The Men who Stare at Lasers (Premium E275) Sample
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If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, premium episode 275, The Men Who Stare at Lasers. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Brad Abrahams, and Liv Agar.

I don't think it's worth watching.

And yet, here I am, only 28 minutes into A Glitch in the Matrix, a 2021 documentary about simulation theory that consists of crude Unreal Engine renders and Zoom interviews. The film is an hour and 48 minutes long. I'm not going to make it. In the end, it didn't really have anything to do with our main topic anyway, but I didn't really know where else to start.

The fires are still seething in the surrounding mountains. I've waited until the last minute to write my portion of the episode, because work feels like a side quest from this game's real mission. Be the last one standing as a ring of climate disasters slowly close in around the remaining players. The players are too busy fighting each other to notice or even care about the ring. It sounds like your final notice or something. Your final goodbye. Before the fires take you.

I am the meme of like the dog sitting in the room. As you record a podcast. Now, I've had plenty of time to carefully plan out this episode. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a trailer on YouTube about a group of guys who smoke DMT and stare directly into lasers, claiming that just beyond they could see binary code. I instantly texted Brad. He was built for this kind of work, even eager to potentially try the experiment himself and better yet, recruit others to do it with him.

Brad informed me he was well aware of the phenomenon. In fact, he had already texted me about it. I had somehow missed the message. And so, without any further procrastination, here is the story of the men who stare at lasers. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. From the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

It was last Saturday. I'd just pulled into my driveway after a hike with my fiancée in a surreal, dwarf-palm-filled state park. We may have been in a slightly altered state, which has relevance for what's to come. An Amazon box is waiting for me, propped up against our front door. I tore it open in anticipation. Inside was a 5 milliwatt red laser. I set it up on a tabletop tripod, plugged it in, and the diffracted beam shone a bright cross shape on our living room wall.

I pressed my face right up against the beam, my left eye almost touching the wall. I stare at the photons as if my life depended on it. Why am I doing this? To see if The Matrix really is a documentary. As Jake mentioned, this all started when we came across a series of videos of people staring at laser beams. Their expressions were of shock and awe. Oh my God, come on. Wow, what the fuck? Holy shit. I just saw something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What the fuck? Oh, I see that. I feel it. You can see through the laser into another dimension. I've been under the influence of mind-altering substances a lot, but I've never seen anything like that. Whoa. So they're on acid, right? DMT. DMT, okay. The businessman's acid. Lit.

Liv, can you describe for our listeners sort of what these people are doing and maybe even like the type of person? Honestly, initially, I thought that these are going to be guys staring directly into a laser. I was like, okay, I would see why you would hallucinate. Your vision would be impaired. Yeah.

But no, they seem to be putting a laser on a wall. So it kind of streaks onto the wall. And they're very intimately, like they're hugging their face against the wall and just staring at the red streak. Yep. And it's a, you know, I feel like it's the sort of type of guy you would expect based on the audio, based on the knowledge that they're on DMT. Just staring at a laser. You're imagining the right guy. Yeah. This reminds me of...

A time that I did mushrooms in college and I had like a journal that I kept with me and in the journal, so many profound things. I found this like I found the most beautiful, like perfect leaf. It looked like it was a gift from God.

I was so enamored by this leaf I found on the ground that I put it within the pages of the journal. And the next morning when I went through it, I was not on mushrooms anymore. It was like a dry – it was just garbage. It was just garbage that I had written, that I had collected off the ground and been shoved into this thing. There was nothing magical, nothing significant about it. Yeah.

I feel like there's two types of like people who do psychedelics. The first one is like a more measured response of like, oh, this made my brain crazy for a bit. And then the other response is like, I've opened up a dimension, you know, a fifth dimension or whatever. Maybe it's more of a spectrum, I guess. But these guys are certainly on one part of that spectrum. Yeah.

So these are all from a video that went viral on TikTok. A bearded man in his late 30s or early 40s wearing a baseball hat that says, fuck it, addresses the camera seriously. Hello, everyone. I'm about to claim that I have proof that we live in a simulation. Now, I know it's a lot to live up to. So either I just shot myself in the foot or...

I have something that is truly enormous and profound for you. What if I would tell you that in order to see a portion of reality that we so far have not been seeing, the only way to do that is to be in an altered state.

Now, this is not a new statement all by itself. People have claimed this many times that when they do certain substances, they seem to see another portion of the world that we don't usually see. Now, that's a deal breaker for science right there, because they deem those states incoherent. I beg to differ, and I'll tell you why I disagree. I'm not saying that the scientific method is wrong.

it absolutely is the most valuable thing we have. But it's time for us to venture into new territories of observations in order to discover what in fact is there. But here's why I'm making my suggestion. I'm about to claim to you that I found a way to stabilize a signal from those altered states that allow you to see something

that is as real as a table, as a chair, as anything that you want to define as real in this three-dimensional space. This guy's awesome. He never makes actual claims. He just tells you the thing he's going to do as if it's like...

So he tees it up in the next clip, I think, with what you're hoping for. I see. Yeah, I feel bad for... I feel like physics is the only institution that gets it worse than philosophy in relation to cranks. Because there's always... Apparently with even physics profs, you always get a couple cranks emailing you every month or so being like, here's the thing about the Schrodinger's cat experiment that physicists don't consider. Yeah.

You just have to like deal with, and I feel like the simulation stuff is an extension of that. It certainly doesn't help that the guy is sitting in front of like two large gaming monitors and he's wearing a hat that says, fuck it brand. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, what?

Why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.

It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe. That's not true. The part about me crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.