Is there anybody here who's actually like literally thinking, are you actually controlling the simulation? Does it ever feel like that?

All right, some yeses, some nos. Mostly nos because you're very rational. I like to think that I've attracted a hyper-rational audience, or at least you are now. So the rational people should say no, it doesn't look like that. It's anecdotal and it's coincidence. And I'm also good at identifying a parade and getting in front of it, so you should know that about me. Sometimes it's not all about prediction. Sometimes it's saying, I think I see a parade. What happens if I get in front of it? Then it looks like you predicted it.

But sometimes I also wonder myself. If you do my actual life, you know the public parts, but if you do my whole life you would have to say to yourself, what's going on here? It looks like something weird is happening in my life that I can't explain. So let me tell you something that's the weirdest story you might hear this week. And it's a story of weird stories. Everything I tell you next I swear to God is true. Now when I say it's true I mean it's my impression of what happened. It's my experience. The actual underlying truth, I don't know. I don't know what the underlying truth is. But I can tell you my experience. So I'm not lying about my experience or my memory of it. Right? That part I promise you.

About, was it two days ago, I had this overwhelming feeling that I was being watched. Now I've had it before. You've had that, right? You ever have that feeling you're being watched even when you're alone? So I was alone at home and I thought, I'm being watched. And I had an overwhelming feeling — and again you should not put any stock in this, right? It's just feelings, just a feeling — that the creators of the simulation were online and looking at me at that moment. Like I was being observed.

Now I couldn't, I didn't have a feeling if I was being observed by one entity or multiple, but I had the feeling that whoever was observing or whatever was part of a population, not a single entity. Now the questions that you're going to ask, let me anticipate your questions. Scott, were you on drugs? Of course I was. It was after 9 a.m. But I'm on drugs every day in marijuana and I know what marijuana feels like. Can you accept that if you get high every day for thirty years or so or more, you know what it feels like? There are no surprises, right? It doesn't sometimes feel like mushrooms, right? It doesn't sometimes make me hallucinate. It's always the same. And if you do it every day it doesn't give you any kind of an experience like somebody doing it once in a while. The people who do it once in a while have this profound, you know, you better not drive your car, don't use any power tools kind of situation. If you do it every day it just makes you feel normal. You know there are very few things I couldn't do completely high. I could play a sport, play an instrument about the same, not much difference. But that's only people who use it every day. Ordinary people would have a profound effect so you can't compare them to the so-called chronic users.

All right, so that's the first question. So I embarked on an out-loud conversation with whoever it was and I swear to God I could feel I was getting answers. Now this must be what people feel when they believe they're having a conversation with a god. I imagine it feels the same way. And I don't imagine that my experience of it was so outside what people have felt for millennia, right? Humans have always felt, am I talking to God or are the gods talking to me right now? It's a very common experience.

So remember I'm not trying to claim that I understand the experience I'm explaining. I'm just saying it happened and then you could put your own interpretation on it. And so I had this long conversation about what this was all about. And then because I didn't believe my own experience and I didn't feel I was necessarily talking to anybody except my own imagination, I thought, well maybe I'll test it.

So I said, if this — I said out loud, if I'm in a simulation and I have determined and I've discovered it's a simulation, do I get powers like Neo from The Matrix? Like if you know you're in a simulation do you get power over it? In other words, does that give me the ability to change things in real time and actually change my reality because I now understand it and I can just change it? And so I thought, well it's worth the test.

So I said, I'll give you — I said out loud to the creators of the simulation, is that all right? Here's a test. If you can make this happen then I'll believe I'm in a simulation. Otherwise just my imagination. Although it could be my imagination either way. And so I said, all right, my biggest problem at the moment two days ago was that my knees have been hurting me for well over a month, maybe two months. And they hurt so much that although I was still active and still going to the gym it was sort of hard to walk upstairs. Like once I was back from the gym and I was really starting to worry if my bad knees were going to be forever because sometimes you have temporary knee problems, sometimes it's forever.

I thought if it's forever like I'm starting this downward spiral where I'm just going to be unable to exercise for the rest of my life. I thought, well it feels like maybe it's bone on bone or something. I didn't know what it was. So I said, all right simulation, if you can make my biggest problem go away, my knee pain, that I will accept that I'm not only in the simulation but that I have some control over it.

So two months of solid knee pain, never not knee pain, right? It wasn't good at night, wasn't good in the morning, was never good. It went away as I was talking. Didn't come back. It's still not back two days and my knees have no pain whatsoever.

Now I don't have any explanation for that. If you're saying to me, Scott that's like a perfect placebo situation because I talked myself into it and I had a profound experience of something that probably wasn't real, right? I probably wasn't talking to anybody but because it was so profound, hypnosis and placebo and everything I know about the mind suggests that I may have erased my pain. You know maybe I have the same inflammation I had before but I may have just turned it off.

Now let me tell you something else that's related to this. Sometime last year I was at an event at a friend's house and it was an individual who was doing some work in the backyard and it was super cold. It was like a really cold night and the individual is a young man and he wasn't wearing a jacket. He just had a t-shirt on and I was wearing a full winter jacket and I was pretty cold. I was like, and I said to him like how the hell are you putting up with this cold? And he told me the following story. He said that he had an experience with some psychedelics, I think it was mushrooms, and that during that experience he had the realization that his sensation of cold was a manufactured feeling and that he wasn't in any real danger at that temperature. Temperature was maybe 50.

Right, so you can't stay outside at 50 for too long without being uncomfortable but it's not really dangerous, is it? I don't think it's dangerous. I mean if you can handle being outside at 50 degrees with your t-shirt it's not going to kill you. It might even be good for you, right? Might actually be good for you. So he had actually separated cold from a feeling. He just didn't feel cold anymore. And the reason he didn't feel it is because he chose not to. He simply turned off that feeling because he realized it was fake. It was a false signal.

And so the other day I was outdoors without a jacket, you know temporarily just to check my mailbox, and I thought wow I'm going to be out here way longer than I want to be. And I was super cold and the cold was starting to hurt. And I said, what would happen if I reframed the cold? So I'll give it a try. And you know I keep hearing about these people who do the cryonic chambers where it's like super cold and they stay in there for a few minutes and like I'm surprised they don't die. And I thought, wait, if you know Joe Rogan and those people can get in this super cold thing and it's actually good for them, wouldn't it probably be good for me to simply experience something that's uncomfortably cold for a few minutes?

And as soon as I reframed what I was doing to a health-related process I said to myself, I bet this is actually good for me to be like super cold. I know you're laughing. Let me just pause. I live in California. I used to live in upstate New York. If you adjust this for what you're used to, when I say I went outside it was 50 degrees and I was super uncomfortable. If I had been in New York that would have been roughly zero. Roughly zero, right? So in New York if you live in New York and you live in the cold you could go outside in your t-shirt at roughly zero degrees and sort of do some stuff, you know. You wouldn't like it that much. Do some stuff and then come inside. You wouldn't be damaged, right? Would you agree?

So when you're making fun of me for being a wuss because I couldn't handle 50 degrees just know that when I grew up in New York I could have done zero. It's just what you're used to, right? So the moment I refra