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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.

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