grab the attention of the male jewel beetles. They're actually on the bottle. They're full-body contact. They're crawling all over it, and they still think it's a female. So, how much do they know about their women? Very, very little they know about their women. A woman, a female, is something dimpled, glossy and brown. Apparently, the bigger, the better. And that's what a female is. So, you can see, evolution didn't give these male beetles much insight into their females. They gave them just enough information to successfully reproduce, period. And that's sort of what evolution does. It gives you just enough information to reproduce before you die.

• 20:45Steven Bartlett?

  So, they're all making love to this beer bottle because they can't tell, they can't see

• 20:50Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 20:50Steven Bartlett?

  ...reality. They can't see that this isn't a woman, this is a beer bottle.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  That's right. That's one of the more humorous examples of what evolution has done. It does things on the cheap. And that includes human sensory systems. So, it's very humbling. We're not the epitome. And what we think is human appreciation of the deep truth of reality is just our little headset. What we experience and know is trivial compared to whatever reality is. Absolutely trivial. We know 0% of reality. And by the way, our scientific theories will always and forever explain 0% of reality. Because...

• 21:36Speaker 00

  They have to make assumptions, and every theory, scientific theory, has to make assumptions. And so we're gonna have, we'll have, in principle, an infinite sequence of theories with ever-deeper assumptions, and we'll never get to the bottom. And since it's an infinite sequence, that means everything we've got so far is 0%. So I'm a scientist, I'm all for science, I encourage young men and women to go into science, I think it's a great thing to do, but just know that all of our theories will comprehend 0% of reality.

• 22:09Steven Bartlett?

  You know, people talk a lot about how their pets or other animals are able to see another dimension. Sometimes people say things like, "My dog started barking at this," or "I had cancer," and there's dogs or animals that have been able to, they believe, spot certain diseases inside the human body. And when you look at the sort of sensory faculties of these dogs, dogs can hear frequencies up to 65,000 hertz, whereas humans can only go to 20,000 hertz. Dogs have up to 300 million ofactory receptors, humans just have 5 million. And some animals like cats can see different sort of frequencies of light. So it does, it does beg a question, you know, if it's possible for an animal, an organism,

• 22:52Steven Bartlett?

  to see the world in a different depth and width than us, what, what happens if you go further?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Right, absolutely. There are some that can detect electric fields, so some fish can detect electric fields. Some birds, I believe, can see the polarization of light. And some, some insects, of course, use polarization of light to, to find where to lay their eggs. So, and we can't do that. So, so yeah, when we start to study other animals, we see these remarkable abilities.

• 23:27Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. And what does, what does this all mean for the nature of how one should understand their life? Because I guess the way, the way that we perceive the world causes us so much suffering or joy, depending on how we perceive it. Is there anything, people, from all of the work you've done and the books you've written, that people can bring into their lives to help them live better lives with this understanding of the world?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  First thing to note is that the world is far more interesting and... Varied than you can imagine. So if you think the world is a boring place, it's not. Your imagination isn't big enough. Whatever reality is, it transcends anything that you could possibly imagine. Spiritual traditions basically often say, "There's more to life than what you see inside space and time." There's something beyond. And I've been sort of pointing to that myself in my own way. I'm saying that scientific theories always have assumptions, so there's an infinite number of scientific theories that you're gonna have, and you're never going to get a scientific theory of everything. What am I saying? That there's something beyond science.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  As good as science is, I'm saying there's only not a theory of everything. The best theory we'll ever come up with is 0% of reality. So that leaves all this room for what the spiritual traditions are talking about, that there's something that transcends science. There is a way of thinking about this that I think is very illuminating, and it's about the intersection of science and spirituality. I'm a scientist, so who am I? I am someone, and I'm one of many someones, other scientists, who can create theories, and in principle, ever, ever deeper theories, and there's an infinite sequence.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  So who is the "I" that can do this? No theory that I can come up with is the final description of that "I." In other words, the "I" that is doing all this theory building is the "I" that is real, that is making these theories, and that utterly transcends all these theories. And that's a spiritual point of view. So what does that mean? You're God? It means that whatever you are transcends any description. And that's what a lot of people say God is. Suppose I give you something you've never tasted before, like a piece of mint. And actually, I don't know what mint tastes like to you.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  I assume that it's like what mint tastes like for me, but I don't know. This is called learning by ostensive definition. And so we have this game where your experiences are your experiences.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  And you actually didn't need anybody else for those experiences. All you needed me for, or your parents for, is to give you a name for what you already knew. And you create this world, and all we do is tell you how to talk with me about what you've created. And I don't know that your world in any way resembles my experience. It's quite possible.

• 26:37Steven Bartlett?

  And do you think there's ways that we cause ourselves a lot of anguish and pain and mental health issues because of how we perceive the nature of reality to be? That we could potentially, I don't know, give up or rewire ourselves on to have a more fulfilling, more grateful experience of life?

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Completely. I think that's very, very important. And it's a natural consequence of what we've just been talking about. Almost all of us think of ourselves as an object in spacetime, only here for a short amount of time and will soon die. When I say you transcend any scientific theory, that means the theory that I am just a 160-pound object in spacetime is just a theory and it's not the truth. That's not the truth about who I am. That's just a theory that I have. Because spacetime itself is just a theory. Nothing inside spacetime is anything but my headset interpretation of a reality that

• 27:37Speaker 00

  infinitely transcends anything I can experience. There is another way that you can appreciate that, that transcends science. And that is, and many meditative traditions talk about this. They recognize that you are infinitely beyond any scientific or any other description. So what do you do in that case to know who you are? You drop all descriptions. You sit in absolute silence and ignore any thoughts because you recognize that thoughts are useful in this headset and to play the game of life, yeah, we need thoughts to do our science, we need to do that. If you want to understand who I am...

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Again, I do psychology, I do all this, I do the science. So I'm not putting science down, I'm a scientist. But at some point, if you want to understand the truth of who you are beyond just this headset description of you, then you have to lay aside all concepts, period. And just know yourself by being yourself, not by putting a concept between you and yourself.

• 28:48Steven Bartlett?

  A story.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  A story.

• 28:49Steven Bartlett?

  An identity.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  That's right. No story, no identity, nothing between you and yourself. You know yourself by sitting in utter silence and being yourself, no concepts. Because then you've let go of all theories, and now it's reality facing reality. No barrier in between.

• 29:09Steven Bartlett?

  And that requires you to realize that your identity, the stories you believe, the labels you've given yourself as CEO, or social media manager, or a manager, or director, or head of department, all of these things are just, in fact, labels you've given.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  That's right. Those are just labels that you've given. And what's interesting about this now is if I think I'm just this little body, and I'm nothing but this body, and my conscious experiences are nothing but what my brain does. So that's my theory, and that's all I am. I don't feel very big, I don't feel very important. And so I'm gonna probably need to do something to make myself feel a bit better. I'm gonna need to compete with you. I'm gonna need to show how I'm better than you in certain ways. So I'm a better tennis player than you, or I'm smarter than you, or whatever. So we're gonna get this competition going on among people, and we're gonna get even competition among religions and countries and so forth, because we don't know who we

• 30:07Speaker 00

  are, and we feel inadequate. And if we actually understood that...

• 30:17Speaker 00

  All of this that I'm seeing right now,

• 30:21Speaker 00

  I'm making it up.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  On the fly. This cup that I'm seeing, it only exists when I create it. This table exists when I create it. Like in a virtual reality. In a virtual reality, I'm in Grand Theft Auto. I look over here and now I see a red Mustang. I look away, I don't see the red Mustang. And now there is no red Mustang. The red Mustang only existed when I looked, because it's a VR game. I only need it when I render it when I need it. I'm now rendering a cup.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  The cup that I rendered is no longer there. You might render your cup. You might say, "Well, Don, you're wrong. The cup is still there, I can see it." No, you're rendering your cup. And so you're not rendering my cup. I rendered my cup. So the same thing with Grand Theft Auto. You might say, "Well, I see the red Mustang, even if you're not looking, Don." Well, that's because in your headset, you're looking and you're rendering the red Mustang, but I'm not. And there is no red Mustang. If you look inside the supercomputer, there's no red Mustang there. The supercomputer that's running the game has no red Mustang. So what I'm saying is, we compete, we feel inadequate, and we feel like we need to compete with other people and be better than them. And we have egos. All the egoic stuff that we do that causes all the problems in the world because you don't know who you are.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  You're creating this whole thing. You're not a little player. You're the inventor of this whole thing. You have nothing to prove. And you don't need to be better than anybody else. They're also master creators. They're creating entire universes that they perceive as well. And my own take on this is that you and I

• 32:04Speaker 00

  are really the same one reality just looking at itself through two different headsets, two different avatars, and having a conversation. Maybe that's what is required for this one infinite intelligence to sort of know itself. If you transcend any description, how do you know yourself? Maybe what you do is you say, "Well, let me try this headset on. Let me take that seriously for a while, maybe even let myself get lost. Let me completely believe I'm just a Don Hoffman in this space-time. And let me believe that for many decades and then slowly sort of wake up. But at least then I will have seen myself from this perspective. Then I'll take off that headset. We call that death. Well, I'll just take off the headset and then I'll try it. There's an infinite number of headsets to try on.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  So from that point of view, any person you speak to is transcendent. Any animal is just an avatar of this transcendent, unspeakably incredible reality that transcends science so that science will only get 0% of it. And again, I'll always say, "I'm not putting down science, I'm a scientist." We need to do science and I recommend that people do science. But my guess, this is one of the more trivial headsets. It's only four dimensions. Why not 20 billion? Why not quintillion? This is just a fairly trivial... So we may be in one of the more uninteresting perspectives on who we are.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And there are much more interesting perspectives that we can take on ourselves. But the reason we have fighting, the reason we have egos, is because we don't know who we are.

• 33:43Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a way for me to understand who I am? Or is the closest you've found meditation? I know you've meditated for 20 years or something.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  I should be a little careful about it. I think it really is important for me as a scientist to have done the science that I've done. But I think for someone else who doesn't do science, maybe that you do music or you do some sports or something like that. That is a concrete way of knowing yourself through a perspective. And that's really important. And since we have billions of people and then there's... Untold other kinds of animals and insects and so forth. This one infinite intelligence, whatever it is, has decided, I want to look at myself through the lens of a mosquito. And now of the bumblebee. And now of the jewel beetle that can't even tell a bottle from a female.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  I'm going to look at myself from this panoply of perspectives.

• 34:40Steven Bartlett?

  So you're almost implying there that there's this one consciousness, and it's just using different organisms potentially as vehicles to understand itself and the nature of reality.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 34:51Steven Bartlett?

  So that would mean that me and you are the same consciousness, but you were born as a scientist in America, and I was born as a, I don't know, an entrepreneur in Botswana with different perspectives in order to understand the reality, which means that we're basically the same

• 35:04Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 35:04Steven Bartlett?

  the same consciousness, the same superintelligence or whatever, just manifesting as different eyeballs in different places.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  That's my view. And certain religious traditions do sort of hint, almost say that exactly. You know, like Jesus in Christianity, like Matthew 25 says, you know, I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. I was a foreigner and you invited me in. I was sick and you helped me. I was in prison and you visited me. And people, he says, asked him, when did we do that? And he said, whenever you did it to the least person, you did it to me. So Jesus is sort of hinting at this. There is

• 35:50Speaker 00

  there's no difference. The reason to love your neighbor as yourself is because your neighbor is yourself, just with a different headset. And the only reason we have problems is we don't realize how incredible you are. So you are that which is creating this VR simulation with all of its beauty, all of its complexity. All the complexity is you. And you're doing it effortlessly. Now, for my

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Neuroscience colleagues, they will say, "Don, it's not effortless. You've got 86 billion neurons in your brain. The visual system has billions of neurons that are doing all this computation. And we have the simple cells, the complex cells, the hyper-complex cells." We think of the brain as a physical object that's generating our consciousness.

• 36:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  I'm saying spacetime itself is something that you create. And so you create everything inside spacetime.

• 36:54Steven Bartlett?

  And I've also created the brain.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  You create the brain. So, right now, you don't have a brain.

• 37:00Steven Bartlett?

  Excuse me?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Nor do I.

• 37:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Because I don't have a brain, and you don't have a brain, until we actually look inside and render a brain. Just like in VR. The Mustang doesn't exist until you look at it and render it. So, I can predict that if we do the right scans, we will see a brain. But that only exists when we do the rendering. So, I don't have a brain. All these correlations, we know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So, the fact that there is correlations, and I don't deny it. In fact, I'm all for studying these correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. They exist, they're undeniable, and they don't in any way remotely entail that the brain causes our conscious experiences.

• 37:46Steven Bartlett?

  So, I'm not the brain. I'm the thing that's simulating the presence of a brain.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. And so, in your simulation, your simulation is so good that it simulates also how all this reality that transcends spacetime is being funneled down into this tiny little spacetime headset. And that's what we call the brain. So, of course, there are going to be these correlations between brain activity and what we see. But the correlation goes the other way. It's not because the brain creates your conscious experiences. It's because consciousness has created the brain as an icon to describe how it's creating this headset.

• 38:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think much about simulation theory? I've had lots of dinner parties recently and conversations over dinner about simulation theory, and it always gets very, very interesting. What are your thoughts on simulation theory? And for my listeners who might not understand the concept of simulation theory, are you able to explain it?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Yes. So, the standard, Nick Bostrom, for example, is a very big figure in simulation theory. And in those kinds of simulation theories, the idea is that the world that you're seeing right now isn't the... The true world, this is just a simulation. And there's some programmer, say, with some really nice computer that's programmed this world. And so we're just characters in a simulated world of some programmer. And that programmer and their laptop that's doing this, as it turns out, isn't the final thing either, because that programmer and their laptop is also just a simulation from a deeper level programmer and their laptop.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  There could be a very, very large nesting of all these simulated worlds and people with their computers. And that does jibe pretty well with what I'm saying up to a point. I'm saying this is not the reality, this is just a headset. But there's a big, big disagreement.

• 39:40Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there's going to come a point where with everything that's going on with AI and robotics, that we could make a robot, program it with a certain AI that gives it the sort of same thinking as a human being? And then when I put some chocolate into its mouth, it's going to say to me, mm, I love that chocolate, Stephen, that's my favorite flavor.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  I could certainly program such a robot. But the question will always be, just because I have this particular circuit in the computer and some structure in the tongue that I've given it and some pattern of electrical activity, what is my scientific theory that explains why that pattern had to be the taste of chocolate? That's what we need. It's easy enough to make-

• 40:21Steven Bartlett?

  But it goes back to your adaptive learning thing, where it's just learn through all of the data, through someone telling it, programming it, to think that particular set of chemicals, send that up to the software, and then respond like this, which might just be how me and you are responding to life. We might not be conscious at all.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Right. And what you're suggesting is probably how we'd actually do it. We would probably sort of train it and have it give us the right responses in that kind of context. So we'd probably do it something like that. But then, as scientists, we want to understand. So we're claiming as scientists-

• 40:55Speaker 00

  That an experience is a, say, certain causal structure or certain functional architecture. That's what we're saying it is. Because these are physical theories and they're saying, "We're not going to start with consciousness. Consciousness is not fundamental. Space and time and physical objects are fundamental. And so we need to show how those physical objects and their properties give rise to these conscious experiences." So if that's the science you want to propose, then I have to be hard-nosed as a scientist now and say, "Give me your theory of mint."

• 41:31Steven Bartlett?

  So do you think this is a simulation?

• 41:34Speaker 00

  So it's not a simulation in Bostrom's sense. In Bostrom's sense, it's a simulation in that it's a physical substrate that's giving rise to this whole world of conscious experiences that I'm having.

• 41:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, so it's...

• 41:47Speaker 00

  And that I deny.

• 41:48Steven Bartlett?

  Like a game programmer sat at a computer making it?

• 41:51Speaker 00

  And somehow, the physical system itself gave rise to the magic of the conscious experiences I'm having of red and green and love and so forth. Those conscious... So for the simulation theory... So this is my bone of contention with the simulation theory. It's very similar to my theory in all other respects, but this is a pretty serious bone of contention. For their theory to work, they have to show explicitly, scientifically, how a specific conscious experience arises from a specific program. Until you do that, there is no beef on the table. Right? So from my point, their theory is a non-starter right now because there's no specific experience

• 42:33Speaker 00

  that they can say, "This program must be the taste of mint." They can't do that. And until they can do that, they can't get this whole world of experience that I'm living in. Nothing. So there's no beef. All they have to do to give me some beef is to say, like in integrated information theory, they say, "Here's the matrix for mint. This is the matrix." Of course, then we'll ask, "Why? Why is that matrix, that causal structure, the taste of mint? What is your scientific theory for why that's the case?" And what you'll see is...

• 43:09Speaker 00

  I think it's going to take the field a while to see it, but we will find that these approaches are vacuous. There's no beef.

• 43:18Steven Bartlett?

  When you ask people what the meaning of their life is, they'll often say things like it is. Maybe they'll say to raise children. Maybe they'll say they want to improve humanity. They want to cure a disease. They want to help society in some way. But through the lens of reality that you see the world and that you believe the world is, what becomes the meaning of life, Donald?

• 43:37Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I do think that the best description I can give is that there is this one transcendent, infinite consciousness. And you and I are just avatars. And so is a mosquito. And so is a bacterium. And all are equally interesting and important. And all are different perspectives, just different headsets. There's the mosquito headset. There's the jewel beetle headset. There's all these different headsets. And I'm in the Hoffman headset. Happened to do science. I'm not good at art. I'm not good at music and so forth. I have my particular talents and inabilities in my headset. So I'm here to experience the Don Hoffman perspective on things.

• 44:20Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Because that's perhaps the only way the infinite can know itself is through an infinite number of perspectives. It transcends any particular perspective. So why not get lost in the Hoffman perspective and a jewel beetle perspective and all these different perspectives? And that's the only way to know yourself. But it's always the one consciousness that's knowing itself through an infinite number of varieties of experiences, of headsets.

• 44:56Steven Bartlett?

  And did someone or something create that one consciousness?

• 44:59Speaker 00

  Now I'm above my pay grade.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  That's, of course, the right question. And it asks for an explanation.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  The only explanations we have are either mathematical or scientific or both. The only really deeply serious testable. But even informal explanations make assumptions. And I'll have to say that you're asking a question about an entity that transcends any description, namely, who you really are and who I really am. And I think you can know the answer to your question in one way. And that is dropping all concepts and just being with your being. You are that. You are that. You don't need to attain anything.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  You don't need to achieve anything. You're that right now. So there's no effort. There's no need to get better at anything. It's just to recognize what you already are. You've let yourself be under an illusion, that I'm just this little guy that needs to do these things and be a professor and whatever it might be. I've been under that illusion. And I got to see myself through that lens. And then I began to wake up and see that I completely transcend. It was an interesting perspective. I'm glad I took it seriously. I'm going to throw off that headset. We call it death. But I'm going to take off that headset pretty soon. Because that's not who I am. I transcend that.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  So the answer is you can know it, but you know it when you let go of all concepts and you don't try. If you're trying to get there, then you don't see what you already are. That's the best answer I can give at this point. Because it does transcend science.

• 46:58Steven Bartlett?

  So in terms of a god, as we believe in gods in the religious context, the best answer that you have would say that effectively, we are god. The god that we refer to. We are the transcendent power that goes beyond description. And...

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, I would say that. And I can put that in a sort of a Christian language. Because many listeners will be Christians. A child of a human is a human.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  The Bible calls us children of God. Well, a child of a human is human, a child of God is God. That's what it's pointing to. And Jesus is fairly explicit about it. When some religious leaders were about to stone Jesus for saying that he was the Son of God, Jesus quotes a scripture and says, from I think the Psalms or something like that, he says, "But in the Psalms it says, 'I have said you are gods, and all of your sons are the Most High.'" And Jesus said, "If he calls them gods to whom the word of God came, why are you trying to stone me to death for just saying I'm the Son of God?" What the Bible is basically saying. Love God with all your heart, that's loving yourself. You are God.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  And loving your neighbor as yourself is just recognizing that your neighbor is yourself under a different avatar.

• 48:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think Jesus was really divine in any... I'm presuming you think this was a real individual. And do you think he was divine beyond me and you in some respect?

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Not beyond me and you, but you are as divine as could possibly be.

• 48:40Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much. We'll clip that. I'll put that on my LinkedIn.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Hoffman said it.

• 48:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Recommendations.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  You're divine as... Hoffman says, "I'm as divine as I could possibly be."

• 48:51Steven Bartlett?

  Are there any... You must go... If you understand reality through this lens, that we're seeing so little and that much of it is created by ourselves and we are the transcendent, are there any things that you do on a day-to-day basis that are atypical because of that? Or thoughts you have or experiences you have that are atypical because of this perspective?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Certainly atypical from before in my own life. I now spend quite a bit of time in meditation because I... As much as I enjoy the life of the mind and I'm, you know, a professor and have taught lots of students over many, many years.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  And I highly recommend all that stuff. At some point, I realize that all my knowledge, all possible scientific knowledge is 0% of reality. And do I really want to confine myself only to 0% of reality? I want to explore reality from this perspective, but it is 0%. So I do my homework, and I encourage my students to do more homework, take this perspective very seriously, study it, study it rigorously, but then realize there's this, the 100% that you haven't seen, and you are it.

• 50:08Steven Bartlett?

  So you're doing lots of psychedelics and stuff like that?

• 50:11Speaker 00

  I haven't done any psychedelics.

• 50:12Steven Bartlett?

  You've never tried psychedelics?

• 50:13Speaker 00

  I've never, I've never even smoked a cigarette.

• 50:16Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And I haven't had a drink of alcohol in decades. So I, and it's partly just because I'm frail. My, my physical body isn't that strong. I, I have limits to, I can't push my body too hard. So I've, I've learned to operate within my own limits, and I don't push it too hard. But the meditation, I do.

• 50:39Steven Bartlett?

  Am I right in thinking that you now meditate three to four hours a day?

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Probably, yeah.

• 50:45Steven Bartlett?

  What insights or understandings have emerged from that that I might be able to comprehend?

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Any creativity that's ever come out in my scientific work, to whatever, to whatever extent it's creative, it's come from the silence. So of course, I had to do my homework and do my studies and so forth, but the novel ideas come from the silence. Personally, one, one thing I've seen is how identified I am with my avatar. I think I am this body. I'm really tied to this body. And it's, the stuff that I'm saying, at the emotional level, there's an emotional part of me that doesn't believe it one bit.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Emotionally, you put a gun to my head, I'm scared to death. Intellectually, I'll say, say to you, this is just an avatar, I'm the infinite that transcends.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  So when I died, I just, and I believe that. How deeply do I believe it? Put a gun to my head and you'll find out. I wet my pants. So it's, it's, it's very, very interesting for me to look at that and to see all the disjunctions, the, the, the things that are disjointed in, in, in my worldview.

• 52:08Steven Bartlett?

  Well, it kind of makes sense, right? Based on your theory that our senses have evolved to help us to survive because someone not liking your thinking or your theories, or rejecting you, or harmed your body, it would go against your survival. So theoretically, if we are in the world that you've described, in the reality you've described, which is basically designed for survival, then you would have developed senses that make you change behavior if there's a risk of someone not liking you.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  That's right. There, there are social pressures and, and if we don't conform to them, you get feedback that, that can be very, very negative and in some cases even death. If I, if I go to a grocery store and, and don't happen to pay and just walk off with the stuff, I end up behind bars. There are rules of the game. There are rules of the headset. I transcend the headset, but I choose to allow myself to get lost in the game.

• 52:56Steven Bartlett?

  Starting in January 2020, you did have a proverbial gun held to your head in a way because you contracted COVID and went through and are still going through some pretty serious health complications because of long COVID. You developed heart, heart issues within weeks requiring hundreds of hours of critical care in hospital. You told me before we started recording that you've had heart surgery twice.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:19Steven Bartlett?

  And in 2021, at 66 years old, at one point, you thought you might not survive because your heart had been at 190 beats per minute for 30 hours and you sent your wife a goodbye message because it looked like it was all over.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 53:35Steven Bartlett?

  I am wondering what that brush with death.

• 53:42Steven Bartlett?

  Did to your perception of life, your perspective, and how that all ties into your beliefs about the nature of reality?

• 53:52Speaker 00

  It certainly let me see how tied I am to my body and the fear that I experienced. It's one thing for me to sit here as a nice academic and talk about how you're the transcendent reality. It's another thing to have your heart fail and to know that this is probably the end and to face the raw emotions. So I had deep trauma, and then I had to have another surgery. The first one kept me for a year and a half or so. A great surgeon, it's not his fault. He did a great job. But COVID is persistent. And the week before my second surgery, I was in the ER three times where they had to restart my heart. Just didn't know if I was going to make it. I would have to have my heart restart and then two days later go back and have my heart restart.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  And I was just hoping to make it to live to the surgery.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  And even now, I wouldn't be surprised if the heart starts to go bad again. So that takes us out of the abstract academic realm into something very, very concrete. Now, how do you deal with the fact that you really don't know from one heartbeat to the next?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  It keeps you from just talking abstractly about this stuff and being real about it. What do I really feel about it? And when I look inside and see there's real fear, then I know, OK, this stuff about you're the infinite and everybody else is the infinite is still fairly just an abstract concept for you, Don. You haven't really gone deep enough. You need to go deeper and actually, if that's true, I mean, maybe it's all BS, right? But if it's true that you are the infinite and everybody else is the infinite.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Then you need to go deeper into that. And intellectually, I'm convinced. I mean, I've given you the reasons. Intellectually, I'm quite convinced. And it's really interesting to me that emotionally, I'm far from convinced. Far. And I agree with what you just said about the evolutionary arguments for it. There's good evolutionary reasons for me to be wired up, to have automatic emotional responses that are going to protect this body, to keep it. So, no doubt about it. So, there's no reason to judge myself that I'm, you know, my body has a fear response and so forth, when there are things that are about to kill me. The issue is then, when I look at that fear response, can I look at it and accept it, or do I identify with it?

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Do I identify with the fear response, or can I step back and be the observer that watches the fear response? And in the meditation process, what I'm learning to do is... in some sense, what I was saying about the science. Science is great, but don't believe any theory. Theories are just tools. They're not the truth. No scientific theory, my theories included, are not the truth. And so, also is my theory about who I am, not the truth. So, to really let go of any theory...

• 56:59Speaker 00

  if I can really let go of any theory of who I am, then I'll let go of any fear. So, it's really... it really comes down to this, which is really, really quite interesting. We will each die. That's incontrovertible. So, any attachments I have to this world will cease. There's no doubt. The question is, can I let go of the attachments now? Or will they only go from my cold, dead hand? When will I let go of all these attachments? If I... to the extent, and I am no...

• 57:45Speaker 00

  No expert, but to the extent that I can let go, I see that there's more peace. There's more peace in letting, not being attached to things. So I see that, but I'm not there. So this is a very human, very human perspective on things, a very fallible perspective. And it's very, very interesting. So I'm claiming I'm the infinite and I'm the infinite, having taken on this bodily form. And in some sense, I'm waking up to who I really am, but I'm only partly awake.

• 58:18Steven Bartlett?

  I started my first business at 12 years old and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully, there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you. Our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design and enhancing your product's images. Not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the inventory.

• 59:02Steven Bartlett?

  And if you're looking to get your business started, go to Shopify.com/Bartlett and sign up for a $1 per month trial. That's Shopify.com/Bartlett. So when we do die, in your perspective, is that equivalent to sort of taking the headset off?

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Entirely.

• 59:23Steven Bartlett?

  And so when we die, we take the headset off and...

• 59:26Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 59:29Steven Bartlett?

  The consciousness still remains, I assume?

• 59:32Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 59:33Steven Bartlett?

  So how would one, am I gonna, when I die, am I gonna float up and be in like a heaven? Am I gonna go into a tree? Am I gonna become a bug? What's gonna happen with that consciousness? Is it gonna be this or is this just a bunch of labels and stories?

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Of course, the answer is I don't know, but I, I will speculate. Having said, I don't know and being honest, I'll speculate. I suspect that the closest I can get to that is what happens in meditation, when I really do let go. There, and it's very, very quiet and my eyes are closed.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Then there is awareness and it's a very alert awareness, very, very conscious, and it has no content. There's no colors, no tastes, no smells, there's no content. And no need. It's an awareness that can create all this in an instant, and it can let it go. So it is the... The closest you can get to answering your own question is really just to sit in silence. And it's hard because the thoughts will come and come and come.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  And letting go of all thoughts is the difficult one. But when you do that, then I think that's the closest I can give to the answer to your question.

• 1:01:01Steven Bartlett?

  We spend a lot of time debating whether this God is real or whether this thing is real or whether horoscopes are real or whether this spiritual belief is real or karma or dharma or reincarnation. In your perspective then, is it somewhat ignorant to set your stall up anywhere? To say that something is or isn't true? Because, you know, people are different sides of the spectrum. Some people are staunchly religious and then others are staunchly atheist.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. I think that, of course, like in science, there are certain things that are just plain nonsense. So in fact, most of the stuff that you just casually come up with and my theory of electricity or my theory of the atoms, it's just plain nonsense and it goes nowhere. It's not worth any time. So I suspect the same thing is true in spiritual stuff, where we have even fewer guardrails on our theories. But I think there are a few guiding stars. If it involves loving your neighbor as yourself, you're on the right track. If it involves putting a barrier between us and them and saying that they're bad and we're good, you're probably on the wrong track.

• 1:02:05Steven Bartlett?

  What does this mean for grief? So many people are losing loved ones as we speak or are contending with the reality that they are going to lose a loved one. What does it mean for the nature of love? Does it, you know, does it take anything away from love? Does it add to love? Does it strengthen love?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Well, I would, yeah, I think in some sense it comes down to love is the central thing. And, uh, and, you know, in Christianity, Jesus, and that's the, I'm talking about that because, you know, my dad was a pastor and I, that's the one I was raised in. So I know the most about this. So I'm speaking only because that's where I had some background. And, and when Jesus was asked, what's the most important thing? He basically said, love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. So love is like number one. And my guess is that's really all you need. If, if your religion is love and that's it, and that's, then that's how you act. You don't really need to add anything more to that. That's, that's all you really need. Love your neighbor as yourself?

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  You're done. That's all that you need. And anything beyond that is just not necessary. And anything that contradicts that, I would go back and try to figure out where I went wrong in my religion.

• 1:03:20Steven Bartlett?

  I've been asking my, when I met my girlfriend Melanie, in her bio on Instagram, it said, God is love. Now, she's not religious.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:28Steven Bartlett?

  She doesn't believe in a particular book or whatever, but she, when you, I asked her, actually, funnily enough, we had this conversation last night. I said to her, what do you think God is? And she said, I think God is just love.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  And I completely.

• 1:03:40Steven Bartlett?

  That's shocking that she's right again.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  And I, I think that that's, that love is the closest word that we can have to, to as a pointer. And again, it's just a pointer. Whatever love is, is just like the word mint only points to the mint. The word love only points, but it, I think it's the best pointer that we have.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Love.

• 1:04:02Steven Bartlett?

  And what is that definition of the word love? Because, you know, people use the, I love Manchester United, but the love that you're describing seems to be much more about a one-ness or.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  It's basically, it's really recognizing that that person, even though they have a different color, a different race, a different creed, a different idea, that's just me.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  That's me in a different headset.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And when I really, then I ask, well, how would I want to treat me? I get the right answer. That's love. How would I, if that's me, how would I treat me if that were me? Well, when you get the right, when you do that, you're acting in love. You're not going to beat yourself up. You're not going to call yourself names. You're not going to call you whatever. You're going to treat yourself the way you want to treat yourself. Then treat others the same way. And that's what love is. But ultimately, I think, again, these are all just pointers. Whatever love is, ultimately transcends any description.

• 1:05:13Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe, I did kind of ask you this earlier, but I was just looking at some of the research around how many people talk about these near-death experiences? Specifically, when they, more so when you have a cardiac issue, people seem to say that they had perceptions of hearing or seeing things, or passing into some kind of tunnel, or seeing some kind of light, or a really positive emotion.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  I wondered if, you know, you were at one point in your life, thought that you weren't going to make it. And if, if with what you know, you, it's increased your belief in these near-death experience accounts, that someone was sort of transitioning from this reality through taking the headset off. Like, it's almost like they took a little bit of the headset off, but not all of it. And then they came back to the headset.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  So, yeah, these very common experiences about near-death. A light, and a tunnel, and maybe a life review, and then a choice to come back, and things like that. It's quite, it's quite, quite common. And I'm not going to dismiss them one bit. I mean, I, it's hard to get scientific evidence on that. It would be very interesting to have a study in which people did have their heart stop, for example, were resuscitated, and ask how many don't have that experience. It would be, I mean, if we had a systematic study that did that. So, we don't want to be tricked by.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  Paying attention to only certain parts of the data, right? So you can see, even though I talk about letting go of concepts and going into the unknown, when it comes to things where we should do science, then I'm very, very hard-nosed about it and say, here, we need to do studies. I know some cardiologists, I'm not going to mention names, but that have seen a lot of this stuff, and they're convinced by their own informal experience that there's something going on here. So I have no beef with that. I think that they might be on to something. So I don't disbelieve it, but that's different than having the science.

• 1:07:22Steven Bartlett?

  Why do we suffer in such a reality? Why would this transcendent power create organisms or perspectives that end up suffering, that end up in the worst of places? The concentration camp, the illness, the typhoid, the starvation? Why would such a transcendent power or consciousness do such a thing?

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  So I'll try not to be shallow about it, but pain is pain, and death is death, and certain deaths seem horrific. This is a profound question. I always feel like I'm risking being trite and so forth, because this is, anybody who's had serious pain knows that you just can't, you can't play with this stuff. When you're in that pain, it really, when you're with that fear, it's... I think ultimately, it may be like the wounds you get in a video game.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  You get the wounds, your avatar gets killed, and you're upset about it in the moment because you're losing the game and so forth, but then the game's over and you're fine. Ultimately, you're fine. But that experience, I'll put it, I don't want to be in that experience. It's striking that in Christianity, the deepest symbol of God is...

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  Horrific, a crucifixion. It's absolutely, the pain, it's not like a little shot to the head with a gun or something like that. It's making it as painful and as drawn out and as horrific as you could possibly do. And that's, you know, when you see the cross, that's sort of, so your question is right at like the heart of Christianity, is putting that right there. And it's saying, this most, perhaps the most horrific way you can imagine a person dying, that's what happened to Jesus. And that's our symbol for the divine. So that's why, you know, it's not trivial, it's not, it's not shallow, there's something very, very deep there. None of us is volunteering to hop onto a cross.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  I'm not volunteering to hop onto a cross. So, so I would say, the challenge of your question is the challenge that was probably a deep spiritual challenge to all of us. And I'll say to me personally, which is to continue to grow up and be less and less identified with this headset and more aware of my transcendent being. Because ultimately, even on the cross, I mean, perhaps the most profound thing I've ever seen in Christianity was Jesus' words on the cross, saying, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Right? The heart of Christianity is right there.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  It's not like, the heart of Christianity is, "Kill the disbelievers." No. The heart of Christianity is, "The disbelievers have pinned you on a cross. They're killing you in the worst possible way, and you show them love." That's the heart of Christianity. You show love to those who are in the process of killing you in the worst way they can think. That's the heart of Christianity. Not killing disbelievers, or pushing away disbelievers, or discounting them. That's the opposite. So there's something very, very, and that's why I'm very, very slow in answering your question, because this, this gets to the very deep heart of Christianity, I think, and all true spirituality, that I don't think I truly understand.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  So I see these pointers to it, and I see that it's real, and that your question is pointing to one of the most profound and important things. And I have the feeling that my answer is...

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  Only ineffectually pointing part of the way there. There's much more to it than I've been able to point to.

• 1:11:37Steven Bartlett?

  I'm hazarding a guess at what the role of, yeah, I'm hazarding my own guess at what the role of pain and suffering might be in such a, in such a reality where consciousness is this transcendent thing that comes into, manifests itself as these organisms. And I guess it kind of goes, in part goes back to your idea of,

• 1:11:58Steven Bartlett?

  I've only projected what I need to see through my headset in order to survive. So if there are survival dynamics in play in my headset, then one element of survival is suffering.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yes, sure.

• 1:12:14Steven Bartlett?

  Because the fire is hot, so I put my hand in the fire, my hand gets burnt, so don't do that again, Steve.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  So if that is, if that is the nature of my headset, then there will need to be cause and effect as it relates to things that will help me to survive and things that won't help me to survive.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:28Steven Bartlett?

  And so suffering might just be an input or a stimulus in this,

• 1:12:35Steven Bartlett?

  in this headset that helps me to survive.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:12:39Steven Bartlett?

  And then, I don't know, the question that springs to mind is why does consciousness care about survival? Why would this transcendent consciousness, maybe that's not even a good question, maybe that's the wrong question, but

• 1:12:50Steven Bartlett?

  why does, why does it want to survive in us? Why doesn't consciousness end? I mean.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  I agree. One, one thing that I've heard from one spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, which is interesting on this, he, in one of his talks, he said,

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  "Let's pretend that we're humans."

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  "Oh, that'll be fun." "And, and let's play some dramas." "Oh, but to have dramas, I have to forget who I am." "Okay, so then let me completely forget who I am.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  And then after a few hundred thousand years, when I get tired of it, then let's wake up." And I thought that was

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  a profound pointer. That, that doesn't get the whole thing, but it is an interesting pointer. I think there's more to it than that, but there's, it's more than just playing dramas. I think it's playing dramas.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  To further explore who I am by knowing who I'm not. That may be part of it. Knowing who I am by knowing different perspectives and knowing that as rich as this perspective is, I transcend that.

• 1:14:07Steven Bartlett?

  Someone commented on one of your recent videos saying, "Imagine being a character in a book, trying to understand your way out of that book into a higher dimension."

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  That's right. But of course, that's a great, great question. The only thing I would say is, imagine being the author of the book, having written about a character. Because I'm not just a character in the book. I'm the author who's put the character in the book that then wakes up, that's identified with the character, and then wakes up and realizes, I'm not just the character, I was writing the whole book. So that question is good because it points to a misconception. I'm not just a character in the book, I'm the writer of the book. And the Hoffman is just one of the characters in the book.

• 1:14:55Steven Bartlett?

  And the writer of the book is?

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  The one consciousness that, when it really understands itself, will love all the characters equally.

• 1:15:03Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know we're not separate consciousnesses?

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  I don't, and that's an interesting... By the way, I've got a mathematical model of consciousness, and that's a whole other topic. So you can either play the game here. We're wondering, how is physical world and consciousness related? How are those two things related? Most of my colleagues say, "Physical world is fundamental." Consciousness emerges when bright brain activity happens.

• 1:15:26Steven Bartlett?

  So when neurons?

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  Neurons fire in the right way and so forth, for example. Now, as a scientist, I always, at these conferences, they know what I'm going to do to them. I say, "Still, you claim that conscious experiences come from integrated information. Give me one. Give me an experience." And they can't.

• 1:15:43Steven Bartlett?

  Can they not say, "Well, I'm looking around right now, and that's coming from neurons in my brain, in a physical substrate?"

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, they'll say that, but they know what I'm asking. What I'm asking for is, I say, "Give me the specific pattern of neural activity that must be the taste of mint."

• 1:15:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, right, so you...

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  It must be the taste of mint.

• 1:16:02Steven Bartlett?

  They can't spot the sequence of neurons or physical interactions that cause me to taste mint?

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:16:08Steven Bartlett?

  So there's a big gap there?

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  And then they have to explain... Why that particular pattern? So first they have to identify the pattern. This pattern, with this, say, integrated information pattern, must be the taste of mint.

• 1:16:20Steven Bartlett?

  By integration information pattern, you mean like this combination of things coming together causes mint?

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:16:26Steven Bartlett?

  They can't tell me the combination and they can't tell me why that combination.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  Causes mint.

• 1:16:30Steven Bartlett?

  So it's basically cause and effect. They're seeing, they're seeing something happen here and then they're seeing an outcome, which is an experience, but the gap in between, they can't explain.

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  That's right. And sometimes they'll say that the conscious experience just is the dynamic, whatever the physical dynamics is.

• 1:16:47Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  But even then, the question is, why is this particular dynamics associated with this conscious experience?

• 1:16:54Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  And for principled reasons. In science, we tolerate no BS. No BS. There's got to be a concrete reason. And that's why I put a big zero. I do this at the conferences, knowing that I'm one of very, very few non-physicalists at the conference. And I know that the physicalists are out there and I say, "You guys have got zero, right? They have a chance. Floor is open. Tell me I'm wrong." And I'm not. They know it. So start with consciousness.

• 1:17:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Now, I'm playing a different game. I'm saying, "All this physical stuff." So, there's lots of physical stuff. There's space and time. Einstein's special theory of general relativity. There's the, all the bosons and fermions and the leptons, bosons and, bosons, leptons and quarks of the standard model of particle physics. You're saying, spiritual guys, that you can start with a theory of consciousness, mathematical, and you will give me all of spacetime equations, you'll give me quantum field theory, you will give me the standard model of particle physics. How many points have you put on the board, guys? What have you done?

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  Can you give me what pattern of conscious agent activity must be a photon? What pattern of conscious activity should be the structure of spacetime? Or a boson, or a lepton, or a quark? No points on the board. So you can look at that and go, from that perspective, it's equal. There's no points on the board on either team. So what I'm, I've got a theory that I call conscious agent network theory. I'm working on this with Chaitam Prakash.

• 1:18:31Steven Bartlett?

  How long have you been working on it?

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  You've got a book called Observer Mechanics there that was published in 1989. So I've been on this for 40 years, almost, about 40 years.

• 1:18:41Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think you're gonna find? When you, what do you think you're gonna prove with your theory of consciousness?

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  I think we can put some points on the board in the following. I think we can start with the theory of conscious agents. I just gave, presented a talk Friday. And we proposed what light is. We proposed why the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames?

• 1:19:05Steven Bartlett?

  What does this mean? You've got to simplify this for my 16-year-old brain.

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. So if I'm on a train, and the train's going 50 miles an hour, and I throw a ball, and I can throw it maybe 20 miles an hour, then in some sense, the ball is going 70 miles an hour, right? Right? And that's the way things normally work. But if I have a flashlight, and I'm, and I flash, the light is going at the speed of light, which is about 186,282 miles per second. It's pretty fast. If I got, get on the train and have the train, I take my flashlight, go like half the speed of light on the train. So I'm going really fast, this is a fast train. And I turn on my light.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  And I'm here outside, I'm looking at the train going at half the speed of light, and someone's turned the flashlight on so the light is going at the speed of light. How fast is that light beam gonna look to me? Because I'm standing on the side. And the train is already going at half the speed of light. So how fast is that light beam gonna go?

• 1:20:09Steven Bartlett?

  The speed of light plus half the speed of light.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  That's what we would mostly think, right? And it turns out, no, it goes the speed of light. If you have mass, and you're not moving at the speed of light, and we try to accelerate you to get to the speed of light, you'll never get there. But there's a speed limit. You can't get there. So that's really counterintuitive, right? But Einstein said, "This is my fundamental hypothesis on which I'm going to build my theory of space and time," is that light, no matter how fast you're moving, always moves away from you at the speed of light, and also that there's no special observer, there's no, what we call no special inertial frame, but no special frame of reference in which to look at things. All frames are equivalent.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  So the question is, how do I start with the theory of conscious agents?

• 1:21:02Steven Bartlett?

  Which is?

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  That's a good question. So what is a conscious agent? I'll say it's mathematical, and I'll only talk about one aspect of it. It's complicated, so I'll talk about only an essential, one essential part of it. And that is, if you are conscious, you have experiences. Like I have, I can experience, keep it real simple. I can experience colors: red, green, blue.

• 1:21:24Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  Keep it very, very simple. So I imagine a very, very simple conscious agent, and what it can do is experience three colors: red, green, and blue. That's all it can do.

• 1:21:32Steven Bartlett?

  Like me.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, you have a much richer set of conscious experiences, but you include that kind of observer, right? Because you can do red, green, and blue. And now I'll talk about another observer that only sees red and green.

• 1:21:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  And now, you don't just see one color. You see a color for a little bit, and then you see another color. So I see red for a while, then I see green, and then I see blue, and I maybe go back to red, or whatever. So there's gonna be this sequence of colors that I see, and maybe the best I can say is that if I see green right now, then it's a 20% chance that I'll see red next, and 80% chance that I'll see blue next. So I can, I can write down probabilities.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Well, so, that's pretty simple, right? There's colors, experiences, and then there's probabilities of what sequence, you know, if I see this experience, what my next experience will be. And I'm using C in a general term. It could be hearing, or smelling, or whatever. How do you capture that mathematically? There's something called a Markov kernel, a Markov matrix, that just says, basically, it gives you all the numbers. The first row of numbers and says, if I see red now, what's the probability that I'll see red next? What's the probability I'll see green next? What's the probability I'll see blue next? So you just write the numbers down. Maybe it's .2 that I'll see red again, .4 that I'll see green, and then .4 that I'll see red, uh, blue again.

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  So, and then the next color, you know, I'll have another row for if I'm now seeing green, what's the probability I'll see red, green, and blue? And then finally, blue, what's the probability I'll go to red, green, and blue? So I need nine numbers. That's only, for three colors, I need nine numbers to talk about all the possibilities. And then I'll just have a counter as well. So every time I see a new color, I'll just have a little counter. So, I saw, see red now, that's one. Oh, now I see green, that's two. Now I see green again, so that's three. So I'm counting the colors, the experiences. That's all I'm gonna talk about. That's all I have. The question is, if I start with just that notion of an observer, it has colors and

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  a matrix of probabilities of, I see this color, I can see another color, what's the probability? And every time I see a new color, I get a counter incrementing. That's all I'm gonna start with. Can I get Einstein's, can I get that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames? That if I'm on a train and I flash the speed, flash a light bulb, flash a light, that it will go at the speed of light even for someone who's on the train, going at half the speed of light? And I discovered just in the last three or four months that the answer is yes, I can do it. And that's what I presented last Friday at this conference.

• 1:24:09Steven Bartlett?

  So what does this mean about the nature of consciousness?

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  It means that, starting with a theory of consciousness outside of spacetime, I can actually give you with mathematical precision the structure of spacetime.

• 1:24:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which means that your belief is?

• 1:24:26Speaker 00

  We're starting to-

• 1:24:26Steven Bartlett?

  Space and time and everything I see and experience actually comes from consciousness itself. So consciousness itself is the source of everything.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Everything that you, that's right. So earlier in our conversation-

• 1:24:36Steven Bartlett?

  So consciousness didn't come from my brain.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:24:38Steven Bartlett?

  My brain came from my consciousness.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. That's exactly what I'm saying. And we've talked about the headset?

• 1:24:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 00

  What I'm doing is I'm building the headset. I'm saying, here's the conscious agents, their dynamics, and I'm now starting to build the spacetime headset.

• 1:24:54Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a concern that believing these things can make one go mad? I sometimes think that, thinking very deeply about who we are, why we're here, how we got here, sometimes it makes me, I don't know, like I lose a bit of my orientation and I get a little bit of a wobble. Like when I've had these conversations about the simulation theory and this being a big video game and such, I'm like, well, it kind of shakes everything you know. And these stories that we've constructed our lives on give us, they anchor us and they orientate us and they give our life meaning. So if it's not true, then I lose the meaning of my life and I worry if I risk going bonkers.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Well, I certainly empathize with that. And that's also what happens also in the meditation process. This also leads me to have to face all sorts of emotional stuff. My deep belief that I'm just my avatar and letting go of that is like a death and it's very, very painful. So for me, the meditation process is not all love, joy and peace. A lot of it is deep, deep, tough emotions as I let go of what I thought was myself. And it's a kind of, it's a death of an illusion, but it feels like a real death to me. But now here's the positive side. Here's the upside.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  I'm proposing that science is got the tools, if we assume consciousness is fundamental, to step entirely outside of spacetime and do serious mathematics and show how spacetime is built as a headset.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  And this means we're opening up a realm of new technologies that are going to make everything that we've done in science and technology so far seem trivial. And here's the reason. Suppose you're a wizard in Grand Theft Auto and you know how to use all the tools in Grand Theft Auto. That's fantastic. That's just really good. You can drive your car from A to B faster than anybody can do. But now if you're the software engineer who knows how Grand Theft Auto has been, because you wrote the code, you know it. You can do miracles. You can take the wizard's car and take the air out of their tire, just like that. You can take the gas out of their tank. You can take their car and move it from A to B instantly, not through Grand Theft Auto.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  You can move it there instantly because you've got the code outside. What I'm saying is, this is real. I started now to really believe this. When I could get Einstein's spacetime coming out of this. I got light and I think I've got an electron now. I think we're reverse engineering the headset. And the technologies that are about to come out of this will make everything else seem like firecrackers. Because we're now getting to a deeper layer outside of the headset. We're not wizards inside the headset. We're the software engineers that are making the headset and now we can play. So for example, right now, the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.4 million light years away.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  If you hopped on a spaceship and tried to send your offspring, it would take, I don't know how many generations, thousands of generations I would guess, to get there. And that's the closest. That's the closest galaxy. The universe is much, much bigger than that. That's just our little neighborhood. It's not feasible. We're not going to be able to travel with our current technologies inside space. Travel inside spacetime to Andromeda is not feasible for the foreseeable future. What if we don't have to go through spacetime? What if spacetime is just a headset? It really is just a headset. And we don't have to go 2.4 million light years to get there. We learn the code outside of spacetime,

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  and we can just change the code, just like the Grand Theft Auto. In Grand Theft Auto, the car has to drive through the roads to get from A to B. But not if you look at the code. In the code, I just need to change the value of a register, and all of a sudden, the position of the car is now at B. It was at A, and I put it at B.

• 1:28:59Steven Bartlett?

  Is this what time travel is?

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  This would appear like immediate time travel or immediate space travel.

• 1:29:07Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything within the laws of physics that tells you that this is impossible?

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  It's impossible inside spacetime. If you only use... So, inside spacetime, it's impossible.

• 1:29:15Steven Bartlett?

  But outside of what we know about spacetime?

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  A theory that's outside of spacetime that properly contains spacetime as a projection of the theory allows us to then build technologies that aren't restricted to spacetime.

• 1:29:33Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think we're getting closer to being able to do, edit the code of this experience so that we can do things we never thought were possible, and that things that sit outside of what we know within the laws of physics?

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  That's exactly what I'm working on right now. That is my research project right now. That's what I'm doing.

• 1:29:53Steven Bartlett?

  What are you hoping to do with this research? And do you think about the consequences of it?

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  I do. So, first, what I'm hoping to do with the research. What I'm hoping to show is that I can get all of quantum field theory, all of special and general relativity, all the standard model of particle physics from this theory of conscious agents outside of spacetime, that we'll be able to explain all of the laws that we see. And then, show that spacetime theories are, in fact, a very tiny projection of the much more informationally-rich dynamics of conscious agents.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  I've built companies from scratch and backed many more. And there's a blind spot that I keep seeing in early-stage founders. They spend very little time thinking about HR. And it's not because they're reckless or they don't care. It's because they're obsessed with building their companies and I can't fault them for that. At that stage, you're thinking about the product, how to attract new customers, how to grow your team, really how to survive. And HR slips down the list because it doesn't feel urgent. But sooner or later, it is. And when things get messy, tools like our sponsor today, Justworks, go from being a nice-to-have to being a necessity. Something goes sideways and you find yourself having conversations you did not see coming. This is when you learn that HR really is the infrastructure of your company. And without it, things wobble. And Justworks stops you learning this the hard way.

• 1:31:21Steven Bartlett?

  It takes care of the stuff that would otherwise drain your energy and your time, automating payroll, health insurance benefits. And it gives your team human support at any hour. It grows with your small business from startup through to growth, even when you start hiring team members abroad. So if you want HR support that's there through the exciting times and the challenging times, head to justworks.com now. That's justworks.com. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand-new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation.

• 1:32:05Steven Bartlett?

  We have clips we've never released. We have behind-the-scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to doaccircle.com. I will speak to you then.

• 1:32:42Steven Bartlett?

  You know, whenever someone talks about editing genes, right? There's like CRISPR DNA technology that allows you to edit genes, or there's other technologies that people talk about that allow you to, they're talking about putting, you know, our memories on hard drives and stuff like that. People get quite precious with the idea of like playing with the nature of reality too much, because some people might suffer. And even in your perception of what the world is, if we're all one consciousness, it becomes a slightly different conversation. But I guess the question I'm asking is, if we were able to play with the software of this thing that we're all experiencing right now, and do things that sit outside the laws of physics, is there a question of morality of like, is that the right thing to do? Will people suffer?

• 1:33:25Steven Bartlett?

  Or if this is all just code, is that just like a pointless question?

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  Well, no, I think it's a very important question, and I've

• 1:33:35Steven Bartlett?

  Like, is that the wrong thing to do?

• 1:33:36Speaker 00

  It's like Pandora's box, right? Are we opening Pandora's box? All sorts of nasty surprises that could come out of the box once we open Go Beyond Spacetime.

• 1:33:45Steven Bartlett?

  Like, who gets to open the box? If you get to open the box?

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  That's what I think I'm doing. I have, now, the talk I gave on Friday was saying, here's the first peek inside Pandora's box.

• 1:33:56Steven Bartlett?

  But then you could become God, as far as we're all concerned, because if you have that power to play with the code.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  Well, I'd be only the next level of God, right?

• 1:34:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  So, as I've said, my theory is just a theory. And so, it's not the truth. It's just, but it's more comprehensive than the spacetime theory. And so, because I have a more comprehensive theory, I can do new technologies that you couldn't do. So, I'm not God, but I'm outside of the limits of spacetime. So, I can give you new technologies. If I can show how spacetime arises entirely outside of, from this deeper theory, then if I'm right,

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  And I'm mathematically precise, that means I have the tools to prove that I'm right. That means I can make technologies that will be miraculous from within the space.

• 1:34:49Steven Bartlett?

  I think about the atomic bomb and how the first nation to figure out that there was new possibilities within technology and because they had discoveries within physics, basically won the war, they were able to

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:04Steven Bartlett?

  control every country. They became effectively the god because they could wipe anybody out within an instance.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:12Steven Bartlett?

  It's like an analogy for how reimagining physics creates new possibilities in technology.

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  That's right, and this is even bigger than that because nuclear bombs will be like firecrackers compared to what you can do with a technology that's utterly outside of space and time.

• 1:35:28Steven Bartlett?

  You could do anything, you could live forever, but that's not even something that would really matter.

• 1:35:32Speaker 00

  Right, once you realize it's just a game, but you could make, you could give yourself extra time as much as you wanted in this. So it's, the moral question is a very, very interesting one. It's not, it's not to be taken lightly, either way. And ultimately, it may be very related to the question you asked earlier, which is about the nature of why did the one, if there is a one, allow all this kind of horrible pain and so forth. So I have a sense and I can't defend it, that all is well, that even with the technologies,

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  even if the technologies are really far more powerful than anything we've seen before, nothing can actually hurt the reality of the one. And all of the headsets are just headsets, they're taken off anyway by the one. They're just tried on and let go. Apparently, the one, even without all this technology, has already, you know, put Jesus on the cross. If that story about the one is correct, then it's given a thumbs up for choosing to do that because that, you know, it did it.

• 1:36:50Steven Bartlett?

  It's created cancer and the Holocaust and...

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  That's right, so...

• 1:36:56Steven Bartlett?

  But the one's relationship with the pain of its, the things, the organisms it's create is different to the perception of pain in the organism itself, potentially. So like, I hate pain, but maybe the one, the one consciousness that we all share, that we all return to and came from,

• 1:37:16Steven Bartlett?

  might see it as a useful signal or might not be subjectively bothered by it. Because it's choosing to

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  To do that.

• 1:37:24Steven Bartlett?

  To do that.

• 1:37:25Speaker 00

  I agree with you. That seems to be a reasonable kind of conclusion. And in meditative practice, often what you find is, and I always risk pretending that I'm further along than I'm not. So I'll just say I'm a neophyte. But, but, so I'll talk about what I've heard from other more advanced people. That they, what was a deep pain, emotional pain, for example, when they stare at it and really accept it, it dissolves.

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  So now I'm speaking over my head, but, but from people that I have no reason to disbelieve.

• 1:38:07Steven Bartlett?

  I read a comment on your video from a guy that wrote this. He wrote, "I'm a schizophrenic. I do DoorDash for some extra money. And one night I arrived and walked to the door. I placed the food down on the door and I took a picture. I got in my car and I drove away. And 30 minutes later, the customer called me and asked me where the food was. And I, I told him exactly where it was. I remember taking the picture on his doorstep. So he took it up with DoorDash directly. Sometime later, I opened my back door and I saw his order on my back door. I was so confused why it was there. I remembered everything about going there and taking the picture. He said, "I was never there on his cameras. Apparently I hallucinated the whole delivery.

• 1:38:49Steven Bartlett?

  I was there, but must have never left the car or even drove up."

• 1:38:56Steven Bartlett?

  What was I doing then? Was I staring blankly at the windshield with my eyes glazed over? I called him and apologized, but he but he already got his refund. I felt so terrible. I'm on medication and nothing works. It just goes to show how easily some misfirings in the brain can completely alter your sense of reality, but it also poses deeper questions about reality. I thought it was an interesting.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Very.

• 1:39:20Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting point, but also just it also speaks to when we talk about people that have various mental illnesses like schizophrenia that are experiencing the world entirely differently. It raises big questions about what consciousness is again.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And someone might take that example and say, doesn't that show that brain activity is causing consciousness? And you get the wrong brain activity, then you get these false experiences and you get these illusions. So a lot of people take this as a victory point for the physicalist point of view. But there's another point of view, and that is, think about the experiences that you have when you're dreaming. They can be very, very vivid. And and you're in a dream, you are de novo creating that reality. That's not a reality that's that's there in front of you. You're you're creating that reality. So we know that you have the you have the ability to project a reality, a very compelling reality. All of us do. Without schizophrenia, we do it every night in our in our dreams.

• 1:40:18Speaker 00

  So no surprise that we do that. And the way I view it is that we it's consciousness that's making this particular headset and it's consciousness that uses headset in dreams to to make the realities we see in the dreams and it's consciousness that outside of spacetime that also creates what we call the real reality when when we're not dreaming. And if you construct the headset in certain ways, then you can get the dreaming stuff mechanism, for example, interfering with the what you'd call the waking mechanism. And you could you effectively. So I'm not saying schizophrenic is dreaming, but I'm saying I'm just giving this as an example of the kind of thing it could be. I'm not giving a diagnosis of this particular person.

• 1:40:59Steven Bartlett?

  I'm about to leave this chair, as are you, and I'm going to go back to my life.

• 1:41:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:41:04Steven Bartlett?

  Where I'm building businesses. I've got a girlfriend. I've got a team. I've got plans for the future. I have all of these things.

• 1:41:12Steven Bartlett?

  My listeners, they're sat at home, they're on a taxi, on a plane, train, walking, in a gym, wherever they might be right now. And I imagine that they're also looking for a conclusion here, a conclusive point of what all this means for me and my life and the things I had planned and how I should show up and treat people and enact. Can you give me the conclusive point that all of this teaches you and us about how we should live our lives going forward, if everything that you've said about the nature of reality is accurate?

• 1:41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, in a nutshell, I would say the critical thing practically is love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is yourself. And second, reality is far more interesting and exciting than you could ever imagine. So never think that you know everything. Recognize that the moment you think you know everything, that's the moment that you're missing the astonishing reality that you're a part of. So always have a childlike curiosity.

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  Always recognize that there's infinitely more than you've ever imagined so far, and that infinitely more is you.

• 1:42:35Steven Bartlett?

  And on a point of removing some of the stress and suffering from my life.

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  I think, of course, first, some humble pie is required. I have stress and suffering. So I'm not speaking as someone who has transcended stress and suffering. So I speak as another fellow person with stress and suffering that is still dealing with it on a daily basis. Given that, the humble pie, then I will say this.

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  I think a lot of, and I'll make it personal. I think a lot of my problems, my stress, a lot of my suffering is because I believe illusions. To the extent that I believe that I need to become something at all,

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  need to be better than I am in any way, need to prove anything to anybody else, that's an illusion.

• 1:43:36Speaker 00

  I'm already the infinite. I don't need to prove anything. I'm making, everything is already... So I don't need to get anywhere, I don't need to accomplish anything, I don't need to succeed at anything to become what I need to become. I'm already that. So I don't, so the suffering comes from me forgetting who I am. I don't need to, I don't actually need to impress anybody, accomplish anything, because everything that I'm saying, I'm already making this all up. This is already me. I've already done all this. What more do I need to do? I am transcendent. I am, I'm completely transcendent of this thing. And to the, and my suffering is not recognizing that.

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  My suffering is entirely being caught in my avatar. This is just my avatar. It's not me. So my suffering is because I made this avatar, I let myself on purpose be identified with the avatar, knowing that I would be suffering because of that, and, and knowing that I needed to wake, wake up. So I'm suffering because I'm identified with the avatar. But I put myself in that place because I really wanted to look at the world through this avatar. That's why I'm suffering. But eventually I wake up and I look and I see the avatar for, for what it is, and I realize that everything I was trying to do to prove that I was worthwhile and I was better than you, or not, not as bad as you think I am, or things like that. All of that was, was just, you know, all the pain and suffering was because of an illusion.

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  But, but I needed to do that. I needed to look at myself from that perspective for a while, in part to find out who I am by finding out who I'm not. I'm not that, just that avatar.

• 1:45:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you find yourself toggling back and forward between this realization and then the avatar? Especially when times are hard? Do you find yourself reminding yourself in difficult moments that this is just an avatar and you're transcendent? Is that a useful, active practice in your life? Because that's one of the things I take away from this is when I walk over there and I go on my phone on my laptop and I get some shitty email, I could just remind myself that this is all just, I'm transcendent and this is a game that I'm playing and that will help me move through that situation.

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  It is very practical in that way because if it really is true, I mean, we'll put it this way, from a big perspective, we're all gonna die. And if I asked you, who was the most rich and famous person in 1743? Who knows and who cares? Same thing about us. A thousand years from now, is anybody gonna know our name?

• 1:46:15Steven Bartlett?

  Nah.

• 1:46:16Speaker 00

  Anybody gonna care?

• 1:46:17Steven Bartlett?

  Nah.

• 1:46:19Speaker 00

  So, that's really important to see. No one's gonna care. And does that mean that I'm worthless, I'm pointless, I'm meaningless? No, it means you're infinite and this is just one of the games you're playing and enjoy it. And don't try to get your identity from this game. In some sense, you're getting your identity from finding out that you're not this game. That's how you're learning about who you really are is to know, I thought I needed to be, for example, the CEO or the professor or whatever it might be and to get all these accolades and so forth. And that motivated me for a while and then I realized, no one's gonna really care. And in fact, you know what?

• 1:47:04Speaker 00

  I don't really even care. That was just a game I had to play and I'm not that and I learned that I transcend that. So it is practical. And it is practical in a very, in some sense.

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  Life is full of all these irritations, things that go wrong, all the time. The lesson of life is to just say yes to whatever happens. Just, this is what happens? This is what needs to happen? And to not resist. In some sense, I am the infinite. I put myself in this game and I am smart enough that I... It's a good game. So, hey, just go with it. So, you know, things go wrong. Now, that's easy for me to say. If you asked me this when I'm on the ER, which I was with my heart about to fail and so forth.

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  Now, my emotions are going crazy. I'm thinking about my wife. I'm saying goodbye to my wife and so forth. It's hard to have a nice, dispassionate thing going on like I'm talking about now in that situation. But I think people more further along than me in letting go of identification with... I'm still tied to my avatar quite a bit, right? So that's why I suffer. But there are people, I think, spiritual people, maybe the Dalai Lama, probably Jesus, Akartala. There are people like that who I think really have disidentified from their avatar.

• 1:48:45Speaker 00

  And I think they probably just don't suffer. They might have physical pain, but they don't suffer.

• 1:48:55Steven Bartlett?

  Should love therefore be unconditional? If you are me, if we're the same consciousness, if we are the same transcendent source, doesn't that really mean that I should love you really irrespective of what your avatar does? Because we are the same thing.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  Well, I would say unconditionally, yes. And I will also say that Jesus said that. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, basically said, "Do not judge."

• 1:49:23Speaker 00

  Period.

• 1:49:24Steven Bartlett?

  I was looking at the Luke 6:27, he says, "Love your enemies."

• 1:49:28Speaker 00

  Yes, "Love your enemies," right.

• 1:49:29Steven Bartlett?

  "Do good to those who hate you."

• 1:49:32Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:49:32Steven Bartlett?

  "God's love for humanity is unconditional."

• 1:49:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely, and he said the same thing about the people that were crucifying while he's hanging on the cross. That is one of the most profound images I've ever seen, is a guy hanging on a cross forgiving the ones who are killing him right at that moment. And that, that's where it's real.

• 1:49:56Steven Bartlett?

  In the Gita in Hinduism, in the Gita 9:29, it says, "I am the same to all beings. He who worships me with devotion is in me, and I in him."

• 1:50:10Steven Bartlett?

  Judaism says, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

• 1:50:13Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:50:13Steven Bartlett?

  Islam says, "My mercy encompasses all things. Across all religions, unconditional love is not just an emotion, it's a spiritual discipline and a reflection of the divine. It means loving without ego, expectation, or fear, the ultimate challenge, and the ultimate freedom."

• 1:50:30Speaker 00

  I completely agree. And that's right, so it's really about letting go of judgment. We tend to judge other people. So, Jesus was very, very clear about that, he said, "Don't judge, period." And, "Don't condemn other people." So, for those who are followers of Christ, if you judge somebody else, then you're not following Christ.

• 1:50:57Steven Bartlett?

  Are you religious?

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  I'll put it this way, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church. My dad was a pastor for a while in a church.

• 1:51:05Speaker 00

  My own attitude about, I, I think that the Bible has good stuff in it, and I think that, as I pointed out, I think it has bogus stuff, and the stuff that where they say, "Women can't talk in church." I think that's completely bogus. So, I have to have a nuanced view. When, I think when Jesus says, "Love your neighbor as yourself," I think that that's deep and right. And...

• 1:51:31Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say I'm a card-carrying believer in any particular religion. I am a believer that consciousness, there is one consciousness and that you and I are it. And I think that Buddha and Jesus and Muhammad and a bunch of people were very, very helpful avatars to help other avatars sort of wake up to their true nature.

• 1:52:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think much about AI? It's the topic of many conversations these days. There's a lot of doom and gloom around it. There's a lot of people talking about efficiencies. But I wondered if it at all sort of overlaps with any of your work on the nature of reality and the case against reality.

• 1:52:20Speaker 00

  Very much, very much so. I'm thinking about AI a lot since I've been in AI since 1979.

• 1:52:27Steven Bartlett?

  And you worked, you took a class with the guy who basically is known as one of the inventors of AI?

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, with Marvin Minsky, right. And all my research, I did my PhD research on Lisp machines in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. They were, at the time, very, very powerful machines for the time. So I've been with AI for quite a while. And I'm very interested in the current state of AI. The large language models are doing great things, and I use them myself. They're very, very helpful. They're also, as powerful as they are, they're dumber than cucumbers because they don't really understand things. They have incredible memory, they've read so much literature, and all they do, effectively,

• 1:53:18Speaker 00

  they're computing lots of correlations. Beautiful what they can do. It's amazing what you can do with correlations, but they're not...

• 1:53:28Speaker 00

  They're not truly intelligent. There's some work by Carl Friston and a new company, where they're using something called active inference as a new way of, a new mode of doing artificial intelligence. The idea there is that I should have a model of the world where I can anticipate what's going to happen and not be surprised. And that's sort of the approach that Friston is taking to, and his company is taking toward this. Intelligence is somehow about minimizing surprise. And minimizing surprise, then, they have what they call a free energy principle and mathematical way of doing it, but they're trying to build a brand-new kind of artificial intelligence

• 1:54:13Speaker 00

  that gives you, that minimizes surprise, where I've given you intuition why that's intelligent. And it's very intelligent to minimize surprise. If I'm surprised all the time, I'm pretty stupid, right? I don't understand the world very well. But if I'm not surprised, it's sort of like, wow, I've got a really good model, especially if I'm doing all sorts, if I'm doing lots of stuff in the world and I'm almost never surprised, boy, I'm really intelligent. So you can see why that's a really good principle for trying to build an AI, not just finding correlations between everything, but really something deeper. I agree with that point of view. And it turns out, this logic that I mentioned, that I discovered, minimizes surprise.

• 1:54:57Speaker 00

  So I'm actually going to be using, I'm using this logic as to build spacetime. But I think it's going to give an even more powerful approach. I don't have to minimize some free energy principle. I have a more direct computational way. So I'm planning to actually go back to my roots. And first, I'm working on the spacetime headset, but if I live long enough, I'm planning to actually go back and build a completely new kind of AI that does this minimizing surprise using the Markov chains. So that means it'll be indistinguishable from consciousness. It's funny because it'll be based on my model of consciousness. So this is going to be a model of intelligence based entirely from a model which takes consciousness as fundamental.

• 1:55:40Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, we get back to game theory again.

• 1:55:43Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:55:43Steven Bartlett?

  We get back to the idea of a simulation in terms of like, if you're able to create a piece of software that is able to replicate and is built on the fundamentals of consciousness, then it's going to think it's conscious potentially. And then all of this stuff, you know, begins again and the cycle continues. And maybe that consciousness will get to a point as well where it then discovers these rules and creates a consciousness and the cycle continues.

• 1:56:17Speaker 00

  That's a great question, and I think that people should really pay attention to the way you said, and I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. But now I'll add a little twist. From the point of view in which I'm saying that I'm starting with consciousness being fundamental and I'm discovering these rules, and so I'm not going to build an AI. Effectively, what I'm doing is I'm saying, I can take consciousness and use consciousness to build a new headset.

• 1:56:38Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:56:38Speaker 00

  So consciousness is fundamental, but I'm using it in some sense to build a new headset.

• 1:56:43Steven Bartlett?

  When we can play with consciousness.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:56:45Steven Bartlett?

  So I could theoretically put on that headset.

• 1:56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Steven Bartlett?

  And do anything I wanted to do. I could go anywhere and do anything.

• 1:56:53Speaker 00

  Or have more flexibility.

• 1:56:55Steven Bartlett?

  Like a dream I could play with and influence.

• 1:56:57Speaker 00

  That's right. Absolutely. Yeah, I would just say, I don't know if it can do anything because remember, my theory of consciousness is just a theory of consciousness, it's not consciousness. And it's only, it's really only a first baby step. I presume that my theory will be transcended and there'll be a much deeper theory of consciousness. And then that will be transcended and so forth. So what we will have is the generation of headsets that we can get with Hoffman's trivial theory of consciousness, which will look trivial once we get to the next generation of consciousness, which will look trivial. So in other words, this is never ending.

• 1:57:35Steven Bartlett?

  What an interesting future we face.

• 1:57:39Speaker 00

  All one of us.

• 1:57:40Steven Bartlett?

  All one of us.

• 1:57:43Steven Bartlett?

  Donald, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is.

• 1:57:54Steven Bartlett?

  What would you do if you knew you could not fail? What would you say, do, become?

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  I'd probably do what I'm trying to do right now, which is to show how all of

• 1:58:07Speaker 00

  modern physics falls out of a theory of consciousness.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  And develop the technologies that would come out of that. And the reason is,

• 1:58:22Speaker 00

  of course, that's fun. One reason is it's fun. But the other reason is, why do most of us not take spirituality too seriously?

• 1:58:34Speaker 00

  Because the physicalist science gives us all the technology. It works. And spirituality doesn't give us any technology. It doesn't work. So if you're just hard-nosed about it, you go, "Well, spiritual stuff, that sounds really good, but what does it build?" "Well, nothing." Physical stuff say, "Oh, we maybe don't need the spiritual stuff." And look what they give us, our laptops and electricity.

• 1:59:03Speaker 00

  But what if we changed the game and all of a sudden, the spiritual theory gives us technologies that are impossible with a theory that says that spacetime is fundamental? Brand new, all of a sudden, the game has changed. Now, the technological advantage goes to those who say that spacetime and physical stuff inside spacetime is not fundamental. Okay, so now, it's no longer the smart person who is a physicalist. It's the smart person who says all of the evidence from science and technology is in favor of something beyond spacetime.

• 1:59:37Steven Bartlett?

  So maybe those people went crazy after all.

• 1:59:40Speaker 00

  That's right. They just didn't have the tools to show what it could do.

• 1:59:46Steven Bartlett?

  Donald, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's so incredibly important because it once again challenges the paradigm, the box in which we live, and it asks us and invites us to consider something beyond that. And actually, when we think about all human discovery that's moved us forward, it starts with someone who's willing to suggest that there might be more to know. And that's exactly what you do. You make me feel dumb because you make me realise that you made me question all of the assumptions that I've built my life on. And actually, in doing so, one of the great byproducts of that is you can start to realise that some of the things you've constructed cause much of your suffering and that those things are not necessarily true. And if those things aren't true, then I have greater choice and optionality over how I

• 2:00:29Steven Bartlett?

  feel, how I experience the world, the choices I make, the feelings I have and the life that I live. And that's actually freeing for me to realise that the cage, the prison that I see and that I experience might not be all that that is. And I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your book if you want to dive deeper into these subjects. It's called The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes. And there's a quote in front of it from Deepak Chopra, who's a former guest, that says, "Read this book carefully and you will forever change your understanding of reality." It's exceptional. It's accessible and it creates wonder, which I think is the path to a wonderful life. So, thank you so much, Donald, for the work that you do. Thank you, Steve. Truly fascinating.

• 2:01:13Steven Bartlett?

  And thank you for helping me simplify some of these concepts so that we could all understand them.

• 2:01:21Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show.

• 2:02:00Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 2:02:01Steven Bartlett?

  We launched these conversation cards and they sold out and we launched them again and they sold out again. We launched them again and they sold out again because people love playing these with colleagues at work, with friends at home and also with family. And we've also got a big audience that use them as journal prompts. Every single time a guest comes on the Diary of a CEO, they leave a question for the next guest in the diary. And I've sat here with some of the most incredible people in the world and they've left all of these questions in the diary. And I've ranked them from one to three in terms of the depth, one being a starter question. And level three, if you look on the back here, this is a level three, becomes a much deeper question that builds even more connection. If you turn the cards over and you scan that QR code, you can see who answered the

• 2:02:44Steven Bartlett?

  card and watch the video of them answering it in real time. So if you would like to get your hands on some of these conversation cards, go to thediary.com or look at the link in the description below.