What if the universe isn’t a cold, dumb machine or a cosmic soap opera run by a temperamental sky-dad—but something deeper that both science and spirituality have been circling from opposite sides?
In this conversation, Paul welcomes his friend Sam, the mind behind The God Conjecture: a framework that tries to show how a certain model of God and creation can sit cleanly inside modern physics and computation. Drawing on Wolfram’s Ruliad (the space of all possible computations), Kabbalistic cosmology, and observer theory, Sam lays out a universe in which conscious beings aren’t accidents—they’re how reality learns about itself. Then Paul does what he does best: he brings all of those ideas back down to the complexities of real life.
They talk about:
- Why ethics might be something we discover, not invent—like math or gravity.
- How “evil” can be understood as inefficient paths that burn time and energy instead of moving us toward integration.
- Shame, addiction, and rock bottom as the narrowest point in your story that opens into the widest cone of new possibilities—if you survive it.
- How postmodernism helped us break all the old frames… and why it’s now failing to put anything back together.
- Why humans, for all our flaws, might still be the most “godlike” observers we know—because of our creativity, metaphor, and ability to turn trauma into art, love, and sovereignty.
If you’ve ever felt too smart for the religion you grew up with and too soulful for a purely mechanical universe, this episode sits exactly in that tension: science, mysticism, shame, crisis, and the stubborn hope that your life actually matters.
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] – Why the God Conjecture?
Sam’s journey from inventing billion-dollar financial structures and living the “Instagram life” to Kabbalah, fatherhood, and the need for a non-nihilistic compass for his son.
[12:04] – The Ruliad, observers, and a different kind of “God debate.”
What the Ruliad is in human terms, why the usual “does God exist?” argument is stuck, and how the God Conjecture reframes the whole thing.
[20:21] – Paul’s translation: sacredness without dogma.
Paul reflects back what he’s hearing: a universe with order and sacredness that doesn’t require us to crawl back into dogma or superstition.
[23:51] – Ethics as discovery, not invention.
Sam’s claim that ethics are more like math than fashion trends, and that “good” can be seen as the efficient path through the possibility space.
[28:26] – Evil as inefficiency.
A wild reframe: evil as what burns cycles, wastes computation, and keeps systems stuck near the boundary instead of moving toward integration.
[33:11] – Shame, rock bottom, and the cone of possibility.
Paul brings in crisis coaching and Smart Funny Tortured: why he quietly smiles when someone hits rock bottom, and how that maps to Sam’s formal model.
[39:21] – Why big religions don’t die.
The idea that major spiritual traditions persist because they posit the largest possible “limit object”—Dao, Brahman, Ein Sof, Logos—which psychologically explodes our sense of what’s possible.
[42:56] – Postmodernism’s gift and collapse.
From “genre mashup superpower” to fragmented islands and political fracture: how postmodernism helped us, and why it’s not evolutionarily fit anymore.
[54:01] – Humans vs AI: who’s more “godlike”?
Why Sam thinks human observers are still far more powerful than current AI, what true machine consciousness would require, and how creativity and metaphor act as “attractors” in the future.
[1:04:41] – Post-traumatic sovereignty as higher-order observing.
Paul brings it home: Smart Funny Tortured, siege on shame, and what it means to become the kind of observer who can integrate more reality without shattering.
Links & resources
Sam’s paper: The God Conjecture (GitHub)
Paul’s Smart Funny Tortured framework: smartfunnytortured.com
Mentioned concepts and thinkers:
- Wolfram’s Ruliad
- Kabbalistic cosmology (Ein Sof, Tzimtzum, Sefirot)
- Postmodernism and the noosphere
- Post-traumatic sovereignty & Siege on Shame (SFT universe)
Guest
Sam Alexander Senchal
Sam Alexander Senchal is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of observation, consciousness, meaning, free will, computational physics, analytic philosophy, and theology. He is published with the Wolfram Institute, where his work engages deeply with ideas like the Ruliad and observer theory, and how they might connect to long-standing questions about God, ethics, and human experience.
Before stepping into this frontier space, Sam spent years in investing and product design for large institutions, raising and investing roughly $500 million over his career. That background in high-stakes, real-world systems gives his philosophical and theological work a rare groundedness: he’s not just speculating about abstract universes, he’s lived inside the machinery of this one.
The God Conjecture—the focal point of this episode—is his attempt to build a coherent bridge between modern physics and mystical cosmology, and to show how a properly framed “God concept” can sit cleanly inside a computational picture of reality.
In his spare time, Sam also writes and produces music, rounding out a profile that sits somewhere between quant, mystic, and artist—exactly the kind of mind we love in the Smart Funny Tortured universe.
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