A Glitch in the Matrix= Digital Prison: Are We Living in a Simulation?

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, alright, so.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Can you see me?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Hey?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, here you are, pepall Hey. So I am just
now starting the audio recorder. All right. So that's so
that's set up, and I'm starting the video recorder and

(00:52):
I'm just making sure that it's recording. Okay. So hello.
One of the things that you.

Speaker 4 (01:00):
Wrote about was sort of your first primitive idea of
simulation theory as a kid.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yeah. Yeah, can you just read that? Was like, can
I do one thing before that? Yeah, because this is
gonna set the tenor for everything, please Okay. I was
in a class when I was in college. I went
to the University of Missouri, Columbia. This was in the
early nineties, and a teacher was in front of the
class and the teacher said, something interesting about the brain

(01:30):
is that we actually can map what we think about
the human nervous system by the highest level of technology
of the day. So, for example, when the aqueducts were big,
people thought that humors controlled the body, that different liquids
would come in and teach you or make you feel
a different way. And then whenever the telegraph came, then

(01:52):
all of a sudden we thought that, well, these are
nerve impulses. That go down sort of like wires. And
then she said, now we know that the brain is
computer and I raised my hand. I said, because that's
our highest level of technology. And she said, no, the
brain is a computer. And I didn't do that well
in the class. But the but the thing is, so

(02:12):
when we talk about simulation theory, we right now are
living at a time where you know, you have the
PS four PSVR. You know, I'm a Sony brand WHRSE,
so I apologize for not throwing out other things. But
the basic, you know, virtual reality level of simulation is

(02:32):
something that we can use as a model, but it
isn't necessarily what is going on. And I think that's
important that that we can use it and we can
understand that that's what's going on, but we aren't necessarily
in a server room somewhere. It might be something different.
You know, if you run into a thing in the
world that you don't understand, your brain is gonna go,

(02:55):
uh okay, maybe this is what this is. And as
technology gets or advance, we'll have better ways of describing it.
So everything that I describe here, keep in mind, you know,
I'm a twenty first century guy. How my brain works
if you're watching this in the future, we are dumb.
It's just that we don't have the tools that you

(03:15):
have to think of this stuff.

Speaker 5 (03:29):
In September of nineteen seventy seven, the writer Philip K. Dick,
creator of Minority Report, Blade Runner, and Total Recall, addressed
an audience of fans in met spreens. They expected to
talk about science fiction, but his lecture explored religion and
philosophy as well. To him, all three subjects were deeply interconnected.

Speaker 6 (03:57):
The title of my address is if you find this
world bad, you should see some of the others.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
The school.

Speaker 7 (04:06):
Still the subject of this speech.

Speaker 6 (04:13):
Is a topic which has been discovered recently and which
may not exist at all.

Speaker 7 (04:20):
I may be.

Speaker 6 (04:21):
Talking about something that does not exist. Therefore, I'm free
to say everything or nothing.

Speaker 8 (04:28):
School.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
It's just the faciliated together for its own.

Speaker 6 (04:32):
We are living in a computer programed reality.

Speaker 7 (04:36):
And the only clue we have to it.

Speaker 6 (04:39):
Is when some variable is changed and some alteration in
our reality occurs.

Speaker 5 (04:50):
Philip kave Takes belief that we were living in a
digitally created artificial world sounded like madness in nineteen seventy seven,
but then in nineteen ninety nine, the Matrix introduced simulation
theory to the wider world. In the years since the film,

(05:12):
this idea has begun to be taken seriously as more
than science fiction. It is fiercely debated online and in
real life in classrooms, laboratories, design studios, and core rooms.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
So the idea is right, any sufficiently advanceivilization.

Speaker 9 (05:27):
Would create could create a simulation that's like our existence.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
And so the theory follows that maybe we're in the simulation.
Have you thought about this and a lot? Are we?

Speaker 10 (05:41):
I am actually in a simulation and so are you?

Speaker 5 (05:50):
So are we living in simulation?

Speaker 11 (05:52):
I find it hard to argue against that possibility.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
If we're If all of this is I'm kind of
informational process running in some machine. The machine is not
in this universe.

Speaker 12 (06:06):
It's somewhere else, and this universe is a consequence of
its run.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
Because it's kind of getting this that artifacting or whatever problem.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
How Hello, I am sorry about the strange lighting.

Speaker 9 (06:33):
All I have is Christmas lights.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
You talked about, you know, sort of this journey starting
after a spate of synchronicities. What were what were those like?

Speaker 9 (06:43):
There's a number of rather small examples, you know, the
kind of everyday things that you would you know, I'm
thinking of someone, and I turned the corner in there
they are. I would start giving myself sort of tests.
I'm thinking of an orange fish. I would like to

(07:05):
see an orange fish in the next ten minutes. And
ten minutes later in the walk, I turned down a
street and there's a restaurant with an orange fish on
it that I'd never seen before. So small things like that,
and occurrent with enough regularity. I began to sort of
track my days numerically. And if you'll allow me to
go in a tangent a little bit here, Rodney, I

(07:27):
don't enjoy the average five day week. I like to
work in weeks of twelve days. I would notice that
sort of on every twelfth day, I would see a
certain type of thing pop up. And I tracked this
over the course of about a year and long story short,
started to notice, you know, things that would pop up

(07:51):
with a certain regularity. You know, on every third day,
for instance, I would kind of that would be when
something would happen sort of related to my career, or
every fifth day I would notice an interesting synchronicity related
to my family or so and so and so on
and so forth, and at a certain point, of course,
that becomes hard to delineate. Is this regularity something that

(08:14):
I'm noticing or something that I'm making you know? Is
it a Schrodinger type of situation where just by virtue
of staring at this thing, it becomes something that it's not.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
One of the big things was that I would go
to a lot of places with my parents and they
would be empty or very few people, like a shopping
mall with not a lot of people in there, writing,

(08:47):
driving down the road and never seeing another car, things
like that. This is because I moved from Pontiac, Illinois,
which is you know more had more people, to dorseal Ainoy,
which had like five hundred people. Our nearest neighbor was
a quarter of a mile down the road and all that.
So I didn't interact with a lot of people. And

(09:10):
one of the things that I that I thought, again,
this is in my little you know, I moved there
when I was in like second grade. In my little brain,
I was like, aha, this is a great way of
saving time and money because they won't need to have
as many people. Occasionally I would go to Saint Louis,

(09:32):
which was about fifty miles away, but whenever we did,
my dad had a very tight control over our schedule
in our tenory. You know, once I saw the idea
of a facade, you know, this is on a Western
movie thing. Once I saw the idea of it, I
was like, Oh, well, that's what's happened all this time

(09:53):
that we're spending in the car. This fifty minutes that
it takes us. We're inside this car they're playing you know,
this film of us driving while they're changing all the
sets into the Saint Louis set. But I'm not gonna

(10:14):
get to go and see everything because my dad is
going to be there to make sure that we hit
the points that we're supposed to hit. And then we
get back in the car and we go. Can you
see me there?

Speaker 10 (10:32):
I am an East Coaster who lives in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
I have an electrical engineering degree from Harvard. I'm an entrepreneur,
and I've also I've got Crohn's.

Speaker 10 (10:46):
Disease, and it all plays in, It all plays in
to the simulation. I think the sort of basic idea
is that if you believe that enough high power computing
devices are going to be distributed in society and that
the computers will get stronger and stronger and stronger.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
Like our cell phones. Hey you guys, Hey, no quiet.
So you know, if there are in fact.

Speaker 13 (11:17):
Enough machines that are running video game style world simulations,
the question is, you know, if there's that many fake
realities and only one base reality, what are the chances
that you happen to be in base reality?

Speaker 14 (11:32):
The odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Speaker 5 (11:40):
The most influential statistics based look at simulation theory was
a two thousand and three article by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.
It was titled are you living in a computer simulation?

Speaker 15 (11:56):
Well?

Speaker 16 (11:57):
I was at the time a kind of postdoctoral fellow
at Yale University. The idea, since some vague form have
been with me for quite some time, that amounted to
something more than just an idle speculation, And so I
wrote that up and published that in Philosophical Quarterly, and
it immediately Yeah, evoked a huge amount of interest and

(12:21):
has continued to be a huge amount of interest. It
seems to come in waves. Every year or two, some
new set of people.

Speaker 7 (12:29):
Discover it for the first time.

Speaker 16 (12:32):
So I may get distinction between the simulation hypothesis, which
is the hypothesis that we are literally in a computer
simulation engineered by some advanced civilization. And the simulation argument
it uses some simple probability theory, but the basic idea
can be quite easily grasped, which is that at least
one of three propositions is true. The first alternative is

(12:56):
that most all civilizations at our current stage technological development
go extinct before they reach technological maturity. The second alternative
is that there is a very strong convergence virtually all
technologically mature civilizations in that they all lose interest in

(13:20):
creating simulations of this kind. They're always interested in creating
access to simulations.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
And the third.

Speaker 16 (13:26):
Alternative is the simulation hypothesis, that we are almost certainly
in a computer simulation. So if you reject these first
two propositions, it follows that almost all people with our
kinds of experience are simulated. And then, conditional on that
being the case, I argue we should think we are
probably one of the simulated ones rather than one of

(13:49):
the non simulated exceptional original ones.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Personally, for me, it's all about probabilities.

Speaker 10 (13:55):
I'm some of the things thinks in terms of probabilities anyways,
and I've just found in my life that there's lots
of low probability outcomes. Happened again and again and again
and again.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Damn if I keep glancing onto the sides because my
screen's over there.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Okay, you actually at.

Speaker 4 (14:25):
My drawing table. So if I keep glancing over there,
I'm just looking at you and I'm looking at the camera.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
What kind of drawing do you do?

Speaker 15 (14:33):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (14:34):
It depends, uh you know Mobius?

Speaker 4 (14:37):
Sure, yeah, I readrew one of his entire books with
characters from Peanuts and staff characters from him, and then
I just do uh painting and stuff like just doling
like fake mgnola's stuff. H nothing.

Speaker 7 (14:55):
That not wonderful.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
What I'm working more on the Mobius style for an
entire new book right now.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
That's cool. So you got full time?

Speaker 4 (15:04):
No I wish, no, I do a special teaching. When
did you start thinking that there was more to simulation
theory than the science fiction can see? Well, we know,
Musk when he started talking about it, really started thinking
about it more.

Speaker 14 (15:22):
The strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably
being in a simulation, I think, is the following that
forty forty years ago we had pong like two rectangles
in a dot.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
That was what games were.

Speaker 14 (15:39):
Now forty years later, we have photo realistic three D
simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting
better every year. If you assume any rate of improvement
at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
I think that triggered me to really think hard about it.

Speaker 6 (16:12):
Does any one of us remember, in any dim fashion
a worse earth circa nineteen seventy seven than this? Have
our young men seen visions and our old men dream dreams?
I have nightmare dreams, specifically of prisons and jailers and
ubiquitous police. I wrote out these dreams in novel after novel,

(16:37):
story after story.

Speaker 7 (16:39):
To name two in which this prior, ugly present.

Speaker 6 (16:41):
Obtained most clearly, I cite The Man in the High
Castle and my nineteen seventy four novel about the us
of the police state called Flow My Tears. The Policeman said,
I'm going to be very candid with you. I wrote
both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of.

Speaker 7 (16:59):
Such a horrid slave state.

Speaker 6 (17:01):
World, or perhaps the term world is the wrong one,
and I should say United States, since.

Speaker 7 (17:06):
In both novels I was writing about.

Speaker 6 (17:08):
My own country. Some people claim to remember past lives.
I claim to remember a different, very different, present life.
I know of no one who has ever made this
claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is
not unique. I can even tell you what caused me
to remember it. In late February of nineteen seventy four,

(17:29):
I was given sodium pentathol for the extraction of impacted
wisdom teeth. Later that day, back home again, but still
deeply under the influence of the sodium pentathol, I had
a short, acute flash of recovered memory. In one instant
I caught it all. You are free to believe me
or to disbelieve, but please take.

Speaker 7 (17:50):
My word on it that I am not joking. This
is very serious, a matter of importance. I am sure
that the.

Speaker 6 (17:56):
Very least you will agree that for me even to
claim this is in itself amazing.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Hello, I knew not.

Speaker 5 (18:04):
Philip K. Dick wrote over eight thousand pages trying to
understand the recovered memories he experienced in February and March
of nineteen seventy four, an experience he called two three
seven four. This writing is known as the Exegesis. Eric Davis,
working with Pamela Davis and Jonathan Leatham, wrestled with this text,

(18:26):
who added a single book from it.

Speaker 17 (18:30):
It was a great experience, although a kind of crazy
making one in a way. And you know, you're really
in the you're like in the anti chamber of the
guy's problems and his trauma and his despair. And it
was so such a vast text that he kind of
had to do it by attrition. Really, there were a

(18:51):
number of things that really worked. One is that when
he was really engaging his own writing, we included that
when he was describing experiences, we included that. There's a
part where Dick describes the writing the Exegesis as a
hell chore. I think it really it shows the challenges
of wrestling with extraordinary experience, and particularly experiences which you know,

(19:13):
we can find throughout religious history of insights seeming insights
into reality that for whatever positive vision they give you
about the true nature of things, do manage to undermine
your sense that the everyday world is at all a coherent,
realistic operation. And that's quite a harrowing ride.

Speaker 9 (19:44):
I could probably put together a list of all the
various small synchronicities that kept popping up, but they were just,
you know, so mundane. But there's so many of them
that eventually I kind of I took one of these,
you know, a particularly auspicious day for myself, and decided
I was going to do a sensory deprivation tank, which

(20:06):
is not something I had done before, but it was
just you know, something that that felt like it could
be an interesting experience.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
And so I did that.

Speaker 9 (20:16):
And there's a guy in New York here on twenty
third Street who has a sensory deprivation tank in his apartment,
which is a strange thing, but you go in, he
you know, gives you the spiel, you ask him any questions,
and then you go into it. And I, never having
had done this before, I you know, I kind of
went to it not really knowing what to expect. But
he said just sort of like ask for what you want,

(20:38):
or ask for you know, what you'd like to know.
And you know, the sense I got was like, yes,
I'm asking the universe or whatever, but I'm also really
asking myself, and you know, maybe those aren't different things. Right.

(20:58):
The first few minutes were very I was very aware
of where I was. But after a few more minutes,
you know, I sort of stopped sensing my body. I
could now hear my eyelids. I could actually hear what
I thought might be my nervous system. I kind of
in that state had come out and said, listen, I
get the sense that you're trying to tell me something.

(21:21):
I'm not sure I even knew who the you was
I was talking to. I don't know if it was
the universe or I am also an ordained minister, so
I was raised with that, so there was, you know,
there's a god part of it for me, so sort
of ask, you know, like just come out and what
it is you'd like to say. Yeah, And I'm not

(21:56):
a new age guy at all, or at least I
wasn't before I did this, But my head started to buzz.
My forehead just started to violent, pounding, swirling buzz that
I I felt like I opened up and I just
became aware, like, Okay, I am not a body at all.
I am the code. I am a string of letters

(22:17):
and numbers and acids and so forth. And I knew this,
of course from DNA, but more than that, it means,
you know, nothing on me is real, and nothing on
anyone is real. I'm a pattern, I'm a code constantly
replicating itself, and I'm a vibration, and that's what it is.
Got out of the tank and I started started talking

(22:38):
to the guy and he was talking about, oh, it's
your third eye opening and sometimes that happens. And I
asked him, well, what do I do with that? He's like,
I don't know, enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
I've always had a little bit of a sense of this,
but this is the big event. I was about eleven
or twelve, and I'm adopted. I'm a pastor's son. My
adopted dad as a pastor. So I go to church
every Sunday, and I believe at this point in time

(23:13):
though it wasn't a Sunday service. I think it was
like an Advent service. It was at nighttime. And most
people have some reference for church, but in case you don't,
they're people. They're dressed up and they're sitting in This
is in the early eighties, so people dressed up more
than they maybe do now, and they're sitting in pews.

(23:35):
Pews are like long benches, and they have their hymnals
open and they're singing. And I look around at everyone's singing,
and I think to myself, the way we're making these
noises is that we have these meat flaps, and we're
forcing air through these meat flaps, and we're making noise.

(23:58):
And we're animals basically, Yet we put on all of
these clothes and we sit in this place and we're
making these noises by forcing air through our meat flaps.
And I start thinking about how bodies move and how
weird it is that they moved that way, and just
the absurdity of the situation keeps on going around around
in my head and I'm like, oh, none of this

(24:19):
is real. That's what's going on. And as soon as
I had that realization, the only way I can describe
it is I was nowhere. I was nothing. I felt
sort of like loneliness was a thing. I was the
personification of it. I was cut off from everything. It
was only me, and it was soul crushing and claustrophobic.

(24:44):
But I didn't see anything. It wasn't that I saw blackness.
I wasn't seeing, and I wasn't feeling. It was this
almost negation of self, except that I was there feeling
this weird emptiness, this gone my entire life.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
I'm living with a family and I'm really used to it,
specifically my brother, and then I go off.

Speaker 15 (25:17):
You know.

Speaker 4 (25:18):
The parents are always like, we're eighteen, We're kicking you out.
But I kind of beat them to the punch because like,
the day after graduation, I was out of town.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
I had moved away.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
I didn't come back for years. But during that time,
I was just alone.

Speaker 15 (25:32):
You know.

Speaker 4 (25:33):
I lived with a friend, but I didn't have my
brother with me, and all we would do for like
two straight years just play video games. I worked at
a Chillea's and I would always come home. We would
do stupid things like play Guitar Hero for two straight days,
or we would get a game and I'd do it

(25:53):
from front end back and then just go back in
and just.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Beat it again.

Speaker 4 (25:57):
All the time, video games for years and years, and
it's literally all I did. Didn't draw, it, didn't do anything,
and so I got a dark place there. It's like,
maybe I'm stuck in this rut on purpose. Maybe it's

(26:18):
not my design, it's what I'm not religious at all,
But how do I reconcile feeling like I'm in a rut?

Speaker 11 (26:25):
Though?

Speaker 4 (26:26):
Like a preprogrammed rut, I have to go to the
science route, and the only really blending of religion in
science there is it would probably be a simulation theory,
to be honest with you.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
When I had that first experience in the church. The
analogy that I use is like, let's say that your
grandpa has a favorite radio. Hey, listens to it all
the time and all that, and one day you decide
to take that radio apart, and you're looking at all
the pieces and hey, hey, I took this part, and
then you you can't put it back together again. That's

(27:03):
the feeling that I had when I was in that
sort of null state, if you will. And in my mind,
that is what's outside of the simulation.

Speaker 6 (27:24):
Contemplating this possibility of a lateral arrangement of worlds, a
plurality of overlapping Earth along who's linking axis, a person
can somehow move, can travel in a mysterious way from
worse affair to good to excellent. Contemplating this in theological terms,
perhaps we could say that herewith we suddenly decipher the

(27:45):
elliptical utterances which Christ expressed regarding the Kingdom of God,
specifically where it is located. He seems to have given
contradictory and puzzling answers. But suppose, just suppose, for an instant,
the cause of the perplexity lay not in any desire on.

Speaker 7 (28:02):
His part to baffle or to hide, but in the
inadequacy of the question. My kingdom is not of this world,
he is reported to have said. The kingdom is within you,
or possibly it is among you. It was his mission
to teach.

Speaker 6 (28:17):
His disciples the secret of crossing along this orthogonal path.
He did not merely report what lay there. He taught
the method of getting there. But tragically the secret was lost.
The enemy, the Roman authority, crushed it. When I saw
Star Wars this morning, I thought to myself, deja vous.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
The simulation idea has been around way before all of
us started thinking about computers, The concept of people standing
at the pearly gates and looking at their lives. Right,
what is that if not a debrief? If you will,
after you get out of a simulation.

Speaker 17 (29:07):
Look what I feel?

Speaker 10 (29:08):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Realistic, isn't it less?

Speaker 16 (29:11):
Another Rene de cart tried to build an epistemology from
a foundation of skepticism and radical doubt.

Speaker 18 (29:19):
I will suppose that some malicious demon has employed his
energies to deceive me. I shall think that the sky,
the air, the earth, and all external things are merely
the delusions which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.
I shall consider myself as not having hands, or flesh
or senses, but he's falsely believing that I have all

(29:39):
these things.

Speaker 16 (29:41):
A slightly more modern version of the same idea as
the brain in a vat, where again you tried to
challenge the philosopher to prove that the external world exists
and that he or she is not a brain in
a vat in some mad scientist laboratory, being kind of
fed inputs that mimic what the external world would have done.

(30:13):
So it didn't really matter how realistic these thought experiments were.
There were just logical possibilities, and the challenge was how
can you disprove them.

Speaker 5 (30:24):
One thousand years before Descartes Evil Demon, a similar idea
was put forth in ancient Greece by Plato.

Speaker 19 (30:31):
So he describes, like, imagine the situation. There are figures.
They're chained inside of a cave from birth. They have
no experience of what's outside of it. They're looking at
a wall, and on the wall they kind of see
this projection.

Speaker 11 (30:44):
Do you see men passing along the wall carrying all
sorts of articles which they hold projected above the wall
statues of men and animals made of wood and stone
and various materials. Of the objects which are being carried
in like manner, they would only see the shadows.

Speaker 5 (31:07):
Emily Potost wrote about this parable's relevance to both simulation
theory and other aspects of digital communications and miscommunications.

Speaker 19 (31:18):
It's a very cinematic metaphor, and I just love that,
how you know, that sort of imagination of how film
affects us, and just like there's like that lostiness between
what is really happening and what perception shows us. There's
sort of lostiness between what media shows us and what
the real world outside of that media representation is. So

(31:40):
now it's not just what their senses decide to show them,
it's what the media decides to show them.

Speaker 17 (31:44):
And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. Let's go
back to Hindu myths. You find these incredible miss of
like you know, the king's going along and stops for well,
and he drinks, and then he goes and he has
a whole other existence, a whole other life, and then

(32:05):
pop he comes back in, and they'll even go have
worlds within worlds within worlds, so you have the structure
of worlds within worlds, and once you have that, it
undermines the primary world.

Speaker 9 (32:16):
It really kind of crystallized for me when I started
observing the experience of the Villager in Minecraft. He's a
massively simplified version of us. He has free will, he
moves about the space as he sees fit.

Speaker 15 (32:30):
Well.

Speaker 9 (32:30):
The interesting thing though, is for me, what it was
with the Villager is, you know, what does he do
when you the avatar come down into the game of Minecraft,
you know, and you inhabit your avatar and Minecraft and
you descend to Earth. What does the Villager do when
you encounter him? He looks at you, you know, he
looks at you as if you are the same as him.

(32:52):
Of course you're not, because you are being controlled by
an intelligence and higher power.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
It'd be hilarious if Elon Musk was a player Harry
and he just comes into the game say hey, you
guys know uh huh or simulated.

Speaker 14 (33:07):
This could be some simulation it could do.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
You entertain that.

Speaker 4 (33:10):
But then he gets the log off, go back to
artifice or heaven or whatever and laugh with his weird
extra dimensional friends that hey, I was just playing around
with that simulation again today and I keep dropping him hence,
but no one's picking it up.

Speaker 9 (33:27):
But it's interesting because for me, the villager speaks to
there are a few different levels of what, you know,
being raised into Christian faith, I would call God. There
is the God who made the world, and then there's
the avatar who's descending in front of you. And they're
different because the God who made the world is not
the person who's in front of you. We don't get
to see that. We don't get to see the creator

(33:48):
of the game. To extend this metaphor to perhaps ridiculous lengths,
you know, one minute a pixel on your screen will
be representing a flower and it is that flower, And then.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
The next minute a villager will walk in and.

Speaker 9 (34:02):
That pixel represents him. That pixel is part of him.
It doesn't take much to think about, like, well, if
I just extrapolate that to three dimensions, it's the same
as Adams and cells. You know, one year, this cell
is part of me, and then tomorrow it'll flake. Often
it'll be part of something else, and every seven years
our cells replace themselves anyway.

Speaker 5 (34:24):
Artist Chris Ware was so struck by the implications of
Minecraft that he created this cover illustration for the New.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yorker video game itself captures this sort of sense of
I don't know, more than anything, just like death. Whenever
I play it with my daughter, I feel like we're
dead and we're flying around looking at the world or something.
It's the only experience I've had that kind of closely
approximates what I imagine a disembodied consciousness might experience, or something.

Speaker 15 (34:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
How else to really put it.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
We build these kill your sculptures. She built giant, well, giant,
you know, it's a relative term when you're talking digitally
and in reality, but giant sculptures of myself and my
wife amidst kind of golden farmhouses and that then would
go underground and train lines or mine card lines that

(35:19):
would go underground and connect between the landscape that kind
of pre existed. But now she's fourteen, so she's kind
of passed, passed beyond. But now she's in this sort
of baroque phase where she and some of her friends
now have gone back to Minecraft and are now looking

(35:39):
at their worlds that they made in their pre adolescence
and kind of revisiting them and listening to the music
again and getting all tearful. So it's a fourteen year
old nostalgia for a lost world of innocence or something.
I guess when she's forty and I'm eighty five or whatever,
and downloaded onto a flash drive we can continue to visit.

Speaker 7 (36:18):
My relationship with the United States has always been a.

Speaker 20 (36:21):
Very bad one. It has always seemed to me that
I was about to be arrested by the American police
for some obscure reasons to Perhaps that's because of reading
Kaska's The Trial. That book influenced me very much. You know,
where someone is arrested for a crime and he's never

(36:42):
told what crime he has committed.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
When I was a kid, and one of the things
that I really keyed into was adults at the time
would repeat things over and over again. For instance, Newsweek magazine.
My dad used to get it all the time, and
we'd be sitting around the dinner table and he'd say, well,
you know, and then he'd say word for word a

(37:08):
sentence that was read from the Newsweek magazine. So it
was like the magazine programmed him to say that thing.
This wasn't an original thought that he had, and that's
really where it started. I guess, you know, in my
like early childhood, the concept that the people that I

(37:32):
was dealing with were I used the term chemical robots
at the time, but the concept that they weren't actually conscious.
They had these repeated behaviors that they would do over
and over again.

Speaker 5 (37:50):
In his paper, Nick Bostrom defined a simulation of the
entire mental history of mankind as an ancestor simulation when
estimating the amount of compute uting power one might need.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Does the idea of ancestors simulations suggest that we're retracing
the steps of the genuine society that created the simulation.

Speaker 16 (38:14):
Well, that's one possibility. That could also be all kinds
of variations, vrenching from complete fantasy worlds that we are
no resemblance to anything that existed in physical reality, to
variations of history. All of that is conceptually possible. But

(38:35):
an ancestor simulation that I talk about in the paper,
which is to consider the type of simulation where the
simulators would be creating very detailed simulations of people like
their historical predecessors, maybe not exactly the same people, but
the same kind of people.

Speaker 4 (38:56):
Back when I was nine, nine or ten, I used
to joke about with my brothers and sister that people
would just go home and just like sit down stair
of walls and no one was watching. You know, they
were just like, you know, go home and te posts
effectively in their private spaces when they weren't seen, because
they would just deactivate their programming. I guess I used

(39:20):
to joke about that, but that idea ran with me
a lot while I was older, and it kind of
became a little horrifying that these people I'd be talking to,
since nobody was watching, they would just the program would
stop working.

Speaker 16 (39:44):
Does not assume that all the details of our world
would be simulated to perfect subatomic precision all the time,
and indeed, that kind of simulation might well be completely intractable.
Obviously depends on the kind of compute power available in
the basement simulator. If they have infinitely fast computers, sure,

(40:04):
But now the idea rather is that you would be
able to create a simulation capturing only enough that to
the simulated creatures they couldn't tell the difference, and that
would involve some pretty clever footwork on behalf of the
simulators that they would be able, for example, to fill
in more detail in a particular part of reality when
we are paying attention but then not simulating all of

(40:27):
those details all the time.

Speaker 8 (40:31):
I'm occupying maybe twenty square feet, and yet there's a
whole world that exists because I know about it just
here in my brain.

Speaker 9 (40:43):
I worked with a company for a little while that
launched a what is now a very popular app that
is an interactive fiction app. You know, there's an element.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
Of well, it's just like writing a chooser or an adventure.

Speaker 9 (40:58):
But what it became swiftly obvious to me how simple
some of our own decision making is from a coding perspective.

Speaker 5 (41:11):
A popular recent Reddit ama was with a user who wrote,
I am a real life non player character.

Speaker 21 (41:19):
And all right, we're all good. So a NPC is
a non player character that you will normally see in
a video game. They're usually the people that aren't controlled
by the player of the video game. They are the
characters that were kind of programmed in there. It's kind

(41:42):
of like talking to a person in real life, but
they only have a set amount of things that they
can say.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Good buddy and a good part in the one and.

Speaker 21 (41:51):
You only have a specific lines that you can say
back to it in a response.

Speaker 17 (41:59):
I can only if I was really a game or
how I would experience social interaction. But even as non
non game player, I sometimes find myself, you know, dealing
with non player characters.

Speaker 21 (42:11):
I work at a grocery store, and I have a
specific list of things that I need to accomplish when
reading a customer and checking out their items. And because
of that, it just made logical sense that I create
kind of a mental script that I go through with

(42:31):
each customer.

Speaker 9 (42:32):
When this stimuli happens to him. Generally speaking, he reacts
in this way. It's not terribly different from the code
that tells the chickens of Minecraft what to do, or
the Turtles and Mario Brothers, or the mosquitoes of Maine.
You know, they're all kind of operating on the same principles.
If this, then that, If not, then don't. It's not

(42:53):
too much of a leap to think that consciousness may
may mean we are being inhabited some sort of player
type intelligence.

Speaker 10 (43:03):
That the reason everyone loves to be like Oh small
World is because it is. Actually There just isn't enough
processing power to render seven billion consciousnesses.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
There are not seven billion consciousnesses.

Speaker 10 (43:16):
Yeah, there might be seven billion in the general algorithm
of how many people are on Earth, but when you
start talking to people, there's probably like a couple hundred
thousand ais that are serving as the substrate for the
you know people, you know experience that everyone's having on Earth.

Speaker 3 (43:34):
So when you find that you know the same people
are six degrees of separation, it's just it's not a
surprise at all.

Speaker 10 (43:40):
In fact, it's a flaw in the system, and that's
just a limit of the actual processing power of the
machine that the SIMS running on.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Well, have you ever encountered a non player character?

Speaker 10 (43:51):
I mean you encounter them all the time when you're
walking down the street, and you don't interact with people
like it's just.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
Like any video game.

Speaker 10 (43:58):
It's just there's much less as in power being attributed
to the automatoms. But once you start interacting, then something
has to actually serve as the intelligence behind that so
called you know.

Speaker 4 (44:12):
Human.

Speaker 9 (44:15):
Society is rapidly, rapidly secularizing. You know, religion is completely
falling apart, and there's elements of that that are wonderful.

Speaker 11 (44:24):
You know, I think.

Speaker 9 (44:25):
Religion plays an overly restrictive role in people's lives too often,
certainly the religion I was raised in that. But I
do know people from you know, from my childhood in
a fairly evangelical Christian world, who you know, wanted to

(44:45):
would have committed violent acts if only God, you know,
if only God wouldn't punish them for it. Now, why
it takes God to do that as opposed to one's
own honor and self worth and love for the neighbor,
I don't know, but that was the case, right. I
believe that this thought that we're living in a simulation,
I think that is going to just increase in popularity

(45:07):
and for people who are content to see both sides
of an argument and that doesn't split our heads into
you know, for people who are content to see shades
of gray, I think that's a fine. It's a fine
idea because we don't you know, it doesn't change anything
about my daily life necessarily, and you shouldn't.

Speaker 7 (45:25):
So.

Speaker 9 (45:26):
So if I'm a simulation, okay, So if I was
created by a creator God, okay, So if I'm a
random sparking of cells, okay, fine, it doesn't change much
about how I am living day to day but there's
a lot of people with very absolutist mindsets, and I
think once you tell them, hey, you're a simulation the
nihilistic side of humanity, their first reaction will be, then, well,

(45:49):
it doesn't matter what I do to anyone else, because
I know that I'm real and I feel it. But
if there's no proof that they're real, you know, then
what's the point of laws, what's the point of all this?

Speaker 10 (46:00):
You know?

Speaker 19 (46:05):
I do honestly think there is a certain degree of
inability to separate real world from digital realities. When you
have something like the shooter in New Zealand live streaming
what he's doing and going after people like he's in
a first person shooter and going after the people who
are like Muslims or you know, people should have synagogue.

(46:26):
Is going after someone who is constructed as an other
by the media that they consume.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
We must meet the threat with our valor, our blood,
indeed with our very lives, to ensure.

Speaker 18 (46:40):
That human civilization, not insect dominates this galaxy now and always.

Speaker 19 (46:49):
However, you end up sort of in that place where
everyone you shoot at just kind of disappears, and they
were all pod people, you know, and they weren't.

Speaker 22 (46:58):
Real or the NBC meme.

Speaker 19 (46:59):
You get into a place where you kind of treat
reality like these are digital disposable bodies.

Speaker 4 (47:17):
And so one guy might plug in, he's Kanye Wets.
One person might plug in and he's instead.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Of doing that, he's Michael Phelps.

Speaker 4 (47:26):
They plug in and they play, and they stay at
the top level in some way that they can doing
different exploits. But then you have people who who log
in they used to play a lot, and they're really good,
but then they unplugged and they didn't come back years
and years, and the reflection in our reality would be
a celebrity that is, who was really good and then
just fell from grace and never really came back. I

(47:48):
can't name a specific celebrity here. Plus I don't want
to throw that into your film anyway. So they would
they would do something, and they would they would go
totally like they'd be going straight, and all of a sudden,
I will be doing something that's totally perpendiculated to their
normal behavior patterns because in a video game, you're doing it,
you're doing it well. Then all of a sudden, he's

(48:09):
get bored and you start doing something totally different, and
I've done that myself, and you I'm playing grand theft
auto and you know, you have millions and millions of dollars,
and all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, okay, I
think I'm gonna hold up in this apartment building to
see how many police I can get to try to
kill me. You know, they kind of go for something crazy.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
I once said to my uncle, well, what if this
is all fake? You know, what if none of this
is real? And he said, well, then what's to keep
me from going door to door just shooting people in
the head, or what's to keep me from, you know,
shooting you? And it always struck me, is that what
you want to do? Is that is the only thing

(48:58):
keeping you from doing that, the fact that the world
is real and there are consequences.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
Did you see that video of the gentleman on the
East coast West coast, I'm sorry who He hijacked a
commercial airflight that was empty. It was just him on board,
and he had no training whatsoever, and he started just
flying around the coast.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
What the hell, Oh my god, what is happening right now?

Speaker 23 (49:34):
Did you ever see that, I'm sorry, he's flying he's
talking about things.

Speaker 16 (49:52):
This is probably like jail time for life.

Speaker 15 (49:54):
I would hope it is for a guy like me.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
One of the things he's doing is he's kind of
breaking people's perceptions because he's doing stuff like he's doing
loops and whatnot. He's getting remarkably close to the ground.
He's over the ocean, over the over the land, he's
doing tricks.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
It was just flying the playing around. Be a shame
comfortable with that?

Speaker 15 (50:25):
Oh hell yeah, it's a black man.

Speaker 12 (50:26):
I'm played video games.

Speaker 15 (50:27):
Before, so I did I know what I'm doing a
little bit.

Speaker 4 (50:37):
And this is shortly before he crashes personally into a
I believe in island, just offshore. But yeah, it's nuts.
That's one of his last thoughts is how much it's
like a video game to him? Anthing crashes, I see.

(51:03):
But yeah, there is a dark side. There's there's people
out there who are going to be chaoic about it.

Speaker 6 (51:26):
One very pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to
many of us, again and again and always without explanation,
the acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before,
what we were just about to do now. We would
have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present dejevous, which, hey, Pucket,

(51:58):
what is it?

Speaker 22 (51:58):
Dejevo is usually a glten matrix. It happens when they
change something.

Speaker 6 (52:03):
What we need at this point is so locate to
bring forth is evidence someone who is managed somehow.

Speaker 7 (52:09):
It doesn't matter how to.

Speaker 6 (52:11):
Retain memories of a different present, latent, alternate world impressions
different in some significant way from this.

Speaker 5 (52:19):
Philip K. Dick might have been surprised to learn how
common memories of a different present would become in the
twenty first century.

Speaker 24 (52:26):
If you'd remained a kit kat looking like this, then
you could be living in an alternate reality. Welcome to
your conspantacy chat in that today's topic is the maindwarping
reality banding Mandela effect.

Speaker 25 (52:38):
It's called the Mandela effect because hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison, and
that actually never happened, But hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of people are like, no, I remember Nelson Mandela died
in prison, but like that never happened.

Speaker 24 (52:52):
So when reports of the former South African prison's death
became news in twenty thirteen, it re sparked the theis
debase on whether or not some house LEDs ulternate time White.

Speaker 12 (53:01):
The Berenstein Bear children's books have changed. They used to
be called Barren Steam Bears, and now they've always been
known as the Barren Stain Bears. Over ten thousand Mandela
effects have been logged and confirmed.

Speaker 25 (53:14):
If you go back and literally find like a VHS
tape of like snow White from like nineteen ninety eight,
and you put it in a VHS player, they.

Speaker 22 (53:22):
Say, mirror on the whole wall.

Speaker 25 (53:25):
Tell me, tell me, bitch that you do not fucking
remember mirror, mirror on the wall.

Speaker 26 (53:32):
Well, that doesn't exist.

Speaker 25 (53:33):
Genelact alternate reality.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
I think yes.

Speaker 10 (53:51):
When I was young, I lived in Mexico, very young,
like ten years old, and then I returned there for
the summer with my mother. Once I was eighteen years old,
and I really didn't know anybody. I finally get a
call from some friends, friends of friend. These guys picked
me up and they're in a nineteen seventy jeep wagoneer,

(54:15):
big old machine. It immediately becomes clear that they've been
drinking because they say, hey, you know, help yourself to
a beer. And I look in the back of the wagoneer.
There's all these empties rolling around and couldn't find a
seat belt, and I just said, all right, fuck it.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
I opened a beer.

Speaker 10 (54:31):
Then we were driving down a major street in a
city called Cornavaca. It had a cement divider between the
two sides, and the driver, for shits and giggles, decided
to pop in an opening, pop onto the wrong direction
and drive until there was another opening. So we were

(54:51):
driving against traffic in the wrong side.

Speaker 3 (54:55):
And no cars came. No cars.

Speaker 10 (54:57):
You know, we didn't get in an accident. So that
was the first near miss, but I don't count that.
And so we headed off. They we went to a
liquor store, bought they bought some more liquor. They said,
now what should we do. Let's go to the pyramid.
So there was a pyramid in town, and so we
head over. We climbed fence. We're walking on a Mexican pyramid.

(55:19):
It's you know, it's a kind of an awesome experience
in and of itself. And they're getting bored. They say,
all right, that's it, let's let's go home. When we
get back in the wagon. Here and in Mexico at
that time of year, this was summer. They have Monsoon's last,
you know, five minutes now, the road's completely wet, and

(55:42):
these guys are drunk, and I'm sitting in the back seat.
The driver says to the passenger, hey man, why don't
you take the wheels? And I'm sitting in the back
and I'm like, yeah, that's the worst idea I've ever heard.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
But it's too late.

Speaker 27 (56:01):
It's too late, and he grabs the wheel and the
car hits the side of the road right away, but
it hits the curb and slides, so it hits one
sided street and slides in the other direction, hits another
curb and flies through the air, probably about one thousand

(56:21):
feet through the air, and lands on the roof.

Speaker 10 (56:30):
All the windows shattered, and I broke ribs because I
took the impact of the roof, and gasoline started pouring
out of the car, and I got the wind knocked
out of me. I crawled out of the window and
got as far away as I could, and then.

Speaker 3 (56:50):
A truck pulls up and they say, oh, great, banditos.

Speaker 10 (56:58):
And then another car pulls up and it's the Federales,
the Mexican police, you know.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
The bandifos just leads.

Speaker 10 (57:05):
And I'm like, oh, great, the police are here, and
they're like, no, actually, it's worse. It's worse that they're
here once they learned, once they learned that we've been drinking,
they're gonnaarrest us all and then they're gonna they're gonna
ask for a big bribe for you because you're American.
So I was standing in the darkness and then another
car pulls up. A guy gets out and he says,

(57:29):
excuse me. I am the chief accountant of the Carnavaca
Police Department, so the local city police.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
And he knows about the corruption of the federales. And
my hosts managed to.

Speaker 10 (57:45):
Get the information to him that they had hidden an
American in the darkness, and they got me out of there.
But the whole thing, it seemed so so imposible that
I was that I had survived.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
The likelihood of all of that was just so low.

Speaker 10 (58:06):
Somebody's got to be putting their hand on the scale
because that kind of just think of it in terms
of the algorithm tweaking probabilities so that things are essentially
more interesting because it's a game.

Speaker 4 (58:24):
Okay, So I think the first like public place where
I actually was able to put a name to an idea,
probably the Matrix movies. You know, you can't you can't
mention simulation without mentioning that the book he keeps all
this stuff in is uh, what's it called? Simulation and simulacrap.

(58:49):
It's right there at beginning of the movie, just throws
it right in your face. After the trilogy was over,
they released that animation, the Animatrix. Yeah, I think that
one really hit home the button, like the idea was
planted and that thing really pressed on it. In the
Renaissance Part one and two, it's kind of hosted by
the almost like this technology demi god, who's kind of

(59:12):
bringing you in and out of reality, you know, as
far as like what's going on inside the matrix, what's
going on outside the matrix? The history of how the
simulation was built.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
I moved to Canada. I lived in Canada for a
couple of months, and so my friend from Illinois drives
up to Canada. We're hanging out and what do you
want to see? I don't know. Let's go and see
this dumb Keanu Reeves action film. So we go and
see this movie. It's pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.

(59:46):
And then he gets out of the tank and we're
like WHOA.

Speaker 5 (59:58):
Joshua Cook was a Virginia High school student. When you
heard about the film.

Speaker 15 (01:00:05):
I was riding in a car on the way home
and a friend of mine was in the car get
she mentioned this movie Matrix that people were going crazy over,
people were going to the movie theaters fifteen times in
a row to see it, and that people were getting
obsessed about it and raven about it. Oh man, you gotta
see it like theyn't never see anything like it in

(01:00:27):
the graphics.

Speaker 28 (01:00:28):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 15 (01:00:29):
And then I heard them say something about black trench
coat and stuff, and that really hit me for a
few reasons. One is I had already had a fascination
and obsession really with the black trench coat because of
the movie The Crow, which was like my first movie obsession.
So I went to the Blockbuster video store and from

(01:00:50):
the very beginning of the movie it had my attention,
and it had kind of like a rough aggressive you know,
Robs the heavy metal being to to is the matrix.

Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
The soundtrack that makes you go see I thought about
the structure of the whole thing, like what would it
be structurally, and an idea came to my mind of
what it would would look like. I don't think it's
a system of people in pods somewhere else. I think
it's something completely different than that.

Speaker 11 (01:01:22):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:01:22):
When I think about I think of a like a
giant white, brilliant white marble hallway, right, and then there's
like a pedestal in center and this giant black sphere,
that black sphere to these people in this reality that's
effectively a computer, you know now, and that computer is running.
There could be a little art museum card next to us,

(01:01:44):
a universe whatever, and they just see what happens out
of that black mass of you know, stars and clouds
and deep, deep, deep down people like us. And then
going from that model, you wonder, okay, is it important
to them? Are we a very special case that the

(01:02:05):
entire reality is focused on so trying to figure out
what the point of life is? And so they just
keep rerunning the universe.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
I think what they want us to do is improve
upon the simulation that they've already made. And this was
where we get into gans. I don't know if that's
how you pronounce them, but gas generative adversarial networks. Basically,

(01:02:35):
the idea is that you have two ais, and they're
competing with each other. AI number one is the forger.
It wants to make pictures of human beings that look
like human beings enough to fool someone. And then you
have another one that's the inspector. The inspector's job is

(01:02:55):
to tell the difference between fake pictures of people and
actual pictures of people. And the two of them just
run at each other, boom boom boom, trying to fail,
trying to win all that until eventually you and I
look at the pictures and they look real to us
because they've gone through all these iterations. But what are

(01:03:19):
people if not generative adversarial networks. COMP tries to solve crime,
criminal tries to beat comp.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
Idiot you'll laye.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Hacker tries to hack a system. A programmer tries to
fix the system. Audience gets jaded with this type of media,
so somebody new comes along and tries to make something better.
We're constantly getting back and forth at each other. If
you look at social media, maybe this is why we're
always arguing, because we exist specifically to refine and hone things.

(01:04:05):
In the end, what do we want to create if
not another simulation?

Speaker 15 (01:04:17):
Yeah, I mean there are a few lines in there
that were pretty deep. Leo asked Orpheous, why do my
eyes and Orpheus looks at Eos says, because it's every
used of before. Well, I felt the same way, and
I feel like, man, it's got to be more than this.

Speaker 19 (01:04:35):
Okay, you'd never used your eyes before. When he gets
out of the matrix and he's and everything's blurry, that's very,
very similar to sort of what happens in the Plato's
cave when he goes this. When you're taken outside the cave,
it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to
what you're seeing outside the cave. And then when he

(01:04:55):
comes back inside the cave, he can't see either because
he's used to seeing things as they really are, and
so you know it says, Oh, and your friends are
sort of watching on the projection screen things and they
give themselves awards for being the fastest and best. It's
spotting what's going on, and you just aren't interested in

(01:05:16):
this anymore because you've seen so much more. It's funny
how this just sort of like value system that allows
us to believe that we know something that everyone else
doesn't like also contributes to that othering when he's walking
down the street and everyone is fake, you know, and
then yeah, and the person in the red dress, and

(01:05:36):
then later the guy's like, oh, I engineered her.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
Yeah, that seems like that is such.

Speaker 22 (01:05:42):
A school shooter fantasy, that.

Speaker 19 (01:05:47):
You have these unique eyes to see what no one
else can see and everyone else is just like they're
just asleep.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
Having told you my story about when I was a kid,
when he got out of the tank, the immediate thing
that flash on my mind was, Okay, this is kind
of like what happened to me at that point. But
there was no tank to get out of, and I

(01:06:22):
maybe didn't even have a body per se.

Speaker 15 (01:06:29):
I went to a store in the mall near my house.
It was called Hot Topic, I don't know if you've
ever heard of it, and they had all kind of
golf wear, black clothes, black everything. There was a line
of trench coats hanging on a on a wreck in
the corner of the store, and I was with my
sister Tiffany, and I made a bee line straight for

(01:06:50):
the trench coats, you know, I ran, I ran to them,
and I grabbed one and I held it to my
chest real tight, like it was like my girlfriend or something.
It was, you know, it was bad. My sister's looking
at me, like, what are you doing. Whenever I would
be going through something really bad, whether it was being
bullied at school or whether it was being abused at home,
I could escape. I could leave the room. I could

(01:07:12):
escape put the black trench coat on. It was like
the trench coat was like a living, breathing organism to me.
You know, it made me feel when I put it on.
It made me feel strong. It made me feel powerful, unassailable.
It made me feel closer to Neil than I ever been.

(01:07:33):
I would wear the trench coat to the mall mainly.
I would walk around the mall just all day with
the Matrix music on my headphones. I had the soundtrack
was a my CD player, and people would see me
coming and they would just kind of back away, you know,
and I had this sick thrill of wearing it. So

(01:07:53):
being neo. Being neo was that I felt for a
long time and actually saved me. But until a certain point,
you know, everything that's really happened with me has kind
of been a dichotomy, sometimes a paradox. I probably watched
the Matrix movie. I don't know exactly, but I know
it was hundreds of times. After I saw it the

(01:08:15):
first time, I had to watch it again, and then
I had to watch it again, and I watched it
again and again and again. There there were days when
I would watch it two or three times in a
row and like the world that they're in, this this boring,
you know, tried mundane, you know, the sickening world. I

(01:08:35):
felt the same way and just felt like nothing was
going right and what the hell am I doing here?
And I felt like, man, there's got to be more
than this. Maybe there's something with this matrix game.

Speaker 28 (01:08:44):
Maybe it's like.

Speaker 15 (01:08:45):
Maybe it's real. Maybe it's not so fake after all,
you know, who.

Speaker 7 (01:08:48):
Knows one thing?

Speaker 6 (01:08:59):
I really want you to know these claims can neither
be proved, nor can they be even made to sound
rational in the usual sense of the word. It has
taken me over three years to reach the point where
I am willing to tell anyone but my closest friends
about my experience, beginning back at the vernal equinox of

(01:09:20):
nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 21 (01:09:22):
Yeah, your presentatives is.

Speaker 6 (01:09:26):
One of the reasons motivating me to speak about it
publicly at last, to openly make this claim is a
recent encounter I have undergone, which, by the way, bears
a range resemblance to Hawthorne Abinson's experience in my novel
The Man in the High Castle with the Woman. Julianna
frank Cotde Juliana read Robinson's book about a world in

(01:09:54):
which Germany and Japan and Italy.

Speaker 7 (01:09:58):
Now this is a difficult if you haven't read the book.

Speaker 6 (01:10:02):
But he wrote a novel in which Germany, Italy and
Japan lost World War Two, and he was living in
a world in which they had won World War Two.
She felt she should tell him what she comprehended about
the book, in other words, that his novel was true.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
When he was working on Jimmy Corrigan's the main character
meets his dad and then his dad dies, And as
I was working on the story itself, I met my
dad for the first time and.

Speaker 4 (01:10:37):
Then he died.

Speaker 1 (01:10:40):
John Updike said something once about this strange predictability of fiction,
and you just kind of let it go at that
and didn't really follow up on that. But there is
something where you get into this imaginary world of writing
stories and reimagining memories, where you can kind of start
to feel like you're not necessarily predicting the world, but
having some play in the stream of it or something.

Speaker 6 (01:11:05):
For several years, I've had the feeling of growing feeling
that one day a woman who would be a complete
stranger to me would contact me and tell me that
she had some information to impart to me, and then
she would appear at my door, just as Juliana appeared
at Hawthorne Robinson's door. She would tell me exactly what

(01:11:28):
Julianna told Abinson, and that is that my book.

Speaker 7 (01:11:32):
Like his, was in a certain real, literal.

Speaker 6 (01:11:35):
And physical sense, not fiction, but the truth. So well,
this did finally happen to me. I even knew that
her hair would be black.

Speaker 17 (01:11:48):
One of the first things that a lot of science
fiction critics remind you when you're talking about scaice fiction.
Science fiction is not about prediction, but of course people
think about it anyway, and Dick is quite a few
like he sees no slacker in the act virtually anticipating
the future department, especially around consumer gadgets and ideas about
consumer gadgets.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
But I think.

Speaker 17 (01:12:09):
What's more prophetic is just what it feels like to
be alive right now, you know, to be confused onto
logically confused, Like I'm not really sure where reality is exactly.
I'm certainly convinced that there's a lot of very dark

(01:12:30):
forces on the horizon. There are things that are trying
to manipulate me, using information or using the fact that
I'm still a subject of capitalism, and they're kind of
manipulating that. And at the same time they're sort of
like deeper rumblings in the nature of the world that
seem really unclear. And at the same time people seem

(01:12:50):
drawn potentially drawn into their own sort of solipsistic world
of like manipulating with the world through all these interfaces
and and kind of detaching in a way, even at
the same time you're completely bound up. And that's a
primal theme in Dick is the tension between our social reality.
The reality is a social construction that we are always

(01:13:12):
able to kind of fragment away from in generally harrowing ways.
We go into solipsis, we go into psychosis, we go
into paranoia. Want to hear it, and so I think
he captures the texture of our life. I mean, especially like,
just as a trivial example, the texture of like lots

(01:13:34):
of little alerts, all the time, you know, pings on
the phone and and you know, here's your email ding,
and then oh, don't forget this, and like that kind
of mind that's constantly distracted by these little bits of
information tugging at us, some of which are advertisements trying
to like or you know, you start thinking about a
trip and then you write somebody in an email and

(01:13:54):
Google reads your email, and then suddenly all the ads
are like trips, trips, trips.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
It's just like WHOA.

Speaker 17 (01:13:59):
That fabric of consciousness is just straight out of.

Speaker 15 (01:14:08):
I remember typing guns and guns for stee on like Google,
and in Virgina, I said, Fairfax, Virginia, and I saw
this place was called Gallleon Sporting Goods Store. And I remember,
like a few days after I looked that up my father.
I was in the basement with my father and he said,

(01:14:30):
I seen your searches for guns for sale and looked
at me and he had like this worried, slash angry
look on his face. And I didn't say anything, and
I we looked at each other for a good minute,
almost like a standoff in and I just I walked
up the basement steps and left. And we never had
another conversation about it, he.

Speaker 17 (01:14:53):
Had this great line about that he thought that the
contemporary world was sort of recreating the animist world that
people pre modern people saw, and his work captures that
sense of a kind of profane technological animism and a
liveness that he's not very trustworthy. Vick was always aware

(01:15:17):
of the broken People are broken, technologies are broken, cosmologies
are broken, Gods are broken. Even though it seems like
other people are just always paying attention to like the
new and how the new technologies can solve this thing.
What I experienced my technological life is like is just

(01:15:41):
a lot of broken things.

Speaker 4 (01:15:47):
So you have your giant developers. You have Activision Blizzard
they do World of Warcraft and Overwatch.

Speaker 2 (01:15:55):
You have EA, which is.

Speaker 4 (01:15:58):
I have I've seen EA related to the Nazis more
than I've seen them related to video games. They're pushing
out these things now where you're paying full price for
a video game, but you're only getting like forty percent
of a video game, and the portion you get is
broken and buggy and sometimes like literally in cases some games,

(01:16:20):
it's like the latest one was Atlas is unplayable, like
it's literally dead on arrival. People are still paying full
price for it and getting tricked into it. Can't get refunds,
they get patches that don't work. You're stuck in these
digital worlds that aren't going so well, and then when
you get out of them, you're stuck in reality that's
not going so well either, and you can't help draw parallels.

(01:16:45):
The grass is dead on both sides.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
Of this thing.

Speaker 4 (01:16:49):
Perhaps right now, maybe our artifices are a little bit
more active than we thought, and they're just like really
hot fixing a lot of things, and they're quick patching
reality right now, and it's just like shit's hit in
the fan right now.

Speaker 19 (01:17:01):
That's what's happening outside the matrix. In Neo's world too.
It's like the real reality if you get outside of
the matrix, is terrible. The real reality is like war
and you can't breathe to me. The subject of that
is like, maybe there was there was a taboo that
we transgressed, that we went past a point of no return.

Speaker 28 (01:17:23):
February seventeenth, two thousand and three. It was a Monday.

Speaker 15 (01:17:31):
I woke up. There was a whole lot of snow
outside from a recent blizzard we had just had, and
I walked downstairs, and I saw my father shoveling snow.
So I got my clothes on helped them shovel the snow,
and in the middle of doing that, I remember my
mother came out and she looked up and she said,
there's so much snow. We're gonna remember this for a

(01:17:53):
long time. I spent the rest of the day in
my room, playing violent video games and watching the Matrix
movie with my black trench coat on and my gun
in my hand. As evening time continued, paranoia sunk in

(01:18:13):
even further. Lightning struck my brain. And this is what
hit me. I said to myself. The only way I
could find out for sure, the only way I could
find out for sure if the Matrix was real, then
I wasn't losing my mind, was to simply pick up
the phone and call them. I left my room and

(01:18:39):
I walked precariously over to the house phone in my
parents' bedroom. I slowly picked the phone up off the hook,

(01:19:01):
and then, taking a deep, nervous breath, I spoke those
powerful words, his words, the final words of NEO. I
know you're out there. I can feel you now. I
know that you're afraid. You're afraid of me. You're afraid
of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come

(01:19:23):
here let me tell you how this.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Is going on the end.

Speaker 15 (01:19:26):
I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.
I'm going to hang up his phone, and then I'm
going to show these people what you don't want them
to see. A world without you, of a world without
rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world world
where anything is possible. Where we go from there is

(01:19:49):
a choice. Send me to you. And I hung up
the phone, and I walked calmly back to the TV
in my room and began watching the Matrix all over again.
And I remember sitting there on my bed looking up
at the Matrix poster, just saying, basically, fucked my life,
you know. I got my shotgun out and I put

(01:20:15):
some slugs in there in the chamber, and I slid
the action forward and I left my room. But before
I did, I put a CD player on on my head,
headphones on my head. And this one was a little
different than the Matrix. This one was by a band
called Drowning Pool. The words to the song were beaten,

(01:20:40):
why four can't take much more? Something's got to give
that the bodies of the floor. That's what I was
listening to as I left my room and I went
downstairs to get to the base. And remember when I

(01:21:22):
got to the bottom of the basement stairs, I saw
my mother was sitting there at the computer with a
smile on her face, and she turned. She swiveled in
her chair to face me, and when she saw the
gun in my hands, which she'd seen for the first
time ever, her smile disappeared, and I shot her. I

(01:21:43):
shot her in the chest. And I turned my attention
to my father, who was on the other side of
the basement, and he dove. He was at his computer too,
and he dove under the table and he was looking
at me with a look I've never seen on him before,
and just that look of shock and disbelief. And remember

(01:22:06):
I crouched down to be level with them, and I
shot him about three times. I went upstairs to reload,

(01:22:29):
and when I came back down, I still had my
headphones on. The words that were forced through my ears
were skinningga in, skin, blood and bone. Grow by yourself because.

Speaker 28 (01:22:43):
You're not alone.

Speaker 15 (01:22:44):
You want it in now. You're here, driven by hate,
consumed by fear that the body said before. That's what
I was listening to. As I went down for the
second time to the basement. I was standing at the

(01:23:05):
top of the basement staircase, and my mother was standing
at the bottom of the staircase holding her chest as
she bled out, and I lifted the gun up and
I aimed it at her face. She looked at that
and she said, she said, Joshua, he said, what did
you do? And she looked and she kept looking at

(01:23:28):
me for a minute, and I she said, she said,
you wouldn't And I pulled the trigger. When I pulled
the trigger, and her face exploded, you know, half her face,
her eye and her face floated out to the back
of her head, and her flesh was just turned into

(01:23:51):
like riblets by bloody mess. And it messed me up
really bad because it wasn't anything like I had seen
on the matrix, you know, real life was so much
more horrific, and it kind of jarred me. I was
still pretty numb, but I remember it charring me because
it was different than than what I thought of the matrix.

(01:24:15):
So I turned around and I went upstairs to get
to the dining room. I picked up the phone in
the kitchen and my sister was on the phone. I
didn't realize at the time that my sister was on
the phone with my father at the fact moment that
I killed him and my mother, and she heard the
whole thing, and I didn't realize it. So here I am.

(01:24:36):
I got the phone in the kitchen and I said hello,
and and my sister said Josh. And I said, Tiffany,
I said, what are you doing here? And she said, Josh,
where's Daddy? I want to talk to daddy, you know,
I said, I told her. I said, hang up the phone, Tiffany,
I got to call someone. And she didn't hang up.
So I let the phone hang and I went to

(01:24:58):
my father had a cell phone. I went to a
cell p phone. I went outside. I took a Coca
cola out of the refrigerator and I started drinking. I
popped the top and I started drinking it and I
called nine one one. When I hung the phone up. Uh,
I got a call. I got a call on my
dad's phone from a friend of his, and my dad's

(01:25:21):
friend said, hey, Josh, is your dad there? And I said,
he can't come to the phone right now, and he said, oh, okay,
will you give me give him a.

Speaker 28 (01:25:29):
Message for me.

Speaker 15 (01:25:30):
Just tell him. I called, said, said, will you give
him that message for me? And I said sure, and
he hung up the phone. I hung up the phone,
and moments later the police arrived at the driveway at
my house with their guns drawn, about five or six
of them with their drunk, with their guns drawn on me,
and UH told me to get down on my knees,

(01:25:52):
and of course they arrested me.

Speaker 6 (01:26:07):
I in my stories and novels, often write about counterfeit worlds,
semi real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited
often by just one person, while meantime the other characters
either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow
drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs
in the corpus of my twenty seven years of writing.

(01:26:30):
At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious
explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo worlds. But
now I think I understand. What I was sensing was
the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what
evidently is the most actualized.

Speaker 7 (01:26:49):
One, the one.

Speaker 6 (01:26:50):
Which the majority of us, by consensus gentium agree.

Speaker 17 (01:26:53):
On the real nub of it morally, ethically, and even
kind of cosmologically, is how we deal with each other. Like, Okay,
I'm in a simulation. Okay, I'm in a false phenomenal world.
How do I deal with this person I'm in love with?
How do I deal with this person who is my enemy?

(01:27:14):
How do I deal with a dying parent? But if
I have the hunch that this is a simulation and
there are other people like me there who aren't just simulations,
it puts weird pressure on my on my ethics. How
do I deal with somebody else who's in a false world,
But who's actually behind that avatar is someone like me

(01:27:36):
that I really want to communicate with, fall in love with,
bond together with. And that's really key to Phil Dick, Like, yeah,
Phil Dick was kind of crazy. He had, you know, visions,
He can never decide what a man. He's neurotic and
pathological and paranoid and all those things. But at the
same time, constantly throughout all of the texts, there's this

(01:28:00):
very grounded empathy with people suffering under these false conditions.
He's very real portrayal, very sobering portrayals of human beings
that are still they have a heart, and that heart
is what kind of keeps you going as you suffer

(01:28:22):
these various nightmare scenarios that he throws your way, including
the ultimate one of just not knowing. And I think
that that's one of the ways that people get attracted
to simulation hypothesis is because it seems to maybe solve problems,
but I think it just makes the problems even more plain,
you know, kind of poignant and in your face.

Speaker 15 (01:28:47):
So when I met my lawyers for the first time
in Sir in fact Joe, they asked me about my crime, and.

Speaker 28 (01:28:56):
I told him.

Speaker 15 (01:28:56):
I said, I did my thing just like Neo in
the Matrix, like I was in virtual reality, and that
really took them by surprise. They weren't expecting. I also
told them that the moment of my crime, I had
also felt a tinge of remorse, because it was two
strong things at the same time. That it was that

(01:29:18):
I was entering the world or exiting the world of
the matrix and in their real life with what I
did to my parents. My lawyers later went to my
house and they went upstairs to my room and they
saw my enormous matrix movie poster on my wall, and
they saw my black trench coat Atlanta on my beds

(01:29:39):
moved out on my bed they saw my black boots,
the ones like neo war and they began to think
that they may have an insanity defense. They said that,
I quote Harvard, a bona fide belief that I was
living in the virtual world of the Matrix at the

(01:30:00):
time of the murders. That was part of my defense,
Susan what is Real, which was later dubbed the Matrix defense.

Speaker 5 (01:30:11):
The Matrix defense is a version of the insanity defense
and is a descendant of the taxi driver defense of
John Hinckley. It has been used multiple times since Joshua's trialed,
most notably by Lee Malvo aka the DC Sniper.

Speaker 15 (01:30:27):
The doctor, the psychologist, doctor Schausa. He diagnosed me with
a form of schizophrenia called simple schizophrenia, and that's when
he made the declaration that people are scarcely real to me,
and things like that. There are different events that happened
in my life, different things I was feeling that we're
in a combination led up to me exploding. The abuse

(01:30:50):
I had been suffering from my parents at home for many,
many years and then I had the bullying at school
and the undiagnosed mental illness I had, and all of
that together kind of folded a taking time bomb and
I call it the perfect storm. But I net by myself.
I never made any excuses, called my crime, and I

(01:31:13):
just wanted to die. You know. It's like, just forget
about all of this stuff, man, you know. And as
a matter of fact, in at the end of my
sent engine hearing, I got to say a rich statement
to the judge out loud there and there I just
I told her that I didn't I wasn't making excuses,
and I deserved the deathinitely. I deserve to die. And

(01:31:33):
I think about what I did every day. I wish
I could take it back, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:31:38):
Ultimately, Joshua decided not to pursue the Matrix defense and
pled guilty. He was nineteen years old when convicted. He
is not due to be released until twenty forty three.

Speaker 28 (01:31:52):
The movie, The Matrix movie has affected people in all
sorts of different ways. It all depends on where you're
coming from and the psychology of it. Mine is just
kind of an extreme case. There are people out there
in today maybe listening to this, that are going through
the same things that I was. And this is the
whole reason why I'm even talking about this today, because

(01:32:15):
I know I have a purpose of calling in my
life to try to reach them.

Speaker 5 (01:32:20):
Joshua wrote a book about his experience in hopes of
reaching other troubled kids and stopping them from repeating his mistakes.

Speaker 2 (01:32:29):
Now that I'm in my mid forties, I am actually
finally able to deal with people as human beings. And
you could think of it one way. If people are simulated,
they're getting better and they're easier to relate to. But
is it possible that I saw everyone as these sort
of robotic humans walking around because I couldn't figure them

(01:32:53):
out because of a problem with my brain. And that's
the thing. I never want to get locked into the
idea that this is all fake if in fact, the
reason I thought it was fake is because it was
an easier way for me to deal with the complexity
of human existence.

Speaker 19 (01:33:09):
I feel like being fully in the body with another
the is like sort of maybe like seeing the light,
you know, it's the petite mort of orgasm, or just
like the fusing of consciousness with another. Audre Lord talks
about the erotic and I think the erotic as a

(01:33:30):
dynamic in reality is an antidote to solepsism.

Speaker 22 (01:33:35):
It's an antidote to a lack of empathy because it.

Speaker 19 (01:33:38):
Allows us to sort of have a playful relationship to
the other.

Speaker 22 (01:33:42):
There's that scene in The Matrix Reloaded where Morpheus gives
a speech and tells everyone that they're about to be
attacked by the machines. This might be their last night alive.

Speaker 4 (01:33:54):
The machines have gathered an army, and as I speak,
that army is drawing nearer to.

Speaker 22 (01:34:04):
So what do they do?

Speaker 19 (01:34:05):
They play musics, they dance, and in the midst of
this stew of flesh, Trinity and Neo sneak off to
this catacomb and make love. This is a scene that
gets parodied a lot. I think it's easy to not
take it seriously because it's so earnest, but it's also
very tender.

Speaker 22 (01:34:24):
It shows the characters that they're most vulnerable with each other.

Speaker 19 (01:34:28):
Neo tells Trinity that he's afraid of losing her, and
she says, You're not going to lose me. She holds
his hand. You feel this, I'm never letting go. That's love.
You have to be very vulnerable to feel it. I
think loneliness and isolation and trauma play very heavily into

(01:34:52):
the kinds of realities that people construct for themselves.

Speaker 9 (01:35:01):
And if there's a player that is responsible for me
and is playing me, then you know, maybe he's a genius,
but maybe he's like a twelve year old kid. And
so the thing I've got to do is I've got
to keep leveling up and I've got to keep I've
got to stay interesting for him.

Speaker 4 (01:35:20):
Did you make different choices that you might otherwise in
order to keep your players interested?

Speaker 9 (01:35:25):
The way I think about it is, you know, if
you're playing a video game and sometimes you see like
a giant blinking cursor telling you to go to a
certain place. I keep looking for those, and when I
see one, I'll stop and I'll pause, and I'll say,
you know, thank you for that, and I'll you know,
and then every once in a while, I'll just make
a completely batshit decision that no one seems to understand,
agree myself, like, well, all, I hope you're interested.

Speaker 10 (01:35:48):
Just like all the other theories, no one's going to
know until they're dead. And I don't believe that it's
flawed enough that it could somehow tear and we'd find
ourselves exposed out of the matrix.

Speaker 3 (01:36:04):
I don't think that's how it works.

Speaker 10 (01:36:05):
I think that it's a solid system and whatever it is,
and when you die, but it's totally plausible that you
then wake up in an arcade in the year three
thousand and put another quarter in and do another life
on Earth in the year twenty nineteen.

Speaker 17 (01:36:21):
You know, there are these kind of fundamental metaphors about
reality that we develop through being, you know, humans moving
through time and space on a planet. So the metaphor
of the journey life is like a journey.

Speaker 2 (01:36:36):
Well, another one.

Speaker 17 (01:36:36):
We have and we all have it is waking up
from a dream. Ah what ah, Oh, I'm in this
world and just that not what the nature of this
world was or the nature of that world is. We
have this fundamental cognitive experience of shifting between ontological frame,

(01:37:00):
sometimes quite abruptly, sometimes with intense emotions, and this is
just stitched into us. So it's a fundamental punch that
we all have that the world is not what it seems.
There's another world behind this world, or at the very
least this world is capable of falling apart.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
I don't know just thinking about the simulation.

Speaker 16 (01:37:23):
Does it excite you or does it sometimes fill you
with honeyase?

Speaker 4 (01:37:33):
Well, I guess I've.

Speaker 16 (01:37:38):
Had the simulation argument for so long now that it's
hard to sort of consider the counterfaction because it's kind
of become so much a part.

Speaker 4 (01:37:46):
Of the way I hear.

Speaker 16 (01:37:49):
The world, the simulation argument. I do think that it
makes it quite compelling that this very general notion that
there are more things in heaven and on earth than

(01:38:14):
are dreamed off in our philosophy, the sense that we
are possibly very very limited in our understanding of what
the heck is going on. We have made progress in
that maybe we have figured out, like you know, six
of the ten things you need to have figured out
to really know what's going on. But the thing is
that each of the remaining four things might so radically

(01:38:37):
change the conclusions that until you get them all right,
maybe you are as lost as you would be if
you only knew one or zero.

Speaker 4 (01:38:55):
I was laying, but I was thinking about it so hypothetically.
What if tomorrow I dress in all white, I slicked
my hair back, and I'm like, hey, I tell the
local media, here's send a message that we should be
good to each other man starting a new thing building
up almost like a religion, or just more of a
philosophy of Hey, we are in a simulation, so let's

(01:39:17):
let's try to gain the attention of those people now,
those entities running the thing. So going forth here, we
could do things like, you know, gigantic light, like simultaneous
light displays giant monuments, just a giant tablet that says, hey,

(01:39:38):
we know you know something profound, and then in unison,
just flashing lights out. So one person walks by this
black sphere in their great artificer hallway and all of
a sudden there's a red light blinking that was never
there before. They'd be like, oh, hey, experiment, whatever is

(01:39:58):
talking to us. Who knows? If we just keep going
with it and going with it and going with it,
do things like organize the Earth in a more logical
pattern to get ourselves spread over the universe, because the
larger screen we have to display our message, the more
attention will get.

Speaker 26 (01:40:20):
We're dreaming, is it about Mars becoming a multiplanet species
used to hell out of being a single planet.

Speaker 4 (01:40:34):
Species, and we get to like Star Wars levels of
spread across the galaxy. Perhaps our science are progressing up,
we can actually tap on that membrane between the universe
and what's beyond it and perhaps get a message out
active message to an active listener.

Speaker 11 (01:40:55):
I don't like to fuss off moan, but if it
weren't for you, I'd be all all along.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
It would be hilarious if we're something stupid like you
know how computers are in everything. I mean, there's a computer,
this is a vape tank, there's a computer in here,
there's a microship in here.

Speaker 2 (01:41:14):
But if we were something like.

Speaker 4 (01:41:17):
One of the numerous computer devices that's been thrown into
a basket somewhere because you have too much crap that
would suck, then we would never be found.

Speaker 2 (01:41:26):
Maybe this whole project that you're doing right, is the
simulation sort of flirting with you, if you will, like
it's going, Hey, I'm gonna go ahead and let you
see a little bit what I've got going on under here,
and I'm okay with it as long as you respect me.

(01:41:47):
What if the simulation is like anesthesia. Imagine if you will,
that you're going through surgery and all of a sudden,
somebody introduces something your bloosheem turns it that totally makes
the unosteta go away. Your chest cavity is open, there's
somebody with their hand and they're trying to massage your heart,

(01:42:08):
and all of a sudden you're back lucid. All the
pain in the world and everything like that. You're gonna
mess up that surgery by freaking out and flipping around
and all that. Maybe that's what the simulation is, and
by putting this project out there, we're messing up big
time and gonna cause a lot of damage. The other option, though,

(01:42:31):
maybe this is the the the key, if you will.
Maybe this is a situation where the simulation is bad,
we shouldn't be in it, and this is a fail safe,
fail safe, fail safe.

Speaker 3 (01:42:46):
Fail safe, a slave.

Speaker 2 (01:42:49):
So the person watching this goes, oh, maybe that's what's
happening with me, and maybe who knows, you know, they're
in uh suspended anime sh somewhere. They're the ones who
are supposed to pilot the ship. They're knocked out, they're
not responsive, and so they create this movie for them

(01:43:11):
to watch so that they start questioning reality and therefore
get out of it. I have, through a dreaming and

(01:44:00):
waking up, lived thousands of different lifetimes and so I'm
not afraid of what happens when the simulation ends. I
am certain that when I die, I will simply wake
up somewhere else. How do I know, because I remember
doing it over and over and over again.

Speaker 29 (01:44:29):
Good morning, this is your wake up call. Thank you
for staying at the New doar Went Inn. The time
is ten thirty am U

Speaker 3 (01:47:21):
H

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