Julian Edelman and the Simulation Hypothesis

Football, the holographic principle, heirloom tomatoes

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Introduction & précis

A couple of nights ago I fell asleep while sitting at my desk watching chess videos on Youtube. When I awoke, an indeterminate amount of time later, Youtube was playing a conversation between two former NFL football players — Danny Amendola and Julian Edelman — about Superbowl #51, (February 5, 2017). Both men had played significant parts in that game as wide receivers for the victorious New England Patriots.

Although I’m not much of a football fan and had not watched the game in question — I have no idea why Youtube’s algo decided to show this program to me — I was aware of the the contours of that Superbowl contest. It’s a famous game, especially in New England, where I reside.

I watched about five minutes of the Amendola-Edelman conversation before the subject changed to Tom Brady. I cannot abide hearing one more goddamn word about Tom Fucking Brady, and so I logged out, trundled off to brush my teeth, and went to bed.

But those first five minutes were gold.

What started out as two old friends reliving one of the most significant games either one of them had ever played in — mildly interesting stuff, but nothing earth-shattering — ended up in absurdist territory — like something out of a play by Samuel Beckett, maybe, or a sketch by Bob and Ray.

This post begins with a transcript of that Edelman/Amendola conversation, lightly edited by me, followed by some random musings on the nature of reality and late-stage pan-surveillant oligarchic capitalism it engendered. Not to mention an over-the-top season-ending finale of the TV show Dancing with the Stars, done on a setting right out of the movie Barbie.

Here is a picture of Ernie Adams, whose name comes up in the conversation. I’ll have more to say about him in a little bit.

Superb Owl 51 backgrounder

(If you’re familiar with gridiron (“American”) football, and especially if you’re familiar with the game between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots that is branded by the NFL as Super Bowl LI, you can skip this section.)

The game is famous because of the dramatic fashion in which the Patriots won it. At halftime, Atlanta was ahead by the score 21 - 3. According to Wikipedia, late in the third quarter, when the score was 28 -12 in favor of Atlanta, the probability of the Falcons winning the game was 99.8%. Regulation time ended with the two teams tied at 28 points each. The Patriots won in overtime, 34 -28, accomplishing what still stands as the greatest comeback victory in Supberbowl history.

Key to the comeback was the Patriots’ successful completion of two ‘2-point conversions’. ¹

Amendola/Edelman and the tomato eater

This conversation was recorded during an episode of Julian Edelman’s podcast, ‘Games with Names.’ Also present was the comedian Sam Morril, although he didn’t say anything in this part. I’ve edited this a bit for concision & clarity.

Edelman

When it hits 28 to 3, is any part of you, like, 'maybe this isn't our game.' Is any part of you thinking that? Don't lie Danny; don't lie.

(aside) Danny was on the sideline saying ‘What the fuck, guys. This is gonna be the worst off-season ever. We're not even gonna get to do anything. Jesus Christ, I'm probably not even gonna be here next year.’ (end aside)

What was really going through your mind, Danny?

Amendola

I mean, I've been down in games before, and we've gotten, you know, killed in games before. But I was like, 'This is the Super Bowl. Everybody's watching this, and we better score just so we don't get run out of the building.’ Because we were down by so much.

I think it was a fourth down in the third quarter and I had caught an out — like a 10 yard out of this ghost right — and I was like — it was at that point, I was so tired and I felt like my back was completely against. . . I thought I was digging myself out of a hole. At that point we're just trying to focus on one play after another. Just don't fuck it up so we don't have to hear that shit from Bill, and we could keep rolling. . .

Edelman

And that that goes to show you the strength of the football team. That's how a lot of guys felt. We were like, ‘You know we're not we're not out of this thing yet.’

When you play in the Super Bowl, the rhythm of that game is tough.

Amendola

Yeah.

Well, the whole time I'm looking at the clock in relation to the score and I think it was like, three minutes and fourteen seconds left, and we were down by 16. We got the strip sack — I think it was like maybe high — like, you know, high two minute mark, and I'm like 'Shit, if we score here we're gonna get the two, and then all we got to do is get the ball back right after that and then we'll be set.’

Edelman

But then you have to. . .

Amendola

The time in my mind was working out that it was going to come down to the wire if we did everything right.

Edelman

But you had to get two two-point conversions. And those aren't easy.

Amendola

You remember we never practiced more than one two-point conversion play in the week before a game? But before that Super Bowl, for whatever reason, we had two two-point conversion plays. That was the first time we ever did that, that we got to actually practice two plays in the week before a game.

Usually we already know the two-point play is probably something that we haven't got to run yet because we only run a handful of them a year.²

So I thought it was so odd preparing for the game that we had we had installed two two-point plays. So I'm like, "Oh, shit." And then it comes down and I'm laughing my ass off, because the second, the second two-point play was to me. And I don't even know if it really even worked in practice. It was just kind of like hit or miss.

But I'm like, ‘these coaches are genius.’

Edelman

My theory on this, Sam, is the guy on the wall right behind us — Ernie Adams. He actually cracked the simulation that we're in and knew that it would come down to two two-point conversions.

That's the kind of guy Ernie Adams is. He let Bill know; Bill then therefore made the team practice two two-point conversions. Danny scored the second two-point conversion to get us tied to then go into overtime.

Amendola

Ernie, yeah

Edelman

Do you have any stories about Ernie?

Amendola

Bill built Ernie his own private press box on the visitor's side, a little tiny two-seater where Ernie sits and watches every game. It's like an Eagle’s Nest. Ernie and the Eagle’s Nest up at the top of the top of the Foxboro Stadium, on top of Gillette.

I didn't really interact too much with him. He didn't say much to me I didn't say much to him. I usually dab him up and I’d be kind of awkward with him in the hallway and then he'd crack a smile. He's definitely a football mind.

Edelman

Do you remember him always bringing in a fucking huge heirloom tomato, and that's all he would eat for the whole day? He would sit at the table by himself in the cafeteria —

Amendola

Like eating an apple?

Edelman

No with a fork and knife.

Amendola

Thank God.

Edelman

He would fork and knife this thing — a little pepper; no salt. He always stayed away from the sodium. He would eat that thing and every day I'd walk by and be like 'Hey Ernie! How's the tomatoes?’ And he'd go, ‘They're in season!’

Amendola

Yeah.

The Simulation Hypothesis, 1

Of course you’ve seen The Matrix (the first one, not the sucky sequels), and maybe you heard about Plato and his cave (not to be confused with Plato’s Retreat, the 1980’s sex club) when you were in high school, and everybody knows about the butterfly’s dream.

So you’re already peripherally aware of the simulation hypothesis. But to really get at what Julian Edelman was saying about Ernie Adams, we need to take a closer look.

Wikipedia:

The simulation hypothesis proposes that what one experiences as the real world is actually a simulated reality, such as a computer simulation in which humans are constructs. There has been much debate over this topic in the philosophical discourse, and regarding practical applications in computing.

In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed the simulation argument, which suggests that if a civilization becomes capable of creating conscious simulations, it could generate so many simulated beings that a randomly chosen conscious entity would almost certainly be in a simulation. This argument presents a trilemma: either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction; or advanced civilizations choose not to create them; or if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one. This assumes that consciousness is not uniquely tied to biological brains but can arise from any system that implements the right computational structures and processes.

Professional sports oligarchy, 1

Let me detour for a minute and talk about late-stage capitalism, which as Thomas Pikety showed in his monumental opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century, always devolves in to oligarchy and the destruction of democracy.

It’s 696 pages of economic theory and political analysis, but it’s remarkably readable, I swear to Fred. And et explains SO MUCH about what’s going on in the world around us. Not just economic policy, but masked ICE thugs kidnapping people off the streets and sending them to concentration camps

For it is in this context that the Edelman/Amendola Superbowl³ discussion takes place.

Matt Stoller has a substack called Big, whose subject is ‘The history and politics of monopoly power.’ His most recent post concerns professional sports.

I want to start with how sports have changed over time, from when we were a middle class nation to our more oligarchy-style nation. Traditionally, from the 1920s onward, American sports were a sort of cultural public utility. On radio and then TV, depending on the sport, games were publicly available to a large local audience for free, financed by local advertisers. Going to the games was affordable, a fun thing to do, to grab a hot dog and beer and sit in the bleachers.

“As American as baseball and apple pie" is just one of many expressions centered on this common experience. Stadiums and arenas were and still are often financed with taxpayer money, in part due to corruption, but in part because people are proud of their local sports teams and want them to succeed.

Even today, the biggest contests, like the World Series or Super Bowl, are national events. [. . .] [S]ports are a cultural currency that were recently available to everyone. First generation immigrants used sports to integrate into America, and NBA stars projected American soft power globally in the 1990s.

Not all heirloom tomatoes have ridges like these beauties do, but if you see a big tomato with ridges, odds are pretty good that it’s an heirloom.

Bill and Ernie

According to Wikipedia, Ernie Adams and Bill Belichick met as high-schoolers and bonded over football geekery. Adams went on to have a long career in professional football, mostly in association with Belichick. He did do some coaching, but later he took on a role devised by him and Belichick that involved ‘moneyball’ like analyses of players, plays, game strategies and the like.

Adams also, for intervals of several years, left football for the world of finance. During his first stint away from football he went to Wall Street, where he became a trader of municipal bonds. After a few years of that he returned to football and the Eagle’s Nest. And then after a few years of Eagle’s Nest & football analytics, he returned to Wall Street as the proprietor of an investment firm. But ultimately football was what gave him joy and meaning, and he went back to the Patriots and Gillette Stadium until his retirement in 2021.

In all of these domains he showed an interest in ‘quant’ stuff — statistics and simulations.

The butterfly’s dream is a famous Taoist allegory that has been passed down through the ages. It is a story about a man named Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly and upon waking up, he was unsure if he was a man who had just dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man. This allegory has been used to illustrate the Taoist concept of the transformation of things and the idea that reality and illusion are not always distinguishable.

Long-time readers of Sundman figures it out! are familiar with the garden my wife Betty makes each year, with some help from me, on the back porch of our falling down house. (The 3-part essay ‘Scared Firefighters up in the Bucket’ has lots of photos & commentary.) 2025 has been a rough year, and our garden is not famous. See if you can spot the one tiny non-heirloom green tomato.

Big, part two

Stoller’s post on monopoly and politics in sports continues,

The legal structure of American sports has always been a function of anti-monopoly and labor laws, because sports as a business is especially susceptible to monopolization. In most industries, competitors can operate independently, but sports leagues require collaboration by competitors. In addition, sports is really human effort and muscle, automating something or disrupting it with technology is besides the point. The business history of baseball, basketball, and football is thus littered with antitrust lawsuits, mergers, and strikes.

Along with this increasing inequality, there are three other reasons the sports landscape is in chaos. The first is that the main financing mechanism for both college and professional sports - broadcast TV - is moving to streaming. The second is that the advertising to support sports is oriented increasingly around gambling, which introduces a host of conflicts of interest. And the third is that college sports, which is the basis for training Americans for both professional sports and the U.S. Olympic teams, was upended by a Supreme Court antitrust decision saying that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) can no longer engage in key restrictions of student-athlete compensation.

The net effect is that it costs thousands for a hardcore sports fan to follow the professional teams he or she might have watched twenty years ago for much less, or even for free.

Here’s sports reporter Joon Lee: [Stoller incorporates this quote in his post]

From 1999 to 2020, the average price of a seat across all sports rose roughly twice as fast as overall consumer prices. It increased 19.5 percent between May 2023 and May 2025 alone, one of the biggest jumps of any category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The result isn’t just inconvenient. It’s lonely. As access shatters, rituals vanish, as do the moments that make sports communal — a bar full of strangers cheering for the same team, the generational ties passed down through the seasons. Those experiences fade under a system that dictates that the more you can pay, the more you can see — until the game disappears behind another paywall.

Simulation hypothesis 2, and an overlooked literary masterwork

Wikipedia, again:

In the Western philosophical tradition, Plato's allegory of the cave analogized human beings to chained prisoners unable to see reality. René Descartes' evil demon philosophically formalized these epistemic doubts, to be followed by a large literature with subsequent variations like ‘brain in a vat.’ In 1969, Konrad Zuse published his book Calculating Space on automata theory, in which he proposed the idea that the universe was fundamentally computational, a concept which became known as digital physics.

Here’s an excerpt from the great and criminally overlooked novella Cheap Complex Devices, published by an obscure writer of rare talent, which addresses, in convenient metafictional text, not only the Simulation Hypothesis, but several other philosophical, epistemic, ontological conundrums:

When you look at me it is obvious that I am a man. Yet once for a period of several months I was convinced that I was in fact not a man, but rather a swarm of honeybees, the moving patterns of which, in some inexplicable Chuang-Tsu or Marvin Kinsky-like way, gave rise to my thoughts and created in me the misapprehension of being human, as in the butterfly’s dream. When I was in that state of befuddlement I sometimes became further confused as to whether I was indeed not a swarm of bees but rather, in fact, a Shaker village of the 1800’s—those two forms of social organization (beehive and Shaker village), after all, having so much in common: the ancestral Mother, the celibacy, the division of labor, the good food, the architectural and building skills, and the clean lines of their interior design, for starters.

I no longer have these thoughts. Nor do I any longer believe that I am a brain in a vat of electrolytes controlled by wires ingeniously rigged by the global military-industrial-entertainment complex to make me think that I have a body with eyes, ears, nose, skin and so forth. Furthermore, I no longer believe that the dominant organizing rubric of life on earth is Moloch, a cutthroat capitalism, a ruthless ponzi scheme of mega-transnational corporations and their vassals, an engine of mindless cruelty whose sole function is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, Moloch, ineluctably destined to crush the very concepts of human autonomy and dignity into the black hole of mindless consumption while spewing its waste on the wretched of the earth, debasing and eventually obliterating the very notion of human decency.

Here’s what Nicole Galland, co-author with science fiction grandmaster Neal Stephenson of several novels, including The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., had to say about Cheap Complex Devices.

Why Art Modell, though beastly dead, owes Julian Edelman $10,000

Before getting to the stunning conclusion of this post, let me mention that videos of Edelman’s and Amendola’s performances in Superbowl LI are easily findable online, although I cannot include them here because they’re licensed by the NFL, which doesn’t allow people like me to use them in essays like this, because the NFL sucks.

Also, you can find videos of Danny Amendola performing on the TV show Dancing With the Stars. His ‘freeform finale’ performance, set to songs from the movie Barbie, with Amendola in a bright pink ‘Ken’ outfit, complete with blond wig, must be seen to be believed.

Finally, apropos of Matt Stoller’s observation that ‘[f]irst generation immigrants used sports to integrate into America, allow me to recommend All-Star Break, Revisited, my essay about watching baseball with my mother’s mother, an immigrant from Scotland, and my father’s father, an immigrant from Finland. And about much more than that.

OK, now the big reveal:

Wikipedia:

With the Patriots and throughout his career, Adams was known for keeping a low profile. Former Browns owner Art Modell notably quipped, "I'll pay anyone here $10,000 if they can tell me what Ernie Adams does.”

From Popular Mechanics, August 29, 2025:

According to one model of the universe, everything you touch, see, and feel is a sort of projection, generated from information in a 2-dimensional reality. This idea implies that the world around you is a cosmic hologram. It’s not the plotline of a science fiction show but a modern idea in physics called the holographic principle, whose math suggests that time, space, and gravity itself are all encoded in a lower dimension. Inside a black hole for example, this idea says that all of its properties originate from a 2-dimensional boundary of the black hole, creating its 3-dimensional volume as if projected from a flat screen.

Wild as this idea seems, it has made some researchers wonder: if the universe itself can be holographic, could the mind work the same way?

Uziel Awret, a physicist and senior researcher at the nonprofit science research organization Inspire Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, is trying to uncover the nature of consciousness. He says that, like the universe, the brain could be manifesting “holographic duality,” meaning two very different descriptions of reality can actually describe the same system, like two sides of the same coin.

And this, then, is the simulation that Ernie Adams cracked.

Pulling together decades of study of the game of American Football going back to high school, synthesizing insights gained from a countless grueling cold hours sitting in his little 2-seater Eagle’s Nest above Gillette Stadium, drawing on his hard midnight study of the ‘quant’ sciences of Wall Street, Ernie Adams, the eater of heirloom tomatoes (which Edelman somewhat disconcertingly pronounces ‘hair loom’) was able to crack the simulation.

He cracked it before Superbowl 51, a mere week before the game was to be watched by billions of people all over the globe. And by cracking the simulation he was able to inform New England coach Bill Belichick that the team would need to be ready with two two-point conversion plays if they were to win the game.

And that’s what Ernie Adams did, and Julian Edelman figured it out. Art Modell, the one time owner of the Cleveland Browns NFL team, said, "I'll pay anyone here $10,000 if they can tell me what Ernie Adams does.”

Alas for Jules, Art Modell is no longer around to honor his promise.

Passing the collection plate

I’m just a poor writer who’s trying, and not always succeeding, to make enough dough to pay his mortgage & car payments on time. (My situation is actually pretty scary right now, no lie.) If you enjoy my kind of writing and would like to help out, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you’d just like to make a one time-contribution, here’s a link to buy me a coffee (any amount welcome — pay no attention to the exorbitant suggestions).

I’m now offering ‘merch’ at my ‘Buy me a coffee’ page. The first item on offer: In Formation #3. If you want to understand the Thiel/Vance threat, you really should get your hands on a copy.

Cheerio!

Postscript

I sent a link to this post a listserv of some friends I’ve known since we technical writers at Sun Microsystems in the 1980’s and 90’s, at least 2 of whom are football fans. Nobody had much to say about my post, but it did generate some chatter about TV and being an immigrant learning about America through sports &c. One person said that he found all the ‘simulation theory’ stuff ‘ultimately boring.’ This was my reply:

I would like the game gridiron football more than I do, I suppose, if it were not for all the 'meta' stuff around it. Stuff like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the college football system which for nearly one hundred years, until just recently, chewed up and spit out thousands of poor young (mostly Black) men for the amusement and enrichment of white people (mostly but not only men), and the militarism and jingoism and fascism-adjacent pageantry promoted non-stop by the NFL, and all the macho/militaristic rhetoric (good receivers are called 'weapons' by commentators) etc, etc. And let's not forget the consumerism and celebrity worship. Can't forget those. If I find myself in a hotel room with nothing to watch but an NFL game I might watch it. Or at least some of it. But usually I'll just turn off the TV and read a book.

As for the simulation stuff, I find cosmology interesting although I don't understand it. I watch videos by people like Sean Carroll on the nature of space and time and reality and all that kind of stuff. And I read & watch stuff on the nature of consciousness and blah blah blah. I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea.

I decided to write about all that for my substack because I thought that Edelman's comment about Ernie Adams cracking the simulation was really funny, and the follow-on images given by Amendola and Edelman of Adams as a guy who sat by himself in a 'two-seater' Eagle's Nest and ate his lunch of a single "hair loom" tomato, sitting alone in the Patriots cafeteria, using a knife and fork, pepper but no salt (he watched his sodium) — I just thought the idea that it was this guy who managed to pass through the wall of illusion and figure out the nature of reality, and that he used that knowledge to tell Bill Belichick that he needed to have the Patriots prepare two two-point plays. I just thought that was all really funny. And Art Modell's comment made it funnier.

But evidently not a lot of people were as tickled as I was. So far my Edelman post is on track to be one of my least popular ever.

1. After a team scores a touchdown, which is worth 6 points, it has the option of attempting to kick the ball through the uprights, which is worth 1 point if successful, or attempting to run a play from scrimmage at the 2 yard line to advance the ball over the goal line in the manner of a touchdown, which, if successful, is worth 2 points. Because the success rate of extra-point kicks is about 95% while the success rate of 2-point attempts is about 50%, kicks are much more common than 2-point attempts.

2. The point Amendola is making is that the Patriots had already practiced a two point play for earlier games, but hadn’t used it in an actual game. Therefore the opposing team would not have seen that play and wouldn’t know what to expect.

3. One of the consequences of oligarchy is that you can’t even mention the word “Superbowl” without a license from the NFL for fear of corporate lawyers bearing automatic weapons and wearing ski masks descending from black helicopters. You have to say ‘the big game’ or some other circumlocution, like ‘superb owl’. But I guess I just like to live dangerously.