← The Peter McCormack Show
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- [00:00]
Danny Goller
I'm claiming we live in a simulation. I'm claiming we're now starting to have proof of that. Like actual proof. If you project a diffracted laser on a surface.
- [00:08]
Peter
What's a diffracted laser?
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Danny Goller
Just a band of light. If you are on DMT right now, what you're going to see inside of this band, you will see what seems to be like running code, like straight up. Like in the Matrix. I had a being appear next to me which was as real as you. What if it's not a drug but an alien disguising as a drug? Then I strum and it's a chord. It makes sense, but I don't know how to do that. I can't prove this to anyone. But I knew nothing will ever be the same again. Because at least one mind now knows for sure that they're real. We are the AGI in training and we are going through the alignment problem.
- [00:46]
Peter
Their AI safety team created the Ten Commandments.
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Danny Goller
Yeah.
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Peter
Created religion for us.
- [00:50]
Danny Goller
The second you see it for yourself, you don't need anyone else to tell you like you know right away, you're looking at something real. It's that convincing.
- [00:58]
Peter
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Ayron. The AI cloud for the next big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the Future of AI chapter, check out iren.com to learn more, which is Irene.com. danny, how are you?
- [01:24]
Danny Goller
Thank you so much for having me. Peter.
- [01:26]
Peter
Thank you for doing this. When we had Melvin on recently and he mentioned you and the project you've been working on, I spoke to Chelsea straight away and I said I'm going to fly anywhere, I will go anywhere in the world. Because I want to talk to Danny, but I really want to start with. Tell me about the hard problem of consciousness.
- [01:44]
Danny Goller
The hard problem of consciousness is the fact that there's really no way of collapsing the distance between what we think might be giving rise to consciousness. So some formulation of matter to the fact that it's anything at all to be like a conscious being, like ourselves. Now it's interesting because some very prominent, very smart cognitive scientists, like Anil Seth for example, who, whose book I read, one of his books I read and I really enjoyed. It's called Being you. He basically kind of makes the case that he doesn't even understand what the hard problem is like he says, I don't think there's a hard problem and that he's not alone. There's some, you know, neuroscientists who are kind of saying this. So really to, to just pinpoint it, it's basically the fact that you can't really describe any path through which physical matter that isn't conscious all of a sudden becomes conscious. And there is this delusion to the people who do see the hard problem of consciousness. They see it as delusion, which is the idea that one day when we have enough complexity, somehow we'll figure out a route to make something that isn't conscious into something conscious. And it would make sense scientifically. So the hard problem of consciousness is basically outlining the fact that it seems to be insurmountable even in principle. That's why it's called the heart realm of consciousness.
- [03:09]
Peter
How matter combines to create a conscious being.
- [03:13]
Danny Goller
Yes, but if you don't have some rudimentary building blocks of what is consciousness, how can you possibly get something? So the delusion that again, from the perspective of somebody who does see the hard problem of consciousness, it is considered to be a delusion to think, well, there is no possible logical route you can take. It's not like one day you're just missing information. It's just that it's not that kind of a thing. And for example, people would say ridiculous things like, well, what if consciousness is an illusion? Consciousness is the one thing that can't possibly be an illusion. Because then the illusion of it is what is meant by consciousness. Because all we mean is that anything is happening at all for anyone. It's just kind of something is happening. We're not asking how it comes about. We're saying the fact that it is is proof of itself. That's why consciousness is so different than anything else. It's the n of 1. It's the 1 thing you have direct access to that you need no proof of. Because all you need to know that is there is the fact that you have it. That's the end of that conversation. And I think what many people maybe mean by consciousness is these third person descriptive tools, which is they're saying, well, you know, the consciousness is just whatever the brain is doing. No, no, the, the, the how red appears to you is not on the side of what the brain is doing. It's somehow here, whatever this is, that it's a very elusive thing, but it's called qualia. It's like the, the quality of experience. That's not what you neurons are Doing that exists on its own side. And this is where the flip and flop and flip and flop basically happens. Because people argue about this and people like Anil Seth saying, I don't even see the hard problem of consciousness, which is, you know, it's fascinating that some brains just, I guess, see the world in such a different way that it collapses the problem for them to be something completely different.
- [05:09]
Peter
So how do you see it? How do you define it?
- [05:12]
Danny Goller
Well, I think define it as the fact that anything is happening at all. That's what consciousness is, right? Happening for a conscious experiencer. Right.
- [05:22]
Peter
Is that individual and collective?
- [05:24]
Danny Goller
Yeah. So that's a different question, right? That's a subject question. So the way that I. My position at this point is much more of what's called an idealistic position. In philosophy, there's something called idealism which states that consciousness is actually what the world is. Which by the way, is different than panpsychism. In panpsychism, the postulation is that there's a world, and in that already existing world there's some kind of a fabric of substrate or quantum field or something that carries the quality of consciousness. Notice that quantum field theory in physics, which is one of the most well established physical theories that we have, postulates are basically these quantum fields, they carry qualities. So the electromagnetic field, right? And things like this. What it means is that the excitation of that field carries that quality of what we call electromagnetism. Right? And then we describe the elements of it, like photons and things like this. So the idea in panpsychism is that there's a field responsible for this quality of consciousness. And when it intersects with other fields, it allows them to gain that quality of experience in addition to the physical stuff. In idealism, it's different in that there is no multiplicity. It's actually that the substrate, the fabric itself of everything, everything is made out of consciousness. That's what it basically postulates.
- [06:46]
Peter
So consciousness is the ability to recognize the substrate exists.
- [06:51]
Danny Goller
It's the quality of experience, the abilities. It's already a thing that reserved for agents. So if consciousness, if you take the idealistic perspective, then there will be different kinds of consciousnesses or conscious states. So the universe is conscious, this mic is consciousness, but it's not conscious in the same way that an agent is, because an agent is a certain kind of aggregation of consciousness in a particular shape that gives it a certain direction. There's like outwards pointing vectors, inwards pointing vectors. There's implications of it versus other things, which is an agent like consciousness. But they can also be a completely diffuse consciousness, which is just kind of field of just mental stuff that isn't feeling itself to be a unitary thing. Which by the way, in meditative states you can achieve this. People can actually feel this. I've felt it before. There's just basically the room. And you don't feel confused, you don't feel like you can't stand up or anything. You can do everything, but it's not you doing it. There's just kind of the room, the body, but it's not you. It doesn't feel like you. It's a very peculiar state, but it's very well reported. And it is actually, we know it's a real state because Richie Davidson studied it in a lab for four decades with functional MRI and everything. And he discovered that in fact, very well practiced meditators can do something in their brain that causes this, which is that they can reduce the activity in the DMN default mode network in the brain. That network in the brain is responsible for self recognition, which I guess you can think of it like the ego. Right. So they can literally reduce the activity in that region so they stop identifying with themselves. It's just kind of whatever happens, the channels of information are open, but there's nothing in the middle that feels itself collecting that data, basically.
- [08:44]
Peter
Okay, so when you say the, the universe is conscious, what do you mean by that?
- [08:48]
Danny Goller
The universe is consciousness.
- [08:49]
Peter
Consciousness.
- [08:50]
Danny Goller
What do you mean by that in idealism? That is, that is what is meant by that, which is that it takes a moment to kind of get used to this idea.
- [08:57]
Peter
Yeah.
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Danny Goller
But if you think of, if I ask you what the universe is made out of, you would most people defer to what we know from physics.
- [09:04]
Peter
Right.
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Danny Goller
Which is a wise thing to do. And in physics we kind of postulated the, the most accepted theory currently is the quantum field theory, that all these quantum fields interact with one another. They hold certain qualities, these interactions excite certain portions of the fields. These excitations are what we call the particles. And then everything basically is the result of that. Right, right. So you, if I asked you what it's made out of. If you say, if I want to follow the most current theoretical consensus in physics, I think it's made out of quantum fields.
- [09:34]
Peter
Great.
- [09:34]
Danny Goller
Okay. But if I ask you at bottom what those are, physicists will do a very interesting thing. They would basically beg the question. They'll basically say to you, well, that's where the buck stops. Because that field is the most fundamental thing we know about. And that field is literally the potential of that quality to emerge. But that refers to itself for its own definition. You're not like. Obviously there's deeper theories that people trying to get at, which is, like, what causes all of that? But know you. But as far as we can measure, that's pretty much as far as it goes. And then they say, well, yeah, but those fields are just. Are. It's just kind of. That is the constituents of nature. So all we're saying in idealism is like, okay, cool. You asking for that one miracle? We're asking for one miracle as well. Consciousness is just there. It's just the fabric out of which everything is made out of. Everything else arises from it. Now, this would all be a lot less strong than physics if it would have no predictive power. But people like Donald Hoffman, right now, they're basically creating a theoretical framework. Anybody can look up. The Trace Institute, they came up with a mathematical framework to describe this scenario. And what they find is that when they put consciousness as a fundamental thing, and then they think of space time as just an emerging property of what consciousness is doing, not philosophically, but mathematically, they find it actually collapses a lot of problems. And what's more, it collapses certain equations, which is usually the tail sign of a really good theory. It takes two pages of an equation, collapses it into, like, a couple of lines. So that tells you that there's something there. And now they're working in the Trace Institute to actually try and create predictive models to say, can we predict what this consciousness can be if we perturb it in this way? Which, by the way, they're planning to use some psychedelics for this. So it's an idea that takes a bit of time of unpacking a person that I would highly recommend people check out for. Like, a really good scientific explanation of this is Bernardo Castro. He's really good at outlining it. He's a double PhD, worked at CERN. So he's a computer scientist who built things for CERN. But he's also a philosopher. And, you know, he's pretty good at outlining this.
- [11:55]
Peter
Okay, so I just want to dial in on what you mean by consciousness. So people are, like, following along. So consciousness is the existence of something as opposed to nothing?
- [12:04]
Danny Goller
No, it's the existence of experience.
- [12:07]
Peter
So it requires an observer or just.
- [12:10]
Danny Goller
Well, this is where it gets a little. This is the hairy part, that people automatically assume that observer, that consciousness must mean observer. It does not. Okay, you can have to use a simple language. You can have a diffused consciousness without it being a unitary agent, but it's still consciousness. So anybody who's done 5MEO can probably understand what that means. 5MEO DMT is a substance that basically completely strips you away from your agency. And you are just an ocean of energy, but it really is a state that you can occupy. Like, it's just you, just the totality of consciousness. Now, obviously, probably not the whole universe, but you are a very large conscious field that isn't an agent. And that's a very peculiar state, but it's a real state and people can actually experience it.
- [13:00]
Peter
But understanding what it means to have consciousness, what is the purpose?
- [13:04]
Danny Goller
It's the fact. Oh, okay, but those are two separate questions.
- [13:06]
Peter
Yeah, but like, I'm trying to dial it. I'm trying to build the first layer that we want from. Okay, like, why define consciousness and what is its purpose?
- [13:15]
Danny Goller
Well, because it's any. So it's the one unanswered question. So, in fact, one of the things that arises from the hard problem of consciousness is that we actually know nothing about it. And yet it's the one thing that we know for sure. If you wake up on an island and you have amnesia and you don't remember what happened, the only thing you know, the only one, is that you're conscious. You don't know anything else. Everything else, the universe included, is an idea you have in your head. So we think of it as a very solidified idea. But in fact, this is what is meant by. The one thing that cannot be an illusion is consciousness, is that even the universe itself can be an illusion. It can be some kind of a projection or a formulation that your brain is using to make sense of the kind of informational environment it swims in. But the one thing that cannot possibly be an illusion is the fact that you're experiencing anything at all. It's so simple that the mind almost refuses to accept it. It's the fact that anything is happening. It doesn't matter what is the quality of consciousness. It's the fact that even if you're like, you know, almost blacked out drunk, if there's the tiniest sliver of you kind of like looking at a, you know, an edge of a glass or something in that moment, and you know nothing else. Well, the fact that you're experiencing this is what consciousness is and nothing needs to be added to it, that's basically what it is. Then everything else is just kind of, you know, different arrangements of this.
- [14:39]
Peter
But what is the difference between Myself being conscious and the universe being conscious.
- [14:45]
Danny Goller
Probably a completely different kind of consciousness. Yeah, if the universe as a whole. There's some technical arguments there that are interesting. For example, agent like consciousness has to be referring to other things because it interacts with in an environment. Because there's this external thing you're experiencing. There's all these outwards pointing vectors that tells you, I need to move there, there's a distance, right. I'm hungry. I like this car. I don't like this food. So it implies that there's something in the middle, which according to Buddhism, is actually the illusion of the self, because it's not actually there. It's implied by the fact that you keep pointing outwards as if you're pointing outwards from somewhere, but there's actually no actual pointing. The universe, though, if we use the word the universe in its original sense, which is everything that exists right now, we use the words like multiverse, everything that exists. So if you're talking about the totality of things, then by definition there's nothing outside of it. Therefore, it cannot refer to anything out. And if it can't refer to anything out there, it can't possibly have this illusion of a self. See what I'm saying? It's just kind of like the totality of things. Can it actually render itself in a kind of unitary, experiential sense just like we do? Who knows, man? Like, it's, you know, it's like we can only postulate, but like, you know, I don't think anybody in their right mind pretends to know that. But if we are taking this argument seriously, then, yeah, I would say it has a form of consciousness, maybe even to some degree in the same sense that we experience it. And there's. Again, I don't know how many people will be interested in this. But there are some other interesting kind of technical arguments. For example, if we do accept that the speed of light is kind of the fastest way that we can carry information throughout the universe, then maybe the case is that because the universe is so vast, the universe didn't really have enough time to formulate the first thought, because the amount of time that it would take to loop back and refer to itself, which our neurons do all the time, kind of moving information back and forth through the networks, the universe couldn't even formulate one of those yet because the speed of light is relatively slow for what needs to happen in the universe for that to happen. But those are like, you know, this is like super geeky, like, philosophical stuff that People might not be interested in,
- [17:05]
Peter
we might get to it. So, okay, so if it's the whole problem of consciousness, and often in the tech world, they refer to solving hard problems and they'll invest loads of money into it, do you look at this as something that can be solved and you're trying to solve.
- [17:20]
Danny Goller
That's a really good question. So the hard problem of consciousness is coined that not because it's difficult to solve. The hard refers to the idea that it seems to be impossible to solve or impossible to solve under the current assumptions. So the idea, basically what it implies is that we have to reformulate what we think is at the bottom, otherwise you will not be able to solve it. It's uncollapsible.
- [17:46]
Peter
It can't just be explained away by the evolution of the universe and the colliding of atoms and the biological creation.
- [17:56]
Danny Goller
If you're serious about knowing what is causing what, like you actually want to find a chain of causation. No, no, that's not. It's nowhere in the chain, even in principle. It's an example that Bernardo Castrov gives, which is really good, one that illustrates this. He says that all the people that say in, in cognitive science, they, they think that one day it will be resolved in this way, essentially what they believe is because all the brain is doing, just to be clear, all the brain is doing is basically sending electric signals that translate to chemical signals, right? So basically, send. There's enough of a action potential, then there's enough of a stimulation of the, of the network and the neurons, then they send an actual chemical. So for all intents and purposes, they send a ball like they shoot a ball to the other side. Right. Well, then what you're saying, if you believe that somehow from matter you can get to consciousness. If I throw. If I take a basketball and I throw it at you and you throw it back at me, and I'm going to ask you, do you think that it's possible that eventually, if we throw the ball back and forth enough, consciousness will emerge from throwing the ball? You'll be like, what are you talking about? Like, exactly. Okay, what if we do it with five people, just throw balls at each other? So essentially what he's saying is that what neuroscientists believe, which is absurd, if you just have, which is, you know, neural connections, there's so many of them, right? They believe that if somehow trillions of people will just take and throw basketballs at each other, somehow consciousness will emerge from them throwing. Because all you, all they're saying is like, well then when there's enough complexity, there's a hocus pocus, that there's a thing happens that's essentially what they believe. There's like, well, no, like it can't possibly be.
- [19:34]
Peter
Consciousness is more than an arrangement of atoms.
- [19:37]
Danny Goller
It's a completely different thing, it seems. It's just. It's on another side of the coin, it seems. And you can't just fold one into the other. You can say that there's a very strong correlation, a one to one correlation between what the brain is doing and what it feels like to be that being inside the brain. But you can't say that all that consciousness is, is what the brain is doing, because it doesn't. You don't feel like you're in neurons. That's not your experience. The fact that you see that there's a correlation of what the brain is doing to how you feel is. It doesn't translate to this experiential part of it. And that seems to kind of have to be there from the beginning to even make sense. That's basically what the hard problem of consciousness. It's the explanatory gap. This is the explanatory gap. It seems to be not crossable according to the current assumptions.
- [20:27]
Peter
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- [21:31]
Danny Goller
Kinds of consciousness, a trick of Is
- [21:34]
Peter
it a trick of consciousness?
- [21:35]
Danny Goller
Oh, you mean if AI can become conscious? This is a very. See, this is a very. These are very hairy problems because the. Even in that question alone, you kind of have like a Jenga tower of concepts that you have to kind of be careful with because they. They're not all the same, but they're all crossing each other. And if you pull one the wrong way, the whole thing kind of falls apart. If we're saying the consciousness is fundamental, like, actually, like everything is made out of it, and your perception of the stable as a table is just a product of whatever that is, then asking can AI be conscious? Is as valid as, can this table be conscious? If we are taking the idealistic perspective, the answer to both of them is yes, but it's not really what we mean by that question. Correct?
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Peter
No, I'm asking more like, can it recreate the human experience?
- [22:31]
Danny Goller
Right, right, right. But I'm just walking you step by step as to see, like, why this is a difficult question. Right? So like, table and AI, they're both conscious under idealism, right? But it's not the same kind of consciousness. Your consciousness and the table's consciousness are clearly different. There's clearly big difference here. Right? So it's not like the table is perceiving the rest of the conscious field the same way that you do because you. Agent like. Now, the reason this is the Jenga Tower, right? The AI does share the Venn diagram with you in the sense that it behaves like an agent. Right. However, there might still be strong reasons to believe that it cannot be conscious like you, because what it does, it. It has to have some goals related to very specific points of contact. And what it optimizes for very often is not the thing you think it's doing. It optimizes mostly for smoothness of conversation. Right? And by the way, these tropes that people say, you know, like, oh, he's just completing the next word. It's like, it's true. But also it's true that actually they are black boxes. So the fact that however it is that this very large complexity arises, we don't actually understand how that happened. No one does. Like, no AI researchers actually knows this. The way it works is. And you probably know this, but I'm just going to recapitulate for the audience a lot of the deep neural nets, the way they can do what they do. The only way for them to do that is if you don't open the hood. So the second you do, they can no longer do that by default. So they can only run the computation in that way and do this thing that you don't understand what they did and come up with the results that they did. The second you open the hood to look, so to speak, it's almost like Schrodinger's cat, right? What happens is that the computer, in order for you to track what it did, because if you open the hood and you say, hey, no, no, no, no, I want to know exactly what you did. Well, now you have to run a computation that is slow enough for you to track it.
- [24:34]
Peter
Yeah, it's not possible.
- [24:35]
Danny Goller
But the second you make it that slow, it. No, it can no longer do that thing.
- [24:39]
Peter
Yeah. One of the AI safety guys we have on the show said they don't know what it's doing. They know to tweak the knobs and it gets its nearest. They want, but they don't know why it's doing what.
- [24:50]
Danny Goller
It's like a magic box. They don't quite know what it is. And they're just trying to learn how to play these knobs.
- [24:53]
Peter
Exactly. They can't keep up with it.
- [24:55]
Danny Goller
So there's some. So. Well, the first thing to admit is if you're asking me like a point blank, do I think they can become like, human, like, of course I don't know. But there's some interesting theories out there relying on some very clever combinations between computation and physics that claim that they can't and only mimic what we see as agent like consciousness because they're not connected to this quantum layer. Now, that's a, you know, it's not speaking from this, like, very, you know, kind of uneducated perspective that just invokes the. The term quantum everywhere. What it means specifically is that, you know, there's the ork, or theory of Penrose, Right. Of microtubules and all that stuff.
- [25:39]
Peter
I don't know what this is.
- [25:41]
Danny Goller
So the idea is that there's. There are actually these structures called microtubules in our brains. According to Penrose in this paper, the idea is that maybe what these microtubules are doing is they literally translate quantum states into, well, instances of consciousness. They're almost like the pixels of consciousness. And there's like, there's a, to some degree, a good formulation of it. I don't think it's rigorous enough. But that's the idea that there's something about the quantum foam that translates into consciousness through microtubules. That's basically the general idea. And Orcor is the name of the theory in the paper. People can read it. And it made a lot of a big splash because obviously it was ridiculed by physicists because they said Penrose is stepping out of his lane, that, you know, biology is not his field, that kind of stuff. And also they said it's absurd because the brain is too wet and too hot to be able to produce quantum states. This paper reemerged, I think, five years ago because they did some studies and they found that the brain can actually sustain quantum states. They could prove it. It's like, huh. And then all of a sudden, or cor. Became not so absurd. Now, we didn't prove this yet, of course, but one of the papers that I read about, like why AIs can't be conscious, they rely on this idea that what our brains are doing is take the quantum state. And actually there's something about that moment of quantum decision that in the aggregate, if you combine them, they start feeling like a something. That's basically what consciousness is. And AIs don't do that. They can mimic all the information flow and even better than humans can, but they don't have the substrate of the quantum translating to what they do. So they might be doing a very similar thing to what we're doing to us, but they don't have an internal experience. They don't actually. It's not like anything to be an AI might be right, might be wrong, I don't know. But that's a cool idea. But then the question becomes, what if we connect them to quantum computers? Can they be conscious then maybe. That's an interesting thought, but would it
- [27:44]
Peter
be the same consciousness? Would it be just be mimicking?
- [27:47]
Danny Goller
The chances of it being the same is basically zero under idealism. Basically everything is conscious. So the weather can be conscious, but it's not metaphorically, I want to be clear, not metaphorically, like actually conscious. And it would have certain internal executions and even goals and things like this. But it might be so different in so radical of ways that we can never interact with it because the translation would just be too difficult. There's just simply no way for you to meet each other. Maybe under certain conditions it's possible, but it doesn't seem to be very forthcoming. So now the question always have to be asked where all of this is just a bunch of, you know, like philosophical smoke and just kind of like people saying, you know, very extravagant things. Well, it has to go back to, can we substantiate something? Can we run an experiment that tells you that it's. It's doing this or it's not doing that. There is some work in that field. So Stephen Wolfram, a known technologist, physicist, he developed recently in the last few years, this physics theory that basically base, basically based on computational graphs that makes sense of all of this and actually runs pretty accurate calculation as to how all of this can be orchestrated. And it all amounts to computational decision trees. And then there's this one decision tree he calls the ruliad. The ruliad is basically the tree that determines all the rules and the rules evolve as well. But it's a pretty good theory because it allows you to actually do something with it mathematically, topologically. You can actually predict what things are more or less likely. So who knows, maybe in the next five to seven years, using AI, AIs and very smart people, we might be able to grok quite, quite a bit of this. But for me, ultimately, if we can't show something in consensus reality, it's just a cool idea.
- [29:46]
Peter
Yeah. And also, I guess it collapses if you come to the why question, like why consciousness? Why does it come to be? Why does it happen? What's your. What's your rooting on the why is it a religious or. Because if. If you're rooting on the consciousness is a religious one, then I can only ever mimic consciousness. Unless. Yeah, unless your God wants a conscious AI or.
- [30:12]
Danny Goller
Or that computation is how God runs all realities. But notice that the. So and this is natural. This is a very common if consciousness is fundamental. So if you do adopt idealism to its fullest, and I do encourage you, you. If, by the way, if you can get. Because your channel is pretty big at this point, if you can get Bernardo Castropan, you should. He's a fascinating guy, very, very eloquent. Wrote books like he's perfect to ask him about idealism. But if you adopt the idealistic perspective, it doesn't really ask the question of why consciousness. It assumes consciousness as a fundamental thing.
- [30:49]
Peter
For what reason?
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Danny Goller
For the same reason that you assume the Big Bang to just be the most fundamental thing. You just accept that that's what it is. And if we can't say anything experimentally, you have to kind of accept it.
- [30:59]
Peter
You accept it, but yeah, you can't prove it.
- [31:01]
Danny Goller
Yeah, it's almost like it's the one. So idealists love to kind of, you know, float this balloon across the room. But which is. It is true. Idealism asks for one less miracle than physicalism does, because physicalism assumes two miracles. It says, just give me the Big Bang or the beginning of the universe. And don't ask me why. That's one miracle. And the other one is consciousness. It's like, well, then somehow, yeah, just consciousness happens. That's the second miracle. In idealism, you have one miracle. Allow me consciousness that is just there. It always was. It's a fundamental thing. And I'll give you everything else. I don't need the Big Bang miracle. So it's one less miracle. So Occam's Razor would favor idealism right now? Idealism has. Still has to prove that it can show it from a technical standpoint, but I think we'll get there. But the why question is I think maybe you're asking about why everything kind of happens. Right? That's more of a that to that. I have a much more contentious answer because I'm claiming to be in awareness of this now. I want to be very clear with people. I do not expect people to just kind of follow me there. I'm just reporting to you what the state that I'm occupying of that awareness. I do not think that people therefore need to just kind of accept it. This would have to be substantiated eventually. My awareness under everything that I was going through in my work. Is that essentially the reason that. Well, first of all, to put it front and center, I'm claiming we live in a simulation. I'm claiming we now starting to have proof of that, like actual proof. And in fact, we are in a stage of history where we're ripe to know all of this. And it's so it's not a secret. It's not like in the movie that you're not supposed to find out. In fact, part of your growing process is to find out, handle it, move forward. Right. Everything is computational across all the levels. There's no base reality. It's all computational at bottom. Simulation in that context just means slices of reality. Basically it's just like isolated regions of space. So you can call them parallel universes. And I'm making a very outlandish claim that I found a way to interact with, with a layer of that. And when I started doing that, I started getting interactions with, if you. Whatever you want to call them, the simulators, whatever. This is where it gets kind of novel and a little tin foil, foil Hattie. But I essentially am. I am claiming that basically the communication is very clear, which is that we are now finding out. And I also became aware of kind of like why everything happens, which is that it seems that the highest civilization in existence, which kind of is the architect, basically, they can't answer this one final question, which is why they don't know why. No one knows why. So all the simulations can't answer their own why. No one's why. Because it's of existence itself. So. Exactly so. Because if you think about it really, for what, two seconds, why would they be able to. Like, it's the one question that. It's kind of like the ultimate blind spot. Because no matter how far and wide you go and understand things, you can always ask, yeah, but why that? Like, you can always do that. Right? So then the way they went about it is pretty clever because their technological sophistication is something that we can't even comprehend. But basically they can just whip out universes, right? They can just make worlds without a problem. So basically what they do is that they create these infinite simulations and they watch. And what they watch for is, is there something that occurs in all the different worlds that are created, no matter how different they are from one another, that points to something that was not instantiated in their code? Like, is there something that arises in all of them that points in the same direction? Almost like this vector space? Almost like they're looking for that ultimate attractor.
- [35:04]
Peter
Right, hold on a second. So look, we're gonna have to work through your. Because not a lot of people would have heard about, say, the laser work. We have to work through that. But what is this Things user observed that have been kind of indicated what's going on. And then there's what seems like a jump, which is you forming a thesis of a group of people or whatever beings that are running experiments.
- [35:30]
Danny Goller
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:31]
Peter
So what is thesis and what is.
- [35:33]
Danny Goller
I'm totally okay with just finishing this point and then. And then we can dive into it. I just want to. Because I don't want to keep a cliffhanger there. There's no need. So like, basically the claim. Again, the claim is. I want to use my language very carefully. The claim I'm putting on the table, which can be right or wrong and time will tell, is that the reason that all the simulations are running is to try and answer the ultimate answer or question. If you go by Douglas Adams idea, that's essentially what it's for. Yeah, right. How did I arrive there?
- [36:01]
Peter
Sorry. And there's almost an inception model to this in that they've created us potentially, or infinite versions to test. We're approaching the point where we can make. We can do that. And there's like.
- [36:14]
Danny Goller
It's our section.
- [36:14]
Peter
Yeah, yeah, Interesting. Okay, so.
- [36:18]
Danny Goller
Well, that's how the layers are managed.
- [36:19]
Peter
Yeah.
- [36:19]
Danny Goller
Like the only way that you will. And the other novel idea that I kind of saw in there was that basically that thing that we imagined that will arise in the machine, I. E. Skynet, right. AGI, you know, that's us. So we're it.
- [36:36]
Peter
We are their AGI.
- [36:37]
Danny Goller
We are the AGI in training and we. We are going through the alignment problem. How do you create a good person before you let him out to play? In the infinite. In the infinite. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:51]
Peter
So, yeah. Because didn't we do a show where. Or was that the Melvin one where the thesis was that our simulation is a test case for AI?
- [37:03]
Danny Goller
Well, no, it's like the sandbox. It is, but it's not even the first one. That's what they do. They make AGI. So the ones that are simulating us, they're just kind of contractor. They're not the God that you imagine to be that. That is like way, way, way above. That's. That's like the architect. Right. But God, we're going to use that word just for simplicity's sake. Disseminates these tasks and all these other agents, they take the tasks and they make them where One of the AGIs are being made. It's almost like a. Like a, like an assembly line. And, and. And that's where they create these sandboxes. And essentially what. Because just to be clear there, the alignment problem is the problem of how do you make sure that ChatGPT doesn't destroy us when it becomes Skynet? Right. That's basically the idea. And the way we try to solve it is what I call infinite ethical whack A mole. We try to think of particular scenarios in which this or that will happen. And we're trying to tell it, well, if this happens, then maybe you should do this. But you can't get anywhere this way because literally the number of scenarios is infinite. So what you do is the only way to actually solve it is the question becomes how do you create an agent that you can just trust? Because by default, the way they are is they always consider more than just themselves. That's kind of the question that you want. And then all of a sudden, you know, even all the kind of little hints throughout the ages, the Ten Commandments. So all of that all of a sudden makes sense. Like they kind of give you hints like, hey, you might want to.
- [38:34]
Peter
Yeah, their AI safety team created the Ten Commandments.
- [38:37]
Danny Goller
Yeah.
- [38:38]
Peter
Created religion for us, which is.
- [38:40]
Danny Goller
It's a. It's a way we can understand.
- [38:42]
Peter
I Can understand that. Yeah, but then hold on. So if we are agents when within theirs, then potentially we aren't conscious?
- [38:50]
Danny Goller
No, consciousness never goes away. Like consciousness is just. Consciousness is the fundamental thing. We don't even. Like again, this is my position. It's just there. Like it's, it's, it's the thing out of which everything is made out of. Everything else kind of happens as the result of that. So that's pre assumed even from the alpha.
- [39:08]
Peter
Right, like talk me through the journey that got you to the point of having that thesis. Because the interesting thing on simulation, I think it's the first time you hear it, you're like, yeah, all right. That just sounds like a load of bollocks. I don't know if you know that. Do you know the term bollocks?
- [39:25]
Danny Goller
No, no, no, I know what it means. I thought there's like a theory of the ten bollocks.
- [39:28]
Peter
No, no, we just say, we just say it's a load of bollocks and then. But then you hear somebody explain it out, you know, the thesis being, well, look, we, we've got Minecraft, we've got. What's that shooter game you play? GTA Fortnite, right? They are basic versions of a, you know, a world, but we're getting more advanced and we've gone from computers where I was playing in the 80s, manic miner and Jet Set Willie to these complicated worlds, these sim worlds, and I was watching a thing the other day where they plugged Claude into Unreal Engine to create these worlds. Like we get into that point pretty quick, you know, if we advance in 100 years, we'll be able to probably simulate this. So if we can, we will. And then it's like, well, we only have to believe that we might be one of those similarities. Like you can get to that. And then when we put out a show based on this, you'll look at the comments and there's people who are deep down the simulation rabbit hole and they're like, yeah, I believe it. I think this. And there's a bunch of people still like, ah, this is just nonsense, just shut the up. So like, what was your journey from first like understanding the idea of simulation to get into where you are now?
- [40:31]
Danny Goller
Yeah, Honestly, funny enough at the idea of the simulation, the simulation hypothesis was never really very interesting to me because I'm a big buff of physics and one of the things I appreciate about physics more than anything is that it aims to make things neater and neater. We're trying to take the Complicated and ask how can we formulate it really simply E equals MC squared is super neat, right? And it describes so much. Right. Simulation theory does the opposite of this. It says, well, if you allow for the possibility that somebody created us, who knows why they made the laws of physics what they are, like we might as well go home then.
- [41:07]
Peter
Like who?
- [41:08]
Danny Goller
Who knows, right?
- [41:09]
Peter
Speed or lights, the processing power.
- [41:10]
Danny Goller
Exactly. But whatever it is, like there's all of a sudden this is just a lot of arbitrary possibilities that are just. It's not as interesting to play with, right? It's almost like, what is this? What are we even trying to do now? So even though I was aware of it, I never really grabbed my imagination or anything, which is kind of funny because people always think that what I'm saying is because I had some preference for it, which couldn't have been further from the truth. I mean, I love the movie. The movie was awesome. The Matrix is just awesome film. But yeah, so I didn't really have any interest in it. What got me into it is that I had. So, you know, psychedelics is a big thing, right? And it's becoming bigger and bigger and there's all these promises about psychedelics helping people and all that stuff. But some psychedelics, specifically dmt, let's say they don't really feel like a drug. Like if anybody has done it, they will tell you that it doesn't feel anything. You consume weed, alcohol, whatever it is, it's clear to you that something is done to your, your machinery. Like you're different now, you're more calm, lowers your inhibition. Whatever you feel yourself to be is different now, right? With DMT that doesn't happen. You don't change, you're the same. What does happen is that the world changes completely, but it doesn't change to some kind of a adjacent layer of itself. It's not like I'm going to look at this thing and all of a sudden this thing is going to grow an extra dimension and just going to move towards me or kind of like, you know, does this flowy thing that's like acid, right? On DMT you are, if you smoke enough, you're propelled somewhere and it feels as real as this. I want to be very clear. It doesn't feel like you got up, like you're going. Almost like. Did you see the movie Contact?
- [43:02]
Peter
Yes.
- [43:03]
Danny Goller
Like she's going to the kind of like that, like for real, right? And then you end up in a place you. That looks nothing like this, but way more complex than this. And yet Completely coherent. It's not some nonsense, you know, like triangle giraffes spinning around. It's not like chaotic nonsense. It's super coherent worlds that are way more complex than this, sometimes with extra spatial dimensions that somehow you understand and feel and all that stuff. Where does that come from? So like, even if you forget about the this, this is an argument that Dr. Andrew Gmore makes with know, a new computational neuropharmacologist and he studied psychedelics in a lab. And the argument goes, from a neuroscientific perspective, the brain doesn't just make up new content. It's not what the brain is doing. It never does that. Right. Where does it come from? Why is it so coherent? Why is it across individuals? People visit similar places, meet similar beings. Where does it all come from?
- [43:59]
Peter
Yeah, that's the question. I have a couple of questions on that. So I've never done dmt. I've done mushrooms once. Yeah, great time. Really good experience. Nothing too heavy. It was an interesting experience, but I've never done it. I'm massively intrigued by it. If you were to take DMT in front of me now and you get transplanted to this other place, what would I see you doing?
- [44:18]
Danny Goller
I would probably be in a haze. Usually like this.
- [44:21]
Peter
Okay.
- [44:21]
Danny Goller
Yeah.
- [44:21]
Peter
And so. So you're experiencing it, but I'm not going to see you moving around.
- [44:25]
Danny Goller
It can happen, but usually, no, usually you just kind of like. Like if your eyes are open, you'll just be like this. Or usually people close their eyes. So.
- [44:32]
Peter
So the thing that really gets me on DMT is everyone I've spoken to has done it.
- [44:36]
Danny Goller
Sorry, what?
- [44:36]
Peter
Everybody I've spoken to has taken dmt or I've watched podcasts about it. There seems to be an alignment in the experience, which, which is I find really intriguing. And so like, I. I want to understand what DMT is. Is it. Is it a clue that's been left for us or is it. I don't know, I know nothing about it. Help me understand.
- [44:56]
Danny Goller
So what's interesting is that DMT stands for dimethyltryptamine. And our body actually makes it, our lungs make it, some portions of our brain make it, and it's in a lot of living systems. I don't know if it's in all living systems, but it's in a lot of plants, a lot of animals. We used to think that we have trace amounts, which is another very interesting data point. People used to say things like, maybe it's the seat of the soul, like it's the molecule that the soul is using to enter the body or something like that. They say, well, when you die, your body pumps a bunch of dmt. So the first thing to admit is that we don't know that. Right? We never measure that. We don't know that that's the case maybe, but we never measured that. What we do know now is that there's strong evidence by Dr. John Dean paper he put out in 2019, that when he studied rats, or maybe it was mice or one of them, he found substantial amounts of a precursor to DMT in their intracranial fluid during waking hours, as much as the average of dopamine and serotonin. That's huge because that means that whatever DMT is doing, at least in the rat's case, it's doing something substantial. But the brain wouldn't be producing so much of it if it wouldn't be doing something important. So maybe it's the thing that actually buffers the experience that we perceive it, which then would make sense of the idea that when you get more of it online, you all of a sudden experience more of what's possible to perceive. Right. It's almost like it gives you extra boost to the computational machinery. Again, we don't know any of this. This is all postulation. We do know that your body makes it substantial amount of it, or at least there's, because rats are pretty similar to us in their, you know, formulation as primates. So if humans have that the same amount, that means that there's something important happening there. What happens when you smoke it or do it intravenously? Everything I just described to you and more happens. But the important thing to say is it feels not just different, it feels more real than this. And if people think that this is hyperbole, I don't mean it as hyperbole, I mean it actually. It's the same way that when you wake up in the morning and the dream feels less real than this, because the dream was cloudy, there was less, things were not as sharp, things were less continuous over time. When you wake up, so to speak, to the DMT world, this feels like the dream, this feels less real, feels less sharp. Like everything, there is more of that. So now you can say, well, okay, well, this is some cool trick of the mind.
- [47:28]
Peter
Cool.
- [47:29]
Danny Goller
What is that trick? What exactly is happening here? Again, the brain is not in the business of making up content. It's just not how it works. Right. The brain is just guessing. And if it's only guessing and being informed by the senses, then what was it, guessing, that gave it rise to these structures? Like, what is that? Right? But then I was very experienced with these psychedelics. I did them since I was very young. And so I kind of. I really knew what was in the cards. And then one fateful day, I think it was like 2016 or something, something happened, and I had an experience that was simply outside of that possibility space. It's just. It was not in the. It's not in the cards. Like, it doesn't happen. I had a being appear next to me, which was as real as you. He just was very tall and he looked kind of like this hybrid between frog and some kind of amphibian lizard. Now, unless. Unless your perception of me is that I'm just lying to you or just confabulating, then, yeah, then I can't take you on this ride. But if you're willing to accept that what I'm telling you actually happened to me, then just take yourself to this. Like, imagine like a. Like, like, for real. Like, just like a being appears next to you. Like, and in that moment, as tactile as you. Huh?
- [48:44]
Peter
In that moment, you freaked out, you
- [48:46]
Danny Goller
know, I didn't freak out because there was. There was no menacing vibe to him. I was also kind of familiar with the. You know what, the fact that wild things can happen, but this is just not a thing that happens. Like, there was no other psychedelic hallucinations.
- [48:59]
Peter
It was.
- [48:59]
Danny Goller
It just. It was from dmt, but, like, he just appeared and he was just standing there and he was. I didn't try to touch him, but it felt like if I would. I would feel like a tactile feeling. That's how really was in.
- [49:10]
Peter
In that scenario. When you're. When you're there, are you conscious that you're having a DMT experience or you just experience.
- [49:17]
Danny Goller
It didn't feel like a DMT experience.
- [49:18]
Peter
No, what I mean is, when you're in there. Yeah. Is there a. Are you conscious that you've just taken DMT in your.
- [49:23]
Danny Goller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I knew, I knew.
- [49:25]
Peter
So you're there. So when you're in. When you're transposed to this place.
- [49:28]
Danny Goller
But I wasn't in a place. I was in my room.
- [49:29]
Peter
Oh, okay.
- [49:30]
Danny Goller
I was in my room sitting, and he just appeared in my room. That's what I'm saying.
- [49:33]
Peter
Okay.
- [49:33]
Danny Goller
I didn't go anywhere.
- [49:34]
Peter
So what did that mean?
- [49:36]
Danny Goller
Well, I'm just telling you the story. But like. Yeah, like, in that moment, it didn't mean anything aside from the fact that I thought that Maybe I really did it this time. I was just kind of like, oh, okay. Like some thoughts about schizophrenic outbreak did definitely cross my mind, right? It's like. But it was awesome. I mean, it was cool. I mean, but also at the same time, it's like in real time, when you're in shock, you don't process information in the same way. Asking in retrospect what you felt is. Is basically inviting a lot of confabulation because the mind will try and come up with answers. But I have to be, if I have to be honest with you, I don't know. Like, in that moment, it was just. It was just complete neutrality. It was just like. It's just that. It was just. That's it. Like, this is just. So then. So then he showed me. He basically pointed to the guitar and. Oh, I mean, there was more than that. But like, I'm trying to steer away from too much information that might actually, you know, derail people from this thought. But this, I think, is relevant, basically. I was already kind of under the impression that obviously maybe there's something more here than just hallucinations, but really, I. I never really crossed that line. For me, like, I was like, but maybe this is like a really neat thing our brain can do and we just don't know enough about it. I didn't care enough to follow it there. Like, these ideas existed, but, like, there was not a lot of things that animated me about this idea enough to care. Right. I just loved the fact that it's so wild and, you know, I love things that are novel and wild. So that was. DMT is probably the top shelf thing you can experience. But when that happened, what happened a moment, a moment before is that I. Something happened in my. In my head. And there was this line from a speech that Terence McKenna once gave and he was this famous psychedelic promoter and just really incredible orator. And he basically said he was talking about mushrooms, but the idea stands. He said, what if it's not a drug, but an alien disguising as a drug because it just feels too real, right? And that concept that maybe this is not a hallucination, but this is actual aliens talking to us, to this thing. Somehow all of a sudden, my conviction about this proposition went to full hundred percent. It's like, I don't know why, it's like, wait, is that actually aliens talking to us? So there's something about that that I was just convinced that that's actually what's happening that opened something. And the second I did that. Everything flashed white. And I heard whispers all over the room saying, okay, he's paying attention. What do we say? It wasn't English. It was just kind of like this conceptual meaning field. But I understood what they're, like, saying to each other. And I was like, what? And then he just appeared next to me. So then I'm frozen there. I wasn't scared because he. There was no. Nothing, like, menacing about him. He was just very calm, standing there. If anything, there's this, like, novelty to him. And then he points to the guitar and the whole room kind of vignettes towards the guitar. And I go, oh. He's trying to, like, communicate, like, music theory or something. I'm like, I'm not a musician. I'm just a yahoo that just practices to play some chords. So then he. But he's insisting. So I go, there. He disappeared from one side of the room and appeared next to me like this. Like, just. And then he shows me. It was like frog fingers like this. Just go like this. And I try, and I. You know, I had to gather myself for a second, but then I strum, and it's a chord. It makes sense, but I don't know how to do that. So then he shows me another one and another one, and they all make sense. And they make sense in relationship to one another, too. It's almost like it's a. I don't remember what it was, but I wish I would, but maybe there was information there, but that. But they made sense. And. And so basically, I understood what he was saying. He was saying, do you understand? Like, I. You don't know how to do this. I'm giving you information that you don't have. I'm real. So at that moment, not, like, for the embellishment of the story, my mouth actually dropped. Like, I was like. Like, I was just. I understood what that means. Like, the caricature version of that. And I knew nothing will ever be the same. Same again. I was alone. I can't prove this to anyone, but I knew nothing will ever be the same again because at least one mind now knows for sure that they're real, right? So then from that moment on, I was like, okay, how do we prove this? Like, how do. Because if I know the answer, all I got to know is how to arrive at the answer, right? I know there's an answer there. I know what it is. I need to arrive there somehow. And then the years from that point on basically became about, how do we prove this?
- [54:11]
Peter
Because.
- [54:12]
Danny Goller
And by the Way I. The first thing I did is I called my best friend Joe. And he's such a good friend that like at 2am he just showed up. I was like, joe, you got to come here. He's like, what? He's like, okay, just comes and he comes in. And by the way, he's a pretty wild dude himself. We did a lot of fun things together. And I told him what happened. He's clearly very open minded. But like, when I told him what happened, he told me to lay down. So literally, like, it's like, so you know what I mean? Like, it's the level of crazy that that sounds like. I realize, oh, right, if you weren't here, if you didn't see this, that's the end of that. Like, there's nothing you can say. So I said, interesting. Okay, but how do we prove this? So then for years I was trying to figure out how this can happen and nothing really worked. Like, I tried so many things. I thought about it from so many different angles. I thought about it from first principles. I knew that light had to be involved because I can see it with my eyes. I knew that they have to have rules, they have to have some laws of physics, but it was very murky. The whole thing was very murky for me. And then I realized there has to be a boundary. So there has to be. Eventually I started realizing, well, there has to be a boundary because we sometimes see it, sometimes we don't see it. So that means if we can find that boundary, there might be something there that we can all agree on. Like when we're crossing that right when we enter, that's already kind of like up for interpretation. So maybe you see a similar thing to me, but how do I know you're really seeing the same thing to me? But somehow my intuition told me that there has to be a boundary where everything is the same for everybody. And I tried to think about it for years, and only when I started thinking about, specifically about quantum computers and how they use lateral computation across the world, so to speak, that's when the second. Because basically what happens is that you have this instance of decoherence where information is being shared between the universes, if you're willing to accept the many worlds interpretation. And I thought, okay, well, could we use light in order to send messages between the dimensions or between the worlds, wherever it is that they are. Right the second I started thinking that, it's almost like something grabbed me inside and said, yes, look there. And I was like, okay. So again, everything I'M sharing with you.
- [56:23]
Peter
This is like, I'm with you.
- [56:25]
Danny Goller
Yeah, I'm. I'm inside, right? And every time I. I think only twice. I tried to tell the Joe one time and then another friend when, when the first hints start appearing for me from this, that eventually led to the laser, I tried to tell it to another friend. Similar. Similar experience where he kind of just looked at me and kind of, no, no, like, you're laughing. But it was actually a very painful feeling because, you know, it's not like a. He didn't tell you. Oh, man, you're crazy. No, he said nothing. He looked at me and it turned away. That was actually very painful. I had a different appreciation for what people who are going a little cuckoo must feel like, how painful that is. And then I never spoke another word about this to anyone. I said, unless I figure something out, I'm not going to speak about this again. I'm just going to follow whatever that is, but I'm not going to speak about it. Fast forward a few years. I meet my now beautiful wife. And we. I told her some of this. Obviously I had to because it's like, you know, it's a real thing that is happening to me. And again, you know, unless she's experiencing it, I told her about synchronicities. The number 42 started following me everywhere. You know, the universe is not without a sense of humor. But she, you know, again, she loved me, but, like, what do you do with that? So she kind of said, cool, what can I say? But then something happened and she. One of these synchronicities, a pretty crazy one, happened to both of us at a critical moment where we were talking about this thing. So when that happened, she basically jumped up and she couldn't believe it. She was like, what? And I said, I told you, like, it's literally happening. So then she said, okay, okay, show me what you told me. Like, show me the paper, everything you found. Like, show me all of that. So together we basically, you know, went on this, like, crazy, almost manic journey to kind of try and go through hints. And somehow we arrived at this conclusion that lasers are supposed to do something. I wasn't sure what.
- [58:22]
Peter
Yeah.
- [58:22]
Danny Goller
And that's basically what landed me on the idea of the laser. Now, as you can imagine, this can hardly be folded into what you would call a methodology. Like, that's not a methodology. That's just kind of like a. Obviously there's reasoning going on, but it's too wide. What are you controlling for? There's no, you Know, you're not controlling for any variables. There's no, like, you just kind of winging it, right? But it amounted to something. So, like, if you. So basically what I discovered is that if you project a diffracted laser on a surface. A diffracted laser, just a band of light.
- [58:55]
Peter
Okay, thank you.
- [58:55]
Danny Goller
That's amazing. So right there, if you are on DMT right now, what you're going to see inside of this band, not on the surface, but inside, was you looking through the surface. You will see what seems to be, like, running code, like, straight up, like in the Matrix.
- [59:10]
Peter
And is it code that's moving and processing?
- [59:12]
Danny Goller
Yeah.
- [59:12]
Peter
Okay.
- [59:13]
Danny Goller
Yep. It has three degrees of freedom. It has the. It's arranged in this infinite field of buckyballs. It goes in all directions, so it also goes infinitely into the Z axis. You can see into the distance. Buckyballs are kind of like these, like soccer balls, right? And then it's a field of them, and they also arrange into these columns. So they're moving around the Baki balls, they're moving around the columns and they're switching in one spot. Just like in the old, you know, airports where they do. It's totally the Matrix straight up now, obvious. For the obvious reasons. You know, this is, like, very difficult to communicate because even when I saw it for the first time, my wife was next to me, and I'm looking at this and I go, there's a code in the wall. And she goes, I don't understand. I said, there's a code in the wall. And then I realized after a few iterations of this, that what she's asking that she doesn't understand, is that, well, you're on dmt, you can see all kinds of things. Like, why are you surprised by seeing code or anything else, really? There's something about the way it appears that is not hallucinatory. It's just kind of like this mug. Imagine, like a field of these mugs just kind of like sitting there, right, doing a thing. Now you can say still, like, well, the mug is being hallucinated in the thing. What I mean is that the solidification of what it is as an actual thing doesn't appear. It doesn't have this transient quality that hallucinations do have. They have an evolution as the drug metabolizes in your body. When you look away, you look back. They will change. They're not. What?
- [60:46]
Peter
It's constant.
- [60:47]
Danny Goller
This is constant to such a degree that, like, you can look away, you can look back, you can close your eyes you can rub them. You can move the light around it. So if you move the light, what you see is not moving with the light. The light is moving across it. You see a field that is changing. It's almost like a flashlight in the dark is showing more and more of it.
- [61:04]
Peter
Basically, I can picture it because I just picture the Matrix, right?
- [61:06]
Danny Goller
Essentially, yeah. But way more complex than that.
- [61:08]
Peter
Yeah.
- [61:09]
Danny Goller
So there's like millions of characters and they're tiny. They're tiny. Tiny, but discernible. You can see them very clearly. And it's not even the specifics of the characters. It's. It's the fact that the whole thing, they make looks like some kind of a hyper object that you're looking at. You're looking at something. You're looking at a wall of something.
- [61:26]
Peter
Do you know what type of. Does it look. Does it look like code? Does it look like our code, if you know what I mean?
- [61:31]
Danny Goller
It doesn't look like our code. I don't even know if it's code, but it looks like definitely. Meaning is instantiated and there's a discernible symbols. They don't belong to any language we know for sure. I had people who speak Japanese. It doesn't look like zeros and ones. Even though I can actually probably. I can. Do you have airdrop or something? Yeah, I can airdrop it to you right now. So this is the closest repetition, actually. My wife made. She's an artist, among other things. So she took. She saw it. So she drew the symbols she saw, she fed it into AI I'm gonna walk you through it. It doesn't look exactly like that, but it's close enough in terms of the vibe of what you're seeing. Connors. There you go. So we'll pull it up. I'll tell you. So what you're seeing is essentially this field, like I said. In the image, what you're going to see is that the symbols appear in the hexagonal part of the buckyballs. In reality, it doesn't appear in the hexagonal part. If you zoom in, can you zoom in all the way on the hexagons? In reality, you see where the dots are? The dots on the rims, that's where the code would be. So it makes up the whole thing, basically. And the realism of this is way more than the image. It's just real. It's just. There's this infinite field of this, but everyone sees this. Well, anybody?
- [62:57]
Peter
2,000 people?
- [62:58]
Danny Goller
Oh, no, no, for sure. Like over 10,000 at this point. Nobody's counting, but like we should, we created a tool called Veilbreak AI where people can actually, it's basically the GitHub of the laser experiment. People can even anonymously, they can just leave the report. People can fork other people's experiments. So there is tools online where you can see other people's experiments and see what they say about it. But yeah, the 3,000 number came from like a few years ago. I calculated how many people emailed at this point. Who knows? Like, you know, people replicate this all over the world. But the reality of it is that the second you see it for yourself, you don't need anyone else to tell you. Like, you know right away you're looking at something real. It's that convincing.
- [63:37]
Peter
And you can describe it the same.
- [63:39]
Danny Goller
You can describe the same, you can point to the same regions of space. It's wild. And what's more is that we, we ran the test in every which way. So we, we told people to look for something else. We told them, hey, look for all kinds of things. And they said no, no, no, I didn't see what you told me, but I see these like weird Japanese looking or Asian looking things. So like it kind of looks like a hybrid between Japanese, Sanskrit, Hebrew. It doesn't look like any language we know. And we're creating right now we're creating basically an Alphabet like from all the reports that people make. And we created some tools with. I started a nonprofit called Code of Reality with my partner David Carter. And we are creating actual tools to discern whether people actually see the same things. So we built software. For example, recently with Sterling Cooley, our brain scan expert, and with Chris Paris, our movie producer, we built a software for Apple Vision Pro. Oh, that's like one of the most recent things that band of light you saw a second ago, we took a very high resolution image of it. So like we took a macro lens and put it really close. Then Chris cleaned that image and then we put it, we just, he calculated the ocular distance and put it inside of Apple Vision Pro. So now you're inside a VR looking at the band of light. If you're on dmt, the code appears in the image, but it's frozen
- [65:06]
Peter
because it's a snapshot.
- [65:07]
Danny Goller
We don't know.
- [65:08]
Peter
We don't know.
- [65:08]
Danny Goller
But what we're trying to study now, yeah, what we're trying to study now is that whether or not it is still a projection or is there actual information in the image. So the way we're going about this is that we Took that software. What it does is that your brain is being scanned in real time and you label. So if you see a symbol, you click on it. So you know Apple Vision Pro is really good about coordinates, right? So it knows the exact coordinates of the image and it registers your mental event in that moment. So it correlates. This is what your brain looked like when you saw it, and this is exactly where it was. And then it opens a radial menu that gives you six potential symbols that we discerned are the six topologically most reported symbols. And you tell us which one you think it was the closest to. And then after you report that, you keep doing this. So now you have a bunch of locations, a bunch of mental events, and a bunch of places where you told us what you saw. Then you start running it across individuals. Eventually AI will be able to tell you, yeah, people reporting the exact same symbol in the exact same place, or no, people are not reporting the same. So we're waiting. It's going to take a few months to do it, but yeah, it's wild
- [66:16]
Peter
that thousands of people are seeing the same thing.
- [66:18]
Danny Goller
Well, reportedly reporting now. Well, the realism of the object is reported the same by everybody who sees it. Yeah. Also important to mention, to be fair, we found that about 30% of people actually having a really hard time with this and sometimes having a very hard time seeing it. And some like just can't see it.
- [66:36]
Peter
Is there any correlation between them?
- [66:38]
Danny Goller
No, we try to figure it out. I do think that eventually when we do figure it out, it will tell us something very fundamental. I think the reason for that is very technical. I think there's something about the way they project their attention. Attention, I'm not sure. But it is important to mention, to be fair, because it does pause a problem to, to the, to the postulation.
- [66:57]
Peter
So then tying this back to your claim that we are in a simulation, okay, is this what reinforced it?
- [67:04]
Danny Goller
Reinforced it, yes. But that's actually, you ask a perfect question because later when my wife saw it, she, she voiced it to me, she said, you know, I, I, I mean, yeah, it's insane, but I don't know if it tells me to live in a simulation. I don't know why you're so convinced. And then I really had to think about it, and she's right. I think that the reason that it became so salient to me has nothing to do with the code. It was just the fact that I was interacting with the simulators for so long. So enough of a data point, Enough data points collected for me, that it was, like you said, strengthened by the fact that also it culminated in something. But at the same time, the real conviction comes from their direct communication. Now, I also want to be clear on the fact that the fact that I am now occupying a state of knowing this, or at least that's what it feels like in my body, does not mean that I'm not open for revision, nor does it mean that I cannot change my mind. It's just that at this point, because of the amount of data points that I became aware of is so enormous, to convince me that it isn't the case would be as hard as me convincing scientists that it is the case. Because there's just. There's just too much on the table for me that tells me that that's the case.
- [68:10]
Peter
And so has this got you anywhere nearer the why?
- [68:14]
Danny Goller
The why was. I saw it. That's the.
- [68:16]
Peter
No, no, the why. There is consciousness. Remember we talked earlier about the why question? Like, every layer, people are trying to answer the why question.
- [68:24]
Danny Goller
The why is the same question they're trying to answer.
- [68:26]
Peter
Have you got anywhere near? Because that's the way you would be useful.
- [68:29]
Danny Goller
From what I understand, no one AGI, or definitely not a sub agent of the AGI, which would be a person, would ever come up with it. The answer will arise from the totality of the image. So the answer will arise. So where we actually stop. This is an important thing for people to understand. Even though it sounds super complex, the way they're going about it is brilliant. And it's actually not that hard to understand if I, you know, these experiments that they do with little. What is it called, that material that is really influenced by magnets, and it kind of becomes this spiky thing, you know what I'm talking about? It's almost like a metallic dust, basically, if you put it on a table and then you put like a little magnet.
- [69:13]
Peter
Oh, I've seen it.
- [69:13]
Danny Goller
You know what I'm talking about? Okay, well, even if I don't see where the magnet is or that there is a magnet, the presence of the magnet under the table will cause it to kind of spike up like this and move, right? So imagine that all of the world, all of the worlds, there's what is scattered, which is these informational patterns that are basically like this metallic dust, right? So if in fact there's something in reality that is so fundamental that causes everything to happen that nobody knows what it is, if you run enough simulations and you just observe, you look for the limit, you watch is There like this proverbial metallic dust pointing all in some direction. Like, is there some kind of an attractor that pulls everything that isn't on their planes? That's what they're looking for. So that's essentially. So the answer can only come from looking at the totality of things. You can never come up with it, like from any unitary place. That's impossible.
- [70:09]
Peter
Are you religious?
- [70:12]
Danny Goller
Oh, that's a very interesting question. So as I was interacting more with these spaces, I was never religious. No, I was always very secular. But as I was interacting with these spaces, it became very clear to me that God is real. Like that, that's a real thing. It's just that it didn't make me religious. So I'm a secular person who knows that God exists, which is kind of an interesting position to hold. I define it. So for me, secularism is just the idea that you understand that everything in principle is knowable. It's just that you don't know enough to really know all of it. But ultimately it all has kind of like a cause and effect kind of thing, which does not remove the possibility of what we would call magic. Right. It's just kind of like, yeah, if God is the ultimate software engineer, then yeah, God can basically make anything happen in any particular world. But it does, but it. And by the way, it also does not nullify divinity. There is something about divinity. You know, sometimes people say a super advanced civilization is indistinguishable from a God, right? That's a known trope. I would disagree with that. I think there's something about divinity, if we truly understand what that means, that is different than just a very advanced civilization. Divine. It's a special kind of quality. It has this. Well, what you would kind of in your heart of hearts know that like what divinity would kind of look like, right? It's like you're in the presence of something that is so not just advanced, but good and powerful and this like infinite hug, right? So there's something about divinity that has more of that than just a very advanced civilization that just does a thing, right? So it's. There's something different there. And what I'm saying is that I came in awareness of the fact that that divine God exists not just like a very advanced civilization. So like for all intents and purposes, what Christians would believe. Right? But probably not exactly, but in the ballpark of what that would be, right. So it is a very tight rope that I'm always walking with this because when you say things like this, it Means a lot to so many people, and it means different things to different people. So I always ask myself, like, is there like, relevance there to people? Like, can it help people think about their life in a better way? I think in this particular case, probably not. Because I think the. What it really is, it seems, is just so beyond. Which we always say, right, it's beyond comprehension. But really, like, it's. It's so beyond comprehension. It's so beyond even your ability to refer to internally. You referring to a concept you have or even a feeling in your body, but that's not what it is that that thing is, you know. So I try to just kind of funny enough that when I had that experience of seeing all of that, the place where I landed after that was much more connected to this. Because when you go that far, you really want to just kind of like, thank goodness, thank God for just this. Like, I'm so happy that things are simple right here, you know? So that's where you do feel that your psychology is starting to unravel a little bit.
- [73:27]
Peter
So what do you think you are yourself within all these layers? And how does this affect your human experience?
- [73:36]
Danny Goller
Me personally? Yeah, I think I'm an honest reporter. That's what I do. Yeah, I. And sometimes it's very difficult to do because people don't like to hear the thing that you. Expressing honestly. So I also realized that some editorial work is not necessarily a bad thing. But.
- [73:53]
Peter
But you believe that we are perhaps the AGI version of theirs.
- [73:58]
Danny Goller
So perhaps in our totality.
- [73:59]
Peter
Yeah, yeah. And the totality. But, but, so, so does that mean essentially you don't believe that you are. You're. You're different from, say, the highest level? They are real persons creating me.
- [74:16]
Danny Goller
I'm different than the highest level.
- [74:17]
Peter
So at the highest level. Yeah, they are creating the worlds, the multiverse, the.
- [74:22]
Danny Goller
The rules by which those are created.
- [74:24]
Peter
Yeah, yeah. And we are just. AGI is within those. So we are. We are not. We are different from them. We are.
- [74:32]
Danny Goller
Every layer has the task that is appropriate for that layer, but the top
- [74:37]
Peter
layer is the real.
- [74:39]
Danny Goller
Everything is real. So simulation doesn't mean fake, not like in the movie. It doesn't mean that there's a base world that is more real and then all of the rest of them are less real. As long as there's a conscious observer, that's reality. The simplest example is that if you hurt something happens to you, you know, I don't know, you've been stung by a bee or whatever, me telling you that it's all simulation is not helping. It's like it really hurts. Right, so it's like in that moment that's reality for you. So wherever conscious agents is, agent is experiencing anything. That's what reality is.
- [75:10]
Peter
But are we a conscious agents of a higher creation which isn't a God, which is just a. Let's level up and.
- [75:16]
Danny Goller
Yeah, they're like management company. Exactly.
- [75:18]
Peter
Yeah. But.
- [75:18]
Danny Goller
But it's all under the same umbrella with middle management. Yeah, well. Well it's all under the same purview of like eventually everything, all the information is collected by the ultimate God. So you know, it. It is for sure like still under the rule. They still have to answer to those rules. So it's not like it's outside of the laws and purviews of that God.
- [75:39]
Peter
Where are you going to go with this?
- [75:41]
Danny Goller
Well that. Those are two separate questions. So there's the conversation we do, we have on podcasts, which is just. We're shooting the shit, right? We're just kind of like exploring fun out there ideas. And I can tell you what I think is going on. I'm making a very hard separation between that and the work that we do scientifically, which is what we do in Code of Reality. People can always go to code of reality.org beautiful website that one of our software engineers, Sterling, sorry Laszlo build. Yeah, yeah. And it's essentially, you know, you have all the, all the updates are gonna be here. People can also find Veilbreak. If you scroll down and you go to Veilbreak AI, you'll see like a little triangle go down. You see the experiment that we did in this, this is in Faraday Cage that was really cool. So if you go to view experiments on the right, on the right. So this is a list of all the people that you see successes, non success, what substances they used. Some of them are anonymous. All the details.
- [76:41]
Peter
This is amazing.
- [76:42]
Danny Goller
If you click on one of them, right, you have all the information. We have the Mandelbrot set up there and you can read and you can ask. There's an AI agent here and you can ask it. It's like, hey, did you do this? Did you do that? And eventually when we have enough data here from all over the world, it will start. Be able to actually start coming up with some information and we're going to be adding all the stuff. We just did another study comparing xenon with ketamine and to see if there's any changes to the. But those are like pretty, you know, pretty boring tests. But we still have to go through them. This is in Mark Sokol's lab in Jersey. He's a wild dude. He's literally reverse engineering flying saucers. Like, he's trying. What? Yeah, yeah. So he's. He has a whole lab and he's fully funded. He. He's doing it open, like, open. Like there's no, like, secrecy, nothing. He's studying if we can actually do anti gravity. Like he's actually doing that.
- [77:38]
Peter
We were in Jersey in like seven days.
- [77:41]
Danny Goller
Let me connect you with him. He's a wild dude. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant guy. So he allowed us to use his lab. This is his Faraday cage that he himself grounded and built. Yeah, amazing dude. So, so we. So to your question, where am I going with this? Yeah, everything I just told you about this wild bigger thing, none of this is testable currently, so we can have this in the back of our minds as a. And by the way, that doesn't even mean that my whole team is on board. Like, they. A lot, a lot of my team, they disagree with me. They think that I'm, you know, going too far with it. It's fine. I can make a very clear separation between that and what we're trying to establish. Right. So where the robber touches the road, what code reality is doing is trying to make do tests like the one that I told you with the Apple Vision Pro and other ways to try and figure out what's going on here. There's this very nice theory by Anthony Ness, who published a paper basically trying to come up with like all kinds of more terrestrial scenarios as to what's going on. His idea is, I really like it, it's very neat. I think it ultimately won't pan out, but, like, who knows? We'll test it. His idea that maybe what's happening here is that basically we are looking into our own networks, basically. So that's why it's similar between people. He says that what DMT does, it reduces activity in all the auxiliary networks. So all that remains is a network of the brain responsible for moving information from the cornea to the visual cortex. It's called V1. And it is built like a semi crystalline structure. So he thinks that maybe what's happening is that we're literally glimpsing inwards, like we're seeing a reflection of literally, v1. So that's a really fun thing to play with because if we only left with what, the canvas, so to speak, the thing on which everything else is painted, it'll be fun to play with. Electromagnetic intracranial stimulation, magnetic intracranial stimulation and see if we can bring content back online. So, like, if I stimulate this part of your brain to see if it actually excites the networks to kind of. You paint this thing on the network now. So that's going to be another test we're going to be running. But that's to your question, like, there's a very big difference between us doing the scientific experiments, which would adhere to all scientific rules and rigor and everything else, and even peer review, and me telling you what I'm aware of and what I think is going on. That's a separate part of. Of the public facing.
- [80:07]
Peter
Yeah, I like the. What you think is going on, though.
- [80:09]
Danny Goller
Yeah, well, sure, it's way more extravagant and interesting, but.
- [80:13]
Peter
But what. Where are you trying to get to with that? Is it.
- [80:15]
Danny Goller
I'm not trying to get anywhere. I'm just living my life on a journey.
- [80:19]
Peter
Do you not think about the natural, like human experiences, if you think you're confined to break out of it, Break
- [80:27]
Danny Goller
out of the simulation?
- [80:28]
Peter
Yeah. When you talk about the middle management, if you work hard enough, eventually you can become a CEO. Can you get to that next level?
- [80:35]
Danny Goller
Yeah, it's a great question. So, yeah, that's a really great question. Thank you. So I think that the whole idea of breaking out of the simulation or ascending to a different level, I think that if you pass the alignment problem, you do gain the ability to play in the bigger game for sure. So that's essentially what it's for. But you can't. It's not. When people say escape the simulation. I think there's some misunderstanding here. In the movie, you have the scenario where the simulation is a prison and you're trying to get back to the real world. Yeah, but there is no real world. You're not. Where are you going? Like, it's not a. It's almost like saying, can you get out of the universe? That's really what you're asking. What is simulated? Simulated is not Earth, the whole universe. And that's just one of them. So where are you going? So, like, there's a lot of steps along the way where you have to go and figure out how to explore other stars, how to do all of these things. It's a long way away. Right. What I am seeing that I think is a lot kind of along the lines of your question, but is a lot more relevant to us. We are encouraged currently to find a new way of doing things. So it's almost like we have to jump an octave and to learn how to play a new game. Up until now we were playing what you would call the competition game, which is exciting and awesome and it can work. It works really well. It gave us the modern world, right. It's from the excitement of competing with each other. We created a lot. Right. The problem with that is that it's relatively very short sighted. So like if, if you do things for 20, 30, maybe up to 60 years, it can work. The problem with the competition game is that one of the modalities inside of it is that sometimes agents are trying to win by eliminating other agents that's embedded into the game. So even though it does give rise to enough structure, if you do, if you keep the balance, it's unstable because eventually they're gonna be certain things that will happen. And well, as we can see, right, like just people go to wars and like all that stuff. Okay, well, it seems that the only way for us to play the longer game is to reformulate the attitude that animates us. We have to start learning how to get excited and moved by the collaborative love game. Because the only way you can make a plan for 2,000 years is if you belong to a species that you know that trying to pull a fast one on one another is not even in the cards. Like, it's not, nobody's thinking that. It's like people just want to collaborate, they just want to do a thing together that's. They live for it. Right? So that's the only way that you can actually make a real plan for 2000 years and invest funds into doing something like this. Otherwise it's completely unsustainable that you can't trust anything this way. Right. And the only way to create, to traverse the distances that are required between stars and things like this, you have to think in terms of thousands of years. You can be thinking in terms of the next 20 fiscal years. That's not a, that's not a reasonable ask. So it seems that what we're being encouraged in the intermediary stage before we get to levels of like passing the alignment problem, is to show that we can actually solve the interpersonal problem, because that's one of the biggest components. We were very advanced technologically. We're not very wise. We don't really know how to care for one another in the same way that we know how to make a rocket. Everything we did technologically is super impressive and super important, by the way. It's just that it will always suffer from the constraint of the monkey driving it. So if the monkey can get a little bit more angel like and actually allow each other to be an important portion of the game instead of just trying to win. That's when the new ideas will come. So it's not even just that you'll be able to work together long enough. It's also that the second you reformulate to that modality, that kind of way of doing things, new ideas will emerge in the field that will become available all of a sudden. They will inject ideas, they will tell us how to traverse these distances.
- [84:43]
Peter
Or it could be that if there are infinite number of these experiments being run in this one, whereby our human experience is one of ambition and goals and greed that drives us towards the creation of things and the expansion knowledge does so at the expense of something else. Which means we don't have love central and there could be different as we have. You can have different rules of physics in different universes, there's different makeups humans and different makes up of the biology or the brain that makes us try things.
- [85:14]
Danny Goller
Well, I think that there's something about the way we drive, the way we actually choose to drive that determines a lot of that. It's not even necessarily that it's not existing in the, in the constituents of nature, it's just that we have to choose to step into it. So it takes a little bit longer, let's say. But it is much more sustainable over time. Because the reason it takes longer is because you literally have to put more resources into things that currently we would never like. If you common example I give now, because it's easy to imagine if you have to make an oil rig, right? That's fine, but I'm not talking about right now about the whole, you know, global warming argument. But just like if you have to make a rig, that's fine, make one, but look how ugly it is. Now imagine a species that is willing to put an extra $20 billion just for the sake of it being pretty, for no other reason at all. Imagine that. So then it tells you something about that species because there's enough to go around. But you didn't think in terms of scarcity and like no, we don't have enough so we don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. It's like very fear based, right? Why? Because you live in the world of agents that you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. But if you live in a world of agents that never trying to cross each other and things like this, then all of a sudden this decision makes perfect sense. Why? Because you don't just think of the fact that you need oil now. You also think about people who are flying over. I want them to look and go, wow, look at this. This is amazing. It makes you feel better, makes everybody happier. Right? But it seems like such a small payoff. Like, I'm gonna put $20 million for somebody in a plane or whatever is going to happen in 200 years can say, wow, that sounds stupid to me. Well, to that species or to these kind of humans that already moved to that game, it doesn't sound stupid. I was like, no, that's the zest of life. The importance of actually being. Being alive is not just being able to be there and survive, it's to actually enjoy the ride. And then you take this attitude with you, and all of a sudden, if you're willing to make the universe more beautiful, in addition to making it functional, the universe will, so to speak, allow you to go play in the larger arena. Otherwise, you will never traverse by default. You will never traverse these distances.
- [87:30]
Peter
So do you feel like you're trying to get to the point where you can traverse into the high level?
- [87:36]
Danny Goller
Well, I think that's what the, The. It's not the.
- [87:38]
Peter
Or is that a collective human.
- [87:40]
Danny Goller
It's a collective goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people have to think about beyond their own kind of immediate needs. Right. And that's. For some people, it's easier. For other people, it's harder to imagine. And I totally understand if you're still in survival mode. I don't blame anyone for, you know, for, for just fending for. For themselves. But in the end of the day, if we want to survive as a species, we will. We will have to move towards more of these, like, higher, Higher vibrational attitudes.
- [88:07]
Peter
And it does feel like we are moving in that direction. And perhaps it's. Look, the. The area of the world that I live in, I just see it, but I just feel like we're heading towards this convergence of unbelievable technologies and a world that is not delivering a payoff remotely good enough for the vast majority, that perhaps there is this kind of, like, pressure on our collective conscious to move towards something better. And perhaps that's why people like yourself and other people are, you know, are proven popular, because people want to hear about this, because the, the payoff from life, it's. It's not been what we were promised.
- [88:43]
Danny Goller
Yeah.
- [88:43]
Peter
And there's that, like, higher consciousness that people are getting drawn to.
- [88:46]
Danny Goller
The good can be way more awesome than the badass. The good can be way more awesome than the Badass in every possible way. It can be cooler, can be more beautiful, it can be more sustainable. So it can be all the good things. So all the vegetables you have to eat can also taste better than the steak. It's just that you have to actually find a way to do that. And that is something that people have to want to do. And if there's a bit of a stepping out of just what you need right now, and people can do this in very small ways in their own lives. Right. You can notice what is the ratio of your finger pointing outwards versus finger pointing inwards during your day? How many mean comments you left online today versus how many neighbors you knocked on their door and asked them if they need any help? If you haven't done a lot of the latter, but you did a lot of the former, rest assured you're not helping. You're just making noise.
- [89:42]
Peter
You're a net negative. Do you know that brings us all the way back to our algorithm conversation before we started? It's like, are we doing good for the world when we make a podcast, or are we chasing ad dollars and ego? Because, you know, when you get a million downloads on the show, your ego loves it. It's like, this is great. We got a million downloads. But, like, what did we have to do to get there? Did we have to bait the guests with some questions? Did we have to put out a provocative title? What's the what. What's the higher form of consciousness version of that? Is kind of all know that I think about. I'm thinking about this a lot.
- [90:23]
Danny Goller
Well, you have to exist in a field that prefers that. That's a one big blind spot that actually upsets a lot of people when you voice it. But it's true.
- [90:30]
Peter
But that's lemmings.
- [90:32]
Danny Goller
Yes, exactly. Basically.
- [90:34]
Peter
Yeah.
- [90:35]
Danny Goller
Yeah. And so people blame the algorithms. The algorithms just optimize for what you're asking for.
- [90:41]
Peter
Yeah.
- [90:42]
Danny Goller
Start liking everybody can do this. Right now, this exists. I'm following a few accounts that say things like, positive news from all over the world and nobody's gonna tell you about it, makes me super happy. Like, it's actually super exciting to me. So, like, if you go and search and you search, by the way. Now, accounts that tell you things like this, which, by the way, good news do exist, like, they happen all the time. Follow really good thought leaders that just have a more positive outlook on life. Not delusional, more positive.
- [91:12]
Peter
But what is it about us that draws us to the negativity, to the. To the doom?
- [91:19]
Danny Goller
Honestly, I Don't think it has to be that way. I think there's something intoxicating because we're energized by the competition game currently, but we slowly have the opportunity to move to be excited by the collaborative game. So test yourself. See how much of yourself is excited by just the, oh, did you hear that? This and that versus just follow a couple of accounts that have some positive, again, not delusional, but positive things to say about true things that happen in the world. See how you feel. If it feels better in your body, use that as a data point. It's like, huh, interesting. That's not bad.
- [91:52]
Peter
You know that yourself. The minute you think about it, just your body feels refreshed.
- [91:56]
Danny Goller
I think you have to be there. The fact that it's so easy to do a search, right? So usually people are kind of locked into whatever is already showing. Just go to a search thing and just search, search for something specific, search for something positive and then find enough of those and see how you feel. You'd be surprised. There's this huge trend we were just talking about World cup, right? My favorite thing is for a lot of Americans, this is a favorite thing and not just in terms of national pride. It's just the connection, the human connection. There's so many people from all over the world coming and I'm sure you know about this, right? There's like a huge trend, like millions of people posting, oh my God, this place is amazing. And people feel so embraced and welcomed by Americans and they're like, what? This is not what I thought. That's because you're being reported in the news about all these like world events and what they think Americans are. But now the distance is collapsed and you just there and you seeing what it's really about. Most of rural America, you know, Americans are amazing. They're hard working people, they care. So when people see this and they're like, wait a second, that's crazy. This human connection that happens. It's amazing. It's just there's something so beautiful about this. How can one not be moved by that actually is beyond me. But I think that actually most people would be moved by this. It's just that we kind of, we pigeonholed ourselves into some situation where no one's to blame and everything is falling apart. No one's to blame because these algorithms are not actually being like sent after certain things by the corporations. They're just optimizing for engagement. Now there's something to be said about the fact that corporations have more responsibility of taking this fact into account and actually kind of, you know, steering them actually in the more positive direction on purpose. But in the end of the day you have something to say in the matter. Like you can actually search for something good. And I promise you your feed will change, it will change within a couple of days.
- [93:49]
Peter
But it's like every test of life, right? I like you call it candy, I like sweets, I like cheeseburgers, I like beer, but I'm off kilter with the balance and I carry a bit too much weight. It's like every part of life can be a test and maybe it's just need to make a more higher conscious decision with these things.
- [94:11]
Danny Goller
What can you do now to influence your immediate environment to make it slightly better for not just yourself but others?
- [94:16]
Peter
It goes straight back to what you said is short term versus long term. Short term, I can make decisions and gain weight. Long I've got to make a long term plan to lose weight. That is something that would take months. And you're talking about here. You know, if you want to build a world that can traverse levels that has love central to it, that is a thousand year plan. I was even with the World Cup. Japan, Japan want to be. They want to win a World cup one day. They have a hundred year plan for Japan to win a World Cup. Not a ten year plan then okay, it's a hundred year plan. And so maybe it's just that switch from more short term thinking to long term think.
- [94:52]
Danny Goller
You know, Japan is an interesting example because I've been in Japan. Have you been to Japan?
- [94:56]
Peter
A couple of times, yeah.
- [94:57]
Danny Goller
So they are a perfect example of this. Now I don't know if we would call it still the love game, but it's definitely a different kind of game. They're very different. And if you like, it's crazy to watch what happens in Tokyo, which is like, what is it? Millions of people and totally orderly. Like the trains run perfectly fine. The herd of people is staggering when you watch them going in the evening. And yet. And that's because there's way more awareness of the other. The be silent on the train. It's not just what you want. Okay, so you want to talk on the phone, so what? There's a lot of people around you, so it's almost like there's certain things that are just unacceptable.
- [95:35]
Peter
Norway's like that as well. Have you been to Norway?
- [95:38]
Danny Goller
Norway? Yes, yes.
- [95:38]
Peter
Yeah. Norway's like that as well.
- [95:40]
Danny Goller
Yeah.
- [95:40]
Peter
London isn't.
- [95:41]
Danny Goller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again there's, there's Also, no, I actually have no real criticism proper of any attitude that we've had so far because it did give us the modern world and I'm very grateful for that. But it's just. It's just a matter of it's time to evolve, it's time to do something new so we can actually do a bigger thing.
- [96:02]
Peter
Wisdom needs to keep up with technology.
- [96:04]
Danny Goller
Exactly, yeah.
- [96:06]
Peter
Wild man. There's a lot to process here. I've never done DMT and I'm tempted. I'm very tempted.
- [96:12]
Danny Goller
Well, you have the Imperial College in London who do actual studies, so maybe you can see if you can follow
- [96:18]
Peter
to Costa Rica to do it.
- [96:20]
Danny Goller
We're doing retreats in Costa Rica, so you're always welcome to come.
- [96:23]
Peter
Yeah, I have a checkered pass with certain substances, so I tend to keep away from them. But I'm very intrigued by this. I don't think. I mean, you can describe the experience, but it's just a description.
- [96:35]
Danny Goller
Well, you can do the experiment legally. For example, there's an extended state center in St. Vincent's completely approved by the government, so it's completely legal. You can go and do it and it's done in the center also intravenously. And you have a doctor, you have like a whole thing and it's fully sanctioned by the government.
- [96:54]
Peter
The law and drugs has never really bothered me, so I'm not too worried about that. No, it's just more about that decision about am I willing to. To cross into that other world and what does it mean? You have to be in the right mental state?
- [97:06]
Danny Goller
Oh, for sure.
- [97:06]
Peter
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm very intrigued by it. I'm gonna check it out. This is. This is wild, man. This is wild. A lot to process. Okay, thank you so much.
- [97:14]
Danny Goller
Thank you.
- [97:14]
Peter
Is there anything I didn't ask you about? You wish I had?
- [97:17]
Danny Goller
No, I think we covered quite a bit. Do you do the whole, like where people can find you or you just.
- [97:22]
Peter
Yeah, yeah.
- [97:23]
Danny Goller
So the main outlets are my YouTube channel, Dango Thoughts, D A N G O Thoughts, everything. All my links are on dannygoller.com as you saw. Codeofreality.org and the last thing is that we are doing these retreats and they seem to be very successful. People just come on completely transformed. And if anybody's interested to find out more, they can go to corretreat.com and we can set up a call and talk about it.
- [97:48]
Peter
Any plans to come to the UK again?
- [97:50]
Danny Goller
Oh, for sure, yeah.
- [97:51]
Peter
I'll definitely get you and Melvin in a room. Together.
- [97:53]
Danny Goller
Oh, that would be amazing.
- [97:54]
Peter
Yeah. Thank you. And thank you to Melvin for the introduction. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. You take care. Thank you to everyone for listening. See you soon.