Danny Goler's Laser Experiment and the Code of

There is a particular kind of person who, upon encountering a frog-shaped being during a DMT experience, does not simply file the event under "wild night" and move on. Danny Goler is that kind of person. Born in Moscow, raised in Israel, military service, then fifteen years in Los Angeles doing parkour and stunts and rubbing shoulders with A-listers who, he noticed, were not actually calling their own shots—Goler is a man constitutionally allergic to glass ceilings and comfortable uncertainty alike. When the frog entity appeared in his room and demonstrated guitar chords he did not know how to play, Goler treated it as what a physicist might call an anomalous data point demanding explanation. The result, years later, is what he calls the Code of Reality: a structured visual phenomenon he claims to perceive when shining a cheap red laser at a wall while under the influence of DMT, and which thousands of people around the world have apparently replicated independently, reporting the same symbols, the same sense of structured language, without coordination.

On a nearly three-hour episode of The Why Files, host AJ Gentile pressed Goler past the viral story and into the texture of what the experience actually felt like—and what Goler is doing to test whether it means anything. What emerged is a conversation that resists easy categorization. It is not a credulity-fest. It is also not debunkery. It is something rarer and more interesting: a person trying, with visible intellectual effort and genuine epistemic humility, to figure out if something strange he experienced is real.

The Experiment Itself

The architecture of Goler's claim is fairly simple to state, fiendishly difficult to assess. On DMT, he reports perceiving structured symbols—something resembling language—within the speckle pattern produced by a laser beam scattered off a surface. The speckle pattern is real physics: coherent light produces interference patterns that look chaotic to the naked eye but carry structural information. What Goler claims is that DMT-altered perception reveals a signal inside that structure. His friend Tim, the first person Goler showed it to, was in an altered state and had forgotten being told about it. He reported, unprompted: "Bro, there's language in there."

The obvious objection—and the one that neuroscientist and pharmacologist Andrew Gallimore has raised—is the speckle theory: that the visual cortex under DMT is simply pattern-matching against random noise, the same way humans see faces in clouds. Goler's response is more nuanced than the objection deserves. He argues that the speckle is not evidence against the phenomenon but rather the prerequisite for it—the "canvas," as he puts it, on which information is painted. Whether or not that information is genuinely external rather than neurally generated is precisely the question his nonprofit, Code of Reality (co-founded with David Carter), is attempting to answer.

The methodology he's developing is legitimately interesting. Using Apple Vision Pro, Goler's team has created a frozen high-resolution image of the laser speckle band that users, while on DMT, can interact with inside the headset. The software logs brain state, location, and which of six symbols the user reports seeing at which position in the image. The ambition is to build something like a Rosetta Stone—a cross-individual map of reported symbols—and check for replication. If people are seeing the same symbols in the same positions, Goler argues, you can no longer attribute the effect to stochastic neural noise. The speckle theory would require individual brains to independently hallucinate identical content at identical coordinates. That would be a different kind of problem entirely.

Goler also engages seriously with independent researcher Anthony Nes's counter-hypothesis: that the laser experiment is revealing the crystalline structure of V1, the primary visual cortex pathway from eye to brain, and nothing more external. This is, it should be said, a more parsimonious explanation. Goler acknowledges it. He and Nes agreed that if symbol-position correlation across subjects holds, the V1 theory cannot account for that specificity. Until that data exists, both explanations remain live.

What makes Goler credible as an interlocutor—and what The Why Files episode captures well—is precisely his willingness to say this out loud: "We don't know. We we literally I thought of everything." The thirty percent of participants who attempt the experiment and see nothing constitutes, in his framing, not a nuisance to be explained away but a signal. He doesn't know what that signal means. He finds it more interesting than the people who see something.

The Wider Framework

The laser experiment is only one thread in a much larger cosmological tapestry Goler is weaving, and here is where the conversation becomes harder to evaluate—not because the ideas are incoherent but because they are doing a great deal of work simultaneously.

Goler's operating framework holds that reality is a simulation in a fairly specific sense: not a video game being run on some external server, but something more like a deliberate alignment process. The simulation, in his telling, exists to train agents—us—to expand their circle of moral concern beyond the self. He draws a direct line from this to the AI alignment problem, framing it with a memorable phrase: "infinite ethical whack-a-mole." You cannot solve alignment by patching specific failure cases, he argues, because an infinite universe generates infinite scenarios. The only robust solution is what he calls "good people"—agents who genuinely consider more than themselves in any situation. His implicit claim is that this is what the simulation is selecting for.

It is a genuinely interesting synthesis, and it has the virtue of connecting spiritual intuition to a concrete contemporary problem. It is also, necessarily, unfalsifiable in its grandest form. Goler seems aware of this without being troubled by it, which is either wisdom or a blind spot depending on where you're standing.

His treatment of creativity follows similar lines. In a 2017 essay called Contemplations of Meaning, he described creative acts not as generation but as remembrance—recovering something that always existed. He returned to this on The Why Files, entertaining the notion, drawn from theorist Eric Wargo's work (Time Loops, 2018), that creativity might involve something like retrocausation—the future self sending memories backward. "What if the universe never thought of it either? Like it thought it through you," Goler said, and the idea landed in the conversation with enough weight that the host stopped and said he hadn't considered that.

Whether any of this is true is a question that the conversation does not resolve and cannot. What it does do is demonstrate a quality that is rarer than either believers or skeptics tend to acknowledge: intellectual seriousness about experience that doesn't fit the available frameworks.

The Texture of the Man

Goler describes his vipassana practice—the ten-day silent meditation retreat based on the tradition closest to what the Buddha actually taught, available free or by donation worldwide—with the same empirical precision he brings to the laser work. He frames the body-scan practice in computational terms: unprocessed psychological material occupies cognitive bandwidth, and dissolving it through sustained neutral attention frees that bandwidth for perception. When he stepped outside after a particularly intense session, he says, the world looked the way a phone screen looks when you retrieve it after a mushroom trip—hyper-real, digitized, impossibly saturated with meaning.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson's research on meditators, and subsequent psilocybin studies showing default mode network suppression in both contexts, lends at least partial empirical scaffolding to this description. The mechanisms are not identical, but the phenomenological overlap is real enough to have attracted serious scientific attention.

What emerges across nearly three hours is a portrait of someone who has done the uncomfortable work of changing—from someone whose friends were afraid of him, to someone practicing, daily, the art of considering others in the moment. He describes this not as achievement but as ongoing practice, as calibration. "The truth of it is truly just in the moment," he said. "Like it really is just in that moment and in no other moment." Eckhart Tolle would recognize the sentence. The difference is that Goler arrived at it through a frog-shaped entity, a laser pointer, and a decade of vipassana retreats—which is, arguably, a more interesting path.

The question the conversation leaves genuinely open is not whether Goler is sincere—he manifestly is—but whether sincerity and methodological rigor are sufficient to resolve what he's investigating. The Code of Reality nonprofit's Apple Vision Pro dataset does not yet exist in analyzable form. The cross-subject symbol-position correlations have not been published. The console—a holographic control panel that Goler reports appearing in whatever room he's in every time he smokes DMT, and which at least one other person appears to be corroborating—remains entirely in the territory of testimony.

That's not nothing. Testimony is how science starts. It is not where science ends.

— Theodore "Teddy" Ashworth III, Culture & Media Correspondent