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- [00:01]
A
Hey, I like your new RAV4. Thanks. Yours too. What does RAV stand for anyway? To me, it's the remarkably advanced vehicle.
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B
Really?
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A
To me, it's the Runway approved vehicle for its amazing style. What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle.
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B
Oh.
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A
Or really awesome vehicle. It really is the recreational activity vehicle, the stylish 2026 Toyota RAV4 Limited. What's your RAV4? You might not be real, at least not in the way that you think that you are. So, for example, the screen that you're looking at, the room around you, the car you might be driving, the body that you are in, the sound of my voice that you're listening to right now. Well, according to some of the smartest people in history, Oxford philosophers, Silicon Valley billionaires, Nobel track physicists, even Plato and Descartes, they all believe in some way that all of it might just be lines of code operating on a machine that you will never see, controlled by something or someone that you will never meet. Well, today we're breaking down simulation theory, the idea that everything around us might not be real. It might actually just be quantum particles that behave one way when no one is watching and completely differently when you decide to look at it. Memories that millions of people share of events that never happen happen. Centuries of religious beliefs that teach us that this world has to be escaped. Two anonymous tech billionaires quietly paying scientists to find a way out. And we ask of what? What are we trying to escape? Well, that is the question that we will be answering today. The question that humans in one way or another, have been asking throughout all of history. But the real mystery isn't whether we are in a simulation, because if we are, the next question is who is running it. So if you are interested in philosophy, specifically consciousness and how we interface with reality, and if it is possible that all of this might actually be a simulation, well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world, from all time, forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this tent is I just find a crazy rabbit hole on Reddit or Wikipedia or something, and I do as much research as I can with the help my good friends Sophia and Zach, and we try to figure out what's really happening in the universe. And oh, boy, today is an episode unlike any other that ultimately touches on these questions. What is reality? And is it possible that everything that we see, experience, touch, feel and know is just code? That it's just a simulation running inside of a computer? That perhaps you and I are no different than, you know, a character from Grand Theft Auto or in a Sims backyard somewhere, you know, and that we are just a fabrication of some type of consciousness that exists outside of our reality. That perhaps this is a computer simulation just running every relationship in love and connection and experience you've ever had. It's quite a doozy. So before we jump in, I just want to say a few things. One, thanks to you. I want to give a big shout out to you watching right now. Yeah, dude, I want to say thanks for tuning in, because every time you click on an episode or you listen to us on Spotify or YouTube or really interface with our content, you help the show grow. You help the algorithm to know this is great content. And you help my dreams come true. And you keep the lights on in the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Also, I want to give a big thanks to the guy right beside me. I can't do the show alone. No. I have a good pal that sits in the tent with me every single week, and he's in Greece. So instead, I got my pal Miles here. What's up, Miles?
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B
Bow. Bow. What's up, Miles?
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A
We're learning about simulation theory. You know anything about this?
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B
No. I'm excited to learn, though.
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A
I'm glad you're here because you're going to learn why it's actually an interesting theory. It has a sort of a compatibilism with some type of. With a bit more of a secular, perhaps even an agnostic worldview. But it also somehow ties in with religion in a way that I think makes people feel like, all right, maybe, you know, like, I don't. I might not believe in God, but, like, this might be a simulation. Like some of the most like skeptical, atheistic scientists and physicists and billionaires around the world. A lot of them kind of subscribe to a version of simulation theory, and it can work with God and without God. We're going to get into all that. But before I go any further, I also want to say a few things. One, I'm not a philosopher. I did almost get a minor in philosophy in college, and I love philosophical topics. And this episode is kind of a foray into that. If you guys want to see more philosophy content, please let me know. Please drop a comment. I want to do more episodes that just go through regular old philosophy. Maybe we do a philosophy camp. I think that'd be awesome. Go through old Greek philosophy, go through, you know, Camus and Foucault and Descartes. Go through all like the great thinkers of our time and, you know, Nietzsche, all the people that have, you know, in some way, shape or form affected the way that we interface with what is knowable. Now, this episode is a lot. And by the end of it, you're going to want to call your mom or like go outside and like hug a tree or something. And more than maybe any other deep dive we've ever done on this show show before, this one has made me the most existential and question reality maybe more than anything else we've ever done. So let's get right into it. Simulation theory, also sometimes called the simulation hypothesis, proposes that you and I experience physical reality. But this reality that we experience could actually be completely computer generated and that we exist in a computer generated environment. Not a hallucination, not a dream, but literally a technological simulation generated by a machine populated by conscious beings, which is us. And we don't realize that we are inside of this machine. So the pixels on your phone, the taste of coffee, the voice of your mother, all of it, according to this theory, could just be simplified to rendered output. All of it the product of code basically executed by a computer running somewhere outside of what we recognize as the universe. And I know what this sounds like. You're probably like, oh, this is just the Matrix. Well, kind of. The movie hit theaters in 1999 and it turned a centuries old philosophical question into a pop culture moment that no one could really shake. Like this idea of like the red pill and the blue pill, like the actual red pill, the choice to basically wake up. For most people, you know, watching this, that movie is still the gateway into this entire conversation. But there is a real philosophical, scientific and serious version of simulation, simulation theory that isn't, you know, kind of popularized by Hollywood. It was written in the most serious version by an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom. And in 2003, Bostrom published a paper in the Philosophical Quarterly called are you living in a computer simulation? And it's only about 12 pages long. And it's arguably one of the most discussed philosophy papers of the 21st century. And here's basically what he argues. Boston Bostrom said that at least one of these three things has to be true. This is what they call in philosophy a trilemma. And the first is that humanity goes extinct before we ever Develop the technology to run massive hyper realistic simulations of conscious beings. Okay, humanity goes to stinks before we can ever have this technology. Two, we do develop the technology, but for some reason, no advanced civilization has actually, you know, actually ever runs them, or the third option that we are almost certainly already living inside one. And that's it. That is the entire thing. And it is called the simulation trilemma. And the logic underneath it is actually pretty hard to argue with. If at any point any civilization develops the ability to run convincing simulations of conscious life, and if that civilization runs even a few of those simulations with millions or billions of simulated minds inside of each one, then the number of simulated consciousnesses would eventually outnumber the the number of real consciousnesses by an enormous margin, possibly trillions, to one. Does that make sense? This basically means statistically speaking, any random conscious being that you pick, say you, is far more likely to be in one of the simulated ones than in the originals. Does that make sense? The idea that if a civilization has the technology to run simulations, they can run so many simulations to create this conscious reality that if you just pick by like a dartboard, any random conscious being, there's a high probability that they exist within the simulation. That makes me feel a little weird, right? Because I don't feel like I'm a simulation. I feel like I'm a real person out here doing, doing things, you know, walking around, working out, eating steak and stuff. Like, I feel like I'm real. So the idea that I'm in a simulation makes me feel a little strange. Now, Bostrom called these hypothetical worlds ancestor simulations, the idea being that future civilizations far more advanced than us might run simulations of their own past. Kind of like how we would make like, like a video game set in ancient Rome or like Assassin's Creed is based on, like, a lot of the Knight Templar stuff, except the people inside those games are conscious and they don't know that they're in a game. And now here's where things get really interesting. For about 13 years, Bossman's paper lived mostly in, like, academic philosophy circles. Smart people would argue about it, some would agree, some wouldn't. It was basically like a thought experiment. And then in June 2016, Elon Musk got on stage at Recode's code conference and was asked about it, and he didn't hesitate.
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B
And so the theory follows that maybe
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A
we're in the simulation.
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B
Have you thought about this a lot?
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A
Musk argued that 40 years ago, video games looked like Pong. You know, the game, like two Rectangles going up and down with a little dot trying to score. Well, today we have photorealistic 3D worlds with millions of players inside of them. And the rate of improvement isn't slowing down. So if you extrapolate forward even slowly, even at 1000th of the current pace, within a few thousand years, we would have games indistinguishable from reality and there would be billions of those games running on billions of devices. Then he dropped the line that turned simulation theory into a global conversation overnight. He says the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. He's basically saying that he believes that the odds that we are in a simulation is almost a mathematical certainty. And he's not alone in that belief. And to be honest with you, if I'm Elon Musk, I would also believe the same thing, right? If I'm the richest guy that ever lived, I'd be like, this is obviously a simulation. I'm obviously like the main character being controlled by whatever being is controlling the simulation. Now, like I said, he's not alone. So astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, one of the most public facing scientists Alive, he told NBC News that he gives simulation theory better than 5050 odds. Adding in his words, I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none. So here's where we land, right? We have a philosopher who builds the framework in 2003, a billionaire who makes it very mainstream 16 years later. And then one of the most like front facing trusted scientists on the planet is having a hard time of, you know, thinking why it's actually not true. But here's the thing, none of that on its own proves anything because, you know, believing something is possible isn't the same as proving that it is true. And to actually take the next step to argue that we are in fact inside a simulation, we have to look at something bigger than philosophy or theories of probability. You have to really consider the universe itself. Because once you start looking closely at how reality actually behaves, like at the smallest scales and like the strangest experiments, it starts to look less like a physical place and starts to kind of look like code. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion, camp, history camp, and Camp Gagnon. Now let's get back to it. So let's look at the case. Bostrom's core argument stripped down isn't about glitches in the matrix or weird coincidences. It's purely a statistical argument. So just to reiterate, he argues that if a single advanced civilization, what he calls a post human civilization, ever develops the computing power to simulate consciousness, that one civilization could run millions or even billions of simulations, each containing billions or even trillions of simulated minds, all of whom believe that they're real. Now, if there's one real universe with one real version of humanity, and that humanity eventually creates millions of detailed simulations of its own past, then the real minds, the original ones, become the rarest thing in existence. Statistically. An actual flesh and blood biological human becomes a minority of one to billions. So here's what that means for us. If one real civilization can spin up a million fake ones and those fake ones feel exactly like the real ones, then where do you think that you are? Again, it's not flashy. It's just a probability one. Now, of course, the obvious question is, you know, is it possible? Could a computer actually do this? Well, according to Bostrom, he thinks the answer could be yes. He estimates that simulating a single brain, every neuron, every synaptic firing, would take somewhere between like, 10 to the 14th and 10 to the 17th operations per second. That's roughly a hundred trillion to 100 quadrillion calculations just for one brain. Now, to simulate the entire mental history of every human that's ever lived, Bostrom estimates that it's, you know, like, you know, 10 to the 33rd power to 10 to the 36th power. So basically a number with 33 zeros after it. It sounds impossible. And by today, today's standards, it kind of is. Like, no supercomputer that we have on Earth even comes close to that. But there's another theory. MIT physicist Seth Lloyd ran a different calculation, not on a hypothetical simulation, but on the universe itself. So he estimates that in the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, the entire physical universe could have performed roughly 10 to the 120th operation on 10 to the 90th bits of information. So in this, he isn't trying to prove simulation theory. He was just trying to describe the cosmos in computational terms. But what his math implies is this. The universe doesn't just contain enough computing capacity to run a simulation of itself. It contains enough to run a near infinite number of them. So think about that for a second. To build a simulated reality, you just need enough hardware. And the universe, according to one of the most respected physicists alive, he says, has more than enough hardware and computational power to do that. And there's one more thing that makes the simulation argument a lot harder to dismiss. A simulation doesn't have to render everything. So here's what I mean by that. Think about like a video game. The game doesn't render every blade of grass on every hillside all the time. It only renders what the player is looking at. Everything else is just data sitting in RAM waiting to be drawn. Only when someone turns around to see it. So Bostrom argues the same logic could apply to our universe. To convince a conscious mind that it lives in the real world, you don't need to simulate every single atom all the time. You just need to simulate enough to keep the observer from noticing the inconsistencies. You have to render what's being watched. And everything else just stays as a code. So when physicists look at the universe at the smallest possible scales, what do they actually find? Well, I'm glad you asked. In the famous double slit experiment, one of the strangest results in all of physics. Subatomic particles behave like waves only until they're observed. So the moment a conscious observer measures them, they snap into a single fixed location. They behave one way when no one's looking, and then a completely different way when someone is looking at it. Now that sounds a lot like a video game rendering an object only when it's being observed. And then there's the Planck length, the smallest possible unit of measurement in physics. I mean, it's roughly 1.6 times 10 to the negative 35th meters. Below that scale, the rules of physics literally just stop working. The universe, in other words, appears to have a built in resolution limit. You could say like a pixel size. And in 2012, three physicists, Silas Bean, Zora Devouti and Martin Savage, published a paper proposing that that if the universe were really built on some type of underlying lattice, the same way computer simulations of physics are constructed, that lattice should have a measurable signature, specifically in the way ultra high energy cosmic rays move through space. And they didn't claim to find the signature, but they argued it could in principle be tested. So we've got now quantum particles behaving like rendered objects, kind of a built in pixel size and a falsifiable lattice hypothesis. Now, based on this, we can start to understand why so many smart people have stopped laughing at this video game simulation thing. But here's the thing. Not every scientist who's looked at this argument has walked away convinced. So in 2020, an astronomer at Columbia named David Kipping, also friend of the show, ran the entire simulation argument through what's called a Bayesian probability analysis. And essentially this is a much more rigorous statistical reckoning than like the back of a napkin, like one in billions version. And his conclusion based on current evidence was basically the odds that we live in a simulation are roughly 50, 50 and maybe even slightly leaning towards base reality, which is way less certain than what Elon Musk or, you know, even Neil Degrasse Tyson may have been saying. But Kipping added a critical caveat. The moment humans ever build a fully conscious simulation ourselves, the second we cross that line, the probability all of a sudden flips, because then we'd have proof that conscious simulation is possible. And the math would tilt overwhelmingly towards the idea that perhaps we are inside one too. So the question isn't like, could it happen anymore? The question is, when will we be able to do it ourselves? And if every major tech company on Earth is racing towards exactly that capability, it's possible we may be closer to flip that probability than anyone is really comfortable admitting. So the math kind of works and the technology eventually will work, and the physics is suspiciously in its favor. So the probability of reality is a simulation seems to be somewhat well supported as of the research and the findings in the 21st century. But the crazy thing is that this isn't even a 21st century idea. All of this doesn't start with the Matrix or with Bostrom's paper. Humans have been asking the exact question of, is what I'm seeing real? For thousands of years? And we've just kind of used different names for it. So the earliest version of this comes from perhaps the most famous philosopher who ever lived. Around the 4th century BC, a Greek philosopher named Plato wrote a passage in his book Republic, specifically in book seven. And this is what we now call the allegory of the cave. And you probably heard it, but here's what he describes. A group of people are chained inside a cave since birth, and they face a stone wall, and behind them a fire is burning. And between the fire and the prisoners, a other people walk back and forth, casting shadows on the wall in front of them. And the prisoners have never seen anything else ever in their lives. So when they see these shadows moving on the wall, they don't think that they're shadows. They think that these shadows are reality. Because for them, that's all reality has ever been. The point that Plato is making with this allegory 24 centuries before the Matrix was that what we accept as the truth of the world might just be a projection, a flattened, low resolution version of something bigger generated by a source that we can't even see. And the only way that we can make sense of what we see is to base it on what we've already experienced in the allegory. Of course, one of the prisoners leaves and goes and sees the real world and tries to explain it to the people inside the cave. Like, hey, these shadows are not reality. There's an actual reality out there. And we're just seeing the projection of the reality. The sword sort of shadow you're seeing on the wall, that's not a sword. The real sword is out there making the shadow. And of course, the prisoners don't believe him. And then about 100 years after Plato, on the other side of the world, a Chinese philosopher named Zhuangzi was wrestling with a different version of the same question. You see, Zhuangzi is one of the founding figures of Taoism, and he has a now famous story that he tells. He dreamed that he was a butterfly flying through the air, completely convinced of his butterfly ness, not aware of any human being at all. And then he woke up and he was himself again a human being. But the question that haunted him afterward, and that's still cited in philosophy classes to this day, was this. Was he Zhuangzi who had just dreamed of being a butterfly, or was he a butterfly now dreaming of being Zhuangzi? If both experiences feel real from the inside, how do you ever prove which one is the real you? Now, of course, this is not a question about technology. That's a question about whether consciousness can actually trust itself. Meanwhile, in another part of the world entirely, Hindu philosophy was developing the concept of Maya. The idea that the world that we perceive is a veil, not necessarily fake, but also not what it appears to be. In certain schools of Hindu thought, ordinary reality is said to conceal a deeper reality underneath it, and that the entire purpose of spiritual practice is to see through the Maya, to see past this illusion. So you can see, even just with these versions of, you know, religious or philosophical thought, you see a pattern across cultures, across continents that basically the same suspicion keeps showing up that what we're seeing might not be the full picture. And then, of course, in 1641, a French philosopher, Rene Descartes, wrote a book called Meditations on First Philosophy. And he introduced what might be maybe the most disturbing experiment in all philosophical history. Descartes asked his readers to imagine a powerful, malicious entity, an evil demon, he called it, who possessed enough power to manipulate everything a person sees, feels, hears and remembers every sensation, every memory, every thought. Now you have to ask yourself how Would you know that this is the case? How could you possibly tell the difference between the real world and a perfect deception designed and maintained by something powerful enough to fool you forever? And the problem is that you couldn't. And that's the point. Now, replace Descartes, evil demon with a supercomputer or a future civilization running a simulation, or an artificial intelligence that we haven't built yet. The structure here is identical. And then, in 1981, an American philosopher named Hilary Putnam closed the gap entirely. In his book Reason, Truth and History, Putnam introduced what's now called the brain in a vat thought experiment. And here's what he says. Imagine your brain has been removed from your body and it's placed in a tank of nutrients and a bunch of wires are connected to it, and a computer feeds it perfect signals, the exact kind of signals that your brain would normally receive from your eyes and your ears and your skin, your nerves, your brain stem, all that. And from the inside, you would experience a completely seamless reality. You would see your hands, you would feel sunlight, you would hear your own voice. You would believe with total certainty that you were an actual whole person living a full life. But you wouldn't be. You would just be a brain in a jar plugged into a machine. If that scenario sounds familiar, it's because this is what the Wachowskis built. The Matrix. On top of 18 years after Putnam's book came out, Hollywood took that exact thought experiment and turned it into one of the most influential films of the last 50 years. Also in 1981, the same year as Putnam and his Brain VAT theory book, a French theorist named Jean Bourriard published a book called Simulacra and Simulation. And his argument was a little different from the others. He wasn't talking about computers or demons or brains in vats. He was talking about us, about what happens to a society when it becomes so saturated with images and screens and media and copies of copies of copies of copies, that people start to lose the ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is a representation of what is real. So for Baudrillard, the simulation wasn't being run by aliens or by gods or AI or anything like that. It was being run by the culture itself, by the people in charge of the images. And that, crazy enough, is where this whole conversation starts to get probably the most uncomfortable and in certain ways, the most likely. Because for 2000 years, philosophers have been asking the same question. Can we trust what we're seeing? How do we know that our senses are true and that there is a reality that undergirds everything that we do. And every version of the question, from Plato to Descartes to Putnam has implied something else underneath. If reality is being generated, controlled or filtered, then who is running it? Who are they? And this might be the most disturbing part of the whole theory, fellows. This episode is sponsored by Bluechew. Look, life is about preparation. You got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast, and you got to prepare for all of the things happening in your life. And, you know, sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's, you know, being an adult, you're on the same page. Sometimes people forget to prepare for the bedroom. And that's why you need Blue Chew gold. Bluechew Gold is going to take you to the next level in the bedroom. It combines four ingredients into one powerful solution. Two to support you physically, two to support arousal and desire in the brain. And it works in just as fast as 15 minutes and will make you feel more confident with bedroom matters amongst only married relationships. That's how I promote it, okay? I think it only should be within the sanctity of marriage trying to create children. Okay? I'm a Catholic. That's what I believe. Now, Bluechew is great because if you go to bluechew.com not only are you going to get the number one brand for better bedroom experiences, you're also going to get a little deal Right now, If you buy two months of BlueChew Gold, you're going to get the third month free with the promo code GAGNON. That's G, a G, N O N. You're also going to get an additional 10% off plus free overnight shipping on your very first order. When you visit bluechew.com use the promo code Gagnon and you can check out more details and important safety information. Thanks so much, Bluechew. Let's get back to the show. So let's go through the top candidates that have been proposed. So the first theory is future humans. This is Bostrom's original answer from ancestor simulations. He kind of posited in 2003 the idea that post human civilizations, humanity, but thousands or million years ahead of us, might one day run massive simulations of their own past, the way that we make documentaries about ancient Rome or make a game in World War II. But their simulations are alive and they have consciousness inside of them. And in this version, we are not creations, we are reenactments. The simulation isn't being run for amusement or warfare or science is being run because of some unimaginably advanced version of us, got nostalgic or perhaps is trying to learn something about their own past. Now, is it possible this is why you have aliens and UFOs that apparently show up around, like, nuclear testing sites? Is it, you know, the future humans seeing the simulation being like, oh, the simulation is about to blow up. We have to stop it somehow. Who knows? Now, theory two is artificial intelligence. This is the matrix version. Instead of future humans, the simulation is being run or it's being maintained by some kind of super intelligence that maybe we built, or perhaps it emerged on its own. And the crazy thing is that there might be some validity, because something just like that is already being invented. So In August of 2025, Google's DeepMind division publicly announced something called Genie 3. And it's what's known as a world model, an artificial intelligence that can generate complet interactive 3D environments from nothing but a text prompt. So you put in a sentence and Gini 3 builds you a fully navigable world running at 24 frames per second in 720p, capable of maintaining visual and physical consistency for several minutes at a time. You can walk through it, you can interact with it, and then you can come back to a spot that you visited earlier, and it will remember what was there. So think about what that actually means. A computer generating a world that wasn't designed by humans, built moment by moment, frame by frame, in response to whoever is exploring it. Now, if you extrapolate that forward, what does that exact simulation look like in 50 years? What about 500 years? It kind of looks like a machine that can simulate not just landscapes, but perhaps it can simulate minds themselves. Which means in this version of simulation theory, we are not characters in someone's memory. We are characters in something's code built by an intelligence that might not even be human at all. Now, of course, there's a third theory, which is aliens, or whatever's behind the UFOs that I kind of mentioned earlier. And this one comes from a famous astronomer and computer scientist named Jacques Vallee. Now, Jacques Vallee spent decades studying UFO sightings, not as a believer or skeptics, but as like a data scientist trying to figure out what people are reporting and why. And he came to a weird conclusion. He argued that whatever this phenomena is, it doesn't behave like physical spacecraft from another planet. He says that it behaves like something manipulating perception itself. So UFOs appear and then they disappear, and then they change shape and they defy physics, and they frequently Leave witnesses with this eerie sensation that they were meant to see something, that the encounter was staged, that they were chosen. And Valle's framing is that UFOs might be Windows or glitches or deliberate openings into another layer of reality. Not aliens coming from a different planet, but something that exists behind the veil of this reality that we know, something poking through somehow. So in simulation terms, that's not a visitor, that's either an operator or someone potentially hacking the code or a bug in the system. And then of course, there is a fourth theory. This is the religious version, and this ultimately rests on God, or depending on how you frame it, whatever that entity is. And let me explain what I mean by that, because once you accept that a sufficiently advanced intelligence could create a complete, conscious, self contained universe, you've essentially described in technological language what every major religion in human history has been describing for thousands of years. A creator operating outside of time and operating outside of space, bringing the world into being through commands capable of intervening or not, capable of erasing it or not. I mean, think about the very existence of the universe from the book of Genesis. Let there be light. Is that energy going into the mainframe of a computer that spurs all of existence? This is exactly what the Hindu concept of Maya was getting at, what the Gnostic Christians were getting at, what Plato is getting at with the world of forms. The simulation hypothesis doesn't replace religion necessarily. It just gives religion a new vocabulary. Even atheists can admit the likelihood of this. So MIT physicist Max Tegmark has said that if we are in a simulation, the creator of that simulation is God, right? Like it's just God with admin privileges. Bostrom himself wrote that simulation theory bears loose analogies to traditional religious concepts of a creator. And then There is Theory 5. This one is a little out there, but it's worth contending with because I've seen it floating around on the Internet. This group is basically. This is a theory basically posited on the idea that the people pulling the strings of reality are the elites, the billionaires. And this is the theory that nobody on the scientific or philosophical side really talks about. But again, I've seen it circulating, and here's why. In October of 2016, a writer named Tad Friend published a profile in the New Yorker about Sam Altman. At the time, Altman was running Y Com Combinator. This is Silicon Valley's most influential startup, incubator. And today you probably know him because he runs OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The profile was sprawling and deeply researched and full of strange little details about how some of the most powerful people in technology actually think. But buried near the end of the piece was a paragraph that when it leaked online and went viral all over Twitter and everything, Friend wrote, and this is exactly what he wrote. Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer. Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. So think about that. Like just written in the New Yorker, two tech billionaires, unnamed, are funding scientists secretly to break us out of the simulation. And Friend didn't say who they were. He didn't say what the scientists were working on. He didn't even really explain what breaking out means in practical terms. He just kind of dropped it at the end and didn't really have a follow up. And of course the Internet lost its mind. Is it Elon Musk or Peter Thiel Altman? No one knows. And no one has ever confirmed who it is. The billionaires, whoever they are, are anonymous still. But here's the thing. Once you see that detail that somewhere in Silicon Valley, two of the wealthiest people on the planet, probably connected to the tech space, are seriously enough convinced that we are in a simulation that they are paying scientists to find the exit, every other story about the world starts to feel a little different. Like, why is Elon Musk so obsessed with Mars? Why is Altman so focused on building super intelligent AI, perhaps even to the detriment of humanity? Why is the entire upper class of the technological industry pouring billions of dollars into projects that in their own words, are about escaping or merging or transcending the world that all of us live in. Why is there so much seemingly sudden conversation about UFOs and UAPs? Maybe it's all crazy coincidences and these are just separate things and, you know, people are putting these theories together, or maybe there's something happening. And the truth is it's not just independent billionaires, but also the government. So in 2017, the U.S. defense Advanced Research Project Agency, also known as DARPA, launched a program called Social Sim, the computational simulation of online social behavior. And the publicly stated goal was to develop high fidelity simulations of how information spreads and evolves across online populations. So things like disinformation campaigns and astroturfing and belief propagation, basically how ideas move through human networks at scale and in plain English, The US government is building computer simulations on us and how we think and how we react and why we believe stuff and they started this in 2017. It's presumable that they're much farther along by this point that we're actually talking about it. So if you ask, is anyone trying to simulate human beings? The answer is certainly yes. And, I mean, the Pentagon is doing it. Now, this doesn't prove that we're in a simulation, of course, and certainly not a simulation built by the elite or the government or anyone in particular. DARPA isn't simulating reality itself. They are simulating online behavior, which are two different things. But the pattern is that you have governments simulating populations, billionaires funding scientists to break out of whatever this is, AI companies generating interactive worlds from text prompts and philosophers warning for decades that none of this is theoretical. And now there is one more thing that we have to bring up in the story, because before any of these tech billionaires, before Genie 3 or DARPA or Bostrom, there was a man who tried to warn everyone about this, and his name was Philip K. Dick. Now, if you don't recognize his name, you've definitely seen his work. He was a science fiction author whose novels and short stories eventually became Blade Runner and Total Recall and Minority Report, the Adjustment Bureau, A Scanner Darkly, some of the most influential science fiction stories of the 20th century. And all of them are obsessed with the same theme. What happens when a person realizes that the reality around them is. Isn't what they thought it was. So in September of 1977, 22 years before the Matrix, 26 years before Bostrom's paper, Dick stood in front of a science fiction convention in Metz, France, and delivered a speech that he called, if you find this world's bad, you should see some of the others. And the audience thought that it would be kind of like a joke, maybe like a fun, you know, literary lecture, like stories. But what they got was this. He said, 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. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present deja vu, hearing the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant. What Dick was describing in 1977, a programmed reality with glitches, where deja vu was a sign that something behind the scenes had just been updated, was almost word for word the version of simulation theory that Silicon Valley would start taking seriously 50 years later. He didn't do the math or know where the tech was going. He didn't have computers. He didn't even really have the language. But he had the insight and it seems like he was telling everyone who would listen. So here are the explanations we have so far. Right. Future humans could be AI. Maybe it's aliens or interdimensional beings. Maybe it's God, or at least the being that we call God that is the system admin of the simulation. Maybe elites are billionaires or the government. Probably not. But throwing it out there. And maybe the most disturbing answer isn't any of those. Maybe it's just the question itself. And what I mean is that no matter who you imagine running the simulation, it's just the fact that you are admitting that someone is. And the fact is that a lot of smart people keep arriving at the same conclusion. But here's probably the weirdest thing about the simulation theory that Philip K. Dick was pointing out. For all the philosophers, all the math, all the billionaires, all the DARPA programs, the reason that most people actually start believing isn't because of any of that. It's because of the feeling, the occasional hard to shake sense that something about reality is off or different. The moment that you could swear that you've lived through something before. The moment that a coincidence is just too perfect. There's a whole catalog of moments like that that people point to. And maybe the most famous version of this is the Mandela effect. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the Internet? That's a power move. 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So in 2009, a self described paranormal researcher named Fiona Broom was at a science fiction convention talking to a small group of people there. And then the conversation turned to Nelson Mandela, of course, the South African anti apartheid leader who had spent 27 years in prison before becoming the country's first black president. Broome casually mentioned that she vividly remembered Mandela dying in prison sometime in the 1980s. And she remembered the news coverage. She remembered seeing footage of his widow's speech, and she remembered riots breaking out in South Africa. But the whole problem with her memory is that none of it happened. Nelson Mandela didn't die in prison. He was released in 1990, and he went on to serve as president of South Africa from 94 to 99. He didn't die until December of 2013, 24 years after the death Fiona Broome remembered watching on TV. Now, here's where things get interesting. When Broome shared her memory with the people at the convention, a bunch of other people standing there were like, oh, yeah, I remember that, too. And they didn't just, like, vaguely agree, like, oh, yeah, maybe I remember. They remembered specifics. They remember the funeral. They remembered what people wore, what people said, the aftermath, the cities, the riots. People who had never met before, who had no reason to fabricate a memory, all carry the same vivid, detailed, incorrect recollection of an event that never happened. I mean, there's a bunch of other Mandela effect stuff. If you've never heard of it, you should absolutely Google it. I'm sure most of you probably have, and they've circulated all over. And you can try to answer some of these yourself. The cartoon family of bears from your childhood. Remember the Berenstain Bears? Is it with an E, like Berenstain or Berenstein? What about the famous Monopoly man? Top hat, mustache, cane? Does he have a monocle? Pikachu from Pokemon. At the end of his tale, is there a black tip? The line from the Empire Strikes Back. When Darth Vader reveals himself, does he say, luke, I am your father? If you answered yes to these, well, congrats. You have experienced the Mandela effect because none of the things that I told you are real. The bears have never been the Berenstain Bears. They've always been the Berenstain bears with an A. The Monopoly man never had a monocle. Pikachu's tail is solid yellow. There's no black on it. Darth Vader's actual line is, no, I am your father. And here's the thing. These aren't, like, obscure, trivial errors. These are things that millions of people remember a certain way. People who grew up with these books, watched the movies, played games. Confident, vivid memories that don't match a recorded reality. Now, of course, the scientific community has a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. So in 2022, two researchers at the University of Chicago, Wilma Bainbridge and Deposri Prashad published a study specifically examining what they called the visual Mandela effect. They tested hundreds of participants on dozens of cultural icons, and they found that, yes, the effect is real and it is measurable. But their explanation isn't a parallel universe or a shifting timeline or a glitch in our simulation. It's something that they called schema theory. The basic idea is that human memory doesn't work like a video camera. We don't store experiences perfectly in our brains to be accessed later. We store the gist of things, and then when we recall a memory, our brain fills in all the gaps that make sense. So a rich old timey businessman and a top hat, of course he has the monocle that fits the image. Or maybe they conflate it with the Planter's peanut guy who does have a monocle. A yellow electric mouse with a tail. A black tip on the tail is consistent with the black tipped ears. A spelling like Berenstein sounds a lot more familiar than Barren stain. Perhaps you know someone with the last name Stein and you're like, oh, that's obviously it. And then your brain just fills in the gaps over years until it's confronted with the truth. Now, according to this theory, our brain isn't lying to us. It's just filling in things, making the memory coherent in a way that isn't necessarily consistent with reality. But when you sit down and actually look at the catalog of Mandela effect examples, there's something about the consistency of the errors that isn't really explained. How are so many people misremembering things the exact same way? How are they remembering the same wrong things? And their brains are filling in the same gaps the exact same way across age groups and countries and generations. The cognitive science explanation works on paper, but it doesn't really explain that feeling that something is off. Because remember in 77, Philip K. Dick stood in front of this entire room in Metz, France, and he said, when some variable has changed and some alteration in our reality occurs, we would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present deja vu, hearing the same words. He was claiming that deja vu, that strange feeling that you've already experienced something or heard something in that exact moment, it's not a memory error. It was a signal, a clue that something behind the scenes that has been updated. Now, of course, that's not what the science says, that's just what his theory is. The neuroscientific explanation for deja vu is pretty well established. If you're curious, it's understood as a tiny memory misfire, a momentary glitch in how the brain processes familiarity. The temporal lobe sends a signal saying, hey, this is familiar. And then the frontal lobe fact checks that signal against actual memories. And then the two systems briefly fall out of sync. And then when the familiarity signal fires back without a corresponding memory to back it up, you get this weird feeling that you've been in a place before. Scientists at the University of St. Andrews have actually shown that deja vu is most common in younger healthy brains. And it actually disappears with age. Far from being a sign that something is wrong with you, deja vu is actually a sign that your memory check systems perhaps are working correctly. Now, of course, that's what the scientists say, but the science here isn't fully complete. And I'll show you how the science explains deja vu. It doesn't dissolve it though. Knowing that deja vu is a memory checking glitch doesn't make the experience less strange. You still feel like you've been a place before. You still feel for a second that reality is hiccuped, that you can almost predict what's going to happen next. And it's not just deja vu. It's like perhaps when you think of an old friend and you know a minute later they text you. Or the feeling of like being in an empty room and you feel like you're being watched. Or like the song lyric that you swear that you knew that you were certain of, but it's not actually in the song. Like it's the dream that feels more real than the day. It's like those crazy coincidences or like little like, like mystical things where you're like, that's crazy that this just happened. Every single one of those supposedly has a scientific explanation, whether it's confirmation bias or pattern recognition or probability. Yet every single one of them feels when you experience it, like a crack in reality. Which of course is what Philip K. Dick said it was. So here's what's laid out in front of us that we need to contend with. We have a theory built by Oxford philosophers, endorsed by billionaires, supported by suspicious physics at a quantum level, foreshadowed by ancient mystics, suggested by present day technological advancements, and confirmed perhaps at like a gut feeling level, perhaps on the everyday level, by millions of people who have at one point felt that something about reality isn't exactly what we're told, that things are a little different than perhaps how we feel. And it's a weird feeling we have to contend with it. So if the science tells us that our brains are glitching or that our brains keep glitching in ways that feel like a simulation, and a man who claimed that he had seen behind the curtain and described those glitches before computers were powerful enough to render anything more than just like a dot, well, what is the difference? Because in a world that is a simulation, in a world that feels like one, how would we know? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the brief synopsis of simulation theory. Now, it's a fascinating one because when you think about simulation theory, you're like, okay, like it doesn't feel to me like it's a likelihood. But then at the same time I'm like, I can't prove that it isn't. Like, it feels like the reality I exist in is so true, it's so consistent. Every time I do something, it is always it's your league to dominate in ea Sports Madden NFL 27. Powered by the all new Persona engine, you can build your franchise the way you want. And to really live your entire football journey, get the MVP bundle. It comes with Access to College Football 27 Madden NFL 27/ Deluxe Edition Rewards in both games. From campus legend to NFL superstar. Make your rise with the MVP bundle. Learn more at EA.com raid ad for everyone with mild lyrics user interact and in game purchases includes random items is rendered the exact way. But at the same time, if you're a religious person, you believe in God, then perhaps simulation theory is perfectly compatible. You're like, yeah, God is just the creator of the simulation and the way that it works. Perhaps it's through code, perhaps it's through, you know, just like God's immaculate power and the meditation of God. Perhaps if you come from like a Hindu tradition, you might have this philosophy of, you know, Brahma meditating all day underneath a Bodhi tree and creating all the reality that we know and it comes from the thoughts of the creator. Now maybe it's God turning on the computer, maybe it's not even a computer. Maybe that's just the language that we have to describe some type of super advanced technology that is the actual undergirding element of our creation of the reality we live in. So to me I'm like, I think you could probably be a religious person and still believe in this type of theory, right? Like to say, like, oh, simulation theory is true. So therefore there is no God. To me, it's like the exact opposite. If you believe simulation theory, then there is someone running the simulation or something. Maybe it's an AI, but now that AI is God. Maybe it's Allah, maybe it's, you know, Jesus Christ. Whatever it is for you, all of a sudden it's like, well, yeah, we're simulated. And there's even like, little things like how math is like the undergirding principle that is consistent, it fits throughout the entire universe. You can find like these mathematical equations in the creation of a pine cone versus the speed of light. Everything that exists can be broken down to math. And maybe that is a part of the code that actually created reality in its own right. But I don't know. Miles, did you learn anything about simulation theory? Do you have any thoughts?
- [48:22]
B
Yeah, this shit sort of. Sorry, I'm probably not supposed to curse. This stuff really, really makes my brain sort of hurt. I was reading the Wikipedia article as you were talking about it, and it's just.
- [48:34]
A
It's kind of hard because, like, it's one of these things that is theoretical. And you're like, okay, I can get there theoretically, but it's hard to, like, really embody it, to be like, oh, yeah, this is true.
- [48:43]
B
Yeah, it's big time scary.
- [48:44]
A
It's a weird thing because you can imagine like, okay, we are in a simulated reality. I get like probability statistics. If you think about supercomputers. Sure. But it doesn't feel like it's a simulation to me. So I don't, like, it doesn't change my reality that much. Like, imagine a scientist was like, hey, it's 100% a simulation. We're inside a computer right now. Does that change how you live? If anything, it makes me live better because I'm like, oh, there is no death. Just, you know. VIDEO GAME TURNS OFF I don't know
- [49:15]
B
what it would do to my brain. It. Yeah, I don't know. It's such a big concept that it's equally like big and terrifying, but also just so big and terrifying that it's like. I really don't dwell upon it.
- [49:31]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [49:32]
B
I'm afraid of heights, but when I get in a plane, it's so high up that you're no longer afraid of the heights.
- [49:37]
A
Exactly. I think that's kind of what it is. It's like, kind of scary, but then you kind of zoom out and you're like, all right, like, sure, it's true. Like, even for me, as someone that believes in God, I'm like, all right, God's real. He created the simulation. And maybe the simulation he created is through technology. Maybe it's like, through math. Maybe it's through something that, you know, that's how it works. It doesn't really change anything because it could still be the religion that I follow. It still could be, like, the worldview that I ascertain. It doesn't mean that I'm all of a sudden out of step now if all of a sudden God is like a fallible human being from the future. Now, that obviously fundamentally changes my understanding of, like, omniscience and, you know, like, moral goodness and stuff, but it doesn't necessarily change the fact that, like, there is something that exists outside of this reality.
- [50:23]
B
Yeah, that's true. It just would reframe what it is. But in a weird way, it's also if there is some sort of super something that is making the simulation, like, what is that? What is that God like?
- [50:38]
A
But now the concern is like, this is kind of like what the Gnostics are pointing at is that the God that created this world is not a good God.
- [50:45]
B
Yeah, interesting. It would.
- [50:46]
A
Yeah, the Gnostics would say, like, the God that created this world, the demiurge, is actually bad. And it's like, not totally bad, but, like, not totally good. Like, kind of human in a way that, like, created something that was filled with pain, but also love. And that there is an actual God above the demiurge that is the actual monad that is purely good, but the demiurge that created this reality doesn't even know that there's a monad. So then, according to the Gnostics, like, Jesus Christ is sent down from the monad to enlighten humanity that they're actually in a simulation. This is what Gnostic philosophy is. Again, this is not Christian. This goes against the Church teaching for clarity. But it's an interesting theory where it's like, what if there's a simulator that creates our reality that is outside of our reality, but doesn't know that there's a God even above them?
- [51:41]
B
Well, yeah, interesting.
- [51:42]
A
Like, imagine you created a computer simulation that runs all this stuff, and every one of those simulated beings inside your computer is a conscious being, but you yourself don't believe in God.
- [51:51]
B
Yeah, interesting.
- [51:52]
A
What does that now do to the conscious beings inside the computer? Like, what is their. What are they actually trying to achieve? They're trying to get to base reality, which is perhaps even outside of you. So the Creator that created them isn't even the top. God.
- [52:05]
B
Yeah.
- [52:06]
A
Whoa.
- [52:07]
B
It's funny that the deeper you dig into it, like my brain, like a computer, just sort of like overloads and goes, you can't power down. Yeah, yeah. Like, get out of this system. It's taking up too much ram because
- [52:22]
A
it's a little scary to think, like, hey, let's say you can create a computer simulation, but you yourself are a simulation. What does that mean for the entities that exist within your simulation? And then how many, how infinite is that regression to get back to base reality? And what even is base reality?
- [52:40]
B
Yeah. I don't want to be an anti in the ant farm now.
- [52:43]
A
What if ants had ants?
- [52:45]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [52:46]
A
What about those ants that are now in the ants. Ant farm?
- [52:49]
B
Yeah.
- [52:49]
A
And what are they trying to achieve? Where are they trying to go? Are they trying to transcend to just be the new people in the ant farm? Are they trying to get even above that? So when people talk about, like, layers of reality, that's perhaps what they're kind of touching on. And then, of course, the UFO stuff, it's like, oh, maybe the UFO thing is the system administration affecting our reality. It's not coming from a different planet. It's just interdimensional.
- [53:12]
B
Yeah. It's the hand of God being seen for a second.
- [53:14]
A
Yeah. And maybe God and demons and angels and UFOs and all this stuff are the same thing where it's outside of the fabric of our reality. It's done by the system admin. What do you guys think? Have you heard this theory before? Have you seen the Matrix? If you are familiar with Bostrom's work. Bostrom. Sorry, dude. If you're familiar with Bostrom's work, I would love to know what your thoughts are. If there's anything that you learned here that you didn't know before. What are your immediate feelings? If you are a philosophy of the mind researcher or some type of, like, consciousness expert, I would love to know your thoughts as well. Please drop a comment. YouTube, Spotify, I read all of them. I might not get back to you, but I'm sure someone will and it will be productive for the convo. Now, great news. If you like religious stuff, kind of like how we flirted with today. Well, you're going to love the Religion Camp channel where I go through what every religion believes and why. We just had an episode about the Amish that people loved. You can check that out. Also, if you like history stuff, we talked about Plato a little bit. Well, you can check out History Camp. Also, if you love philosophy content, and you want to see more of it on this channel, please let me know because I would love to explore more philosophical content. I just want to make sure it's something that you guys want. And if you just like to rock with, like, crazy theories and mysteries and deep dives and conspiracy stuff, well, great news. You're in the right place. Here at Camp Gagnon, we drop two episodes a week or one like this, another one with someone way smarter than me. Thank goodness. That can actually answer good questions. And we drop these episodes all the time, so make sure you subscribe to the whole camp universe. Never miss a day without some content. I appreciate you all dearly, and I'll see you next time. Peace.