, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, and I mean everything in every reality better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go.

Would you like to see the matrix? You know some people think that we live in a simulation. And if this were a simulation you would be subject to resource constraints, wouldn't you? If we were any kind of computer simulation, the one thing you could be reasonably sure of is it would have some kind of limits because everything has to have a limit just logically. And so could we ever spot the limits of our own simulation as evidence that that's what we're in?

Here's the frame that I'm going to give you for today's entire episode and it goes like this. Did you ever wonder why cognitive dissonance is so common? Or to put it more generally, why people have completely different views of reality? And it doesn't just apply to the news. Don't you know that sometimes you'll be talking to your friends you've known forever and you'll have completely different memories of events in which you both were there? What's up with that?

Why do we have memory but our memory is so close to fantasy that sometimes you can't even untangle them? Why do we so often live in what seems like completely different worlds? And here's the answer. It has to be that way because of resource constraints. Cognitive dissonance isn't a flaw, it's a feature. You couldn't program the simulation without that requirement. Here's why.

Imagine creating a simulation. And by the way, if those of you who have programmed back me up on this. If you were creating a simulation in which every character's actions had to be known to every other object and item in the entire universe because they might someday interact, and someday you might hear about something that somebody else did and it has to be consistent, if our memories were perfect it would have to be consistent.

So if you tried to build an artificial world in which everybody's story, their narrative if you will, or their subjective reality, if they had to be consistent in all ways with all other stories, the resources would be astronomical to the point where it's unimaginable that it could be programmed. But could you build a world in which people believed they were seeing an accurate view of the reality but in fact the accuracy was only a trick of the mind? That'd be a lot easier.

So watch, if you will, the predictive power of the simulation hypothesis. Do I tell you that the simulation is the true way to see the world? Never. Nope. The only thing I could tell you is that some ways of looking at things might be more predictive than others. And that's probably the closest you can get to somethin