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All right. So...

Can you see me?

Hey!
Yeah, there you are. Hey, Paul.

Hey! So I'm just now
starting the audio recorder.

All right, so that's set up.

And I'm starting
the video recorder.

And I'm just making sure
that it's recording.

Okay. So... Hello!

One of the things that

you wrote about was sort
of your first primitive idea

- of simulation theory as a kid.
- Yeah.

Yeah, can you describe
what that was like?

Can I do one thing before that?

Yeah.

'Cause 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 '90s.

And a teacher was
in front of the class

and the teacher said,

"Something interesting
about the brain

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 all of a sudden
we thought,

"Well, these are nerve impulses

that go down
sort of like wires."

And then she said, "Now we know
that the brain is a 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 thing is,

so when we talk
about simulation theory...

we, right now, are living
in a time where,

you know, you have
the PS4, PSVR,

you know,

I'm a Sony brand whore,
so I apologize

for not throwing out
other things.

But the basic, you know,

virtual reality level
of simulation

is something
that we can use as a model.

But it isn't necessarily
what is going on,

and I think that's important.

That we can use it
and we can understand

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,

"Okay, maybe
this is what this is."

And as technology
gets more advanced

we'll have better ways
of describing it.

So,
everything that I describe here

keep in mind, you know,
I'm a 21st Century guy,

that's how my brain works.

If you're watching this
in the future, we aren't dumb,

it's just that we don't have
the tools that you have

to think of this stuff.

In September of 1977,

the writer Philip K. Dick,
creator of Minority Report,

Blade Runner,
and Total Recall,

addressed an audience of fans
in Metz, France.

They expected a talk
about science fiction but his

lecture explored religion
and philosophy as well.

To him, all three subjects
were deeply interconnected.

The title of my address is...

"If you find this world bad,

you should see
some of the others."

The subject of this speech...

is a topic which has been
discovered recently,

and which may not exist at all.

I may be talking
about something

that does not exist.

Therefore, I am free to say
everything or nothing.

We are living in
a computer programmed reality

and the only clue
we have to it

is when some variable
is changed.

and some alteration
in our reality occurs.

Philip K. Dick's belief

that we were living in
a digitally created,

artificial world
sounded like madness in 1977.

But then in 1999,
The Matrix introduced

simulation theory
to the wider world.

In the years since the film,
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 courtrooms.

So the idea is right,

any sufficiently
advanced civilization

could create simulation
that's like our existence,

and so the theory follows

that maybe
we're in the simulation.

- Have you thought about this?
- A lot.

And are we...

I am actually in a simulation,
and so are you.

So, are we living
in a simulation?

I find it hard to argue
against that possibility.

If all of this is some kind
of informational process

running in some machine.

The machine is not
in this universe,

it's somewhere else,

and this universe is
a consequence of its running.

This is kind of getting that
artifacting or whatever problem.

Brother Mystwood,
hey, how are you?

Hello. I am sorry about
the strange lighting.

All I have is Christmas lights.

You talked about, you know,
sort of this journey

starting after a spade
of synchronicities.

- What were those like?
- Yes.

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 turn the corner
and there they are.

I would start giving myself
sort of tests.

I'm thinking of an orange fish.

I would like to see an orange
fish in the next 10 minutes.

And 10 minutes later
in the walk,

I turn 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
occur with enough regularity.

I began to sort of track
my days numerically.

And if you'll allow me to go

on a tangent a little bit here,
Rodney.

I don't enjoy the average
five-day week.

I like to work in weeks
of 12 days.

I would notice that sort
of on every 12th 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 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,

so on and so forth.

And at a certain point
of course,

what becomes hard to delineate,
is this regularity

something that 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.

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.

Driving down the road
and never seeing another car.

Things like that.

This is because I moved
from Pontiac, Illinois,

which had more people,

to Dorsey, Illinois,
which had like 500 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 one of the things
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, "A-ha!

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 St. Louis...

which was about 50 miles away.

But whenever we did,
my Dad had a very tight control

over our schedule
and our itinerary, 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 happening."

All this time that
we're spending in the car,

this 50 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 St. Louis set.

But I'm not gonna get to go
and see everything

because my dad is gonna
be there to make sure

that we hit the points
we're supposed to hit

and then we get back in the car
and we go.

Can you see me? There!

I am an East Coaster
who lives in Los Angeles.

I have an electrical
engineering degree from Harvard.

I'm an entrepreneur.

And I've also...

I've got Crohn's disease.

And it all plays in
to the simulation.

I think the sort of
basic idea is that

if you believed it enough...

incredibly high-power
computing devices

are gonna be distributed
in society

and that the computers
will get stronger and stronger

like our cell phones...

Hey, you guys! Hey! No! Quiet!

So, you know, if there are
in fact...

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?

The odds that we're
in base reality

is one in billions.

The most
influential statistics-based

look at simulation theory
was a 2003 article

by Oxford professor
Nick Bostrom.

It was titled "Are You Living
in a Computer Simulation?"

Well, I was at the time a...

kind of post-doctoral fellow
at Yale University.

The ideas in some vague form

have been with me
for quite some time

that amounted to something more
than just idle speculation.

And so I wrote that up

and published that in
Philosophical Quarterly.

And it immediately evoked
a huge amount of interest.

And has continued to be
a huge amount of interest.

It seems to come in waves
every year or two.

Some new set of people
discover it for the first time.

So I make a 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.

And 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 that
most all civilizations

at our current stage
of technological development

go extinct before they reach
technological maturity.

The second alternative is
that there is

a very strong convergence

in virtually all technologically
mature civilizations

in that they all lose interest

in creating simulations
of this kind.

They all lose interest

in creating
ancestor simulations.

And the third 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 the non-simulated,

exceptional, original ones.

Personally, for me,
it's all about probabilities.

I'm someone who thinks in terms
of probabilities, anyway.

And I've just found in my life

that there's lots
of low probability outcomes

happen again and again
and again, and again.

Bam.

If I keep glancing off
to the side,

it's 'cause my screen's
over there.

Oh, okay.

You're actually
at my drawing table.

So, if I keep
glancing over there,

I'm just looking at you.

And I'll look back to camera.

What kind of drawing do you do?

- It depends. You know Moebius?
- Sure.

Yeah, I re-drew one
of his entire books

with characters from Peanuts
instead of characters from him.

And then I just do
painting and stuff like...

just doodling like
fake Mignola stuff.

Uh-huh.

Nothing that wonderful, but...

I'm working more
on the Moebius-style

for an entire new book
right now.

That's cool.
So, are you a full-time...

- professional comic artist?
- No, no.

I wish. No, I do
Special Ed teaching.

When did you start
thinking that there's more

to simulation theory
than Science Fiction can see?

Well, we know Musk. When he
started talking about it

I really started
thinking about it more.

The strongest argument
for us being in a simulation...

probably being in a simulation,
I think is the following.

That 40 years ago, we had Pong.

Like two rectangles and a dot.

That was what games were.

Now, 40 years later,

we have photo-realistic
3D 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.

I think that triggered me
to really think hard about it.

Does any one of us remember
in any dim fashion

a worse Earth, circa 1977,
than this?

Have our young men seen visions
and our old men dreamed dreams?

I have.

Nightmare dreams, specifically,
of prisons and jailers

and ubiquitous police.

I wrote out these dreams
in novel after novel,

story after story.

To name two in which
this prior ugly present

obtained most clearly,

I cite
The Man in the High Castle

and my 1974 novel about
the US as a 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 such a horrid
slave state world.

Or perhaps the term "world"
is the wrong one

and I should say
"United States",

since in both novels,

I was writing
about my own country.

Some people claim
to remember past lives.

I claim to remember
a 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.

In late February of 1974,
I was given sodium pentothal

for the extraction
of impacted wisdom teeth.

Later that day, back home again
but still

deeply under the influence
of the sodium pentothal,

I had a short, acute flash
of recovered memory.

In one instance,
I caught it all.

You are free to believe me
or to disbelieve,

but please take my word on it
that I am not joking.

This is very serious,
a matter of importance.

I am sure that,
at the very least, you'll agree

that for me even to claim this
is in itself amazing.

Philip K. Dick
wrote over 8,000 pages

trying to understand
the recovered memories

he experienced in February
and March of 1974,

an experience he called
"2-3-7-4".

This writing is known as
"The Exegesis".

Erik Davis,

working with Pamela Davis
and Jonathan Lethem,

wrestled with this text
to edit a single book from it.

It was a great experience,

although a kind of
crazy-making one in a way.

And you're in the antechamber
of the guy's problems

and his trauma,
and his despair.

It was so... such a vast text

that you kinda had to do it
by attrition, really.

There were a number of things
that really worked.

One is that
when he was really engaged

in his own writing...

...we included that.

When he was
describing experiences,

we included that.

There's a part where

Dick describes the writing in
"Exegesis" as a "hell chore".

I think it really shows
the challenges

of wrestling with
an extraordinary experience,

and particularly experiences

which we can find throughout
religious history

of 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.

I could probably put together
a list

of all the various
small synchronicities

that kept popping up,

but they were just so mundane,
but there was so many of them

that eventually
I took one of these,

you know, a particularly
auspicious day,

I guess, for myself.

And decided I was going to do
a sensory deprivation tank.

Which is not something
I had done before.

But it was just...

something that felt like it'd
be an interesting experience.

And so, I did that.

And there's a guy
in New York here,

on 23rd Street

who has
a sensory deprivation tank

in his apartment,

which is a strange thing,
but you go in,

he gives you the spiel.

You ask him any questions,
and then you go into it.

And I, never having
had done this before,

I kind of went into it

not really knowing
what to expect.

But he said, just sort of
ask for what you want

or ask for, you know,
what you'd like to know.

And the sense I got was like,

"Yes, I'm asking the universe,
or whatever

but I'm also really
asking myself."

And maybe those aren't
different things, right?

The first few minutes
were very...

I was very aware
of where I was.

But after a few more minutes,

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 kinda, in that state,
had to come out, and said,

"Listen, I get the sense

that you're trying
to tell me something."

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'm also an ordained minister,
so I was raised with that.

So there's, you know,

there's a
God part of it for me.

Just sort of asking it,

come out, just come out

and do what it is
you'd like to say.

Yeah, and I'm not
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.

A 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 a code.

I am a string of letters
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 pattern, I'm a code
constantly replicating itself.

I'm a vibration,
and that's what it is.

Got out of the tank

and I started talking
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?"

And he's like, "I don't know.
Enjoy it."

I've always had a little bit
of a sense of this,

but this is the big event.

I was about 11 or 12...

and I'm adopted.

I'm a pastor's son.

My adopted dad
is a pastor,

so I go to church every Sunday.

And I believe at this point
in time, 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,

there are people,
they're dressed up

and they're sitting in...
this is in the early 80s,

so people dressed up more
than they maybe do now.

And they're seating in pews.
Pews are like long benches.

And they have
their hymnals open,

and they're singing.

And I look around
at everyone 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.

And we're animals, basically,

yet we put on all 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 move 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 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.

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-ness.

My entire life,
I'm living with family,

and I'm real used to it.
Specifically, my brother.

And then I go off.

You know, the parents
are always like, "You're 18.

We're kicking you out."

But I kinda beat them
to the punch

because, like,
the day after graduation,

I was out of town.

I had moved away.

And I didn't come back
for years.

But during that time,
I was just alone, you know.

I lived with a friend,

but I didn't have
my brother with me.

And all we would do
for like two straight years

is just play video games.

I worked at a Chili'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 do it from front to back,

and then just go back in
and just beat it again.

All the time, video games,
for years and years,

that's literally all I did.

Didn't draw,
didn't do anything.

And so I got into
a dark place there.

It's like, "Maybe I'm stuck
in this rut on purpose.

Maybe it's not my design.
It's whatever."

I'm not religious at all,

but how do I reconcile feeling
like I'm in a rut, though?

Like a preprogrammed rut.

I have to go the science route.

And the only really blending
of religion in science there is

would probably be
a simulation theory,

to be honest with you.

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.

And he 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 apart."

And then you realize you can't
put it back together again.

That's 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.

Contemplating this possibility

of a lateral arrangement
of worlds,

a plurality
of overlapping Earths

along whose linking axis
a person can somehow move

and travel in a mysterious way

from worst to fair
to good to excellent.

Contemplating this
in theological terms,

perhaps we could say that
here with we suddenly decipher

the 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

that the cause of the perplexity

lay not in any desire

on 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 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...

déjà vu.

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?

Hey, Miller, look what I found.

Wow.

Realistic, isn't it, Mr. Miller?

René Descartes
tried to build an epistemology

from a foundation of skepticism
and radical doubt.

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 judgement.

I shall consider myself as not
having hands or flesh or senses

but his falsely believing
that I have all these things.

A slightly more modern version
of the same idea

is the brain in a vat.
Where, again,

you try 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's laboratory

being kind of fed inputs

that mimic what
the external world

would have done.

It didn't really matter
how realistic

these thought experiments were.

They were just
logical possibilities,

and the challenge was,
how can you disprove them?

One thousand years

before
Descartes' Evil Demon

a similar idea was put forth
in Ancient Greece by Plato.

He describes, "Imagine,
the situation.

There are figures 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."

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.

Emily Pothast wrote about

this parable's relevance

to both simulation theory
and other aspects

of digital communications
and miscommunications.

It's a very cinematic metaphor,

and I just love that,

how that sort of imagination
of how film affects us.

And just like there's
like that lossiness between

what is really happening
and what perception shows us,

there's sort of lossiness
between what media

shows us and what
the real world outside

of that media
representation is.

So now,

it's not just what their senses
decide to show them,

it's what the media
decides to show them.

And this is extremely
dangerous to our democracy.

Let's go back to Hindu myths.

You find these incredible myths
of like, you know,

the king's going along and
stops for a well and he drinks

and then he goes and has
a whole other existence,

a whole other life.

And then pop! He comes back in.

And they'll even 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.

It really kind of
crystalized 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.

But 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?

When you inhabit your avatar
in 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.

Of course, you're not.
Because you are being controlled

by an intelligence,
a higher power.

It'd be hilarious if Elon Musk

was a player character.

And he just comes
into the game, like,

"Hey, you guys know...
...we're simulated."

This could be some simulation.

It could.
Do you entertain that?

But then he gets
to log off, go back to...

Artificer, heaven or whatever,

and laugh with his weird
extra-dimensional friends

"Hey, I was just playing around

with that simulation
again today.

And I keep dropping them hints,
but no one's picking it up."

But it's interesting because,

for me, the villager speaks to,

there are a few different
levels of what, you know

being raised in
the Christian faith,

I would call God.

There's 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 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 the next minute,
a villager will walk in,

and 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 atom
is in cells. You know, one year

this cell's part of me,

and then tomorrow
it'll flake off

and it'll be part
of something else.

And every seven years,

our cells
replace themselves, anyway."

Artist Chris Ware

was so struck
by the implications

of Minecraft that he created
this cover illustration

for The New Yorker.

Video game itself...

catches 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.

I don't know how else
to really put it.

We build these peculiar
sculptures.

She built giant... Well,
"giant" is a relative term

when you're talking
digitally being reality.

But giant sculptures
of myself and my wife

amidst kind of
golden farmhouses

that then would go underground,

and train lines
or mine cart lines

that would go underground
and connect between...

the landscape
that kind of pre-existed.

But now she's 14, so she's
kind of 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 at
their worlds that they made

in their preadolescence
and kind of revisiting them,

and listening to the music again
and getting all tearful.

So it's a 14-year-old nostalgia

for a lost world of innocence,
or something.

I guess when she's 40
and I'm 85, or whatever

and downloaded onto
a flash drive

we can continue to visit.

My relationship
with the United States

has always been a very bad one.

It has always seemed to me

that I was about to be arrested
by the American police

for some obscure reason.

Perhaps that's because
of reading Kafka's The Trial.

That book influenced me
very much.

You know, where someone
is arrested for a crime,

and he's never told
what crime he's committed.

When I was a kid, and one of
the things 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 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 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.

In his paper,

Nick Bostrom defined
a simulation

of the entire mental history
of mankind

as an "ancestor simulation"

when estimating the amount of
computing power one might need.

Does the idea
of ancestor simulations

suggest that we are
retracing the steps

of the genuine society
that created the simulation?

Well, that's one possibility.

There could also be
all kinds of variations

ranging from
complete fantasy worlds

that bear no resemblance

to anything that existed
in physical reality

to variations of history.

All of that
is conceptually possible.

But 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.

Back when I was 9?
Nine or 10,

I used to joke about
with my brothers and sister

that people would just go home,
and just like sit down

and stare at walls
while no one was watching.

You know, they would
just like...

you know, go home
and T-pose, effectively,

in their private spaces
when they weren't seen

'cause they would just...

deactivate their programming,
I guess.

I used to joke about that,
but that idea ran with me

a lot when I was older.

It kind of became
a little horrifying

that these people
I would talk to,

since nobody was watching,
the program would stop working.

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, it depends on
the kind of computer power

available in
the basement simulators.

If you have
infinitely fast computers, sure.

But, no, 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 leave more detail
in a particular part of reality

when we are paying attention.

But then not simulating all
of those details all the time.

I'm occupying maybe
20 square feet?

And yet there's a whole
world that exists

because I know about it.

It is here in my brain.

I worked with a company
for a little while

that launched what is now
a very popular app

that is
an interactive fiction app.

You know, there's an element of,
"Well, it's just like writing

a choose-your-own-adventure.
But what became swiftly...

obvious to me...

how simple some of our
own decision-making is,

from a coding perspective.

A popular recent Reddit AMA

was with a user who wrote

"I am a real life
non-player character."

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 programmed in there.

It's kind of like talking
to a person in real life,

but they only have a set amount
of things that they can say.

Hey, buddy, got a dead cat
in there or what?

And you only have
specific lines

that you can say back to it
in response.

I can only imagine
if I was really a gamer,

how I would experience
social interaction.

But even as a non-game player,
I sometimes find myself

you know, dealing with
non-player characters.

I work at a grocery store,
and I have a specific...

list of things
that I need to accomplish

when greeting 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 each customer.

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
in Mario Brothers,

or the mosquitoes of me.

You know, they're all kind of

operating on the same
principles.

If this then that,
if not then don't.

It's not too much of a leap
to think that

consciousness may mean...

we are being inhabited

by some sort of
player-type intelligence.

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.

There are not seven billion
consciousnesses.

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 AI's,

that are serving as
the substream for the, you know,

"people you know" experience
that everyone's having on Earth.

So, when you find that
you know the same people,

or six degrees of separation,
it's just not a surprise at all.

In fact, it's a flaw
in the system.

And that's just the limit of
the actual processing power

of the machine
that the sims running on.

Well, have you ever encountered

a non-player characters?

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 like
in a video game.

It's just, there's much less
processing power

being attributed
to the automatons.

But once you start interacting,

then something has to
actually serve

as the intelligence behind
that so-called human.

Society is rapidly secularizing.

You know, religion is
completely falling apart.

And there's elements of that
that are wonderful.

You know, I think religion plays

an overly restrictive role
in people's lives too often.

Certainly, the religion
I was raised in does.

But I do know people

from my childhood

in a fairly
Evangelical Christian world

who, you know, wanted to...

would've committed
violent acts,

if only God...

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 thy neighbor, I don't know.

But that was case for me.

I believe that this thought,

that we are living
in a simulation,

I think that is going
to just increase in popularity.

And for people who are
content to see

both sides of an argument

and that doesn't
split our heads in two,

you know, for people who are
content to see shades of grey,

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 it shouldn't.
So I find the 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 would be

"Well, it doesn't matter what
they 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,
you know?

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
were like Muslims or, you know,

people shoot up synagogues.

Going after someone who is
constructed as an "other"

by the media that they consume.

We must meet the threat
with our valor, our blood,

indeed, with our very lives

to ensure
that human civilization,

not insect,

dominates this galaxy
now and always!

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 real,
or the NPC meme,

you get into a place where
you kind of treat reality

like these are digital,
disposable bodies.

And so one guy might plug in,

he's Kanye West.

One person might plug in,
instead of doing that,

he's Michael Phelps.

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 log in,

they used to play a lot
and they were really good,

but then they unplugged
and didn't come back.

Years and years since
they were plugged in our reality

would be a celebrity
who was really good,

and then just fell from grace
and never really came back.

I can't name a specific
celebrity here,

plus I don't want to throw
that into your film.

Anyway, so they would
go totally like,

they'd be going straight

and all of a sudden
they'll be doing something

that's totally perpendicular

to their normal
behavior patterns.

'Cause in a video game,
you're doing it well...

then all of a sudden,
you just get bored

and you start doing something
totally different.

I've done that myself, you know.

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 hole up
in this apartment building...

and just see how many police
I can get to try to kill me."

You know, then you kind of
just go for something crazy.

I once said to my uncle...

"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 as,
"Is that what you want to do?"

"Is the only thing
keeping you from doing that

the fact that the world is real
and there are consequences?"

Did you see that video
of the gentleman

on the East Coast...

West Coast, I'm sorry,

who, he hijacked...

a commercial air flight
that was empty?

It was just him onboard,

and he had no training
whatsoever.

And he started just flying
around the coast.

What the hell?

Oh, my God.
What is happening right now?

Did you ever see that?

He's flying and he's
talking about things.

This is probably like

jail time for life, huh?

I would hope it is
for a guy like me.

One of the things he's doing is

he's kind of breaking
people's perceptions

'cause he's doing stuff like,
he's doing loops and what not.

He's getting remarkably close
to the ground.

He's over the ocean,
over the land.

He's doing tricks.

Just flying the plane around,

do you seem
comfortable with that?

Oh, hell yeah. It's a blast.

I've played video games
before, so...

I... I know what I'm doing
a little bit.

And this is shortly before
he crashes purposefully

into a, I believe an island.

Just offshore.

But yeah, it's nuts,
that one of his last thoughts

is how much it's like
a video game to him.

Then he crashes.

But yeah, there is a dark side.

There's people out there

who are gonna be
chaotic about it.

...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. Déjà vu.

Déjà vu.

- Switch. Apoc.
- What is it?

A déjà vu is usually
a glitch in the matrix.

It happens when
they change something.

What we need at this point
is to locate,

to bring forth as evidence

someone who has managed
somehow,

it doesn't matter how,

to retain memories
of a different present.

Latent, alternate
world impressions,

different in some
significant way from this.

Philip K. Dick might have been

surprised to learn

how common memories
of a different present

would become
in the 21st Century.

If you remember a Kit-Kat
looking like this...

then you could be living
in an alternate reality.

Welcome to
"Conspiracy Chat N'That."

Today's topic is the
mind-warping,

reality-bending Mandela Effect.

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
dying in prison."

But like that never happened.

So, when reports

of the former South African
president's death

became news in 2013,

it re-sparked
the previous debate

of whether or not
we've somehow slid

into an alternate timeline.

The Berenstein Bears
children books have changed.

They used to be called
"Berenstein Bears,"

and now they've always
been known as

"The Berenstain Bears".

Over 10 thousand
Mandela effects

have been logged and confirmed.

If you go back

and literally find
like a VHS tape

of like Snow White from 1998

and you put it in a VHS player,

they say,
"Magic mirror on the wall".

Tell me! Tell me, bitch, that
you do not fucking remember

"Mirror, mirror on the wall."

Well, that doesn't exist.
Mandela Effect?

Alternate reality?
I think yes!

When I was young,
I lived in Mexico.

Very young, like 10 years old.

And then I returned there

for the summer
with my mother once.

I was 18 years old,

and I really didn't
know anybody.

I finally get a call
from some friends,

friends of friends.

These guys pick me up,

and they're in
a 1970 Jeep Wagoneer.

Big old machine.

It immediately becomes clear
that they have been drinking

because they say, "Hey,
help yourself to a beer."

And I look in the back
of the Wagoneer,

and there's all
these empties rolling around

and couldn't find a seat belt,
and I just said,

"All right, fuck it,"
I opened a beer.

Then, we were driving
down a major street

in a city called Cuernavaca.

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 driving
against traffic

in the wrong side

and no cars came, 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.

They bought some more liquor.

They said, "What should we do?
Let's go to the pyramids."

So there was a pyramid in town,
and so we head over...

we climb a fence, we're
walking on a Mexican pyramid.

It's, you know, it's...

kind of an awesome experience
in and of itself.

And they're getting bored.

They say, "All right,
that's it. Let's go home."

And we get back in
the Wagoneer, and in Mexico

at that time of year,
this was summer,

they have monsoons
that last five minutes.

Now the road's completely wet,
and 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 wheel for a sec?"

And I'm sitting in the back
and I'm like...

"That's the worst idea
I've ever heard!"

But it's too late, right?
It's too late.

And he grabs the wheel...

...and the car hits the side
of the road right away,

but hits the curve and slides...

So it hits one side
of the street

and slides in
the other direction,

hits another curb
and flies through the air...

...probably about
a thousand feet through the air

and lands on the roof.

All the windows shattered,
and I broke ribs...

'cause 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 a truck pulls up.

And they say,
"Oh, great. Banditos."

And then another car pulls up,
and it's the Federales,

the Mexican police.

You know, the banditos
just leave.

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 learn
that we've been drinking,

they're gonna arrest us all,

and then 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...

"Excuse me.
I am the chief accountant

of the Cuernavaca
Police Department",

so the local city police.

And he knows about the
corruption of the Federales.

And my hosts managed
to 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 implausible
that I had survived.

The likelihood of all of that
was just so low.

Somebody's gotta be
putting their hand on the scale

'cause I kinda just
looked at it in terms of

the algorithm tweaking
probabilities,

so that things are essentially
more interesting

'cause it's a game.

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 mention simulation
without mentioning that.

The book he keeps
all of his stuff in is...

what is it called,
Simulation & Simulacra?

It's right there,
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 it home.

Like, the idea was planted

and that thing really
pressed on it.

In Renaissance, Part I
and II, it's kinda hosted by

almost like this
technology demigod.

Just kind of 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.

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.

"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

and it's pretty good,
pretty good, pretty good.

And then he gets out
of the tank,

and we're like, "Whoa!"

Joshua Cooke

was a Virginia
high school student

when he heard about the film.

So, I was riding in a car

on the way home,
and a friend of mine

- was in the car.
- Get in.

She mentioned this movie

Matrix that people
were going crazy over.

People were going
to the movie theaters

15 times in a row to see it.

And that people were getting
obsessed about it,

raving about it.

"Oh, man, you gotta see it!

You've never seen anything
like it. And the graphics.

Oh yeah!"

And then I heard him
say something

about a black trench coat
and stuff.

And that really hit me
for a few reasons.

One is, I had already had
a fascination,

an obsession really,
with the black trench coat

because of the movie
The Crow,

which was my first
movie obsession.

So I went to the
Blockbuster Video store.

And, from the very beginning
of the movie,

it had my attention.

And it had kind of like
a rough, aggressive,

you know, Rob Zombie,

heavy metal theme to it.

The Matrix.

The soundtrack
that makes you go...

Whoa.

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 look like.

I don't think it's just people
in pods somewhere else.

I think it's something
completely different than that.

I don't know. When I think
about it, I think of like

a giant white, brilliant white
marble hallway, right?

And then there's like a
pedestal in the center,

and this giant black sphere.

And that black sphere, to
these people in this reality,

that's effectively a computer,
you know?

No, and that
computer's running...

There could be
a little art museum card

next to it that says
"Universe... whatever".

And they just see what happens
out of that black mass

of stars and clouds, and deep,
deep, deep down,

people, like us.

And then you go on
from that model,

you wonder, "Okay
is it important to them?"

"Are we a very special case

that the entire reality
is focused on?"

'Cause they're trying
to figure out

what the point of life is,

and so they just keep
rerunning the universe.

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 it, but G-A-N-S.

Generative Adversarial Networks.

Basically, 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 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 people if not...

generative
adversarial networks?

Cop tries to solve crime.

Criminal tries to beat cop.

I'm gonna kill you.

You idiot! You made me!

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 are 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.

In the end,
what do we want to create

if not another simulation?

Yeah, I mean,

there were a few lines in there
that were pretty deep.

Neo asked Morpheus,
"Why do my eyes hurt?"

And Morpheus looks at Neo
and says...

"Because you've never
used them before."

Well, I felt the same way.
And I felt like,

"Man, there's gotta be
more than this."

Okay, "You've never used

your eyes before"
when he gets out of the Matrix

and everything's blurry,

that's very, very similar
to sort of what happens

in Plato's Cave, when he goes...

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 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 at spotting
what's going on.

And you just aren't
interested in 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,
the person in the red dress,

and later the guy's like,
"Oh, I engineered her."

Yeah, that seems like...

that is such
a school shooter fantasy.

You have these unique eyes to
see what no one else can see.

and everyone else
is just like...

they're just asleep.

Sleep. Sleep.

Having told you my story

about when I was a kid,
when he got out of the tank...

the immediate thing that
flashed in 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 maybe didn't even
have a body, per se.

I went to a store

in the mall near my house,
it's called Hot Topic.

I don't know
if you've ever heard of it.

And they had all kind of
goth wear,

black clothes,
black everything.

There was a line of
trench coats hanging on a rack

in the corner of the store.

And I was with my sister,
Tiffany.

And I made a beeline straight
for 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...

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 escape
with 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 Neo than I ever been.

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...
it was in my CD player,

and people would
see me come in,

and they would just kind of
back away, you know.

And I had this sick thrill
of wearing it.

So being Neo, being Neo was...

I felt for a long time
it actually saved me,

but 'til a certain point.

You know, everything
that's really happened

with me
has kind of dichotomy,

sometimes a paradox.

I've probably watched
The Matrix movie...

I don't know exact,

but I know
it was hundreds of times.

After I saw it the 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 were days
when I would watch it

two or three times in a row.

And like the world
that they are in,

this boring, you know,
trite, mundane...

you know, just sickening world,
I felt the same way.

I just felt like
nothing was going right.

What the hell am I doing here?

And I felt like, "Man,
there's gotta be

more than this."

Maybe there's something
with this Matrix thing.

Maybe it's real.

Maybe it's not so fake
after all. You know, who knows?

One thing 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 1974.

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 strange resemblance

to Hawthorne Abendsen's
experience in my novel

The Man in the High Castle
with the woman Juliana Crain.

Juliana read Abendsen's book
about a world

in which Germany and Japan
and Italy...

Now this is a little difficult
if you haven't read the book,

but he wrote a novel
in which Germany,

Italy and Japan
lost World War II.

And he was living in a world

in which
they had won World War II.

She felt she should tell him

what she comprehended
about the book.

In other words,
that his novel was true.

When I was working
on Jimmy Corrigan,

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 then he died.

John Updike said something
once about...

about the strange predictability
of fiction.

And he just kinda
let it go at that,

and didn't really
follow up on that.

But there is something
when you get into this...

imaginary world

of writing stories,
or 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.

For several years, I've had
the feeling, a 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 Abendsen's door.

She would tell me exactly
what Juliana told Abendsen,

and that is that my book,
like his, was in a certain,

real, literal
and physical sense,

not fiction but the truth.

Well, this did
finally happen to me.

I even knew
that her hair would be black.

One of the first things
that a lot

of science fiction critics
remind you

when you're talking
about science fiction,

"Science fiction is
not about prediction."

But of course people
think about it anyway.

And Dick has quite a few.
Like he's no slacker

in the actually anticipating
the future department,

especially around
consumer gadgets

and ideas about
consumer gadgets.

But I think
what's more prophetic

is just...

what if feels like
to be alive right now.

You know, to be confused...
ontologically confused.

Like, I'm not really sure
where reality is exactly.

I'm certainly convinced
that there's a lot of

very dark forces on the rise,

and there are things that
are trying to manipulate me

using information
or using my...

the fact that I'm still
a subject of capitalism,

and they're kind of
manipulating that.

And, at the same time,
there's sort of like

deeper rumblings

in the nature of the world
that seem really unclear.

And at the same time,
people seem potentially drawn

into their own sort of
solipsistic world

of like manipulating
with the world

through all these interfaces

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 as
a social construction

that we are always able
to kind of fragment away from

in generally harrowing ways.

We go into solipsism,
we go into psychosis,

we go into paranoia.

Hey, guys, I used
to be one of you!

- Stop selling...
- 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
of little alerts all the time.

You know, pings on the phone
and here's your e-mail, ding!

And then,
"Oh, don't forget this."

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 start thinking
about a trip

and then you write
somebody an e-mail,

and Goggle reads your e-mail
and then suddenly

all the adds are like,
"Trips! Trips! Trips!"

It's just like, "Whoa," that
fabric of consciousness

is just straight out of this...

I remember typing

"guns for sale"

on like Google.

And... In Fairfax, Virginia.

And I saw this place called
Galyan's 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,
"I've seen your searches

for guns for sale."

And looked at me,

he had like this
worried/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.

And then I just walked up
the basement steps and left.

So we never had another
conversation about it.

He 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 aliveness

that is not very trustworthy.

I love you, daddy.

Dick was
always aware 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...

Your plastic pal
who's fun to be with!

...what I experience
my technological life is like

is just a lot of broken things.

So, you have
your giant developers.

You have Activision Blizzard,

they do World of Warcraft
and Overwatch.

You have EA, which is...

I think 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
40% of a video game.

And the portion you get
is broken and buggy.

And sometimes like literally,
in the case of some games,

like I think the latest one
was Atlas, it's unplayable.

Like it's literally dead
on arrival.

People were still paying
full price for it

and getting tricked into it.
You 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 a reality

that's not going so well
either.

And you can't help
draw parallels.

The grass is dead
on both sides of this thing.

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 hitting
the fan right now.

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 subtext of that
is maybe there was

a taboo that we transgressed,

that we went past
the point of no return.

February 17th, 2003.

It was a Monday.

I woke up. There was
a whole lot of snow outside

from a recent blizzard
we had just had.

And I walked downstairs,
I saw my father shoveling snow.

So I got my clothes on
and helped him 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 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 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,

I could find out for sure

if the Matrix was real

and I wasn't losing my mind

was to simply pick up
the phone and call them.

I left my room
and I walked precariously

over to the house phone
in my parents' bedroom.

I slowly picked the phone
up off the hook

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 us.
You're afraid of change.

I don't know the future.

I didn't come here to tell you
how this is going to end.

I came here to tell you how
it's going to begin.

You're gonna hang up
this phone,

and then I'm going to show
these people

what you don't want them
to see.

A world without you.

A world without rules
and controls,

without borders or boundaries.

A world where
anything's possible.

Where we go from there
is a choice up 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,
"Fuck my life," you know?

I got my shotgun out and I...

I put 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 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 why for
Can't take much more

Something's got to give
Let the bodies hit the floor"

That's what I was listening to
as I left my room

and I went downstairs to get
to the basement.

And I remember

when I 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 hand,

which she's seeing
for the first time ever,

her smile disappeared,
and I shot her.

I 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 I remember I crouched down
to be level with him

and I shot him about
three times.

I went upstairs to reload

and when I came back down...

Oh, I still had
my headphones on.

The words that were forced
into my ears were,

"Skin against skin
Blood and bone

You're all by yourself
But you're not alone

You wanted in
Now you're here

Driven by hate
Consumed by fear

Let the bodies hit the floor"

That's what I was listening to

when I went down
for the second time

to the basement.

I was standing at the 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 up at me
and she said...

she said, "Joshua."

She said, "What did you do?"

And she kept looking at me
for a minute, and she said...

she said, "You wouldn't."

And I pulled the trigger.

When I pulled the
trigger and...

her face exploded.

Half her face, her eye
and her face exploded out

through the back of her head...

and her flesh was just
turned into like ripplets,

a 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.

It kind of jarred me.
I was still pretty numb,

but I remember it jarring me

'cause it was different than
what I thought of The Matrix.

So I turned around
and I went upstairs

into 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 exact moment that
I killed him and my mother.

She heard the whole thing,
and I didn't realize it.

So here I am,

I'm at the phone in the kitchen
and I said, "Hello?"

And my sister said, "Josh?"
And I said, "Tiffany?"

I said,
"What are you doing here?"

And she said,
"Josh, where's Daddy?

I wanna talk to Daddy."

And I told her, I said,

"Hang up the phone, Tiffany.
I gotta call someone."

And she didn't hang up,
so I let the phone hang

and I went to,
my father had a cell phone.

I went to his cell phone.
I went outside.

I took a Coca-Cola
out of the refrigerator

and I started to drink...

I popped the top
and I started drinking it,

and I called 911.

When I hung the phone up...

I got a call on my dad's phone
from a friend of his.

And my dad's 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 him
a message for me?

Just tell him I called."

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 of my house

with their guns drawn.

About five or six of them
with their guns drawn on me...

told me to get
down on my knees,

and of course they arrested me.

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 27 years of writing.

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 reality
lying tangent

to what evidently
is the most actualized one.

The one which the majority of us
by consensus gentium agree on.

The real nub of it,

morally, ethically,
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?

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 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,

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 kinda crazy.

He had visions

he could never decide
what they meant,

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
very grounded empathy

with people suffering
under these false conditions.

This 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 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...

you know, kind of poignant
and in your face.

So when I met my lawyers

for the first time
in Fairfax jail

they asked me about
my crime and...

and I told them 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 that.

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 I was entering the world,
or exiting the world

of the Matrix.

And then 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

laying out on my bed,
smoothed out on my bed.

They saw my black boots.

The ones like Neo wore.

And they began to think

that they may have
an insanity defense.

They said that I, quote,
"Harbored a bona fide belief

that I was living in
the virtual world of The Matrix

at the time of the murders."

That was part of my defense.

- This isn't real?
- What is real?

Which was later dubbed

The Matrix Defense.

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 trial,

most notably by Lee Malvo,
aka The D.C. Sniper.

The doctor, the psychologist,

Dr. Shostak, 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 were different events
that happened in my life,

different things I was feeling
that were in a combination

led up to me exploding.

The abuse 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 for years.

And all of that together

kind of formed
a ticking time bomb.

I call it the perfect storm.

But I, myself, I never made
any excuses for my crime.

And I just wanted to die,
you know?

It was like, just forget about
all of this stuff, you know.

And as a matter of fact,

at the end
of my sentence hearing

I got to say
a written statement

to the judge out loud there.

And there I just,
I told him that

I wasn't making any excuses,

and I deserved
the death penalty,

I deserved to die.

And I think about
what I did every day.

I wish I could take it back.
You know?

Ultimately, Joshua decided not

to pursue The Matrix Defense
and pled guilty.

He was 19 years old
when convicted.

He is not due to be released
until 2043.

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 today

who may be 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 I know
I have a purpose,

a calling in my life
to try to reach them.

Joshua wrote
a book about his experience

in hopes of reaching
other troubled kids

and stopping them
from repeating his mistakes.

Now that I'm in my mid-40's...

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 out

because of a problem
with my brain?

And that's the thing,

I never wanna 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.

I feel like being fully
in the body with another

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 an other.

Audre Lorde talks about
the erotic.

And I think the erotic
as a dynamic in reality

is an antidote to solipsism.

It's an antidote
to a lack of empathy.

Because it allows us to sort of

have a playful relationship
to the other.

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.

The machines have gathered
an army, and as I speak

that army is drawing nearer
to our home.

So, what do they do?

They play music. 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.

It shows the characters
at their most vulnerable

with each other.

Neo tells Trinity
that he's afraid of losing her.

And she says,
"You're not gonna 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
in the kinds of realities

that people construct
for themselves.

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 12-year-old kid.

So the thing I've gotta do
is I've gotta keep leveling up

and I've gotta stay interesting
for him.

Do you make different
choices than you might

otherwise in order to keep
your player interested?

The way I think about 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...

"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.

Including myself!
Like, "Well, well, well!"

I hope you're interested.

Just like
all the other theories,

no one's gonna 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.

I don't think
that's how it works.

I think that
it's a solid system.

And whatever it is,
ends when you die.

But it's totally plausible
that you then wake up

in an arcade in the year 3000
and put another quarter in

and do another life on Earth
in the year 2019, you know?

There are these kind of
fundamental metaphors

about reality that we develop
through being humans

moving through time and space
on a planet.

So the metaphor of the journey,
"Life is like a journey."

Well, another one we have,
and we all have it is,

waking up from a dream.

"What? 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 frames,

sometimes quite abruptly.

Sometimes with
intense emotions.

And this is just
stitched into us.

So it's a fundamental hunch
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.

- What's happening?
- Nothing.

I don't know,
does thinking about

the simulation,
does that excite you?

Or does it sometimes
fill you with unease?

Well, I guess...

I've had
this simulation argument

for so long now
that it's hard to sort of

consider the counter faction.

'Cause it's kind of become
so much a part of

the way I view 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 are dreamt of
in our philosophy.

This sense that we are
plausibly very, very limited

in our understanding
of what the heck is going on.

We have made progress in that
maybe we have figured out,

you know, six of the 10 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
change the conclusions

that,
until we get them all right,

maybe we are as lost

as you would be if you only knew
one or zero.

I was lying in bed,
I was thinking about it.

So hypothetically,

what if tomorrow
I dress in all white

I slick my hair back,
and I'm like, "Hey,"

I tell the local media,

"Here's the message that we
should be good to each other,

I'm 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, let's try and gain
the attention of those people."

Now, those entities
are 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, we know..."
or 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 talking to us."

I mean, who knows,
if we just keep going with it

and going with it
and going with it.

Do things like organize Earth
in a more watchful pattern

to get ourselves
spread over the universe.

'Cause the larger screen
we have to display our message,

the more attention we'll get.

You're dreaming.

Doug, was it about Mars?

Becoming a multi-planet species

beats the hell out of being
a single-planet species.

Then we get to, like...

Star Wars levels
of spread across the galaxy.

Perhaps our science
will progress enough

where we can actually

tap on the membrane between...

the universe
and what's beyond it

and perhaps get a message out,

an active message
to an active listener.

I don't like to fuss or moan,

but if it weren't for you,

I'd be all, all alone.

It would be hilarious
if we were 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 microchip in here.

But if we're something like...

one of the numerous
computer devices

that's been thrown
into a basket somewhere

'cause you have too much crap.

That would suck, 'cause then
we would never be found.

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."

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
in your bloodstream

that totally makes

the anesthetic go away.

Your chest cavity's open,

there's somebody
with their hand in it

and they're trying
to massage your heart.

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 you're gonna cause
a lot of damage.

The other option, though,

maybe this is 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 failsafe.

So the person watching
this goes,

"Oh, maybe that's
what's happening with me."

And maybe, who knows,
you know,

they're in
suspended animation 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 to watch

so that they start
questioning reality,

and therefore get out of it.

I have,
through dreaming and 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.

Good morning.

This is your wake-up call.

Thank you for staying
at the New Darwin Inn.

The time is 10:30 A.M.