984. You stole that idea. So I don't know that this is an original idea, but I'm pretty sure I didn't hear it anywhere. So if you've seen it somewhere in a book, let me know.

And the idea goes like this: that there is a way for us to determine if we are real, like an original species, or a simulation. And the way you could do that is by looking at how we alleged humans do software development. And if our reality that we see around us, yeah, that we can touch and drink, if that reality has the same limitations that a programmer would have built into a software simulation, well then we're probably a simulation.

For example, if you built a simulation, you wouldn't let the characters see beyond the edges of it. In other words, you wouldn't let them get out of the simulation so they could look in and see it. And sure enough, we have a universe that's infinite, and you can't travel faster than the speed of light, and the universe is expanding at the speed of light because the light itself is expanding or is moving in outward directions. So you know it fits that we can't get outside the simulation.

Who incidentally, we can't see the smallest part of the simulation. In other words, no matter how good your microscope is, you can't see the smallest thing. Oh yeah, we can deduce that there are particles and we can split a particle, but what's the particle made of? Nobody knows what this stuff is made of. And if you could find out what the particles are made of, what's that stuff made of? In other words, everything is made of something else. But could you keep going down the list of what things are made of forever? Is everything made of something else? And would it be an infinite progression? Because that makes no sense. So that's one of your signs that you're in a simulation.

Here's the other sign. The other sign is that we would have lots of false memories. Because if you built a simulation, would you make a real history that existed? Like for every single thing that happened in the universe, would you have to create it and then store it so that in case anybody had a memory that was in conflict with another memory, as we have with Kavanaugh and his accuser? Two people have different memories. Would the person who made the simulation create a simulation that has in it every fact that's ever happened, just in case there's ever a disagreement? And then people could say, okay, one of those is true, one of them is not. Let's figure it out. You wouldn't really build it that way because it would take too much resource.

Instead, you would give people false memories for any situation that can't be confirmed. That's the important part: can't be confirmed. So if there was an event in the past like the Kennedy assassination, there's a video of it. That video collapses the reality and makes that the actual shared reality, and it can never change because there's video proof of it.

But what about the memory that Kavanaugh did something bad that conflicts with the memory that he did not? Those are opposites. It can't be true in a normal universe. It could not be true that he did something bad while simultaneously true that at the same time he wasn't there and didn't do anything. Can't be true. But if we live in a simulation, they can both be true.

So in other words, as long as those two competing histories can never be fact-checked, they both exist as true, as true as anything else in the simulation. Because the simulation isn't true. It's a movie that's presented to us. So in the simulation, it can be true that the event happened at the same time it's true that it didn't happen. And the only thing that would collapse those two competing memories, the only thing that could turn them into one, is independent corroboration. Probably not from another person, because another person just has faulty memory too. It would have to be from a videotape, maybe the mother finds a diary page that talked about it, maybe there's some weird situation where there's physical evidence.

But in my world, the world that I actually see and perceive and go through life as if it's the real reality, in my world, which I do not suggest you share, both are true. That's the actual world that I exist in. In other words, the perception that I have all the time is that both histories can be a hundred percent true, because neither of them are true. Meaning we're a simulation. There's nothing that's true. But if one of them were ever confirmed, it would harden into the history. And if it's never confirmed without an outside corroboration, the two histories just go on as true. They're both true forever.

Is this how you landed, Christina? Well, that plus my good looks.

All right, now here's the question. What are the odds? Let's go back to talking about false memories. Remember the coincidence I told you? That this situation with Kavanaugh is about a judge who's trying to become an even more famous judge, at the same time he's being accused of doing something when he was seventeen that was stopped by his friend whose last name is Judge. Think about that. The last name's friend, who was the only other person in this reality who's named... I think there were some unnamed people who were allegedly there, but of the people who are named, one is a famous judge and one is named Judge.

Now, if you were going to create a false memory about a judge doing some