Transcription
Right now, there's this three lb lump of matter inside your skull. And now I've said that, you realize it's thinking about itself. Neurons firing in unimaginably complex patterns, trying to understand the consciousness those neurons are creating. A consciousness so complex that the thing creating it, the human brain, cannot even begin to understand how it does it. Your brain is now thinking about your brain. It's attempting to comprehend its own existence using only the tools the brain provides.
Even though it's never even directly experienced reality, every sight, sound, touch, taste, everything you think of as the real world is electrical signals interpreted by neural tissue. You've never touched anything. You've just felt your brain's interpretation of nerve signals. You've never seen anything. You've experienced your brain's reconstruction of light data. You are right now living inside a simulation your brain creates. And this is what we call reality.
But this experience we call reality doesn't always feel real. And you probably know what I mean. Maybe you haven't said it out loud. Maybe you thought it was just you. Maybe it's stress that can make you feel disassociated, right? Or maybe just too much screen time or not enough connections with other human beings. Although maybe it's something much more though. Something we can barely articulate despite living inside of it every second of our lives. Because millions of people are describing the exact same thing, a drift away from what makes us human. Slow at first, then suddenly everywhere. You might feel it inside of yourself first and then start noticing it in others. Or it might be the other way around.
Like when I was standing in a shop recently the other day and I realized the woman next to me was talking to her phone. And it actually felt oddly normal until I started thinking about it. And then I just felt alarmed that I ever felt it was normal in the first place. Add milk to my list, she said. Her phone responded with the uncanny AI voice as she disappeared down the aisle. And then I went outside and saw Whimo, a driverless car just going by. And I'm so used to it at this point that I didn't even think about it. I glance around and me and half the people are staring at their phones. Blue light washing their faces, swimming in a weird cacophony of fluorescent product packaging, and beeping noises from the checkout machines. Just nobody's really here.
Outside there's a billboard with that annual Coca-Cola ad blatantly AI generated with its distortions that have you transfixed as you study them, which is probably exactly what it wants to achieve. It doesn't look out of place on a street where everything is new and fake. Electric cars parked up, white LED street lights, people walk everywhere with AirPods in their ears, noise cancellation turned on, drowning out the sounds of the environment that feels just completely fabricated.
Anyway, in the digital world, which used to be a way to escape from all of this, this only gets so much worse. Over half of all the internet traffic is bots now. You can just fill the dead internet theory every day. You scroll through comments and some viral video, it's bots, Twitter accounts with their opinions, bots. Or it's AI generated videos, AI generated music with fake views, fake bot comments boosting, pushing them in your feed, making all of this fakeness inescapable.
Nowadays, AI is in every aspect of our lives. It lives in your web browser, your phone, and soon your home. It answers basic questions we can answer ourselves if we only bother to think. AI hallucinations are mixing with facts to warp the very nature of human knowledge. The fakeness of it all isn't only that all of these bots and LLMs are pretending to be human. Is that everything, real people, fake people, all the technology powering it is just blurring into the same algorithmic behavior. It's all melting into one, including us. And if you stop and think about it, we're becoming more like AI ourselves. It's as if we're becoming living proof that everything eventually becomes some sort of simulation. And if that's the case, maybe we're already in a simulation and always have been.
Now, you've probably already heard of simulation theory, which pretty much argues this point. So, in 2003, the futurist philosopher Nick Boston published a paper that pushed the idea that we're living in a simulation into the mainstream. He argued that at least one of these three statements must be true. One, civilizations never reach the technological ability to create realistic simulations of conscious beings. They always destroy themselves first or hit some insurmountable barrier or simply lose interest. Two, advanced civilizations could create these simulations, but they choose not to. Despite having god-like power, they decide it's unethical, pointless, or uninteresting. Three, we are almost certainly living in a simulation right now. If one civilization in the entire history of the universe reaches the point where they can create realistic simulations efficiently, they could then create billions of them, maybe trillions. And that means we're likely already in one. You might wonder why any civilization would do this in the first place. There are limitless possibilities, testing scenarios, exploring possibilities, running experiments, and infinite other motivations we do not understand.
This whole idea caught fire and then started appearing on podcasts and interviews everywhere. You probably noticed that living today is just so confusing and you probably don't realize how much money you're actually leaking online. You add something to your cart, you check out and you just pay full price. Not because you want to, but because finding coupons is annoying and half of them don't even work. So that's where Coupert comes in. Coupert is a free AI powered shopping assistant that automatically saves you money while you shop online. No efforts, no hunting, no guesswork. Here's how it works. Once you install the Coupert extension, it works on Chrome, Edge, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and even mobile Safari. You just shop like normal. So, when you hit checkout, Coupert automatically tests every available coupon code in seconds and applies the one that saves you the most. No pop-ups, no fake codes. You can literally watch the savings apply in real time. And that's not all. Coupert gives you cash back from over 76,000 stores, including places like Temu, Macy's, and Sephora. Activate cash back before checkout, and a portion of that purchase comes back to you. You can then withdraw it for your PayPal, gift cards, or straight to your bank. On top of that, Coupert shows price comparisons as you browse, so you know if the deal you're about to buy is actually a deal. This is why over 9 million users use Coupert and why it works with 200,000 plus merchants worldwide. It's not a shock why it's rated 4.8 out of five on Trust Pilot, which is really rare for anything in the online shopping space. And even better is that Coupert is fully transparent. It does not steal creative tracking links like Honey does. Honestly, it's just one of those tools that quietly saves you money in the background. Small savings don't feel exciting until you realize how much they add up over time. So, if you're shopping online anyway, ask yourself why pay full price. So, make sure to check them out using the link in the description below.
Elon Musk has said the odds were in base reality are one in billions. The argument makes sense. So, the assumption then is that somebody beat us to it and this is a game. >> No, no, there's a one in billions chance that this is base reality. >> Oh, okay. What do you think? >> Well, I think it's one in billions. >> Okay. >> James Corden asked Neil deGrasse Tyson who put the odds are better than 50/50 and said he doesn't have a good argument that we're not in a simulation. Among those with more scientific credibility, physicist Seth Lloyd at MIT who studies quantum computing. Max Tegmark also at MIT. David Chalmers at NYU one of the world's leading philosophers of consciousness. Martin Rees, the former astronomer royal, John Wheeler, the legendary physicist who studied under Niels Bohr and coined the term black hole. They're all paraphrasing bits from Bostrom's original idea.
But honestly, simulation theory is just the start, and it didn't first appear in academic circles. We've been feeling it for a while, first crystallizing in 1999 when The Matrix hit the cinemas and blew people's minds everywhere. Blue Pill, Red Pill, humans as batteries for alien machines. It left people feeling genuinely rattled. It was one of the only movies that challenged people around the world's idea of what reality even is. And it gave us a cultural shorthand for something people were experiencing in the modern world. A glitch in the matrix, a moment when reality reveals itself. Like when Neo sees a black cat twice, they call it déjà vu or otherwise a glitch in the matrix. And it happens when they change something. Déjà vu becomes the go-to example of reality malfunctioning. That strange sensation that you've seen something before.
And it's not the only phenomenon like this. There's the phantom vibration syndrome. We've been so programmed with technology that we all just regularly hallucinate notifications, movements, or sounds that didn't even happen. Another, the Mandela effect, shows how we can't even trust reality at a societal scale. Named after a bizarre collective memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. People say they remember the news coverage, the funeral, the tribute. Except he didn't die in prison. He was released in the '90s and became president of South Africa and died in 2013. If that doesn't ring a bell, imagine the Monopoly man for a second. Does he have a monocle? He never had one in reality and yet so many swear he did. It's just the classic Mandela effect. How about that Curious George never had a tail? That the line from Snow White isn't "Mirror, mirror on the wall." It's "Magic mirror on the wall." Darth Vader never said, "Luke, I am your father." It's "No, I am your father." What about the quote played against Sam from the film Casablanca? Also not real.
One of the most bizarre ones of recent times that gets me though is the seahorse emoji. Reddit erupted that there used to be a seahorse emoji. Once you see it, you can't help but agree. Some can describe exactly where it was positioned, right next to the fish or the crab. Except there never has been a seahorse emoji, not in any official Unicode release. People have checked old phone screenshots, combed through emoji archives, and there's no sign of it. Some people say it was on MSN Messenger, but no conclusive visual proof exists anywhere. So obviously the next natural step was to ask ChatGPT about it, but it glitches out. In fact, all AI models seem to even now. If you press ChatGPT, it will claim there was one in Unicode 2010 or 2012. But that's an outright lie. Press it harder and it finally admits there wasn't. It wants to believe though, just like we do when we see that seahorse image. Now, you might think that ChatGPT has surely learned this from conversations surrounding the seahorse emoji. But it had the same answer immediately after the original Reddit post was created, meaning it didn't extract the story from its training data. The usual explanation for the Mandela effect in humans is confabulation. Our brains filling in gaps, blending similar memories, creating false but plausible memories. We're just unreliable witnesses to our own lives. And AI is experiencing the exact same thing from its programming. Though this is a system underpinned by math and code and designed to be truthful and objective, it's living proof that we can't trust our existence. A massive hallucination that seems to penetrate natural and artificial intelligence. You can't trust any of it.
And this isn't the only time this happens. There are other spontaneous parallels, like when early AI image models seem to always generate psychedelic visuals, even when not prompted. They created patterns from noise, which is exactly how the brain generates visuals in dreams when DMT is active. So really, the Mandela effect and déjà vu are living proof of how we can't fully trust our own existence. Do you even remember the last sentence I said before this? That on its own might be weird, but it's hardly proof of a simulation until you look at reality deep down at the quantum level where you find something eerily similar happening with subatomic particles. And that's where the simulation theory rabbit hole really begins to spiral.
Take what happens when scientists observe a particle such as an electron or a photon. Before we look at it, it doesn't have a definite position. It's in a superposition. All possible locations simultaneously with different probabilities for each. Then you measure it. You look and the superposition collapses. The particle is suddenly in one specific place. No, it's revealed to be in one place. It was in many places and observation forces it to choose. Why does observation do this? Nobody really knows for sure. It's called the measurement problem and it's been driving physicists mad for a century. And scientists have described the Mandela effect as a large-scale manifestation of what happens at the quantum level. We all have different versions of the same reality until we check and then they all collapse into one. This incidentally also describes how a video game engine works. When you're playing a game, the engine doesn't usually render the entire world as that's resource intensive. Instead, it only calculates what you're looking at. You can see it happening in some older games. Trees start off as basic polygons before they render into realistic trees. Google just released something called Genie2, an AI that generates entire playable 3D game worlds in real time. It's generating everything moment by moment based on what you're doing and where you're looking in the game world.
Form explained the parallel to simulation theory with Rogan. And so this is the way a lot of computer games are designed today that they have a certain rendering distance like you only like actually simulate the virtual world when when the character goes close enough that you could see it. But like what what is happening inside this table right now is completely irrelevant. You have no idea of knowing whether there even are atoms there. What he's saying is reality doesn't render the details until something or someone is looking. Most of reality is filtered out so we can function. But there are moments when that filter thins out or breaks down completely. When suddenly we're not just living through our current senses.
Take a lucid dream. One that feels like it lasts for days, months, or even years. You can feel texture, temperature, flight, intense fear, or terror. Sensations your body may have never experienced in real life. All while your physical self might as well not exist at all. But then you wake up and the whole world you were in disappears instantly. Characters, physics, entire storylines gone in a blink. They're switched off and deleted except for a few fading memories the last seconds. Or sometimes with sleep paralysis, you'll look up and still be kind of in the dream even though you're consciously awake.
Near-death experiences are just a far more intense version of this. And then there are the things that people don't like to talk about because they kind of make you sound mad even though almost everyone has a story. I always remember my friend's dad, an atheist who worked in chemistry, who told me a story of when his mother died in England and he woke up in night sweats in New Zealand and instantly sensed there was something seriously wrong. The next morning, he found out. People shrug this off as just a coincidence most of the time. What else can you do? But it nags at you anyway when you consider how many people report these kinds of supernatural experiences, including lifelong skeptics. Sometimes in life, things just seemingly happen with no real explanation as to how. It's always just a coincidence.
So now consider this. If we are living in a simulation that is constantly rendering life like some sort of super intelligent game, there would be some sort of code running through it all. Right? Well, physics implies exactly this. So there are these numbers built into the fabric of the universe called constants. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds in physics, said they were one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics. A magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. One of these constants, about 1/137, controls how strongly light and matter interacts. Think of it like a dial. Turning it up just 4% and atoms, the building blocks of everything collapse. There would be nothing. Turn it down to 4% and atoms fall apart. Same result, but no life at all. It has to be set precisely where it is. Feynman said it's the number that all good theoretical physicists put on their wall and worry about.
Then there's the mind-bending cosmological constant that determines how fast space expands. So incredibly precisely tuned that you can't even begin to imagine it. It's equivalent to winning the Powerball jackpot 40 times in a row. If you lose, life cannot and will not exist. Then there's the Fibonacci sequence appearing in sunflowers, pine cones, pineapples, rose petals, broccoli, those alien-looking fractals, snail shells, hurricane formations photographed from space, the spiral arms of galaxies. The most peculiar one of all is probably in your DNA as your DNA shares the same golden ratio as the galaxy we live in. Molecular biology, botany, meteorology, cosmology. It's the same mathematical pattern at every scale. Scientists have called it a universal constant for self-replication. All of this makes complete sense. And that is exactly the problem. That's why Einstein once said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
And it's not only physics and math that keeps repeating itself. There are things like epigenetics, other strange phenomena that show that we're more programmed than we'd like to believe. But none are more otherworldly than DMT, which is widespread in the mammal brain. Plants, marine life, toads, fungi, and even some bacteria. Pretty much every living organism. It's been reported that your brain dumps it during sleep and before death. Some even say before birth, but no one really understands why. In studies from the 1990s, so before the internet made stories easy to compare, people kept reporting the same kinds of encounters. They take DMT and see a geometric machine-like beings, insectoid intelligences, hyper-organized environments that felt designed rather than imagined. People constantly saw reptile textures. But because it was so strictly illegal, it was almost impossible to research.
However, very recently in 2024, DMT research got really wild. Some groundbreaking studies at the highly respected Imperial College London kept volunteers in the state for up to 30 minutes using controlled IV infusion. You'd think that level of intensity would overwhelm people, but it didn't. Their nervous systems almost adapted instantly and they reported back those exact same entities that seem to pop up everywhere. It's why Alex Grey, the artist, seems to tap into something that no one can really explain in his art. And the astonishing thing is that these volunteers, both men and women, are all coming back with accounts of meeting the same entities. One participant from those studies described seeing the same beings every single time. What I tend to see very regularly is this group of humanoid forms. They're almost gingerbread men like. They are distinguishable from each other. There are children and adults and it's a grouping. I think what we've learned now with these so-called elves that they are of a multitude of forms but unified by their character but they always seem to have the same they're extremely lively giggly mischievous um kind of bursting with energy life. Multiple volunteers independently describe the same concept that these entities exist in structured environments. A few of us have said something around different tribes or an ecosystem. >> Another volunteer developed something completely unprecedented. By his third session, his body adapted. >> The third session, I returned into my body and all of a sudden I could experience a full breakthrough with all of the entities around me, but I could move. I could raise my head. I could look left and right. And uh by the fourth session, I knew that I could have even stood and walked around if I wanted to. I could have simply treated a breakthrough as augmented reality.
If you think this is all just some druggies tripping in some lab, think again. Tribes who somehow figured out this crazy concoction called Ayahuasca in the Amazon have been reporting the same teachers and geometric spirit beings for thousands of years. Even archaeologists studying ancient Egypt have reported that they too experienced psychedelic experiences. And some of the world's most trusted anthropologists have been documenting remarkably consistent DMT motifs across cultures. They say the spirit world is one with structure, order, and rules of its own. The CIA was even apparently trying to access the spirit world through projects just like MK Ultra. But still, nobody really has any idea what these psychedelic substances are and what they're really tapping into. Some people say these beings sound a lot like aliens. And it's no surprise that this has fueled all kinds of theories. Whether it is just some hallucination that every single human seems to have on the same substance, or whether these are aliens or at least intelligence that isn't human. Others even point to this being God. But a simulation explains both the intelligent design and the trippy math of physics without requiring either faith or impossible luck. Maybe DMT is a back door conveniently embedded into the code of reality, sneaking into our brains and giving us a lever to pull to access a different form of consciousness that transcends the one we get in the daily grind.
What's strange is that it's almost impossible to be tested for DMT because it's just so active within you at all times. And because it's so short-lasting, you can go from thinking about hyper dimensions, alien technology, entities from a higher dimension, and then naturally transition the next minute to staring at some brain reel, going back to normal, as if nothing ever happened. So now we're in a situation where we're doing to ourselves exactly what a simulation would do to us. Optimization, compression, replication. We've built modern civilization on these principles. It's all about mass production, standardization, scalability over authenticity. We've optimized the soul out of everything because that's what systems do. They find the most efficient path. Especially in the modern West where everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy. That tomato you ate, it was bred for shipping trucks, not flavor. Uniform red and engineered to survive 3 days in transit. When you see one that actually grew in dirt at a farmer's market, it looks wrong and misshapen. Go to Italy and taste a real tomato and you realize you had a fake one the entire time.
Walking down the food aisle in any modern supermarket, all the packets of brightly colored slop are barely fit for human consumption, yet paradoxically are optimized to be consumed in huge quantities, never making you full, always making you crave more. What you think a beautiful face looks like has nothing to do with real human faces. It's filtered, smooth, touched up with AI, processed so many times that there's no original left to reference. How you think relationships work comes from movies, TV, Instagram couples, reality TV, all optimizing, boiling complex emotions down to nothingness. Everything from a butterfly flapping its wings to space above us just becomes so mundane. Everything you do, you have to put on a facade. You can't get a job without simulating some double life on LinkedIn. You need to simulate a double life on dating apps to make yourself more appealing. On Instagram, you need to make a cooler version of yourself. Soon, there will be digital IDs to prove your existence for basic services.
The French philosopher Baudrillard called it simulacra. The point where reproductions become so pervasive, so refined that they erase the very concept that an original ever existed. Disneyland was his primary example. He argued that it presents itself as imaginary, an obvious fantasy to convince you that everything outside its gates is authentic by comparison. The theme park functions as a decoy. It's so blatantly artificial that it creates the comforting illusion that a distinction still exists between simulation and genuine authenticity. But that distinction has just collapsed. In many cities across the US, like Los Angeles, the suburbs, the highways, the television studios producing the very cartoons that Disneyland imitates, all of this has already become part of the same hyperreal system. Disneyland doesn't even simulate America. Disneyland is America, and America has become Disneyland. Most towns are built completely new, all clones of one another with no real ties to the land or the people.
And AI takes this to a whole other level. It doesn't only attempt to copy reality and impersonate us. It just generates information that never existed, making it convincing by copying our communication patterns. A photo of someone never born, a scientific paper with no research. The new mind-numbing game of identifying AI footage from real stuff. You ask something and it answers with perfect confidence. You accept it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning it tells you what you already are predisposed to believe. And that just keeps you engaged every single day to the point where these AI conversations are just becoming conversations. It's like we started talking to humans the same way you talk to AI. It almost feels no different to the conversations you have in real life with real people. Just the same questions and same pre-planned answers. And that's it.
The biggest proof of simulation theory has to be us. We've become so tethered to technology over such a short space of time that this is just how it starts. We are turning inward on ourselves and no one's talking about this aspect of it and it's arguably the most horrifying aspect in my opinion. You can see it in how the largest most powerful organizations in the world and their controlling governments are just fixated on AI as other forms of technological progress like space exploration are pretty much dead because of it. We're spending hundreds of times more in AI than we are in space. NASA was aspirational once for the whole human race and has just become hollowed out and defunded. Sure that SpaceX and China has competitors, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to AI. Instead of going to space, all tech wants to do today is build a simulation and force us to live in it. And the gap just keeps on widening. More money is being poured into virtual reality, AI, digital worlds, creating realities that don't physically exist. You can explore an infinite number of digital realities without ever leaving your room.
Somewhere along the line, without deciding it consciously, we made a choice. And you've got to say it makes perfect evolutionary sense when you think about it. In reality, if this is reality, the side effect of all of this optimization and efficiency is a life that's becoming repetitive, fake, and algorithmic, detached from anything outside of our own selves. You could go touch grass, tell yourself none of it matters anyway. And ironically, that grass would contain DMT, maybe the back door to other worlds out there just waiting for us. But really, you know deep down inside of you that it does really matter because there's always a part of us that wants to understand how and why we even exist. And you can't turn that thing off. Maybe the system makes it their way to always keep us guessing, to keep us in the dark while they keep the lights on and technology and humanity slowly blur into one. And we walk deeper and deeper into a simulation if we're not already in one right now.