In the first ever Screaming into the Void podcast, I sit down with Brian Herr of The Human Code to discuss (among other things) one of my favorite topics — simulation theory! Are we living in a simulation, and why should you care?
We also take on some of the big political and philosophical questions of the day — you don’t want to miss this!
Brian has written some fascinating stuff over at The Human Code and today’s a perfect day to catch up on some of it!
I’m working on the transcription now — it will be up later today — but we wanted to get the audio out there so subscribers who prefer to listen to podcasts have that option right away.
Let us know what you think about the first episode, and let us know what you want to see in future episodes!
Transcription below. All errors mine - SC
Brian Herr of The Human Code
Welcome everyone, this is a conversation between Brian of The Human Code and SimulationCommander. You can find us both on Substack. I’m at bherr.substack.com, and SimulationCommander is at simulationcommander.substack.com. Today we’re synching up to talk about, among other things, something that I — Brian — have recently been turned on to, which is “Are we living in a simulation, ala The Matrix?” This is something that SimulationCommander has spent considerable time pondering and researching. He might say it’s more than pondering and research, but I’ll leave that up to him. My interest is in human flourishing, so what I find fascinating is how a simulation scenario would allow for human flourishing. And so we’re going to get into all that, and I want to welcome SimulationCommander, I might just call him Commander for short. How are you doing, sir?
SimulationCommander of Screaming into the Void
I’m doing great, it’s awesome to be here and meet you, virtually, and talk about all this stuff. I’m really excited.
BH
Yeah, I think it’s fun. We’ve been bouncing off each other on Substack, and I want to talk a little more about Substack later on, there’s a lot of really cool things going on on Substack. I especially love the comments section, and I think in a lot of ways that’s where you and I really started to interact beyond me reading your stuff and you reading mine. Like I said in the intro here, one of the things that really was fascinating to me was this entire philosophy, theory, or reality depending on how you look at it. So you’ve done the deep dive, can you just give us a primer on what that is and what that means to you?
SC
Absolutely. So the basic building block of simulation theory is the idea that at some point in the future, humans — presumably — will develop the technology to run simulations in which the simulated beings do not know that they’re simulated. Think of the Sims video games, very popular maybe a decade or so ago.
BH
Yeah, that makes sense.
SC
So we take that as block number one. At some point humans are going to develop this technology. And then we assume that once we develop this technology, that we will run an almost uncountable number of simulations — because that’s how we’re going to get the information. Just like we run simulations now to determine the weather or to find out if a pirate can beat a ninja. All these sorts of things, we run the simulations. So basically it breaks down to: either you’re living in the world where we haven’t developed this technology yet, and we’re still building toward it — the ‘real world’, you would say. OR, we’ve already developed this technology, and since we’ve done that, we’re running trillions and trillions of simulations. What would happen if the Axis won World War II? What would happen if Jesus never lived? All sorts of stuff. And so if you just look at it mathematically, it’s WAY more likely, way more likely, that we’re actually living in one of the simulations and we don’t realize it — because the simulations outnumber the real world trillions and trillions and trillions to one. Does that make sense?
BH
Yeah! So you believe that we’re already living in a simulation. At some point humans have developed the computing power to be able to manifest what you and I call reality right now.
SC
Yes. Although I’m not 100% on this, I just think that it is mathematically probable. The big question that people usually ask next is: Why does it matter? Because if we’re in a simulation or if we’re in the real world, how can you change your life to take advantage of that? And so the working theory that I sort of came up with was, because there’s so many simulations and there’s choices being made by all the people in all the simulations — this is kind of like the multiverse theory sort of.
BH
That’s exactly where I was just going, yeah. Alternate timelines.
SC
Right, exactly. So the thing that you need to understand, as a sim — if you’re assuming right now that we’re sims — is that every choice that you make happens. If you choose to have eggs for breakfast, or you choose to have bacon for breakfast, both of those simulations occur. Your consciousness simply follows the path that you chose. If you have eggs for breakfast, you have eggs for breakfast. But there is an entirely different simulation in which you have bacon for breakfast. And those branch to near infinity, basically. So when you wake up and you’re like, ug, I don’t wanna do that exercise. I don’t wanna the things that I know I am supposed to do. This is what humans do, we’re kinda lazy. But the motivation — for me, this might not work for everybody — I would wake up and I would think, ‘well, I don’t want that other version of me to get the benefits of doing the things that I chose not to do. So I’m going to do those things that I know I’m supposed to do, and therefore live in the better simulation or as the best version of yourself. There’s a lot of ways to say it, but basically you make the right decisions and you get rewarded for that down the line.
BH
Now who rewards you? Is that something that’s built into the simulation by the people who have created the simulation in the first place? And I guess maybe I should back up — if we’re sims, who are the humans that are real and are living outside of that and created this?
SC
They would be the programmers, whoever’s sitting around in a lab coat or whatever. Maybe not even a lab coat, the technology might be so pervasive that we’re literally on some teenager’s laptop, we don’t really know. But you mentioned the Matrix earlier, and that’s where most people kind of get the reference. But the big difference in the Matrix is there actually was a real world where you had a physical body, and you could escape the Matrix, get into your physical body, and then interact with the real world. In simulation theory, I don’t think that there’s any of that. I don’t think you can ‘escape’ the simulation or anything. So we’re stuck in this place that has rules that have been programmed. And it’s kind of like the Matrix where you say ‘some rules can be bent, and some can be broken’. And the rules that have been laid out for us are generally — if we eat right, our health is better. If we exercise, our health is better. The things that people know that they’re supposed to be doing. So you’re being rewarded, not by an external programmer or god-like figure or anything, it’s just by the rules of the simulation you’ll be living a better life.
BH
So to me that would imply that these simulators, these programmers, have an idea of what the highest and best version of a sim would be. And it’s almost like you’re saying we can choose to level up and get rewarded based on the planning of these simulators, these programmers.
SC
Right. And I would assume that those rules are based in their reality, right? I would assume that the way that we are growing is based on the way they grew in the past, if that makes sense.
BH
Sure. It does, yeah. So they’ve taken a successful model, maybe these people have achieved some kind of utopia and they’ve come back and are running these sims. Or maybe they’re much further down the line than we are. To me, it sounds like we would be a big information-gathering experiment.
SC
Yes! Yes! That is exactly it. The purpose of sims, as I would see it, would be to gather data. And you would do that basically just by living. If you live a longer life, you will gather more data. Sort of incentives there.
BH
So maybe what’s happening is they’re taking the data that they’re collecting from us, because there’s maybe not a perfect scenario that they’re living, and they’re trying to solve problems in their real world by running these simulations that we’re doing to see what we come up with, so they can solve their problems.
SC
Exactly. Exactly the way we use simulations today, just not as powerful.
BH
Very, very interesting. This is mind-blowing to me.
SC
So the best part about this theory and the way that I chose to enact it in my life is that if I’m wrong, and this IS the real world and there’s no simulation, then now all I’m going is making really awesome choices for my life. So it’s sort like a scenario that’s win-win, because either I’m taking advantage of the rules of the simulation that allow me to ‘level up’, or I’m just doing it on my own. And in the end it doesn’t matter at all.
BH
And then if you are a simulation, like you were saying, you’re playing by those rules. But how do you intuitively know that you’re being rewarded? Maybe you’re going in the completely opposite direction and everything you’re doing is actually an adverse event that they’re saying ‘Man, that’s wrong.’ But I guess what you said initially was, that’s where intuition can come into play. Whether you’re a sim or whether a real-life human being, I think intuition is a powerful thing that can lead us. And as the sim, let’s say that we are this sim, are we picking up pre-set clues? They’ve written a code, and we’re just — intuitively as a sim — finding those little clues to bring us closer to what they’ve already coded.
SC
Yeah, I think it could definitely be something like that. But I think if you go out and live, and you eat right — I say this a lot, but eat right, exercise — you feel better. Your body feels better, you have more energy, that’s the kind of reward that I’m talking about. Where the fact that you did it makes your body healthier, or makes your mind healthier, or whatever you’re working on at that moment. And so I don’t think it’s necessarily that we’re being rewarded by the code externally, I think that — like you said — it’s sort of a discovery, and humans have been doing this for thousands of years, of ‘What is the optimum way to live?’ How do we maximize our potential as humans? And I think that most people would agree it’s not sitting on the couch watching TV, it’s not yelling at other people all the time and being super confrontational. There’s a general guideline for how to live a good life, and I think that the simulation is sort of the way that we find that out.
BH
Obviously the world we live in today, while it seems like we’ve progressed quite a bit as far as technology, we’ve obviously evolved a lot of ways in our thinking and understanding of science. But it also seems like in a lot of cases there’s a bent now, especially living in the United States in 2022, to be dumbed down. I’ve talked about the mass hypnosis in some of my writings, where you look around, and the past 2 1/2 years really have been an example. And to me, the covid experience has revealed — I’ve even said it to people: it’s like the Matrix is just really glitched. There’s obviously been something very significant happen since the beginning of 2020. And whether we are living in the real world as real humans, or we are in a simulation, what do you feel is attributing to that? It’s like a very significant chapter has been turned in our book. Do you have any theories on what that would be, from a simulation perspective?
SC
Well, the simulation is basically made up of all these competing energies. And you can mold the simulation around what you want, but it’s a very limited circle of the stuff that you have complete control over. Like if you go out into the woods, you can chop up some trees and build a house. But when you get into society, into the complex interactions, there’s all these competing energies. Everybody’s trying to move the simulation in their own direction. So for example, you’d have like Fauci or whatever, he’s got his power, and he’s radiating all of that out. And his power bumps up against other peoples’ powers, and something has to give. Somebody’s going to be a little bit stronger, somebody’s going to have more airtime, if we’re talking about Fauci. So all of these energies are competing, and not all of them have the same outlook that I do. A lot of people might look at the world and think ‘I want to get rich, I want all of this power.’ And so they’re making the decisions that get them the power, get them the fame or whatever, but it doesn’t bring us closer to the utopia or whatever — the ideal society. But that’s human nature, because not all people are like this. You said that covid opened this super new page in history, and I agree with that in modern times. But I think if you went back in history, and you looked at the way that civilization was a few thousand years ago, I think we’d see a lot of the same leaders demanding complete control. You don’t get to talk out, you don’t get to speak against whatever is going on — and if you do, you get disappeared. And I think that’s been the normal human existence for most of our time on whatever it is, Earth or the simulation.
BH
There’s absolutely no doubt about that, and it’s cyclical. It’s unfortunate, but it’s cyclical. At our heart it just seems like we’re barbarians that are going to create our own little kingdoms. So absolutely, it’s not a new thing overall. From a limited perspective of my lifetime, it’s been unlike anything else. And probably many of our lifetimes. But then, why wouldn’t we have learned from that, if these simulations have been taking place for thousands of years? Is it because we’re just not heeding the results of what happened? I guess a lot of this stuff applies, like you said, whether we are in the simulation or whether we’re in the real world, it’s a lot of the same philosophy. The actions will bear the same results. But if there is a programmer or simulators outside us, why do you think it would be beneficial for them to allow these cycles to repeat, and for us to not really learn the lessons of the past?
SC
Most of the answer to that is that they are still learning.
BH
THEY are still learning themselves.
SC
Yes, exactly. They probably haven’t solved these problems in the future, because humans are basically the same as we were a few thousand years ago. They need to have flawed humans in the simulation because in the real world, humans are flawed. In one of the things you wrote, you asked ‘Why can’t we just simulate utopia?’ and everybody’s happy all the time. And the answer to that could be, first, we don’t know how to do it because we’re not actually there yet. Or, we wouldn’t accept it. Kind of like in the Matrix, they said ‘We tried to make a perfect simulation for you guys, and nobody would believe it.’
BH
Right, the program didn’t take, or whatever they said.
SC
Exactly. But also, if we are talking about these trillions and trillions and trillions of simulations going on that are always branching based on choices, there could be a simulation out there that IS utopia. And the entire purpose of the simulation could be — what choices did the people make to get there? So the vast vast vast vast majority of those simulations will not be perfect. They won’t be utopia, because people are making decisions that cause them to go down the wrong path.
BH
So right now at this very exact time that we’re talking, it seems like our simulation is far from utopia. But what you’re saying is that one of the trillions of other simulations out there, there’s other sims just like us living. This could be the string theory, there’s a lot of parallels between the simulation and the real world. Parallels between the simulation and what we understand string theory or timelines to be. It’s fascinating to me that there could be an almost infinite number of other ‘us’s.
SC
There ARE an infinite number of other yous. One of you is President.
BH
Ug. I don’t want that.
SC
I’m sorry to tell you this! But yes, you’re exactly correct. And the basis of simulation theory, in my life, is that I want to take the best route. Some people say ‘be the best version of yourself’, I feel like that’s the exact same sort of thing. Where you’re following that timeline where you make the good decisions, you feel good about it, you get rewarded, that sort of thing.
BH
Right. So in my worldview as it stands right now, I do believe in God. Where would that come into the simulation? Is that just because the people in the real world have also some kind of concept of a universe or a God, or whatever you call it, that they’re trying to replicate within the simulation? It is just simply another parallel between that world and our simulation, with this idea God, deity, creator, that kind of thing.
SC
That’s super interesting. I would think that it would probably be based on the human need to believe in something. And I think we’ve really seen this in the last 10 years or so. As the church has sort of fallen out of favor, we get a lot of people who replacing the church with the State.
BH
Well, the science of Faucism, let’s go back to him for a second. There were candles made of him showing him as a Saint. Regardless of who we are, I think that you hit the nail on the head right there. We have been designed, or compelled to believe in something, and something bigger than ourselves.
SC
Exactly. But if you take the example of Dr. Fauci, let’s say for a minute that he did everything right. He told us not to close the schools, he told us not to mask, he told us not to lockdown. He did everything right. Imagine where we would be, as a simulation or as a society, if he had done that? How many more millions of people would be on Team Reality? How many more millions of people would already be agreeing with us? So just that one little tweak — if he makes a different decision, everything changes, right?
BH
Right. So that introduces to me the flipside: Is there true evil? And I believe in the duality of mankind. What I believe, and this is outside the simulation, this is my understanding of the real-world, I believe that fundamentally we’re broken. And there’s redemption, but fundamentally evil has made its way through all of the systems. And so thinking about this from the point of a simulation, is what I consider to be evil to be corruption or a virus or something within the programming.
SC
I think everybody’s got evil in them. Or at least the capacity.
BH
Let’s maybe not call it evil. But in this simulation, we have not achieved perfection, we have not achieved utopia, either individually or as a society. So there’s obviously some kind of flaw or bent that’s not been corrected yet.
SC
And I think that flaw is just human nature. I honestly believe that Fauci thinks he’s a good guy. I think that Biden believes that he is doing good. If we can’t solve THAT issue, of people doing the wrong things but thinking that they’re doing the right things, then I don’t know how we can achieve the utopia. And maybe that’s what the simulation is designed to find out. I’m not exactly sure.
BH
Sure, and you just said the wrong thing, so we have to have some calculus, or a fence, or a dividing line, or some kind of standard that’s right and wrong.
SC
And I think that most people do. I think that humans instinctively understand fairness, and treating each other with dignity and whatnot. And I think that we know that we’re supposed to do that, I think that some people just don’t. And that might be poor programming, or programming due to human nature. That’s just the way they are. And everybody follows their own path and figures out their own truths at their own time. And so maybe Fauci, this is a longshot, but maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and think “Oh my God, I fucked everything up!” But I wouldn’t bet on it.
BH
And maybe there’s a reality, like you said, that he’s done the exact right thing, or I’ve done the exact right thing. Like you said, whether it’s a simulation and we’re sims, or we actually are human flesh-and-bones not plugged into some machine or simulation, the parallels are still very much the same in so many regards. The issue that I’m thinking through, that I’m struggling with in thinking about it like this is: To me, it’s a little nihilistic. If I’m not a human being. If I am not a flesh-and-blood entity with a spirit, and I’m code…..I can’t wrap my mind around that. And I think that some people would maybe take that nihilistic approach, and I’m sure that people do take that nihilistic approach. But like you said, still the only choice is — whether you’re in a simulation or whether you’re in “reality” — we have the choice to live that best life, to make those best choices and to have those best options. And maybe you and I are just optimistic. There’s a lot of people who aren’t.
SC
That could be. But yes, you pretty much nailed it on the head. Once you kind of come to this place where it could be either, you do the thing that works in both. And that’s kind of my philosophy about it. And it’s changed my life. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a magic bullet or anything, but once you start looking at the world as a series of choices that you consciously make, and you follow the path know will lead to the good outcome — or you believe will lead you to the good outcome, at least — the change in your life is almost instantaneous. You can let the bad stuff go, because you don’t have the ability to control that stuff. I can’t stop Biden from doing whatever Biden is doing. My energy is too far away and not powerful enough. So I let that go — other than the ranting every three days or so — and I focus on me and the circumstances immediately in my life. And for you, this would be your family, right? You do the things that are good for your family. Make sure that your kids are growing up properly.
BH
Yeah. I think we’ve come about it from different angles, but there was a point back in 2008 when I got real deep into the Glenn Becks. Just….hey wait a second, I’m a citizen of the United States and there’s what I think are some things that are fundamentally wrong. So I became very angry at the time, and went down a lot of rabbit holes. They were good in a lot of ways, but I think you can only dip in so long before it starts to change you. I look at some of these people who have shows or that are talking heads, or people who live in New York or Washington DC, and I think — DC for example — those are people who have been in for just way too long. They have zero concept of what’s outside. And obviously you see those things in concentric circles through the media, and even now into social media and everybody’s bubbles. So I think there was a point where I was like “I can’t control most or all of that, so what can I control?” And like you said, I can control the decisions I’m making right now. I can work on helping my family to become a better unit and a light on a hill. And out of that really came, for me, what creates human flourishing? What are the conditions that allow human beings to flourish in the best possible way? And a lot of that really is giving up ownership to things that you can’t possibly begin to control on a mass level. Now, on the flipside of that, that’s one of the reasons that I started Substack, because hey look, I CAN control this. A lot of times when I start to look macro, I start to think about the story — and I don’t know, you’ve probably heard this, especially living where you are — a kid’s walking along a beach and there’s somebody watching this kid. And all these starfish have washed up on this beach, and they’re going to rot in the sun if they don’t get back into the water. We’re talking hundreds, thousands of these starfish that have washed up on the shore. And this kid’s throwing them in, one by one. One by one. Here’s another one. And this person watching says “What are you doing? You can’t save all of them. What difference do you think that you’re making?” And the kid picks up a starfish, and throws it back in, and goes “Well, I made a difference to that one.” And that might be extremely naïve, but to me it’s powerful because it helps to guard against the very same nihilism I was talking about earlier. One word, one phrase, one article, one thing — how are you going to shift that narrative just a little bit in somebody else, and along the way, what are you going to discover about yourself? I think, like you said, the view whether you find yourself as a sim or whether your find yourself as a flesh-and-blood human being, those parallels run right up against each other.
SC
Exactly. And you really hit on it perfectly. There’s a line where you can embrace the ability to try to make a change on the macro level, but not lose yourself and turn into one of these people — I just saw a Bill Burr comedy last night, and he was talking about people getting upset that John Wayne said something 50 years ago — and if you’re not careful, that’s where you’ll end up. If you throw yourself into the muck and make it your life, that’s where you end up, and that’s an extremely bad place to be. Because, like you said, you have no real understanding of what’s actually going on, it’s just your own media bubble or worldview bubble. And so that’s the one extreme, and the other extreme would be not doing anything at all. And that’s probably not great, either. And I think we have the same view on this, is that if we can put out a story, if we can talk to somebody, if we can write an article — we don’t really know how many people that change will affect down the line. And it’s not even that, even in your family life. If you improve the lives of your children, you turn them into better people — who knows how many people THEY will affect in the future. So we can make changes. And we can get the simulation moving in a direction, but it takes a whole lot of us, especially at the level that we’re at. We’re basically powerless in the whole giant scheme of things, but we do have the ability to change minds, and that’s probably the most important thing we can do. We’re not going to go to DC and single-handedly dismantle the swamp. But if we can convince two people….
BH
We saw somebody who thought about that. It’s astounding to me. I want to let you finish your thought, but it is astounding to me how powerful that swamp is. When you look at the Trump enigma, whether you believe that he was just another agent in this thing, or he was actually somebody outside the system trying to disrupt the system — man that system blew back. And to that point, like you’re saying, we have a right and an obligation and duty on the individual level to change the immediate circle around us, to take on the machines. It’s daunting, next to impossible, because the machines are so embedded. They’re so systematized and captured.
SC
Exactly. And I think that’s been the biggest revelation for most people in the last couple years, is exactly how deep the swamp is. Speaking of Trump while he was President, you had people lying to him about troop movements in Afghanistan. You had them lying to him about troops in Syria. You had subordinates literally talking to their Chinese counterparts saying “Hey, if we’re going to nuke you, we’ll go ahead and give you a heads up.” And how many of those things do we not know about? We’ve delegated all these powers to the bureaucracy, and if even the President can’t stand up to it — it’s a super daunting task.
BH
And to circle back to a point you made about — either you’re sitting on the couch doing nothing, or you’re getting sucked into cancelling John Wayne for something he said in 1963. We’ve all seen, or many of us have seen, some of the memes ‘I support the Current Thing’
BH (Continued)
And I’ve written some articles about the woke movement — that’s probably the best name that I can give to it is just the Woke Cult. And I think it’s extremely dangerous when you don’t have a personal framework that you have made your own. Even beyond your family, as an individual. If you don’t have a framework, and honestly a lot of the reasons that I’m writing and doing the different podcasts that I do is because I want to continue to understand what my framework is. I can’t claim to have it figured out. And a lot of the times when I’m writing, or having discussions with people, it’s because I’m pursuing something a little bit more foundational for me. But I think there’s a really, really dangerous mentality, and even systemic oppression that’s in our society right now, that you do have all these people that are clinging to ‘The Next Thing’ because they have who have zero understanding of who they are. There’s no identity. And when you have more and more people every day that can’t stick their flag in something that’s tangible, all they’re doing is standing on “I have to cancel John Wayne because that’s what this group that I find my identity in is doing.” But they don’t know why they’re doing it. That’s a really, really dangerous place to be.
SC
Yes, it’s extremely dangerous. Especially because — today you have to say that you’re cancelling John Wayne because of XYZ, but what is the cult going to tell you to do tomorrow? And the day after that? And the day after that? And your situation remains the same — I have to continue to go along with the cult because I have no other identity. I don’t have anything going on in my life that’s worthwhile, and so I join this group. It’s really easy, all I have to do is walk up and say the right words, and then I will be accepted. And this like gang members back when I was growing up. They were the kids who didn’t have anything else, and the gang was the family. That’s sort of the same thing. Everybody wants to belong, and if you don’t have a place that you belong, you’ll go out and you’ll find one. And that’s really dangerous because the cult hates people who leave the cult the most. They always have. So the pressure for you to comply with what they’re saying is tremendous, just absolutely tremendous.
BH
And it just exponentially builds the longer that you’re in.
SC
Yes, exactly. If you would go back to 2005 and tell Democrats “You guys are gonna love Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney. You’re going to talk about how awesome Liz and Dick Cheney are.” They would have been like “NO, that’s not gonna happen! No way. No way! Dick Cheney is a murderer! He’s a war criminal!” But now, a couple decades later, the cult needs you to believe that Liz Cheney is a good person, and Dick Cheney is a good person. Because the current narrative right now is — they’re talking out against Trump. And it’s sort of insidious because you don’t notice it as it’s going on, because it’s just one step. One step. One step. One step. Then you look back and you’re all the way down the mountain and you’re like “uh oh.”
BH
And it happens on, I don’t want to say sides, but it’s easy to say “Oh those crazy progressive liberals”, but it happens on the other side of things, too.
SC
Absolutely. Absolutely. The only reason I bring up the left now is, I’m a libertarian, and the left has the power. Once the right has power again, I will rail against them just as hard — just like I did during the Cheney/Bush years when they were passing the USA PATRIOT Act and all of that freedom-killing crap. It’s just that right now they’re not dangerous because they’re the minority and they don’t have any institutional power, whereas the left is now THE MAN that’s holding us down.
BH
Which, you go back to the hippies in the ‘60s that were against the man, and many of them have become the man. You’re talking about one step here or there, that’s the Overton Window that continues to shift. One of my foundational articles on Substack is ‘Meet me on the 50-yard line’, and it might be a little idealistic, but there IS a ballgame. We’re all in this ballgame. And whether real-life or simulation, this current view that we’re seeing through our eyes as we sit here and talk in this place, we’re in a ballgame. We’re not sitting in the stands. Well, some of us are. I’d like to think I’m on the field. But I think what the opposition is very good at, like you said, is moving ball a meter. Moving that ball down the yard line just a little bit more. And when you don’t push back against that, it often becomes a complete inversion from where you first started. That’s why I think that’s why there’s still many more people, if they would get in the game and understand there is a game taking place, with or without their knowing, there’s a lot of opportunity to right the ship. But one of the discouraging things, really, has been the last couple years seeing all the evidence, and understanding that people would just rather choose comfort over something that might be a little bit sacrificial. The Good German Theory, not to pick on Germans, but the Good German Theory is that ‘If I just do this and comply just a little bit…’. It’s putting your head in the sand.
SC
They don’t realize that their ability to live their lives is at stake, too. And they probably will, eventually. Hopefully it won’t be too late by the time they get in the game, as you say. But they’re part of the stakes of the game, if you will. Nobody’s unaffected at all.
BH
Yeah. In these big movies, Lord of the Rings or whatever, there’s always this little side thing that you forget about. And a lot of times that’s where your help comes from, and it turns the tide. To me, the direction we’re going is a very bad tide that needs to be turned. And there were so many moments during 2020/2021 where I’m like “Well, there’s that little branch that’s going to come and all of a sudden change the game” — but it never came, or at least not in the way that I thought it would. Now, we do find ourselves in a spot here in 2022 where this tide has seemingly receded a little bit, but that also makes me suspicious, because before a tsunami comes, that tide really rolls out. And there’s never going back to “normal”, there’s been a major dent in this timeline or this simulation or whatever. But just from a standpoint of looking at the tide going back out it seems, it also gives me the willies, too.
SC
I can definitely see why you’d be worried. And I agree with you, there were so many times — even during 2020 — when the panic should have been over. The first one I can think of is the antibody testing in April 2020 that showed that the virus was FAR more widespread that we believed, and we were missing 10-12 infections for every one we were catching. And at that point it was obvious it was going through the population, it was too late to stop. But nobody ever mentioned that. None of the ‘experts’ ever said anything like that, so the panic kept going. And then in July, there was a study done saying maybe up to 50% of people have existing immunity because of past viruses and cross-immunity and some sort of interaction there. And THAT should have ended the panic, because all of a sudden now instead of the entire world being infected, you’re looking at half the world getting infected. And then there was another one — they’re so numerous — once seasonality became obvious in the summer of 2020. All of these things SHOULD HAVE ended the panic. The official data, that I’m sure that you went and found just like I did, ALWAYS counteracted the official narrative. Always. And the most frustrating thing about the last couple years to me is that so few people actually went and did the work to figure it out themselves. They just watched the news, and the news told them what to think. And that’s extremely dangerous, because if you’re giving up all your individual autonomy to the guy on the news — well, the guy on the news is getting paid by Pfizer, or getting grants from the government or whatever. He’s going to repeat the narrative. And so basically you’re just saying “I’m going to support the current thing, and it doesn’t even matter what it is! Just tell me what it is and I’ll put up my Facebook filter.”
BH
Yeah. And I think we’ve been conditioned. One of the things I did want to touch on was the 24-hour news cycle that started in the ‘80s. I think that was one of the most dangerous things to have happened to us. And I heard somebody explain it, I think we can probably link to it, I saw this guy give a TED talk, and he was talking about it morphed from news, which is objective and proven and reviewed. That’s what news used to be. You had an editor and there were high standards for it — not saying there wasn’t a bent or some kind of subjectivity to that, but at least for a long time there was some rigor to it, or so the prevailing wisdom goes. But then somewhere along the line — just like a lot of these other things — it’s easy to start blurring the lines. And once you start blurring the lines, then you can really rewire human brains. And when you started to have commentators, you started to have opinions. And you have a news anchor that in one segment is giving what seems to be objective fact, then they get up and walk over to another set, and now they’re talking opinion or having a roundtable discussion. That starts to blur a line until the point where objectivity is out the window. Then we slid into the fact that a lot of these legacy medias couldn’t compete with people that had a phone. And so — clickbait. The writing of the article for headlines. So we get to the point where the CDC puts out a paper saying one thing, but then they put out a press release saying the opposite — because they know nobody’s going to check on it. And so in many ways we’re here because we have abdicated our role of critical thinking.
SC
Absolutely. And I totally agree with you about the 24-hour news cycle. The simple fact is that there’s not 24 hours of news in a day. It’s kind of like ESPN, there’s just not sports 24 hours a day, so you’re going to be filling that time with something. And that something that they filled it with was opinion, and clickbait, and whatever would drive up the ratings so they could stay in business. And I think that one of the many mistakes that we have made in the past is that newspapers, and journalism in general, has catered to the advertisers. And you need to write the things that will sell the ads so that your paper can continue. But when you do that, you’re focusing on advertisers. And I think one of the things that Substack fixes is that, to succeed on Substack you have to appeal to your READERS. The readers are the people who decide whether or not your thing is worth paying for. And just in that little shift, now you don’t just want to get as many clicks as you can with your BS clickbait headline, now you want to write something where the readers will appreciate it, they’ll understand it, and they’ll reward you for it. And I think that’s a very, very good step in the evolution of media. But the legacy media is still kicking and screaming because they don’t want to die. The only reason that they’re still alive is that they’re repeating the narrative. Nobody’s really interested in MSNBC as an entity to give us news. So I think that Substack and other Substack-like things are going to be very important in the future. And we can see that as the subscriber lists grow and more and more people who are — ironically, as Fauci said the other day — people who are hungry for the truth. They’re tired of the misinformation and whatnot. And it’s true, and that’s why they’re no longer listening to him, and they’re listening to people have been correct for the last two years. And at this point I’ve got to thank Twitter a little bit, because I was spending a lot of time on Twitter. And it wasn’t getting anywhere, I didn’t think.
BH
It’s just a gutter.
SC
Yeah. And you’re so restricted. You can write a little blurb, you can maybe throw up some graphics or whatever. But once I got onto Substack, I just realized that this long-form journalism of multi-page articles where you can really flesh out your ideas, you can have discussions with people in the comments, it’s just so much healthier for everything. For the attitudes of the people who are involved, for the conversation itself, it’s just night and day. And that’s one of the things I’m really hopeful because of.|
BH
Yeah, and that really clicked for me when I started following Alex Berenson and then bad cat. And it was so refreshing to not just read these articles, but to get into the comment sections. And I was just commenting for a long time, for a couple months. And it just really inspired me to say, “All right, this is extremely healthy.” And in most everything I do, I try to keep the lens of health — what is healthy, physically, spiritually — in the forefront. And like you said at the outset of this, we just kind of know what healthy is, whether that’s been because of a group of people outside of the simulation that have also led us sims to the point where this is healthy, we DO understand if you’re paying a bit of attention, you can gravitate towards health. And with Substack, that was really apparent to me early on. And the comments, I would spend a lot of time on those comments. And I still do, because some of the best discussions happen there. And if you’re willing to be adults and have these discussions, it really is free speech. The challenge and joy of free speech is, let’s have more conversation rather than less conversation. Let’s hear all the ideas, and the bad ones are just going to be scrapped, because eventually they show themselves for what they are. Chris Best, one of the founders of Substack, was recently on Joe Rogan, within the past week. And it was a good interview. It was long, it wasn’t probably my favorite interview that Joe Rogan’s done, but it was interesting to hear his commitment to this platform and to talk about how it’s really up to the author. The author recommends other authors if they want, or not. There’s no real algorithm that Substack is trying to capture, like when you join Twitter. “Hey, you might want to follow these five other people who are going to tell you the exact same thing that these other five people are going to tell you. There’s freedom there. And so I am really excited about Substack, and I do hope and pray that alternate ecosystems are developed, because what we have in the institutions that we have right now — it’s just such rot. And we have to build those parallel economies, and I think Substack is a very good first step in that.
SC
Absolutely. And I think that you really understand the dichotomy. If you’ve been on Twitter a while and then you flip over to Substack, and you read the comments, you’re just blown away by the difference. On Twitter, everything is curated and managed. And on Substack we actually have the free expression, like you were saying, to just talk out these problems. And that’s what we have done for thousands and thousands of years as humans, is talk out these problems. And like you said, the bad ones fall to the wayside and the good ones rise up. Maybe the first example I can think of is during the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, there was a place called RonPaulForums.com. And it was full of all the Ron Paulers from all of the different places. And everybody had different ideas to help. “We can do this, we can do this, we can do this”, and you could see in real-time — the bad ideas, nobody would respond. The good ideas, people would respond and they stayed up at the top of the list, so more people would see them and MORE people would respond, sort of like a snowball effect. We took all the ideas, everybody’s ideas, and we just started “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” And now we’re left with these good ideas. That’s the way that the process works. And now at all the institutions, they’re doing away with all that and they’re saying “This is what you can say, and if you deviate from that, you will simply be un-personed. And that is so unhealthy as a society and for people in general, because they’re not able to get the information and come to their conclusions in a natural way that would make them supportive of The Thing, whatever The Thing is. They’re just being told to support it, and so they do.
BH
Yeah. And you said un-personed, I think that’s a key word. Because what free speech does, what a competitive field of ideas does, with adults that understand the concept of it, is “OK, you don’t like my idea, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t like me.” And you might not like me, but I’m not going to make this personal. Something I’ve been working through in my job is, there’s conflict. This life, this simulation, obviously conflict is a part of it. And the duty of responsible people is to work through conflict, again, in a healthy way. And a healthy way to do that is through the understanding that the ideas matter, and we need to flesh them out. And the more ideas and the more conversations around these ideas, the better. Without saying “Oh, you hate my idea? You don’t like my idea? Well, you don’t like me, so F you.” But where we’re at right now is this place where if you don’t like these microaggressions, if you don’t like what I say, you hate me, you hate all of these people that I identify with in my little tribe or my group, and that makes you a monster. And so I have to turn you into a monster, then I have to kill you as a monster. And that’s, in so many ways, where we’re at right now. And it’s so toxic.
SC
It’s true, and I think a big part of that is, as children — we probably grew up in about the same era — we got kicked out after breakfast and were told to come home before dark.
BH
Yeah, go figure it out. It’s a big world, go figure it out.
SC
Yeah. Go do your thing and figure it out. And that leads to unsupervised play, which is where you learn conflict resolution. It’s where you learn to interact with other people without pissing them off so badly that they’ll just take their ball and go home. I think bad cat wrote an article about this a couple months ago, and he just nailed it, because there’s so many things to learn when there’s nobody to run to. You’ve gotta figure it all out yourself. And a lot of these things are inter-personal conflicts. And since these people aren’t learning those skills when they’re younger, they’re growing up and thinking “Oh, you don’t like my idea, you don’t like me.” No, I just don’t want to go play kickball right now. And I’m sure that as you were growing up there were probably kids you didn’t really like so much in the group, but you still had to learn how to tolerate them. Learn how to maybe minimalize their impact on you, maybe. But the struggle is what made you learn, and if you’re not going through that struggle you’re not going through the learning process. And then we have these “adults” who are still basically children because they haven’t gone through this process of figuring out who they are, of figuring out how to interact with their immediate circle. And basically that translates into what you see on Twitter, in these other places that are so toxic, like you were saying.
BH
We’ve become just incredibly narcissistic with a complete lack of humility, and we don’t grace, we don’t understand mercy, we don’t understand forgiveness. And when you live in that society, this is what you get. You get people who go back and cancel John Wayne for something he said in the ‘60s. Like, that happened in a time. Let’s have the conversation. But to tear down a statue or to retroactively cancel somebody, it’s insane and unrealistic. I’m hopeful that the pendulum swings back, and as we start to wrap this up here, I want to get back to back to that point where we do. But I think there’s a pendulum, and I pray that we’re not so far up on the one side of the pendulum where it completely snaps off the clock. I think we are in the midst of a fundamental transformation as a society, or in your view the simulation. To me, I think we’ve reached a critical point regardless. I think as we move from this point, in 5-10 years, we’re not going to recognize a lot of things that we recognize right now. And I’m hopeful we’re at the tipping point where we reign it back in, in some way, shape or form and the cooler heads to prevail. I’ve heard a lot of talk recently that we’re very much in a Cold War of ideas right now, especially in the United States, and I think to a large extent around the world. But there was that mutually assured destruction in the Cold War between the Soviets and the United States and in that era. I feel like there’s a bunch of people out there on both sides who don’t want the escalation to tip over the scales. But I also don’t know if there’s enough people who say — the only reason we came back from the brink, not the ONLY reason, but in Russia there were enough people who looked around, enough Generals and people who said “Wait a second, I don’t want my family to be nuked.” When it comes down to it, I don’t know if we have enough of that on one side or the other. And I just hate the whole ‘one side or the other’. So I guess what I’m asking, where do you feel we go from here? What is the simulation telling you? What are the tea leaves telling you? And is there any hope that you can see that we can end this on?
SC
Well, the good news is that there’s more hope now than there was a couple years ago. During 2020, especially later 2020, everything looked hopeless. Everything. But when you look at the number of vaccine uptakes now, it’s bottomed out. People are ignoring the CDC and Fauci. Finally. So the tide is turning, and that’s the good news. But the bad news is, we’ve got a long way to go. And the biggest obstacle that we face is this institutional power of controlling speech, of government and social media coercion together. Like the Twitter and CDC e-mails that I talked about a couple weeks ago.
BH
Or the, we didn’t mention this specifically, but the Freedom of Information Act documents that came out where it showed Facebook gave the CDC $150 million in advertising.
SC
Yes, exactly. Like this insidious merger of government and corporations, where in the past we would call that fascism. But now fascism is ‘whatever the Republicans do’.
BH
You can’t say it, but fascism is extremely fashionable. And going back to World War II, pre-World War II, it also was then. And it wasn’t just in Italy, in the United States we’ve always had a bent toward that fascism. And then you have a reality check, and you rethink things until it pops its head up again. And I think that’s where we’re at right now. There’s going to be another reality check. But please finish your thought.
SC
You’re right, though. It’s circular. We sort of forget these things because we didn’t live them, then the ideas grow, and then at some point we’re like “Hey wait a minute, this is a terrible, terrible idea.” And I think that we’re getting to that point, and we’re getting to that point simply because the collectivists, the Joe Bidens and the people who want government to control things, all their ideas are bad. All of their ideas make us worse off. And we’re slowly figuring that out, and the Inflation Reduction Act will be another example. Biden loves to talk about how much he’s doing, and loves to talk about how much the government is ‘investing’, and loves to talk about this and that — but people who are living in the real world, or the simulation or whatever, they see the disastrous effects that these policies are having. And so at some point, they will just say “You gotta stop this.” And hopefully that’s this November, but maybe not. But more and more people are realizing that once you lose your bodily autonomy and you give up the ability to think, or make your own medical decisions.
BH
To transact business.
SC
To transact business, exactly. The more that the we get away from freedom, the worse everybody is. And hopefully that message will break through this narrative that has been created that all good things come from the government, and that government is here to help you. If you just look at the covid spending, they like to blame inflation on the fact that everybody got their $1,200 or $2,400 or whatever it was, but they never mention the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that got printed and then given away to the cronies. They want to blame the problems on the little people, while ignoring the fact that they printed so much and gave so much to their buddies. Really, all they did for us was send us a check so we’d shut up. And we wouldn’t get upset that they were raiding the treasury again. But I think more people are realizing that today than did in 2020. And hopefully more people will realize it next year than did this year.
BH
Yeah. And I think what I’m hopeful for is that — we had a cancer check. I’ve always been suspicious of authority. And I think these last couple years, if you were paying attention in any way, shape or form, what these last couple years have done is exposed the rot that’s through EVERYWHERE. And it is like going in and getting a diagnosis saying your body is filled with cancer. And that means aggressive treatment of that cancer. I believe that’s where we are right now. I believe in a lot of ways, people are understanding the rot, the institutional capture, the corruption, in ways that we’ve never seen and places we’ve never seen. To me, the healthcare system. There’s horror stories. But for me, I’m really going to think twice before trusting a doctor. Not that I necessarily did before, but where do you turn for truth? So I think the revealing and the pulling back of the creatures that have been festering underneath the skin and the tumors that have been festering underneath the skin that we maybe weren’t prepared to look at before, we’re much more prepared to look at now. But we can’t just stop and say “Oh, that’s really rotten.” You have to root it out.
SC
You have to do the work.
BH
You have to do the work. And in a healthy way. So many times you really have to scrape things out in order to save the whole body. So it’s kind of an optimistic view from me, because it means that we can do the work, but we have to be very aggressive about doing that. I’m not 100% sure what that looks like, but I think that — to bring it back to Substack — things like this, we need to guard them from being captured as much as we can. And we also need to continue to create those alternate economies, but we also do need to work within the systems that are in place, as corrupted and hopeless as it might seem, we do need to work within that. Again, going back to those hippies from the ‘60s, they knew that they had to get into the system to change the system — even though they didn’t like the system at the time. So I think it’s very much a multi-pronged approach, but I’m hopeful that enough people — and enough people with influence and power and money — can step up and have the courage to really cast their lot and play the hands that they have not been playing and holding back on.
SC
Right. Right. Exactly. I think it will get easier for people do that as, to use your metaphor, as the cancer becomes more obvious and it’s staring them in the face. Maybe their standard of living starts declining. Nobody wants to rock the boat while everything’s hunky dory. But you start realizing that this is unsustainable, then you’re really forced to look in the mirror and say “OK, is this how we want to continue?” And I see more people than there were saying “This is unsustainable and it can’t continue.” And that is very hopeful to me. But then I go on Twitter.
BH
I think that’s probably a pretty good place to stop for now. I would love to discuss with you about picking up a round 2 or doing some kind of longer conversations down the line, or more conversations down the line, because this has been really, really fascinating to me.
SC
Absolutely! The time has just flown by, I can’t believe we’re already finished here. I’d love maybe make it a re-occurring thing, or at least have another conversation to get to some of the stuff we talked about but didn’t get to actually talk about.
BH
Yeah, we could just go on forever. I do love this, I appreciate you coming, and hearing the voice to a page that I’ve been reading. But let me go ahead and wrap this up. That’s going to do it, once again visit bherr.substack.com and simulationcommander.substack.com to find a whole galaxy of thought-provoking articles and conversations. And please be sure to like and comment on what you find interesting. Thank you, bye!
And…………….done (best without sound)
Audible Screaming #1