The Basement: Rizwan Virk | The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Physics & Mysticism

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See site or store for details. - Today we're sitting down with Rizwan Virk, MIT computer scientist, Stanford MBA, video game pioneer, and one of the early investors in Discord. - Early investor in Discord, huh? So he's the reason my guppies are up at 3AM screaming at strangers in Fortnite. I have questions for this man. - His book, "The Simulation Hypothesis," is now out in a fully revised second edition. It argues that quantum physics, ancient Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games are all pointing at the same unsettling truth, that what we call reality may not be reality at all. - Hang on, hang on, hang on. I say reality isn't real and people call me crazy. This guy says it and gets a book deal? - Oh, well, he lays out a better case than you do. - Does he say how to lizard people run the simulation? - No. - Pfft, amateur. - Today we're covering the observer effect, the Mandela effect, NPCs versus RPG characters, and why UFOs might be avatars projected into this reality from somewhere outside it. Oh, and Riz got to talk to Philip K. Dick's wife, Tessa. She told him something about JFK that stopped the show cold. Let's go down to the basement. - Dr. Rizwan Burk, welcome to the show. Dr. Rizwan Burk, welcome to the basement. - Thanks so much for having me here. - I'm excited that you're here. Since you're an old computer nerd like myself, what was the baud rate of the first computer you had that could connect? - Wow, good question, because, you know, originally we had a Commodore 64. - Had the 64, okay. - We even had a Coleco Atom. I don't know if you remember this. - Of course, it was the plug-in. - Yeah, and then there was a tape. It used a tape drive. - That's right. - But then the tapes, if you left them on top of it, it would erase the tape. - That's right. - I think we eventually got an Apple II. Apple IIe, I think it was, which was the portable model. And I don't think we really connected until, you know, much later, but it was like 2,600 baud modems, like way back in the day. - Yeah, I think mine was a VIC-20, 1981, with 150 baud connection, and the cassette tape is where you loaded everything. - Oh, right, yeah, I remember those. - Yeah, I can't believe it. - Well, you know, I started learning to program in my math class, and we were living in the Midwest, and our math teacher allowed myself and my best friend, 'cause we'd finished the math problems quickly, he's like, "Okay, why don't you guys go play on this TRS-80?" - Yes! - He used to call it a trash 80, and they had an adventure game, which was like, it wasn't Zork, it was like the original adventure text game. And I realized you could actually modify the code, and, you know, the characters would say something different than, you know, what they were supposed to say. And that was my introduction, really. - Really? - To programming, yeah. - That was an amazing, the TRS-80 was an amazing machine. That was Radio Shack invented that thing. - That's right, yeah, yeah. And then later they called it a trash 80. - They did. - But it was a good machine for its time. - What was the programming language on that? Was it basic? - It was just basic, yeah. I mean, that's how I learned to program, was basic there. And then one day my dad took us to his work, and they had just bought like an Apple II. This was before we had one at home. And he was like, "Here, why don't you guys, you know, my older brother is like a year and a half older than me. I think kind of like you and Gino in terms of age." And he just took us in there and left us, and we started to program a tic-tac-toe game, 'cause we saw you could draw a line. So that was the first game that I ever wrote from scratch, was just a simple tic-tac-toe game on the Apple II at my dad's office. - Apple II, was that basic on there as well? - Yeah, it was called Apple Soft Basic. - That's right. - But in the end, it was Microsoft Basic behind the scenes, which was how Microsoft started as a company. - Right, back when they got along. - That's right, yeah. - Did you go to Apple II? Apple IIgs with color? - No, 'cause I think by the time that came out, one, it was expensive. - Yes, it was. We didn't have it. We would go to friends' houses. - Yeah, exactly. Like very few of our friends actually had like expensive computers. I mean, I'd pull it out to try to type a report, you know, in high school and then print it out. And then when I got to college, I went to MIT, and they had a whole computer lab, which was the Sun workstations. - Oh, yes. - Which had pretty good graphics capability. - Yes, they did. - Yeah, so I always ended up using the computer lab and very few people actually had laptops in their dorm rooms. In fact, one of my best friends had like a Mac, one of the very early Macs, I forget which one, but you know, with a little floppy drive. - Sure. - The three and a half inch floppy drives. But mostly we would spend all our time doing our assignments and writing games in the computer lab. - So like using Solaris? - Yeah, I was using Solaris and I used something called X Windows. - Yes, of course. X is still, you can't get rid of X. - You really can't. Yeah, it's like really solid. It's like the infrastructure that it was built on. So I actually learned to use X Windows on Unix before I actually used the Windows PC, believe it or not. I mean, obviously I'd seen a Mac and we would send each other messages. It was called Project Athena at MIT. It was one of the first kind of networked computer labs. 'Cause if like my brother went to University of Michigan and you go to the computer lab and each computer was kind of, I mean, they're connected to the printer, but they were kind of doing their own thing. Whereas with Project Athena, they were investigating or experimenting with writing software where you would communicate with each other and we would just sit there and send trashy instant messages to each other. - Of course. - Before IM was available on PCs and stuff. So in fact, one of my friends started the company that became MSN Messenger. They were bought by Microsoft. And so a lot of the instant messaging stuff that we've seen over the years had its origins in like these old MIT things that people had just built as part of this program. - Built on like Solaris and X? - Yeah, built on Solaris and X. - Oh, I love that. - It's programmed in C. - In C. - In C units basically, right? - I love it. - Programming it, yeah. - My first love is SGI Irix. I'll go back, I still have an SGI box. I just love that. - Dude. - Oh yeah. The big blue box, I used to love it. Is that how you got started, that's how you got interested in video games? - Yeah, well, I got interested in video games around the same time that I was learning to program because we had an Atari. - The 2600? - Yeah. - The 2600? - Yeah, the 2600, like the original Atari system. And we had games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders and an obscure one called Yars of Revenge that I always thought was cool. - Yes. - And there was a racing game. I think it was Pole Position. And it was while I was playing the racing game, I would look at the guys in the bleachers, which were just like these little squares. - Sure. - It was like 8-bit graphics we're talking. And then there'd be like a mountain and it would look like there's something out there. And I always start to wonder, well, what would happen if I drove the car past the bleachers and past the mountain? Of course, you weren't able to. But I always wondered, like, is there a little world in here with all these kind of straight lines? So that's when I really started to wonder about the intersection of video games and virtual reality. - That is an interesting game to choose because I think Pole Position is one of the first games back then in 8-bit to actually use background parallax, where things started to move at different, I think it was a three or four level parallax, but it looked kind of real. - That's right, yeah, that's exactly right. And I have this slide that I show sometimes, which shows Pole Position as an 8-bit racing game. And then it shows like a 16-bit racing game for the Nintendo. And then it shows like a 32-bit, you know, for the PC. And then it shows like the modern games. And you can just see how much more realistic it got just by adding a few bits. - Sure. - Right, and it's gotten to the point where you look at these racing games. And I mean, even though you can tell the characters are graphical, virtual, characters designed by game designers, the city looks so realistic that you literally could not tell if that was a real city or not. In fact, I don't know if you saw the recent Matrix movie, the fourth Matrix movie. - I did. - It wasn't that great of a movie, but. - No, but the tech was good. - The tech was good. But just when they came out with that, they came out with a demo on the Unreal Engine. - Sure. - Which I know you know about. - I'm an Unreal guy, so yeah, I have it. - Absolutely, and so they used the Unreal Engine and they came out with this demo called the Matrix Awakens. And it wasn't like a full game, it was like a mini game. But it started with a guy that looked like Neo, you know, kind of getting the message on his computer, 1999 computer, wake up, Neo. And of course, this was '21, so we're talking five years ago now. So the graphics were not nearly as good as they are today. But he would get up and go with Trinity, and there were scenes where you almost thought it was really Keanu Reeves or Carrie-Anne Moss, but the city they were driving around, I think they filmed that one in San Francisco and Berlin. And it looked like a combination of those two cities. And it had just gotten ultra-realistic. - The car chases looked real. - Yeah. hold away from the kind of uncanny valley those cinematic shots of like the car tearing around the corner and flipping over that looked pretty good yeah it did look pretty good and and you know the key is you stay away from the humans yes and everything looks realistic i mean there's a reason why so toy story was built or made by pixar which actually came out of lucasfilm so george lucas's you know special effects company and his film company and there's a reason why the first fully computer generated film was actually about toys it was toy story because it's much easier to make those look realistic than it is to get humans there was a film based on one of the final fantasy games uh spirits within and they spent like they had like a 200 million dollar budget and they spent like 50 million of it on the hair on the hair to get the hair right and so this is all before ai right now we're seeing a world where ai is making the generation of realistic characters very easy to do yes and and but but that's kind of how i've seen the technology evolve you know just in my lifetime sure we'll we'll take us back to how your first game i mean you couldn't program a game for 2600 right because it was cartridge no you couldn't yeah but on the c64 you could yeah and so again i would make these little graphical games like tic-tac-toe and you know other little games that kind of tried to imitate some of the cool arcade games you know that i had we got an apple ii and then i started to look at more from a game design perspective there were these adventure games like have you ever played king's quest sure uh which was you know super popular but there was a whole series of these types of adventure games and they were on the big floppy disks yes not even the small floppy disks which which disks which are pretty old now yes they are kids today have no idea what kids today they were five and a quarter inch they were huge yeah they were huge exactly and so what would happen is you'd put in one of the disks and it you know a picture of i don't know a city let's say and then you'd say move the character around they were kind of like the text adventure games like zork right but with some graphical pictures and then you would go to the next one in the next one kind of like a graphic novel choose your own adventure almost yeah almost right and the innovation that king's quest made was they actually added like a character that you could actually go to the left or to the right it was bananas and it looked like it was real yeah and sierra online the company that showed that uh was really considerate and they were really considerate and they were really considerate and they were one of the pioneers in graphics in fact they were the first to build make a game a graphical game for the apple 2 that was called mystery house and it was just line graphics and it was a husband and wife team and she was the artist and he was the programmer and they figured out how to get 74 of these or 78 some number in the 70s of these line graphics onto a single floppy disk that's crazy that was considered a huge innovation back then because every other game you had to keep taking out the disks and put in the next one yeah yeah and i remember thinking well how is it that they can compress these uh these images which are really big and get so many of them and and it turns out it's because they use you know a compression technique or they actually use just vector graphics which are commands that tell it so you don't actually store all the pixels right you store the directions yeah so if anybody's ever done this i mean they have a picture of a jpeg right if you let's say it's 300 kilobytes or something or 500k so it's less than a megabyte and if you uncompress that i mean we're getting kind of geeky now so i don't know how far we want to go down this is a geeky audience okay so you know if you uncompress it and save it as a tiff an uncompressed if it'll be something like a hundred megabytes for that one picture right and if you think of a film or a tv show like game of thrones i mean the reason i can stream it on my phone is because it's not sending a hundred plus megabytes per frame it's compressing a down and so i began to think about compression really early as an optimization technique for games and there was this one program i think it's called like the graphics magician and it was like a hundred bucks and i couldn't afford it and i went to my parents because you could take like images and compress them down and you could create like a little adventure game and i think i entered a programming contest where you could go to different planets and you could in fact this is funny it wasn't even that graphical because it was mostly text but i called it the simulation machine no way in high school i've completely forgotten about this and the reason i did it was so you could it was like a little bit of text you could change and then the user has to figure out where they are and maybe you could add a graphic or two as well but i actually used to call it the simulation machine oh synchronicities are happening all over your life i haven't thought about that in years actually we went to the university of michigan where they had a big programming competition there you still have that all that stuff no when my dad died recently we uh you know we ended up moving cleaning up things in that house and selling it because my mom stays with my my siblings now but we did still have the apple 2c sitting there so who knows maybe there were some old floppy disks still sitting around it's possible i love it that you were thinking about compression that young that's amazing um i can remember writing programs on the c64 before we can afford to afford a hard drive and just printing them out just printing out pages lines of code before and then you re-enter them then you re-enter them until the 1541 drive came out and then the world changed like we'll never be able to fill this up so so where do you go from from there how old were you when you started when you entered that contest uh that was in high school so it's probably like 16 17 somewhere were you thinking this is what i want to do yeah i was thinking that computer science is definitely what i want to do in fact and this ties to a larger theme we can talk about later but if you had asked me kind of later in high school when i was old enough to kind of know something about the world or even early college like what is it you're going to do with your life i would have told you i'm going to be a software entrepreneur okay then i'm going to be a writer and then you mean later on later on when i was really old like 28 because back then you know i thought i was in high school i thought 28 year old is really old you know i'll make my millions and then i'll go be a writer and it's odd when you think about it because i believe we all may have these scripts for our lives that we're unaware of at a conscious level but somehow unconsciously they seep through sometimes and they come out of it and they're not going to be out but i definitely wanted to program computers because i was good at it right and i think then i got to mit and i found you know mit we had some really smart people and there were guys that were really good at physics and there were guys that are really good at like chemistry there were guys that were really good at aeroastro and i think it was a wake-up call for most people who went there because they were like you know either valedictorians or they were you know top of their class and you're around these people and and every now and then you have somebody who's really good at x or y and so people say is mit hard and i say well it depends if you're really good if you're the guy that's really good at physics then mit is not that hard right but if you're everybody else then physics is really hard at mit and i was the guy for whom computer science was just really easy well then why book what book did you want to write i wasn't sure at that point i just knew that i liked to write stories and i wanted to write something someday uh it was just a sense that i had that i would be a writer going back to the fourth grade when i wrote a little story about a dwarf that you know lived in some kingdom and i was like oh my god i'm going to be a writer and i'm going to be a magical kingdom or something like well you were writing story-based games you weren't really writing shooters you were writing story games yeah well i finally got into the video game industry was you know much later so after mit i did enterprise software for a while so i kind of went in this other direction and it wasn't until i moved to silicon valley that i got back into games and into the game industry and that was when the iphone was relatively new right so it was like wow we have a gaming platform and i'm going to be a writer and i'm going to be a writer and i'm going to be a platform now steve jobs and the rest of apple they didn't realize when they were designing the iphone they built this thing called the app store which okay everybody knows what it is now but back then it was you know big innovations you could just write your program and upload it into the store and people can just download it on their phone because before that the games on mobile phones were like you know these little line games or right and you had to go through a big giant publisher and then you know verizon had to approve your game there was very few games you could play on the old phones and with the iphone anybody could upload an app and so they what apple didn't anticipate was that games would become so popular they didn't see that coming they were actually surprised by it and for the first 10 years of the app store let's say 2008 to 2018 the number one top grossing games of grossing apps were all games of course even now if you look at it probably you can't even imagine how many games you can get on the iphone right now and so it took off as a gaming platform so then with each you know new hardware released they ended up increasing the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hit song named after the color of lemons not a coincidence big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years think about it but now seven up is fighting with their new lime lemon soda now lime comes first seven up flip the sip the capabilities of the hardware to be able to play more and more games and at that time a lot of the big guys dismissed the iphone games is you know no big deal these are just you know little games you sell for 99 cents are you know our real games are these these big triple a games but it turns out today the mobile part of the gaming industry basically dwarfs the game industry and so it's the biggest segment of the entire video game industry which is and it's bigger than movies And sports combined. Yeah, and add record to music. And music combined. All of those combined. Combined. Video games is a bigger industry. So I really saw that evolve from zero to a pretty major industry. Because back then, a couple of guys could just write a mobile game. And then we ended up building games that were called simulation games, but not in the sense that we're talking about the simulation hypothesis. It was like if you've ever played Farmville. Sure. There were games on Facebook where you simulated having a farm, or you simulated running a cafe, and we had a game called Tap Fish, which I guess with your heckle fish might be appropriate. But you basically had your own fish tank, and you would raise little baby fish and breed them, and you'd have different species. And that ended up being the number one grossing game in the app store for a while. And then we sold it to a big Japanese company. Now, since you brought it up, we got to get into what was the daily show beef with Tap Fish? Because you handled it so well. You handled it so well. Didn't they sandbag? Didn't they kind of- They totally sandbagged me. Right. Yeah. That's when I learned you have to be a little bit careful with people who are Hollywood types in general. Because until then, I was kind of naive. And they basically came in and kind of sandbagged me and kind of edited this piece. What did they say? They want to interview you about this popular game? Yeah, about the popular game in the industry. Oh, that's not what they did. Yeah. No, no. So they ended up- Basically, we were one of the games that were the first free-to-play games out there. And what happened was Apple made it so that if somebody had a password, you could just buy stuff in the game. And what would happen is some kids ended up spending, not just in our game, I mean, you name it, these games. And this is when the industry was actually pretty small. Today, you have Fortnite, which is like doing, I don't know, a million dollars a day probably, if not more than that. Yeah. So we're talking very small numbers. But what would happen is you'd have people whose kids would end up spending like $1,000 on Farmville. And so they sandbagged me by having a parent of a kid actually call me and have a call with us. And then they edited out the part where the parent thanked me for what I said and tried to explain to him how it works. Turns out he had given his kids his password and they had used the password. And they made it seem like, well, I don't know. Like, we were the villains. Yes, they did. And they edited out the part. They even had a part where, you know, if you want to buy, you have to like enter the password. They edited that part out and made it seem like, oh, you don't even need passwords. And so they made me look like the bad guy. So that was my introduction to, well, what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up. But you, I think it might have been the next day, didn't you, you posted a rebuttal on your blog, which I think is still there, about here's what really happened. Yeah, I did. But nobody read the rebuttal. Well, yeah. A small number of people read it. A lot of people read the rebuttal, but many people saw the episode. And so that's when I started to really think about, OK, what I talk about today is what I call the hard simulation hypothesis, which is that the physical world is a kind of simulation. But there's also the soft simulation hypothesis, which is more like the narrative matrix, which is what we've been told. Perhaps not everything that we've been told is as we've been told on TV, whether it's the wars, whether it's who to make fun of. You know, in 1984, they had the two-minute hate, which was. Who are we going to hate today? Right. We'll get everybody together in a room, and we'll put them up there, and we'll make everybody hate them. And of course, you know, we go through that now in the media all the time. Sure. But it was kind of a rude introduction, which is why I like doing podcasts, because in podcasts, they're not going to edit. I mean, they may edit some things in, but it's really a conversation. Yes. And people are able to see our whole conversation. They won't just see like a little part made to look like somebody said something that they didn't say. Yeah. That annoyed me when I read that story, but it didn't surprise me. So eventually, we're going to get to Sausalito and your VR experience, but can you tell us what's happening between, like, leading up to that? How were you working on the industry? So what happened was, yeah, I was working on different games. We did a game company where we built games for TV shows. There was a TV show called Penny Dreadful and a show called Grimm. Do you remember that show? I love Grimm. Yeah, Grimm is great. And so it was like a. In fact, I designed. Not many people know this, because it was a small game, but I designed probably one of the first, if not the first, card battle game on a phone, because the phones were much smaller back then, and people didn't know how you were going to do a whole card battle game there. And I did one called Titans vs. Olympians. So we had, like, the Greek, you know, the Greek Titans, and then the Greek Olympians like Zeus, and you would play this game for so many turns. And then eventually, we ended up creating a card battle engine, which we could use. This was now a different company. We sold off our game company to a big Japanese company, and then we did some games for TV shows, and I became more of an investor and advisor to different companies. Didn't you do Game of Thrones? Oh, one of the companies that I was an investor in did a Game of Thrones game. Yeah, my mom has spent a fortune on that game. Yeah. I was an investor in Telltale Games as well, which had the Walking Dead game that was huge. It was, and it was great. And Telltale was story-based games. It's really back to the same thing. It's like a graphic novel that you play. Yeah, exactly. Now, Telltale eventually imploded. This happens a lot with game industries, where game industry companies, where you have a big hit, and then you try to do too much, and then the whole thing implodes. So that wasn't good for me as an investor, but it was good for the industry, because Telltale then broke up, and all these people went out and started new game companies. So there's all kinds of interesting games out there now that were from people who used to work at Telltale. So at that point, we're talking maybe 2010, 2011? Yeah, I also invested in a small company that's now called Discord. Yes, I'm aware. I'm aware of that. Which was a game company, actually. It wasn't. Really? Yeah, they started as a MOBA game, kind of like League of Legends, but on an iPhone. And I knew Jason Citrin, who had founded Discord, because he was in the mobile game industry. So we all kind of knew each other back then in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. A lot of the big AAA games were in LA, but a lot of the mobile games came out of the San Francisco Bay Area. And so when he started this company, he was like, okay, I'm going to do either a 3D printing company or. Or another game company. So he ended up doing another game company, and I ended up investing in his first round. But then what happened was that the game wasn't that successful. And these guys hated Skype. So they wanted to build something other than Skype for talking to each other while they're playing their mobile battle arena game. And then eventually, they ended up releasing that as a separate app, Discord. And I remember we had lunch, and he said, oh, the game's not doing so well, but this app is doing well. I was like, really? He goes, yeah, we have like 100,000 downloads. I was like, that's pretty good. Like per month? He's like, no, per week. And I said, wow, how much marketing are you spending? Dollars are you spending to get these downloads? Because there was an advertising industry that often mobile developers use to get people to download their apps. And he was like, zero. People are just dragging their friends into it. And of course, now Discord is huge. It's huge. Sure, we use it. You guys use it. Yep, it's used all over the place now. But it started off just for gamers, and then it eventually expanded. How did you get into investing in these companies? Well, if you're. You're just part of that ecosystem. You kind of know a lot of different entrepreneurs, and when you sell your company, you're like, okay, how do I help along the next generation of entrepreneurs? And then I went to MIT and ran a startup program there for a couple of years, which was based on not all games, but it was at the MIT Game Lab, which is within the Media Lab complex there. And that was a lot of fun, so I did that for a little while as well. Were you still writing code during this time? No, by then I had kind of stepped back from writing code. I think. You miss it a little bit. You miss it, don't you? I do miss it, but I don't have the time for it. I hear you. Which is why now with AI, it's gotten pretty good. Like a couple of years ago, I said, this was like maybe a year and a half ago, I said, okay, let me see if ChatGPT can write a simple Pac-Man game. And it got something up and running pretty quickly, but it wasn't quite right. The Pac-Man wasn't pointing in the right direction. And I found I had to do so much vibe coding and extra prompts. Eventually, I just went into the code and just started changing it myself to fix the code. So, you know, the direction of the Pac-Man, for example. But now I hear that it's gotten so good that you don't have to go into the code yourself anymore. So I may get back into it. We'll see. Even though you had to go in and tweak that code back then, I still bet you got it working faster than Williams did in 1981. Oh, way faster. Right. In fact, that was the benefit, was you get something up and running quickly with AI. Now, if you added the total amount of time it took me to get it right, it would probably have been similar, but I wouldn't have had anything. You could really see. Right. Till, like, let's say 50% of the process. Here, I had it, like, 10% of the process was the initial getting the game up and running. And then the rest of it was tweaking. So it's a different, I think, you know, people who are building games today now are dealing with a much better set of tools. Yes, they are. Than we had, or certainly than the guys had who did, like, these original game, arcade games. Sure. Whatever. Not even 64K. No. Think of the Atari memory on those, you know, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wrote a game called, I think it was called Breakout for the Atari cartridge. And Steve Jobs got paid for it, but he actually had Wozniak come in and write it for him. Did they write Breakout? That was the one when you hit the bricks? Yeah, I think it was that one. Don't quote me on that, but it was definitely something like that. It was a very early, one of those cartridges. It was, but it was a groundbreaking game because of the physics, which were really cool. Yeah. Here's an aside on Atari. Please. Having been in the game industry, there's a great book called Eat, Bit, and Cop. Apocalypse. If you've ever played the game Missile Command, which we've all played because that was a really popular game. By today's graphics, it looks very primitive. I doubt I could get my nephews interested. I don't know. It's pretty playable still. It is. I haven't tried it lately, but the guy who wrote it was researching ICBMs and nuclear war. He started to have dreams and nightmares about a nuclear war. This book, 8-Bit Apocalypse, is all about his moral dilemma in writing this game and what he went through. Back in the 70s and 80s, that was a real thing, as you remember. Of course. Every day we thought it was going to be a nuclear war. We live with that every single day. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Sausalito 2016. Tell me what was going on that day before you throw on the VR headset. Was VR a thing? Did someone invite you over and said, we got this idea? What happens is virtual reality has gone through a bunch of different waves over time. Even back when I was in college, back in 92, 93, there was a novel called Snow Crash. There was a wave of VR. In fact, the term itself was coined in, I think, 1987 or 1988 by a guy named Jaron Lanier. The movie Lawnmower Man was very loosely based on him, as I understand it. But that wave kind of went away. And they had a glove, even, if you think of Ready Player One. That's right. They had a glove way back in the late 80s and 90s. And then it kind of went away. And what happened was in 2012, there was a new wave of VR. Oculus was one of the first startups. Sure. Consumer headsets, right? Because until then, they were unaffordable for consumers. And so there was a whole series of headsets, like the HTC Vive, et cetera. And I had sold my last video game company. And one of the companies that actually took over some of the games was in Sausalito, a company called Free Range Games. And they were working with HTC to create sports games there. And so we went over to their office just to kind of meet the people and find out more. And it was a beautiful day in Sausalito. If you've been there, people who've been there will know. On a beautiful day, you can see the San Francisco skyline. And I think it's one of the prettiest views that we have in any of our major cities out there. So they were literally right on the bay. So you could, from their offices, we could see the skyline. And they said, hey, you got to come upstairs and try out this new VR headset thing. And so I was going through one of these waves. Some of my academic research that I've done is about how innovation goes through waves. And a bunch of venture capitalists jump in and a bunch of entrepreneurs jump in. And that's what happened in the mobile game industry. It was a new wave. A bunch of entrepreneurs started to build games. And then a bunch of investors started to invest in the game. Tell me a few more things about that. A few more of those waves. That's interesting. Yeah. So these waves happen over time. I mean, we're obviously in a major wave now. The AI wave? The AI wave. But this isn't the first AI wave. The first AI wave happened in the 80s. And it was with this thing called expert systems. Okay. Okay. And these were rule-based systems. So they tried to take an expert who's really good at, I don't know, let's say machine debugging or diagnosis of problems. In an industrial setting. And they tried to codify those rule sets into a big knowledge system. And the idea was you could just ask the knowledge system what's wrong, and it would guide you through the whole thing. Now, that turned out to be not manageable. It was too many rules. And it's just like having a lot of code that you have to manage. Right. Because they were coding these rules, often by hand. And that took too long. And so there was a company called Symbolics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around MIT. It was a big hub for them. Mm-hmm. This AI wave. So that AI wave kind of went away. And then we had another AI wave back in the 2000s, which was starting to be based on deep learning and big data. Yes. Which is this idea of neural nets, and you can have multiple layers of neural nets, and then they make the decision for you. Neural nets have been around for a while. Sure, machine learning. Yeah, we know that big blue and chess and all of that was happening. Yeah. Yeah. Although most of that was still ruled. Still rule-based. Believe it or not. Really? So, I mean, the guys who won the Turing Prize, a guy named Jeff Hinton, he was, I think, was at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Anyway, they kept it alive because people weren't using neural nets for much. Even when I was a student at MIT, they showed us how a neural net worked and how we could use it to train it to, like if people were the number two or the number three, we would feed it examples. And these were like really simple neural nets. They weren't, they didn't have many layers, but they worked. I mean, back then, but nobody was using them for anything. And it wasn't until they scaled them massively. That was the difference. That's where machine data, big data and machine learning comes from. It's like you just run it on huge sets of data. Is that when Jeff Hinton started to panic? Because he doesn't like where things are going. He doesn't like where things are going now, right? Well, not then, but eventually he did because people took up his ideas. He had Googled Deep Mind. Yep. And playing games like chess is an interesting example because Deep Mind had the ability to play the game Go. And they had the AlphaGo platform, which was one of the first platforms that could actually beat like a human champion of the game Go. And it's much harder than chess. Much harder. Yeah. But they had coded some rules and then they used the machine playing a human. And then eventually they had the machine just play itself like a million times. Sure. And so it learns the path. It learns the patterns. Like you don't actually have to code the patterns. And there's a guy named Claude Shannon. And again, we're kind of geeking out on the information side of this now. But Claude Shannon was considered the founder, the father of information science. He was at Bell Labs and he became an MIT professor. And part of the reason we can ship, you know, information across the wire is because of his work. And he wrote a paper about computers and game playing way back in like the 1950s. And he said, you know, there's different stages that it could go through. One of which is you can tell it the rules and it'll play the game. And there's a little picture of him and his wife sitting with like a big box that has a chessboard on top. And it was one of the first chess playing computers. But it was a physical machine and it would light up where. I know it. I know the machine. Yeah. And you had to, somebody had to physically move like the pawn or the horse to, to that place. And so, but he said, eventually machines will be able to learn the rules of the game. And that's what happened with, you know, there was like AlphaGo and then there was another version where they didn't even teach you how to play Go. They just said, play and we'll just tell you if you win or not. And eventually it learned the rules. So that's machine learning. That's machine learning. So that we got a kind of got a hint of that in, I think it was 1985 with war games, right? We're just playing tic-tac-toe over and over. It's learning. That's right. Yeah. That was a great fictional representation. That was, I think, an era defining movie for many of us. Yeah. For me, it was. Yeah. I mean, both you saw AI, where it might end up and how it can learn from itself. Yes. And I think that's, that's an important lesson. I wish they would have re-released the movie today, especially with autonomous weapons and a race for it, using AI within the military. I'm less of a believer that AI will take over the world necessarily. But more, that AI can be used for nefarious ends, whether it's censorship, whether it's automated, you know, autonomous drones that are basically killing people on behalf of other humans. That's true. We'll, we'll get to that. That's, that's in here for sure. Phone call, you got to come upstairs. You got to check this thing out. Yeah. So back to the story. So they had built a whole VR sports suite. In fact, I think it was just called VR sports. And, so they said, try this on. And this was not like today's headsets, which they're still big and uncomfortable, but back then they were really big and uncomfortable. Oh, they were worse? They were worse. I mean, literally there were wires coming from the ceiling onto the headset, because this was, you know, there weren't even that many wireless headsets. In fact, I don't know if there were any. Oculus itself was, you had to hook it up to a PC. This was the HTC Vive. Yes. So put on this headset. We used to joke that it was called a toaster on your face. It was like having a toaster on your face. Because it also got pretty hot. Yeah. It got pretty hot. And it was just so big. It was, it was kind of heavy. In fact, okay, this is a random aside, but one of the first VR headsets ever built was by a guy named Ivan Sutherland back in 1968, somewhere in, I think at Harvard or in Massachusetts. And it was, you know, this big giant thing that you put on your head that was connected, not just with wires, but physically connected. And they called it the sword of Damocles, which is like this old Greek myth. That the sword's always above your head. Above your head, because it felt like it was going to snap your neck. Right. It was so heavy. I never heard of it. I've never heard of that. That's wild. That was one of the first ever like real computer controlled virtual reality type of things. And so in this case, it was pretty uncomfortable. And I started to play this table tennis game. Now, hold on. Before tennis, you put it on. Do you look around first and get a sense? Yeah. You look around. So what are you thinking? Like, this is pretty good. Yeah. So first of all, the room was empty. It was actually about the size of this room. Okay. And I look over and there's like a ping pong table. You can tell it was graphically generated. In fact, I have a screenshot of it in my book, The Simulation Hypothesis. And you can actually, you know, you saw it and then there was an opponent on the other side. Now, the opponent it didn't look very realistic it was just like a bunch of you know like circles and angles and squares and stuff uh and but they said here you know put the controller in your hand and you can start to play and so the ball would come across and i would start to hit the ball and the best thing about that game was the responsiveness of it like the physics engine was so good that if i like move my hand fast versus if i move my hand slow the ball would go faster it would shoot across or not shoot across and you weren't feeling latency it was there was no latency that was the best part there was latency in kind of the overall graphics of like sure that's why they had a very simple opponent they didn't have a photorealistic physics was dialed in the physics engine was really good and that's key for a sports game of course yeah even for a shooter game it's key you want to be able to figure out who shot first but it was so realistic that four of the players were able to shoot the ball and the ball was so realistic that four of the players were able to shoot the ball and the ball was so realistic that four of the players were able to shoot the ball and the ball was so realistic that four of the players were able to shoot a few moments it fooled my body into thinking that i was playing a real game of table tennis so much so that i decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table just like this really like i might do at the end of a game of table tennis now of course there was no table it was an empty room uh and the vr table was about this size but uh it was an empty room so what happened was the controller fell to the floor and i almost fell over and i did a double take i was like whoa wait what just happened oh of course there's no table did you hear cheers around you who was in the room it was just like one or two other guys so it wasn't like they had to give you the smile like yeah you get it now you get it now and it's the kind of thing you you know even back then you had to really just try on a headset in order to understand what's possible uh and the headsets are still too big these days so we're not kind of at the point of mass consumer adoption getting there getting there yeah we're getting there but that got me thinking um and that's really what got me down this rabbit hole and that's one of several strands of thinking that got me down this rabbit hole but i started to wonder how long would it take us to build a game or a virtual reality that was so realistic that we would forget not just for a couple of moments which is what happened to me obviously i knew it was a game but you would forget for an hour and then you would forget for a day and then could you forget like the Matrix basically where rio had lived in this virtual reality his whole life and he didn't really know that he was in a virtual reality the lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything even our music that hit song named after the color of lemons not a coincidence big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years think about it but now seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda now lime comes first seven up flip the sip so I got down in the rabbit hole by looking at how technology might evolve over the next few decades and we can talk more about that if you like it was called I called it the simulation point but then I stepped back and I started looking at the quantum physics side of things oh we're gonna get to that later yeah but no I just want to summarize to say it turns out that the quantum physics was telling us that the world isn't really as real as we think it is it's not and then I did another thread which was looking at the various religious and mystical traditions and I realized oh they're also telling us that the world is not really real at least not the way we think it is and I realized that there was a universal idea here that tied together silicon valley technology with physics and science but looking at it from the point of view of an information-based world or video game designer and mystical experiences which are the basis for the world's religions and so that's really what got me down to this rabbit hole in a big way and writing the book as well this is a perfect segue to my next question is you were sort of living a double life because you were going to the Monroe Institute you were learning meditation drum circle with what I mean all this kind of stuff yeah so what happened was when I was an entrepreneur back in the 90s when I did my first startup pretty much as soon as I graduated like within a year but most of my career has been as an entrepreneur so during the day I would deal with things like you know code reviews right builds engineers managing engineers hiring sales people which really sucks if you're like a technical guy and investors and customers and a lot of our customers were big fortune 5000 companies sure today and this was in Boston so it was actually much more conservative in the financial industry than like say in silicon valley where the guys were sitting around smoking weed you know as part of their startups like that wasn't happening in enterprise software startups in Boston but at the same time I started to learn about different types of meditation techniques and I started to explore different aspects of consciousness what drew you to that you know I've always had a bit of an interest in it but I will say that initially I just thought hey if I can learn to meditate I can be a better computer programmer because then I can concentrate of course I can be a better entrepreneur because I can visualize what I'm trying to build but then the more you got into it the more you realize that it's not so much about that stuff right it's not about the selfish thing what I eventually got to realize and I wrote my first book it was called Zen Entrepreneurship about this time when I was living this double life and like every chapter you know one chapter is about a problem we had with our startup and you know the customer canceling on us and the next is about me jetting off to the Monroe Institute you know for a week to try to do out-of-body experiences or I started doing lucid dreaming and there was a guy named Carlos Castaneda who wrote about this way back in the 60s and I was like I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do this I'm gonna do this 70s. A lot of young people today have no idea who he is. They should learn. They should learn. And he was on the cover of Time Magazine. Okay. Time Magazine would be like, I don't know, what would it be? It'd be like- We don't have those anymore. We don't have those anymore, right? It'd be like being Joe Rogan's top guest for the year or something like that this year. I don't know what you would put in today's terms. But basically, he was called the grandfather of the New Age movement. And he talked a lot about, initially, about psychedelics. But eventually, he was talking about dreaming and different states of consciousness. And some people, there's some controversy about, did he really find a Mexican shaman that taught him this? Or is he borrowing other people's ideas? But the interesting part of his teachings for me were about his dream experiences, which it almost didn't matter if he was imagining this while he was on psychedelics or while he was dreaming, because that's what it was all about. But it was realizing there's something different about our reality. This really got me into thinking about alternate models. Because, okay, I'll give you a startup example, because I know you've been in the computer startup world. One day, I had a dream about this competitor of ours. And I was like, that's odd. I've never dreamed of this guy before. One, never. Two, I hadn't even heard from him or his company for a year. Is this Mark? Yeah, this is a guy named Mark. Okay, I like this story. Okay. So this guy named Mark, he had a company called Edge Research. And I had a dream where I was in a business conference, and I started chatting with him about it. And I woke up, I thought, that's weird. Like, why am I dreaming about this guy? We haven't heard from his company for a year. And we had software that was connecting IBM products to Microsoft and Oracle products. So we were like a big partner of IBM back in those days, using a product called Lotus Notes. Probably too much information for the audience there. But basically, I went in the office that day, and I get a call right in the morning from a product manager at IBM. And he says, oh, hey, we're going to do a big announcement today. And I just want to let you know, because you've been a good partner to us, but this new product we're going to release is probably going to kill your product. I was like, great. Thanks. Because we had a product that worked on top of their product. And I said, well, how come I've never heard of this product before? Because IBM's a big company. I'm sure it would have leaked somehow. He's like, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, who had this company called Edge Research? We bought them a year and a half ago. And they were like, oh, we're going to do a big announcement today. And I said, well, they've been working on it in secret up in New Hampshire. And now we're going to do the big announcement today. And I thought, okay, that's weird. I had the dream in the morning. The phone call came after, right? Some people think, oh, it's not a big deal because it happened the other way around. No. The dream came first out of nowhere. It was almost like a precognitive sense that this guy was going to show up again today in some significant way. I believe it was. What was the dream? The dream was just, was not that, it was more like, I was at a conference like I used to go to, and he was at one of the booths. And I was asking him, hey, we haven't seen you in a while. What have you been working on? And we were just having that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody who's in your industry. But he was cagey about something in the dream. He was. But he was always cagey. So as I recall, this is 30 years ago now. So we're getting into details I may not even get right. But I do remember being a little cagey. And it was sort of par for the course because when we had built our product, our first product and announced it, he had called me and he was being a little bit cagey. He was asking me about it and didn't tell us he was going to have a competitor or so, a competitive product. But that to me was one of many wake-up calls that I had around dreams and the nature of reality. That, in fact, we may be getting clues about things that haven't happened yet. And our idea of time as being linear may not be correct. And only when we're getting clues about things from a materialistic point of view may not be correct either. There may be other ways to get information. So that was one example. You know, once I ended up you know lucid dreaming uh and said hey let me go visit you know my girlfriend uh at the time was still my partner now uh in cambridge i was like let me fly over to her apartment and i looked over there in the living room and there was this weird light on the couch and i thought that's weird because you know the middle of the night you should probably be sleeping in the bedroom uh but there was this weird light on the couch and i didn't really think much of it because then the lucid dream goes away so if you've ever tried lucid dreaming it's hard to stay in it it's hard to stay lucid and just goes away and then i i told her about it the next day and she said oh yeah i was sleeping on a couch last night whoa and i would have these little confirmations like that like i would be flying around cambridge and they had all these ultra realistic glass you know high skyscraper type buildings but we didn't have that many back then and i'm thinking okay what what's going on here and then recently i went on a trip back to cambridge because i still have a place there and if you go to kendall square now which is just outside of mit they've got all these tall skyscrapers that are like these glass buildings and stuff so you've seen the future i might have like it's hard to say because i don't remember exactly what the buildings look like but it was definitely the tenure of the tenor of the future well at monroe were you able to get out of body so i tried it so the monroe institute they did um they did hemi sync hemi sync hemi sync what it does is it puts in like different rhythm beats and it gets your brain into a certain rhythm yep i found that it wasn't quite working for me to get out of my body but i did have an actual experience where i was uh what today i would call a shamanic journey so later i learned uh how to do this with just drumming and just breathing you can get into an altered state and you can have you can do what shamans do which is they they have almost like a visualization that you're aware you're doing something in another reality but you're also aware of your physical body so this is the experience that i had at the monroe institute where i i saw this guy kind of looked a little bit like me brown guy but he had a beard and he was a sadhu sitting against a tree who knows maybe it was in in india somewhere like years ago i thought hey this is interesting and i felt somehow connected to this guy and so this is like a vision i'm having while i'm in you know with a hemi sync how present are you in the real world are you like oh my god this is happening i i i was present where i i was still aware of my body but you were but it was enough and this is for me this is very close to what happens with shamanic journey yes it's you you're aware that there's some other reality really something happening there you're still aware of your body but it's almost like you're not paying attention to your body is this like samadhi no it's not quite samadhi this is more like you're leaving your consciousness is leaving your body and going somewhere else but it's not like a full lot of okay it's like just a part of you is going out to this other place this other place could be a real place it could be an imaginary place it could be a place where multiple people can validate things i'll tell you about that in a second okay we used to have those kind of experiences too but but in this case the guy was sitting against the tree kind of like i am now but maybe leaning back a little bit more and he's like you're doing it all wrong what do you mean i'm doing it all wrong he goes look if you want to get out of your body don't you remember you learned this like in a past life or something he goes this is what you do you don't lay down you like sit against because if you lay down you go to sleep you sit back against the tree that's what he was doing this i don't know how many years ago this was if it was even real and he goes up to your third eye and i could like at that point i could be i felt like i was him for a second and you would leave your third eye and you would go out and then you would come back and when you left i could see him like you know sitting his body sitting there he's like that's how you're supposed to do it you saw that i saw that in my vision right wow and i was like that's wild and there was a time after that when i got back home where i was sitting at a desk coding or something it was the middle of the afternoon you know you get the you get tired in the afternoon and i started to doze off and i remembered this and i went up and i and i basically went out of my body and i saw my physical body and then i came back but for me what what happened in these dreams is i would just wake up somewhere else like in a lucid dream that became an out-of-body experience rarely have i had the kind of experience where somebody actually just sees themselves sleeping in the bed and you you brought up that uh you had out-of-body experiences with other people yeah so what happened was after that i found uh an easier way for me to do that was uh using shamanic drumming so i studied with a guy named robert moss who wrote a book called conscious dreaming a really interesting guy australian guy who somehow has gotten tied into all these aboriginal and uh iroquois and native american dream practices and he kind of pulled it together and so we would get into a group and you know somebody would do drumming it's a certain beat of the drumming and anybody can look it up look up shamanic journey you'll see what the beat is it's like a that that that that and what it does it's very similar to the binaural oh okay it puts your mind and your uh breathing and your uh oh it's frequency related frequency yeah so it puts you into kind of this altered state and then you you basically have an intention that says hey let's all go to you know riz had this weird dream last night at a business conference let's all see what we can do and we would all go into there and try to you know we'd all look around and then we'd come back and say hey what did you see hey what did you see and every now and then there would be like a lot of correlation and you know i have a skeptical engineer side sure as well as this kind of intuitive side where i'm intrigued by all of these of course kind of like you i'm sure right absolutely and so but but the time i study monroe i knew lucid dream i do all this oh yeah that's great could you see each other or no sometimes not necessarily some people could but they could you know some people were better at it than others of course but for me one of the most interesting ones and again you might go to what robert used to call a stable place in the dream world like meaning it's it's like my dreams are subjective your dreams are subjective 90 of our dreams are and i write more about this in my book you know zen entrepreneurship and my book treasure hunt which is about dreams in the business world uh not so much in the simulation books but it's a fun topic anyway and so one one day he said we're going to journey to serious i was like what does that mean journey to serious what are we talking about let's just do it so he started the drumming set the intention and then you say what you saw and i remember going to this weird planet that maybe was orbiting serious again this was you know a vision i was having so hard to say how realistic it was i saw these giant buildings but they were on stilts it was just bizarre to see these giants and it was like a ruins of an ancient civilization but there was an even more ancient civilization that had ruins at the bottom and so that's why these big buildings were on stilts wow and then i went off to the side and it looked like superman you know like did you ever see uh in the original movie do you remember the fortress of solitude of course so there were like all these little points and so afterwards crystals and stuff yeah white crystals uh and then there was this group of people that were looking out over like different planets uh but like living beings there were some living beings there too but they weren't like they weren't there physically it was it was a little bizarre let's leave that part off for now because fair enough because that i might have then transitioned to something else i just love this story yeah so i went described all these details to robert and some of the other people who went on the journey with us and they were like they were like something like 17 points that many of us including the soup right down to the superman crystalline structures and buildings on stilts they saw that yeah there's no way several of them saw that like not 100 of the people don't always see it but that's why you you do it in a group and you say okay what is the what are the correlations we can make now is that a shared dreamscape in an imaginary world could it be like an actual planet uh on sirius could it be something else uh you know my skeptical mind kicks in and says well okay i don't know but there certainly was something going on here that whether it's an archetypal thing uh but the fact that there were so many instances where this would happen the stilts is very that's a very strange detail it was very specific because everyone could say futuristic buildings or something but the stilts is a very strange detail it was very specific because everyone could say futuristic buildings or something but the stilts is a very strange detail it was very specific because anyone could say futuristic buildings or something but the stilts is a very strange detail it was very specific because everyone could say futuristic buildings or something but the stilts is a very strange detail it was very specific because everyone could say futuristic buildings or something but the stilts is a very strange detail but the stilts is very specific yeah it was stilts on top of like an ancient ruins almost like an older civilization and that's why they built on stilts so that when they build a new building you wouldn't ruin like the old buildings you know uh and that was the reason why and then eventually i think the second part of it was they had moved off the planet and they were somewhere monitoring what was going on in different parts of their local quadrant of the galaxy or something but now it gets into a little more star trek so that should just be my sci-fi self coming out at that point right but whatever it was there's there's something there and um we'll talk about that more with simulation before we go to break uh can we talk about the uh assailant uh the assailant synchronicity and how weird that was sorry which one um assailant uh jacques valet jeffrey cripple and morpheus oh yes yes so the the matrix synchronicity yes at the sln institute yes uh so those people who don't know sln is like this kind of a hippie commune set up in big sur north of la and they have conferences there and so jeffrey cripple is a professor at rice university he's he's one of the few academics that's been looking into ufos and mysterious subjects in fact i just wrote a paper uh that that i put a preprint of online which is uh i wanted to call it aliens over harvard it's actually called aliens over harvard and stanford but it's actually called ufos in academia a case study in stigma uh boundary work and the edges of legitimate science so i interviewed a whole bunch of professors about who had studied the ufo subject openly about why is there a stigma about studying this seriously in some way. That's a great idea for a paper. Is that out yet? Yeah, the paper, preprint is available online. If people search for it, they can find it. Or they looked at my Twitter account, which is at Riz Stanford. I guess it's called X now. I keep calling it Twitter still. Yeah, me too. But so I interviewed people. And it turns out, going back a little bit, I graduated from MIT in June of 1992. And there was one other major interesting thing that happened at MIT in June of 1992. It was an alien abduction conference at MIT in June of 1992. And I heard about it. What a strange place to have that conference. It was an invite-only conference. And John Mack, who many people will know from Harvard, was one of the co-chairs, along with a physics professor from MIT. And I remember thinking, this is weird. Why are we having an abduction conference here? And I mean, I didn't go to the conference because it was invite-only. Bud Hopkins was there and all these guys. Wow, the big names. And that was like the last series. The last serious abduction conference in that phase. Because, you know, John Mack got in trouble for setting the subject. But so I went back and I interviewed people like David Pritchard, who's the MIT professor who hosted it. John Mack has passed away. But Ralph Blumenthal, who is his biographer, who wrote a book on him, and Jeff Kripal actually kept these alive with these secret conferences that were invite-only. And so they used to happen at Esalen. And so at Esalen, I came out with. the book, The Simulation Hypothesis, on March 31st, 2019, which was the 20th anniversary of the release of The Matrix. Yep. And. Intentionally or no? Intentionally. Okay, nice. And that's why I ended up self-publishing the first version, because there's no way a publisher could have got it out on time, because I only finished it in December. And I was like, okay, I'm going to get this out. The second edition was Penguin Random House, so they did all the usual. Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. C-Cyter store for details. Usual publishing timeline things. But so I had met Jacques Vallée, who I'm sure your audience knows him. Very well, but what is he like as a person? He's a super nice guy, and he's really thoughtful, I think. And that's what I like about him, is he'll present what he's heard, what people have told him, but he won't necessarily present his conclusions. So I think he's one of the few people in the entire UFO world, and for those who don't know him, he was part of the inspiration, for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he's been involved since Project Blue Book, but he's a computer scientist at heart, which is how we connect it. Really nice guy. He even wrote a foreword for the French edition of the simulation hypothesis in French. He did? Yeah, he did. What an honor. It really was an honor. And again, it was just in that French edition. So, but it was really awesome that he did that. He's a very important person. I think so. Yeah, and then, you know, he's getting up there now. Hynek passed away. Mm-hmm. You know, many years ago, so I never got to meet him. But, you know, Jacques has lots of stories. But he started telling me about some of the overlap between-- well, he started telling me about UFO cases that led me to start thinking about the overlap between the UFO phenomena and simulation theory. But so there was a really interesting synchronicity that happened right when my book came out. And Jacques had given me a little blurb for the English version of the book. And I heard about this afterwards. So I actually wasn't there, but it was a synchronicity involving me. And he said, Jacques gave a presentation at Esalen at one of these conferences that they have there. And it was just before, let's say, lunch. And his last slide had a picture of my book. And he was talking about Rizwan Virk and the Matrix. And it probably had a picture of the Matrix. And so they left it as the last slide. OK. And they all said, oh, that's interesting, because the book had literally just come out. And so then they left the classroom, and they walked over to the cafeteria. Have you ever been to Esalen? They're not that far. It's right on Big Sur, beautiful. They walk into the cafeteria. And who's there but Morpheus? I mean, they literally see Laurence Fishburne sitting there in the cafeteria while they had just been talking about the Matrix and my name. And so I heard this from multiple people, including Jeff Greifel and other people who were there. They're like, hey, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book. And I was like, oh, damn, I wasn't there. But it was an interesting synchronicity. It is. I mean, the simulation is always listening. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk simulation theory. We'll be right back. So you've had this VR experience, precognitive dream, a weird synchronicity. And then I think you start to realize that simulation theory is not just a thought experiment that technology, physics, and religion are all starting to point in the same direction. Yeah, that was the realization that I came to was that there's no way-- there's no way in just a pure, materialist model for some of these weird things to be happening, not just the things that have happened to me, but things that others have reported. And so I really first wrote an article about simulation theory. I was actually visiting Sri Lanka. And in Sri Lanka, there was a famous science fiction writer who lived there, Arthur C. Clarke, whom anybody who's into sci-fi knows Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. And his office is still well-preserved there. Really? Yeah. It's technically not a tourist attraction, but a buddy of mine was there. He's like, no, you can go. You just slipped the guy a few rupees. I didn't know that. Awesome. Yes. So a buddy of mine from MIT had started a company in Sri Lanka. And I had invested in his company, and I was helping him out. So I went out to visit him. And I really want to see Arthur C. Clarke's office. So I went there, and his desk is preserved. And it's got all these books behind him. And it's got 2001, 2010, but it's got different versions. Wow. And so I see this. And sometimes I think we have a recognition of something. It reminded me of something. And I was like, yeah, that's right. I was supposed to be a writer. Like, you kind of have this vision. And it flashes in your mind, and you don't know all the details. It's like you remember the storyline. And somehow it dawned on me that I needed to do more writing. But at that point, I had gotten this idea that the video game was a good way to explain this idea of the physical world being virtual. And I had also spent a lot of time in a game called Second Life, which was from a decade before that. Sure. But it was a virtual world. So the difference between a virtual world and a game is, in a game, you're trying to score points, and you're trying to win. But in a virtual life, you're just kind of living there. And people would have jobs inside Second Life. They would come home from their real job, and then they would log in to be a bartender at a club-- That's right. --in Second Life. And so I'd ask them, like, why are you doing this? They're like, well, because it's fun. Because they got paid in Linden dollars. This is pre-Bitcoin, which were worth peanuts. So they weren't doing it for the pay, even though technically they were being paid. It was like that was part of their virtual life, their character's life. And people would have relationships and get married. And that made an impression on me as well. But I decided to write an article, a long article, about why I think we might be living inside a video game. And I tried to pull in some of the elements that I'd been thinking about. So that article allowed me to pull together these different ideas. And I wrote it in 2017, beginning of 2018, partly because of the Arthur C. Clarke experience. And it was just a flashpoint that said, oh, I'm going to have a bunch of books that are going to be translated in a bunch of languages. At that moment? At that moment. It was like, but I got to get busy doing my writing. Right. Right. I wrote the article, and I said, oh, that's enough for now. I'm done. I was running this program at MIT. I'm doing other stuff. But that got me into talking about the technology side of it initially more. Because when I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix, I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which is, I define it as a type of technological singularity. Now. People know that term because they think of like Skynet, super intelligent AI, going to kill us all and take over the world. So the AI singularity is what? When AI supersedes-- It exponentially grows to the point where it's become super intelligent or-- Beyond us. Beyond us. That's one example. But the guy who coined the term, the technological singularity, was actually a guy named Werner Wenge, who is a science fiction writer and a computer science professor. And he defined it in many different ways. So it wasn't just AI. He said it could be computers networking with each other to become intelligent, or us merging with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about, the merger of biology and silicon. But Wenge was relying on an earlier famous guy named William von Neumann-- Of course. --who's a famous Hungarian mathematician. He basically defined the von Neumann architecture that all of these computers still pretty much use the von Neumann architecture. The guy really was a genius. And he borrowed the term singularity from physics, because in physics, singularity is when you're approaching that line at the center of a black hole. And he said, it's the point at which technology grows exponentially such that everything is different for the human race. And you can't come back from a singularity. That's the it. Yeah. At that point, everything is different. And so Vinji wrote the paper, and then Kurzweil wrote a book about it. So a technological singularity is when technology gets to the point where you can't come back. And so I started to think, well, if we were to build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality, then we would have reached what I call the simulation point. And if there are AI characters inside there that you can't tell if they're AI characters or not, then we're basically able to create a full virtual world. And there's something called the Turing test, which most people have heard of. It's, again, going back to the beginning of the 20th century, the Turing test. And it's, again, going back to 1950, back in the time of Claude Shannon. It was actually Alan Turing. He wrote a paper called The Imitation Game. Actually, that's what he called it. And for people who don't know, most people have heard of it by now, but there's a computer behind curtain A and a person behind curtain B, and you're passing messages back and forth. Now, how did they pass messages back in those days? They didn't have cell phones. It was teletype machines. Sure. That was how he decided to do it. And he said, if you can't tell the difference between the AI. So if you can't tell the difference between a computer and a human, then the computer has passed the Turing test. And of course, today, many people think with ChatGPT and Claude and Google and Grok that we've pretty much passed the Turing test for text, because the chatbot is all a text-based interface. There used to be a prize called the Lobender Prize, which was set up in the 90s. And it was for the chatbot that actually came closest to passing the Turing test. And there was a chatbot named Alice that was one of the winners of it. It was the first chatbot that actually took on a personality of a young woman. I remember Eliza. I don't remember Alice. Eliza was even before that. So Eliza was in the 1960s. So this was like 90s or so, like the 90s. And there was a guy, a Hollywood guy, who saw this chatbot back in the 2000s. He's like, huh, a chatbot that has the personality of a young woman. And his name was Spike Jones. And he decided to write a script. It's called Her, which became the film with, who is it? Was it Joaquin Phoenix? Joaquin and Scarlett Johansson. And Scarlett Johansson played the voice. And so you see what's called the science fiction feedback loop at work, where science fiction inspires technology, and then technology inspires science fiction. And then when Sam Altman and these guys came out with, I think it was ChatGPT3 or 3.5, one of the versions they came out with, they started referencing her. And there was a big blow up because the voice of the woman who sounded like the guy's girlfriend. And the video sounded like Scarlett Johansson. It was just someone who sounded like her. He promised it wasn't her. Yeah. It was just someone kind of like her. Right, right, right. Was it Samantha, I think, in the film was her character? Yeah. And he literally referenced the movie Her. So you start to see the science fiction feedback loop over time. But coming back to what I was talking about was in my book, the second edition of Simulation Hypothesis, I defined something called the virtual Turing test or the metaverse Turing test. And we're not quite there yet. And that is if you're in a multiplayer game or a virtual world like a Second Life or World of Warcraft or Fortnite, I'm sure there's a lot more recent examples now. And your avatar is controlled by you. And there's two other avatars, one of which is controlled by a human player and one of which is controlled by an AI. And if you can't tell the difference between those two, and you can do anything you want in the virtual world, you can drive cars, you can fly on dragons, you can go skiing, you can talk to each other, you can flirt. You can have virtual sex, whatever you want. And if after, say, an hour, you can't tell which of those avatars, and you're talking too, so there's voice element, which of course today, if you've seen any of the latest AIs, they can- They can do it. They can have a voice. In fact, I got a call from an AI not that long ago. Could you tell it was AI? They made it so that they told you it was AI. Oh, okay. It was called Bordy. It was an AI venture capitalist who basically was like, well, as an AI venture capitalist, I can talk to every single founder on earth, right? Because it's just making calls and it's automated. But it was actually pretty good. I mean, in taking what I said, it's an example of where they're putting in, the LLM is behind the scenes, but it's basically the brain that's driving the character. And in fact, we were talking about the Matrix Awakens, and that was a virtual city. And there was a guy, he put a smart NPC, the engine into it, which basically has an LLM behind it. So that all the NPCs in that city, they were kind of dumb NPCs in most games, but now we have smart NPCs. And so he walked around this virtual world and he started telling people, you're in a video game. Yep. I remember this. You're an NPC. And some got upset, didn't they? Yeah. Some were like, that's ridiculous. Or some were like, I got to go to work. I don't have time for this crap. Others were like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me about it. Tell me more. And this was back in like 22, right? So looking at how fast AI technology evolves, I mean, we're already many generations beyond that, but they reacted kind of like real people might. And so we're not quite at passing the virtual or metaverse Turing test yet, but I think we will be eventually. And that's one of the stages of these 10 stages to get to the simulation point to build a matrix. And another would be like BCIs, putting in brain computer interfaces like in the matrix. So before we go too far down, one thing I don't think I've seen anyone else do this is your NPC versus RPG inside the simulation. But before we get there, take us back to your paper. And what was your argument for this could be a simulation? I mean, the actual technology. Yeah. So the technological argument was that video games can get to be so good that we will reach the simulation point at some point. And it could be soon, it could be a hundred years, it could be a thousand years. It really doesn't matter that much as long as we get to that point. And so if we will eventually be able to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds that we can't distinguish if we're having the real experience or not. And one of the stages also included like false memories, like Philip K. Dick. We can talk more about him. I hope so. Yeah. Because he's one of my favorite authors. And in Blade Runner, for example, you had the android that had Rachel, who remembered being a little girl growing up. So she didn't think she was AI, but she had those memories implanted in her. But if we can have those experiences and you can't tell the difference, then how do we know for sure that we're not inside a virtual world right now? That was the crux of the argument, but it was built on the idea that technology is developing and people like to have virtual lives. And then the quantum physics was part of the argument as well. So I don't know if we want to get into that. In just a second, because I want to dispel something. And this was in my episode about simulation theory. Physicists will argue this can't be a simulation because to simulate all this material, all consciousness down to the quantum level, you would need a simulation bigger than the universe itself. And my response was, that's not how simulations work. Right. Exactly. I mean, the way that simulations work is you simulate the parts that you need. Right. So physicists love the law of big numbers. They love to say infinity. Oh yeah, it's infinite, or there's an infinite number of particles. But computer scientists, we hate infinity because we are always dealing with limited resources. So it's all about optimization. And I tell people, so in the book, we mentioned King's Quest, so I'll bring it up again. Yep. If you look at King's Quest, you'll see that each of the screens, when that guy is walking, it almost looks continuous, but it's really not. All the pixels of all the screens are laid out, which means they're called raster images or bitmap images, but they're basically rendered. The pixels are sitting there on disk and it's just a matter of loading it. Now, back in the 80s, and you know this because you were around, if you tried to build something like World of Warcraft or a Fortnite or a CSGO, which is a first person shooter, you wouldn't be able to do it because there's too many pixels to keep track of. Right. And they didn't know how to compress that down in such a way that you could render it on the fly. The hardware wasn't that good either, but the thing that I learned as a computer scientist is that it's, yes, the hardware gets better, but it's the algorithmic improvements that really make the order of magnitude difference. Like hardware might go from one to two, but if you want to go from one to 10 or one to a hundred, you need to change the way that you're doing things. And so the reason we can render a World of Warcraft today, is we don't need all the pixels for all the castles to be on your computer. What we do is we generate it through 3D models based upon where you're looking. And the first game that got really popular that did this was Doom. Of course. Back in the 90s. I mean, they had Castle Wolfenstein and before that as well, but the game that really got popular and it simulated a first person perspective. And so it basically, you know, just showed you what your character could see. And the rule of thumb was only render that which is observed. And by the way, that's what we do. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar, right? And that's what we do with Zoom too. If you and I, I mean, we happen to be in the same room, although how would the audience know that we're not in the same room? But if we're on Zoom and I'm in Phoenix and you're in Los Angeles, then my computer doesn't have to render all of Los Angeles. It just renders your background. And similarly, your computer doesn't have to render all of Phoenix. It just needs to show the part that is visible from the camera. So that castle that's way out in the distance is really just a few pixels. That's all we're rendering until you get there. And then we give you more and more information. Yeah. And it's rendering it on demand. Yes. And this is a key feature of how 3D, particularly 3D video games are built. And the information for that castle is still out there. And sometimes even that is generated on the fly. There was a game in 2016 called No Man's Sky. Oh, procedural. Yes. Procedural. Right? And it had 18 quintillion planets. Okay. That's an interesting number, actually. It is, right? You probably know why. I do. Yeah. But you have to explain. So- But that's an interesting number. Yeah. But first of all, it's a really big number. Yes. So it pretty much seemed infinite at that point. And the way video games used to be designed is you would have to have your design team design every one of those planets. Now, there's no way that anyone could design 18 quintillion worlds. It's just too much. So what they did was they used procedural generation. Which is what? Which is basically code that runs and generates the scenery for you as needed. So when you get to the planet, it would generate like the trees, the forests, the landscapes, the mountains, using a whole bunch of algorithms. And there's a whole bunch of algorithms that. You know, there's algorithms that can simulate water. Sure. There's fractal algorithms. If you've ever looked at how like, you know, you can have trees being generated. In fact, in my second simulation book, The Simulated Multiverse, there's a whole chapter on like these types of algorithms and how it looks like nature is algorithmic. It does. In nature. Nature is algorithmic in nature. No pun intended. Because, you know, you look at like the seashells and you see. Right. The Fibonacci numbers are there. The Fibonacci numbers. But you see all these similar sequences of things or algorithmic generation or fractals, right? Which are. Fibonacci numbers are there. right right it's like oh he didn't go in there that's so that's fine we have this one pre-loaded so render that right exactly so you render it quickly so it's all about performance because there are operations which are slower or more expensive and operations which are quick and in a multiplayer game the most expensive operation is to go from your computer to the server on the internet that's the slowest part of the whole process right and then bring information back now imagine there's you know a million players all doing this well you have to kind of optimize in such a way that assets can be loaded it was funny a few years ago uh these filmmakers called me called me up it's been a while since i've talked to them and they said hey we're trying to develop this show for netflix and it's called these guys are living a little uh small town and they look up and they see this dialogue box that says sky not found you know which is like an asset what happens in video games when it can't find your ass yes but so code caching is basically a way to save what's needed and so in this model of using the observer effect like a video game as long as there's at least one observer then you still have that rendering there and then you also have multiple levels of what game designers would call lods just in case right yes right so that lod is a level of detail so we'll show it to you but just just as much as you need to right especially like we're talking about things right off in the distance right and then you can go in and the assets can become higher and higher resolution kind of like i don't know if people remember this but like when jpegs used to load on uh old web browsers sure you know that was an expensive operation today we think oh it's no big deal i'm going to download a whole video like on wireless but back then it was a big deal and so the text would load first and then slowly it would fill in yep you know the actual images over time and that's the way it's going to work that's it's it's an optimization technique so and now that's called lazy loading yeah and so lazy loading is a good way to think about it uh and in fact there's an underlying concept called lazy evaluation which goes down to the code level so it basically says don't execute any code unless you absolutely need to so what is it holding on to so what it does is it looks for references oh so it's actually a timing issue more than right so before we're talking about optimizing the number of bits you send we're talking about optimizing your gpu your graphics processing unit for for drawing things but this is optimizing the cpu and what it says is if you had like a really long equation x equals one plus two to the power of this plus blah blah blah blah blah and then you never use that variable x later in the program it's not needed now maybe it's used you know a couple days later the program's now in these x says okay i'm going to go back and calculate that big long equation because that's an expensive operation right uh and so lazy evaluation is actually built into a lot of programming you know languages and compilers and virtual machines like java etc which says basically only run the code that you really need to run it's like having comments like when when you have comments in code i mean again coding is becoming a lost skill now because of ai but the comments are not part of the actual program they're not really needed so when it gets compiled it doesn't compile the comments it just gets rid of them and it's just compiling the code parts now when you're running it i remember i was back at mit and we did a had a professor who was studying parallel processing at the time i think later he became cto of sun uh sun microsystems and a bunch of other things as well but but he was like trying to come up with a way when you have multiple processors uh and like with ai today gpus are the constraints factor. You see video games in most technology advances. AI uses GPUs. Cryptocurrency, mining uses GPUs. And GPUs were developed for graphics and video games. Is this why most games are built on engines? Because a lot of that math has already been handled? Yeah, because engines make it much easier to build a game. Because what would happen is, in the old days, everyone had to write everything from scratch, including the physics engine, the loading engine, like the things we just talked about. You'd have to write, how do you take a 3D model and put the rendering or the textures, which is like putting the clothes and the skin on top of the person. Right, particle systems. Yeah, particle systems. All that stuff has been built over many years. And in the old days, every team had to write all that themselves, which would just take way too long. Now there's Unreal and there's Unity. Unity became big partly because the mobile game industry, because it was a way of doing a game on iOS and on Android. Once, write the code. Because before that, people used to write their games directly in C or Objective-C or Java for the other one. So the whole engine makes it easier to build new worlds on top of it. And then some companies like Unreal, they made their engine available to other people as a product. So they can build games on it. I think it was the Unreal Tournament initially. Yeah, it was. Is what it was built as, right? Yeah. And then it became a pretty solid engine. It's probably one of the best ones out there. My favorite. Oh, yeah. You guys use it here, right? Yep. And so where were we going with this? Parallel. Yeah, the parallels between quantum mechanics and the way that we write code. Because the big question is, not just does this happen, because I think quantum mechanics has been validated. Yes. This stuff. This stuff happens. We don't know why it happens, and we don't know how to think about it or interpret it. Now, there's another. So the first most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen Interpretation, which basically says that all these probabilities exist, and then the probability wave collapses down when an observation or a measurement has been made. Right. That's the wave function collapse. The wave function collapse. And that, to me, reminded me of what I've just been talking about. Yes. Which is the optimization and the lazy evaluation, and the caching, and the rendering, and the first-person point of view. You didn't need to know the position yet. Right. Yeah, we didn't really need to know. No. It was there. what's going on. Right. And you can calculate it. You can calculate what might have happened before then as well. This will get more interesting if we talk about multiple timelines. Please. I'll come back to that. And so the other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with physicists is. Now, they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer, right? No, they didn't. Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler. Mine too. Yeah, he was a great. Delayed choice, yes. Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, but he was also the supervisor, a PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman. Yep. He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was it the Challenger or Columbia? Challenger in 1986, when he like took the little O-rings and put them in ice water and said, look, let's look at what happens to these. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper. There's an interesting story here about how quantum computers came about, but we'll come to that later for the time. And so Wheeler was the supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett, who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions get separated. And that was. And that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happen. So that became known as the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation. Right. Is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it. No, no. And Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn't like it either. And so Wheeler said, take out this stuff about there being multiple physical worlds, just stick to the math. And so Hugh Everett needed a job and he's like, okay, fine. I'm just going to finish. I'm going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. But that became the basis for a lot of great science fiction today. Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like. I know that they didn't really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it. Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation? Because you can still have your block universe theory, just in a different universe. I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications. Because he had his, the universe, God does not play dice. That's right. That's true. With the universe. With the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like, he didn't, it wasn't that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation. And he tried to disprove it. He couldn't. Yeah, he couldn't. And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. And then Bohr didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called the Copenhagen interpretation because Bohr, Niels Bohr was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him. And a bit of an ego. And a bit of an ego. Of course. Yeah. Okay. That happens a lot in science. Yeah. And so that's the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics. Where do you land? So this is what's interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer. There's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem is it's like, it goes from all these possibilities to this one and nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic. It's like magic. There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations, step one, and then over here, step two, and then step three, he's got the answer and his professor or the other. professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs. That's what happens. That's what happens, right? But if it's a video game, well, then we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game. Now, the big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. You've probably seen the Spider-Man meme where you've got like the three Spider-Mans, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who's the third one? Toby, Toby McGuire. Yeah, they're all pointing at each other. Well, you know, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse. That's what we're told. That's how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a science point of view is they say it's not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much faith. You're creating a new world, okay, not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point, at each choice. Which would be at the Planck scale. At the Planck scale and maybe even at the Planck time. At the Planck time. Which, you know, by the way, the Planck scale is another reason why I think, you know. Same. Physics is showing us that we have pixels in the universe. Sounds like pixels. It's the smallest measurable distance. And Planck time sounds like Framer. Exactly. A clock speed or Framerate. Yep. Which is, and now we do know that the universe is probably quantized. Scientists don't agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought like, you know, a MacBook or that's like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don't know what that means. What it means is hertz is instructions per second or cycles. Right. Per second. And so you can only do so many and you can't really do anything in between that minimum time. Right. And that's what the Planck time is, is like the, the amount of time it takes speed of light to get through the Planck length, basically. And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those. And it's more likely we live in a, in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program. That's a lot of universes. So, so it's not parsimonious and you have to create all these universes. Right. But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami. He wrote, what did he write? It was the conscious universe. I forget his book, but he wrote, he wrote a few really, he's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his talks and, you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don't think about it until later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities. In the sense that we think of them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again. The Lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7up is fighting back. 7up is fighting back. Their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7up. Flip the sip. If you kept doing it a bunch of times, right, then that's the, then it's a probability. Yes. Right. So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don't know if it was Pascal, it was one of these French mathematicians that began with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice and he asked him, hey, can you quantify, you know, how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea. He said, if you have one die, single dice. I said die has six possibilities. He called them six possible futures. I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it's evenly weighted, you know, we're in Vegas, so it's a gambling analogy. If it's properly weighted is one out of six. But you can't really have a probability until you've tried something multiple times. Like, you know, you could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times. Yeah, a lot of times. The universe has something called fine-tuning, which is if a certain number of constants, like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off by like 1%, the planets would fly apart, the galaxies wouldn't stay together. And there's like so many of these. People can look them up. There's at least 12, and there's probably more than that. Sure. But it looks like the universe is fine-tuned. And well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times, and then you would basically, prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree. That's right. Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation. So let's just focus on this subset of possibility. Right. So you tune Avogadro's number until it's just about right. Yeah. Or moles constant or the speed of light. Yeah. It's like, this is what works. Right. Throw that stuff out. Right. Exactly. And you tune that stuff. And that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book, because I have the second edition. And also, I interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife. Tessa Dick? Tessa Dick, yeah. Wow. What was that like? It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone, but she had so many stories. Oh, wow. And she's still around. And she would tell me these stories. And I interviewed her because the Wachowskis, who made The Matrix, were inspired. They were inspired by Philip K. Dick. Of course. In fact, she told me, I asked her, what would Philip think of The Matrix? And she said, well, first, he would like it. That's the first reaction would be, this is awesome, because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money. Probably good. For using his ideas. I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk at Mets in 77. Yeah. And so she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk. And there's a written version. Everyone should. It's amazing. There's a famous line from it where he says, we are living in a computer-programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. And so when I, originally, I was just interested in the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer-programmed reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience, and everyone's like, what? I love it. They think they're going to see a sci-fi author talk, and they're getting this philosophical, it's so important, that talk. It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out her name is Joan Simpson. She was his friend. She went with him to the conference, and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, the rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay, so he must have added it in in his notes while he was flying over there. But if you read the rest of the speech, the next line is, we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past, a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate path. And his most famous book while he was alive was actually The Man in the High Castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don't know, they may have seen, some of you may have seen the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. his wife. She said he would have loved that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War II, and they end up splitting America between them, and you have kind of a police state on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened where the Axis powers won the war. And now we're on a different timeline. And he said at some point, all the memories came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book too, by the way. Was he? That's what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because there were such bleak memories in that timeline. Yeah, he saw it. He said this happened, but somewhere the variable was changed. Exactly. Who changed it? He called it the programmer and counter-programmer. And so he used this idea of orthogonal time, which he compared it to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit, you can try. The other suit. But what he also said, so Tessa encouraged me to read his speech. And I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. He also said we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate timeline. And of course, back then it was hard to do that, but now we have this thing called the Mandela effect. And whether you believe in the Mandela effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe. We are having multiple possible history. Well, let's talk about that because people love it. Mandela effect never worked on me until there is one that got me. Otherwise, Berenstain bears all that fruit. Well, you tell the story. What's the Mandela effect? So the Mandela effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past. And it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the 80s. And of course, he didn't in our timeline. He actually was released from prison. He became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and died, I think, in like 2013 or something. They remember his funeral on TV. Yeah, they remember details. Yes. Winnie, his wife, taking over the ANC. They remember all of these. And then Fiona Broome was the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Comic-Con convention in Atlanta. It was called Dragon Con. And it was a Star Trek panel. And the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trekkies, they know their. They know their stuff. They know their episodes. And people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this? Mr. Spock did that. And maybe Mr. Sulu did that. They're like, no, we never shot such an episode. And multiple people in the audience remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore. She used to find all these different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me, and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way. Same. If you asked me what it was, I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. But a friend of mine from MIT, who typically, you know, a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left-brained about these things. He said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen. And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it, and him talking about it, I couldn't get this out of my mind that if you re-ran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines. And so I categorized these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one. Then there's things like movies is another category. The events. The Moonraker one is the one that got me. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, the Moonraker one. That she doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces. Right. It was Jaws who had the steel teeth. Right. And he meets. Was her name Dolly? Dolly. He meets Dolly. And I remember that, too. You remember the braces? I remember the braces, too. I mean, that was the whole point of that. That's what got me. Yeah. And so there's a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein-Bears one. And what I like to say is if someone has proximity or significance to an event and they remember it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online. I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the Simulated Multiverse book where she was a journalism student and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated, probably back in the 80s now, and was working for NPR. So, again, she was in the news industry and she heard that Nelson Mandela had died. Now, you're not going to get that wrong if you went there to meet the guy. You're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Stephen Vico, which is the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance, and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. Do you remember that? Of course. The tank boy? Yep. And the tank, what do you remember? I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him. That's how I remember it as well. But I started asking people about it. And there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw on the news. They were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it's like 10% to 20% in a group. I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Hynek and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember him being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do this, does anyone remember tank boy being run over? And nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this audience doesn't have it. This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards, and she said she lived in Beijing at the time. And she remembers him being run over there, but she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, why are the Bernstein, like, why are they Jewish bears, to their parents? Now, they're not going to get that wrong. The rest of us might get it wrong. Sure. And then there's the Bible verses. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse? Yes, I know the verse. So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb. Yeah, that's not the verse. It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that verse. The lion lays with the kid. The leopard lays with the kid. The wolf lays with the kid. The wolf with the lion, the leopard with the kid. Yeah. So that's a Mandela effect? That's a Mandela effect, because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb and say Isaiah. Yeah. That's not it. 1-11. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture, right? Because they remember. And I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at one that happened to translate it. But people are telling me, no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with the lamb. And the physical object has changed. So recently I met someone who's actually another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Brooks. And she said she went to her Catholic priest and she said, do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion? He goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up. And he looked it up and he's like, what? So you have a Catholic priest. Again, somebody who's closer to it. And there's another interesting scriptural element, which we'll come to in a second. But the other one that really got me was the thinker. The statue? Yeah, the statue. So if you look at it today, and there's a cast of it at Stanford. I happened to be in Silicon Valley, so I went to look at it. You know, where's his hand? Do you remember where his hand was? On his chin. On his chin. And was it clenched or was it kind of like this? I don't remember that. I thought it was kind of fisty. Yeah. If you look at it, it's kind of like, kind of not really clenched too hard. Right, right. But there are all these people who took pictures standing next to the thinker like this with their hand on their forehead. That's weird. And there are people who remember it that way. But if you look at the pictures, it's not there. And so again, I thought, okay, maybe they're pranking us. Like, what's going on? Why are these random people putting these pictures? Because usually when you look at the pictures, then you take a picture next to a statue and you get the pose. You're trying to do the actual pose. And then turns out there's a picture, an actual picture of George Bernard Shaw. So G.B. Shaw was a, you know, he's a well-known guy in England. He also modeled for Rodin and for other people. And they were doing the London release of the thinker and they were unveiling it in London. I forget what year, like 1900 something, 1901. 1901, maybe it was 1910. And they took a picture of him, this one photographer. And it says, the title of the picture, you can find it online, is G.B. Shaw in the pose of the thinker. And guess where his hand is? It's up on his forehead. Wow. And that picture is still there in museums and there are plenty of, you know, people can find it online. And so is it possible that some variables are being changed in a way? And so I began to think. Well, which one's got you? So that one got me. The thinker? Not because I didn't remember it. I mean, I remembered it. I wasn't that close to it. So I didn't think too much about it. But seeing the physical evidence of this picture really got me. That's one that got me. I mean, the Jaws one was another one that I remember. I mean, Jiffy Peanutbutter wasn't that big of a deal to me. There's a famous one about in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, where, you know, Luke, I am your father. Again, I think that could be just faulty memory. I think so. Collective faulty memory. I mean, there's so many now that I've come across. And Chick-fil-A is another one. Like, does it have a K in the Chick-fil-A? That's right. That's right. That would probably get me. You know, I read an interesting theory about Jaws that made me feel a little better, is sometimes when you're remembering, especially if it's a long time ago, your brain fills in what would be most logical. Because that joke works better if she has braces. Right, yeah. So that made me feel better. But that was one that blew me off. It blew my mind. Because I was like, I remember all this stuff perfectly. No, I don't. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's so many of these. So I was looking around at explanations. And so we'll go down the quantum rabbit hole again in a second. Please. But I began to wonder, the scripture stuff really got me too. Not because I remembered the scripture. I mean, I remembered Lion, Willow, and Lamb too, but I'm not that religious. I began to wonder if there's other scriptures that have changed. And in Islam, the Koran, Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity. The Koran is memorized word for word. And you can think of the reason why, and the exoteric or normal reason why is probably just because a lot of people could read back then. But they literally recited it word for word. And there's even a designation of a guy who knows all of that. And I looked around to say, hey, has anyone claimed that this has changed at all? And there's one guy who said, One Sufi Imam. And again, the exoteric reason is, because not everybody has a physical book, the esoteric reason he gave, he said that there are beings that are allowed to go back in time and change objects, but they are not allowed to change your memory. I know these beings. Tell us about these. These beings are called the jinn. The jinn, yes. In Middle Eastern lore. And you go to the Middle East and people take these beings very seriously. Oh, yeah. I mean, people get possessed by these beings. I mean, when I was born in Pakistan, it was kind of like the boogeyman, like, there's a jinn over there, don't pee on that tree. But then it turns out there are actual people who poured scalding. Jacques Vallée told me a story of a guy in Saudi Arabia, a kid who poured scalding water and then got possessed, and supposedly there was a jinn and a priest had to come in and do kind of like an exorcism, but he had to talk the jinn out of it, saying, he's just a young kid, he didn't know what he was doing, and the jinn was like, okay, and they released him. And there's so many interesting stories. That's a huge different rabbit hole to go down. But I got interested. It's so in tune, I think, though. Yeah, it's so in tune. And I got interested in it because it became a way to think about simulation theory as if you have run this more than once, you could have changed things along the way. Now, it's very easy for us to think of multiple possible futures, like, okay, I go to New York, I go to London, I go to live in LA. Those are three different possible futures. But we're not used to thinking. Of multiple possible paths. I mean, that sounds weird to say there could be more than one past. Well, it turns out there's something called the delayed choice experiment. I was hoping this was going to come back to John Wheeler. Yeah. So we're going to come back to John Wheeler. Actually, can we take a quick break? Yeah. Take a quick break and we'll talk about how the past is not really the past. Yeah. Be right back. Take some photons, shoot them at two slits, you get two lines. Observe it, you get an interference pattern. Got it. John Wheeler said, wait a second. What happens next? Yeah. So he came up with what's called the delayed choice double slit experiment. Okay. And what it's telling us is that time is not what we think it is. That the present and the past and the future are different from the way we think about it. I mean, we think of the past as being linear. We know what happened, right? It's just one timeline. This is what's happened along the way. And the delayed choice experiment. And the delayed choice experiment opened up an opportunity that the past could also be in superposition. Now, the best way to understand this actually is not so much the slits, but it's what Wheeler called the cosmic delayed choice experiment. Okay. And he said, suppose there's something like a quasar, which puts out a lot of light and it's really far away from us, like a billion light years. And so that would be outside the galaxy, beyond the ender arm of the galaxy. And how long would it take for the light to reach Earth? Let's say Earth is here. It's going to take a billion years. Right. But suppose right in the middle, there's a big black hole or some other big gravitational object. And the light has to make a decision about whether to go to the left. Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly! Check engine, ABS, or maintenance light on? Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified. Master technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today. Auto Parts. Or to the right. Ah, okay. And that's kind of like two slits. Yeah. And we can have telescopes here on Earth that will measure through what's called polarization of light, whether it went this way or that way. Right. Okay. So the measurement. So the measurement happens now. But it has to go one way or the other, like, let's say it's halfway. So how long ago would the decision have to have been made? It would have been half a billion years ago. Right. Right. So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs now at this point, right? Far before. Yeah, before the dinosaurs. It's kind of like saying, if you're going to go to, you know, San Francisco from New York, are you going to go up towards Chicago or are you going to go down through Tennessee, Arkansas? You have to make that decision, like, well before. Before you get to San Francisco. Yes. Now, what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that it's when the measurement of the light is done today on Earth that the decision gets made on whether the light went to the left or to the right of that black hole. Okay, that's weird because now we're saying that the past isn't fixed, that the past is in superposition, and it's only when the measurement is done here. It's like an observer effect, but for time, not just for space. Those photons went back in time to make the decision about today's observation. Well, that's one interpretation of it. Okay. The other interpretation is that both of those existed as possibilities, and they didn't get fixed until today. So, again, did Germany or Japan win World War II? Germany and Japan. Did the Allies win World War II? Right. What if that decision isn't made until somebody observes the result, and then that result is cached now so that everybody is on that timeline for some period of time? And this, to me, was an interesting revelation because it reveals that there could be a simulated multiverse of multiple timelines, okay, because what if what we're really thinking about is we ran the simulation one way, and we also ran it the other way, and we are basically pulling the past in on demand. Now, you'll appreciate this because not only do we optimize resources with lazy evaluation, but we also say, you know, don't run something until it's needed. Right. Right? And so, in a computer game, let's say like Farmville or Minecraft, okay, kids still play Minecraft today, they have crops that grow, and what happens is you log in, and it. You see that the crops have grown since you logged in yesterday, or four hours ago, or whatever the case is. And now, what happens during the time that you're not logged in? And the answer is nothing. Nothing. Because it would take too many resources to sit there and calculate every single growth of every single blade of grass or of wheat, you know, for that time. And so, what the computer does is it's when you log in, it basically renders what might have happened over the last X period of time. Right. Let's say 24 hours. And it uses a database of probabilities to say, what's the probability that your crops were destroyed by locusts? What's the probability that your neighbor came in and stole some of your crops? Or that the fox got in and ruined a few crops? And you see it as, this is what's happened. Now, my crops are all grown. I can now sell my crops. But what just happened there was that the past was generated. On demand. So, it's not so much that you're changing the past, because physicists don't like that. Physicists don't like when you say retrocausation. It's that you are filling in the past based upon the observations as it's made. And there could have been multiple possible versions of that. Oh, I like this. So, that's a different way to think about time. Now, is it possible that some of us are remembering one version of the Mandela effect? And, you know, we talked about ones that got you, like the Jaws. There's one, you know, there's another one. There's a famous one about Sinbad being in a movie. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's called Shazam. And it turns out it was Shaq and Kazam. That's right. But so many people, you know, would swear they had a VHS tape. And the story was like this. And the kids are asking the genie about his dad that Sinbad actually recorded in, like, 2017. A little clip from this movie that never existed as kind of a joke to say, okay, here's the scene you guys all say you saw, but never existed. Right. But people remembered it. You know, so many different versions and Mandela effects. Gino has one for you that I can't reveal to you. Oh, okay. He's going to tell you later. Okay. But is it possible that we are all remembering a different version? Now, I thought, okay, that's the delayed choice experiment. Wheeler proposed it as a thought experiment. He couldn't do it at the time. It required, like, a pretty complex setup. And so, you know, is it just a thought experiment? Well, it turns out, no. People have actually run this experiment. They have. Now, obviously. Obviously, they haven't run it for, like, you know, the cosmic version. But what they've done is they've gone through two slits and they've sent a particle up to a satellite 1,000 miles away. And so the question is, when they measure the particle, or let's say the light, using our example, from the satellite, it was 1,000 kilometers from the slits themselves. And the question is, is the decision made about which slit to go through, like here, like when it first starts out in the slits, or is it made after the light travels 1,000 miles? And 1,000 miles is not that far in the scope of things, but when you're talking about, you know, nanoseconds, it takes a lot of nanoseconds. Sure, you can measure it. Yeah, you can measure it. And it's very measurable by today's instruments, is the point. And they did this experiment, and they found, in fact, that it was in superposition until it was measured by the satellite. Okay, so then I said, well, how come more physicists don't talk about this? And so I went back, and I found an obscure speech by our favorite scientist. favorite quantum founder, Schrodinger. okay this was an obscure speech he made in the 1940s i think it was a caltech and nobody talks about this for some reason uh people talk about the multiverse which was you know late 50s early 60s uh people talk about the copenhagen interpretation um he said that in effect once the observation was made we would not just be deciding the state the superposition but we would be choosing from one of several simultaneous one of multiple simultaneous histories so literally schrodinger is telling us there are multiple simultaneous histories and it's like when you choose look at the cat you're not just choosing whether it's dead or alive sorry for bringing the cat back that's okay but what did the cat do before it jumped in the box what did it come from the living room or did it come from the the dining room before that was it in the backyard or was it in the front yard it's like you're choosing this history and that is the one that is now being part of our simulation is what i would say i've got to read that speech yeah it's very obscure and i have a reference to it in the simulated multiverse uh but i've never heard anyone else talk about it i found it you know when i was looking around online for the earliest references to the multiverse and again we think of the multiverse as you know branching out this way there's a good uh there's a series on apple tv called a dark matter i don't know i did i did it's based on a book by blake crouch and when i was researching the multiverse i had read that book along with many others uh and uh basically you know this guy has multiple versions of of his life and one of what happens is he gets kidnapped by somebody and he gets taken away and he wakes up in a whole nother university than he was working at and he finds out who it was that kidnapped him it was himself from another version of the multiverse who had made different choices and so he was like almost like a nobel prize winning physicist he didn't have a family and kids and so that guy's taking over his family that's right i won't tell the rest of the the book but that that's pretty much described even if you just look at the series you'll know that's what it's about but so the multiverse i think brings up this idea that we could run multiple processes and maybe they're running you know to try to see what the outcomes are and maybe the outcomes that are less than ideal just like i talked about with pruning maybe we prune we meaning whoever runs the simulation runs these different things because you never run a simulation just once do you no simulation of the weather simulation of virus simulation of you know financial or whether an asteroid is going to to hit us there's something called the three body problem that yep it's when we have three bodies that are kind of circling each other the question is will they stay in a stable orbit or will one day one of them fly off and it turns out we don't know the answer to that right because there's no shortcut you have to just keep running it to see and there's a term that came from a computer so a physicist turned computer scientist named steven wilfrum called computational irreducibility right and wilfrum was pioneer in many things he wrote the mathematica software but he also was a pioneer in cellular automata which for those who don't know they're like simple rule sets yep it's like you can have one row of squares and the squares would light up is lit up or not and it'll go dark following these rules so these are very simple rules a very deterministic version of reality and then there's what's called the game of life yes which is a two-dimensional grid and if you watch it it in nowadays you know we run it on computers but when the guy conway came up with it he literally had a grid sitting at the university of cambridge and his mathematical students would like erase squares and fill in squares but what would happen is you get these very complex arrangements everything's going to be very complex and you now and then you'd get a stable arrangement yep which means you know it's going to stay this way or it flips back and forth but they have what they call complex or chaotic uh results or processes and those you don't know what's going to happen this is the kind of the basis of complexity theory and the game of life is just quickly the rules are the rules are too close if you're if the next square is lit up and the one next to it is lit up then you light up right and if the way the one on top of it i'm making up these rules but these are the types of rules sure and the one below it is gonna go dark right and so at each step every square follows these rules so it's a very simple computer program now for complex and chaotic processes and you would think we could predict what's going to happen but it depends on the initial conditions and this is what led to the whole uh science of chaos theory sure lorenz and all that yeah lorenz and also you know people remember jurassic park with that's right and malcolm who's a chaotician that's right the point point was with the butterfly effect where you know they say the butterfly flaps its wings and say hong kong and the stock market crashes in in in london uh there's a whole chain of events that has to happen along the way and so what computational irreducibility means is you don't know what's going to happen at step 1 million until step 999999999 you know and then you don't know what's going to happen at that step until you go to 998 and it's a 997 and all the way back so you have to run the computer program and so even for a deterministic process okay you don't know what's going to happen for chaotic and complex processes and i believe our simulation would qualify as a complex or chaotic process and so philip k dick believed that the timelines were altered and i asked his wife well did he tell you any other examples of this and she said yeah she goes they told him and i said well what do you mean they you know did you see them she goes i looked like he was talking to somebody but it looked like a little blur to me like the they that runs this simulation people outside this and said it looked like did they look like gray aliens did they look like she's like i couldn't really tell you know because only phil could see them but she could tell there was something weird that he was talking to like sure entity and she said they told him that they prevented the assassination of jfk in dallas but then he was assassinated in orlando wow and then they prevented it in orlando and then he was assassinated somewhere else and every time they changed it it resulted in a worse outcome like a nuclear war right just ended up dying somewhere else so he had to be assassinated yeah it's kind of like if you've ever read that book by stephen king or uh uh you know the the the miniseries uh 11 22 63 where he goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination i won't give it away but you have to read it to see like how the past doesn't necessarily want to be changed but for me that's like it's very similar to what we would do if we were running a simulation we would run it and we would be able to do it in a way that would be similar to what we were doing in the past and we'd get to a point and say okay that's that's enough on this time now let's run the next one now let's run the next one and so it provides simulation theory provides a bridge between the copenhagen interpretation uh the collapse of the probability wave because there's an observer who's playing the game and the multiverse idea because it doesn't require an infinite multiverse so it's like at people often ask me what's the purpose of the simulation okay this is well sure who's running it and why who's running it and why and in in the new edition of simulation hypothesis i have a uh there's about 100 new pages for those who read the old oh wow it's a pretty big update because all the ai stuff that's right happened uh all the brain computer interfaces to the technology side and then i went deeper on the religion but but there's about 20 pages of faqs which are the most commonly asked questions over since the 20th anniversary i was i ended up writing this on the 25th anniversary of the matrix uh and one of those questions were you know what's the purpose of the simulation who's running the simulation and i say look i let me ask you a couple questions one why do we run simulations and two why do we play video games uh and i believe the answer to those two questions gives us an answer for why we might be in a video game in a video game type simulation a personal purpose and a bigger societal purpose and the reason we run simulations is to see what is the likely outcome under this set of variables and then we would change the variables and we also want to know what is the the most favorable outcome right we're like hey if we do this to the asteroid what will happen will it miss earth or will it hit the moon and that's just as bad right as it hitting earth because if the moon gets really smashed then you know we'll be screwed or whatever the simulation is so it's to find the most likely outcome the most favorable and maybe to avoid the least favorable outcome and you have to do that you have to run it multiple times but at the personal level why do we play video games entertainment entertainment we want to have fun so we want to experience certain things like i can't as much as the rings you know when i was a teenager still now i just watch the movies but i used to read it every so often i can't jump on a dragon and shoot you know arrows at orcs in this particular reality but i can do it inside a virtual world and it's a safe a safe quote-unquote way to do it and to have bad experiences too like i i don't believe the purpose of the simulation is grand theft auto right probably not yeah so so anyway that that ties to to to you know some of these these bigger questions around the world and i think that's a really good question and i think that's a really good question and i think that's a really good question why would there be a simulated universe in the first place and why would there be a multiverse but that's projecting our sense of morality and intent onto some greater consciousness so what do you what do you think their end game is are they looking out for us because there's a lot of suffering there's a lot of suffering in this world and i often just say people say to me well i can't be in a simulation because if i was i would be a billionaire and i would write an actor my kid wouldn't have got cancer my kid wouldn't got you know holocaust all these things right but it depends on the nature of the game and what we're trying to experience like when we run a simulation we the better they get we're going to run uh you know very bad scenarios through the simulation what happens if the virus spreads to everybody right right and we want it to be as realistic as possible eventually now this gets back to the npc versus rpg version yes which which we started talking about yes and i think it ties to this bigger question because in an npc version of course they're going to have suffering on us because that's why you build simulations and that's why you run npcs like that doesn't imply that we couldn't be in a simulation just because there's now in the rpg version it gets even more interesting in my opinion because there people are choosing roles that might have bad experiences bad quote-unquote uh or suffering now you know i used to play dungeons and dragons and same right bad experiences bad quote-unquote uh or suffering now you know i used to play dungeons and dragons back before now it's popular again because of stranger things right but back in the day when we used to play back in the 80s you know we do it pencil and paper and you would choose your character yeah you would choose the race you would say it's an elf dwarf or human let's say and then you would choose the general profession thief cleric right warrior you know it's paladin paladin oh yeah that's right and it's not that you know you couldn't you know the the wizard couldn't also be a good fighter it's just that that's not their skill set so you're choosing almost like aptitudes in a sense and you're choosing a storyline or a profession and then you choose the campaign that you're going to be on but you also choose the morality whether evil good chaotic evil all that stuff that's right yeah there's all of this stuff that you're choosing and some of those roles are not good roles no yeah but that to me gets back to this idea whether you can you can treat the simulation theory in one of two ways and again it's an axis just like npc and rpg is an axis because you can treat the simulation theory in two ways you can have both npcs and rpgs in the same game it doesn't have to be 100 of one or 100 of the other in fact most games have both uh and i'm assuming the audience might be familiar with that term but if they're they're not npc stands for non-player character or non-playable character and it actually comes from dungeons and dragons sure the tabletop game yeah because you know you had to interact with a bartender at the inn you had to interact with the guy at the armory who's or one of these other you know items uh and there's going to be enemies there that you have to fight as well which are we were the npcs are we the rpgs well that's that's an interesting question uh and i like to say that we're we may be both because there's something in between okay which is that we choose roles and we are playing the roles but we also go into npc mode for other people in that we are playing certain role like there are people who may have had a role in your life that's a relatively small role or a major role uh but and one woman came to me once and said you know i think my husband is an npc oh no i said that's not a healthy way to think about no in fact it's better to think about everyone as a source player with their own storyline their own difficulties in their own quests but they're going to play roles for us and which could be they're going into npc mode because that is a role that we have agreed to kind of like in a film uh now i i like to say that the other way to think about the simulation hypothesis is a metaphor for reality so the one way is it's literally code running on a machine and if we really get into it i think it's closer to a quantum computing device uh than a regular digital computing device but the other way is to say the video game is a metaphor for this idea that we are coming into this fake or hoaxed reality uh and that we are playing a role and we have agreed to forget that we're playing that role um and so there's a consciousness out there that we're not even aware of that's driving this reality yeah so it could be that we're a player and we so aj riz check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan today you know joe all these guys we are the avatars of our consciousness which is which is sitting outside of the simulation and playing the game now in the matrix you know neo morpheus and trinity existed outside of the matrix uh and of course they look the same because if you're going to hire keanu reeves in a movie sure you want them to be right the same character but in a game when you choose your avatar you don't have to look like that it doesn't have to be exactly you would choose the role that the character has and outside you could be something else entirely you could this feels like reincarnation a little bit it does so you respawn you respond as a new character but you may have some of the skills that you learned there's evidence of that i'm playing right there's like the work of ian taylor uh with the children who you know have marks where they claim you know they were killed for sure uh there's people who uh remember languages uh life between lives by michael newton talks yes so i i spent a lot of time looking at life between lives and i you know when he talks about the in-between time so what he did was he hypnotized people and and also uh dolores uh canon did the same thing i was about to say dolores claymore but that's uh i think i mentioned steve and king earlier that's probably why uh but there's a period just before you go into the life which first there's life selection and they lay out here's the possible trajectories that you might take in your life and here's the major decision points you might make now you're still free to choose to go this way you'll live in california or you live there but if you go there how are you going to meet this other player who's going to be your wife or your husband and but there's different challenges a lot and these are the quests or challenges that you're going to deal with quests that's very interesting so if you think of games and how they're built today you have difficulty levels of quests we have like a quest tree typically where you start off with simple quests and then you unlock the more difficult quests that's very interesting because michael newton talks about and many researchers about soul groups that always sort of reincarnate together and that makes me think it's just a bunch of nerds around a table saying all right let's play again reset the table i'm going to do this you do that and we'll start rolling dice exactly or like hey we're all going to meet on tuesday right at this castle right i have a raid right and michael newton even talks about these little clues that you're gonna i mean i call them clues uh you know he called i forget what he called them exactly but they were like signs that oh when you meet this person you're going to recognize them because you know she's going to be on a red bike or she's going to have an earring and you just can't stop looking away from that earring right have you ever had that experience of course deja vu or you know where does it come from is it because we made an agreement to meet that person at this point in time now that helps us to reframe the idea of suffering as well because another metaphor that was used by spiritual in spiritual traditions so uh in the hindu traditions they talk about the lila the grand play of the gods and maya which is an illusion the world is an illusion right it's a hoax and the buddha talks about the world is a dream i mean buddha literally means wake up woken up like i have awoken like a woman said what are you and he said i am both and what did that mean it meant he was awake which meant the rest of us were asleep and dreaming uh and you know shakespeare had his metaphor of the world's stage right uh so swami yogananda who was one of the first hindu swamis to come and live in the u.s he wrote autobiography of the yogi which was passed around during the hippie generation and it was steve jobs favorite book right so much so that at the end of the book he wrote an autobiography you know after his death at his memorial service at stanford everyone got a little brown box and they opened it up and there was a copy of autobiography of a yogi in there so it really introduced a lot of westerners to these eastern ideas now yogananda had a challenge it was 1920s this is a brown guy with long hair he's here and he's trying to teach about yoga and karma and maya and and he needed to translate it into newer technological metaphors so he used the metaphor of the video of the study the film projector because that was new technology right so right back in 1920 films were relatively new to the to the world and he said that we are like actors in this film and there's suffering happening to those characters but the actors aren't dying but they choose the role with suffering uh but there's a part of us that's outside and you have to look away from the screen to see the light it's just a projection of of all of that onto the screen and it's just a projection of of all of the things that are happening to the screen and so he would use that metaphor and i believe if he were alive today and actually wrote a book uh called wisdom of a yogi about his teachings they asked me to write it uh harper collins india emailed me one day and said will you write this book about yogananda why do you want me to write the book about yogananda for indians like young indians professionals pakistani american with an islamic background who grew up in michigan admit from michigan i was like are you serious they're like yeah we want you to write it i was like why is that they said because you know and i do reference you know yogananda i reference other mystics like they're in the subtitle there's quantum physics and eastern mystics but uh they said because you know you use these technology analogies that younger people meaning like young professionals will understand and i thought about it and i thought if you're gonna know we're alive today you would say we're like in a film but we're the actors and we're the characters we all have our scripts and these roles we're supposed to play but we can change those scripts we have free will we're also the audience that's sitting there watching us or you could say like a game where you're sitting on tables deciding what to do and what does that sound like it sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game it does yeah um speaking of uh can you tell us about the experience you had in encinitas oh yeah so um i was asked to write this book and i said okay i'll write this book and i started writing it and this was during covid and i was hitting a little bit of a writer's block because you know it's like this big responsibility you're writing about this well-known and loved spiritual figure and you know i just for those who haven't read autobiography yogi it's chock full of stories of like uh saints that are like levitating in the air by location you know this guy's over here sitting and meditating and somebody sees them in the park uh you've got like you know the perfume saint who can make any perfume odor up here on his hand you've got this mysterious guy in the mountains who supposedly has been living there for 800 years you've got this fat 300 pound swami that was 180 years old when he died supposedly who's really well known so you got all these stories and i kind of like these stories you've got a guy with a jinn who's controlling what i refer what i confirm what i think is a jinn he's a muslim fakir who's controlling an invisible entity that's making you know like this cup appear and disappear and so i was like this is all great you know but i gotta like write be serious and write you know some serious lessons and i wanted to go visit the place where yogananda wrote autobiography yogi and that was in encinitas uh he has a some some you read autobiography yogi and you think wow man everything goes well for this guy he just says divine mother give me this and it all happens and if you read about his life you realize he had many many challenges and at one point his entire uh his entire organization fell apart and he's like oh man i just want to go to india and meditate in a cave and the message he got was no you need to stay in the west you know you're here in america for a reason uh and so then he decided to go to encinitas and write this book uh for about 10 10 years or so it took him to write the book and he wrote this book and he wrote this book and he wrote this book and he wrote this book and so i wanted to go to the hermitage which is beautiful if anyone's ever been there it's like overlooking the pacific ocean there's a beach he used to walk now it's literally called swami's beach that's the formal name for it and so i wanted to go there and check it out but it was during covid and it was you know closed to the public and so through another series of coincidences like i got to meet some of the people at srf told them i was writing this book and they said okay for you we'll open it up and so literally i went down there and they had you know some of the monks or live there you know gave me a little private tour we sat around and talked and i got to go to yogananda's office where he wrote the book wow uh just by myself and they're like here just you know relax do whatever you want and i decided to meditate and i'm like okay i need a you know so this is inspiring me and it was and then suddenly i got a vision of yogananda now again it's one of these visions where you're kind of present and you still you're still sensing this vision this is like the man by the tree uh no it sort of lives similar to that but this is a vision of yogananda wow similar and he's sitting there with a stack of papers which is how they wrote books back then you know it was typed out and he's kind of looking at me but with his mischievous grin um and you know i always thought of him as a very serious kind of guy but if you talk you know you you read some of his other people wrote about him he was very mischievous he would play practical jokes on his students and stuff and he's like kind of glint in his eye and i was like yeah wow that's that's him writing autobiography yogi i'm having a vision of it here and he kind of smiled at me and he took those papers and he opened the french doors or whatever that go out to the ocean and he tossed them all out there and they flew everywhere and i was like no stop what are you doing like back then once you lost the papers that's it you don't have to go rewrite the book and he smiled and he laughed and i was like okay what is he trying to tell me he goes watch the papers and each of the papers turned into these little white doves and they floated off to carried his words to different parts of of the world and somehow that like totally got me out of my writer's block because he was also saying have you ever read a book like that and i was like have fun with it like don't don't treat it so seriously and it's our words that we leave behind but say what you want to say and just have fun and so i just started writing about all these yogis with these superpowers right and the book just flowed from there and it went on and it did quite well uh in india as well um let's say everything that you've talked about is right and really are in a simulation what does that mean for us as regarding free will does anything matter yeah well sometimes people say if i'm in a simulation nothing matters and i'm well that depends on the nature of the simulation you know if we are here to learn lessons and have certain quests and achievements then if you don't make the quest what do you do you're gonna have to do it again that's right uh it's not you just give up and then you know you you may have more difficult quests afterwards and so when we have difficult situations in our lives whether it's financial health related relationship related um war suffering you know we can view it as a more difficult quest that is part of our storyline and perhaps you know we can give meaning to these problems to say okay this is a terrible thing that's happened but if i view it as a higher difficulty quest and in fact maybe the people whose lives are easy are the early players and the ones who are having you know the the more difficult lives maybe they're the advanced players i believe that you know i'm not sure Along with, I mean, you've probably heard of the telepathy tapes. Of course. With Dr. Diane Hennessey. And, you know, she was working with these autistic kids who were telepathic. So she called me up a few years before the telepathy tapes came out. And she said, oh, you know, this is my work. I've been working with these autistic savant children. And, you know, like Rain Man type, where they can, you know, calculate these numbers. And she goes, I don't think they're calculating. I think they're looking it up in a database. And I think this is an information-based reality. And so one of the best explanations she could come up with at the time was that this is some kind of a simulation. And so she actually sponsored a conference on autistic savants and simulation theory. And, you know, now these autistic kids are showing us abilities that the rest of us don't have. But maybe we view them as having a physical handicap. Because they're nonverbal, one, meaning most of them can't speak, but they can, you know, point to things. They also don't have fine motor controls, right? They have gross. They can move their arm. They can put their finger here. But many of them, you know, don't have the fine motor controls to be able to write, like, by hand. Of course, today you don't have to as much. And so I began to think about that in this context and realized, well, what if the rest of us are in the full body suit of the video game or, like, Ready Player One? And we have the headset on. And all we see is this first-person perspective. But because, like, with a glove, I've got, like, full control. I can. You know, do every little thing that I want. But if I was half in or half out, or if I was sitting there with a mouse, okay, I could move my character around. I could point at things. But it's going to be really hard. Right. But I can see stuff from a third-person point of view that you can't see. That's right. I can put the virtual camera over here. I can message my friends. I can use, you know, private messaging. And then, you know, one of the autistic children, her name is Lidu. She's been at. She's been at some of these conferences with her mother, Dahlia, who's also demonstrating a lot of amazing capabilities, like Mindsight and stuff. But Dahlia came up to me, and she said, Lidu wants to tell you something. Oh, well, what does Lidu want to tell me? She goes, when she's communicating with her friends, it's like they're in a video game, is what she said. And they can help her. And she can see what they're doing. And she can help them. Wow. So it's like they're all in a video game together. And so, for me, this was a different way to think about many of these things. Like they're closer to the source code than we are. Yeah, they're closer to the source code. And they have control of the virtual camera. Yes. Which they're not locked in. And there's some disadvantages to that. But they're actually perhaps the more advanced players who are trying to get the rest of us to wake up that there's more to this reality than we know. That's right. I can get behind that. Last thing for you. What questions or answers do you need to be sure this is a simulation or be sure it's not? What are those things? Well, it's a good question. And again, I think. It depends on where you are on this access, right? So I mentioned the access from the NPC to RPG version. That's one access that's important. The other access is do you view this as a literal computer simulation or do you view it as a metaphor for something very advanced? And I like to say that it's really four propositions that I'm proposing or asserting in these set of books. The first is that the world consists of information and not visibility. The second is that the world consists of physical matter. Now, I met just last year or the year before. In fact, when I was writing the second edition, I spent a semester over at the University of Cambridge in one of their AI groups. In fact, the guy that I work with, Henry Shevlin, he was just hired as the philosopher for Google DeepMind. And the story went viral that Google DeepMind is looking at consciousness by hiring a philosopher that specializes in that. It's very interesting. It's really interesting. But while I was there, I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist from the 70s. And I was telling him these propositions. You can't name him. Oh, yeah. Brian Josephson. Oh, okay. He's actually a philosopher. well known uh something to do with quantum telling i forget what he won the nobel prize for back then but he's also very into different uh models of consciousness um and he also says that you know his colleagues didn't want to talk about this stuff and he had a lot of stigma from his colleagues just just for investigating it um but when i told him that first proposition he goes you know what that's not controversial anymore the that the world consists of information it's not the 30 years ago physicists would have said yeah that's controversial because there's a whole branch of digital physics there's amount instead of just talking about conservation of energy and conservation of momentum we're talking about conservation of information like does information get lost does it get destroyed uh so i mean sure some people might disagree but for the most part the idea that that we live in an information-based reality now john wheeler his other favorite phrase was it from bit right uh and that's why that's when he became my favorite of businesses from the 20th century and what he was saying was he was looking for this thing called a particle and we think of a particle as hard right it's a physical object but he couldn't find it it's it's like those russian dolls you know i think they're called the matryoshka dolls yeah yeah or the babushka dolls if they're male or female there's different versions but he kept opening up this thing and looking for this thing at the bottom and it was just empty at the bottom level and so he said what the conclusion he came to at the end of his life was that the only thing that distinguishes one another is an answer to a series of yes no questions and what is that that's a bit i mean the basis of information theory is a one or a zero yep and so he came up with this phrase that said anything that's physical like this coffee cup or mug actually consists of bits of information and so i think that's a perspective that's gaining traction let's put it that way you can argue with it but you know i think it's not you know that that hard but then that information is getting computed over time we see evidence of algorithms in nature for it the second proposition is kind of obvious but really hard to prove and it is that the world seems physical so it gets rendered for us the bits are rendered in a way that looks real and feels real right when we think we're touching the wall we're not really touching the wall like there's like electrical signals like the basis of the universe is electromagnetic right it's mostly empty it's 99.9 empty space you got on the molecules it's 99.9 empty you look at the atoms it's 99.9 empty space you look at you know you go down to the subatomic particles and in the end what you have is a set of information and that is just like a video game yep now there i'm making argument by analogy that's not necessarily a formal argument but it's an informal one just like the copenhagen interpretation nobody knows how the copenhagen interpretation works nobody knows how the collapse works and i'm saying that basically like a video game there's no castle there there's no dragon those are just like a video game and i'm saying just bits of information right coming to your machine and they're rendering it for you the third gets into the metaphysical side you know which is that this universe is a big hoax a big purposeful hoax maya like maya and illusion so this is what gets into the religious and the maya i i was uh reading about uh roger ebert you know the film credit yeah so he died not that long ago unfortunately from throat cancer but his wife was with him when he died naturally and she talked about his death and she said the last thing he said just before he died was oh my god it's all a big hoax wow she said that meant that the physical universe that we think is real is all a big hoax and other people you know that get close to that boundary you start to hear similar things you do talk to people so that the physical world is not just information it it's it's like a big hoax like maya means illusion but it also means kind of an illusion that you agree to walk into and to fool yourself right we're here in vegas there's like you know the magic shows with i don't know who the latest david copperfield chris angel whoever the right musician is you go to uh and and that's the best analogy i've heard for maya they said you go to a magic show and you know that guy's not really sawing the woman in half but that's what makes it exciting is it's like magic right you don't know how it's done but it's an illusion it's a sleight of hand you know and the buddha you know eventually came to this conclusion you know where he talked about everything is like a reflection in a very clear mirror devoid of inherent existence check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ase certified master technicians and if you need help we could recommend a shop for you ask for o'reilly veriscan so you can buy that or not buy that proposition but certainly the spiritual traditions buy that and then the fourth one which is similar is that you agreed to be here and play a character which is the video game proposition uh you know pure materialists don't like that at all because they'll say well there's nothing beyond this physical world anyway right but to me if you I wrote this book was so that I can talk to physicists at MIT about now. They may not agree with that it's a simulation or a computer simulation, but they're willing to talk to me about these ideas. I can't go in there and say, I want to talk to you about guys leaving their body, floating around and seeing apparitions and haunted tours or UFOs. They'd be like, we're just going to dismiss this out of hand. But they're willing to talk about the world being a simulated reality. And if it is, well, then maybe there are entities that exist outside of our visibility, that exist outside of the simulation that would seem supernatural to us. Like UFOs. Like UFOs or angels. Or angels. Could UFOs that we're seeing be part of the simulation somehow? I think so. So there's two different ways. So one way is, even if they're extraterrestrial, which I think many of those of us who have studied it realize that there's much more going on, in order to explain the data. If you want to really be scientific about it, you want your observations and data to match your explanation. But on the one hand, when you have a multiplayer game, you're not just going to have one planet. You're probably going to have multiple planets. So in fact, part of the purpose of the simulation could be, do you get off the planet? Do you destroy yourself? What's called a great filter. Or when maybe we're all trying to get to the point where these civilizations meet. But then it gets weirder. And on your show, I'm sure you've covered some of these weird phenomena. But when I met with Jacques Vallée, he started telling me about these cases where one person would see the UFO and the other person wouldn't. All the time. I began to think about that. And I thought, huh, that's interesting. And he said, there was another case where this UFO came down at a 45 degree angle and it landed in a clearing and supposedly it left some marks. So everybody went, Mufon went, and they're looking at the clearing. And he said, well, wait a minute. If it came down at a 45 degree angle, and this was in Pacific Northwest, where they had these big trees. He's like, it would have had to have cut through the trees. But the trees aren't cut. I mean, they're still there. They said, yeah, I did. It went right through the trees. But we don't want to say that because we sound crazy. So they're censoring their observations. And I thought about that too. And then you see these observations where these things move around from here to here. It's almost like they're projected into our reality light or a holographic projection. And so when you res inside a game or you're resing, you can kind of move through walls because everything's not fully rendered yet. But once it's rendered, they're physical. And so is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us in that we are a technological civilization? Aliens make at least some sense to us, right? More than the djinn. The nuts and bolts aspect. So in this paper that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show about stigma and academia, the stigma is getting less because of the government and the New York Times article. It's still there, but it's getting less, but only for part of the UFO phenomenon. And that is the nuts and bolts part of the phenomenon. Not the consciousness part. Not the consciousness, not even the alien abductions. No. Because that would require acknowledging beings and beings that are more powerful than us. And it gets into all of that. And, you know, there's this kind of boundary there, but we can, at least we can accept that, okay, maybe there could be aliens because we know now there are other planets around other solar systems. And so maybe they're presenting themselves to us as aliens because that is a technology that would make sense to us at this point in time. Whereas in the fifties, all these contactees are like, they told us they're from Venus, right? We know they're probably not from Venus. Assuming they exist, first of all. We know they're probably not from Venus, they're probably not from Mars, but that was what they told them. Why? They were lying to them. Why? Because they could wrap their minds around it. Imagine if you had said we're from Zeta Reticuli a thousand years ago. They would have been like, what are you talking about? Couldn't understand it. They couldn't understand it. And angels, they could understand. Yes. For thousands of years, they could. Djinn, they could understand. Yes, they could. The Fae, they could understand. And is it possible that, so there's what's called the avatar theory of UFOs or the avatar, and hypothesis. There's two different versions of it. Gary Nolan talks about one version. I talk about the other version. This is a good time to say that you're on the board of the Galileo Project with Avi. Yeah, I'm on the board. I'm on the advisory board, yeah. And you work with Gary Nolan as well? Yeah, I work with the Soul Foundation. I wrote a white paper on venture capital investment in UFOs. So I'm deep in the topic. So you're in the topic. In fact, in the academic world, because I went back to get my PhD after, you know, I have about 15 years between my bachelor's and my master's and another 15 years between that and the PhD. And they're like, you know, I wouldn't talk about this UFO stuff too much if I were you. I'm like, I already wrote a book saying the world isn't even real. Yeah, you're fine. You know, UFOs, you know, it's not even that weird to me. Like, at least the alien explanation is not that weird. The other stuff, maybe. But so one of the avatar interpretation, I think, as Gary talked about it, and, you know, what had to do with the film Avatar. In the film, he was controlling his avatar, the alien, but he was controlling it. And so are these beings controlling the ships and even the beings that we see remotely? My interpretation of the avatar is an avatar inside a video game is your character in the game. And you can control it. You can change that character's characteristics if you want. But you are projecting into a physical reality, into a virtual reality from outside. So it's not just from another planet or it's being projected into. And supposedly, you know, people have been seeing these different beings for thousands of years. Like the Jinn, is it they were just presented themselves a certain way? Because that would make sense to the people at the time. And today, aliens is an interpretation that would make sense to us. And so is it like in a video game, you render the avatar? And in some games, you can change your avatar. Sure. Is it possible that they have unlocked that feature where they can change how it appears to us? Or could you take DMT and see kind of behind the curtain a little bit? Right. Yeah. And people who've taken DMT start to talk about things like, you know, a waiting room, right? Or they talk about different types of beings, like the different, I don't know. I'm not a DMT person, but whatever. The machine elves. The machine elves. The machine elves. You've got like the insectoids. Yes. You've got like all these different versions of beings that are there. You know, and there's the work of Danny Goler, who was a guy who projected a laser on the wall. Yes. And he saw the code, what looked like code, kind of like matrix code. But he said, it's not exactly that. And other people took it. And many other people can see it as well. I started hearing about this right after I wrote the first edition of the book. In 2019, people are like, oh, yeah, I've seen the grid lines of the simulation on DMT. And so it's very interesting to me. How that kind of lines up, because perhaps it's suppressing whatever mechanisms we have in our brain to be able to perceive this other reality. So, yeah. So there's a lot of relationships there. But, you know, my favorite explanation for the simulation for UFOs is that they're being projected into this world in some way to get us. And this came from, you know, my conversations with Jacques Vallée, where he talks about how maybe they're not extraterrestrial at all. Him and John Keel, I think, were among the first, saying they've been here all along. And then the materialist version of they've been here all along is, you know, lost civilization in the bottom of the earth. But a non-materialist explanation would be like they're still here, but they're projecting in. They can see us, but we can't see them. And that sounds a lot like, you know, these stories that we've been hearing for thousands of years about the Fae and the Celtic traditions. They can take you into their world in the Middle East. And there's even stories of, like, hybrids, human-gin hybrids, a man marrying a gin woman, and then having children, and then taking that child gets taken. The Bible has the same stories, or Uriel taking someone up above the clouds and seeing the whole thing. Right, right. And so I think some of that could be going on, you know, with the UFO phenomenon. Personally, I believe there's something there, as opposed to many of my academic colleagues who are like, eh, that's all, you know, it's all flat-earth stuff, right? And they kind of put it all together. Bigfoot, flat-earth, UFOs, psychic stuff. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing, yeah. And especially, in fact, I wrote an article for NBC News years ago saying, you know, the government is taking UFOs seriously. Why aren't, isn't Silicon Valley and academia? And academia still isn't, although more are. That's why I wrote that specific article about stigma. Very important work. Riz, thanks so much for coming. This has been so much fun. I can keep you here another couple of hours, but I know you've got to get out of here. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a fun conversation. You're right. We could go on for a few more hours, I'm sure. We could. Bye, everybody. Bye. So that was Rizwan Virk, Dr. Rizwan. Simulation theory, quantum physics, the Mandela effect, UFOs as avatars, whether we picked our character before we logged into this life. Let's try to untangle some of this. Well, first, Philip K. Dick's 1977 speech in Metz, France. That's documented. You can find it online. I talk about it all the time. He stood in front of a room of science fiction fans and said, We are living in a computer-programmed reality. He said a lot of great stuff during that speech. Definitely watch it. John Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. That's real physics. In 2017, a team took it to space. A satellite about 1,000 kilometers from the slits, peer-reviewed journal, the whole thing, and the result held up. The particle was in superposition. Until it was measured. So that means at the quantum scale, the past genuinely doesn't appear to be fixed until somebody observes it. Think about that for a second. At the quantum scale, there is no time. But here's what I keep coming back to. The idea that only rendering what's observed isn't just a video game trick. It might be the underlying logic of physics itself. Quantum mechanics already works exactly the way a game engine does. What Riz is actually doing. Isn't selling simulation theory as a certainty. It's something quieter. It's more interesting. He's showing that quantum mechanics, ancient mysticism, and video game design all point at the same strange logic. That reality might be rendered, not built. And you don't have to buy the conclusion. But it's a fact. The three completely unrelated fields approached by serious people keep landing in the same uncomfortable neighborhood. His book is The Simulation Hypothesis. Second edition. On Amazon. He's also written The Simulated Multiverse, if you want to go deeper on the multiple timeline stuff. Also find him on X, at Riz Stanford, R-I-Z-S-T-A-N-F-O-R-D. And I covered simulation theory in episode 186. Links down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and none of you are appreciated. Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah. I played Polybius in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friend. And it never ends. No, it never ends. I feel the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKUltra being only two away. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Or would the shadow be put? Oh, there. The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man. I'm told. And his name was Code. And I can't believe. I'm dancing with the fishes. Heck, the fish are Thursday nights with AJ2. And the werewolves have been beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the werewolves have been beat. Through the night The Mothman sightings And the solar storm Still come to a god The secret city underground Mysterious number stations Planet Serpo too Project Stargate And what the dark watchers found We've been a simulation Don't you worry though The black knight said a lot He told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Heck of a shot Thursday nights with AJ too And the weapons of the beat All through the night The Mothman sightings All I ever wanted Was to just hear the truth So the weapons of the beat All through the night Heck of a shot Thursday nights with AJ too And the weapons of the beat All through the night All I ever wanted Was to just hear the truth So the weapons of the beat All through the night ♪ Baby, let's dance ♪ Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance. Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor, because she is a camel, and camels love to dance when the feeling is right or wasting time. 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