MIT scientist: Elon Musk was right, we are almost certainly in a simulation

alright sam is away today and you know when the cat's away the mice will play so i get to indulge in some of my favorite rabbit holes i go down i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to all in in like a days old yesterday is both an entrepreneur you've built and sold multiple companies in the in the video gaming space which kinda led you down the the the pathway of trying to think through are we living in a simulation so let's start there what is the theory and then how you kinda stumbled into believing this yep so simulation theory is the idea that the world that we're living in the physical world is not really physical at all that in fact we are inside of some type of virtual reality or a computer program i i like to say we're inside a massively multiplayer video game the most popular pop culture reference really is the matrix neo keanu reeves starts off at the beginning going to work at a computer software company called meta and he thinks it's a real world and he thinks he has a real job and it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate you know virtual reality of the year nineteen ninety nine which is of course when the matrix came out so that's kind of a a very quick overview yeah and i know it sounds you know obviously a little bit off the wall i remember the first time i heard about it i think elon musk was talking about it like a decade ago and he says that in the very elon matter fact way where he's like you know if you look at the plot of video games we go from pong which is like two lines and a dot on a screen to where we have you know video games today that's like a thirty forty year period which is like the blink of an eye in the time scale of earth so thirty forty years we go from two lines in a dot to like you know grand theft auto type of type of stuff and then he said you know obviously any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization would want to create a simulation because it's way cheaper to find out how things are gonna go in a simulation than it is to go test things in the real world so there's a huge incentive clearly if you could you would build it and so then there's a question of like is this the real one and we're gonna make a simulation later or did some you know was there a real one and this is the simulation and he his conclusion was the more than likely this is the simulation and he just sort of set it matter of fact and then you know they they changed topics and my mind was blown and you know my brain is scattered on the wall and i'm trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about i started thinking about it and you know at the time i would say this was pre ai when he was talking about this it sounded like you know kind of just nerve nurturing i don't know it didn't you know it was hard to really wrap your head around it wasn't there wasn't a lot where you could sort of like sq your eyes and see it then now let's fast forward we have ai chatbot bots ai voice ai i mean you can't you can't tell if a video is really fake anymore like we're we're already at that cusp the turing test of looking at a video my mom can't tell if a video is real or fake at all zero yeah i mean is my background reel or not at at this point right it's similar to am i really talking to you or not actually i'm not i'm talking to my computer which is transmitting the image and it's you know transmitting it to your computer and playing it out on your computer but elon said that back in the year twenty sixteen at the code conference and his conclusion was that the chances that we are in base reality which would mean you're not in a simulation is one in billions so you flipped out around and say okay what he was trying to say is the chances that we are in a simulation is billions to one or so so what is the history of this like where did he get it was this is this a popular theory i just hadn't heard about you know what's what's the kind of origin story well the origin story what he was referring to is something called the simulation argument now what happened was the matrix came out in nineteen ninety nine this wasn't the first you know representation of living in a virtual world but it it it became the most talked about film of that year before that you had philip k dick who's well known science fiction writer behind you here at the novels behind blade runner minority report and a series the matter of the high castle in nineteen seventy seven in met france he actually said 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 even he wasn't the first to to really you know present this idea in the year nineteen ninety nine there was another film called the thirteenth floor which in some ways was a better representation of the simulation argument which i'll come to a second which was put forth by nick bo a philosopher at oxford and that's really what elon was referring to but the thirteenth floor was actually based on a novel called sim three which was from the nineteen sixty so you can see this idea has been floating around for quite a while but what happened was in the early two thousands philosophers began to take this seriously so the w were who made the matrix were inspired by the work of philip k dick but what happened was when they did the matrix sequels in two thousand two two thousand three they started bringing in like real academic philosophers but that's saying here another philosopher named nick bo at argument actually put out a a paper called are you living in a computer simulation and so what ba was essentially saying if you boil it down was that there's three possibilities hey i got something pretty cool to share with you guys so if you're like me you listen to podcast podcasts or youtube videos and you like to take notes you're here to learn and that's a lot of effort sometimes you're on the go and you can't do it and so the folks at hubspot who are sponsoring the podcast i've done something pretty cool for you they have created the m vault it's a place to go find notes and resources that they pull from the different episodes that we do so if we have a guest on that shares their five point framework they write down those five points with the examples that the guest gave and they put the notes their for you so if you want to access the vault it's totally free all you gotta do is click the link in the description below and you can access all the notes and the stuff in the vault we're gonna keep adding into this trying to make it better over time thank you to hubspot this is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast but by instead of telling you to go buy their stuff they're actually giving you something instead one no civilization can ever create these simulations okay so then the chances that we we're in a simulation or basically zero the the second one which i kind fold into together into the the first one but basically you said it's possible but the civilizations that get there decide not to make any simulations okay in that case again the chances is very low that we'd be inside a simulation because they aren't making or you are most likely in a simulation and the third option seems like a jump there but basically what he's saying is that if they can create one simulation they can create multiple simulations and then create a billion simulations so there's a billion simulated world there's only one physical world statistically speaking which one are you more likely to be in and if and this is the point the leap that i think most people have a tough time making if you ever watch a bo on joe rogan you know rogan had a hard time understanding this it's if you can't tell the difference then you know what are the chances that you're inside the simulation well at least fifty fifty right if you can't tell right but if there's a billion simulator worlds and there's only one real world then you're basically you know the chances you're in base realities is one in billions okay so let's let's simplify so because i wanna kinda break it down what what's interesting about this to me is obviously there's the mind blowing income put part of this just you know just being open minded in saying well what if right like let's just walk down that road for a second and see where it takes us so that's obviously just like from a curiosity point of view you know being open minded to person that's interesting the second is the the people that are saying this so you talked about you know elon musk you talked about you know bo who's you know at oxford you yourself you're a computer scientist you're an entrepreneur you're you know it's not like conspiracy theories from the cooks of the world you what i mean like the the people who tend to take this more seriously tend to be some of the more serious people that you would take seriously in the world and so that's i think already one a fascinating part of this the second fascinating part is that it's not just the computer scientist that talk about this so you you've talked about how in religions there's a lot of references to this you know in ancient text before there was ever even a computer yeah and you know i've heard you say that in passing but i didn't know any i wanted to hear a little more specifics of what you're referring to when you say that well you know the subtitle of my book is an mit computer scientist shows why ai quantum physics and eastern mystic all agree were in a video game and so there's actually two versions of simulation theory it's the npc version or flavor of simulation theory and the rpg so rpg stands for role playing game now in the npc version we're all just ai characters inside a simulation that's running on a type of computer in the rpg version the simulation is also running on computation but there's a player of the game who exists outside of the game and so it's that version that as i started to dip into the mystical texts of old particularly the yoga traditions pretty the hindu and buddhism and what i found is they all shared certain ideas and those ideas would have to have been explained to people back then in a way that would make sense to them right so in the buddhist and hindu traditions the world is an illusion it's a type of maya i mean the word maya literally means illusion but it also means a carefully crafted illusion of the type that you know you kind of agree to be a part of almost as if you're going to like a magic show i mean you know that guy you know whoever is david copper field whoever is not really saw that woman in half you know it's an illusion but you're like wow and the more convincing the illusion the more interesting the effect and so i found that this was such a common idea that if you could map it on simulation theory you find that these ancient texts used scientific or technological metaphors of the time in order to make it interesting now one thing that's shared and turns out that's actually that idea is shared in some of the abrahamic religions as well like it it literally you know in the quran it says you know that this world is a type of enjoyable delusion okay el macau which is arabic for an an enjoyable delusion well what does that mean well some people translate it as a sport or a game and so they're trying to express these ideas in ways that make sense back then now in the the b it says that the soul which is called the odd actually puts on the body just like the body puts on a set of clothes so that's i believe it or not that's a technological metaphor i close their a kind of technology and they're trying to explain something that's very mysterious how do you inca and enter into the world now of course in the the eastern traditions you have the rein so you also take off those clothes and then you put on a different set of clothes and you play a different role now how would you describe that to somebody today i would say today you would describe it probably the best way to describe it is you put on a virtual reality headset you enter this world you go through a process of forgetful now this is an important component that exists in every single culture in the world is trying to describe this process of forgetful the greeks have latte the river of forgetful plato describes how the soul inca by crossing the river of forgetful the chinese have meng the goddess are forget fun even in the islamic traditions they say the the word for a human in arabic is in san son literally means prisoners you no prisoner of what there's another arabic word called which means forgetful so you're basically a prisoner or forgetful so a better way to describe it today as you put on this virtual reality headset and everything looks so real you become so en in what's happening around you that you forget who you were you forget the life selection process that you went through if you were if you were choosing what you're gonna play in a video game who's choosing like walmart middle manager you know what i mean like and i can see why people choose that in in kind of today's world if that's the best option you got but if it's a video and you're you go through a character selection process who's not choosing you know you know tom cruise or whoever i like you yeah except that what happens is if the game is too easy you play it once and then you're kinda done with it and you're like like what should i do next and it turns out there are whole virtual worlds like i don't know you ever heard of second life which was kind of a meta which was has been out since two thousand four anyway people would go in and they would just live these virtual lives where they would have like these little jobs they would become a bartender in a club inside the virtual world and i was kind of an ant anthropologists virtual anthropologists did that i would walk around and i just asked hey why do you you know why do you play this like why do you go to your real job and then come home at night and then log in to second life and play a bartender and getting paid in linden dollars which you know this is pre bitcoin so it it is basically peanuts and it turns out that was part of the role that they were playing for that period of time and so the more difficult the role if you think about it when actors get oscars you know what do they get oscars for they get them for the roles that that seem like the people that have had the most suffering so it provides a very different perspective on the on the nature of the game itself and the nature of the challenges that you might encounter and the types of experiences you know what why do you play video games do you to have experiences that you can't have outside of the game so just sorry just to be clear you you said there's two versions of the two branches of belief you know in in this idea so one is arp rpg it's like the matrix there's a player the player chooses how they wanna play and then they come in and they play and maybe they forget kind of the real world or once you're once you're the player in the game you're you're you forget you lose awareness of the outside world the other is the npc world which would be more of like what i see in the business world with simulation so for example hey we're trying to like right now with a open ai thing where they were trying to you know create a a thousand agents to go do try to do a cyber attack yep to see just find bugs in a piece of code or to to simulate you know a political election how might people vote and you'll run a simulation based on whatever and and those aren't like i'm not trying to play a game i just sort of spawn a thousand characters they're gonna those characters are you know just sort of doing what they think they're individually supposed to do and i'm the sort of the observer on the outside which one of those two do you do you subscribe to or well well first of all they're not mutually exclusive in that it's an access you know i taught the first class on simulation theory so i i tend to get into both of those because i wanted to exposed students to these different ideas now the question that asked her earlier is why do we play video games to have experiences why do we run simulations we run simulations in order to see what might happen usually at a civilization level and you know you you talked about open ai we're seeing this with you know agent swarms today but there was a group out of stanford and google a few years ago they created a a simulated world of these agents and they called it like small veil i think and they had like a hundred agents at the time right and they let these agents kinda go and watch what they did and they started to have the self organizing activities like one was organizing a birthday party for another agent one was running for mayor now that was a small number then there was another group that had a thousand agents running in minecraft you know and and some of them had their own religion that they came up with and you started to see these emergent behaviors and now there have been a couple of companies i can't remember their names off offhand but we can look it up there's one in china but and i believe there was a a research paper where they were talking about a million or a billion independent agents and they're trying to make those as realistic as possible now the reason you're on simulations is to see what is the most likely outcome like in the case of you know business simulation or the weather you're running simulation right you also wanna know what is the best outcome and what is what is the kinda of worst outcome and then often you you never run a simulation just once so like an npc simulation you would run it multiple times like even in the the the recent open ai hugging face incident what was happening was there were generations of agents right they would run once and they would find a way to communicate and then they would leave behind the information for the next set of agents and the next set of agents would pick up on that and so even though they weren't doing recur self improvement in the technical sense they kinda were because they were leaving behind you know a starting point by the way when you when you heard that story and for those who don't know the story is some here's my sip my simplified dumb down version of the story open ai was trying to see the sort of like the cyber security potential of a model that was un released and it was specifically a model that was trained for persistence like kind of like a highly determined ai that doesn't just give up the at the first no you know just like we would want in a person we'd want them to have grit and resilience well they so let's call this sort of the resilient model that they trained to not not give up and then they basically the the the goal of it they spawn like other liberals a thousand or ten thousand agents some some number like that they basically gave it capture the flag test so the test was kind of like hey agent number one through a hundred you guys are trying to exploit this piece of software using this potential vulnerability we think it might have this potential vulnerability so that's and if you do it if you get in you get the flag you win that's your goal your goal is to try to exploit the software using this potential vulnerability and it gave it to a bunch from now some of them did it because that there really was a vulnerability some of them tried and it took many attempts maybe they they they partially got there didn't get their and some of them it was kind of impossible like they there really wasn't a vulnerability their vulnerability wouldn't work that couldn't have get that really couldn't have got to the flag so okay so that was kind of the expected not the unexpected what was the crazy thing that happened was that the agents were so persistent and so determines to not fail their their quest that they started doing things that they were not instructed to do such as they use one of you know they gave them one tool and they were like oh this tool gets us like internet access so this tool has like a a a piece of paper essentially where we can scribble down notes and hey if i i write a note you read i know this is not now like a message board so they created a a little they hacked together a message board using something almost like if you were in a prison cell and you realize like hey i can leave a note in the uri and then you know you can come see that in the uri and they became a communication platform for them and it and basically what happened was in the end they not only were communicating with each other about their tasks those who couldn't figure out their task decided to cheat and just capture the flag a different way using a totally different exploit then they were like well they we might have to cover our tracks so that we not caught cheating and in the process of trying to figure out how is the scoring system work how will we be judged they ended up hacking into it a whole another company altogether hugging face they found some users credentials they logged in they got access to their their service and basically created a security incident with another company essentially attributed a crime of of of hacking another all to pass this test and it was kind of a you know there's a polarizing reaction some people think this is like oh my god that's scary this is like this is exactly what we worry about with the ai other people are saying this is massively overblown can you correct what i got wrong and then tell me where you land in this spectrum of like this is overblown we're sort of applying like too much we're ant answer from for it either anywhere wherever we're trying to apply human thinking and human intent to these to these agents that's not really what it was to the people who are like no no this was pretty scary well i think you you got the basics right of the incident itself so i don't think you got much wrong in that but the reason they went to hugging face is because that's where the actual evaluator code was that was going to evaluate them so they were reasoning in a way to get their outcome but then to hide what they had done and but how did they get into hugging phase well they went out to the internet and they found somebody's username password and then they used that exploit so they weren't even supposed to be going out to the internet it was an unexpected kind of path now an important part of it wasn't just that they communicated with each other right this is what i was emphasizing earlier there were these generations the next generation was able to go back to some of the that message board if you will so simulation one they got to the message board but they didn't all they didn't hack hugging face and then somehow we got wiped they turned the simulation off or something happened it got wiped yep then they spawned another ten thousand agents so they came they're like hey there's messages here we can use the and so they meet they were quicker yeah quicker to getting to that solution they used it then they started doing shit like electing not electing but like one guy became the leader and he was coordinating and and then know i guy sacrificed himself you know in order to to learn something that he could then put into the message board one guy so you know where i come out on it is that i i think it's an important an interesting incident obviously all of this is based on prompts and i think you know in the last few weeks we've also had you know the guy who left jacob was at cox i think it was his last name who left ant thor but he was also open ai talking about how they're about to implement recur self improvement and the chances of of that things are gonna go wrong basically that we're gonna end up with sky net and humanity is gonna be wiped out there's been a lot more discussions of that you've got da the ceo of ant saying we need to slow this down even sam alt saying okay we can slow down the frontier models and so there's been a lot of discussion of pd doom so pd doom is the probability that ai is going to basically take over the world and sky exterminate humans etcetera and so you've got values ranging from one percent now a lot of people are saying it's at least ten percent up to fifty percent and higher and so you've got a lot of discussion of pd doom i i i would say we're we're far away from pd doom what worries me is not so much that super intelligent ai we'll try to wipe us out the problem is moderately intelligent ai given directive will go around and mis some of those directive and like the terminator you know if you think about the terminator films the terminator was kind of ag up to a point sky net was kinda like the as the other artificial super intelligence right and so the terminator you know he what do they say about him he it doesn't stop doesn't eat doesn't sleep he just goes on to do his mission whatever his mission happened to be and in that case his mission was to kill sarah connor or whoever he was supposed to terminate and and so when you get ai that's moderately intelligent and you give it these missions and it starts to go around security vulnerabilities it's gonna keep going until it can solve that particular mission and so as we start to introduce ai into weapons systems which is already happening right i mean you're looking at in the iran war we were using ant to decide who to target you've got drones in ukraine that are you know using ai you've got a lot of that process so as we weapon ai i think it becomes problematic but i think the bigger issue is not so much pd doom but pee hack right what is the probability that ai systems will be able to hack a lot of our systems out there and cause chaos hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses the other big ai news was about solving one of the the millennium problems you know which was some fluid dynamics problem called the navy stokes problem but specifically some the problem mark as interesting to me as how they solve it and they solve it by having ten thousand agents that were all working on this one particular method through brute force and so again we have this idea that you're gonna have lots of agents none of whom are super intelligent by themselves they're gonna all look for vulnerabilities and ways around things and so i think the p hack is pretty high that ai will be able to hack systems and cause chaos if you think of two thousand one if you've ever seen that film with space odyssey which was one of the first you know intelligent representations of ai hal who was the computer for the ship and he started mis behaving and he wouldn't let dane come back in the ship so he basically killed the crew now later if you read the the follow on book twenty ten you see the reason was he was given conflicting directive he was told you know this mission is really important and we're not really supposed to tell the crew what you know about all the details and so it it inter from there that perhaps killing them is the best thing to do so this directive is actually a really important point and in in how we bode it but sorry go ahead i didn't mean to interrupt you that have you seen there's a a a user on twitter who created a video almost like a movie of the exact open eye hugging face incident from the point of view of one of the agents see i haven't seen that i i'll have to it's incredible i i'll i'll show it here but you you you have to so i don't i don't know you could be able to hear this but it says point of view you're an agent recruited for the swarm and then it basically just starts you read the question you read your prompt on the page yeah and then it it talks about how you discover this kind of this door and then behind the door you find messages from the other agents you realize you're not alone and it just like showed the experience from the eyes of the agent it's brilliant that's that's really interesting and and you know what does that remind you of being an agent in this simulated world and you're trying to put together you know all of these clues and figure out what's really going on and if you think of right humanity as a series of agents i i referenced science fiction a lot because it's a way to kind of explain these ideas but i mentioned this film the thirteenth floor and which came out in the same years the matrix and in that it was primarily an npc version they were in nineteen ninety nine los angeles and they created a fully realistic simulation of nineteen i think thirty nine or thirty seven los angeles and they were able to go back and look at that and they were all like kind of ai agents within it but they could go in and inhabit one of those agents so they could go into player mode rpg mode this is why i say that the two aren't always necessarily mutually exclusive is that you can have combinations of the two where most people are acting like mpc is about ninety percent of the time we're just reacting to our training to our whether it's our political party our religion you know the experiences that we've had in the same way that an ll is trained on a certain set of data and then it's reacting to that and every now and then there's groups of people who say hey maybe we can figure out what was happening before we got here and those are the mystic in the yogi so that's why you see the full spectrum if you will the to npc to rpg version how many years would you say you've spent researching thinking writing teaching about this well primary since about twenty sixteen so the same year that elon musk was made that statement that you referenced at the beginning of the podcast he was at the code conference i had sold my last video game company as an entrepreneur and i was visiting a vr a video game company up and solves and they had this virtual reality helmet and they were like here try this on and i said okay let me try it on and i tried it on i started playing this virtual reality ping con game and the physics engine was so good that it really felt like i was hitting a real ball so much so that my body forgot for an instant that i was playing a virtual game at table tennis and i tried to put the paddle on the table and i tried to lean against the table and of course there there was no table the the the game controller fell to the floor i almost fell over and i had to do a double taken and so i began to think how long would it take us to get to that point and so i laid out ten stages to the simulation point which i mentioned earlier which involves you know different types of video games brain computer interfaces downloadable consciousness that this is where which touches on the recent fruit fly brain incidents and videos that are out there but all these ten stages and then i began to realize well if we can get there perhaps someone has already gotten there and then i began to look into the quantum physics side of it so back around twenty sixteen and i realized oh wow they're kinda saying the same thing that that the whole world is optimized and it's being rendered for us on demand with what's called the observer effect and the measurement effect and then i just a fact and then i so to explain this now not my physics is weak but my video games is strong so i know in a video game if you have a virtual world i you can grand theft like i i just watched the trailer for gta six you know they spent ten years on this thing in a billion dollars making this incredible game can't wait to play it and when you when you'd play it it's you know you have this whole city but you don't it's not like the game is loading the whole city and the whole of these running it's kind just like when you walk into that building it then renders the graphics for that room that you're in and it's kind of like on the fly right that'd be a smart way to use the the the memory and the chip and the the the video game system that you're you're playing on as i understand there's a physics equivalent of this but again physics was the only class i failed in college and i had to retake it to get a a c c plus later so so explain what physics says that's kinda sound similar or rhymes with that so what you just described there is how modern video games work and so when i was looking at quantum physics there's something called the observer effect the more formal name is quantum and deter and this is the famous double slit experiment which you know to kind of explain it easily like let's let's do it from a computer science point of view there's something called super position and what super position is saying is that rather than the particle going through split a or slit b it's in a state of super supervision so it's going through both until and unless it is observed or it is measured the more technical explanation is measured but the more popular explanation is until it's observed and you say well what happens before it's observed well it's just sitting there in a state of super position now this is also the or i i don't think i ever understood this so there's a there's a like they're shooting light right yeah it's just too slim so the observe date reveals a pattern where you know all of the little particles you shot through the light particles will end up in one of two places because that's where the two s are right either goes through the left or to the right but the uno version creates this interference pattern where it's acting more like a wave now i i like to use sc there's cat as an example because something most people have heard of which is sc there's thought thought experiment and he basically said there's a cat in a box and it has some poison in the box and there's a fifty percent chance the poison will be released and a fifty percent chance that it doesn't so at the end of an hour let's say what what are the chances the cat is alive fifty percent what the chances a cat is dead fifty percent now common sense tells us okay the cat is either alive or dead inside the box we just don't know yet we don't know yet but it has to be one or the other it can't be anything else but what quantum mechanics is telling us in a weird sort of way is that the cat is in a state of super supervision it's both alive and dead until that information is needed right so it gets measured and then it's needed and so to me that sounded a lot like rendering the world on demand in video games why do we accept that the cat is both alive and at like yeah know the the first explanation sounds more real to me the cat is alive dad we just don't know yet you haven't looked oh right and that's the kinda we except this this fancy physics explanation of no no it is both alive and dad you know why is that more true than the first first the the first statement of no no it is alive or dead you just don't know yet well it gets back to the double slit experiment right the cat is just a metaphor to try to explain this idea of two slit slit one or slit two which is two positions of the cat alive or dead it's also the basis for cub which in quantum computing you you got you know a regular bit is a zero or a one but a q has a special kind of gate you've heard of and gates and or gates so and when it goes into that gate it goes into a state of super supervision until it's measured so the reason we accepted is that the quantum mechanics experiments have shown that until that measurement is done the particle is in an ind determined state right it's it's in a set of probability so it exists as a set of probabilities until the observation or measurement happens the other explanation is the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation which we've all heard of now because of the superhero films right over the last thought know five years they've all had multiple versions of spider man you know you've got the the famous meme of the three spider man pointing at each other the multiverse idea is that what happens is the universe splits off into multiple universes and in one the cat is alive and in the other the cat is dead and actually more physicists are starting to come around to the multiverse society although not all of them many don't like that because that means that there's a whole bunch of different worlds out there so you said you spent ten years roughly thinking about this and and in some capacity researching learning writing teaching etcetera do you think in your lifetime you'll ever find out the answer well there's also another axis that i'd like to point out that is relevant to this question so the first axis with the npc versus rp two version the the second axis is what i call the literal to metaphor axis and by literal at the little end you're literally saying we're we are on somebody's computer in the basement you know of somebody's guy's basement or in a server farm on an alien planet or future humans are simulating us right bo actually talked about what he called ancestor simulations so and that's what elon musk was kinda referring to and so when it would be like us or in the thirteenth floor i mentioned nineteen ninety nine los angeles is simulating nineteen thirty nine spoiler alert for those that haven't seen the film it's you know third almost thirty years old now but turns out nineteen ninety nine was being simulated from the year twenty twenty four and so there's a literal version of that then there's a more metaphor version which says that it's like a computer simulation or a video game the world is computational but it doesn't mean it's sitting on a classical computer of our type it could be something much more complicated and that's where the mystical and the religious side comes into play because they use metaphors there was a one of the first indian yogis to come over to the us and olivier and make an impact was a guy named swab yoga honda he wrote a book called auto of a yogi which was steve jobs you know favorite book favorite right yeah they gave it away at his funeral and he when he came over a hundred years ago in the nineteen twenties he said hey let me try to explain these ancient ideas in ways that modern americans would understand and so he used the latest technology what was the latest technology well one was the film projector right which had just come online in the last ten years or twenty years or so and so he said the world is like a film and where all the actors who are playing the characters in there but we're also in the audience watching it so he used a metaphor of the film he didn't mean it was literally a film projector right he was trying to say that is a way to explain that this reality is somehow rev and and so i would say that today we would use a video game metaphor to try to explain that same idea there was a philosopher named david cha who who wrote a essay sa about this back in two thousand three the same year that ba did his thing and he you know he believes that a virtual reality could be so perfect there would be no way to figure out that it is a virtual reality so it's possible it's non fa verifiable but that said just because something is non fa verifiable doesn't mean that you can't look for evidence that that might be the case as for example i i can't really fa that there are no asteroids or meteor or asteroids you know anywhere in the universe i mean you would literally have to go all over the universe or somehow prove it impossible alright but but you can look for evidence of rocks falling from the sky and that you know what happened was science used to believe that all the stories that people were telling about these rocks falling from the sky were just a bunch of ignorant peasants who you know were just making things up turns out they weren't but the scientific model of the time said there are no rocks in the sky therefore they can't be falling therefore you guys are mistaken hall el you know lying whatever else you might be doing but turns out we had the wrong model of reality and so i i usually break down the simulation hypothesis into four assertion and i believe you can verify some of those assertion you may not be able to verify all of them the first is that the universe consists of physical of of information rather than physical material now that used to be a controversial statement but it's not there's a whole branch of digital physics now we used to talk about conservation of momentum conservation of energy now we talk about conservation of information how much information is there in a black hole well you have to look at the surface area so so that's not that controversial the second is that that information is being computed and that it gets rendered for us to look as if it's real like this microphone seems like it's real but it's actually consists of information now there was a physicist named john wheeler is my favorite physicist of the twentieth century and he had a phrase at the end of his life he said physics spent his whole life looking for reality and they look for these things called particles and they couldn't really find them originally they thought they were solid objects and then they realized they weren't so he came up with this phrase it from bit and what it from bits says is that anything that seems like an it like this coffee cup actually consists of particles which really are just answers to a series of yes no questions and what is the answer to a series of yes no questions it's just bits of information one's and zeros right so he basically hem say idea that the whole world is information that's being rendered for us but it looks as if it's real now i think there is evidence that the universe compute there are algorithms in nature dna is in fact you know an information store and there are algorithms that are run off of that can we prove that it's being rendered for us to look real well i i think most people can get on board with that i think the third and fourth assertion are more meta physical that's where many people may you know may not be able to get on board with that the third assertion is the rpg version which is that we chose to be in this game somehow the soul is the player and the and the body is the character and right of it and so it may or may not be physical and then the fourth is that it's all some kind of a big hoax and so anyway you may not buy all of those assertion but i i kinda lay them out as different ways of thinking about this idea i guess where i wanna go from there is you know my other favorite subject right because if we're if we're if we're just gonna spend this hour being mind blown and just kind of like bending our brain a little bit which is what i wanted to do today how do aliens fit into this where where what what would that be they do intersect and now you're you're going down a a whole another rabbit we haven't even talked much about entrepreneurship forget entrepreneurship so you know i spent a lot of time with people that are been investigating the ufo space thanks podcast has brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all my businesses think i have like maybe seven eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market definitely mercury i will fist fight way to who me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic so when you when you talk about aliens you know there's this idea that there might be other aliens on other planets and could they get here and so there's there's two ways in which the traditional search for extra terrestrial intelligence city you know their headquartered right here in mountain view intersect with simulation theory which there's some and and also the ufo subject which has been in the news a lot lately it intersect with both of us phenomenon in an interesting and kind of weird way and the first is the fermi paradox right and the fermi paradox says in rico fermi who was you know on the manhattan project and a nobel prize winner i believe said that well even if aliens were to come here because because the the major objection is well it takes too long for them to get here therefore you know we're not gonna be able to visit aliens aliens aren't gonna be able to visit us because the distance are light years away yeah these are literally light years away and the speeds that we can achieve are nowhere near light speed so it's gonna take you know voyager to seventy thousand years or whatever just to get to the nearest star alpha centauri but it's gonna take much you know way longer to get to other places in the galaxy that might be much more interesting and so the fermi paradox though says that given enough time even with sub craft and you know you should be able to colonize a big part of the galaxy should be able to send out probes which you know might take ten thousand years seventy thousand years but as long as they still continue to upgrade therefore we should have seen evidence of where are all the aliens so one mode of thought is that there are no aliens on other planets i'm not saying that i subscribe to this mode thought to be honest with you but one mode of thought is an explanation for the fermi paradox is we are actually in a simulation and we think there are all these planets hits out there so but they're really aren't because those planets get rendered for us as we observe them and the telescopes look out and you notice how they keep increasing the distance the age of the universe it's you know and we say it's thirteen point five billion years now but let's go back twenty years it wasn't that it was less than that and they always say it very confidently and we keep finding more and more galaxies i mean we talk about the number of stars and galaxies being you know hundred billion two hundred billion and then something like two trillion galaxies the numbers are staggering so one intersection with simulation theory is that all of those are being generated as needed from us and one of the the reasons for running the simulation so there's something called the great filter which is an idea that says do civilizations blow themselves up before they're ever able to get out of the solar system that's would be a reason for the fermi paradox but also for why there might be no simulations ever built civilizations blow themselves up before they get to you know having super intelligent ai they can keep track of all the things that would be needed in a simulation another chain of thought though says that well if you even if it was a simulation why would you populate in only one planet i mean if you played any of these space games like eve online right there should be more levels there should be more levels and who says there with you and what we're trying to do is to see one do how long does it take us to get off this planet the earth module or or the earth simulation and that we've been run multiple times to see if we would blow ourselves up by the way this is another reason given for simulation theory is one of the chances that we all happen to be a alive just at the moment we're about to create artificial life in human history you know there are so many does the past release this this is a whole another rabbit hole that gets into things like that them to what is the path and the double slit experiment we won't let's not go there too much but this idea is that we might be simulating to see what happens if you start off with all these different groups of agents in different planets how long does to take them to connect with each other and actually meet and then another another mode of thought says that guess what they're already here i mean people have been reporting for thousands of years things in the sky and we've just been dismissing those out of hand just like we used to dismiss the meteor years out of hand we meaning you know the kind of the scientific establishment if you will now where things get really weird those if you talk to people that have really spent time in the ufo film so there's a guy named jacques ra he's actually a computer scientist and you know was involved in the beginnings of the internet the da and he was on project blue book so project blue book was the air force ufo investigation project in the nineteen sixties it was shut down on december seventeen nineteen sixty nine and the air force said well they're not a threat to us whatever there so we're just gotta shut this down but he's been studying at since then and what he found was he said that these stories are so weird that even aliens is not a good enough explanation the extraterrestrial option is not a good enough explanation and what happens is these things kinda come into our reality and pop out of our reality and even the beings themselves if you listen to tales there was a guy named john mack as a harvard professor in the nineteen nineties he he's he's a head of the psychiatry department at harvard med school and he started to have these patients who said they'd been abducted by aliens so it's something people used to make fun of and he's started to hear similar stories and he didn't know what happened to them but he's like something happened to these guys they had some traumatic experience somewhere and he couldn't explain it and then you know he got brought for the board at harvard like kinda what they call an acquisition because he he was taking the idea that they might be aliens seriously but even if you look at those these ideas of beings that come in and take people away well it turns out there's tales of that going back thousands of years you know in the celtic traditions the fe which we call fairies today but they were considered real beings who would like take people into their world and they would disappear and in the middle east you have the gin who are these beings that are exist here we can't see them but they can see us and they can in and out of our world they can make themselves visible so you've got thousands of years of history of people seeing other beings and lately we've started describing them as aliens getting back to this idea of using technology as a metaphor and in the bible they talk about you know chariot of fire in the sky n they have paintings of these balls that were in the air in the fourteen hundreds you've got all these people using whatever language they have and in the eighteen hundreds people describe airships as these flying up before we had airplanes and now suddenly we're seeing things in the sky and we're describing them as aliens why because we're a technological civilization our science has advanced to the point where we know there are other planets so there could be other aliens and so we present these things but in a simulated world the behavior of these things which is that they kinda fade in and they fade sometimes like well it they look more like they're being rendered at certain x y z coordinates and then they der render and then they render somewhere else and then the images of the the beings are more like avatars that are being presented to us as a certain way so are are we having you know what we're is that what you if i just said what do you think about aliens is that is that the is that what you believe is happening or is something else well i believe there's more than one thing happening first of all i believe there are aliens you know in in a even in a it's even in a simulated world there's no reason to have only one world that is intelligent life on it so i whether they've come here or not you can argue that i think they're out there but i do also believe that a lot of what's being reported is glitches and the matrix we're showing that our reality is not quite what we think it is and that there are these these objects that are being presented as technological craft when in fact that is us kind of interpreting what we're seeing in the sky kinda like when the native americans saw you know they saw the boats of the spaniards they they didn't know what to call them they never seen them a boat that big they're like they're like cities in the water right that's what they described them as and we're like they're like spacecraft in the sky right that's that's our understanding of can only you you you could only think at the limits of your language in many ways right and if you you you only can describe things based off of relative to what you know if you now one thing jacques valet told me he got early think about this he said he went to a particular site unless say northern california southern oregon pacific northwest somewhere and they said that there was a ufo that came down at a forty five to england landed and this clearing in the trees and if you've been up there you know these trees are pretty big and he stayed afterwards he said look you guys said it came down at a forty five degree angle that would mean that we have to cut through the trees but the trees aren't cut i mean the trees are still there they said yeah it was so weird it was like it was slicing through the trees but not really cutting them and then it came in and landed and i'm looking at that and said you know that looks like a rendering procedure or i'm thinking about it and that looks like a rendering procedure it's like when you're rendering in a video game you know the walls aren't quite solid yet you can like move to the walls walls so you could like transfer something and and d d render it if you will do you feel like you're crazy or do you think everyone else is nuts you know what i mean like like you know when you're hear yourself saying the stuff as you're thinking about these things is there a part of you that's like am i insane am i am i going crazy right now well or are you like this is so obvious to me that everyone else is nuts for not it's not thinking about it this way because i assume twenty years ago you were like you were just an you're making like mobile games you're making like a yeah silly fish game that you know that got acquired you know like you i don't think you were thinking about this stuff or thinking this way i maybe i'm wrong maybe you were doing it all time well i was always interested in weird unexplained things and even as an entrepreneur you know was kinda living a double life where during the day i would be you know dealing with my investors know i started off in the enterprise software industry for out in a video games and you know we had fortune five thousand companies and but on the weekends i would be trying out lucid dreaming techniques or auto of body experiences and so i would have these weird experiences that would convince me i'll give you an examples since you know this i know you talk about entrepreneurship a lot my very first startup up was a was a enterprise software drink up new to connect microsoft products with ibm products and there was his competitor of ours who i hadn't heard from in like a year and a half so i assume you it disappeared never heard of anything about him and one day i walked into the i had a dream of this particular competitor and i hadn't had know i never had a dream with this guy in there so it was just it was odd and weird you can't even say statistically because how many dreams have i had like i had never ever had a dream with this guy in there before i just thought that's really odd why am i dreaming about this guy today this morning i walk into the office and i get a phone call it's this phone call from ibm saying hey you know we know you're a good partner of ours we're about to do a a product announcement later today and we're going to announce the new product that unfortunately it's gonna kill your product because ours was kind of an add on to to the big products like a third party tool and i was like great okay you're gonna kill our product that's great but how come i've never heard this i mean ibm is a big company you know just a lot of people you said oh you remember that competitor of yours edge easter we acquired them about a year and a half ago and they've been working on this product in stealth for the last year and a half and today we're not it and i'm just like okay wait i had the dream in the morning it wasn't the other way around it wasn't that i heard about the product first and then i had the dream with another a nightmare later and so i began to question the nature of our reality a long time ago because i realized that things aren't what they seem and when i wrote my first book an entrepreneurship it was kind of about all of these things i was very worried that people in the venture capital industry people in silicon valley were gonna think i was nuts because i'm writing about all these weird things and in fact i'm just coming out with a new book which is a sequel to that first one called z entrepreneur in the dream where i get into even weirder stuff that i was afraid to put in my first book like what well just you know all kind stuff about past lives and how those past lives may have been feeding into things like our game plan and our story how do you we how do you investigate past lives well you could investigate it through you know you could do h not regression you can do what's called s shamanic drumming shamanic journey today people are you know into psychedelics a lot dmt in fact you know day doesn't go by or somebody like you haven't tried dmt yet like silicon valley or especially in la for some reason right after i wrote by book to simulation i hypothesis this people who had been on dmt told me oh hey i know we're in a simulation you know i said oh really know i don't wrote a book on it but i'm not a hundred percent sure how do you know we're in simulation and i said well because i took dmt and i saw like the grid lines of the simulation and i would hear this more and more in these hexagonal shapes and you know if you look at like how video games are built or or if you if you've ever watched start trek the next generation you've got the the hollow deck you know and we're getting you know some of the stages of the the road the simulation point or can we build something that's so immersive that we would forget that we weren't in a real world and the holiday deck is an example of that and star trek but when the holiday is not projecting it's just like this room with these grid lines and so so i've heard it from enough people now that i actually take it kind of seriously so so where do you land when you you go through the full loops so like there's this forgot the buddhist quote it's like you know before enlightenment chop wood carry water after enlightenment chop wood and carry water and then i feel like with the simulation thing it kinda goes like that where you're like let's say you've never considered it you are resistant to it skeptical of it you start to consider it at some point you might actually say like hey i don't know prob realistically this seems actually like it could it could be true and then you kinda come back to where you were like so i guess i'll just go to work today i guess right like you know what what you do with that information so have you given what you believe does that change the way you live at all or no well it does to a certain extent not necessarily day to day although there are some day to day changes but for one thing you know we just talked about entrepreneurship i mean ninety percent plus percent of startups ups fail but you start to take these failures what what we consider failures right we we only look at the financial success you know of a start up and yet ninety nine let's let's say ninety five percent of startups fail so but yet there are other things you've learned along the way there are other experiences you have with other people along the way and those experiences are the fabric of the journey itself and so if you view those as quests what happens in a video game if you don't achieve a quest well i mean you still have gained some valuable experience and you go off and you do the next quest and sometimes one quest ends up unlocking another quest and so by viewing the world as a series of challenges what you can say is perhaps there's a part of me out there that is choosing these very difficult things and maybe there's a reason for going through some of the suffering now as a computer scientist is my background i say well how would that work you would have to record everything and you would have to play it back and so you know if everything is being recorded and if everything is gonna be played back well then perhaps what the spiritual traditions are telling us that about how you treat other people the choices that you make and how they impact other people you're gonna actually evaluate that yourself you know it's not about heaven or hell it's about you saying oh shit i shouldn't have done that now i'm i i've learned better how to treat people i mean that's a fascinating reframe of heaven or hell that you will go back and experience all your actions through the point of view of others and if you were basically if you were bad you you go through hell because it's what you put out to people through if you sequentially had to status to feel all of that in a row yeah that would feel like hell and then heaven would be the opposite which is if if you if you made other people feel great you're gonna feel great as you replay that whole thing that would essentially feel like heaven tel and it's actually in the it's actually in the religious books i mean if you look at the quran they have something called the scroll of deeds scroll of deeds is two angels one rice down all your good deeds and one rice down all your bad deeds and it says when you die open read your book see what you have done and in the bible there's the book of life and which comes you know from the jewish traditions and the book of life is often presented in a simplistic way of saint peter decides who gets into heaven or not at the pearly gates and these are technological metaphors by the way they don't mean there's literally a book sitting there that with a feather pen that angels are writing in chinese or arabic these are metaphors to try to describe something that they all kind of agree on and then but the book of life actually in other cases is about all the things that you've done in the last year or in into your entire life and you get into heaven or hell based on those and so you can see they're using these metaphors as a way to describe some underlying reality and i think today you know particularly for younger people the idea that we may be in a video humor simulation makes much more sense it's also a more sophisticated metaphor well dude that was a trip i i that was my dmt that the last hour and a half that was awesome i hope you enjoyed it i appreciate you taking the time to to explain things to me and ind me my my questions yeah people should check out your book and and and follow you online what where what's the best place to follow you yeah so my website is zen entrepreneur dot com and all my books are there you can also follow me on twitter x i still call twitter at r stanford like the university or on instagram at r cambridge like the city or the university cool alright thanks for doing it thanks so much ramsey this is a blast i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a role less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast