The Basement: Rizwan Virk | The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Physics & Mysticism

Rizwan Virk built games downloaded millions of times, invested early in Discord, and taught at MIT. Then he put on a VR headset in Sausalito and nearly fell over reaching for a table that didn't exist. That five-second moment sent him down a rabbit hole connecting quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and video game design — and he's not sure he's found the bottom yet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00AJ Gentile?

  You can eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, take supplements, and still wonder, is any of this actually working? That's what I like about the True Age Test from True Diagnostic. It uses epigenetics, tiny chemical tags on your DNA, to estimate how your body's actually aging. You'll see your biological age, how quickly you're aging, and even how different systems like your heart, brain, and liver might be aging. And the methods behind True Age have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and developed researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Duke. It's also easy. You do a simple finger prick at home, send it back in the prepaid kit, and get your personalized report online in about three to four weeks, along with recommendations around things like nutrition, exercise, sleep, and lifestyle. So if you're serious about longevity, or even just curious whether your body's aging faster

• 0:45AJ Gentile?

  or slower than your actual age, this is one of the easiest ways to find out. Right now, go to truediagnostic.com and use code YFILS for 20% off your entire order. That's truediagnostic.com, code YFILS, for 20% off.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100-degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light hydrates faster than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:28AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're sitting down with Rizwan Burke, MIT computer scientist, Stanford MBA, video game pioneer, and one of the early investors in Discord.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Early investor in Discord, huh? So he's the reason my guppies are up a train? I'm screaming at strangers in Fortnite. I have questions for this man.

• 1:47AJ Gentile?

  His book, The Simulation Hypothesis, is now out in a fully revised second edition. It argues that quantum physics, ancient Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games are all pointing at the same unsettling truth: that what we call reality may not be reality at all.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Hang on, hang on, hang on. I say reality isn't real, and people call me crazy. This guy says it and gets a book deal?

• 2:11AJ Gentile?

  Well, he lays out a better case than you do.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Does he say how to liz it people run the simulation?

• 2:17AJ Gentile?

  No. Today, we're covering the observer effect, the Mandela effect, NPCs versus RPG characters, and why UFOs might be avatars projected into this reality from somewhere outside it. Oh, and Riz got to talk to Philip K. Dick's wife, Tessa.

• 2:38AJ Gentile?

  She told him something about JFK that stopped the show cold. Let's go down to the basement.

• 2:53AJ Gentile?

  Dr. Rizwan Burke, welcome to the basement.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me here.

• 2:57AJ Gentile?

  I'm excited that you're here. Since you're an old computer nerd like myself,

• 3:04AJ Gentile?

  what was the baud rate of the first computer you had that could connect?

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Wow, good question, because originally we had a Commodore 64.

• 3:15AJ Gentile?

  The 64, okay.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  We even had a Coleco Atom. I don't know if you remember this.

• 3:18AJ Gentile?

  Of course, it was the plug-in.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then there was a tape. It used a tape drive.

• 3:23AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  But then the tapes, if you left them on top of it, they would erase the tape.

• 3:27AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  I think we eventually got an Apple II, Apple IIe, I think it was, which was a portable model. And I don't think we really connected until much later. But it was like 2,600 baud modems, like way back in the day.

• 3:43AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I think mine was a Vic 20, 1981, with 150 baud connection, and the cassette tape is where you loaded everything.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Oh, right, yeah, I remember those.

• 3:53AJ Gentile?

  Can't believe it.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I started learning to program in my math class. And we were living in the Midwest, and our math teacher allowed myself and my best friend, because we'd finished the math problems quickly. He's like, "Okay, why don't you guys go play on this TRS-80?"

• 4:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes!

• 4:09Speaker 03

  They used to call it a trash 80, and they had an adventure game, which was like... It wasn't Zork, it was like the original adventure text game. And I realized you could actually modify the code, and the characters would say something different than what they were supposed to say. And that was my introduction, really, to programming.

• 4:25AJ Gentile?

  That was an amazing... The TRS-80 was an amazing machine. That was Radio Shack invented that thing.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah. Yeah, and then later they called it a trash 80.

• 4:32AJ Gentile?

  They did.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  But it was a good machine for its time.

• 4:35AJ Gentile?

  It was. What was the programming language on that? Was it BASIC?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  It was just BASIC, yeah. I mean, that's how I learned to program was BASIC there. And then one day, my dad took us to his work and they had just bought like an Apple II. This was before we had one at home. And he was like, here, why don't you guys, you know, my older brother is like a year and a half older than me, I think, kind of like you and Gino in terms of age. He just took us in there and left us and we started to program a tic-tac-toe game because we saw you could draw a line. So that was the first game that I ever wrote from scratch was just a simple tic-tac-toe game on the Apple II at my dad's office.

• 5:05AJ Gentile?

  Apple II, was that BASIC on there as well?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was called AppleSoft BASIC.

• 5:09AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  But in the end, it was Microsoft BASIC behind the scenes, which was how Microsoft started as a company.

• 5:16AJ Gentile?

  Right, back when they got along.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 5:19AJ Gentile?

  Did you go to Apple II GS with color?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  No, because I think by the time that came out, one, it was expensive.

• 5:26AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it was. We didn't have it. We would go to friends' houses.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, very few of our friends actually had, like, expensive computers. I mean, I'd pull it out to try to type a report, you know, in high school and then print it out. And then when I got to college, I went to MIT, and they had a whole computer lab, which was the SUN workstations.

• 5:43AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Which had pretty good graphics capabilities.

• 5:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they did.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I ended up using the computer lab. And very few people actually had laptops in their dorm rooms. In fact, one of my best friends had like a Mac, one of the very early Macs. I forget which one, but you know, with the little floppy drives.

• 6:01AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  The three and a half inch floppy drives. But mostly, we would spend, you know, all our time doing our assignments and writing games in the computer lab.

• 6:10AJ Gentile?

  On, so like using Solaris?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was using Solaris and it used something called X Windows.

• 6:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes, of course. X is still, you can't get rid of X.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  You really can't, yeah. It's like really solid infrastructure that it was built on. So I actually learned to use Windows, X Windows, on Unix before I actually used the Windows PC, believe it or not. I mean, obviously, I'd seen a Mac. And we would send each other messages. It was called Project Athena at MIT. It was one of the first kind of networked computer labs. Because if, like, my brother went to University of Michigan and you go to the computer lab, and each computer was kind of... They're connected to the printer, but they were kind of doing their own thing. Whereas with Project Athena, they were investigating or experimenting with, you know, writing software where you would communicate with each other and we would just sit there and send trashy, you know, instant messages to each other.

• 6:58AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Before IM was available on, you know, on PCs and stuff. So in fact, one of my friends started a company that became MSN Messenger. They were bought by Microsoft. And so a lot of the instant messaging stuff that we've seen over the years, you know, had its origins in like these old MIT things that people had just built as part of this program.

• 7:19AJ Gentile?

  Built on, built on like Solaris and X?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:22AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I love that.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Programmed in C.

• 7:25AJ Gentile?

  In C.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  C units, basically, right?

• 7:27AJ Gentile?

  I love it.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Programming it, yeah.

• 7:28AJ Gentile?

  My first love is, is SGI IREX. I'll go, I go back, I still have an SGI box. I just love that. Yeah, oh yeah. The big blue box, I used to love it. Is that how you got started, that's how you got interested in video games?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I got interested in video games around the same time that I was learning to program because we had an Atari.

• 7:49AJ Gentile?

  The 2600?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, the 2600, like the original Atari system. And we had games like Pac-Man.

• 7:56AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Space Invaders and an obscure one called Yars or Revenge that I always thought was cool.

• 8:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And there was a racing game. I think it was Pole Position. And it was while I was playing like the racing game, I would look at the guys in the bleachers, which were just like these little squares.

• 8:12AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  It was like 8-bit graphics we're talking. And then there'd be like a mountain and it would look like there's something out there. And I always start to wonder, well, what would happen if I drove the car past the bleachers and past the mountain? Of course, you weren't able to. But I always wondered, like, is there a little world in here with all these kind of straight lines? So that's when I really started to, to wonder about the intersection of video games and virtual reality.

• 8:37AJ Gentile?

  That is an interesting game to choose because I think Pole Position is one of the first games back then in 8-bit to actually use background parallax. Where it started, where things started to move at different, I think it was a three or four level parallax, but it, it looked kind of real.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah. That's exactly right. And I have this. Slide that I show sometimes, which shows whole position as an eight bit racing game. And then it shows like a 16 bit racing game for the Nintendo. And then it shows like a 32 bit, you know, for the PC. And then it shows like the modern games. And you can just see how much more realistic it got just by adding a few bits.

• 9:12AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Right. And it's gotten to the point where you look at these racing games. And I mean, even though you can tell the characters are graphical, virtual. Uh, characters designed uh, by game designers. The city looks so realistic that you literally could not tell if that was a real city or not. In fact, I don't know if you saw the recent Matrix movie, the fourth Matrix movie.

• 9:32AJ Gentile?

  I did.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Uh, wasn't that great of a movie, but.

• 9:35AJ Gentile?

  No, but the tech was good.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  The tech was good, but just when they came out with that, they came out with a demo on the Unreal Engine.

• 9:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Uh, which I, I know you know about.

• 9:43AJ Gentile?

  I'm an Unreal guy, so yeah, I have it.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And so they used the Unreal Engine and they came out with this demo called The Matrix Awakens. And it wasn't like a full game. It was like a mini game, but it started with. A guy that looked like Neo, you know, kind of getting the message on his computer, 1999 computer, wake up Neo. Uh, and of course you could, this was 21, so we're talking five years ago now. So the graphics were not nearly as good as they are today. But he would get up and go with Trinity and there were scenes where you almost thought it was really. Keanu Reeves or Carrie Anne Moss. But the city they were driving around, like I think they filmed. That one in San Francisco and Berlin. And it looked like a combination of those two cities. And it, it had just gotten ultra realistic and.

• 10:25AJ Gentile?

  The car chases looked real. Like as soon as you pulled away from the kind of uncanny valley. Those cinematic shots of like the car tearing around the corner and flipping over, that looked pretty good.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it did look pretty good. And, and you know, the key is you stay away from the humans.

• 10:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  And everything looks realistic. I mean, there's a reason why, so Toy Story. Was uh, built or made by Pixar.

• 10:47AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Which actually came out of Lucasfilm. So George Lucas's, you know, special effects company and his film company. And there's a reason why the first fully computer generated. Film was actually about toys. It was Toy Story because it's much easier to make those look realistic than it is. To get humans. There was a film based on one of the Final Fantasy games. Spirits Within and they spent like, had like a $200 million budget and they spent like 50 million of it on the hair.

• 11:15AJ Gentile?

  On the hair.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  To get the hair right. And so this is all before AI. Right now we're seeing a world where AI is making the generation of realistic characters very easy to do.

• 11:27AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  And but but that's kind of how I've seen the technology evolve, you know, just in my lifetime.

• 11:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure. Well, well, take us back to how your first game. I mean, you couldn't program a game for 2600, right? Because it was cartridge.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  No, you couldn't, yeah.

• 11:41AJ Gentile?

  But on the C64 you could.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so again, I would make these little graphical games like Tic Tac Toe and, you know, other little games that kind of tried to imitate some of the cool arcade games, you know, that I had seen. And then we got an Apple II. And then I started to look at more from a game design perspective. There were these adventure games, like have you ever played King's Quest?

• 12:03AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Uh, which was, you know, super popular. But there was a whole series of these types of adventure games and they were on the big floppy disks.

• 12:11AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Not even the small floppy disks, which which disks which are pretty old now.

• 12:14AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they are.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Kids today have no idea what.

• 12:16AJ Gentile?

  Kids today. They were five and a quarter inch. They were huge.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were huge. Exactly. And so what would happen is you'd put in one of the disks and it would bring up, you know, a picture of, I don't know, a city, let's say, and then you'd say, move the character around. They were kind of like the text adventure games like Zork.

• 12:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  But with some graphical pictures and then you would go to the next one and the next one.

• 12:37AJ Gentile?

  Kind of like a graphic novel, choose your own adventure almost.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, almost, right. And the innovation that King's Quest made was they actually added like a character that you could actually go to the left or to the right.

• 12:47AJ Gentile?

  It was bananas.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  And it looked like it was real, yeah. And Sierra Online, the company that made that, uh, was really considered one of the pioneers in graphics. In fact, they were the first to build, make a game, a graphical game for the Apple II that was called Mystery House. And it was just line graphics and it was a husband and wife team and she was the artist and he was the programmer. And they figured out how to get 74 of these or 78, some number in the seventies, of these line graphics onto a single floppy disk.

• 13:17AJ Gentile?

  That's crazy.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  That was considered a huge innovation back then. Because every other game you had to keep taking out the disks and put in the next one.

• 13:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  And I remember thinking, well, how is it that they can compress these? These images, which are really big and get so many of them. And it turns out it's because they use, you know, a compression technique or they actually use just vector graphics, which are commands that tell it. So you don't actually store all the pixels.

• 13:43AJ Gentile?

  Right, you store the directions.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if anybody's ever done this, I mean, they have a picture of a JPG.

• 13:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  If you, let's say it's 300 kilobytes or something, or 500K. So it's less than a megabyte. And if you uncompress that, I mean, we're getting kind of geeky now, so I don't know how far we want to go down this road.

• 13:59AJ Gentile?

  This is a geeky audience.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so, you know, if you uncompress it and save it as a TIFF, an uncompressed TIFF, it'll be something like 100 megabytes for that one picture, right? And if you think of a film or a TV show like Game of Thrones, I mean, the reason I can stream it on my phone is because it's not sending 100 plus megabytes per frame.

• 14:22AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  It's compressing it down. And so I began to think about compression really early as an optimization technique for games. And there was this one program, I think it was called like The Graphics Magician. It was like 100 bucks and I couldn't afford it and I went to my parents' house. Because you could take like images and compress them down and you could create like a little adventure game. And I think I entered a programming contest where you could go to different planets and you could... In fact, this is funny, it wasn't even that graphical because it was mostly text. But I called it the Simulation Machine.

• 14:56AJ Gentile?

  No way!

• 14:57Speaker 03

  In high school, I've completely forgotten about this. And the reason I did it was so you could, it was like a little bit of text you could change and then the user has to figure out where they are and maybe you could add a graphic or two as well. But I actually used to call it the Simulation Machine.

• 15:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh, synchronicities are happening all over your life.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I haven't thought about that in years, actually. We went to the University of Michigan and they had a big programming competition there.

• 15:18AJ Gentile?

  Do you still have that, all that stuff?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 15:20AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  When my dad died recently, we, you know, we ended up moving, cleaning up things in that house and selling it. Because my mom stays with my siblings now, but we did still have the Apple IIc sitting there. So who knows, maybe there were some old floppy disks still sitting around, it's possible.

• 15:37AJ Gentile?

  I love it that you were thinking about compression that young, that's amazing. I can remember writing programs on the C64 before we could afford a hard drive and just printing them out. Just printing out pages, lines of code before we...

• 15:50Speaker 03

  And then you re-enter them later?

• 15:51AJ Gentile?

  Then you re-enter them until the 1541 drive came out and then the world changed. Like, we'll never be able to fill this up. So where do you go from there? How old were you when you entered that contest?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  That was in high school, so it was probably like 16, 17, somewhere.

• 16:08AJ Gentile?

  Were you thinking, "This is what I want to do"?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was thinking that computer science is definitely what I want to do. In fact, and this ties to a larger theme we can talk about later, but if you had asked me kind of later in high school, when I was old enough to kind of know something about the world, or even early college, like, "What is it you're going to do with your life?", I would have told you, "Well, I'm going to be a software entrepreneur."

• 16:26AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  And then I'm going to be a writer.

• 16:28AJ Gentile?

  And then, you mean later on?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Later on, when I was really old, like 28, because back then, you know, I thought, I was in high school. I thought 28-year-old is really old. You know, "I'll make my millions and then I'll go be a writer." And it's odd when you think about it, because I believe we all may have these scripts for our lives that we're unaware of at a conscious level. But somehow, unconsciously, they seep through sometimes, and they come out. But I definitely wanted to program computers, because I was good at it. And I think, then I got to MIT, and I found, you know, MIT, we had some really smart people. And there were guys that were really good at physics. And there were guys that are really good at like chemistry. There were guys that were really good at aerostro. And I think it was a wake-up call for most people who went there, because they were like,

• 17:15Speaker 03

  you know, valedictorians, or they were, you know, top of their class. And you're around these people, and every now and then you have somebody who's really good at X or Y. And so people say, "Is MIT hard?", and I say, "Well, it depends. If you're really good, if you're the guy that's really good at physics, then MIT's not that hard."

• 17:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  But if you're everybody else, then physics is really hard at MIT. And I was the guy for whom computer science was just really easy.

• 17:36AJ Gentile?

  Well, then, why book? What book did you want to write?

• 17:39Speaker 03

  I wasn't sure at that point. I just knew that I liked to write stories, and I wanted to write something someday. It was just a sense that I had, that I would be a writer. Going back to the 4th grade, when I wrote a little story about a dwarf that, you know, lived in some kingdom, magical kingdom, or something like that.

• 17:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, you were writing story-based games. You weren't really writing shooters. You were writing story games.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I finally got into the video game industry was, you know, much later. So after MIT, I did enterprise software for a while. So I kind of went in this other direction. And it wasn't until I moved to Silicon Valley that I got back into games and into the game industry. And that was when the iPhone was relatively new, right? So it was like, wow, we have a gaming platform. Now, Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple, they didn't realize when they were designing the iPhone, they built this thing called the App Store, which, okay, everybody knows what it is now. But back then, it was, you know, big innovations. You could just write your program and upload it into the store, and people can just download it on their phone. Because before that, the games on mobile phones were like, you know, these little line games or TikTok.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  And you had to go through a big giant publisher. And then Verizon had to approve your game. There was very few games you could play on the old phones. And with iPhone, anybody could upload an app. And so they, what Apple didn't anticipate was that games would become so popular.

• 19:02AJ Gentile?

  They didn't see that coming?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  They were actually surprised by it. And for the first 10 years of the App Store, let's say 2008 to 2018, the number one top grossing games of grossing apps were all games.

• 19:16AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Even now, if you look at it, probably, you know, some of the top 10 are probably still games. And so it took off as a gaming platform. So then with each, you know, new hardware release, they ended up increasing.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  The capabilities of the hardware to be able to play more and more games. And at that time, a lot of the big guys dismissed the iPhone games as, you know, no big deal, these are just, you know, little games you sell for 99 cents. You know, our real games are these, these big triple A games. But it turns out today, the mobile part of the gaming industry basically dwarfs the console and the PC games. So it's the biggest segment of the entire video game industry.

• 20:26AJ Gentile?

  And it's bigger than movies and sports combined.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and add record, music.

• 20:32AJ Gentile?

  And music combined.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  All of those combined.

• 20:34AJ Gentile?

  Combined.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Video games is a bigger industry. So we really saw, I really saw that evolve from zero to a pretty major industry because back then you could, a couple of guys could just write a mobile game. And then, you know, we ended up building games that were, they were called simulation games, but not, not in the sense that we're talking about the simulation hypothesis. It was like, if you've ever played Farmville.

• 20:55AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  There were games on Facebook where you simulated having a farm or you simulated running a cafe. And we had a game called Tap Fish, which I guess with your ear hackle fish might be appropriate. But you basically had your own fish tank and you would like, you know, raise little baby fish and breed them and you'd have different species. And, and that ended up being the number one grossing game in the App Store for a while. And then we sold it to a big Japanese company.

• 21:20AJ Gentile?

  Now, since you brought it up, we got to get into what was the Daily Show beef with Tap Fish? Because you handled it so well. Didn't they, didn't they sandbag, didn't they kind of?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  They totally sandbagged.

• 21:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I learned. You have to be a little bit careful with people who are, you know, Hollywood types.

• 21:36AJ Gentile?

  Uh huh.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  In general, because until then I was kind of naive, you know? And they basically came in and, uh, you know, kind of sandbagged me and kind of edited this piece.

• 21:48AJ Gentile?

  What, what did they say? They want to interview you about this popular game?

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, about the popular game in the industry.

• 21:52AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's not what they did.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no. So they ended up basically, we were one of the games that were the first free to play games out there. And what happened was, Apple made it so that, you know, if somebody had a password. You know, you could just buy stuff in the game. And what would happen is some kids ended up spending, like not just in our game. I mean, you name it, these games. And this is when the industry was actually pretty small. Today, you have Fortnite, which is like doing, I don't know, a billion dollars a day, probably. If not more than that. So we're talking very small numbers. But what would happen is you'd have people who would, whose kids would end up spending like a thousand dollars on Farmville.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  And, and so they, they sandbagged me by having a, a, a, a parent of a kid actually, you know, call on, call me and have a call with us. And then they edited out the part where the parent thanked me for, for what I said and tried to explain to him how it works. Turns out he'd given his kids his password and they had used the password. And they made it seem like we were the villains.

• 22:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they did.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  And they edited out the part, they even had a part where, you know, if you want to buy, you have to like enter the password. They edited that part out and made it seem like, oh, you don't even need passwords. And so, so they made me look like the bad guy. So that was my introduction to, well, what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up.

• 23:15AJ Gentile?

  But you, I think might've been the next day, didn't you, you posted a rebuttal on your blog, which I think is still there about here's what really happened.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did, but, but nobody read the rebuttal. I mean, a small number of people read the rebuttal, uh, but many people saw the episode. And so that's when I started to really think about, okay, what I talk about today is what I call the hard simulation hypothesis, which is that the physical world is a kind of simulation. But there's also the soft simulation hypothesis, which is more like the narrative matrix, which is what we've been told. Perhaps not everything that we've been told is as we've been told on TV, whether it's the wars, whether it's who to make fun of. You know, in 1984, they had the two-minute hate, which was, who are we going to hate today?

• 23:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  We'll get everybody together in a room and we'll put them up there and we'll make everybody hate them. And of course, you know, we go through that now in the media all the time.

• 24:03AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Uh, but it was kind of a rude introduction, uh, which is why I like doing podcasts. Because in podcasts, they're not going to edit, I mean, they may edit some things in, but it's really a conversation.

• 24:13AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  And people are able to see our whole conversation. They, they won't just see like a little part made to look like somebody said something that they didn't say.

• 24:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 24:22AJ Gentile?

  That annoyed me when I read that story, but it didn't surprise me. Eventually, we're gonna get to Sausalito and your VR experience. But can you tell us what's happening between, like, leading up to that? Were you working?

• 24:35Speaker 03

  So what happened was, yeah, I was working on different games. We did a game company where we built games for TV shows. There was a TV show called Penny Dreadful and a show called Grim. You remember that show?

• 24:47AJ Gentile?

  Sure, I love Grim.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, Grim is great. And so it was like a, in fact, I designed, not many people know this because it was a small game, but I designed probably one of the first, if not the first, card battle game on a phone. Because the phones were much smaller back then, and people didn't know how you were gonna do a whole card battle game there. And I did one called Titans vs. Olympians. So we had like the Greek, you know, the Greek Titans and then the Greek Olympians like Zeus, and you would play this game and for so many turns. And then eventually, we ended up creating a card battle engine which we could use. This was now a different company. We sold off the, our game company to a big Japanese company, and then we did some games for TV shows, and I became more of an investor and advisor to different companies.

• 25:30AJ Gentile?

  Didn't you do Game of Thrones?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  One of the companies that I was an investor in did a Game of Thrones game.

• 25:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, my mom has spent a fortune on that game.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was an investor in Telltale games as well, which had the Walking Dead game, that was huge.

• 25:44AJ Gentile?

  It was, and it was great.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  And Telltale was story-based games.

• 25:48AJ Gentile?

  It's really back to the same thing. It's like a graphic novel that you play.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Now, Telltale eventually imploded. So this happens a lot with game industries, where game industry companies where you have a big hit, and then you try to do too much, and then the whole thing implodes. So that wasn't good for me as an investor, but it was good for the industry because, you know, Telltale then broke up and all these people went out and started new game companies. So there's all kinds of interesting games out there now that were from people who used to work at Telltale.

• 26:15AJ Gentile?

  So at that point, we're talking maybe twenty ten, twenty eleven.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I also invested in a small company that's now called Discord.

• 26:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes, I'm aware of that.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Which was a game company, actually. It wasn't really. Yeah, they started as a MOBA game, kind of like League of Legends, but on iPhone. And I knew Jason Citrin, who had founded Discord, because he was in the mobile game industry. So we all kind of knew each other back then in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. Like, a lot of the big triple A games were in LA, but a lot of the mobile games came out of the San Francisco Bay area. And so, you know, when he started this company, he was like, okay, I'm gonna do, you know, either a 3D printing company or another game company. So he ended up doing another game company, and I ended up investing in his first round. But then what happened was that the game wasn't that successful. And these guys hated Skype, so they wanted to build something other than Skype

• 27:07Speaker 03

  or talking to each other while they're playing their, you know, mobile battle arena game. And then eventually they ended up releasing that as a separate app, Discord. And I remember we had lunch, and he said, oh, you know, the game's not doing so well, but this app is doing well. I was like, really? He goes, yeah, we have like a hundred thousand downloads. Pretty good, like per month. He's like, no, per week. And I said, wow, how much marketing are you spending? Dollars are you spending to get these downloads? Because, you know, there was an advertising industry that often mobile developers use to get people to download their apps. And he was like, zero, people are just dragging their friends into it. And of course, now Discord is huge, it's huge.

• 27:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure, we use it.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  You guys use it, yep, it's used all over the place now. But it started off just for gamers, you know, and then it eventually expanded.

• 27:51AJ Gentile?

  How did you get into investing in these companies?

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Well, if you're just part of that ecosystem, you kind of know, you know, a lot of different entrepreneurs. And when you sell your company, you're like, okay, how do I, you know, help along the next generation of entrepreneurs? And then I went to MIT and ran a startup program there for a couple of years.

• 28:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Which was based on, not all games, but it was at the MIT Game Lab, which is like within the Media Lab complex there. And that was a lot of fun, so I did that for a little while as well.

• 28:18AJ Gentile?

  Were you still writing code during this time?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  No, by then I had kind of stepped back from writing code, I think.

• 28:23AJ Gentile?

  You miss it a little bit, don't you?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  I do miss it, but I don't have the time for it.

• 28:27AJ Gentile?

  I hear you.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Which is why now with AI, it's gotten pretty good. Like, a couple of years ago, I said, I think this was like maybe a year and a half ago, I said, okay, let me see if ChatGPT can write a simple Pac-Man game. You know, and it got something up and running pretty quickly. But it wasn't quite right. You know, the Pac-Man wasn't pointing in the right direction. And I found I had to like do so much code, you know, vibe coding and extra prompts. Eventually I just went in the code and just started changing it myself to fix, you know, the direction of the Pac-Man, for example. Uh, but now I hear that it's gotten so good that you don't have to go into the code yourself anymore. So I may get back into it. We'll see.

• 29:03AJ Gentile?

  Even though you had to go in and tweak that code back then, I still bet you got it working faster than Williams did in 1981.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Way faster.

• 29:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  In fact, that was the benefit was you get something up and running quickly.

• 29:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  With AI. Now, if you added the all, the total amount of time it took me to get it right, it would probably have been similar. But I wouldn't have had anything you could really see.

• 29:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Till like, let's say 50% of the process. Here I had it like 10% of the process was the initial getting the game up and running. And then the rest of it was tweaking. So it's a different. I, I think, you know, people who are building games today now are, are dealing with a much better set of tools.

• 29:41AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they are.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Than we had, or certainly than the guys had who did like these original game arcade games.

• 29:48AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Whatever. Not even 64K.

• 29:51AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  The Atari memory on those, you know, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wrote a, uh, a game called, I think it was called Breakout for the Atari, uh, cartridge. And Steve Jobs got paid for it, but he actually had Wozniak come in and write it for him.

• 30:07AJ Gentile?

  Did they write Breakout? That was the, that was the one where you hit, hit the bricks?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it was that one. Uh, I don't quote me on that, but it was definitely something like that was, it was a very early, one of those cartridges.

• 30:17AJ Gentile?

  It was, but it was a groundbreaking game because of the physics was really cool.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Here's an aside on Atari.

• 30:24AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Having been in the game industry, there's, there's a great book called Eight Bit A Cop Apocalypse.

• 30:28AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  And if you've ever played the game Missile Command.

• 30:31AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  You know, the, which we've all played because I mean, that was a really popular game.

• 30:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  I mean, by today's graphics, you know, it looks very primitive. I, I doubt I could get my nephew's interested.

• 30:41AJ Gentile?

  I don't know. It's pretty playable still.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  It, it is. I haven't tried it lately, you know, but the guy who wrote it was, you know, researching ICBF. And nuclear war and he started to have dreams and nightmares about a nuclear war. And so, you know, this book Eight Bit Apocalypse is all about his, you know, his kind of moral dilemma and writing this game and what he went through. Because back in the seventies and eighties, I mean, that was a real thing, as you remember.

• 31:07AJ Gentile?

  Of course, every day we thought it was going to be nuclear war. We live with that every single day.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 31:14AJ Gentile?

  All right, so Sausalito, 2016.

• 31:18AJ Gentile?

  Tell me what was going on that day before you throw on the VR headset. Was VR a thing? Did someone invite you over and said, we got this idea?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what happens is virtual reality has gone through a bunch of different waves over time. Even back when I was in college, back in 92, 93, there was a novel called Snow Crash. And there was a wave of VR. In fact, that term itself was coined in like, I think, 1987 or 1988 by a guy named Jaron Lanier. And the movie Lawn Mower Man was very loosely based on him.

• 31:49AJ Gentile?

  Right, as I understand it.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  But that wave kind of went away and they had a glove even, you know, if you think of like Ready Player One.

• 31:56AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  They had a glove way back in the late eighties and nineties and then it kind of went away. And what happened was in 2012, there was a new, a new wave of VR. Oculus was one of the first startups.

• 32:09AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Consumer headsets, right? Because until then, they were unaffordable for consumers. And so there was a whole series of, of headsets, like the HTC Vive, et cetera. And I had sold my last video game company. And one of the companies that actually took over some of the games was in Sausalito, a company called Free Range Games. And they were working with HTC to create sports games there.

• 32:31AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  And so we went over to their office and just to kind of meet the people and find out more. It was a beautiful day in Sausalito. If you've been there.

• 32:40AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  People who've been there will know, on a beautiful day, you can see the San Francisco skyline. And, you know, I think it's one of the prettiest views that we have in any of our, our major cities out there. And so they were literally right on the bay. So you could, from their offices, we could see the skyline. And they said, hey, you got to come upstairs. And try out this new VR headset thing. And so I was going through one of these waves. Some of my academic research that I've done is about how innovation goes through waves. And a bunch of venture capitalists, you know, jump in and a bunch of entrepreneurs jump in. And that's what happened in the in the mobile game industry. It was a new wave, a bunch of entrepreneurs started to build games. And then a bunch of investors started to invest in.

• 33:21AJ Gentile?

  Tell me a few more of those waves. That's interesting.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, these waves happen over time. I mean, we're obviously in a major wave now.

• 33:28AJ Gentile?

  The AI wave.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  But but this isn't the first AI wave. The first AI wave happened in the eighties. And it was with this thing called expert systems.

• 33:38AJ Gentile?

  I okay.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Okay, and these were rule based system. So they tried to take like an expert who's like really good at, I don't know, let's say. Machine debugging or diagnosis of problems in the industrial setting. And they tried to codify those rule sets into a big knowledge system. And the idea was you could just ask the knowledge system what's wrong and it would guide you through the whole thing. Now that turned out to be not manageable, like it was too many rules. And you know, just just like having a lot of code that you have to manage.

• 34:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Because they were coding these rules often by hand. And that took too long. And so that there was a company called Symbolics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around MIT was a big hub for this AI wave. So that AI wave kind of went went away. And then we had another AI wave back in the two thousands, which was starting to be based on deep learning and big data.

• 34:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Which is this idea of neural nets and you know, multiple layers of neural nets. And then they make the decision for you. Neural nets have been around for a while.

• 34:44AJ Gentile?

  Sure, machine learning. Yeah, we all we know that big blue and chess and all of that.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, although most of that was still rules.

• 34:51AJ Gentile?

  Still rule based.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Believe it or not.

• 34:52AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  So it I mean, the guys who won like. The Turing Prize, a guy named Jeff Hinton. He was, I think, was at the University of Waterloo in Toronto in Canada. Anyway, they kept it alive because people weren't using neural nets for much. Like even when I was a student at MIT, they showed us how a neural net worked. And how we could use it to train it to, like if people were the number two or the number three, we would feed it examples. And these were like really simple neural nets. They weren't, they didn't have many layers. But they worked. I mean, back then, but nobody was using them for anything. And it wasn't until they scaled them massively. That was the difference. That's where machine data, big data and machine learning comes from. It's like you just run it on huge sets of data.

• 35:37AJ Gentile?

  Is that when Jeff Hinton started to panic? Because he doesn't like where things are going.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  He doesn't like where things are going now, right? Well, not then, but eventually he did because people took up, you know, his ideas. And then he had Google DeepMind.

• 35:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Playing games like chess is an interesting example because DeepMind had, you know, the ability to play the game Go. And they had the AlphaGo platform, which was one of the first platforms that could actually beat like a human champion of the game Go. And it's much harder than chess.

• 36:09AJ Gentile?

  Much harder.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, but they had coded some rules and then they used the machine playing a human and then eventually they had the machine just play itself. Like a million times.

• 36:19AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  And so it learns the patterns. Like you don't actually have to code the patterns. And there's a guy named Claude Shannon. And again, we're kind of geeking out on the information side of this now. But Claude Shannon was considered the founder, the father of information science. He was at Bell Labs and he became an MIT professor. Part of the reason we can ship, you know, information across the wire is because of his work. And he, he wrote a paper about computers and game playing. Way back in like the 1950s, 1940s. And he said, you know, there's different stages that it could go through, one of which is, you can tell it the rules and it'll play the game. And there's a little picture of him

• 37:00Speaker 03

  with his wife, sitting with like a big box that has a chessboard on top. And it was one of the first chess playing computers. But it was, it was a little physical machine and it would light up. Where

• 37:13AJ Gentile?

  I know it. I know the machine.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you had to, somebody had to physically move

• 37:16AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Like the pawn or the horse to that place. And so, but he said eventually, machines will be able to learn the rules of the game. And that's what happened with, you know, there was like AlphaGo, and then there was another version where they didn't even teach it how to play Go. They just said, play, and we'll just tell you if you're won or not. And eventually it learned the rules.

• 37:38AJ Gentile?

  So that's machine learning.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  That's machine learning.

• 37:40AJ Gentile?

  So that, we got a, kind of got a hint of that in, I think it was 1985 with War Games, right? Where just playing tic-tac-toe over and over. It's, it's learning.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah. That was a great fictional representation.

• 37:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  That was, I think, an era-defining movie for many of us.

• 37:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, for me it was.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, both you saw AI, where it might end up, and how it can learn from itself.

• 38:02AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  And I think that's, that's an important lesson. I wish they would re-release the movie today. Especially with autonomous weapons.

• 38:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And the race for using AI within the military. I'm less of a believer that AI will take over the world necessarily. But more that AI can be used for nefarious ends. Whether it's censorship, whether it's automated, you know, autonomous drones that are basically killing people on behalf of other humans.

• 38:34AJ Gentile?

  That's true. We'll, we'll get to that. That's, that's in here for sure. Phone call, you gotta come upstairs, you gotta check this thing out.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so back to the story.

• 38:44AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  So they, they had built a whole VR sports suite. In fact, I think it was just called VR Sports. And so they said, try this on. And this was not like today's headsets, which they're still big and uncomfortable, but back then they were really big and uncomfortable.

• 38:56AJ Gentile?

  Oh, they were worse?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  They were worse. I mean, literally, there were wires coming from the ceiling

• 39:00AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  onto the headset, because this was, there weren't even that many wireless headsets. In fact, I don't know if there were any. Oculus itself was, you had to hook it up to a PC. This was the HTC Vive.

• 39:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  So, put on this headset. We used to joke that it was called a toaster on your face. It was like having a toaster on your face.

• 39:17AJ Gentile?

  Because it also got pretty hot.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. It got pretty hot, and it was just so big. It was, it was kind of heavy. Okay, this is a random aside, but one of the first VR headsets ever built was by a guy named Ivan Sutherland back in 1968. Somewhere in, I think at Harvard or in Massachusetts. And it was, you know, this big giant thing that you put on your head that was connected, not just with wires, but physically connected. And they called it the Sword of Damocles, which is like this old Greek myth.

• 39:44AJ Gentile?

  That the sword's always above your.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Above your head, because it felt like it was gonna snap your neck.

• 39:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  It was so heavy.

• 39:49AJ Gentile?

  I never heard of that. That's wild.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  That was one of the first ever, like, real computer-controlled, virtual reality type of things. Uh, and, and so, in this case, it was pretty uncomfortable, and I started to play this table tennis.

• 40:01AJ Gentile?

  Now, hold on, before tennis, you put it on, do you look around first?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you look around.

• 40:06AJ Gentile?

  So what are you thinking? Like, this is pretty good.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so first of all, the, the room was empty. It was actually about the size of this room.

• 40:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Uh, and I look over and there's like a ping pong table, graphically, you can tell it was graphically generated. In fact, I have a, a screenshot of it in my book, The Simulation Hypothesis. Uh, and you can actually, you know, you saw it, and then there was an opponent on the other side. Now, the opponent didn't look very realistic. It was just like a bunch of, you know, like, circles and triangles and squares and stuff. Uh, and, but, they said, here, you know, put the controller in your hand, and you can start to play. And so the ball would come across, and I would start to hit the ball. And the best thing about that game was the responsiveness of it. Like, the physics engine was so good, that if I, like, moved my hand fast, versus if I moved my hand slow, the ball would go faster.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  It would shoot across or not shoot across.

• 41:00AJ Gentile?

  And you weren't feeling latency?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  It was, there was no latency. That was the best part. There was latency in kind of the overall graphics of like.

• 41:06AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  That's why they had a very simple opponent. They didn't have a photorealistic opponent.

• 41:10AJ Gentile?

  Physics was dialed in.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  The physics engine was really good, and that's key for a sports game.

• 41:15AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, even for a shooter game, right? It's, it's key. You wanna be able to figure out who shot first. But it was so realistic, that for a few moments, it fooled my body into thinking that I was playing a real game of table tennis. So much so that I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean again. Empty table, just like this, really. Like I might do at the end of a game of table tennis. Now, of course, there was no table. It was an empty room. And the VR table was about this size, but it was an empty room. So what happened was the controller fell to the floor and I almost fell over and I did a double take. I was like, whoa, wait, what just happened? Oh, of course, there's no table.

• 41:52AJ Gentile?

  Did you hear cheers around you? Who was in the room?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  It was just like one or two other guys. So it wasn't like.

• 41:57AJ Gentile?

  They had to give you the smile like, you get it now, right?

• 42:00Speaker 03

  You get it now. And it's the kind of thing, you know, even back then you had to really just try on a headset in order to understand what's possible. And the headsets are still too big these days. So we're not kind of at the point of mass consumer adoption.

• 42:11AJ Gentile?

  Getting there, getting there.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're getting there. But that got me thinking. And that's really what got me down this rabbit hole. And that's one of several strands of thinking that got me down this rabbit hole. But I started to wonder, how long would it take us to build a game or a virtual reality? That was so realistic that we would forget, not just for a couple of moments, which is what happened to me. Obviously I knew it was a game, but you would forget for an hour and then you would forget for a day. And then could you forget like the Matrix, basically? Where Neo had lived in this virtual reality his whole life and he didn't really know that he was in a virtual reality.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  So I got down in the rabbit hole by looking at how technology might evolve over the next few decades. And we can talk more about that if you like. It was called, I called it the simulation point. But then I stepped back and I started looking at the quantum physics side of things.

• 43:34AJ Gentile?

  Oh, we're going to get to that later.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I just want to summarize to say, it turns out that quantum physics was telling us that the world isn't really as real as we think it is.

• 43:43AJ Gentile?

  It's not.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And then I did another thread, which was looking at the various religious and mystical traditions.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  And I realized, oh, they're also telling us that the world is not really real, at least not the way we think it is. And I realized that there was a universal idea here that tied together Silicon Valley technology with physics and science, but looking at it from the point of view of an information-based world or video game designer, and mystical experiences, which are the basis for the world's religions. And so that's really what got me down to this rabbit hole in a big way and writing the book as well.

• 44:21AJ Gentile?

  This is a perfect segue to my next question is, you were sort of living a double life because you were going to the Monroe Institute. You were learning meditation drum circles. I mean, all this kind of stuff.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what happened was when I was an entrepreneur back in the 90s, this is when I did my first startup, pretty much as soon as I graduated, like within a year. But most of my career has been as an entrepreneur. So during the day, I would deal with things like, you know, code reviews.

• 44:51AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Builds, engineers, managing engineers, hiring salespeople, which really sucks if you're like a technical guy, and investors and customers. And a lot of our customers were big Fortune 5000 companies.

• 45:05AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  And this was in Boston. So it was actually much more conservative in the financial industry than like say in Silicon Valley where the guys were sitting around smoking weed, you know, as part of their startups. Like that wasn't happening in enterprise software startups in Boston. But at the same time, I started to learn about different types of meditation techniques, and I started to explore different aspects of consciousness.

• 45:28AJ Gentile?

  What drew you to that?

• 45:30Speaker 03

  You know, I've always had a bit of an interest in it, but I will say that initially, I just thought, hey, if I can learn to meditate, I can be a better computer programmer because then I can concentrate.

• 45:40AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I can be a better entrepreneur because I can visualize what I'm trying to build. But then the more you got into it, the more you realized that it's not so much about that stuff, right? It's not about the selfish thing. And what I eventually got to realize, and I wrote my first book, it was called Zen Entrepreneurship, about this time when I was living this double life. And like every chapter, you know, one chapter is about a problem we had with our startup and, you know, the customer canceling on us. And the next is about me jetting off to the Monroe Institute, you know, for a week to try to do out-of-body experiences. Or I started doing lucid dreaming. And there was a guy named Carlos Castaneda.

• 46:20AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Who wrote about this way back in the seventies.

• 46:22AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Lot of, lot of young people today have no idea who he is.

• 46:26AJ Gentile?

  They should learn.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  They should learn. And he was on the cover of Time Magazine.

• 46:29AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Okay, Time Magazine would be like, I don't know, what would it be? It'd be like.

• 46:33AJ Gentile?

  We don't have those anymore.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  We don't have those anymore, right? It'd be like being, you know, Joe Rogan's top guest for the year.

• 46:39AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Something like that this year. I don't know what you, you would put in today's terms. But basically, he was called the grandfather of the new age movement and he talked a lot about, initially about psychedelics.

• 46:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  But eventually he was talking about dreaming and different states of consciousness. And some people, there's some controversy about, did he really find a Mexican shaman that taught him this? Or is he borrowing other people's ideas? But the interesting part of his teachings for me were, were about his dream experiences. Which it almost didn't matter if he was imagining this while he was in psychedelics or while he was dreaming, because that's what it was all about. But it was real, realizing there's something different about our reality.

• 47:17AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  This really got me into thinking about alternate models because, okay, I'll, I'll give you a startup example because I know you've been in the computer startup world. One day, I had a dream about this competitor of ours. And I was like, that's odd. I've never dreamed of this guy before. One, never. Two, I hadn't even heard from him or his company.

• 47:37AJ Gentile?

  Is this Mark?

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a guy named.

• 47:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I like this story.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Okay, so it was a guy named Mark. He had a company called Edge Research. And I had a dream where I was in a business conference and I started chatting with him about it. And I woke up, I thought, that's weird. Like, why am I dreaming about this guy? We haven't heard from his company for a year. And we, we had software that was connecting IBM products to Microsoft and Oracle products. So, we were like a big partner of IBM back in those days, using a product called Lotus Notes. Probably too much information for the fun that's there. But, uh, basically, I went in the office that day and I get a call, like right in the morning, from a product manager at IBM. And he says, oh, hey, we're going to do a big announcement today. And I just want to tell you, let you know, because you've been a good partner to us, but this new product we're going to release is probably going to kill your product.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  I was like, great. Thanks. Uh, because we had a product that, well, you know, worked with their, on top of their products. And I said, well, how come I've never heard of this product before? Because I mean, IBM's a big company.

• 48:36AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  I'm sure it would have leaked somehow. He's like, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, who had this company called Edge Research? We bought them like a year and a half ago and they've been working on it in secret up in New Hampshire. And now we're gonna do the big announcement today. And I thought, okay, that's weird. I had the dream in the morning. The phone call came after, right? Some people think, oh, it's not a big deal because it happened the other way around.

• 49:00AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  The dream came first out of nowhere. It was almost like a precognitive sense, right? That this guy was gonna show up again today in some significant way.

• 49:11AJ Gentile?

  I believe it was. What was the dream?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  The dream was just, was not that. It was more like I was at a conference like I used to go to and he was at one of the booths. And I was asking him, hey, we haven't seen you in a while. What have you been working on? You know, we were just having that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody who's in your industry. Uh, but he was cagey about something in the dream.

• 49:30AJ Gentile?

  He was?

• 49:32Speaker 03

  But he was always cagey.

• 49:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  As I recall, you know, this is 30 years ago now, so we're getting into uh, details I may not even get right. But, but I do remember being a little cagey. Uh, and it was sort of par for the course because when we had built our product, our first product and announced it, he had called me and he was being a little bit cagey. Didn't, he was asking me about it and didn't tell us he was gonna have a competitor. So, a competitive product.

• 49:55AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Uh, but, but, but that to me was one of many wake-up calls that I had around dreams and the nature of reality. That, in fact, we may be getting clues about things that haven't happened yet. And our idea of time as being linear uh, may not be correct. And only getting information from a materialistic point of view may not be correct either. There may be other ways to get information. Uh, so that was one example. You know, once I ended up, you know, lucid dreaming, uh, and said, hey, let me go visit, you know, my girlfriend. Uh, at the time was still my partner now, uh, in Cambridge. I was like, let me fly over to her apartment.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  And I looked over there in the living room and there was this weird light on the couch. And I thought, that's weird because, you know, the middle of the night. You should. Probably be sleeping in the bedroom, uh, but there was this weird light on the couch and I didn't really think much of it because then the lucid dream goes away. So if you've ever tried lucid dreaming.

• 50:56AJ Gentile?

  It's hard to stay in it.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  It's hard to stay lucid and just goes away. And then I, I told her about it the next day and she said, oh yeah, I was sleeping on the couch last night.

• 51:03AJ Gentile?

  Whoa.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  And I would have these little confirmations like that, like I would be flying around Cambridge. And they had all these ultra realistic glass, you know, high skyscraper type buildings, but we didn't have that many back then. I remember thinking, okay, what, what's going on here? And then recently I went on a trip back to Cambridge because I still have a place there. And if you go to Kendall Square now, which is just outside of MIT, they've got all these tall skyscrapers that are like these glass buildings and stuff.

• 51:30AJ Gentile?

  So you were seeing the future?

• 51:31Speaker 03

  I might've, like, it's hard to say because I don't remember exactly what the buildings looked like, but it was definitely the tenure of the, the tenor of the future.

• 51:38AJ Gentile?

  Well, at, at Monroe, were you able to get out of body?

• 51:42Speaker 03

  So I tried it. So the Monroe Institute, they did, um, they did hemisync.

• 51:45AJ Gentile?

  Hemisync.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Hemisync, what it does is it puts in like different rhythm beats and it gets your brain into a certain rhythm.

• 51:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  I found that it wasn't quite working for me to get out of my body. But I did have an actual experience where I was, uh, what I, today I would call a shamanic journey. So later I learned, uh, how to do this with just drumming and just breathing. You can get into an altered state. And you can have, you can do what shamans do, which is they, they have almost like a visualization that you're aware you're doing something in another reality, but you're also aware of your physical body. So this is the experience that I had at the Monroe Institute where I, I, I saw this guy. Kind of looked a little bit like me, brown guy, but he had a beard and he was a sadhu, sitting against a tree. Who knows, maybe it was in, in, in India somewhere, like years ago. I thought, hey, this is interesting.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  And, and I felt somehow connected to this guy. And so this is like a vision I'm having while I'm in, you know, with a hemisync.

• 52:40AJ Gentile?

  How present are you in the real world? Are you like, oh my God, this is happening?

• 52:44Speaker 03

  I, I, I was present where I, I was still aware of my body, but

• 52:47AJ Gentile?

  You were.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  But it was enough. And this is for me. This is very close to what happens with shamanic journey.

• 52:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  It's you, you're aware that there's some other reality, really something happening there. You're still aware of your body, but it's almost like you're not paying attention to your body.

• 53:01AJ Gentile?

  Is this like samadhi?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  No, it's not quite samadhi.

• 53:04AJ Gentile?

  Not quite, okay.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  This is more like you're leaving, your consciousness is leaving your body and going somewhere else. But it's not like a full out of body experience. It's like just a part of you is going out to this other place. This other place could be a real place, it could be an imaginary place. It could be a place where multiple people can validate things. I'll tell you about that in a second.

• 53:24AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  We used to have those kind of experiences too, but, but in this case, the guy was sitting against a tree, kind of like I am now, but maybe leaning back a little bit more. And he's like, "You're doing it all wrong." "What do you mean I'm doing it all wrong?" He goes, "Look, if you want to get out of your body, don't you remember you learned this like in a past life or something?" He goes, "This is what you do, you don't lay down, you like sit against, because if you lay down, you go to sleep." You sit back against a tree." That's what he was doing, this, I don't know how many years ago this was, if it was even real. And he goes, "You go up to your third eye." And I could, like at that point, I could be, I felt like I was him for a second. And you would leave your third eye and you would go out. And then you would come back and when you left, I could see him, like, you know, sitting, his body's sitting there. And he's like, "That's how you're supposed to do it."

• 54:09AJ Gentile?

  You saw that?

• 54:10Speaker 03

  I saw that in my vision, right?

• 54:11AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  And I was like, "That's wild." And there was a time after that, when I got back home, where I was sitting at a desk coding or something. It was the middle of the afternoon, you know, you get the, you get tired in the afternoon. And I started to doze off and I remembered this. And I went up and I, and I basically went out of my body and I saw my physical body and then I came back. But for me, what, what happened in these dreams is I would just wake up somewhere else, like in a lucid dream that became an out of body experience. Rarely have I had the kind of experience where somebody actually just sees themselves sleeping in the bed.

• 54:42AJ Gentile?

  And you brought up that you had out of body experiences with other people?

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what happened was, after that, I found an easier way for me to do that was using shamanic drumming. So I studied with a guy named Robert Moss, who wrote a book called Conscious Dreaming. Really interesting guy, Australian guy, who somehow has gotten tied into all these Aboriginal and Iroquois and Native American dream practices, and he kind of pulled it together. And so we would get into a group and, you know, somebody would do drumming. It's a certain beat of the drumming, and anybody can look it up. Look up shamanic journey, and you'll see what the beat is. It's like a and what it does, it's very similar to the binaural

• 55:23AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  It puts your mind and your breathing and your

• 55:28AJ Gentile?

  Oh, it's frequency related.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Frequency related, yeah. So it puts you into kind of this altered state. And then you, you basically have an intention that says, hey, let's all go to, you know, Riz had this weird dream last night at a business conference. Let's all see what we can do. And we would all go into there and try to, you know, we'd all look around and then we'd come back and say, hey, what did you see? Hey, what did you see? And every now and then, there would be like a lot of correlation. And, you know, I have a skeptical engineer side.

• 55:56AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  As well as this kind of intuitive side where I'm intrigued by all of these.

• 56:00AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Kind of like you, I'm sure, right?

• 56:02AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  And so, but, but the times

• 56:05AJ Gentile?

  I studied Monroe, I knew lucid dream, I do all this stuff.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's great.

• 56:09AJ Gentile?

  Could you see each other or no?

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Sometimes, not necessarily. Some people could, but

• 56:13AJ Gentile?

  They could?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  You know, some people were better at it than others.

• 56:17AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  But for me, one of the most interesting ones, and again, you might go to what Robert used to call a stable place in the dream world. Like, meaning it's, it's like my dreams are subjective, your dreams are subjective. 90% of our dreams are, and I write more about this in my book, you know, Zen Entrepreneurship, and my book Treasure Hunt, which is about dreams in the business world. Not so much in the simulation books, but it's a fun topic anyway.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  So one, one day he said, "We're gonna journey to Sirius." And I was like, "What does that mean, journey to Sirius? What are we talking about?" "No, no, let's just do it." So he started drumming. Set the intention. And then you say what you saw. And I remember going to this weird planet that maybe was orbiting Sirius. Again, this was, you know, a vision I was having, so hard to say how realistic it was. I saw these giant buildings, but they were on stilts. It was just bizarre to see these giants. And it was like a ruins of an ancient civilization. But there was an even more ancient civilization that had ruins at the bottom. And so that's why these big buildings were on stilts.

• 57:18AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  And then I went off to the side and it looked like Superman. You know, like, did you ever see in the original movie? Do you remember the Fortress of Solitude?

• 57:26AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  So there were like all these little points. And so afterwards-

• 57:29AJ Gentile?

  White crystals and stuff?

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, white crystals. And then there was this group of people that were looking out over like different planets. But like-

• 57:36AJ Gentile?

  Living beings?

• 57:37Speaker 03

  There were some living beings there too, but they weren't like, they weren't there physically. It was, it was a little bizarre. Let, let, let's leave that part off for now.

• 57:44AJ Gentile?

  Fair enough.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Cause that I might've then transitioned to something else.

• 57:48AJ Gentile?

  I just love this story.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I went and described all these details to Robert and some of the other people who went on the journey with us. And there were like, there were like something like 17 points that many of us saw. Including the, right down to the Superman crystal line structures and buildings on stilts.

• 58:07AJ Gentile?

  They saw that?

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:08AJ Gentile?

  There's no way.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Several of them saw that. Like not 100% of the people don't always see it. But that's why you, you do it in a group and you say, "Okay, what is the, what are the correlations we can make?" Uh, now, is that a shared dreamscape in an imaginary world? Could it be like an actual planet on Sirius? Could it be something else? Uh, you know, my skeptical mind kicks in and says, "Well, okay, I don't know." But there certainly was something going on here. That whether it's an archetypal thing, uh, but the fact that there were so many instances where this would happen.

• 58:42AJ Gentile?

  The stilts is very, that's a very strange detail.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  It was very specific, right?

• 58:45AJ Gentile?

  Cause anyone could say futuristic buildings or something, but the stilts is very specific.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it was stilts on top of- Like an ancient ruins, almost, like an older civilization. And that's why they built on stilts, so that when they built the new buildings, you wouldn't ruin like the old buildings, you know? And that was the reason why. And then eventually, I think the second part of it was they had moved off the planet and they were somewhere monitoring what was going on in different parts of their local quadrant of the galaxy. So now it gets into a little more Star Trek. So that could just be my sci-fi self coming out at that point, right?

• 59:18AJ Gentile?

  But whatever it was, there's something there. And we'll talk about that more with simulation. Before we go to break, can we talk about the Esselen synchronicity and how weird that was?

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Sorry, which one?

• 59:33AJ Gentile?

  Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Morpheus.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, yes. So the Matrix synchronicity at the Esselen Institute, yes. So those people who don't know, Esselen is like this kind of a hippie commune set up in Big Sur, north of LA, and they have conferences there. And so Jeffrey Kripal is a professor at Rice University. He's one of the few academics that's been looking into UFOs and mysterious subjects. In fact, I just wrote a paper that I put a pre-print of online, which is, I wanted to call it Aliens Over Harvard. It's actually called Aliens Over Harvard in Stanford, but it's actually called UFOs in Academia: A Case Study in Stigma, Boundary Work, and the Edges of Legitimate Science.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  So I interviewed a whole bunch of professors about, who had studied the UFO subject openly, about why is there a stigma about studying this seriously in some way in academia?

• 1:00:33AJ Gentile?

  That's a great idea for a paper. Is that out yet?

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the paper, pre-print is available online. If people search for it, they can find it, or they looked at my Twitter account, which is @RizStanford. I guess it's called X now. I keep calling it Twitter still. But so I interviewed people, and it turns out, you know, going back a little bit, I graduated from MIT. In June of 1992. And there was one other major interesting thing that happened at MIT in June of 1992. There was a abduction, alien abduction conference at MIT in June of 1992. And I heard about it.

• 1:01:05AJ Gentile?

  What a strange place to have that conference.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  It was an invite only conference. And John Mack, who

• 1:01:10AJ Gentile?

  Sure, from Harvard.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Many people will know from Harvard was one of the co-chairs along with a physics professor from MIT. And I remember thinking, this is weird. Why are we having an abduction conference here? And I mean, I didn't go to the conference because it was invite only. Bud Hopkins was there and

• 1:01:24AJ Gentile?

  Wow, the big names.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  And that was like the last serious abduction conference in that phase. Because you know, John Mack got in trouble for

• 1:01:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he did.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  studying this subject. But so I went back and I interviewed people like David Pritchard, who's the MIT professor who hosted it. John Mack has passed away, but Ralph Blumenthal, who is his biographer, who wrote a book on him. And Jeff Kreipel actually kept, you know, these alive with these secret conferences that, you know, were invite only. And so they used to happen at Esalen. And so at Esalen, I came out with the book, The Simulation Hypothesis on March 31st, 2019, which was the 20th anniversary of the release of The Matrix.

• 1:02:06AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  And

• 1:02:07AJ Gentile?

  Intentionally or no?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Intentionally.

• 1:02:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay, nice.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  And that's why I ended up self-publishing the first version because there's no way publisher could have got it out on time because I only finished it in December. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna get this out. The second edition was Penguin Random House, so they did all the usual.

• 1:02:24Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade, hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Usual publishing timeline things. But so I had met Jacques Vallée, who I'm sure your audience knows him.

• 1:03:00AJ Gentile?

  Very well, but what is he like as a person?

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  He's a super nice guy and he's really, what's the word I want to use? Thoughtful, I think. And that's what I like about him is he'll present You know, what he's heard, what people have told him, but he won't necessarily present his conclusions. Uh, so I, I think he's one of the few people in the entire UFO world. And for those who don't know him, he was part of the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 1:03:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he was.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  And he's been involved since Project Blue Book, but he's a computer scientist at heart, which is how we connected. Really nice guy. He even wrote a, a foreword for the French edition of the simulation hypothesis in French.

• 1:03:42AJ Gentile?

  He did?

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:03:43AJ Gentile?

  What an honor.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  It really was an honor. And, and, and again, it was, it's just in that French edition. Uh, so, but it was really awesome that he did that.

• 1:03:50AJ Gentile?

  He's a very important person.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. And, and, um, you know, he's getting up there now.

• 1:03:55AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Heinecke has, Heinecke passed away, uh, you know, many years ago, so I never got to meet him, but you know, Jacques has lots of stories, but he started telling me about some of the overlap between, um, well, he started telling me about UFO cases that led me to start thinking about the overlap between the, the UFO phenomenon simulation theory. But so there was a really interesting synchronicity that happened right when my book came out. Uh, and Jacques had given me a little blurb for, for the English version of the book. And I heard about this afterwards. So I actually wasn't there, but it was a synchronicity involving me. And he said, Jacques gave a presentation at Esalen at one of these conferences that they have there. And it was just before, let's say lunch.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Right. And his last slide had a picture of my book and he was talking about Rizwan Burke and the Matrix. And it probably had a picture of the Matrix. And so they left it as the last slide.

• 1:04:43AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  And they all said, oh, that's interesting because the book had literally just come out. And so then they left the classroom and they walked over to the cafeteria. If you've ever been to Esalen, they're not that far. It's right on Big Sur, beautiful. They walk into the cafeteria and who's there but Morpheus? I mean, they literally see Laurence Fishburne sitting there in the cafeteria. You know, while they had just been talking about the Matrix and, and my name. And so I heard this from multiple people, including Jeff Kreipel and other people who were there. They're like, hey, you know, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book. And I was like, oh damn, I wasn't there, but it was an interesting synchronicity.

• 1:05:19AJ Gentile?

  It is. I mean, that, the simulation is always listening. All right, let's take a quick break and, uh, when we come back, we'll talk simulation theory. We're back. So you've had this VR experience, precognitive dream, a weird synchronicity.

• 1:05:36AJ Gentile?

  And then.

• 1:05:39AJ Gentile?

  I think you start to realize that simulation theory is not just a thought experiment, that technology, physics, and religion are all starting to point in the same direction.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was the realization that I came to, was that there's no way in just a pure materialist model for some of these weird things to be happening. Not just the things that have happened to me, but things that others have reported. And so I really first wrote an article about simulation theory. I was actually visiting Sri Lanka. And in Sri Lanka, there was a famous science fiction writer who lived there, Arthur C. Clarke, whom, you know, anybody who's into science, I know Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. And his office is still well-preserved there.

• 1:06:26AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's technically not a tourist attraction, but a buddy of mine was there. He's like, "No, you can go. You just slip the guy a few rupees."

• 1:06:32AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that. Awesome.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  Yes. So a buddy of mine from MIT had started a company in Sri Lanka, and I had invested in his company, and I was helping him out. So I went out to visit him. And I really want to see Arthur C. Clarke's office. So I went there, and his desk is preserved, and it's got all of these books behind him, and it's got, like, you know, 2001, 2010, but it's got like different versions.

• 1:06:54AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  And so I see this, and sometimes I think we have a recognition of something, right? It reminded me of something. And I was like, "Yeah, that's right. I was supposed to be a writer." Like, you kind of have this vision, and it flashes in your mind, and you don't know all the details, right? It's like you remember the storyline, and somehow it dawned on me that I needed to do more writing. But at that point, I had gotten this idea that the video game was a good way to explain this idea of the physical world being virtual. And I had also spent a lot of time in a game called Second Life, which was from a decade before that.

• 1:07:36AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  But it was a virtual world. So the difference between a virtual world and a game is in a game, you're trying to score points, and you're trying to win. But in a virtual life, you're just kind of living there.

• 1:07:46AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  And people would... Like have jobs inside Second Life, like they would come home from their real job and then they would log in to be a bartender at a club.

• 1:07:54AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:07:55Speaker 03

  In Second Life. And so I'd ask them like, why are you doing this? They're like, well, because it's fun. Because they got paid in Linden dollars. This is pre Bitcoin, uh, which were worth peanuts. So they weren't doing it for the pay, uh, even though technically they weren't being paid. It was like, that was part of their virtual life, their character's life. And people would have relationships and get married. And, you know, that made an impression on me as well. But, uh, I decided to write an article, a long article about why I think we might be living inside a video game. And I tried to pull in some of the elements that I'd been thinking about. So that article allowed me to pull together these different ideas.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  And, uh, I wrote it, I think it's like the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, partly because of, uh, you know, the Arthur C. Clarke experience. Uh, and it was just a flashpoint that said, oh, I'm going to have a bunch of books that are going to be translated in a bunch of languages.

• 1:08:49AJ Gentile?

  You at that moment?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  At that moment, like it was like, but I gotta get busy doing my writing. And so I wrote the article and I said, ah, that's enough for now. You know, I'm done. I was running this program at MIT. I'm doing other stuff. Uh, but that, that got me into, uh, talking about the technology side of it initially more. Because, uh, when I, uh, started to think about how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix? I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which is, I define it as a type of technological singularity. Now, most people know that term because they think of like, you know, Skynet, super intelligent AI. Going to kill us all and take over the world.

• 1:09:31AJ Gentile?

  So the AI singularity is what? When AI supersede?

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Exponentially grows to the point where it, yeah, it's become super intelligent.

• 1:09:39AJ Gentile?

  Beyond us.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Beyond us. That's one example, but the guy who coined the term.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  The technological singularity was actually a guy named Werner Vindji, who was a science fiction writer and a computer science professor. And he defined it in many different ways. So it wasn't just AI. He said it could be computers networking with each other to become intelligent, or us merging with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about.

• 1:10:06AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  The merger of biology and silicon. But Vindji was relying on an earlier famous guy named William John von Neumann.

• 1:10:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Who's famous Hungarian mathematician. They basically defined the von Neumann architecture, that all of these computers still pretty much use the von Neumann architecture. The guy really was a genius. And he borrowed the term singularity from physics, because in physics, you know, singularity is when you're approaching that line, like at the center of a black hole. And he said, it's the point at which technology grows exponentially, such that everything is different for the human race.

• 1:10:40AJ Gentile?

  And you can't come back from a singularity?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43AJ Gentile?

  That's the it.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, at that point, everything is different.

• 1:10:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  And so Vindji wrote the paper, and then Kurzweil wrote a book about it. But so a technological singularity is when technology gets to the point where you can't come back. And so I started to think, well, if we were to build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality, then we would have reached what I call the simulation. And if there are AI characters inside there,

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  that you can't tell if they're AI characters or not, then, you know, we're basically able to create a full virtual world. And there's something called the Turing test, which most people have heard of. It's, again, going back to 1950, back in the time of Claude Shannon. It was actually Alan Turing. He wrote a paper called "The Imitation Game."

• 1:11:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Actually, that's what he called it. And for people who don't know, most people have heard of it by now. But there's a computer behind curtain A and a person behind.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Curtain B and you're passing messages back and forth. Now, how did they pass messages back in those days? They didn't have cell phones. It was teletype machines.

• 1:11:46AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  That was how he decided to do it. And he said, if you can't tell the difference between the AI. Now, again, back then they thought AI was physical computer. So if you can't tell the difference between a computer and a human, then computer has passed the Turing test. And of course, today, many people think with chat GPT and Claude and Google and all and Grok that we've pretty much passed the Turing test for text. Because it's all, the chatbot is all a text based interface. There used to be a prize called the Lobner Prize, which was set up in the nineties. And it was for the chatbot that actually came closest to passing the Turing test. And there was a chatbot named Alice that was one of the winners of it. It was the first chatbot that actually took on like a personality of a young woman.

• 1:12:31AJ Gentile?

  I don't remember, I remember Eliza, I don't remember Alice.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Eliza was even before that.

• 1:12:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  So Eliza was like in the nineteen sixties. So this was like nineties or so, like the nineties. And there was a guy, a Hollywood guy, who saw this chatbot like back in the two thousands. He's like, huh, a chatbot that has the personality of a young woman?

• 1:12:49AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  And his name was Spike Jones.

• 1:12:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  And he decided to write a script called Her.

• 1:12:54AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Which became the film, you know, with who is it? Was it Joaquin Phoenix?

• 1:12:59AJ Gentile?

  Joaquin and Scarlett Johansson.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  And Scarlett Johansson played the voice. And so you see what's called the science fiction feedback loop at work where

• 1:13:04AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  So it's fiction inspires technology and then technology inspires science fiction. And then when, you know, Sam Altman and these guys came out with, I think it was chat GPT three or three point five. One of the versions they came out with, they like started referencing her. And there was a big blow up because the voice of the woman who sounded like the guy's girlfriend in the video sounded like Scarlett Johansson.

• 1:13:25AJ Gentile?

  There was just someone who sounded like her. He promised it wasn't her.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was just someone kind of like her.

• 1:13:30AJ Gentile?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Was it Samantha? I think in the film was her character.

• 1:13:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  And, and so you, and he literally referenced the movie Her. So you start to see the science fiction feedback loop over time. But coming back to what I was talking about was in my book, the second edition of the simulation hypothesis, I define something called the virtual Turing test, or the metaverse Turing test. And we're not quite there yet. And that is if you're inside a multiplayer game, or a virtual world, like a second life, or a World of Warcraft, or Fortnite, I'm sure there's a lot more recent, recent examples now. And your avatar is controlled by you, and there's two other avatars, one of which is controlled by a human player, and one of which is controlled by an AI. And if you can't tell the difference between those two, and you can do anything you want in the virtual world, you can, you know, drive cars,

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  you can fly on dragons, you can go skiing, you can, you can talk to each other, you can flirt, you can have virtual sex, whatever you want. And if after, say, an hour, you can't tell which of those avatars, and you're talking too, so there's voice element, which of course today, you know, if you've seen any of the latest AIs, they can

• 1:14:37AJ Gentile?

  They can do it.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  They can have a voice. In fact, I got a call from an AI, not that long ago.

• 1:14:42AJ Gentile?

  Could you tell it was AI?

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  They made it so that they told you it was AI.

• 1:14:47AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  It was called Boredy. It was a, an AI venture capitalist, who basically was like, well, as an AI venture capitalist, I can talk to every single founder on Earth, right? Because it's just making calls and it's automated. But it was actually pretty good. I mean, in taking what I said, it's an example of where they're putting in, you know, the LLM is behind the scenes, but it's basically the brain that's driving the character. And in fact, we were talking about The Matrix Awakens, and that was a virtual city. And there was a guy, he put a smart NPC engine into it, which basically was, has an LLM behind it. So that all the NPCs in that city,

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  you know, they were kind of dumb NPCs in most games, but now we have smart NPCs. And so he walked around this virtual world, and he started telling people, you know, you're in a video game.

• 1:15:41AJ Gentile?

  Yep, I remember this.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  You're an NPC.

• 1:15:43AJ Gentile?

  And some got upset, didn't they?

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, some were like, you know, that's ridiculous. Or some were like, I gotta go to work. I don't have time for this crap. Others were like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more.

• 1:15:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  And this was back in like 22, right? So looking at how fast, looking at how fast AI technology evolves. And we're already many generations beyond that. But they reacted kind of like real people, Mike. And so we're not quite at passing the virtual or metaverse Turing test yet. But I think we will be eventually. And that's one of the stages of these 10 stages to get to the simulation point to build a matrix. And another would be like BCI is putting in brain computer interfaces.

• 1:16:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Like in the matrix.

• 1:16:26AJ Gentile?

  So before we go too far down, um, one thing I, I don't think I've seen anyone else do this is your NPC verse RPG inside the simulation. But before we get there, take us back to your paper. And what was your argument for this could be a simulation? I mean, the, the actual technology.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the technological argument was that video games can get to be so good that we will reach the simulation point at some point. Uh, and it could be soon. It could be 100 years, could be a thousand years. It really doesn't matter that much as long as we get to that point. And so if we will eventually be able to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds that we can't distinguish if we're having the real experience or not. And one of the stages also included like false memories, like Philip K. Dick. We can talk more about him.

• 1:17:22AJ Gentile?

  I hope so.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, because he's, you know, one of my favorite authors. And in Blade Runner, for example, you had the android that had Rachel, who remembered being a little girl growing up. She didn't think she was AI, but she had those memories implanted in her. But if we can have those experiences and you can't tell the difference. Then how do we know for sure that we're not inside a virtual world right now? That was the crux of the argument, but it was built on the idea that technology is developing and people like to have virtual lives. And then the quantum physics was part of the argument as well. So I don't know if we want to get into that.

• 1:18:01AJ Gentile?

  In just a second, because I want to dispel something. And this was in my episode about simulation theory. Physicists will argue, this can't be a simulation, because to simulate all this material, all consciousness, down to the quantum level, you would need a simulation bigger than the universe itself. And my response was, that's not how simulations work.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. I mean, the way that simulations work is you simulate the parts that you need.

• 1:18:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  And you, so physicists love the law of big numbers, right? They love to say infinity. Oh yeah, it's infinite, or there's an infinite number of particles. But computer scientists, we hate infinity, because we are always dealing with limited resources.

• 1:18:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  So it's all about optimization. And I tell people, so in the book, there's a, we mentioned King's Quest, so I'll bring it up again.

• 1:18:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  If you look at King's Quest, you'll see that each of the screens, when that guy is walking, it almost looks continuous, but it's really not. All the pixels of all the screens are laid out, which means they're called raster images or bitmap images. But they're basically rendered, like the pixels are sitting there on disk and it's just a matter of loading it. Now, back in the 80s, and you know this, because you were around, if you tried to build something like World of Warcraft, or Fortnite, or a CS:GO, which is a first-person shooter.

• 1:19:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  You wouldn't be able to do it, because there's too many pixels to keep track of.

• 1:19:23AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  And they didn't know how to compress that down in such a way that you could render it on the fly. The hardware wasn't that good either, but the thing that I learned as a computer scientist is that it's, yes, the hardware gets better, but it's the algorithmic improvements that really make the order of magnitude difference. Like hardware might go from 1 to 2, but if you want to go from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, you need to change the way that you're doing things. And so the reason we can render... A World of Warcraft today is we don't need all the pixels for all the castles to be on your computer. What we do is we generate it through 3D models based upon where you're looking. And the first game that got really popular that did this was Doom.

• 1:20:06AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  Back in the 90s. I mean, they had Castle Wolfenstein and before that as well, but the game that really got popular, and it simulated a first-person perspective. And so it basically, you know, just showed you what your character could see. And the rule of thumb was only render that which is observed.

• 1:20:25AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  And by the way, that's what we do.

• 1:20:27AJ Gentile?

  That sounds familiar.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  It sounds familiar, right? And that's what we do with Zoom too. Like, if you and I, I mean, we happen to be in the same room, although how would the audience know that we're not in the same room?

• 1:20:36AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  But if we're on Zoom, and I'm in, you know, Los An- Phoenix, and you're in Los Angeles, then my computer doesn't have to render all of Los Angeles. It just renders your background. And similarly, your computer doesn't have to render all of Phoenix. It just needs to show the part that is visible from the camera.

• 1:20:51AJ Gentile?

  So that castle that's way out in the distance is really just a few pixels. That's all we're rendering until you get there. And then we give you more and more information.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's rendering it on demand.

• 1:21:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  And this is a key feature of how 3D, particularly 3D, video games are built. And the information for that castle is still out there. And sometimes, it's even that is generated on the fly. There was a game in 2016 called No Man's Sky.

• 1:21:18AJ Gentile?

  Oh, procedural, yes.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Procedural, right? And it had 18 quintillion planets, okay?

• 1:21:23AJ Gentile?

  That's an interesting number, actually.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  It is, right? You probably know why.

• 1:21:28AJ Gentile?

  I do, but you have to explain it.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:21:31AJ Gentile?

  But that's an interesting number.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, but first of all, it's a really big number.

• 1:21:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  So it pretty much seemed infinite at that point. And the way video games used to be designed is you would have to have your, your design team design every one of those planets. Now, there's no way that anyone could design 18 quintillion worlds. It's, it's just too much. So what they did was they used procedural generation.

• 1:21:53AJ Gentile?

  Which is what?

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Which is basically code that runs and generates the scenery for you as needed. So when you get to the planet, it would generate like the trees, the forests, the landscapes, the mountains, using a whole bunch of algorithms. And there's a whole bunch of algorithms that, you know, there's algorithms that can simulate water. There's fractal algorithms, if you've ever looked at how like, you know, you can have trees being generated. In fact, in my second simulation book, The Simulated Multiverse, there's a whole chapter on like these types of algorithms and how it looks like nature is algorithmic.

• 1:22:31AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  In nature. Nature is algorithmic in nature, no pun intended. Because, you know, you look at like the seashells.

• 1:22:40AJ Gentile?

  Right, the Fibonacci numbers are there.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Fibonacci numbers, but you see all these similar sequences of things or algorithmic generation or fractals, right, which are.

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body with a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  Fractals are when you have self similarity at different levels.

• 1:23:24AJ Gentile?

  Right, no matter what, where, how close or far away, it looks the same.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  It's very similar.

• 1:23:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Because it uses a similar algorithm.

• 1:23:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Even though there might be some randomness in the algorithm.

• 1:23:32AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  And fractals came from a guy, I think, what was his name, Mendel Braut? It was a guy in the seventies who said, how long is a coastline? So if you were to measure a coastline, how long would it be? Like say in England. Well, it depends on the scale. Because if you're measuring it from satellite, you know, you'll see kind of like a, almost like a straight line.

• 1:23:52AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  But if you go in to the bays and nooks and crannies, it'll be longer because now you're going like this. Well, if you got really small, you would start to see even within one rock, you would See all of these little variations, right? And so it depends on what scale you're at. But there's some self similarity at larger scales. And so all of these algorithms, so that's what this game was was known for. Uh, it's still out there now, uh, but it was considered a boring game when it first came out, but now they've added supposedly. I haven't played it in a long time.

• 1:24:24AJ Gentile?

  Me neither.

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  But supposedly it's gotten better.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  But it was known for this large number of worlds and almost infinite generated on demand. Like that's the key phrase that we need there. And so why 18 quintillion? Well, it's because it's two to the power of 64.

• 1:24:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Right. That's why it's that very specific number.

• 1:24:46AJ Gentile?

  So this is 64 bits.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  You had 64 bits that kept track of, you know, how many worlds do you want to keep track of now? There's no reason that's the limit. I mean, they could also have used 128 bits.

• 1:24:57AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  But it was very convenient, yeah, to to use like 64 bits because that's that's a commonly used uh, size of what's called a word, which is like multiple bytes um, within coding. Uh, and so you see this very interesting, interesting number. It's also, by the way, a big number related to the chess, um, the chess story from ancient India.

• 1:25:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is. Now you have to tell that story. It's a great one.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  I'll tell that story and then later we'll tie it to exponential problems and quantum computing. But for now, I'll just tell the story.

• 1:25:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Because we're talking about that number. So there was a king in India who loved to play chess. And he beat everybody and he, there was this wise man or sage. And he's like, I want to play chess with you. And the sage goes, nah, I don't really want to play. King goes, really? I'll give you anything you want if you'll just play chess with me.

• 1:25:41AJ Gentile?

  Anything?

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Anything. And the wise man goes, okay, if I win, meaning if the king loses, you'll give me one grain of rice for the first square in the chessboard. And then you'll give me two grains of rice for the second square and then double it to four and double it to eight, double it to 16 for all the squares of the chessboard. King will look, okay, and that's not a very big price to pay.

• 1:26:01AJ Gentile?

  It's only 64 squares.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, and I told you I'd give you anything. This is all you want? Well, of course, the, the wise man wins the game of chess. And then the king realizes when you go two to the power of 64, you double it 64 times. It was more grains of rice than would fit in all of India.

• 1:26:16AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  Uh, and that's an example of a big exponential problem.

• 1:26:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Uh, and how it grows. And so what we do as computer scientists is we optimize and figure out how much of that do we really need at any given time and we cache it. So that's, I think, ties together this idea of how video games only render that which is observed.

• 1:26:38AJ Gentile?

  So tell us about caching and lazy loading as well.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, should we draw the analogy first to the quantum physics?

• 1:26:46AJ Gentile?

  However you want to do it.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in quantum physics, there's this thing called the observer effect, which I think everybody has heard of. And it's based on the double slit experiment where the light goes through two slits and if it's a particle, if a particle is solid, you can really only go through one of those slits. You can't go through both. But if it acts as a wave, it basically, you know, spreads out with this weird interference pattern and it's like it's going through both. And what quantum physics is telling us is that it's not until it's observed or measured that the particle decides which slit it's going to go through, or even which slit it just went through. Now, that's a weird kind of thing because if it's a particle, it could only have gone through one.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  But quantum mechanics has a thing called superposition. And the superposition says it's in multiple states.

• 1:27:36AJ Gentile?

  Or in all states.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  In all states.

• 1:27:39AJ Gentile?

  At the same time.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  It's a superset of all the possible positions, if you will. That's where the term comes from. It's also used a lot in quantum computing, which we can talk about later if we have time. But it's in a state of superposition and then when it gets observed, it gets rendered. Now, this is usually where I bring up Schrödinger's cat.

• 1:27:57AJ Gentile?

  We can if you want to.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  People have heard it.

• 1:28:03AJ Gentile?

  People have heard it and Schrödinger was trolling because he didn't like this. But we can use it.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  Schrödinger thought it was bizarre, right? And didn't like it and he said, "Look, it's ridiculous to say that a cat is in superposition. It's either alive or dead. We won't get into details. But it's in the superposition until you open the box." Now, common sense says, "No, no, no, hold on. It's either alive or dead already. We just haven't looked in the box, so we don't know if it's alive or dead." But, no, that's not what quantum indeterminacy is actually saying.

• 1:28:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  It's saying it's in both of those states.

• 1:28:39AJ Gentile?

  That's why he was wrong.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:28:41AJ Gentile?

  He was wrong.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, he ended up being wrong. And there's an aside to this if we get around to talking about multiple timelines with Schrodinger.

• 1:28:48AJ Gentile?

  We have to.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, I looked at that as a guy doing video games and a guy who's been optimizing code all my life, and I realized, "Oh, the rule of thumb there is only render that which is observed." Until then, it stays as a set of information and a set of probabilities. And I thought, "That's just like how we build video games." We render the part of the world that gets observed. Now, in the old Newtonian model, the world just exists. All the particles are there and we move through it. It's kind of like King's Quest, where you can move the guy around, but all the pixels are there. But in quantum mechanics, it's like the pixels are generated dynamically.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  And so that was a big insight for me, that, "Oh, quantum indeterminacy is so bizarre. Why would it possibly exist?" And I said, "Well, because it's an optimization technique."

• 1:29:45AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  If you have limited resources, you only need to render that which is observed. Now, that brings up all kinds of questions about what happens if there's multiple observers. Are different people seeing different things? But, there's also something called caching in computer science. And what we do is, if I have just been to this world and it gets generated, or this room, let's say, and then you bring your avatar into the room, well, your computer is going to render it faster because the data's already there. But more than that, the next room is cached. And so is the next room over there on the left and the right.

• 1:30:20AJ Gentile?

  Because there's a probability that you might go into one of these places. So you can sort of preload the algorithm.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  Yes, it's preloading.

• 1:30:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:30:28AJ Gentile?

  It's like, "Oh, he didn't go in there. So that's fine. We have this one preloaded. So render that."

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly. So you render it quickly. So it's all about performance because there are operations which are slower or more expensive and operations which are quick. And in a multiplayer game, the most expensive operation is to go from your computer to the server on the internet. That's the slowest part of the whole process.

• 1:30:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  And then bring information back. Now imagine there's, you know, a million players all doing this. Well, you have to kind of optimize in such a way that assets can be loaded. It was funny, a few years ago, these filmmakers called me, called me up. It's been a while since I've talked to them and they said, hey, we're trying to develop this show for Netflix. And it's called, these guys are live in a little, uh, small town and they look up and they see this dialogue box that says, "Sky not found."

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  You know, which is like an asset, what happens in video games when it can't find your asset.

• 1:31:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  But so caching is basically a way to save what's needed. And so in this model of using the observer effect, like a video game, as long as there's at least one observer, then you still have that rendering there.

• 1:31:40AJ Gentile?

  And then you also have multiple levels of what game designers would call LODs, just in case, right?

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  Yes, right.

• 1:31:47AJ Gentile?

  So that LOD is a level of detail. So we'll show it to you, but just, just as much as you need to.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  Right. Especially like we're, we're talking about things that are off in the distance, right? And then you can go in and the assets can become higher and higher resolution. Kind of like, I don't know if people remember this, but like when JPGs used to load on, uh, old web browsers.

• 1:32:08AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  You know, that was an expensive operation. Today we think, oh, it's no big deal. I'm going to download a whole video like on wireless. But back then it was a big deal. And so the text would load first and then slowly it would fill in.

• 1:32:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  You know, the actual images over time. And that's, it's, it's an optimization technique. So.

• 1:32:26AJ Gentile?

  And now that's called lazy loading on the web.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  And so lazy loading is a good way to think about it. Uh, and in fact, There's an underlying concept called lazy evaluation, which goes down to the code level. So it basically says, don't execute any code unless you absolutely need to.

• 1:32:44AJ Gentile?

  So what is it holding on to?

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  So what it does is it looks for references.

• 1:32:48AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  So it's actually a timing issue more than.

• 1:32:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  So before we're talking about optimizing the number of bits you send, we're talking about optimizing your GPU, your graphics processing unit for drawing things. But this is optimizing the CPU. And what it says is, if you had like a really long equation, x equals 1 plus 2 to the power of this, plus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you never use that variable x later in the program. It's not needed. Now, maybe it's used, you know, a couple of days later, the program's running and now it needs x. It's okay, I'm going to go back and calculate that big, long equation, because that's an expensive operation.

• 1:33:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  And so lazy evaluation is actually built into a lot of programming, you know, languages and compilers and virtual machines like Java, et cetera, which says, basically, only run the code that you really need to run. It's like having comments, like when you have comments in code. But again, coding is becoming a lost skill now because of AI. But the comments aren't part of the actual program. They're not really needed. So when it gets compiled, it doesn't compile the comments. It just gets rid of them. And it's just compiling the code parts. Now, when you're running it, I remember I was back at MIT and we did, I had a professor who was studying parallel processing at the time.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  I think later he became CTO of Sun, Sun Microsystems and a bunch of other things as well. But, but he was like trying to come up with a way when you have multiple processors. And like with AI today, GPUs are the constraining factor. This is, you see video games in most technology advances. Like AI uses GPUs. Cryptocurrency, you know, mining uses GPUs. And GPUs were developed for graphics and video games.

• 1:34:35AJ Gentile?

  Is this why most games are built on engines? Because a lot of that math has already been handled?

• 1:34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, because engines make it much easier. To build a game because what would happen is in the old days, everyone had to write everything from scratch, including the physics engine.

• 1:34:50AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  The loading engine, like the things we just talked about. You'd have to write, you know, how do you take a 3D model and put like the rendering or the textures, which is like putting the clothes and the skin on top of the person.

• 1:35:03AJ Gentile?

  Right. Particle systems.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Particle systems, all that stuff is, has been built over many years. And in the old days, every team had to write all that themselves, which would just take way too long.

• 1:35:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  Uh, now there's Unreal and there's Unity. Unity became big partly because the mobile game industry.

• 1:35:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Because it was a way of doing a, a game on iOS and on Android.

• 1:35:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  Once, write the code. Cause before that, people used to write their games correctly on in C or Objective C or Java for the other one. But so it, the whole engine makes it easier to build new worlds on top of it. And then some companies like, you know, with Unreal, they, they made their engine available to other people as a product so they can build games on. I think it was the Unreal Tournament initially.

• 1:35:51AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  Is what it was built as.

• 1:35:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then it became, you know, a pretty solid engine. It's probably one of the best ones out there right now.

• 1:35:58AJ Gentile?

  My favorite.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. You guys use it here.

• 1:36:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and so where were we going with this?

• 1:36:02AJ Gentile?

  Parallel.

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. The parallels between quantum mechanics and the way that we write code. Uh, because the big question is not just does this happen? Because I think, you know, quantum mechanics has been validated.

• 1:36:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  Uh, this stuff happens. We don't know why it happens and we don't know how to think about it or interpret it. Now there's another, uh, so the first most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation.

• 1:36:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  Which basically says that all these probabilities exist and then the probability wave collapses down when an observation or a measurement has been made.

• 1:36:39AJ Gentile?

  Right. That's the wave function collapse.

• 1:36:41Speaker 03

  The wave function collapse. And that to me reminded me of what I've just been talking about.

• 1:36:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  Which is the optimization and the lazy evaluation and the caching and the rendering and the first person point of view.

• 1:36:50AJ Gentile?

  You didn't need to know the. Position yet.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, we didn't really know.

• 1:36:54AJ Gentile?

  No, it was there.

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  What's going on.

• 1:36:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  And you can calculate it, you can calculate what might have happened before then as well. This will get more interesting if we talk about multiple timelines.

• 1:37:05AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  I'll come, I'll come back to that.

• 1:37:06AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Uh, and so, so the other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with it with physicists is, now, they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer.

• 1:37:17AJ Gentile?

  No, they didn't.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler.

• 1:37:25AJ Gentile?

  Mine, too.

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was a great.

• 1:37:27AJ Gentile?

  Delayed choice, yes.

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, uh, but he was also the supervisor, uh, a PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman.

• 1:37:37AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was that the Challenger or Columbia Challenger in 1986? When he's, he like took the little O-rings and put them in, uh, in ice water and said, look, let's look at what happens to these.

• 1:37:53AJ Gentile?

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper, this is an interesting story here about, uh, how quantum computers came about, but we'll come to that later for a good time. Um, and so Wheeler was the supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett.

• 1:38:10AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  Uh, who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions get separated. And that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happen. So that became known as the multiverse, uh, or the many worlds interpretation.

• 1:38:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  Is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it.

• 1:38:32AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  And Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was, you know, the other kind of really big giant at the time, um, didn't like it either. And so Wheeler said, take out the stuff about there being multiple physical worlds. Just stick to the math. And so Hugh Everett needed a job and he's like, okay, fine, I'm just gonna finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. Uh, but that became the basis for, you know, a lot of great science fiction today.

• 1:38:54AJ Gentile?

  Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like? I know that they didn't really. Like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it. Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation? Because you can still have your block universe theory.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06AJ Gentile?

  Just in a different universe.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications. Because, you know, he had his, the universe, God does not play dice.

• 1:39:14AJ Gentile?

  That's right. That's true.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  With the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like, he didn't, it wasn't that he disagreed with the math. That was in the dissertation.

• 1:39:24AJ Gentile?

  He tried to disprove it, he couldn't.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, he couldn't. And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. Uh, and then Bohr didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called the Copenhagen interpretation because Bohr, Neil Bohr was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him.

• 1:39:42AJ Gentile?

  And a bit of ego.

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  And a bit of ego, of course, yeah. That happens a lot in science.

• 1:39:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  Uh, and so that's the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics.

• 1:39:51AJ Gentile?

  Where do you land?

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  So this is what's interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer. Uh, there's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem is it's like, it goes from all these possibilities to this one. And nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic.

• 1:40:15AJ Gentile?

  It's like magic.

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations. Step one, and then over here, step two, and then step three's got the answer. And his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs.

• 1:40:34AJ Gentile?

  That's what happens.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  That's what happens, right? Uh, but if it's a video game, well, then there, we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists. That is, that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game. Now, the big, the, the big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. Probably seen the, the Spider-Man meme where you've got like the.

• 1:41:00AJ Gentile?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  The three Spider-Mans, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who's the third one? Toby, Tobey Maguire. Yeah, they're all pointing at each other. Well, you know, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse.

• 1:41:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  That's, that, that's what we're told. That's how you can have all these different stories. Uh, but the problem from a, a science point of view is they say it's not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much faith.

• 1:41:23AJ Gentile?

  Too much.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  You're creating a new world, okay? Not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinancy point, at each choice.

• 1:41:36AJ Gentile?

  Which would be at the Planck scale.

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  At the Planck scale and maybe even at the Planck time.

• 1:41:41AJ Gentile?

  At the Planck time.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  Which, you know, by the way, the Planck scale is another reason why I think, you know.

• 1:41:46AJ Gentile?

  Same.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  Physics is showing us that we're, we have pixels in the universe.

• 1:41:49AJ Gentile?

  Sounds like pixels.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  It's the smallest measurable distance.

• 1:41:52AJ Gentile?

  And Planck time sounds like frame rate.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, a clock speed or frame rate.

• 1:41:56AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Which is, and now we, we do know that the universe is probably quantized. Scientists don't agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought like, you know, a MacBook or that's like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don't know what that means. What it means is hertz is instructions per second or cycles.

• 1:42:18AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  Per second. And so you can only do so many and you can't really do anything in between that minimum time.

• 1:42:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  And that's where the Planck time is, is like the, the amount of time it takes the speed of light to get through the Planck length, basically. And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those and it's more likely we live in a, um, in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program.

• 1:42:50AJ Gentile?

  That's a lot of universes.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  That's a lot of universes. So, so it's not parsimonious and you have to create all these universes.

• 1:42:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  But there was a physicist named Amit Goshwami. Um, he wrote, uh, what did he write? It was the Conscious Universe, I forget his book, but he wrote, he wrote a few really, he's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his talks and you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don't think about it till later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities in the sense that we think of them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade, hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:43:58Speaker 03

  If you kept doing it a bunch of times, right? Oh. Then it's a probability. Yes. So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don't know if it was Pascal, it was one of these French mathematicians at the beginning with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice and he asked him, "Hey, can you quantify, you know, how I can win at dice?" So he came up with this idea, he said, "If you have one die, a single dice, a die, has six possibilities." He called them "six possible futures." I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, "So your chances of getting one of those futures, if it's evenly weighted," you know, we're in Vegas, so he's a gambling analogy, "if it's properly weighted is one out of six."

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  But you can't really have a probability until you've tried something multiple times. Like, you know, you could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get a real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times. Right. And so... Yeah, a lot of times. A lot of times. You need to get up to a certain number. Right. And then it got me thinking, "Well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run as many times as you wanted. You also didn't have to infinitely run every single possibility." Okay, why? Because you would, basically, if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding, this is the problem with it being infinite, you could prune... Large parts of the tree, like the universe has something called fine tuning.

• 1:45:24Speaker 03

  Which is if a certain number of constants, like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off by like 1%, the planets would fly apart.

• 1:45:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  The galaxies wouldn't stay together. And there's like so many of these, people can look them up. There's at least 12, and there's probably more than that now.

• 1:45:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  But it looks like the universe is fine tuned. And well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times. And then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree.

• 1:45:57AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not gonna want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation. So let's just focus on this subset of possibilities.

• 1:46:08AJ Gentile?

  Right. So you tune Avogadro's number until it's just about right.

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12AJ Gentile?

  Or Mose's constant, or the speed of light.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14AJ Gentile?

  This is what works.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:46:16AJ Gentile?

  Throw that stuff out.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And you tune that stuff. And that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book because I have the second edition. And also, I interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife.

• 1:46:32AJ Gentile?

  Tessa Dick?

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Tessa Dick, yeah.

• 1:46:34AJ Gentile?

  Wow, what was that like?

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone. But she had so many stories, you know.

• 1:46:40AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  And she's still around. And, you know, she would tell me these stories. And I interviewed her because the Wachowskis, who made The Matrix, were inspired by Philip K. Dick.

• 1:46:52AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  In fact, she told me, I asked her, what would, you know, what would Philip think of The Matrix? And she said, well, first, he would like it. The first reaction would be, this is awesome, because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was, he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money.

• 1:47:09AJ Gentile?

  Probably good.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  For using his ideas.

• 1:47:11AJ Gentile?

  I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk at Mets in 77.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk. And there's a written version.

• 1:47:20AJ Gentile?

  Everyone should, it's amazing.

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  And there's a famous line from it, where he says, "We are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some..." Variable has changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. And so when I, originally, I was just interested in the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer programmed reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone's like, what?

• 1:47:44AJ Gentile?

  I love it. They think they're going to see a sci fi author talk and they're getting this philosophical. It's so important, that talk.

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out, her name is Joan Simpson, she was his friend. She went with him to the conference and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, the rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay, so he must have added it in. In his notes while he was flying over there. And, but if you read the rest of the speech, what he, the next line is, uh, we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of déjà vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past, a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate path.

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  And his most famous book while he was alive was actually The Man in the High Castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don't know, they may have seen, some of you may have seen the the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. I talked to his wife, she said he would have loved it, that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War Two. And they end up, you know, splitting America between them and you have kind of a police state on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened, uh, where the Axis powers won the war. And now we're on a different timeline. And he said at some point, all the memories

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book too, by the way.

• 1:49:22AJ Gentile?

  Was he?

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

  That's what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because he, there were such bleak memories in that timeline.

• 1:49:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, he said, he saw it. He said, this happened, but

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31AJ Gentile?

  but somewhere it's, the variable was changed.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:49:35AJ Gentile?

  Who changed it?

• 1:49:35Speaker 03

  He called it the programmer and counter programmer. And so, you know, he used this idea of orthogonal time.

• 1:49:41AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  Which he compared it to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit, you can try on the other suit. But what he also said, so, so Tessa encouraged me to read his, uh, his speech. And I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. He also said, we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate timeline.

• 1:50:06AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  Uh, and of course, back then, it was hard to do that. But now we have this thing called the Mandela effect. Uh, and whether you believe in the Mandela effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible histories.

• 1:50:20AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's talk about that because people love it. Mandela effect never worked on me until there is one that got me. Uh, otherwise the Bernstein bears all that never. Fruit of the, uh, well, you tell the story.

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34AJ Gentile?

  What's the Mandela effect?

• 1:50:35Speaker 03

  So the Mandela effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past. And the, it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the eighties. And of course, he didn't in our timeline, right? He actually, you know, was released from prison. He became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize and died, I think, at like 2013 or something.

• 1:51:01AJ Gentile?

  They remember his funeral on TV.

• 1:51:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they remember details.

• 1:51:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:51:05Speaker 03

  Winnie, his wife, taking over the AMC.

• 1:51:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  Uh, they remember all of these. And then Fiona Broome is the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Star Trek, uh, at a Comic Con convention in Atlanta. It was called Dragon Con. And it was a Star Trek, uh, panel. And the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trekkies, you know, they know their, uh,

• 1:51:28AJ Gentile?

  They know their stuff.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  They know their stuff. They know their episodes. And, and, and people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this? Mr. Spock did that, and maybe Mr. Hulu did that. They're like, "No, we never shot such an episode." And multiple people in the audience remembered this. And so she started to think, "Is it possible that there are other ones?" So she set up a website and started to explore. And she used to find all these different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me, and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way.

• 1:51:54AJ Gentile?

  Same.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  If you ask me what it was. I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. But a friend of mine from MIT, who typically, you know, a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left-brained about these things. He said, "You know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen." And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it, and him talking about it, I couldn't get this out of my mind, that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  And so I categorized these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one. Then there's things like movies is another category. The events?

• 1:52:52AJ Gentile?

  The Moonraker one is the one that got me.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, so, yeah, the Moonraker one.

• 1:52:55AJ Gentile?

  That she doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Right, it was Jaws who had the steel teeth.

• 1:53:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  And he meets, was her name Dolly?

• 1:53:01AJ Gentile?

  Dolly, meets Dolly.

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  At the end, and I remember that, too.

• 1:53:04AJ Gentile?

  You remember the braces?

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  I remember the braces, too. And that was the whole point of that.

• 1:53:07AJ Gentile?

  That one got me.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so there's a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein Bears one. And what I like to say is, if someone has proximity or significance to an event, and they remember it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online, I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the Simulated Multiverse book, where she was a journalism student, and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there, and she came all the way back. Then she graduated. Probably back in the eighties now and was working for NPR. So again, she was in the news

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  industry and she heard that Nelson Mandela had died. And now you're not going to get that wrong if you went there to meet the guy.

• 1:53:56AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  You're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Stephen Vico, which is what the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance, and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. You remember that?

• 1:54:15AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  The Tank Boy?

• 1:54:16AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  And the Tank, what do you remember?

• 1:54:19AJ Gentile?

  I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  That's how I remember it as well. But I started asking people about this, and there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw.

• 1:54:36AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  On the news, like, they were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it's like 10 to 20% in a group. I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Heinecke, and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember him being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do, I said, does anyone remember Tank Boy being run over? And nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this audience doesn't have it. This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards, and she said she lived in Beijing at the time. And she remembers him being run over there, but she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish, who remember asking, why are the Bernstein, like, why are they Jewish bears? To their parents. Now, they're not going to get that

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  wrong.

• 1:55:23AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  The rest of us might get it wrong.

• 1:55:25AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  And so, and then there's the Bible verses. Okay. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse?

• 1:55:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes, I know the verse.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb.

• 1:55:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's not the verse.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that verse.

• 1:55:39AJ Gentile?

  The lion lays with the kid, the leopard lays with the kid.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  The wolf lays with...

• 1:55:42AJ Gentile?

  The wolf with the lion, the leopard with the kid.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44AJ Gentile?

  So that's a Mandela effect?

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  That's a Mandela effect, because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together.

• 1:55:50AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  And there are even like, you know, people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb and... Say Isaiah.

• 1:55:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's not it.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  One eleven. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture. Right. Because they remember so. And I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at, you know, one that happened to translate it. Uh, but there people are telling me no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with the lamb. And the physical object has changed. So recently I met, uh, someone who's, uh, actually, uh, another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Bruxton. She said she went to her Catholic priest. And she said, do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion? He goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up. And she, he looked it up and he's like, what? So you have a Catholic priest, again, somebody who's closer to it.

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  Uh, and there's another interesting scriptural element, which we'll come to in a second, but the other one that really got me was the thinker.

• 1:56:48AJ Gentile?

  The statue?

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the statue. So if you look at it today, and, and there's a cast of it at Stanford, so I was happening to be in Silicon Valley, someone to look at it. You know, where's his hand? Do you remember where his hand was?

• 1:56:58AJ Gentile?

  On his chin.

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  On his chin. And was it clenched or was it kind of like this?

• 1:57:02AJ Gentile?

  I don't remember that. I thought, I thought it was kind of fisty.

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you look at it, it's kind of like, kind of not really clenched too hard.

• 1:57:09AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 1:57:10Speaker 03

  But there are all these people who took pictures standing next to the thinker. Like this with their hand on their forehead.

• 1:57:15AJ Gentile?

  That's weird.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  And there are people who remember it that way. But if you look at the pictures, it's not there. And so again, I thought, okay, maybe they're pranking us. Like, what's going on? Why are these random people putting these pictures? Because it's only when you take a picture next to a statue and you, you get the pose. You're trying to do the actual pose. And then turns out there's a picture. Uh, an actual picture of George Bernard Shaw. So GB Shaw was a, uh, you know, he's a well-known guy in England. He also modeled for Rodin. And for other people. And they were doing, uh, the London release, uh, of the thinker. Uh, and they were unveiling it in London. I forget what year, like 1900 something, I know 1901, maybe it was 1910. And they took a picture of him, this one photographer.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  And it says, the title of the picture, you can find it online, is GB Shaw in the pose of the thinker. And guess where his hand is? It's up on his forehead.

• 1:58:11AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:58:11Speaker 03

  And that picture is still there in museums, and there are plenty of, you know, people can find it online. And so, is it possible that some variables are being changed in a way? And so, I began to think.

• 1:58:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, which one's got you?

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  So, that one got me.

• 1:58:27AJ Gentile?

  The thinker?

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  Not because I didn't remember it. I mean, I remembered it. I wasn't that close to it, so I didn't think too much about it.

• 1:58:33AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 1:58:34Speaker 03

  But seeing the physical evidence of this picture really got me. That's one that got me. I mean, the Jaws one was another one that I remember. I mean, Jiffy peanut butter wasn't that big of a deal to me. There's a famous one about in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, where, you know, Luke, I am your father. Again, I think that could be just faulty memory.

• 1:58:53AJ Gentile?

  I think so.

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  Collective faulty memory. I mean, there's so many now that I've come across. Chick-fil-A is another one, that doesn't have a K in the Chick-fil-A.

• 1:59:03AJ Gentile?

  That's right. That's right. That would probably get me. And I read an interesting theory about Jaws that made me feel a little better is, sometimes when you're remembering, especially if it's a long time ago, your brain fills in what would be most logical. Because that joke works better if she has braces.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:59:21AJ Gentile?

  So, that made me feel better, but that was one that blew my mind. Because I was like, I remember all this stuff perfectly. No, I don't.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's so many of these. So, I was looking around at explanations. And so, we'll go down the quantum rabbit hole again in a second.

• 1:59:40AJ Gentile?

  Please.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  But I began to wonder, the scripture stuff really got me too. Not because I remembered the scripture. I mean, I remembered Lion Will Eat Lamb too, but I'm not that religious. I began to wonder if there's other scriptures that have changed. And in Islam, the Quran, right? Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity. The Quran is memorized, word for word. And you can think of the reason why, and the exoteric or normal reason why is probably just because a lot of people could read back then. You know, but they literally recited it word for word. And there's even a designation of a guy, who knows? All of that. And I looked around to say, hey, has anyone claimed that this has changed at all?

• 2:00:24Speaker 03

  And there's one Sufi Imam. And again, the exoteric reason is, is because not everybody has a physical book. The esoteric reason he gave, he said that there are beings that are allowed to go back in time and change objects.

• 2:00:41AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  But they are not allowed to change your memory.

• 2:00:44AJ Gentile?

  I know these beings. Tell us about these.

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  These beings are called the djinn.

• 2:00:47AJ Gentile?

  Djin, yes.

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  In Middle Eastern lore, and you go to the Middle East and people take, you know, these beings very seriously.

• 2:00:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  I mean, people get possessed by these beings. There are, I mean, when I, I was born in Pakistan, you know, it was kind of like the boogeyman, like, you know, there's a djinn over there.

• 2:01:02AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Don't pee on that tree. But then it turns out there are actual people who like poured scalding, Jacques Vallée told me a story of a guy in Saudi Arabia, or a kid who like poured scalding water and then got possessed. And supposedly there was a djinn and a priest had to come in and do kind of like an exorcism, but he had to talk the djinn out of it, saying, he's just a young kid, he didn't know what he was doing. And the djinn was like, okay, and then it released him.

• 2:01:25AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  There's so many interesting stories. That's a huge different rabbit hole to go down. But I got interested.

• 2:01:31AJ Gentile?

  There's something to it, I think, though.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so in tune. And I got interested in it because it became a way to think about simulation theory, as if you have run this more than once, you could have changed things along the way. Now, it's very easy for us to think of multiple possible futures, like, okay, I go to New York, I go to London, I go to live in LA. Those are three different possible futures. But it, we're not used to thinking of multiple possible paths. I mean, that's, that sounds weird to say there could be more than one past. Well, it turns out there's something called the delayed choice experience.

• 2:02:04AJ Gentile?

  I was hoping this was going to come back to John Wheeler.

• 2:02:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're going to come back to John Wheeler.

• 2:02:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  Actually, can we take a quick break?

• 2:02:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, take a quick break and we'll talk about how the past is not really the past.

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:16AJ Gentile?

  Take some photons, shoot them at two slits, you get two lines. Observe it, you get interference pattern. Got it. John Wheeler said, wait a second. What happens next?

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he came up with what's called the delayed choice double slit experiment.

• 2:02:31AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  And, you know, what it's telling us is that time is not what we think it is. That the present, the past, and the future are different from the way we think about it. I mean, we think of the past as being linear.

• 2:02:48AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:48Speaker 03

  We know what happened, right? It's just one timeline. This is what's happened along the way. And the delayed choice experiment opened up an opportunity that the past could also be in superposition. Now, the best way to understand this actually is not so much the slits, but it's what Wheeler called the cosmic delayed choice experiment.

• 2:03:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  And he said, suppose there's something like a quasar, which puts out a lot of light, and it's really far away from us, like a billion light years. And so that would be outside the galaxy, beyond the interstellar galaxy. And how long would it take for the light to reach Earth? Let's say Earth is here. It's going to take a billion years.

• 2:03:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  But suppose right in the middle, there's a big black hole, or some other big gravitational object, and the light has to make a decision about whether to go to the left...

• 2:03:40Speaker 05

  At Burn Apparel, we've been outfitting tradespeople since 1915. We believe in hard work, honesty, and taking care of our own. We make gear for the everyday worker. Our gear is built to last and priced so you can afford it. For over a century, we've had your back. Burn Apparel: durable, affordable workwear since 1915.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  Or to the right.

• 2:04:11AJ Gentile?

  Ah, okay.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  And that's kind of like two slits.

• 2:04:13AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  And we can have telescopes here on Earth that will measure through what's called polarization of light, whether it went this way or that way.

• 2:04:23AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so the measurement happens now, but it has to go one way or the other, like...

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  Let's say it's halfway. So how long ago would the decision have to have been made? It would have been half a billion years ago.

• 2:04:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  Right. So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs now at this point, right?

• 2:04:40AJ Gentile?

  Far before.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, before the dinosaurs. It's kind of like saying, if you're gonna go to, you know, San Francisco from New York, are you gonna go up towards Chicago? Or are you gonna go down through Tennessee, Arkansas? You have to make that decision like well before you get to San Francisco.

• 2:04:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:04:57Speaker 03

  Now, what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that it's when the measurement of the light is done today on Earth that the decision gets made on whether the the light went to the left or to the right of that black hole. Okay, that's weird because now we're saying that the past isn't fixed, that the past is in superposition. And it's only when the measurement is done here. It's like an observer effect, but for time, not just for space.

• 2:05:31AJ Gentile?

  Those photons went back in time to make the decision about today's observation.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  Well, that's one interpretation of it.

• 2:05:38AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  The other interpretation is that both of those existed as possibilities, and they didn't get fixed until today. So again, did Germany or Japan win World War II? Germany and Japan, did the Allies win World War II?

• 2:05:55AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:05:55Speaker 03

  What if that decision isn't made until somebody observes the result? And then that result is cached now so that everybody is on that timeline for some period of time. And this to me was an interesting revelation because it reveals that there could be a simulated multiverse of multiple timelines. Okay, because what if what we're really thinking about is we ran the simulation one way and we also ran it the other way? And we are basically pulling the past in on demand. Now, you'll appreciate this because not only do we optimize resources with lazy evaluation, but we also say

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  You know, don't run something until it's needed.

• 2:06:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  Right? And so in a computer game, let's say like Farmville or Minecraft, okay? Kids still play Minecraft. Today they have crops that grow. And what happens is you log in and it, you see that the crops have grown since you logged in yesterday or four hours ago, or whatever the case is. Uh, and now, what happens during the time that you're not logged in? And the answer is nothing.

• 2:07:09AJ Gentile?

  Nothing.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  Because it would take too many resources to sit there and calculate every single growth of every single blade of grass or of wheat, you know, for that time. So what the computer does is it's when you log in, it basically renders what might have happened over the last X period of time.

• 2:07:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:07:29Speaker 03

  Let's say 24 hours. And it uses a database of probabilities to say, what's the probability that your crops were destroyed by a locust? What's the probability that your neighbor came in and stole some of your crops? Or that the fox got in and ruined a few crops? And you see it as this is what's happened. Now my crops are all grown. I can now sell my crops. But what just happened there was that the past was generated on demand. So it's not so much that you're changing the past because physicists don't like that. Physicists don't like when you say retrocausation. It's that you are filling in the past based upon the observations as it's made. And there could have been multiple possible versions of that.

• 2:08:11AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I like this.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  So that's a different way to think about time. Now, is it possible that some of us are remembering one version of the Mandela effect? And, you know, we talked about ones that got you, like the Jaws one. Uh, you know, there's another one. There's a, there's a famous one about Sinbad being in a movie.

• 2:08:30AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  Called Shazam. And it turns out it was Shaq in Kazam.

• 2:08:35AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  But so many people, you know, would swear they had a VHS tape. And the story was like this, and the kids are asking the genie about his dad that Sinbad actually recorded in like 2017, a little clip from this movie that never exists. As kind of a joke to say, okay, here's the scene you guys all say you saw, but never existed. Right. But people remembered it. You know, so many different versions and Mandela effect. Gino has one for you that I can't reveal to you. Oh, okay. He's going to tell you later. Okay. But is it possible that we are all remembering a different version now? I thought, okay, that's the delayed choice experiment. Wheeler proposed it as a thought experiment. He couldn't do it at the time. It required like, like pretty complex setup. And so, you know, is it just a thought experiment?

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Well, it turns out, no, people have actually run this experiment. They have. Now, they obviously they haven't run it for like, you know, the cosmic version. But what they've done is they've gone through two slits and they've sent a particle up to a satellite a thousand miles away. And so the question is, when they measure the particle, or say the light, using our example, from the satellite, it was a thousand kilometers from the slits themselves. And the question is, is the decision made about which slit to go through like here? Like when it first starts out in the slits? Or is it made after the light travels a thousand miles? And a thousand miles is not that far in the scope of things.

• 2:10:01Speaker 03

  But when you're talking about, you know, nanoseconds, it takes a lot of. Sure, you can measure it. Yeah, you can measure it. And it's very measurable by today's instruments is the point. And they did this experiment and they found in fact that it was in superposition until it was measured by the satellite. Okay, so then I said, well, how come more physicists don't talk about this? And so I went back and I found an obscure speech by our favorite quantum founder, Schrodinger. Okay. This was an obscure speech he made in the 1940s. I think it was at Caltech and nobody talks about this for some reason. People talk about the multiverse, which was, you know, late 50s, early 60s. People talk about the Copenhagen interpretation.

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  He said that in effect, once the observation was made, we would not just be deciding the state, the superposition. But we would be choosing from one of several simultaneous, one of multiple simultaneous histories. So literally, Schrodinger is telling us there are multiple simultaneous histories. And it's like when you choose, look at the cat, you're not just choosing whether it's dead or alive. Sorry for bringing the cat back.

• 2:11:12AJ Gentile?

  That's okay.

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  But what did the cat do before it jumped in the box? Did it come from the living room or did it come from the dining room? Before that, was it in the backyard or was it in the front yard?

• 2:11:23AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 2:11:23Speaker 03

  It's like you're choosing this history. And that is the one that is now being part of our simulation is what I would say.

• 2:11:31AJ Gentile?

  I've got to read that speech.

• 2:11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very obscure and I have a, I have a reference to it in the simulated multiverse. Uh, but I've never heard anyone else talk about it. I found it, you know, when I was looking around online for the earliest references to the multiverse. And again, we think of the multiverse as, you know, branching out this way. There's a good, uh, there's a series on Apple TV called A Dark Matter. I don't know if you've seen it.

• 2:11:53AJ Gentile?

  I did, I did.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  It's based on a book by Blake Crouch.

• 2:11:56AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  And when I was researching the multiverse, I had read that book along with many others. Uh, and, uh, basically, you know, this guy has multiple versions of, of his life. And one of, what happens is he gets kidnapped by somebody and he gets taken away and he wakes up in a whole nother university than he was working at. And he finds out who it was that kidnapped him. It was himself.

• 2:12:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  From another version of the multiverse who had made different choices. And that guy, although he was like, almost like a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he didn't have a family and kids. And so that guy's taking over his family and kids. Uh, I won't tell the rest of the, the book, but that, that's pretty much described. Even if you just look at the series, you'll know that's what it's about. But so the multiverse, I think, brings up this idea that we could run multiple processes and maybe they're running. You know, to try to see what the outcomes are. And maybe the outcomes that are less than ideal. Just like I talked about with pruning. Maybe we prune, we, meaning whoever runs the simulation, runs these different things because you never run a simulation just once, do you?

• 2:13:01AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  Simulation of the weather, simulation of virus, simulation of, you know, a financial or whether an asteroid is going to to hit us. There's something called the three body problem. I'm sure you've heard of that.

• 2:13:12AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  It's when we have three bodies that are kind of circling each other. The question is, will they stay in a stable orbit? Or will one day one of them fly off? And it turns out, we don't know the answer to that.

• 2:13:22AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  Because there's no shortcut. You have to just keep running it to see. And there's a term that came from a computer physicist turned computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram. Called computational irreducibility.

• 2:13:36AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  And Wolfram was pioneer in many things. He wrote the Mathematica software. But he also was a pioneer in cellular automata. Which for those who don't know, they're like simple rule sets.

• 2:13:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  It's like you can have one row of squares and the squares would light up or not, depending on if the next square is lit up or not. And it'll go dark following these rules. So these are very simple rules. A very deterministic version of reality. And then there's what's called the game of life.

• 2:14:03AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:14:03Speaker 03

  Which is a two dimensional grid. And if you watch it, it in nowadays, you know, we run it on computers. But when the guy Conway came up with it, he literally had a grid sitting at the University of Cambridge and his mathematical students would like erase squares and fill in squares. But what would happen is you get these very complex arrangements. Every now and then you'd get a stable arrangement.

• 2:14:24AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  Which means you know it's going to stay this way or it flips back and forth. But they have what they call complex or chaotic results or processes. And those you don't know what's going to happen. This is the kind of the basis of complexity theory.

• 2:14:38AJ Gentile?

  And the game of life is just quickly, the rules are.

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  The rules are again, if you're, if the next square is lit up and the one next to it is lit up, then you light up.

• 2:14:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:47Speaker 03

  And if the maybe the one on top of it, I'm making up these rules, but these are the types of rules.

• 2:14:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  And the one below it is lit up, then you go dark.

• 2:14:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  And so at each step, every square follows these rules. Right. So it's a very simple computer program. Now, for complex and chaotic processes, and you would think we could predict what's going to happen, but it depends on the initial conditions. And this is what led to the whole science of chaos theory. Sure, Lorenz and all of that. Yeah, Lorenz, and also, you know, people remember Jurassic Park with That's right. Ian Malcolm, who's a chaotician. That's right. The point was with the butterfly effect where, you know, they say the butterfly flaps its wings in, let's say, Hong Kong, and the stock market crashes in London. There's a whole chain of events that has to happen along the way. And so what computational irreducibility means is,

• 2:15:33Speaker 03

  you don't know what's going to happen at step 1 million until step 9999999, you know, and then you don't know what's going to happen at that step until you go to 998, and to 997, and all the way back. So you have to run the computer program. And so even for a deterministic process that has no free will, okay, you don't know what's going to happen. For chaotic and complex processes. And I believe our simulation would qualify as a complex or chaotic process. And so Philip K. Dick believed that the timelines were altered. And I asked his wife, well, did he tell you any other examples of this? And she said, yeah. She goes, they told him. And I said, well, what do you mean, they?

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  You know, did you see them? She goes, I, it looked like he was talking to somebody, but it looked like a little blur to me or something. Like the day that runs the simulation? The simulation, people outside, did it look like, did they look like gray aliens? Did they look like? She's like, I couldn't really tell, you know, because only Phil could see them. But she could tell there was something weird that he was talking to, like an entity. And she said, they told him that they prevented the assassination of JFK in Dallas. But then he was assassinated in Orlando. And then they prevented it in Orlando, and then he was assassinated somewhere else. And every time they changed it, it resulted in a worse outcome, like a nuclear war. Right. He just ended up dying somewhere else. So he had to be assassinated.

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of like if you've ever read that book by Stephen King or, you know, the mini-series 112263, where he goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination. I won't give it away, but you have to read it to see like how the past doesn't necessarily want to be changed. But for me, that's like, it's very similar to what we would do if we were running a simulation. We would run it and we'd get to a point and say, okay, that's enough on this time. Now let's run the next one. Now let's run the next one. And so it provides, simulation theory provides a bridge between the Copenhagen interpretation, the collapse of the probability wave, because there's an observer who's playing the game, and the multiverse idea, because it doesn't require an infinite multiverse. So it's like,

• 2:17:43Speaker 03

  people often ask me, what's the purpose of the simulation? Most sure who's running it and why? Who's running it and why? And in the new edition of Simulation Hypothesis, I have there's about 100 new pages for those who read the old version. Oh, wow. It's a pretty big update, because all the AI stuff. That's right. Happened, all the brain-computer interfaces to the technology side. And then I went deeper on the religion, but there's about 20 pages of FAQs, which are the most commonly asked questions over since the 20th anniversary. I ended up writing this on the 25th anniversary of The Matrix. And one of those questions were, you know, what's the purpose of the simulation? Who's running the simulation? And I say, look, let me ask you a couple of questions back. One, why do we run simulations? And two, why do we play video games? And

• 2:18:27Speaker 03

  I believe the answer to those two questions gives us an answer for why we might be in a video game, in a video game type simulation, a personal purpose and a bigger societal purpose. And the reason we run simulations is to see what is the likely outcome under this set of variables? And then we would change the variables. And we also want to know what is the the most favorable outcome, right? We're like, hey, if we do this to the asteroid, what will happen? Will it miss Earth? Or will it hit the moon? And that's just as bad.

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:18:59Speaker 03

  As it hitting Earth. Because if the moon gets really smashed, then, you know, we'll be screwed or whatever the simulation is. So it's to find the most likely outcome, the most favorable, and maybe to avoid the least favorable outcome. And you had to do that, you have to run it multiple times. But at the personal level, why do we play video games?

• 2:19:15AJ Gentile?

  Entertainment.

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  Entertainment. We want to have fun, so we want to experience certain things like I can't much as, you know, I used to read Lord of the Rings, you know, when I was

• 2:19:23AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:19:24Speaker 03

  teenager, still now I just watch the movies. But I used to read it every so often. I can't jump on a dragon and shoot, you know, arrows at orcs in this particular reality, but I can do it inside a virtual world. And it's a safe, a safe quote unquote way to do it. And to have bad experiences too, like I, I, I don't believe the purpose of the simulation is grand theft auto.

• 2:19:46AJ Gentile?

  Probably not.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so anyway, that, that ties to, to, to, you know, some of these, these bigger questions around. Why would there be a simulated universe in the first place? And why would there be a multiverse?

• 2:19:58AJ Gentile?

  But that's projecting our sense of morality and intent onto some greater consciousness. So what do you, what do you think their end game is? Are they looking out for us? Because there's a lot of suffering.

• 2:20:09Speaker 03

  There's a lot of suffering in this world.

• 2:20:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:11Speaker 03

  I often just say, people say to me, well, I can't be in a simulation because if I was, I would be a billionaire and I would be

• 2:20:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  an actor.

• 2:20:20AJ Gentile?

  My kid wouldn't have got cancer.

• 2:20:21Speaker 03

  My kid wouldn't have got cancer, you know, Holocaust, all these things, right? But it depends on the nature of the game and what we're trying to experience. Like when we run a simulation, we, the better they get, we're going to run, you know, very bad scenarios through the simulation. What happens if the virus spreads to everybody?

• 2:20:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:41Speaker 03

  Right? And we want it to be as realistic as possible eventually. Now, this gets back to the NPC versus RPG version.

• 2:20:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  Which, which we started talking about.

• 2:20:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:20:49Speaker 03

  And I think it ties to this bigger question. Because in an NPC version, of course, they're going to have suffering on us because that's why you build simulations and that's why you run NPCs. Like, that doesn't imply that we couldn't be in a simulation just because there's now in the RPG version, it gets even more interesting, in my opinion. Because there, people are choosing roles that might have bad experiences, bad quote unquote, or suffering. Now, you know, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons.

• 2:21:23AJ Gentile?

  Same.

• 2:21:23Speaker 03

  Right back before. Now it's popular again because of Stranger Things.

• 2:21:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:21:27Speaker 03

  But back in the day, when we used to play it back in the eighties, you know, we do it with pencil and paper. And you would choose your character. Yeah, you would choose the race. You would say it's an elf, dwarf, or human, let's say. And then you would choose the general profession, thief, cleric.

• 2:21:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  Warrior, you know.

• 2:21:43AJ Gentile?

  Paladin.

• 2:21:44Speaker 03

  Paladin. Oh, yeah, that's right. And it's not that, you know, you couldn't, you know, the wizard couldn't also be a good fighter. It's just that that's not their skill set. So you're choosing almost like aptitudes, in a sense, and you're choosing a storyline or a profession. And then you choose the campaign that you're going to be on.

• 2:22:02AJ Gentile?

  But you also choose the morality, whether evil, good, chaotic evil, all that stuff.

• 2:22:06Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, there's all of this stuff that you're choosing. And some of those roles are not good roles.

• 2:22:12AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. But that, to me, gets back to this idea, whether you can, you can treat the simulation theory in one of two ways. And again, it's an axis, just like NPC and RPG is an axis, because you can have both NPCs and RPGs in the same game. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent of one or a hundred percent of the other. In fact, most games have both. And I'm assuming the audience might be familiar with that term, but it's, they're not, NPC stands for non-player character or non-playable character. And it actually comes from Dungeons and Dragons.

• 2:22:44AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:22:45Speaker 03

  The tabletop game.

• 2:22:45AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:22:46Speaker 03

  Because, you know, you had to interact with a bartender at the inn. You had to interact with a guy at the armory who's selling you, you know, the plus five crossbow or one of these other, you know, items. And there's going to be enemies there that you have to fight as well.

• 2:23:00AJ Gentile?

  Which are we? Were we the NPCs or were we the RPGs?

• 2:23:02Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's an interesting question. And I like to say that we're, we may be both, because there's something in between. Okay, which is that we. Choose roles, and we are playing the roles, but we also go into NPC mode for other people. In that, we are playing certain role, like there are people who may have had a role in your life, that's a relatively small role or a major role. But, and one woman came to me once and said, you know, I think my husband is an NPC.

• 2:23:32AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 2:23:33Speaker 03

  I said, that's not a healthy way to think about it.

• 2:23:35AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:23:36Speaker 03

  In fact, it's better to think about everyone as a source player with their own storyline, their own difficulties, and their own quests. But, they're gonna play roles for us, and which could be, they're going into NPC mode because that is a role that we have agreed to. Kind of like in a film. Now, I, I like to say that the other way to think about simulation hypothesis is a metaphor for reality. So, the one way is it's literally code running on a machine, and if we really get into it, I think it's closer to a quantum computing device than a regular digital computing device.

• 2:24:11AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:24:12Speaker 03

  But, the other way is to say, the video game is a metaphor for this idea that we are coming into this fake or hoaxed reality, and that we are playing a role, and we have agreed to forget that we're playing that role.

• 2:24:25AJ Gentile?

  So, there's a consciousness out there that, that we're not even aware of that's driving this reality?

• 2:24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it could be that we're a player, and we, so AJ, Riz.

• 2:24:36Speaker 06

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So, this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 2:25:07Speaker 03

  You know, Joe, all these guys, we are the avatars of our consciousness, which is sitting outside of the simulation and playing the game. Now, in The Matrix, you know, Neo, Morpheus and Trinity existed outside of The Matrix. And of course, they look the same, because if you're gonna hire Keanu Reeves in a movie, you want him to be the same character. But in a game, when you choose your avatar, you don't have to look like that. It doesn't have to be... You would choose the role that the character has, and outside, you could be something else entirely.

• 2:25:39AJ Gentile?

  This feels like reincarnation a little bit.

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  It does.

• 2:25:42AJ Gentile?

  Like, you respawn.

• 2:25:43Speaker 03

  You respawn as a new character. But you may have some of the skills that you learned.

• 2:25:49AJ Gentile?

  There's evidence of that.

• 2:25:50Speaker 03

  I'm playing Right. There's like the work of Ian Stevenson in particular, with the children who, you know, have marks where they claim, you know, they were killed violently. There's people who remember languages.

• 2:26:03AJ Gentile?

  Zena Glossy, The Life Between Lives by Michael Newton talks about it.

• 2:26:08Speaker 03

  Yes, so I spent a lot of time looking at Life Between Lives. And, you know, when he talks about the in-between time, so what he did was he hypnotized people. And also Dolores Cannon did the same thing.

• 2:26:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes, same thing.

• 2:26:21Speaker 03

  I was about to say Dolores Claymore. I mentioned Stephen King earlier, that's probably why. But there's a period just before you go into the life, which, first, there's life selection. And they lay out, here's the possible trajectories that you might take in your life, and here's the major decision points you might make. Now, you're still free to choose to go this way, you'll live in California, or you live there. But if you go there, how are you gonna meet this other character, player, who's gonna be your wife or your husband? But there's different challenges, and these are the quests or challenges that you're gonna deal with in this life.

• 2:26:59AJ Gentile?

  Quests, that's very interesting.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  So if you think of games and how they're built today, you have difficulty levels of quests. We have like a quest tree typically, where you start off with simple quests, and then you unlock the more difficult quests.

• 2:27:11AJ Gentile?

  That's very interesting, because Michael Newton talks about, and many researchers, about soul groups. That always sort of reincarnate together and that makes me think it's just a bunch of nerds around a table saying, "All right, let's play again, reset the table, I'm gonna do this, you do that, and we'll start rolling dice."

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  Exactly, or like, "Hey, we're all gonna meet on Tuesday"

• 2:27:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:27:30Speaker 03

  "At this castle"

• 2:27:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  "To have a raid," right? And Michael Newton even talks about these little clues that you're gonna, I mean, I call them clues. He called, I forget what he called them exactly, but they were like signs.

• 2:27:42AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  That, "Oh, when you meet this person, you're gonna recognize them because, you know, she's gonna be on a red bike, or she's gonna have an earring and you just can't stop looking away from that earring," right? Have you ever had that experience?

• 2:27:54AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  Déjà vu, or, you know, where does it come from? Is it because we made an agreement to meet that person at this point in time? Now, that helps us to reframe the idea of suffering as well. Because another metaphor that was used by spiritual, in spiritual traditions, so in the Hindu traditions, they talk about the lela, the grand play of the gods.

• 2:28:16AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:17Speaker 03

  And maya, which is an illusion. The world is an illusion.

• 2:28:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:28:21Speaker 03

  It's a hoax. And the Buddha, that talks about the world as a dream. I mean, Buddha literally means "wake up, woken up," like, "I have awoken." Like, a woman said, "What are you?" And he said, "I am Buddha." And what did that mean? It meant he was awake, which meant the rest of us were asleep and dreaming. And, you know, Shakespeare had his metaphor of the world as a stage.

• 2:28:40AJ Gentile?

  Stage, right.

• 2:28:40Speaker 03

  So Swami Yogananda, who was one of the first Hindu swamis to come and live in the US, he wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, which was passed around during the hippie generation. And it was Steve Jobs' favorite book.

• 2:28:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  So much so that at the end, you know, after his death, at his memorial service at Stanford, everyone got a little brown box, and they opened it up and there was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi in there. So it really introduced a lot of Westerners to these Eastern ideas. Now, Yogananda had a challenge. It was 1920s. This is a brown guy with long hair. He's here, and he's trying to teach about yoga and karma and maya, and, and he needed to translate it into newer technological metaphors. So he used the metaphor of the video, of the, say, the film projector, because that was new technology.

• 2:29:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:29:26Speaker 03

  So, right back in 1920, films were relatively new to the audit, to the world. And he said that, "We are like actors in this film." And there is suffering happening to those characters. But the actors aren't dying, but they choose the role with suffering. Uh, but there's a part of us that's outside and you have to look away from the screen to see the light. It's just a projection of, of all of that onto the screen. And so he would use that metaphor. And I believe if he were alive today and actually wrote a book, uh, called Wisdom of a Yogi about his teachings. They asked me to write it. Harper Collins, India emailed me one day and said, will you write this book about Yogananda? Why do you want me to write the book about Yogananda?

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  Four Indians, like young Indians, professionals.

• 2:30:12AJ Gentile?

  A Pakistani American with an Islamic background.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  Who grew up in Michigan.

• 2:30:15AJ Gentile?

  Admit from Michigan.

• 2:30:17Speaker 03

  I was like, are you serious? They're like, yeah, we want you to write it. I was like, why is that? They said, because, you know, and I do reference, you know, Yogananda, I reference other mystics. Like there in the subtitle, there's quantum physics and eastern mystics. But, uh, they said, because, you know, you use these technology analogies that younger people, meaning like young professionals will understand. And I thought about it and I thought if Yogananda were alive today, he would say, we're like in a film. But we're the actors and we're the characters. We all have our scripts and these roles we're supposed to play, but we can change those scripts. We have free will. We're also the audience that's sitting there watching us. Or you could say like a game where you're sitting on a table deciding what to do. And what does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role playing game.

• 2:31:01AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:02AJ Gentile?

  Um, speaking of Yogananda, can you tell us about the experience you had in Ensenitas?

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. So, um, I was asked to write this book and I said, okay, I'll write this book. And I started writing it and this was during COVID. Uh, and I was hitting a little bit of a writer's block because, you know, it's like this big responsibility. You're writing about this well-known and loved spiritual figure. And, you know, I just, for those who haven't read Autobiography of Yogi, it's chock full of stories of like, uh, saints that are like levitating in the air by location. You know, this guy's over here sitting and meditating and somebody sees them in the park. Uh, you've got like, you know, the perfume saint who can make any perfume odor appear on his. And you've got this mysterious guy in the mountains who supposedly has been living there for eight hundred years.

• 2:31:50Speaker 03

  You've got this fat three hundred pound Swami that was a hundred and eighty years old when he died supposedly. Who's really well known. So you've got all these stories. And I kind of like these stories. You've got a guy with a gin. Who's controlling what I represent, what I confirm, what I think is a gin. He's a Muslim fuck here. Who's controlling an invisible entity that's making, you know, like this cup appear and disappear. And so I was like, this is all great, you know, but I gotta, I gotta like, right, be serious and write, you know, some serious lessons and. I wanted to go visit the place where Yogananda wrote Autobiography of Yogi. And that was in Encinitas. Uh, he has a hermitage there. And uh, he actually had a, some, some. You can read Autobiography of Yogi and you think, wow, man, everything goes well for this guy. He just says divine mother, give me this and it all happens. And if you read about his life, you realize he had many, many challenges.

• 2:32:34Speaker 03

  And at one point, his entire, uh, his entire organization fell apart and he's like, oh man, I just want to go to India and meditate in a cave. Uh, and the message he got was no, you need to stay in the West. You know, you're here in America for a reason. Uh, and so then he decided to go to Encinitas and write this book. Uh, for about ten, ten years or so it took him to write the book. And so I wanted to go to the hermitage. Which is beautiful. If anyone's ever been there, it's like overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There's a beach. He used to walk. Now it's literally called Swami's Beach. That's the formal name for it. And so I wanted to go there and check it out, but it was during COVID and. It was, you know, closed to the public. And so through another series of coincidences, like. I got to meet some of the people at SRF, told them I was writing this book and they said, okay, for you, we'll open it up.

• 2:33:19Speaker 03

  And so literally I went down there and they had, you know, some of the monks or monastics who lived there. You know, gave me a little private tour. We sat around and talked and I got to go to Yogananda's office. Where he wrote the book.

• 2:33:31AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Uh, just by myself and they're like, here, just, you know, relax, do whatever you want. And I decided to meditate and I'm like, okay, I need a. You know, so this is inspiring me and it was. And then someday I got a vision of Yogananda now. Again, it's one of these visions where you're kind of present and you're still, you're still sensing this vision.

• 2:33:48AJ Gentile?

  This is like the man by the tree?

• 2:33:50Speaker 03

  Uh, no, it's sort of similar to that, but this is a vision of Yogananda.

• 2:33:53AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:33:54Speaker 03

  Similar, and he's sitting there with a stack of papers, which is how they wrote books back then. You know, it was typed out and he's kind of looking at me, but with this mischievous grin. Um, and you know, I always thought of him as a very serious kind of guy, but if you talk, you know, you, you read some of his other people wrote about him, he was very mischievous. He would play practical jokes on his students and stuff. And he's like, kind of glint in his eye. And I was like, yeah, wow, that's, that's him writing, I don't know if he, I'm having a vision of it here. And he kind of smiled at me and he took those papers and he opened the French doors or whatever that go out to the ocean and he tossed them all out there and they flew everywhere. And I was like, no, stop, what are you doing? Like back then, once you lost the papers, that's it, you'd have to go rewrite the book.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  And he smiled and he laughed and I was like, okay, what is he trying to tell me? He goes, watch the papers and each of the papers turned into these little white doves and they floated off to, carried his words to different parts of, of the world. And somehow that like totally got me out of my writer's block because he was also saying, have fun with it, like, don't, don't treat it so seriously. And it's our words that we leave behind, but say what you want to say and just have fun. And so I just started writing about all these yogis with these superpowers, right? And the book just flowed from there and it went on and it did quite well, uh, in India as well.

• 2:35:13AJ Gentile?

  Let's say everything that you've talked about is right and we really are in a simulation. What does that mean for us as regarding free will? Does anything matter?

• 2:35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, sometimes people say, if I'm in a simulation, nothing matters. And I'm, well, that depends on the nature of the simulation, you know? If we are here to learn lessons and have certain quests and achievements, then if you don't make the quest, what do you do? You're going to have to do it again.

• 2:35:39AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  It's not, you just give up and then, you know, you, you, you may have more difficult quests afterwards. And so when we have difficult situations in our lives, whether it's financial, health related, relationship related, war, suffering, you know, we can view it as a more difficult quest that is part of our storyline. And perhaps, you know, We can give meaning to these problems to say, okay, this is a terrible thing that's happened. But if I view it as a higher difficulty quest, and in fact, maybe the people whose lives are easy are the early players and the ones who are having, you know, the more difficult lives, maybe they're the advanced players. I believe that. You know, along with, I mean, you've probably heard of the telepathy tapes.

• 2:36:25Speaker 03

  Of course. With Dr. Diane Hennessy, and, you know, she was working with these autistic kids who were telepathic. So she called me up a few years before the telepathy tapes came out. And she said, oh, you know, this is my work. I've been working with these autistic savants children, and, you know, like Rain Man type, where they can, you know, calculate these numbers. And she goes, I don't think they're calculating. I think they're looking it up in a database. And I think this is an information-based reality. And so, one of the best explanations she could come up with at the time was that this is some kind of a simulation. And so she actually sponsored a conference on autistic savants and simulation theory. And, you know, now, these autistic kids are showing us abilities that the rest of us

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

  don't have, but maybe, and we view them as having a physical handicap, because they're non-verbal. One, meaning, most of them can't speak, but they can, you know, point to things. They also don't have fine motor controls, right? They have gross, they can move their arm, they can put their finger here, but many of them, you know, don't have the fine motor controls to be able to write, like by hand. Of course, today, you don't have to as much, but, and, so I began to think about that in this context, and realized, well, what if the rest of us are in the full-body suit of the video game, or like Ready Player One? Mm-hmm. And we have the headset on, and all we see is this first-person perspective. But because, like, with a glove, I've got, like, full control, I can, you know, do every

• 2:37:54Speaker 03

  little thing that I want. But if I was half-in or half-out, or if I was sitting there with a mouse, okay, I can move my character around, I can point at things, but it's gonna be really hard. Right. But, I can see stuff from a third-person point of view that you can't see. That's right. I can put the virtual camera over here, I can message my friends, I can use, you know, private messaging, and then, you know, one of the autistic children, her name is Lido. Uh, she's been at some of these conferences with her mother, Dahlia, who's also demonstrating a lot of amazing capabilities like mind sight and stuff. But Dahlia came up to me and she said, Lido wants to tell you something. Oh, well, what does Lido want to tell me? She goes, when she's communicating with her friends, it's like they're in a video game,

• 2:38:39Speaker 03

  is what she said, and they can help her and she can see what they're doing and she can help them.

• 2:38:43AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:38:43Speaker 03

  So it's like they're all in a video game together. And so for me, this was a way, a different way to think about many of these things.

• 2:38:49AJ Gentile?

  Like they're closer to the source code than we are.

• 2:38:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're closer to the source code and they have control of the virtual camera.

• 2:38:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Which we, they're not locked in and that, there's some disadvantages to that. But they're actually perhaps the more advanced players who are trying to get the rest of us to, to wake up that there's more to this reality than we know.

• 2:39:05AJ Gentile?

  That's right. I, I can get behind that. Last thing for you. What questions or answers do you need to be sure this is a simulation or be sure it's not? What are those, what are those things?

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  Well, it's a good question. Uh, and again, I think it depends on where you are on this access, right? So, uh, I mentioned the access from the NPC to RPG version. That's one access that's important. The other access is do you view this as a literal computer simulation? Or do you view it as a metaphor for something very advanced? And I like to say that it's really four propositions that I'm proposing or asserting in these set of books. The first is that the world consists of information and not physical matter. Now, I, I met, I, just last year or the year before, in fact, when I was writing the second edition, I spent a semester over at the University of Cambridge in one of their AI groups.

• 2:40:03Speaker 03

  In fact, the guy that I work with, Henry Chevlin, was just, uh, he was just hired as a philosopher for Google Deep Mind and the story went viral that Google Deep Mind is looking at consciousness by hiring a philosopher that specializes.

• 2:40:15AJ Gentile?

  It's very interesting.

• 2:40:16Speaker 03

  In that, it's really interesting. But while I was there, I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist from the seventies. And I was telling him these propositions.

• 2:40:24AJ Gentile?

  You can't name him?

• 2:40:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Brian Josephson.

• 2:40:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:40:27Speaker 03

  He's actually fairly well known. Uh, something to do with what I'm telling, I forget what he won the Nobel Prize for back then. But he's also very into different, uh, models of consciousness. And he also says that, you know, his colleagues didn't want to talk about this stuff and he had a lot of stigma from his colleagues, just, just for investigating it. But when I told him that first proposition, he goes, you know what? That's not controversial anymore. That the world consists of information. It's not? Thirty years ago, physicists would have said, "Yeah, that's controversial." Because there's a whole branch of digital physics. There's a amount... Instead of just talking about conservation of energy, and conservation of momentum, we're talking about conservation of information. Like, does information get lost? Does it get destroyed? Ah, so, I mean, sure, some people might disagree, but for the most part,

• 2:41:11Speaker 03

  the idea that we live in an information-based reality. Now, John Wheeler, his other favorite phrase was "it from bit." Right. And that's why... That's when he became my favorite physicist from the 20th century. And what he was saying was, he was looking for this thing called a particle. And we think of a particle as hard, right? It's a physical object. But he couldn't find it. It's like those Russian dolls, you know? I think they're called the Matryoshka dolls. Yeah, yeah. Or the Babushka dolls, if they're male or female. There's different versions. But he kept opening up this thing and looking for this thing at the bottom, and it was just empty at the bottom level. And so he said what he... The conclusion he came to at the end of his life was that the only thing

• 2:41:55Speaker 03

  that distinguishes one particle from another is an answer to a series of yes-no questions. And what is that? That's a bit. I mean, the basis of information theory is a 1 or a 0. Yep. And so he came up with this phrase that said, "Anything that's physical, like this coffee cup or mug, actually consists of bits of information." And so I think that's a perspective that's gaining traction. Let's put it that way. You can argue with it, but, you know, I think it's not, you know, that hard. But then, that information is getting computed over time. We see evidence of algorithms in nature for it. The second proposition is kind of obvious, but really hard to prove. And it is that the world seems physical, so it gets rendered for us.

• 2:42:40Speaker 03

  The bits are rendered in a way that looks real and feels real. Right? When we think we're touching the wall, we're not really touching the wall. Like there's like electrical signals, like the basis of the universe is electromagnetic.

• 2:42:52AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's mostly empty.

• 2:42:53Speaker 03

  It's 99.9% empty space. You go down to molecules, it's 99.9% empty. You look at the atoms, it's 99.9% empty space. You look at, you know, you go down to the subatomic particles. And in the end, what you have is a set of information. And that is just like a video game.

• 2:43:09AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:43:09Speaker 03

  Now, they're making an argument by analogy. That's not necessarily a formal argument, but it's an informal one, just like the Copenhagen interpretation. Nobody knows how the Copenhagen interpretation works. Nobody knows how the collapse works. And I'm saying that basically, like a video game, there's no castle there. There's no dragon. Those are just bits of information.

• 2:43:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  Coming to your machine and they're rendering it for you. The third gets into the metaphysical side, you know? Which is that this universe is a big hoax.

• 2:43:39AJ Gentile?

  A big hoax.

• 2:43:40Speaker 03

  A purposeful hoax.

• 2:43:42AJ Gentile?

  Maya.

• 2:43:42Speaker 03

  Like Maya, an illusion. So this is what gets into the religious and the Maya. I was reading about Roger Ebert, you know, the film critic?

• 2:43:51AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  So he died not that long ago, unfortunately, from throat cancer. But his wife was with him when he died, naturally. And she talked about his death. And she said the last thing he said, just before he died, was, "Oh my God, it's all a big hoax."

• 2:44:05AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:44:06Speaker 03

  And she said that meant that the physical universe that we think is real is all a big hoax. And other people, you know, that get close to that boundary, you start to hear similar things.

• 2:44:15AJ Gentile?

  You do.

• 2:44:16Speaker 03

  You start to talk to people, so that the physical world is not just information. It's like a big hoax. Like Maya means illusion, but it also means kind of an illusion that you agree to walk into and to fool yourself, right? Where here in Vegas, there's like, you know, the magic shows with, I don't know who the latest, David Copperfield, Criss Angel, whoever the latest musician is. You go to a, and that's the best analogy I've heard for Maya. They say you go to a magic show and you know that guy's not really sawing the woman in half. But that's what makes it exciting is it's like magic, right? You don't know how it's done, but it's an illusion. It's a sleight of hand, you know? And the Buddha, you know, eventually came to this conclusion, you know, where he talked about,

• 2:44:58Speaker 03

  everything is like a reflection in a very clear mirror, devoid of inherent existence.

• 2:45:04Speaker 05

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise vacation, gift cards from DoorDash, and Best Buy. You can play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag. No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. age 18 plus. See playatmcd.com for rules and playatmcd.com/amoe for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Haskell.

• 2:45:34Speaker 03

  So you can buy that or not buy that proposition, but certainly the spiritual traditions buy that. And then the fourth one, which is similar, is that you agreed to be here and play a character, which is the video game proposition. You know, pure materialists don't like that at all because they'll say, well, there's nothing beyond this physical world anyway.

• 2:45:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:45:53Speaker 03

  But to me, if you take all of those together, that encompasses why I wrote this book, which is so that I can talk to physicists at MIT about now. They may not agree with that it's a simulation or a computer simulation, but they're willing to talk to me about these ideas. I can't go in there and say, I want to talk to you about, you know, guys leaving their body, floating around and seeing apparitions and haunted tours or UFOs. Or they'd be like, ah, we're just going to dismiss this out of hand. But they're willing to talk about the world being a simulated reality. And if it is, well, then maybe there are entities that exist outside of our visibility, that exist outside the simulation that would seem supernatural to us.

• 2:46:32AJ Gentile?

  Like UFOs?

• 2:46:33Speaker 03

  Like UFOs, or like angels, you know?

• 2:46:35AJ Gentile?

  Or angels. Could UFOs that we are seeing be part of the simulation somehow?

• 2:46:39Speaker 03

  I think so. So there's two different ways. So one way is,

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  even if they're extraterrestrial, which I think many, many of those of us who have studied it realize that there's much more going on. In order to explain the data, like if you want to really be scientific about it, you want your observations and data to match your explanation.

• 2:46:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:47:00Speaker 03

  But on the, on the one hand, when you have a multiplayer game, You're not just gonna have one planet, you're probably gonna have multiple planets. So, in fact, part of the purpose of the simulation could be, do you get off the planet? Do you destroy yourself? What's called a great filter. Or, maybe we're all trying to get to the point where these civilizations meet. But then, it gets weirder. And I'm sure you've covered some of these weird phenomena. But, when I met with Jacques Vallée, he started telling me about these cases where, like, one person would see the UFO, and the other person wouldn't.

• 2:47:33AJ Gentile?

  All the time.

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

  I began to think about that, and I thought, huh, that's interesting. And, he said, there was another case where this UFO came down at a 45-degree angle, and it landed in a clearing, and supposedly it left some mark. So, everybody went, Mufon went, and they're looking at the clearing. And he said, "Well, wait a minute. If it came down at a 45-degree angle," and this was in, like, Pacific Northwest, where they had these big trees.

• 2:47:58AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:47:58Speaker 03

  He's like, "It would've had to have cut through the trees." But the trees aren't cut, I mean, they're still there. They said, "Yeah, it did, it went right through the trees, but we don't wanna say that, 'cause we sound crazy." Right? So, they're censoring their observations. I thought about that, too. And then, then you see these observations where these things move around. Like, from here to here. It's almost like they're projected into our reality, like a light or a holographic projection. And so, when you rez inside a game, or, you know, you're rez-ing, you can kinda move through walls because-

• 2:48:27AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:48:27Speaker 03

  -everything's not fully rendered yet. But, once it's rendered, they're physical. And so, is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us? In that we are a technological civilization, aliens make at least some sense to us, right? More than the gin, like-

• 2:48:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:48:49Speaker 03

  The nuts and bolts aspect. So, in this paper that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show about stigma in academia, the stigma is getting less because of the government in the New York Times article. It's still there, but it's getting less, but only for part of the UFO phenomenon.

• 2:49:04AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:49:05Speaker 03

  And that is the nuts and bolts part of the phenomenon.

• 2:49:07AJ Gentile?

  Not the consciousness part.

• 2:49:09Speaker 03

  Not the consciousness, not even the alien abduction.

• 2:49:11AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:49:11Speaker 03

  Because that would require acknowledging being- And beings that are more powerful than us. Uh, and it gets into all of that. Uh, and you know, there's this kind of boundary there, but we can, at least we can accept that, okay, maybe there could be aliens because we know now there are other planets around other solar systems. And so maybe the, they're presenting themselves to us as aliens. Because that is a technology that would make sense to us at this point in time. Uh, whereas in the fifties, all these contactees are like, they told us they're from Venus.

• 2:49:46AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:49:46Speaker 03

  Okay, we know they're probably not from Venus. Okay, assuming they exist, first of all, we know they're probably not from Venus, they're probably not from Mars, but that was what they told them. Why? They were lying to them. Why? Because they could wrap their minds around it. Imagine if you had said, we're from Zeta Reticuli.

• 2:49:59AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:49:59Speaker 03

  A thousand years ago. I would be like, what are you talking about?

• 2:50:02AJ Gentile?

  Couldn't understand it.

• 2:50:03Speaker 03

  They couldn't understand it. And angels, they could understand.

• 2:50:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes. For thousands of years, they could.

• 2:50:09Speaker 03

  Gin, they could understand.

• 2:50:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they could.

• 2:50:11Speaker 03

  The fae, they could understand.

• 2:50:12AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50:12Speaker 03

  And is it possible that, that, so there's what's called the avatar theory of UFOs, or the avatar hypothesis. There's two different versions of it. Gary Nolan talks about one version, I talk about the other version.

• 2:50:23AJ Gentile?

  This is a good time to say that you're on the board of the Galileo Project with Avi.

• 2:50:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm on the advisory board, yeah.

• 2:50:29AJ Gentile?

  And, and you work with Gary Nolan as well?

• 2:50:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've worked with the Soul Foundation, I wrote a white paper on venture capital investment in UFOs, so I'm deep in the topic.

• 2:50:37AJ Gentile?

  So you're in the topic.

• 2:50:38Speaker 03

  In fact, in the academic world, because I went back to get my PhD after, you know, I have about fifteen years between my bachelor's and my master's and another fifteen years between that and the PhD. And they're like, you know, I wouldn't talk about this UFO stuff too much if I were you. I'm like, I already wrote a book saying the world isn't even real.

• 2:50:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, you're fine.

• 2:50:55Speaker 03

  You know, UFOs, you know, it's not even that weird to me. Like, at least the alien explanation is not that weird. The other stuff maybe. But so, one of the, uh, the avatar interpretation, I think it's Gary talked about it, and, uh, you know, what had to do like with the film Avatar. In, in the film, he was controlling, uh, his avatar, the, the alien, but he was controlling it. And so, are these beings controlling the ships and even the beings that we see remotely? My interpretation of the avatar hypothesis, an avatar inside a video game is your character in the game. And you can change that characteristics if you want. But you are projecting into a physical reality, into a virtual reality from outside.

• 2:51:36Speaker 03

  So it's not just from another planet or it's being projected into. And supposedly, you know, people have been seeing these, these different beings for thousands of years, like the Jin art. Is it, they were just presented themselves a certain way because that would make sense to the people at the time today. Aliens is, is an interpretation that would make sense to us. Uh, and so that, is it like in a video game, you render the avatar and in some games you can change your avatar.

• 2:52:06AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:52:07Speaker 03

  Is it possible that they have unlocked that feature where they can change what it, how it appears to us?

• 2:52:11AJ Gentile?

  Or could you take D M T and see kind of behind the curtain a little bit?

• 2:52:15Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. And people who've taken D M T start to talk about things like, you know, a waiting room, right? Or they talk about different types of beings, like the, the different, I don't know. I'm not a D M T person.

• 2:52:25AJ Gentile?

  Right. The machine elves.

• 2:52:27Speaker 03

  The machine elves, you've got like the insectoids.

• 2:52:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:52:30Speaker 03

  You've got like all these different versions of beings that are there. Uh, you know, and there's the work of Danny Gohler, who was a guy who projected the laser on the wall and took D M T and he, he saw the code, what looked like code, kind of like matrix code, but he said it's not exactly that. And other people took it and many other people can see it as well. Uh, I started hearing about this is right after I wrote the first edition of the book in 2019, people are like, oh yeah, I've seen the grid lines of the simulation on D M T.

• 2:52:56AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  And so it's very interesting to me how that kind of lines up because perhaps it's suppressing whatever mechanisms we have in our brain, uh, to be able to perceive this other reality. So yeah, so there's, there's a lot of relationships there. But you know, my favorite explanation for the simulation for UFOs is that they're, they're being projected into this world in some way to get us. And, and this came from, you know, my conversations with Jacques Vallée where he talks about how maybe they're not extraterrestrial at all. Him and John Keel, I think were among the first saying they've been here all along. And then the materialist version of they've been here all along is, you know, lost civilization in the.

• 2:53:37Speaker 03

  Bottom of the earth, but a non-materialist explanation would be like they're still here. And but they're projecting in. They can see us, but we can't see them. And that sounds a lot like, you know, these stories that we've been hearing for thousands of years about the fae and the Celtic traditions. They can take you into their world. In the Middle East, there's even stories of like hybrids, human-jin hybrids, a man marrying a jinn woman and then having children and then taking that child gets taken.

• 2:54:11AJ Gentile?

  The Bible has the same stories, or Uriel taking someone up above the clouds and seeing the whole thing.

• 2:54:18Speaker 03

  Right, right. And so I think with that, some of that could be going on, you know, with the UFO phenomenon. Personally, I believe there's something there, as opposed to many of my academic colleagues, who are like, eh, that's all, you know, it's all flat earth stuff, right? They kind of, and they kind of put it all together, Bigfoot, flat earth, UFOs.

• 2:54:34AJ Gentile?

  It's not the same thing.

• 2:54:35Speaker 03

  It's not the same thing, yeah. Especially, in fact, I wrote an article for NBC News years ago, saying, you know, the government is taking UFOs seriously. Why aren't, isn't Silicon Valley in academia? And academia still isn't, although more are. That's why I wrote that specific article about stigma.

• 2:54:55AJ Gentile?

  Very important work. Riz, thanks so much for coming in. This has been so much fun. I can keep you here another couple of hours, but I know you got to get out of here. I appreciate it.

• 2:55:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a fun conversation. You're right, we could go on for a few more hours, I'm sure.

• 2:55:08AJ Gentile?

  We could. Bye, everybody. So that was Rizwan Virk, Dr. Rizwan. Simulation theory, quantum physics, the Mandela Effect, UFOs as avatars, whether we picked our character before we logged into this life? Let's try to untangle some of this. Well, first, Philip K. Dick's 1977 speech in Metz, France. That's documented. You can find it online. I talk about it all the time. He stood in front of a room of science fiction fans and said, "We are living in a computer programmed reality." He said a lot of great stuff during that speech. Definitely watch it. John Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. That's real physics. In 2017, a team took it to space. A satellite about 1,000 kilometers from the slits, peer-reviewed journal, the whole thing,

• 2:55:53AJ Gentile?

  and the result held up. The particle was in superposition until it was measured. So that means at the quantum scale, the past genuinely doesn't appear to be fixed until somebody observes it.

• 2:56:07AJ Gentile?

  Think about that for a second. At the quantum scale, there is no time. But here's what I keep coming back to. The idea that only rendering what's observed isn't just a video game trick. It might be the underlying logic of physics itself. Quantum mechanics already works exactly the way a game engine does. What Riz is actually doing isn't selling simulation theory as a certainty. It's something quieter. It's more interesting. He's showing that quantum mechanics, ancient mysticism, and video game design all point at the same strange logic. That reality might be rendered, not built. And you don't have to buy the conclusion. But it's a fact.

• 2:56:48AJ Gentile?

  The three completely unrelated fields approached by serious people keep landing in the same uncomfortable neighborhood. His book is The Simulation Hypothesis, second edition on Amazon. He's also written The Simulated Multiverse, if you want to go deeper on the multiple timeline stuff. Also find him on X at Riz Stanford, R-I-Z-S-T-A-N-F-O-R-D. And I covered simulation theory in episode 186, links down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and other you are appreciated. Appreciate it.

• 2:58:09Speaker 06

  I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun. Well, there's music, songs singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends.

• 2:58:33Speaker 06

  I'm told and his name was Cole. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish.

• 2:58:38Speaker 06

  And it never ends, no, it never ends.

• 2:58:43Speaker 06

  Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:58:52Speaker 06

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKL truck.

• 2:58:52Speaker 06

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:58:57Speaker 06

  I've been only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there? The Rockwell aliens just fought the smile.

• 2:59:17Speaker 06

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planet circle two, Project Starkate and what the Doc was just found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight said a lot of tone to me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 2:59:58Speaker 06

  All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.

• 3:01:13Speaker 03

  With its abundant natural beauty, charming towns and friendly people, South Carolina offers the kind of discoveries that stay with you long after you've left. Like the realization you're good at something you'd never before tried. Or your first oyster roast, and a taste you didn't expect to love. And other times, it just hits. Like the view on a windswept Appalachian mountain top. So come find the undiscovered you in South Carolina. Visit discoversouthcarolina.com.

• 3:01:43Speaker 06

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.