Know Thyself - E209 – Rizwan Virk: Are We Living in a Simulation? (It's Deeper Than You Think)

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Rizwan Virk is an MIT-trained computer scientist, video game pioneer, and bestselling author of The Simulation Hypothesis. His work sits at a rare intersection: quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games, all pointing toward the same unsettling and strangely liberating conclusion. In this conversation, we explore not the nihilistic version of simulation theory, but the one that actually gives life more meaning rather than less.What We Dive Into:1. The simulation Rizwan describes is not one where you are code running on a server. You are the soul outside the game, choosing an avatar and entering by choice. The body is the character. The player is something more.2. Synchronicities, hunches, recurring patterns, these are not coincidences. Rizwan frames them as messages from a deeper intelligence, perhaps a future self, a guide, or the part of you watching the game from outside. The practice is learning to read them rather than dismiss them.3. In a well-designed game, difficulty scales to keep you engaged and growing. Rizwan applies the same logic to life: the quests that keep returning are the ones not yet completed, and completing them is what the game is actually for.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.im8health.com/knowthyselfcode KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offerhttps://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack ___________00:00 Intro01:46 NPC vs. RPG: Two Flavors of Simulation Theory07:44 The Universe as Information: It from Bit13:07 The Second Assertion: Information Rendered as Real18:06 Non-Locality, Quantum Entanglement, and the Speed of Light22:32 The Simulation Point: When VR Becomes Indistinguishable26:44 The Third Assertion: The World as Purposeful Illusion35:23 Awakening as Becoming Lucid in the Dream38:52 The Fourth Assertion: You Chose to Play the Game43:42 Life Selection, Forgetfulness, and the Bardo49:28 Savant Children and the Autism-as-Backdoor Hypothesis57:28 The Literal vs. Metaphorical Axis of Simulation Theory1:01:52 Yogananda and the Film Projector Metaphor1:07:34 The Life Review, the Book of Life, and the Karmic Database1:13:47 Samskaras, Vasanas, and Yoga as Cessation of Whirlpools1:17:34 Clues on the Treasure Hunt: Synchronicity and the Quest Path1:22:38 The Simulated Multiverse: Running the Simulation More Than Once1:30:09 The Tiger Swami: External Tigers and Inner Ones1:36:23 Rizwan's Heart Surgery and the Course Correction1:44:14 Karma, Dream Palaces, and the Questing Engine1:48:49 Living the Life Review Before You Die1:57:01 Kindness Is Enforced by the Architecture2:03:17 Epistemic Humility at the Edge of Mystical Claims2:14:22 What Is Outside the Simulation?2:22:54 UFOs: Interstellar, Interdimensional, or Rendered?2:33:09 Closing Message: Challenges Are Integral to the Game___________✨MORE FROM RIZWAN VIRK↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rizcambridge↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rizwanvirksimulation↳X: https://x.com/Rizstanford↳Buy The Simulation Hypothesis Book: https://www.zenentrepreneur.com/simulationhypothesis↳https://www.zenentrepreneur.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Everything that feels like it's real. Like this teacup actually consists of bits of information rendered to appear as if it's real, even though it's not. I looked at that as a computer scientist and said that's exactly how we build video games. And today's games looked nothing like they did 20 years ago. So if that keeps going, we could create something that's so immersive, we would be unable to distinguish it from physical reality. How do we know we aren't already inside one of those virtual worlds? Awakening could be like you become lucid in a dream state. Yes.

And this is what the spiritual traditions have. been telling us all along that the world is a kind of carefully crafted illusion. In the Tibetan tradition, they use a lucid dreaming to wake up inside the dream and realize that the physical world is also a kind of dream. You know you're in it, but you also remember not being in it. And that gives you a whole different perspective. What do you make of challenges that redirect our path? I ended up getting heart surgery right at the height of my entrepreneurial career. Every time I thought I'm going to jump in and start another video game company, I would end up back in the hospital. I was getting it more subtly through clues, but I didn't pay time.

Don't be stubborn. It all comes from learning to pay attention to know thyself. Challenges are integral to the nature of the game. We're here to learn that. What happens in a video game if you don't complete a quest? You do it again. I'm back. What are you drawn to again and again?

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a computer scientist and video game pioneer, a best-selling author of the simulation hypothesis and multiverse and many great books, such as the wisdom of a yogi. And he studied at MIT and Stanford. And today we're going to be diving into all things simulation. Reswin Verk, thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Great to be here. The pleasure is mine. When most people say we're in a simulation, it's sort of like a nihilistic shrug. You know, it's kind of like a way to absolve herself of personal responsibility. It kind of bypassed the human experience.

Most people refer to the simulation as like, an alien that someday in the future is running us off their laptop in a basement. That's not necessarily what you mean. And so to set the framework for what you do mean, could you please do that? Sure. So as you said, I think when many people talk about being in a simulation, they're actually talking about one flavor of simulation theory. And that flavor I call the NPC version.

And NPC stands for non-player characters. Anyone who's played a video game will realize that they have their character inside the game which is called an avatar, which is taken from ancient Sanskrit, which originally meant that divinity comes down into human form, like an incarnation of, say, Krishna or one of the gods. But when the guys at Lucasfilm, which is George Lucas's company after Star Wars,

were building games, they were looking for a name for the little character on the screen. And this was back in the days of the Commodore 64 and modem, dial-up modems, and so they built this multiplayer game, and they were looking for a term to call their little guy on the screen, and they felt like they were squeezing themselves

into the phone line, taking their whole personality, squeezing it down into that little character on the screen. So they decided to borrow the term from Sanskrit, and that's why we call our character inside a game an avatar nowadays. So within a video game, you have your character, Avatar, you have the other people who are playing.

you have their characters as well. But then you have all these other characters that are not being controlled by a human being outside of the game. And those are referred to as NPCs or non-player or non-playable characters. And so when Elon Musk said back in 2016 that the chances that we are not in a simulation

is one in billions, meaning the chances that we are in a simulation is billions to one, he was primarily referring to the NPC version where the simulation is running on a big server and everybody that exists is just code on that machine. Now, spiritual people tend to take exception to that sometimes, as you were saying,

because it sort of implies that everyone is soulless AI. But there's another version of simulation theory, which I call the RPG version, which stands for role-playing game version. And in that version, each of us is an avatar inside the game. So you're the Andre Avatar, I'm the Riz Avatar. But we each have a player outside of the game. And the analogy that I like to draw is that the player is like the soul outside of the simulation.

And then the body is the character that you have chosen within the simulation. Now that's closer to what was depicted in the film The Matrix, right? Because Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, they all existed outside of the Matrix. And then they had an equivalent character inside. Now, when you play a video game, you don't actually. you have to look like your character doesn't have to look like you. But of course, if you're going to pay Keanu Reeves to be in your film, you want him to look the same inside the matrix as he does outside the matrix.

And so in the RPG version or flavor of simulation theory, we get much more of an overlap with the spiritual traditions of the world. And so that's why I find that version even more interesting. And, you know, the subtitle of my book, The Simulation Hypothesis is an MIT computer's Ninthus shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern Mystics all agree we're in a video game. And so I like to use the term video game even more than the simulation, because then people can get the idea that they, in fact, are controlling their character. Now, a lot of academics, also when they talk about simulation theory,

they're talking about the NPC version, and that tends to be more of a materialist view. I mean, for example, there's a famous physicist named Brian Green, he was on a podcast recently saying he thought perhaps we were in a simulation because of the mathematical rules of the universe, but he also said that he doesn't believe in free will. And so in that version, it's a deterministic process where the characters are just running code, and they don't necessarily have free will because the code is running them.

But in the RPG version, there is free will in the same sense that when you play a video game, you can decide whether to go over on this question, you know, to go after the Goblin King and get his treasure or to go on this quest where, you know, you have the dragon and the mountains and you're going to go, and you can choose which people

you're going to go on those quests with. And so the free will comes from outside of the system. And so I tend to find that more attractive, that particular version of simulation theory. There are. Actually, let me just add that that is actually an access, if you think of it. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

In a video game, you have both characters and you have NPCs. And so you can go from 100% NPCs to 0% NPCs or 100% source players to 0%. There are innumerable analogies to be pulled from both the Eastern and Western perspective and the AI computational lens and the mystical traditions, which I'm sure we'll spend the rest of this podcast unpacking exactly that.

But those two, I guess, positionings of NPC versus RPG are different fundamentally on what the substrate of consciousness operates on the universe being more information, not matter, meaning it's computeded and rendered.

What do you mean when you view and you do view the universe as information? Yeah, so, you know, I like to say that there are four assertions that I like to make that define the version. of simulation theory that I tend to favor.

And the first of those assertions is more of a scientific one, and that is that the world consists of information rather than physical matter. And that was a controversial position many years ago. You know, I went to undergrad at MIT instead of computer science, and there was a famous guy there named Ed Fredkin. And he was one of the first computer scientists to propose this idea that the world is like a computer program.

And he went out to Caltech, where, uh, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner was. And he taught Feynman about information processing and coding, which was relatively new at the time. This was back in the 70s. And Feynman taught him about quantum physics. And so they kind of collaborated.

And then later, Feynman ended up writing an article and giving speeches that led to today's quantum computers. But a lot of the idea of the world being information comes from this phrase of a famous physicist named John Wheeler, who's my favorite physicist from the 20th century. He worked with Einstein and with Niels Bohr at Princeton. He was the supervisor of Hugh Everett and of Feynman, but Hugh Everett was the guy who came up with the multiverse idea, which of course is prevalent now in all the superhero movies. We've all seen like the Spider-Man movies with like Andrew Garfield and Toby McGrath. and Tom Holland, and they're all pointing at each other. Right, that all comes from Wheeler's student

who came up with this different interpretation of quantum mechanics. But so towards the end of his life, Wheeler said that he spent his entire career trying to find this thing called matter. And when we think of atoms, we think of a solid object, right? In fact, the Greek word, atom,

meant like an irreducible, smallest component. But of course, they're not that solid. So atoms, if you look into them, they're 99.99% empty space, right? And atoms make up molecules, and so of course the molecules are 99.9% empty space. And so what Wheeler said was he originally thought everything was a particle. Then you said you could describe everything mathematically in a field equation during his career. But towards the end of his career, he realized that when you got right down to it, you're looking for this thing called a particle and he couldn't find it.

and he said basically all it is is an answer to a series of yes, no questions which is what we call an information science a bit like a bit in computer science has two values, a zero or a one. And so he basically said everything

that feels like it's real like this teacup actually consists of bits of information at the very bottom level. And so he came up with this phrase which is it from bit. And so when I talk about the world being based on information, that's kind of what I mean. Now you might say, well, I don't

see the bits. It looks solid to me. You know, here I am holding it and drinking some tea from it. That's because the second assertion is that the information is rendered to look to us as if it's real. And taste real. And taste real. Exactly. And so in a, if you're playing a video game and you see a castle on the screen, there's no castle there. It just consists of bits of information that define the boundaries of the castle, that define things like the color of the stones, you know, maybe you have a sandstone type

color like we have in the background here. And so it ends up being rendered that way to appear real to us. And in a video game, you only see the part of the world that your character is in. Now, if you go back to like the 1980s when I was a kid, I used to play Atari with Pac-Man and Space Invaders,

these classic video games. And only then were they starting to think about how do we make the world inside the computer bigger. Now, there's no way they could have made a game like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or watch some of the other games out now. Eldon Ring, my nephews play Eldon Ring a lot. They couldn't have made those games because it would have taken too much computing power

to keep track of all of the parts of that world, because these worlds are huge. In fact, there was a game called No Man Sky that came out almost 10 years ago now, I think it was 2016, and they had 18 quintillion worlds. Now, I used to be in the video game industry in Silicon Valley.

There's no way one team could have designed 18 quintillion worlds. In fact, all of the video game design teams on Earth would not be able to design that many different worlds. So what they did was they used procedural generation to create those worlds on the fly, basically as needed. And we're talking live theoretically inside the simulation. But if we were doing this on Zoom, I wouldn't really be talking to you in that case, would I?

I would be talking to my computer, which would then take my voice, turn it into bits and send it over to your computer. And then your computer would render that. And again, you would be talking to your computer. be talking to me, but it would feel as if it was real. And so when I started looking into quantum mechanics, I realized that this whole thing about the observer effect and the idea of the collapse of the probability wave, people have probably heard of the observer effect by now, but the basic idea is that objects exist in states of superposition or multiple possible values. Like you have the double slit experiment, did it go through the left slit?

or the Wright Slit. You have Schrodinger's cat that says, you know, is the cat alive or dead? Those are just two states, which are represented as zero or one. Now, common sense tells us that if there's a cat in a box and it has a 50% chance of being dead and a 50% chance of being alive, this is the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. He didn't like this idea. That's why he came up with the experiment because he thought it sounded absurd. But common sense tells us that the cat is either alive or it's dead. Can't be both. It has to be one or the other. But what quantum mechanics is telling us

is that the cat is in both states. So it's like an informational state, and it's only when somebody looks, they observe or measure that, that the definitive state happens, so it collapses the probability wave to a single possibility. Now, I looked at that as a computer scientist

and video game designer and said, you know what, that's a lot like how we build video games. Like, we only render the part of World Warcraft that your character can see. And only if there are people in that castle or on that mountain, does it need to be rendered? Otherwise, it just sits there as information in the backdrop. So the second assertion is basically that the information gets rendered

to appear as if it's real, even though it's not. That quantum indeterminacy would be an optimization technique, that it would be actually, like, from an engineering, perspective the most efficient way to build a simulator or video game. Exactly. And so that's why I was drawn to this parallel was in video games, it's always about optimizing your resources. And this is true in computer science all along. If you go back to games like on the Atari or like Pac-Man, I mean, they had like, I don't know, I don't remember the exact number, but they had a very small amount of memory. I mean, compared to today's, you know,

computers, a JPEG file is more, is. bigger than all the memory they had to program a game like Pac-Man. So you're always saying, how do we optimize these resources? Even today with AI, you know, what's the big thing that everyone's talking about? Data centers. And why do they need data centers? Because of these GPUs or graphics processing units, which, by the way, we're created four video games in the beginning because it turns out CPUs weren't very efficient at doing

graphics. So Nvidia and others came up with GPUs, graphics processing units. that could more efficiently do the mathematical calculations you need to figure out what's where. Because if you're rendering only the part of the world you can see, you have to figure out which parts are visible,

where does the light from the sun come? Where do the shadows go? So there are all these mathematical calculations that have to happen, and then you have to translate those into pixels to say, okay, let's put these pixels at this part. And so today's one of the problems with AI is that it's not very efficient,

they're using the brute force method. They're just throwing tons and tons of GPUs. But in computer science, the real breakthroughs come when you learn to optimize. And you end up doing something that's called lazy programming or lazy evaluation. That doesn't mean your programmer's lazy. What it means is that the code only runs when it needs to.

So, for example, if anyone's ever seen code, you know, you might say X equals blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a long equation with a bunch of code. Now, if you never use that value X for anything all day, then you don't have to calculate that long equation because the long equation could take a lot of time to figure out. You can do it in the background, you can do it whenever you need to.

But so lazy evaluation is basically saying you call upon code and memory and resources as needed. And that's how video games are built. And to me, it looks like quantum and determined, determinacy is also a kind of optimization process. We know it's real, at least that's what the physicists tell us, but we don't know why. Why would the universe work that way?

And this is, what do you say, this is exactly what the Nobel Prize and local realism being proved false is pointing at? I think it's one of the things that's pointing at that idea. I mean, initially it's the quantum indeterminacy aspect itself. Like, why does that exist? Then you have the non-locality,

which is the recent prize that came up. Now, that was more about something called quantum entanglement, which is the other weird part of quantum mechanics, right? Einstein called that spooky action at a distance. And what quantum entanglement is telling us is that you can have two particles that get connected and it doesn't matter how far apart they are, If something happens to one, it's instantaneously reflected in the other.

So they could be a million miles away. They could be a million light years away. Now, that's where it starts to get interesting, because we can only send information at the speed of light. Incidentally, that's how video games work. We are sending electromagnetic signals to your computer, and if you and I are fighting each other, the fastest we can communicate with each other

is at the speed of light itself. That is a very fascinating takeaway. And it's almost like a little hint into not necessarily that we can extrapolate to the same degree, but there is by inference a speed limit in this universe, just like there is a speed limit in terms of electricity when rendering a simulation. Yes, it's one of those many parallels that comes up, you know. Another one is this idea of a pixel. And the smallest unit that you can render on a screen is called a pixel,

which is like a picture element was the original term for it. and you can't do anything smaller than that. I mean, you can make a calculation that says pixel divided by 2, but you can't actually render that on the screen. So it becomes the smallest indivisible unit. And it appears that space itself is quantized in the sense that there is a smallest amount of space,

which is called a Planck length. I'm doing this, but of course, it's like minus 10 to the, you know, 35 or something like that. So it's really, really small. but beyond that we can't measure anything. So it effectively is the smallest distance of space that we can measure or do anything with. Again, you can write an equation

that says plank, length divided by two, but you can't actually do anything with it that's smaller than that. And so that's another one of those parallels that comes into play. Now back to the quantum entanglement thing, in a video game, you can have something on one side of the planet

and something on the other side of the planet, but they're just both pixels inside the game. And if they rely on the same memory location, then you can instantly affect one or the other without having to go in the game from one side of the planet or one side of the galaxy to the other side because it's not, the memory is not in the rendered world.

It's like outside of the rendered world. And if both of these rely on that same memory spot, well, then it becomes an optimization technique again. So if you watch Game of Thrones, you can watch it on your phone now, right? You can stream it over Wi-Fi. We couldn't do that before. Like, why can we do that now? And the reason is that the files were just too big.

There was just too much information. And so what people figured out was how do we compress this information so that we can make it much smaller? I mean, if you were to look at the actual pixels in a Game of Thrones episode or any episode, really, in any show, any one of those frames would be huge. and there's 30 frames a second, and it goes on for an hour. So you're talking many gigabytes,

maybe even up to terabytes of information. But because they compress it, and why do they compress it? Because many of the pixels have similar values. So like if you're watching the wall, if you ever watch Game of Thrones in the winter, they have the big wall, well, most of those pixels are white.

So they're sharing the same information. So you have, if you think of the universe in terms of compression and optimization, then it starts to make more sense. And I think that's where the recent Nobel Prize about the non-locality is really important because it shows that, one, you can connect things that are physically far apart, but two, you can also, they can affect each other, which I think points at another optimization technique in the universe, which means we may be living in an information-based universe. Very rad. And to your first point of the four, I think, heard Michi Okaku said, you know, physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's attempt to understand itself.

Which kind of goes to your first point. It gets weirder at the second point. And now, what is the third and fourth? Sure. So the third. Okay, so up to that point, you know, I think you can have a discussion with scientists and materialists about the simulation theory. They may or may not agree, but at least they're willing to have the conversation with you.

In fact, I was at the University of Cambridge last two years ago now for a couple of months, and I met this Nobel Prize winning physicist. And he said that 50 years ago, that first assertion that the universe is made of information would have been controversial, like they would have attacked you for it. But now, no physicist would disagree with that. So you see, we're getting a different perspective on physics because there's a whole branch of physics called information physics now, where, you know, we have conservation of energy, conservation of momentum.

Now they're measuring conservation of information, and they're saying if the universe is an information system. And then the second point, they'll agree that it looks real, even though it's not, and you can argue why that is. But again, to me, that looks more like a video game running the world. The third assertion is where we start to get into the spiritual aspects, I think, of at least my interpretation of simulation theory,

which is that the whole world is a kind of purposeful hoax. we have set up this whole world as a kind of purposeful hoax. And I like to use a story about a former film critic that a lot of people know, Roger Ebert. He was, you're probably too young to remember this, but he was on TV with a guy named Gene Sisko back in the 80s and 90s, and he became a famous film critic.

And he unfortunately passed away from, I think it was thorough cancer back in 2013, but his wife was with him at the time. And she said, the last thing he said, before he died was, oh my God, it's all a big hoax. And he was referring to physical reality being a big hoax. And this is, of course, related to what the spiritual traditions have been telling us all along, that the world is a kind of Maya.

It's a kind of illusion. And I like to interpret that, as I looked at the meaning of the term Maya, you say it's a carefully crafted illusion. It's almost one that you agree to participate. in. And so the third assertion is that the whole world is a kind of Maya or illusion or hoax. That is purposeful. There's an old story about Vishnu that I think is worth here talking about, and it also relates to the Matrix. So there was a sage named Narada, who in some stories is a warrior, but in others is a sage, and he kept saying to Vishnu, okay, I want to know what Maya is.

Can you make me understand? Can you explain Maya to me? And Vishnu's like, no, my Maya is inscrutable. There's no way I can explain it to you. But Narada's like, no, no, I really want to understand Maya. I really want to understand Maya. Vishnu goes, okay. And he, like, creates this pool of water.

And he says to Narada, step into the pool of water. So Narada steps into the pool of water. And suddenly, he's a little baby girl. It's a little baby girl named Susheila, who's a princess in Benares. let's say in India. She grows up, you know, lives her whole life. She marries a prince in the neighboring kingdom. Then she ends up her kingdoms, her husbands and in-laws kingdom fights with her parents and her brother's kingdoms and suddenly all the men kill each other. So her husband, her brothers, her son, her father, they're all dead. Now she's really sad because of this big war. So she

walks out of the city and she's very despondent. And there's a very despondent. And there's a pool of water and she's not really paying attention and she steps into a pool of water. And then suddenly she's back to being Narada, the sage, with Vishnu. And Vishnu says, now you understand Maya. So that whole life was part of this purposeful hoax that was created. And so that's the third assertion that I like to make. Hey, fam, a quick share from something I genuinely love. This is IM8.

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if you want to try it out go to iam8health.com slash know theyself and use code know theyself for an additional 10% off welcome kit and five free sachets that's i m8health.com slash know theyself i hope you enjoy back to the show zooming in on the personal perceptual differences which all also kind of goes into the non-locality, quantum indeterminacy, and you study the variance of subjective experiences, what is the internal quality of me versus you, let alone an octopus, right? As we all have different perceptual sensory organs

that give us a different picture of our own personal Maya, if you will, that seems very enchanting and real to us as objective reality. When you look at the world, it appears like there's a material world that is the way it is. And I'm curious what thoughts you have on when you examine the variance of subjective experience, meaning the different types of ways

that different animals could perceive the same thing, whatever that means, the same thing. It helps undermine the solidity we carry in our own day-to-day perception. Yeah, I think it does. And one of the ways that I like to explain it is in a multiplayer game scenario,

each of us is perceiving the world through our own game console or our own iPhone or our own computer, so depending on what type of game it is. But the fact is there is no shared rendering of the world in a sense. There's no castle on the server that's sitting there. It's only my computer that's rendering the castle and your computer that's rendering the castle on your screen. and I'm rendering it on my screen. Now, if you open that up as a model, right, so the materialist model says everything is the same for everybody.

But if you open up a model where each of us is rendering the world on our own device. Now, I put device in quotes because it doesn't mean there's like a physical computer sitting there or even a virtual reality headset, which is the metaphor that I often like to use because that's kind of what got me down this rabbit hole was when I was playing a virtual reality ping pong game up in San Francisco, and for a moment it fooled my body into thinking it was a real game, and I tried to put the battle on the table, and I tried to lean against the table.

Of course, there was no table. So the paddle fell to the floor. I almost fell over. I did a double take, and I began to wonder, wow, how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix that was so immersive that we would forget that we were inside this virtual world. You call that the simulation point?

Yes, I call that the simulation point. which is a kind of technological singularity. So today we hear the term singularity a lot in terms of AI and superintelligence and will it take over the world. The term was originally borrowed from physics by a brilliant mathematician and early computer scientist called John von Neumann.

He said when technology grows exponentially such that everything will be different for the human race, that he called a singularity of a type. And then later, there was a... science fiction writer named Werner Vinji, who was also a computer science professor, and he wrote up a paper called the technological singularity. And that's what most people are relying on now when most people hear the term singularity now. They've also heard of Ray Kurzweil's version, which is humans merging with silicon. And Vinji said there were multiple ways we could

get to the singularity. Now, for me, I think the simulation point is a kind of singularity, because it shows us that through technology, we can create something that's so immersive that we would be unable to distinguish it from physical reality. That if you assumed any rate of progress, just follow the curve of technological progress, that eventually we would gain the capacity to simulate something indistinguishable

from our current reality. Right. And that's, you know, I was in the video game industry before, and you can see the difference in today's games from 10 years ago, from 20 years ago. There's a slide I like to use when I give presentations that shows like a really old racing game from when I was a kid like pole position, 8-bit graphics.

Then you see Nintendo games and Sega Genesis and PlayStation, which are 16-bit. And it looked a little more realistic. It still wasn't realistic. Then you see the 32-bit version of the racing game. And now suddenly you can't distinguish whether that's a real car or in a real city. I mean, you probably could,

because the people aren't quite there yet. But in terms of the actual city in the car, you can't really distinguish. And so if that keeps going, you're going to get to the point where you could put on a virtual reality headset and you wouldn't be able to distinguish. And then there would be AI characters in there

that you wouldn't be able to distinguish if those were characters being controlled by a human or not. There's something I call the Metaverse or virtual touring test. So you probably heard the Turing test, which is kind of the famous test about AI where you have a computer

behind one curtain and a human behind another computer. curtain, that was the original version. Alan Turing defined this back in the 1950s, and he called it the imitation game. And he said, if you can pass messages back and forth, and you can't tell if it's a human or a computer that you're talking to, then they've passed.

He didn't call it the Turing test. He called it the imitation game, but we would say that it's passed. The Turing did. Now, back then, they didn't have, you know, messaging. So how are they going to pass these messages? Well, they use something called Tala type machines in his version. But most people think that chat GPT and Claude,

and many of these have gotten to that point with text already. But in a virtual world, if you were to hang out with your friend as one avatar and an AI avatar, and you could talk to them, you could run around, you could go hang gliding, you could go skiing, go swimming,

virtual sex, whatever you want to do in the virtual world. If you can't tell that's an AI versus a human, then we get to that point. So that's what I like to call the simulation, point. And I think that, I use that to say that when games get that good, we can create these virtual worlds, but then how do we know we aren't already inside one of those virtual worlds? Because if you can't tell the difference, then it's about 50-50, the odds, at least that you're

in a virtual world versus a real world. The thing that most people can't get their heads around is this inability to distinguish, right? But that also ties to the spiritual tradition. Like in the Tibetan traditions, they have dream yoga, for example, and they use a form of lucid dreaming, even though lucid dreaming is our term for it where you wake up inside the dream, but their goal is to say that if you can wake up inside the dream, you can tell that this is a dream.

And some of your viewers may have tried lucid dreaming, and you have what's called a lucidity test where if you notice something odd about the environment, and then you try to do something that you can't do in the physical world, quote unquote physical world, but you can do it in the dream. And my personal case is floating out of the chair.

Like how do we know this isn't a dream right now? Well, if I can float, then it could be a dream. And so they use that to say if you can figure that out in the dream state, now you can try to do the same thing in the physical world and realize that the physical world is also a kind of dream or a kind of illusion. That awakening or enlightenment could be, sort of just like you become lucid in a dream state. It doesn't remove you from the dream,

but you become fully aware that you are in the dream, and it increases your agency in such dream that we could extrapolate that one picture octave higher into this world, and that becoming awakened would be like lucid in this world, where you realize that lucery dream like nature, and you're still in it. And you're still in it.

You know you're in it, but you also remember not being in it. So it gives you a whole different, perspective. Like if you go back to high school, you're not going to take it quite as seriously as maybe you did the first time because you've already been through high school. You remember what it was like to be in high school. So when the Buddha first became enlightened, enlightened, enlightened the woman asked him, what are you? And he said, I am both, which in Polly at the time, which was the language the Buddha used meant awake. So if he's awake, that means before he was awake, what was he doing? He must have been dreaming. He must have been inside the illusion,

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Learn more at Accenture. And there's there's something really interesting. I had, well, I had an experience a few years back where I was taking a flight, I think it was from Austin back to L.A. And I took like a little nap on the flight. And I went to a lucid dream. And it was so interesting because these experiences inherently ineffable can't really, you know, ever get close to explaining what it is.

It's like in the first person experience of it. But like I felt like every cell in my body turned into bliss. I felt my whole body vibrating. For lack of a better term, it felt like every cell was having an orgasm. It felt like so, so blissful. And I was in this dream and I was flying. I had complete agency. I was fully aware that I was in it.

And it left a big mark on me because I was like, what? I never had an experience to that degree where it was so self-evident. And it, just like we were talking about, it can be drawn out to our day-to-day experience where our sober waking consciousness seems like just the way things are. And then we can have these trans-personal experiences which kind of shake you out of the box you've been looking through. And in that dream, were you in like a realistic, what might be like a realistic world? Or were you in sort of a...

It was like a realistic world. Yeah, it wasn't like some strange astroplane. Maybe it was. Right, or an astral depiction of the world. Or you could have actually been out in the physical world in your energy body at that point. Yeah, who knows? So baffling.

And I try not to make, you know, concrete conclusions from something inherently baffling. But, okay, I don't want to derail us too much. I just think that there's something inherently powerful about those trans-personal experiences and how they don't remove you from the reality in which you're operating from,

but your perception of it radically changes. And like you were speaking to, you can see the rules that you're playing in life not as like a real thing, you know, but as a sort of a means to learn. Right. And that brings us to the fourth assertion. Fantastic. which is that you chose to play the game.

And when you did that, you also were aware of what happens when you incarnate, which is that we all go through a series of forgetfulness. So in the Matrix, they had the little brain computer interface that they plugged into the back of the head. That was how they went in. And then it was so realistic that they forgot. And what we find is that all the spiritual traditions of the world,

not just the Eastern, but also the Western traditions, they have this idea of forgetfulness as a key part of the incarnation process. And that's so that if you remembered everything while you're here, then you may not take any of it seriously. And if you're here to learn, I think that we have a process that is like life selection. So if you've ever played a video game at the beginning,

you'll choose your character. And a wizard, a warlock, a warrior. Are you going to be a wizard? Are you going to be a barbarian, a thief, a bard, a priest? Some pretty weird life selections out there. There are, yeah. If you've ever, there's a world called Second Life, which is a virtual world. So it's like a game, but it's not really a game.

People just go and live virtual lives. And it's been out there for a while. And you've got all kinds of weird corners. Some people choose to go into a world. worlds where they'll be slaves. Some people are doing Star Trek. You know, there's just all these weird experiences that people want to have that they'll have in the virtual world that they don't want to have outside of the physical world. But you choose your race, you choose your profession, and more than that, you choose the general storyline that your character is going to have.

Now, when I was a kid, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons. And that was, you know, without the video game, it was just on a piece of paper. And we would roll the dice. And, Most people know about it now because of stranger things, where they were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and you have your character and has different attributes, whether it's strength, agility, charisma, intelligence, all these different attributes. And then there's a storyline, background story of that character.

And so I think we go through that kind of a life selection process. And if you look at people who have either had near-death experiences or people that have done regressions into the life between life, stage. So there was a guy named Dr. Michael Newton. He wrote a great book called Journey of Souls, this was from back in the 90s. And he inadvertently, as he regressed people to childhood, ended up regressing them into what he calls the life between life stage. So what the Tibetans might call the Bardot, the in between. And so it wasn't a past life, but it was that period in between. And he said there were a whole series of stages that people remember from

dying, the previous life, to before being incarnated in this life. And as you get to the end of those stages, there was one called life selection, you know, and you would look at and you could actually visually see your parents and you could see what they're doing. But interesting enough, you also saw timelines. And sometimes people would use the analogy of a computer or like a video on the wall. And you could see where you might need to make major life choices. If you made one choice, you'd go this way. If you made another choice, you'd end up that way. But you also saw the challenges that that particular character is going to have. And so I think that's part of the life selection process.

It gives us a different way to think about some of the crazy things that happen to people. You know, sometimes I get people, particularly from the materialist's point of view, who said there can't be a God because of all the suffering in the world. And we can't be in a simulation because of all the suffering in the world.

I'm like, have you looked at what we do in our video games, you know, to characters, you have granted theft, auto, you've got all of these games. But in this model, you know, video games are only challenging, are only fun if they're challenging. And as you start off, you want to play the easy game. And people often say to me, look, this can't be a video game

because if it was, I would be a billionaire, I would be a famous actor or actress in Hollywood. That's the only life I would choose. I said, well, that's interesting. When do actors usually win Academy Awards? It's when they play the roles of people that are particularly usually suffering or Tom Hanks,

what was his first Oscar? It was for Philadelphia, a guy that was suffering from AIDS. It's the challenging ones, roles, that are the ones where you perhaps grow the most and you learn the most as well. And so in this model,

you're choosing many of the child disadvantages. So perhaps someone who's physically handicapped is an advanced player and those of us that aren't, we're like earlier player, We're not quite ready for that challenge where you're going to not have a leg or you're going to be blind.

You've probably heard of the telepathy tapes recently with the autistic nonverbal children. I was going to bring up exactly that. You know, Savon syndrome and individuals on the spectrum and very specific arenas, they seem absolutely more advanced than the average human, you know? Yeah, they do, right?

And yet we see them as disadvantaged in some ways. So the researcher... Which they are in others, right? Yeah, they are. So the researcher who did that work initially was Dr. Diana Hennessy Powell. Yeah, it's Powell. And she called me up like a few years back before there's Lovity Tapes. And she said, hey, you know, I've been researching these autistic savants

and they have these amazing abilities. And to me, it almost seems like they're just looking up information in a database. They're not actually calculating these mathematical, you know, solutions that they can get to. And so the only good explanation I have is maybe we live in some kind of an information-based reality like a simulation. And so she was setting up a conference at that time where she had myself and a few other people who talk about simulation theory speak there. And then a few years later, of course, the telepathy teams came out and everyone began to understand that these children have these other abilities. Now, when I look at that, I almost see it as getting back to your earlier point about different people have different qualia, but they also perceive the world differently. Now, if you think of us in a virtual reality, if you've ever seen the movie Ready Player 1, do you remember that?

Yeah, love it. I remember he had a full body suit so that, you know, when he was dancing, there's a scene where she's like, can you feel this? And he can feel it in his suit. Now, if you're inside a full body suit with the gloves, you have fine motor control, right? I mean, you can basically control every little thing of that character. That's why, you know, your dance, you feel like it's real, he had a treadmill. But suppose you were trying to control that same character from a mouse.

Okay, you're using the mouse. You're not going to be able to control like the little muscles as well because it's more of a crude level of control. Right. But you're also not trapped in the suit. So if you're in the suit, you can only see the first person perspective. Like, I can only see what Riz sees. You can only see what Andre sees.

But if you're half in the suit and half out of the suit, you can look around and you can see parts of the world that you would not be able to see if you were locked in a first person point of view. So there's something in a video games that we call the virtual camera. And the virtual camera, if you've ever watched people play video games, a lot of times it's sitting above the head of the character so you can actually see the character walking with their bow and arrows, et cetera.

But there's a first-person point-of-view where you see out of the character's eyes. And we're all locked in that first-person point-of-view, which has its advantages because we're fully in the suit. But if you're half out of the suit and half in the suit, you can actually see what's going on in the other room.

You can change your virtual camera. You can have all these abilities. You can see stuff that's not in the rendered world, what people are thinking, how they're communicating with each other, You can send text messages to each other in a game that's outside of the rendered world. Like the message doesn't appear on the tree in the game. It's like a little chat box that's called a HUD, heads up display, which is over the rendered world.

So you're more aware of those things. And so I had an experience. There's a woman named Dahlia, Bergeron, who demonstrates mind sight and other things. At many conferences like Contact in the Desert. I was just at the Cy Games a few weeks ago in Charlotte. And she has a daughter, I forget how old she is now, but she's one of these autistic nonverbal children who is telepathic. And one day we were at a conference together,

and Dalia said, hey, the daughter's name is Lidu. Because, hey, Lidu wants to tell you something. I was like, oh, great, what does Lidu want to tell me? And she said, basically, when she's watching her friends who may be somewhere else physically, or they are watching her, they can help her as if they're in a video game. She basically used the term like a video game.

She can watch what they're doing and send in help, and they can do the same to her, even though they're not in the same physical location. Right. And so we start to see that using this metaphor of the video game becomes a way to understand things that we couldn't understand before from a scientific point of view.

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DrinklMNT.com slash know-theyself. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. That, yeah, there's something very interesting about how with these nonverbal autistic children where there's this physical degradation of ones like hardware, so to speak, that may give access or rise to this other field of awareness that we'd otherwise be too preoccupied being identified with in a sense. Like there's an eldest Huxley's doors of perception kind of giving the brain the analogy of a reduction valve, right, that we like titrate our

conscious experience to not be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information actually available. to us. And that would potentially explain some of these sci phenomena and capacities of Savant children, where they gain access to abilities or information that they would, in other words, have no business in having.

It's yeah, it invites an interesting perspective there. And then it also, just as we were examining earlier, I think, how we're talking about the variance in our individual subjective experiences.

People that listen to this podcast probably resonate with me and yourself who have at some point identified as a truth seeer. We want to get to know what is more of an objective reality coming to potentially see that's a futile endeavor because we can never get the full picture from a subjective personal experience. Do you think that objective reality could then only be the collective amalgamation of subjective perspectives? I think there's something to that. And again, I like to use the analogy of a video game. So in a multiplayer game, each of us is sort of seeing the same thing. I mean, if you and I are near a castle, we're both kind of seeing the castle. But it's possible that you're seeing other things in that scene that I'm not seeing.

So, for example, there could be invisible dragon. But you can see it because you know, you're Andre, you're very advanced. You're level 30. I don't say I'm level two. And I'm looking at my computer. I see the castle, but I don't see any dragon. And you're like, what are you talking about? It's right there.

Can't you see it? And it's possible that we are amalgamating different subjective perceptions. And there's actually a physics experiment called Wigner's Friend. And it's another one of these mind-blowing experiments. There's another one called the Delay Choice, if we ever want to talk about time and different timelines, we can get into that. But in Wigner's friend. If we have time. If we have time, yeah.

depending on which timeline we're on. Maybe we already got into it on another timeline. But in Wigner's friend, the idea is that you're collapsing the probability wave of these possibilities with a certain set of observers. And if those observers are in the lab and that hasn't been communicated

to people that are outside the lab, is it possible that the people outside the lab could observe a slightly different collapse of the probability wave? And this was just a thought experience. experiment, a lot of great thought experiments in the world quantum physics. But recently they started to do experiments. There was one in the UK that they did. I forget which university it was. But they actually found that it's possible to have a slight difference in the collapse.

And when I said the collapse of probability wave is that you have particles and they have different states, you know, spin left, spin right. So they're doing it at the microscopic quantum level. But that raises the possibility that that we, are all collapsing the probability wave, but then we get entangled with each other. So we all see the same thing because we're all entangled with each other. But if there are people that are unentangled with the rest of us, that perhaps they can see things differently, I think. So I think that the model of a multiplayer, massively multiplayer game, is a good one for this kind of thing where we are aggregating what everyone's doing. It's kind of like,

in some games they have these you know you have little challenges and you have a little boss and then you have the big boss right but then sometimes they have a multiplayer quest which is like a really big boss and everybody has to attack the boss together so they're all kind of working at it

basically the server is aggregating what everybody is doing to figure out how is the strength of that boss going down and you can only do it with like 100 people attacking this to achieve that particular quest does a lot of this perspective not run on the assumption that consciousness could run on silicone that they're as opposed to neurons or i guess what your depends what where your conception of

consciousness is but if we get to the simulation point where we can actually get to the point of simulating a reality indistinguishable from this one um would we not need to run it on silicone and isn't that a big assumption? It's an assumption, one of many, right? First, we're making the assumption that consciousness is running on biology today. I mean, a lot of scientists make that assumption. Of course, a lot of spiritual people will say,

no, consciousness isn't generated from the biology. It's actually projecting itself from outside the system. Certainly is in more alignment with point three and four of what you walked through. Right, and that's where, you know, I get in trouble with the mature. list. Sure.

I go to point three and four. But in fact, I, you know, one of the criticisms I get is, uh, why did you dedicate like a third of the book, Simulation Hypothesis to mystical traditions,

you know, yoga, the world being a dream, God creating the world, angels, all of these things. I said, I did that very deliberately because I wanted to show that this idea of

simulation theory provides a way to bridge the gap between, you know, what, what has become sort of the, dominant cultural institution in the West, which is science. When you go back 500 years, the dominant cultural institution in the West was the church. And they didn't want to give Galileo his due in terms of looking at the telescopes to see that, in fact, the Earth was not the center of the universe. But today, it's shifted, right? It's shifted so that the dominant cultural paradigm

is the scientific paradigm, at least within the press and within institutions. And then religion is kind of relegated to, okay, outside of that world, unofficial world, you can go have whatever religion you want, but keep that personal. Don't bring that into what is actually happening in the world itself. But just like if you go back into the 1700s, most scientists thought that the stories they were hearing of rocks falling from the sky, they were hearing stories like this from people in villages all over Europe.

and they thought, well, they're just peasants. They don't really know what they're talking about. There's no way rocks can fall from the sky because there are no rocks in the sky. So how could they be falling? They had the wrong paradigm. They had the wrong model of the universe. So eventually, when they went out and investigated in France,

a mass siting where thousands of little rocks had fallen, they eventually decided, well, there must be rocks out there and they adopted a different model of the world. And in that model, it could allow for things like, rocks falling from the sky, meteors as we call them today. Now that's accepted. And so simulation theory, I think, provides a model where many of these other abilities and experiences,

whether it's shamanic experiences, yogic experiences, near-death experiences, all of those can have an explanation that actually makes sense. Now, once again, there's another axis I'd like to point out. And in this axis of simulation theory, so it's the second one, we talked about the NPC versus RPG axis, this is the literal versus the metaphorical access.

And so when people talk about the world being a simulation, they usually fall in one somewhere on this axis. On all the way on the left, it's a literal computer that is running the universe with a bunch of bits. On the right-hand side of the axis is that this is a meta- of some advanced computing device.

We don't know what it is because, you know, today's computers aren't quite there yet. But the video game is the latest metaphor out of many metaphors that have come along over the years to try to describe the nature of reality, which is maybe ineffable, like you said. God is the device on that side of the axis. Right, God could be the device.

But whatever we're using to describe it, in my case, I'm using the video game as a metaphor. I don't mean it's literally, we're sitting there like the matrix with something in the back of our heads. We could be souls, we could be consciousness that is plugging in some other way, but that the universe itself follows these mathematical rules and it's computing. It's probably based more on a quantum computing system. That's different than, you know, the kind of bits that we use. In fact, there was a physicist at Oxford named David Deutsch, who's one of the pioneers of quantum computing.

Trying to get him on the podcast. Oh, great, yeah. So he updated Wheeler's phrase, It from Bit, and he said, it from qubit. Because a qubit, quantum bit, is one that can have both values of zero and one at the same time. And then it's only when it's needs to be observed or it's needed for a calculation, you can then collapse that possibility down to a single one. But if we look back in history, the dream was a metaphor that's used very commonly.

and in fact the idea of forgetfulness we talked about briefly, all the spiritual traditions of the world have this element of forgetfulness. Now the Greek said that you cross Lette or Plato, or if you look at the myth of Er, you cross the river Latte, which is the river of forgetfulness, when you incarnate. So you forget about whatever it was going on. And the Chinese have Meng Po.

She's the goddess of forgetfulness, right? She brews the tea of forgetfulness. And you drink that before you. your incarnation and after your incarnation. And as I looked into the different spiritual traditions, I found this was a very common thing, but they all used slightly different metaphors. So I started to look at the Sufi traditions. And in the Sufi traditions, they look at the Arabic word in the Quran for a human is insan.

And insan literally means prisoner. And then you say, okay, well, prisoner of what? Hascaband. Sorry. Prisoner of Ascaband. Yes, that's right. With the deventures. But in this case, there's another Arabic word called Nisian.

And Nisian means forgetfulness. So you are basically the prisoner of forgetfulness. And in the Sufi traditions, they talk about the 70,000 veils between you and God, between you and ultimate truth, Al-Huk, they call it in the Arabic. So that's a metaphor. I mean, they don't really mean there's veils that are hanging down like shower curtains that you have to go through, but that is how they describe forgetfulness.

So they use metaphors. Buddha uses the wheel of samsara as a metaphor. It doesn't mean there's a physical wheel, but that's a technology that is used to try to describe something that is very complicated. And similarly, the virtual reality headset becomes a metaphor for this process of incarnating.

So if you look at the Bhagavad Gita, for example, it says that you take off the body like you're taking off a series of garments and then you put on another set of garments for your next life. Well, it turns out Rumi said almost the exact same thing. He said the soul enters the body like the body puts on clothes. Now, they're, you know, they don't go into reincarnation, but it's the same metaphor. And you say, well, why is it the same metaphor? It's a technological metaphor because clothing is a technology. And because they're trying to the latest and greatest way for us to understand something that is very complicated. Now, I know we were going to talk a little bit about wisdom of a yogi.

So Swami Yogananda came over in 1920 from India, and he became one of the first Indian Swamis to really try to introduce yoga, meditation, karma to the West in what was primarily a Christian nation at the time. And so he had to bridge the gap and come up with language and ideas present these ancient ideas of Maya karma, all these things, in a way that people would understand. And so what did he do? He turned to the technology of the time.

And the new technology at the time was film, film projectors. So he basically said, look, the world is like a film projector. It's light coming from the Lord, and it's all light in shadows of the Lord. It's all movies to me, he would say, in his Bengali accent. There's a clip of him out there saying it too. And he said the purpose is to look away from the screen and look towards delight. That's what he told his students.

But in the movie, it seems like they're suffering. It seems like the character is getting blown up. He lived through World War I, which at that time, it was called the Great War I. We remember it maybe not as well as we remember World War II in our collective cultural memory because that was an even bigger war. But it was the first time you had mechanization of killing going on. And so, you know, you really had a lot of suffering happening. And Eve prayed, said, why are you letting the suffering happen, God?

And the answer he got was, well, it's like a movie. You know, the actors aren't dying, but the characters are suffering in the film. And that's something important to remember. And so the reason I wrote this book called Wisdom of a Yogi was I was asked by Harper-Colns-India on the 75th anniversary of Autobiography of Iogi to write a book about, some of the lessons from Yogananda's book for Indian professionals in

India. And, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I grew up in Michigan. I was born in Pakistan. I grew up in Michigan, so you sure you want me to write in a Muslim household? You sure you want me to write a book for Indians about the lessons in autobiography of a yogi? And they said, yes, we want you to write it.

Because we want you to update the technological metaphors in ways that young professionals in the East could understand video games, social media, internet and that's why I ended up writing that book. But at first I wasn't

sure I wanted to write a book, but I'm a big fan of Yogananda. I think it's a, you know, it was a big task to do that. And I thought about it and I thought, well, you know, if you were alive today, he would say it's like a movie, where are the actors, but we're also the audience, so we're

sitting there watching the movie. Each of us has our scripts, but we can change the scripts if we want. So we have free will. And what does that sound like? It sounds like we're all playing a massively multiplayer interactive role-playing game. And so that's why I ended up writing that book was I realized that he was just updating the metaphors and now in the 21st century, if he were alive today, he would update the metaphor to be something like a video game or virtual reality metaphor. Get your tickets now for the dog stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear.

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Get tickets now. I loved all that. That was you, I think you tied a bow on all of that. It's really just like the blind men and the elephant, right? when you look at all of these disparate mystical ancient wisdom traditions, and they have all this language for what reality is, and then you go on the other side of the access and the scientific way of describing reality,

for me, it's always a sign of wisdom and truth when completely different arenas and areas and places on Earth come to similar perspectives with different language. But they're speaking about, in essence, the same thing. and I find that comforting or at least supportive to know that there's a there there. Yeah, I do too. In fact, I find it very compelling. So not only do I think simulation theory bridges the gap between science and religion, I think within the religions, you can use simulation theory as a metaphor to try to bridge the different traditions.

Because the more I went into these different traditions, the more I found that they were saying similar things using slightly different metaphors. And for me, okay, there's plenty of people who will tell you their religion or their tradition is better, whether it's a, you know, a standard kind of exoteric tradition or an esoteric tradition. But for me, what's interesting is when you find the commonalities and you can translate that, you can use simulation theory as a connective layer. So, for example, the book is used as a metaphor often. And the book is used, you know, the book of life. And the book is used, you know, the book of life, for example, in the Bible. They talk about the book of life as being, you know,

where St. Peter records the people that are going to get into heaven or hell. But there's also versions of the book of life that actually describe all the things that you did along the way. So those are your actions. And I looked at that and I said, that's interesting. That reminds me a lot of the scroll of deeds in Islam, in the Quran. And the scroll of deeds, they're very explicit. There's a book, and you have two angels.

you've probably seen like the cartoon characters with the angel and the devil that actually comes from the Islamic tradition where the prophets said everyone has an angel and a gin but in this case there's two angels one of whom writes down all your good deeds and one of whom writes down all your bad deeds and then it literally says

when you die and on the day of judgment open your book read it read what you have done and you yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner I looked at that and I said, wow, that sounds a lot like, not just like the book of life, but it sounds a lot like what people who have had near-death experiences called a life review. And there was a guy named Daniel Brinkley who was struck by lightning back in 1975.

He wrote a book called Saved by the Light in 1994, I think it was. And he used to be in the military, and he literally killed people. And he had this life review. He called it a holographic panoramic life review. And he had to go back and relive every single moment of his life. but from the point of view of the other people. So when he shot someone and killed them, he had to literally see what it was like

to have that bullet strike him, but he also had to feel the pain. And then, this is where it gets interesting, is he had to see the ripple effects on that guy's family and their children. And so nothing changes your behavior than seeing the effects of what you have done. And to me, as a computer scientist,

and an engineer, I say, well, if that can be done, let's take those stories seriously, a good percentage of people have reported life reviews. People used to say, you know, my life flashing before my eyes. After Raymond Moody described the term near-death experience, he categorized this is one of the stages that people report. How would that work? Well, it would have to be recorded and you would have to be able to replay it. And a few years ago, around the same time that, you know, I was playing this virtual reality ping-pong game, I was working with a startup that could take a game that was played on a regular screen, like League of Legends.

I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's like a big e-sports game. Or a Counter-Strike Global Offensive, which is a first-person shooter. They could basically take that whole gameplay session and they could replay it, but you could put on a virtual reality headset, and they could put you at any XYZ coordinate inside there. So you could literally see yourself shooting someone and you can see the bullet coming at you. So it's almost as if we're in a virtual reality that can be replayed. And for me, it was like, okay, that is a new way to describe the life review using a technological metaphor.

But in the old days, obviously they didn't have computers, they didn't have video games. What would they use? They use the book. I don't think they're saying there's literally a physical book with, you know, angels, seven billion times two angels sitting there writing with a feather pen in Chinese. You know, this is what you did today. That was good. they're trying to express the concept

that this is all being recorded and you will have to review it at some point and that's when people talk about the judgment that's what it meant. So my next book that I'm writing is called God and the Simulation. It's not the next book that's coming out. I have a book coming out sooner than that

but this is the next one I'm still working on because I found these metaphors so compelling they were there across traditions and it turns out in the Indian traditions they have the same thing. There's Chitra Gupta. Chitra Gupta is kind of like a minor god. And he sits next to Yama,

the god of death, who's like kind of a major god. And what does Chithra Gupta do? He is called a record keeper. And so he's making sure everything is recorded correctly that you did in your life. In a book,

we think of it in the Kashic records, but there's a specific name for this book. It's called Agra Sandani. And he writes down everything and he makes sure when Yama sends you on to the next realm or the next life, whether it's a heavenly realm or a hellish realm or whatever it is, that it's based upon your deeds or your karma, if you will.

And so he's also called the record keeper. And so all these metaphors are there to try to express something. I think the latest and greatest metaphor we can use is that of a computer database that's recording all of the karma. And so every time we're creating karma, we're sticking it in this database. and then later as we plan our next life, we're going to the database saying, okay, which of these quests or pieces of karma

do you want to take advantage of? And the Buddha said, that which is subject to arising is subject to cessation. So he's like, stop putting this stuff in the database because it just keeps getting longer and longer. If you can stop doing that, you can reduce what's already there.

And then that leads to a kind of enlightenment where you don't need to go on if you don't want to. Yeah, that conception and explanation of somsaras is these kind of stored subconscious impressions with generate vasanas which color our perception. Like tendencies. Yeah. In fact, if you look at the original description of yoga

in the Patanjali yoga citrus, in wisdom of a yogh, I reinterpreted the translation. So it is, if I remember my Sanskrit correctly, Yoga Aschitavriti's Naroda. Okay. And literally, it translates to Naroda means to stop. Chita means mind stuff,

and Vritis means whirlpools. And so it's literally saying, stop the whirlpools of all the mind stuff. Now, that's not a great English translation. So I kind of reinterpreted it in wisdom of yogi to say yoga is the cessation of the whirlpools of thought and emotion in the river of consciousness.

Right? Because in his sutras, the asanas are just one part. But that was his definition of yoga. And it's when those vritis, those whirlpools harden, they become the samskaras, which then go to, like you said, the vassanas, which become our tendencies

and things we have to deal with in the next life. So stop the grasping an aversion of the vritis. Also from a video game perspective, it's like you're getting all the sense impressions, you're thinking about what's happening to you. Or if you're in a movie theater, have you ever done this where, you know, you're so engrossed in the movie,

and suddenly you stop being engrossed for a second and you look around and everybody's like zomified because they're so engrossed in the movie. It's like we're so busy contemplating what's happening that we're not seeing who we are as the player, I think. No, it's well said. It's an analogy I also often give, you know, if you were to take that same movie theater

and put it out in a big grassy field surrounded by dogs, people, and sunlight, suddenly it's not as an enchanting force and engrossing in your perception as it once was. it doesn't dissolve you of the movie still happening or the atrocities of somebody being harmed on the movie screen for example but your scope of context expands to include and transcend a grander field of awareness which allows you to stop being so reactive and actually respond to stimuli in a fruitful manner

and it's so fascinating talking to you because there's not I sometimes talk to like the cognitive psychologist computational scientists on one end, and then the Eastern mystical or Vedic traditions, on the other hand, very few do I get to kind of jump back and forth between the two, so I'm really digging this. Well, and that's part of my purpose in life has been to try to provide a bridge between these worlds.

And that's partly because I, you know, I spent so much time with people in the computer science world, the academic world. I've also spent time with people, you know, exploring consciousness on the yogic side and the Buddhist meditation. I spent time with people, with people in the UFO and conspiracy world.

And there was a friend of mine that you might know him, Jimmy Church. He has a show here in L.A. And he goes, I know why you wrote this book, Chris. So you can talk to all these people. And I was like, yep, that's exactly right. I can walk into MIT and talk about simulation theory. If I go in there and start talking about karma and somscaras, they're not going to listen.

But you can use that language as a way. I can talk to a fanatical Islamic fundamentalist. So I was asked to present at a conference in the UK after I wrote simulation hypothesis. And it was an Islamic jurisprudence conference about Sharia law. And it was about things like abortion, like when does life begin?

Does it begin at conception? Does it begin after 40 days? When can you do an abortion, basically? Same stuff we're arguing here in the U.S. 120 days, can you do it all the way up day? And I said, why are you asking me to speak at this conference? They're like, well, we want you to talk about simulation theory and it's overlap with what it says in the Islamic traditions.

There was literally an Ayatollah in the audience, right, from Iran. So you had scholars from Cairo in London, Germany, and you had this Ayatollah there. And it turns out you can talk to them about these ideas using this model of a video game. And as long as they know what a video game is, they're open to it. And so you can use it to bridge these gaps.

To quote, this cool guy's name's the Riz. A problem, Dr. Riz now, you know? I just finished my PhD. My students can call me that. I love it. Can I call you The Rizzler? Is that acceptable? Absolutely.

You wrote, we ourselves may be time instances on a branch that is currently being explored in a depth-first search, in which case we might be destined for emerging or pruning in our future, unbeknownst to the specific instance of us. It's a very interesting articulation. And I feel like it speaks to this. first person simulated experience and also the purpose of it. And you kind of said this is, like your purpose is kind of synthesizing these two seemingly disparate fields, right, and finding the conciliants in between the two.

And I have my own version of that. I'm curious what you think from the wisdom of the yogi perspective and simulation hypothesis kind of says about the intelligence of our inclinations. And by following those like subtle natural, proclivities that actually leads us to the most fulfilling version of our destiny. Yeah, and I talk a little bit about that in wisdom of a yogi. My very first book was called Zen Entrepreneurship, which was about this double life that I was living.

I was an entrepreneur during the day, and I was dealing with engineers and venture capitalists and enterprise clients like General Motors and all these big eyes. And then in the evening and the weekends, I'd be exploring different consciousness. techniques. And so I was kind of living this double life and I tried to bring the two together. But one of the aspects that I really honed in on was this idea that we are constantly getting messages in the form of synchronicities. And I call these clues, clues on a treasure hunt, like in the Indiana Jones films. And with Raiders of the Lost Art, for example, at the beginning, it would be nice if Indiana Jones just got the map and said, there you go, just go get it.

but it wouldn't make for a very interesting movie, would it? For us, the audience, and for him, what did he have to do? He had to follow one clue, and then he had to take that and go to the next clue. And sometimes he interpreted the clue wrong, and he had to go back, and then he had to keep going, and eventually he was able to follow the clues to find the treasure. And I feel like that our life is like that, and we have a bit of intelligence that's constantly going on, that's constantly sending us messages.

This could be messages in the form of hunches, could be messages that happen in our dreams, a synchronicity, which is an internal and an external event coinciding with each other, and it's something that happens pretty often. I think people who are into the spiritual seeking tend to be very aware of those, but it's about following our intuition.

Now the question is, who's sending us these messages? Well, you can look at it from a quantum physics perspective, you can look at it from more of a spiritual perspective. From a quantum physics perspective, there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics that says that there are multiple possible futures, and they are sending back information to us, and which of those futures we end up navigating to depends on the messages that we get along the way. And so for me, this is kind of how I navigate in the business world and now within academia and within my writing career is I look for these messages and these clues. From the spiritual traditions, you might say it's like a guide, like what they call it, your guardian angel, or a guide that's sending you the clues,

or you might say it's yourself. It's the part of you that's watching the game saying, oh, don't do that. This is what you're supposed to do. Don't you remember? And so it's sending us subtle hints along the way. And so I think there's this intelligent that's guiding us towards the quests that we have chosen and the challenges that we have chosen.

in this life because there's a saying in the video game industry, which was put up by Nolan Bushnell, who's like the grandfather of the industry, he started Atari. He said, make it fun to play, you know, easy to play, but difficult to master. Because if it's easy to master, you're not going to keep playing. But if it's too difficult to master, then you're not going to play. So you have to make it easy to play initially and difficult to master with each level. and then you increase the difficulty over time.

And so if we've chosen these situations, it's kind of like the, if you've ever seen that film, the Adjustment Bureau, have you seen that, with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It was based on a short story by fellow Kay Dick,

the science fiction writer, and he called it the adjustment team. And there was basically this, in the film, there were these individuals. They kind of made them look like angels in the film. He wasn't necessarily saying that, but they had these little books,

that were showing what's happening right now. And they're like, oh, that's not where we wanted to go. We need to readjust. So they would, like, introduce some character or some event that would put the person on a different, you know, on a different path. And the whole story was built on. I actually interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife, Tessa,

lives somewhere here in Southern California. And she said he came to believe that, in fact, there were multiple timelines and that people were changing parameters, you know, in the past. He gave a speech in Mets, France, in 1977, at a sci-fi convention. And he said, 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. Now, most people heard the first part of that. We were living in a computer program reality, and of course, back then they thought it was crazy. They're like, come on, I mean, this is 77. This was before the IBMPC as well.

But the second part of that is just as important. He said, we would have a sense of deja vu, like we were reliving the same experiences, saying the same things again and again. And he came to believe that someone, programmers were adjusting the timeline. And the quote that you just said from, it was from my book, The Simulated Multiverse.

So what happened was after I wrote the first edition of the simulation hypothesis, which came out in 2019, which was the 20th, literally on March 31st, 2019. So it was the 20th anniversary of the Matrix, which came out in March 31st, 1999. I wrote the book, got it out there.

I said, okay, good. I've done the simulation theory. I'm done. But there was a thought that wouldn't leave my mind, and it was if you can run the simulation once, why can't you run it more than once? In fact, why do we run simulations? People often ask me, what's the purpose?

And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do we run simulations, and why do we play video games? and we run simulations to see what will happen. Maybe you're running a simulation of the weather, you're running a simulation of how virus spreads or the stock market or wargaming or whatever simulations you're running.

But you never run it just once. You always change the variables and rerun it to try to figure out what is the most likely outcome or what's the best outcome and how can you steer towards the best outcome. And what's the worst outcome too? Because you have to be preferred for that as well. But the reason we play video games

is to have experiences with people in the guise of these characters, experiences that we couldn't have outside of the game. You know, I can't jump on a dragon. You know, I talked about lucidity tests earlier. You know, I haven't quite mastered Milarepa's technique of flying across the Himalayas. So most of us can't fly in this life without a plane or something. But in a dream state, you can.

And so you have these experiences, perhaps, in the video game, like jumping on a dragon and shooting arrows at orcs, are going to explore these planets, which we can't do yet. So that's the reason you play the video games. But the reason you run the simulations is to see what will happen. So is it possible that there's a part of us that has already projected what these different timelines might look like and that the messages and the intelligence

are trying to guide us to go one way versus another because there's a part of us that knows what might happen if we go down that path. Get your tickets now for the dog stars. It's no surprise how fast. civilization can disappear. Go! A bearer.

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Your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on. on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. I think also ties into when you wrote a little bit about the Tiger Swami and how what you're repeatedly drawn to sort of reveals your own karma and mission. Like when people are thinking about what is not just the purpose of life, but like if I am running some sort of simulator reality,

what is the purpose of that individually for me and what is the optimal fine-tuned sort of outcome one is trying to simulate towards, right? If there are infinite worlds or if there is infinite possibilities in a multiverse of this conversation going a bunch of different ways, one where I say a slightly different word,

one where I poured this teacup all over my head, you know, like what is your... I'm sure the audience would like to do that. Maybe should I make it this one? That'll be a different different podcasts. Yeah. What is like, to me, what feels like an interesting inquiry of like what it means to know thyself, you know, is what it is that, for lack of a better term, I'm here to be, to simulate in this life. What am I here to learn?

What is the optimal timeline to fulfill one's nature or destiny in this, in the time I'll be alive in this. body, right? This mind-body complex. What are the thoughts you have there in terms of how what we are repeatedly drawn to sort of reveals what it is we're supposed to be, not supposed to be,

but maybe signed up for it to be living in this life? Yeah, and I think that we have a storyline that we select for ourselves. And within that storyline, you still have a lot of free choice on whether you go down this or that. Now, this is where perhaps I disagree with some of the manifestation crowd, right, which is you can manifest anything

because certain things are actually easier for me to manifest in this body, in this Dungeons and Dragons character. Like, I can visualize all I want that I'm going to be an NBA player, right? It just wasn't meant to happen in this life. Actually, there was a guy in the 80s named Spud Webb.

He played for the Atlanta Hawks. He was exactly my height, and he played in the NBA. So it's possible, but that wasn't necessarily what I signed up for. There's a guy named Malcolm Gladwell who wrote many books for one,

was called The Tipping Point, but he wrote one where he said, you know, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. And for me, I remember thinking, what would compel you to spend 10,000 hours doing X? Right, I have some friends. They've probably spent 10,000 hours rock climbing. They're experts at it. And just don't have that, that motivation. Why would I spend 10,000 hours doing that if it's not something that really compels me? So what is the thing that you get compelled to be drawn towards again and again in your life. When I was younger, it was computer programming was one of those things.

I naturally took to it. I mean, I was at MIT, which is one of the premier institutions of science and technology, and I breezed my way through the computer science program. But if I went to the chemistry department, I mean, I would be one of the worst students in that department.

And it's because I think we have certain tendencies that we carry over from previous lives. Now, the story of the Tiger Swam in Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi. So there are many different interesting stories in that book. And this is why I loved the book when I first read it back in the 90s. You have levitating saints. You have bilocating saints.

You've got palaces being materialized in the Himalayas. I do want to talk about that story before we're done. And you have this Tiger Swami. And what happened was that this Tiger Swami, for those who haven't read it, when he was younger, you know, he was kind of a weak kid, weak kid, but he trained himself to be really tough. and he wanted to fight tigers with his bare hands. And so he basically convinced himself to do this.

And he became known as this guy who goes around and fights tigers, which is kind of a weird thing to want to do. But we're talking Bengali tigers with his bare hands. And at one point, he was given a warning, okay, you know, you've done this, you're creating some bad karma in this space. It's time to stop fighting tigers. But he loved the fame that came with it.

And he went to this particular arrival. Raja's territory, and they knew the tiger swam. He was in town, so they called him over to the Raja. And then Raja said, I have this bengal tiger that I want you to fight. Raja Begum, I think was the name. And he goes, I'll give you all kinds of jewels, you know, if you're able to beat him. And he decided to go ahead, but he hadn't seen the tiger. So he went in and to fight the tiger the next day.

And it turns out it was a particularly fierce tiger. And they ended up mauling him so that he was bleeding. He actually did win the fight, believe it or not. but it took him like, you know, six months to recover from all the mauling that happened to his body. And then after that, he seeked out the Swami that had given him the message, and he became a Swami himself.

And so Yogananda was kind of a child prodigy in seeking out, you know, spiritual masters, any kind of magical abilities in Calcutta. He would, like, run there and try to meet the Swami. And so he went and met the Tiger Swami, and the Tiger Swami says what he'd learned afterwards was to fight the inner tigers of ignorance, of greed, of your internal emotions,

and that's the battle that you should do. Now, that's sort of that explicit lesson in that story. But the implicit lesson is, I think that we're all drawn to certain external tigers. In my case, it was the startup world. I was drawn to the startup world, and I wanted to keep having those battles. But then we also may have multiple parts to our story

that the challenges we have in that world, in this case, he was fighting tigers, actually then related to a different challenge that he was meant to go down. For me, I can look back at my career as an entrepreneur and realize that all the struggles, it's tough being an entrepreneur. I mean, you start with nothing, basically,

and you have to build this up. Every day is a firefight. That's like constant stress all the time. You can't pay your employees. Your business is going to go out of, you know, going to go bankrupt pretty much every month and you have to figure out how to make all this stuff happen.

For me, it was those experiences that convinced me that these challenges were actually part of my karmic story. And I defined this thing in my book Zen Entrepreneurship that, what I call the Warriors Path. So that is the combination of the lessons that you're here to learn and the contribution that you're here to make. And so those two are interrelated. It's actually the challenges that you learn during those lessons. the outer tigers that then give you the ability,

not just to fight the inner tigers, but to fulfill your purpose. I mean, we're talking about the Tiger Swami now 100 years later. Why? Because he became a Swami, and he told Yogananga, Yogananda about it, and Yogananda wrote about that story. But many of the stories in Autobiography, yogi,

have this broader perspective that I think helps us in our own lives. And the Tiger Swami is one of the favorites. I interviewed a lot of people who had read the book, people at SRF, which is Yokoananda's organization, but also splinter groups like Ananda and other groups, and they all love that story of the Tiger Swami. There's something interesting also about the course correction that the challenges bring, you know, and I know you've dealt with your own through the heart surgeries, and what do you make of the innumerable challenges that we'll face that, for better or worse, redirect our path? I think that's a key concept for people because it's a way of reframing

something that happens to us that appears to be negative but usually within it we may have a positive outcome for our lives and for me just like with the Tiger Swabing he was mauled I ended up getting heart surgery and I was right at the height of my entrepreneurial career

I was teaching a startup program at MIT in Boston and that's when it hit and I couldn't even finish the program. And if you've ever seen pictures of heart surgery, I don't recommend anyone really look at these. In fact, I don't like to look at them, but it's one of the biggest cuts you can make in the body, put it open,

and then you put it together. And it took me about six months, just like with the Tiger Swami, to recover because the body had been kind of torn apart and put back together. It was a very challenging recovery. But what would happen even after the surgery is, you know, my conscious mind was still in what I call

NPC mode. So NPC mode, now let me just I think some people use the term NPC disparagingly online, and it can lead to this interpretation in the simulation theory of like a nihilistic point of view. Everybody else is an NPC so I can do whatever I want with them. Build egoic superiority and be pretty distasteful very quickly. Yeah, exactly.

So I always tell people, don't assume anyone is an NPC, assume they are players of the game just like you are. I mean, I had a woman tell me once, I think my husband is an NPC. That's probably not the best basis for a relationship. They did end up getting divorced later. I like the through line of being an NPC and just the unconscious modes we find herself in.

Like you said, you found yourself kind of feeling like an NPC at certain points. Yeah, it was an NPC mode where we're conditioned by our environment and unconsciously, and then we're still going through the motions. And so I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley. And those are the motions. You build a company, you sell your company, then you go become a venture capitalist, then you invest in other people's company,

or in Hollywood, in L.A. I'm sure you have a similar mindset if you're in finance. Like, everybody has the same goals and they don't even realize how influence they're being by everybody around them. And so I was still at NPC mode

trying to do the next big thing, raise a billion dollar venture capital fund and go down the path that was conditioned. And yet, when I was recovering from my surgery, I had a series of visions. And I write a little bit about these and wisdom of a yogi, but I haven't gotten into them fully.

And it started when I was in the ICU, so it wasn't like a traditional NDE while I was on the table. Although something may have happened, I just don't remember that. This started to happen to me after I was recovering, and I would fade in and out of consciousness. And I would find myself in this very alpine landscape with a lake and old Adobe-type building, and there were a bunch of Tibetan monks there.

And the Tibetan monks would work on my energy body to try to heal because I was having a really tough recovery. And years later, it's been eight years, and I would say I'm still not 100% recovered. And it took forever. So they were working on that side, but they would also sit there and teach me lessons. There were these windsurfing monks on the lake.

They would talk about how you have to learn to follow the currents. They also would have like a chess board, and they would show me how we have these different choices in our lives and where they take us. But one of the central messages that came to me from that experience was that I had a storyline in my life, which was first be an entrepreneur. And if you had asked me this in college or high school,

I would have said, yeah, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a softer entrepreneur, and then I'm going to be a writer as the second part of my life. Now, back then, I thought I'm going to do it when I'm really old, like 28 I thought was really old. Now, I was already 48 when this happened. And the message that came to me very strongly was what are you doing still in the world of business

and Silicon Valley and making money? You've done that already. That part is done. you should be transitioning to the second part of your story, which is to be a writer and to spread some of the lessons that you've learned, that's the contribution that I was here to make. But it's almost like I had that message before. I was getting it more subtly through clues,

but I didn't pay attention. And that forced a big course correction for me. Because what happened was as I was recovering during that six to nine month period, every time my conscious mind would think, hey, I'm going to jump in and start another video game company. I'm going to do the game for the Walking Dead or the Game of Thrones.

I would end up back in the hospital. And then they had to do another procedure, not as bad as the heart surgery, but still heart procedures. And so every time this happened, eventually I got the message that I was being forced to the point where I only had enough energy

to go to Starbucks, taking Uber to Starbucks for two hours a day and do writing. But in those nine months, I finished two books, one of which became this best-selling book The Simulation I thought says, and the other one was a book

about all the things I had learned in my startup career at which Columbia Business School press published. The subtitle was supposed to be what you won't learn at Stanford Business School. But they took out Stanford

from the title. They're like, hey, we're Columbia. We can't diss Stanford in the title. But that way, it was a way of wrapping up part one. Those are my sort of external tigers, if you will, and then moving into part two.

But I was kind of stubborn, right? I mean, they had to make it so that I just didn't have enough energy to go do this. So don't be stubborn is what I tell people. You can get the messages without having to cut up your body and spend, you know, nine months laying on a couch type of thing. You can get those men. What are you drawn to again and again? Ask yourself that question. And what is the timing?

Perhaps there's something you knew you were going to do long ago, but the timing wasn't right. And now you're getting clues that now is the right time to do that. Wild, wild stories. those experiences too coming in and out of consciousness. I just find it so fascinating, even in the varieties of religious experiences and some of the folks I speak to on this podcast and research outside of it,

without giving it, I suppose, epistemic, like extreme epistemic weight of what it means or what is objective or not, to me, they are, there are pointers to a possible way of how reality works, and especially when you see correlations across many different transpersonal experiences. There's something really refreshing, I think, about this understanding of suffering or grace as a means to learn, right? The lack of willingness to listen to those subtle cues is directly correlated with the suffering that is needed to course correct you towards the past.

of grace, so to speak. And it is a compelling, I think, perspective. I think a lot of people who have gone through immense challenges at a certain point on that path see the gift in it. I think so. And I think we all go through challenges, whether it's financial challenges, relationship challenges, health issues, or, you know, disabilities that you have from birth.

But I think we can reframe those. And that's why, to me, this path of viewing the world of the video game doesn't, not only doesn't have to be a nihilistic path, but it can be a path full of meaning

and it can give meaning to our suffering. And, you know, I'm okay with saying this was a subjective experience. In fact, I learned later that the specific image

of the Tibetan monks was chosen for me because I had been interested in Tibetan Buddhism and dream yoga, that those weren't really Tibetan monks. I mean,

those were just entities that were taking on an avatar or a form of Tibetan monks because that is what I would have been most receptive to later on. So in shamanic journeys, I used to go back. I mean, not in psychedelic shamanic journeys. We use the drumming to get into an altered state.

And so you can see that even though it's a subjective experience, it had great meaning for me. And I think we often, in the Western world, tend to discount those things, but they're often the most meaningful in our lives. Well said. I think that, do you feel like that encapsulates the quest engine in terms of karma and how you see it correlate with the simulation perspective?

Yeah, very much. That gives one perspective on it. Let me give you another perspective, and I'll use another Yogananda story. So there's a ton of stories there that I was really interested in and that was remembered. But one of them was one that caused people, when Yogananda came out with his book in 1946, I think it was, people accused him of writing fiction. They said, this sounds like the Arabian Knights. And one of the stories was about his master, a guy named Sri Yukdaswar. Riyukdaswar's guru was a guy named Lahiri, Mahashai,

as what we call him, I think is Charan Lahiri was his actual name. But when he was 33 years old, he got this appointment out in the mountains somewhere, and he didn't have anything to do in his job. So he started hiking in the Himalayas, and he meets this young man who looks like a young man, but he's actually his master, Babaji,

who says, finally you have come. Don't you remember? He's like, I don't remember you. Don't you remember you used to meditate in your past life in these caves here. And, you know, I've been holding off on contacting you because I wanted you to get married

and live a household or life. And then eventually through an initiation, he remembers his past lives. He remembers the cave where he used to meditate in the previous life. And then there's this story where after spending like a night or two in the cave,

he had put some oil on his third eye and he was remembering everything. Babaji, who was the master, supposedly a mortal master who lives in the Himalayas. And of course I did some research on, okay, was there really a guy who lived hundreds of years?

What do people think? Does it matter? And you find that many of these stories have a metaphorical element in addition to the literal element. And so he sends another disciple to Lahiri in the middle of the night to say, okay, it's time for your initiation ceremony.

And so he takes Lahiri, now we're in the dead of the Himalayas. This is 1861, no lights anywhere. And he sees this giant light in the distance. And this brother-discipline takes him there, and he sees this giant palace, like opulent palace, right out of the Arabian nights. Like if you think of the Aladdin story, if you read the original story,

the genie creates a giant palace for Aladdin. And it's got jewels. And Lahiri is amazed, like, where did this come from? This wasn't here before. and he walks in to the initiation ceremony and they tell him, well, this palace was created for you for your initiation

in this dream world. But the reason is in a previous life, you expressed a very strong desire to live in a palace. And normally you would have to go live that life now. You would have to go spend an entire life like that. But your master has created this dream palace in this dream world,

which is what we live in, simply for your initiation. but also to resolve that karma. So at the end of the night, you know, he just made the palace disappear and there was no palace. And that karma was resolved. So this gives us an interesting,

different way to look at karma. Whether you believe you really created a physical palace or not, it shows that our strong desires become like these vritis and they get put into the database. And so that database would have taken a whole life. And this was a shortcut to that.

And so I think of the questing engine, as pulling out from our database of different karma that we might have, depending on who or with and where in the world we are and what situations need to be created. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

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I think you talked about your, you know, your journey in Silicon Valley. And we all have our own versions of things that we just feel innately we must do. simply for many reasons, but partly to almost be done with it and to realize that the things we thought we needed to get for the feelings they were going to provide us don't actually provide us. They're not the solvent we once thought they were for our internal calamities.

And that's another reference point you give with the Yogananda's work, you know, that you don't need to go to the Himalayas. There's just, and there's so many. Yeah, and we all have these tendencies of things that we're attracted to that maybe our siblings aren't. For example, I'm the only one of my siblings who wants to be a writer. I mean, we had the exact same upbringing, pretty much similar genetics.

But where did that come from? Well, that was just the desire that I had from previous life. So Yogananda, when he was young, had this desire to go off to the Himalayas. he had a vision of meditating with the Himalayas, with yogis in the Himalayas. And so he would, as a kid, try to run away from home to go to the Himalayas. And he kept doing that because he felt like that was something that he kind of wanted to do. And he felt like he was destined to be this wandering monk. And his siblings, his older brother would go and catch him because, you know, he was like, whatever, 10 years old.

He can't, like, run away to the Himalayas when you're 10 years old. So, you know, you see his older brother Ananta giving him chase across. northern India to come back. But what happened was eventually Yogananda found his guru close to home. And he didn't need to go to the Himalayas. He did become a wandering monk, but he became a wandering monk in the West.

Like he never really went and lived in the Himalayas. He became a wandering monk in the West, and he probably, you know, through automobiles and trains, crossed more miles than really any yogi from a previous age. And so the lesson there was, you don't always have to go off to the Himalayas.

You might think that's what you need to do. But what that's really representing is some fulfillment of some inner desire that you might have that I think is a part of your storyline. And I use that almost interchangeably with the idea of karma. Your storyline is the karma

that you're looking to basically resolve in this particular life and the set of quests and challenges, which come from, could be previous experiences, but could come from mental experiences. Like I said, with the Dream Palace. It was like he registered that desire so strongly in the database that then it had to, the rendering engine of the world, the great rendering engine of the world, which is karma,

was creating situations, I think, to resolve that along the way. And so I think all of that plays together with this idea of what really brings us fulfillment and what we're meant to do at different times. and it all comes from learning to pay attention to know thyself, I guess, in comparison to other people, because other people have very different, very different desires, very different tendencies. The people aren't really interchangeable, especially with your siblings.

I think that's a good way to realize if something is karmic versus part of your conditioning in this life. In a recent conversation with John Verveke, we talked about one of the fundamental tenets of wisdom, one being perspectival metacognition. And when you speak about these life reviews that happen in NDE's, we could also in this moment project ourselves to our deathbed in a visualization process and look back on our life, or even from this moment prior, you know, and look on all the behaviors, the things that we value,

the things that we partaken, the way that we responded and operated out of greed or kindness, relationally to people. And surely that gives insight and brings wisdom when you're able to take on those many different perspectives. I bring this up because I'm reminded

when you brought up how in these life review process you're taking the perspective of, for example, someone's shooting someone, what the ripple effects of that are. And as someone who wants to live a life of fulfillment, wisdom, and true contribution and service,

and I'm sure as a proxy, everybody who's tuning into this fundamentally wants, what do you think we can do in this moment to gain perspective sort of from the future retroactively about what it is that's fundamentally most meaningful to do with their life?

Well, I think you could do it on a day-to-day level and then you can do it on a broader level. And so if you know you're going to have this life review, when you interact with people, you can say to yourself, okay, what would this feel like if I were in the other person's shoes? You can even do a mini-life review at the end of the day, right?

You can do a review of what's happened, you know, during that day. And sometimes in a life review, what the NDEers report is that it's often the little things they did that made someone happy, you know, where they just smiled at someone. Or they said a kind word, and there was a ripple effect where that kind word or that smile put the person in a better mood. And when they went home, they treated their kids better. and so there's a ripple effect or you watered a tree and the tree was so appreciative. So there's all these elements

that come into play. But I think at a macro level, it gets back to the golden rule, right? How you treat others. If you can put yourself in those shoes, then you can treat people well and then you're also not necessarily creating lessons for yourself

that you then have to go and resolve later on. So I think in a day-to-day level, keeping the life review and just say, how would I have acted differently today? Like at the end of a football game. What does the coach do? He plays the clip of the football game and says, hey, you know, we shouldn't have done this

or when we did play number three or whatever, we should have done this other thing. You can do that with yourself. And in fact, I talked about the book of life in the Jewish traditions and, you know, in the Bible, so it kind of translates into the Christian traditions as well. But within the Jewish traditions, there's actually a holiday.

I forget which of the holidays it is. But you're theoretically supposed to have like every year your list of deeds for that year. And then you, if you did the right deeds, you'll go to heaven. But otherwise, the next year, you have to do it. So you do it for the last year since that holiday. Every year you're supposed to, if you look back. So it's almost like a life review every year to look at your deeds to make sure that you act differently next time. And so that gives us the ability to, I think, act better. So that's at the day-to-day personal interaction level. So part of the purpose of life.

But then what's the purpose of your life is, I think, your bigger storyline and these possible futures. And, you know, as a young man, I was often looking for ways to get a shortcut and, you know, get ahead. I mean, in Zen entrepreneurship, I talk about how I started meditating because I thought it would help me be a better programmer or helped me be more successful as an entrepreneur and make more money. It's a very selfish kind of thing.

But then as you start meditating or you start down. spiritual path. What happened to me was I realized I had it the opposite. It was all those crazy challenges that were coming up in the world. We're there to help me with my spiritual growth. Like I had it backwards and that's okay. We get into mindfulness because of stress release, stress reasons or health reasons, et cetera. But then it leads to a broader awareness. So I think we can think of ourselves as having multiple possible futures. And as we visualize ourselves in these futures. Again, getting back this idea of manifesting, I view manifesting not so much as, hey, I'm going to create this, but really that I'm going to look at these different paths that I might

have taken, and then I'm going to navigate to the one that I should be on. And I think that gets to the second part of what I call the Warriors path. You're your lessons, but then your contributions. What is it that you're here to make? And the contributions may just be, you know, to your kids, raising them right. I mean, that's probably the toughest job in the whole world, right? Just to be a mom. But your contribution

might be to be a podcaster. You may be drawn to it. You might be to be a writer. It might be to be a speaker or it might be just to express yourselves artistically. And so I think we can use that frame to say if I were to lay this out

as a storyline, what are the things that I might want to have accomplished that also seem like they fit my character because we chose these particular challenges. I mean, if I chose this particular life, well, then I was born in Pakistan near the city of Lahore

where Yogananda lived when he was a kid, or his parents lived. And then my dad came to the West. And I talk a little bit about his journey and wisdom of a yogi. He first went to Paris, was working on a PhD, got so far, but then decided to come into America because he had two little kids, myself and my brother. and my mom back in Pakistan, and he couldn't get a job in France. So there's this weird set of circumstances that got him here,

even to the point where he had multiple visas to come to the U.S., and he kept turning them down, and people were amazed. How did you just keep getting these visas so easily from the U.S. embassy when you turned it down already? But it all kind of worked out and steered him to come to the U.S. I almost feel like that was part of his storyline was to go from the east to the west and to settle here. And so I think we each have these storylines.

And so part of my storyline in doing that was so that I could understand different cultures. We had a slightly different religion than most people in Michigan where I grew up. And, you know, I don't, not that I lived in Pakistan for too long, but I had an understanding of different cultures and how they work together, which, oddly enough, has now made itself, made its way into my purpose in this life, which is to help try to bridge not just science and religion, but also Eastern and Western ideas and bring them back together. Where in Michigan?

Near Detroit. So do you know Michigan? I grew up in Michigan. Oh, really? So, you know, for those who don't know, Michigan looks like this, and we always use our hand, and Detroit is the biggest city. Yeah. And it's right about here.

And I grew up between Detroit and Toledo. Okay, nice. What they called the Down River area. Yeah, yeah, nice. I grew up in Livonia, so. Oh, yeah, I used to go to a junior achievement group in Livonia when I was in high school, when I was a budding entrepreneur in high school. Cool.

I love it. Yeah. I was going to bring it up. I didn't know that you lived in Michigan. So in regards to what you just said, I feel like it's sort of a bone I have to pick with the Abrahamic faiths. Not that there's immense beauty.

I just appreciate the robustness of the eightfold path and the eight limbs of yoga as a means to take something like the golden rule where if you want to live a life of wisdom, one where you actually review it on your deathbed and you're not filled with regret for all the times you showed up in a way that you could have shown up better

is that you take this concept of do onto others as you do unto yourself, you know, as instead of an outside and instruction as an ontological re-disposition, meaning you have through Pratihara, the withdrawal, the senses, you kind of get quiet within, you start to have an expanded sense of awareness,

and that inherently, allows you to experience somebody outside of you as an extension of yourself as opposed to the subject-object difference where I need to treat you a certain way as opposed to you are part of me and so it becomes inherent and the ethical, moral implications

aren't needing to be taught in the same way. They become self-evident. That's what I love so much about the Eastern traditions and I'm sure what you've resonated as well as a contemplative practitioner is it becomes less of a theory and an actual knowing. And I just find that super supportive, to say the least,

in regards to living a life well-lived. Do you have any thoughts there? Yeah, no, I think, you know, many of us are drawn to a more experiential path. And I think, you know, like with the whole counterculture and the hippies in the 60s, you know, they all grew up pretty much in Christian households. so within the Abrahamic fates,

and then they decided to go towards a lot of these eastern traditions. You know, Steve Jobs went to India looking for Niem Koroly Baba who had passed away, and what he found there instead was a copy of autobiography of a yogi. So he basically walked around India

and read autobiography of yogi. But I think many of us have, probably your audience as well, have this desire to have an experiential sense of why these things that the religions say to do are relevant rather than just being told

as a set of rules. I like to say most religions are started by a mystic and the mystic peaks outside of the physical world. They peak outside of the simulation like Plato's philosopher in the cave.

And then they have to come back and now they have to explain it to the people of that time. How can they explain these experiences which are very much ineffable? They start talking about angels rather than beings of light. They start talking about books of deeds,

and they use technology metaphors, and they use other metaphors, and those things get codified into a religious code. Now, I think for those of us in the West, we look at, say, Buddhism and Hinduism. And I grew up in an Abrahamic faith as well, and of course I went to do a yoga. My dad would always say,

you know, we have that in Islam, too. They're called the Sufis. And I didn't really look seriously into the Sufi tradition until much later. But by then, I already had a grounding in the yogic tradition, so it's actually easier to translate some of those things. But then you have the exoteric form of the religion, which is put into a series of rules that people have to follow,

and not everybody is drawn to the esoteric path. But like you, for me, that's a key part of, I think, my personal seeking was to look for those experiences and to understand them, not just at the level of words, but to understand it intuitively. But people use different terminology. So, for example, I was in Austin, Texas a couple years ago, and I'm sitting on the flight back.

And this woman, we started talking somehow, and I was telling her I was on some podcast and about the simulation hypothesis. And she goes, I knew there was a reason why God told me to talk to you. And I was like, whoa, God told you to talk to me. That's interesting. But then I realized, oh, she's using different language. like I wouldn't say God told me to do it, but I might say I had a synchronicity or I had an intuitive sense

that I should talk to you about something. And so she was using a completely different, more exoteric language for a concept that I think is very common that people have intuitions of things they should do and those are messages that may be coming from outside of the physical world. But I resonate with that as well.

Yeah. Yeah, and it's certainly not to say that because it, religion, at least in the exoteric forms of the following of the commandments and the ritual. They provide a framework that I think is absolutely fundamental for the maturation of a species that needs some sort of sense making and meaning making and a connection to the transcendent as you go on to build that experiential connection, right? I don't want to sound like I'm just bagging on, you know, religion, billions of people follow, but you do point back to the mystical origins and the Gnostic

conceptions of these faiths. And to me, that's a much more fascinating and fulfilling and rewarding endeavor. Yeah, and what's happened is because, you know, the religions can get overly dogmatic. That has led to this whole idea of atheism and the new atheists, right, who are basically militant against not just the traditional, traditional religions, but against any spiritual experience and they keep suggesting that it's not real. All of this is a delusion. Not only has got a delusion, but any spiritual experience you might have is a delusion. And it's our responsibility now as the caretakers of culture. We have to call you out. Just like if, you know, you were psychotic, I would have to give you drugs. If you believe in any spiritual experience, it's my

responsibility as, you know, this professor at Harvard to convince you that it's a delusion. So because of the old battle between religion and science. You know, it's led to this other form of scientism. And I think we need to find something in between these where you're taking everything literally, or you're saying it's all metaphorical and none of it's true, but you want to say that there's essential truths in these. We need to find out what those essential truths are. It doesn't mean there's really St. Peter sitting at a pearly gate with a book, but they're trying to tell you something. What is the thing that they're trying to tell you? And that I think gives it some validity.

Like even with the stories of Yogananda, the swamis that are in multiple locations, the guys that lived for hundreds of years, you can have the scientists say, so for example, I was at ASU recently, ended up going back to school and getting a PhD, and we had a professor who's actually a good friend of mine now, but he started off this session talking about technology and longevity,

and he said, who will be the first person to live to 150? years. I raised my hand and I said, well, I don't buy the premise of the question. I mean, there are plenty of yogis in India who supposedly have lived well over 150 years. There's Trilanga Swami, this 300-pound guy who was in Banaras, who was supposedly almost 300 years old. There was his, you know, his disciples. There were many others that supposedly have lived over 150 years. So, you know, we're looking at it only from this particular Western point of view. And I think we might want to acknowledge that there's more to this reality than that.

And I think we need to bring the sides closer together. One way to do that is to use language that both sides can understand. When Westchette first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to West Jetting since 96.

travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. I'm really interested in that discernment. There's the mystical camp. There is the rationalist camp that wants the proof, you know. And we either collapse into infinite skepticism on one hand or just complete belief, you know, where your mind is so open, it becomes closed again. Your brain falls out, so to speak. And as much as I can as a steward for the,

the conversations on this podcast and then just epistemically how I want to be oriented with humility when I'm exploring these things is how can how can as it's stated you know the matured intellect hold paradox and as an MIT trained computer scientist when you hear of biolocation and telepathy and levitation and you know biography of yogis is riddled with all these amazing stories that come from somebody who seems quite sane. What does somebody who's classically trained in that sense and the scientific paradigm makes sense with all of these things? Well, I think the key is not to be too dogmatic,

either in terms of being part of the faithful, whatever that means, believing every little thing exactly the way that it's been presented. but also to not be too dogmatic on the other side, which is to say, oh, we know by location can't happen, therefore it hasn't happened. Getting back to the idea that science doesn't really know everything and that we are discovering more

and to admit the evidence that something weird might be going on, again, getting back to the evidence of rocks falling from the sky. Now, oftentimes in the scientific world, we say, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. But to be open to those extraordinary proof, you have to at least investigate some of these claims and realize that the world may be much more complicated than we give it credit for. I mean, if you look back at, you know, 17th century science or 18th century science, it looks pretty primitive based upon what we know today around quantum mechanics.

And yet you could make declarative statements. even our medical, you know, our medicine today, 200 years from now, they might look back at us, just like we look back at the guys who were leaching, the doctors that were leaching, and saying this is the cure for everything. I mean, we do something similar. And so I think there's an epistemic humility

that we need to have that comes with discernment and to take multiple accounts seriously that suggests the same thing. So, for example, I might say there's no place called China Now, if one person told me a story, there's a place called China, I might say, you know, you're full of it. There's no place with these temples and, you know, thousands-year-old civilizations. But if multiple people start telling me they've been to China, they might describe it slightly differently because some might have gone down to, you know, near Hong Kong, some might have gone up to Shanghai, some might have gone out to where the Great Wall is. So they're going to have differences.

But there's enough commonality there to you can interpret. or triangulate that in fact there probably is a place called China, even if my professor has never been to China, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It's not controvertible proof of a China. You'd have to go there yourself, and then it becomes part of the tradition that's taught down that we have globe. We know there's a place called China. So I think we have to have that epistemic humility. But we can also be discerning about things and not necessarily believe them, like this story of the palace in the Himalayas. Okay, was that a story that was meant to teach about karma?

Yes, that's my main point. Did it also really happen? I leave the door open for that. Earlier, I was joking about not being able to fly, like Tibet's greatest yogi, was a guy named Milarepa, who supposedly was flying all over the Himalayas. Did he really do that?

We can be open to it, but without taking it on faith, that he necessarily did that. I mean, and there are folks who have seen levitation, levitating yogis. So the levitating saint, which might have sounded crazy

30 years ago to people may not be so crazy today. So I think the more that we're open and the more that we investigate, we can live in this kind of space in between what is, if you think of like logos and mythos. Right? Logos is being used

for things that are real and can be measured and mythos is story. And what happens, even religious scholars, by the way, So I've done a lot with academic study of religion now. I actually published a paper on this idea that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphor that connects these ideas from different religions. Some of the ideas we talked about today and that I'm getting into more in my next book.

But there they say treat religion as a sociological phenomena. Yeah, there are stories they tell each other, but they're not necessarily real. Or you convert to the religion and you believe everything is real, like the miracles of Jesus. But there's something in between that says that there are. principles that we don't know about which would allow these miracles to happen, but that doesn't mean we have to believe every little story literally as it's put together because the stories often have ideas or points that they're trying to make. So I think it's important to bring the left brain and the right brain together.

I think you can go too far in one direction. And this has been part of my life mission and what's made it difficult at times, because when I'm with the rationalist, I'm like the Wu guy. But when I'm with people that are into like you age things and spiritual, I'm like the rationalist. Right? So did that really happen? Did it not happen? So I think we can maintain a healthy balance.

But also admitting evidence, it's almost like from a lot of the scientists' point of view, they're in a courtroom and they can dismiss any evidence that they want. And they say, well, of course we win because we can just dismiss any evidence as not being admissible. But eyewitness testimony, subjective experience is the first part of evidence for things like new. near-death experiences. And then you have people who record, tell what was going on in the waiting room. They talk about, you know, the clothes that a new person that's entering the surgery after they're out or wearing or the conversation that they had or something that was going on outside of the hospital. Now, they can't necessarily do that on-demand. You can't have a near-death experience on-demand, which is why the scientists might say, well, that doesn't really exist. But the fact that it happened at all,

it's so highly unlikely that they would have been able to know exactly what was going on in the next room or share death experiences. So around death, I think we can start to look at that as a model. What happens is when people have near-death experiences, they tell the nurses. They don't tell the doctors because the doctors don't believe them. He say, oh, yeah, here's a prescription. But the nurses will sit there and hear these stories all day, and some of them are pretty extraordinary. And so I encourage people to look at that as a way to kind of open their minds.

But I think we can be discerning and still be open to extraordinary experiences, but not necessarily take every single story or every single person in what's called. I mentioned my friend Danube Brinkley, who was struck by lightning and he wrote Save by the Light. He's a thick South Carolina accent. And he was saying, that's the Swami business, Riz. So we don't have to believe everything that anybody in the Swami business says, because in our society there's a lot of potential benefits, financial benefits, et cetera, in that.

Perhaps maybe people are exaggerating claims you don't know, perhaps that happened. So I think you can keep a healthy balance. That's what I've tried to do. And for the scientific endeavor that verifies off of repeatability, I totally, I walk that balance as much as I can as well. there is this difference between irrational and non-rational, which is important too, right?

This one plus one equaling three is irrational as opposed to non-rational is I have this experience that, you know, this transpersonal mystical experience where my body turns into a ball of bliss and light and I meet these astral sages. Okay, I'm not going to be able to give you a proof that you know and and it does i think and you highlighted great that the that the matured mind needs to be able to not discount firsthand person experiences uh but without giving it objective

claim as well because then you get into really dangerous territory where i think you know campbell is quoted as the psychotic drowns in the same water the mystic swims in with delight right where is the difference in the cogency or coherency of somebody genuinely making mystical contact with something versus an internally generated hallucinated state. Right, and that happens. And recently there's

obviously there has been a lot of popularity around using DMT and using psychedelics. And I think that's where you have to start to triangulate a little bit and say okay, where are these hallucinations, were these similar hallucinations. It almost provides a backdoor materialist

way to say, okay, the spirituality, the spiritual experience, don't exist because they're just chemicals that are floating in your brain, right? Like, it's possible to have a perspective on psychedelics of looking down on yourself, therefore all cases of auto body experiences

are, in fact, just that. But it's not really that easy to go to the other room and see what people are doing in the other room. So you have to I think you have to have a healthy dose of skepticism, but also be open-minded about it. So, yeah, I do like the point about the mystic

and, you know, drowning in the same water as the psychotic, because that's another thing we have to be careful of. Sometimes I think certainty is the problem. We crave certainty. And, you know, Freud even said, the danger in self-analysis is that we are too soon satisfied with an incomplete explanation. And I think that happens when we get certainty about something before.

Perhaps we should. Perhaps we, you know, we need to take more time to think about these things. And of course, the rationalist wants certainty. They're like, okay, either happened or it didn't happen. That's it. And I need to know right now, and I'm just going to assume that it hasn't happened. Yeah, any description of something will never be exhaustive of its substance, right? Like, there's just no way.

There's just fundamentally incompatible, supposed, like language and actual experience. And that's where we get into trouble, you know, thinking the finger pointing at the moon is the moon, right? And get lost in the dogmatic perspective. What's outside the simulation? Well, that's the big $64,000 question. There's $64 million today, I guess we'd say. But for me, I don't take a strong position on that. I need you to give me a certain answer.

But the theories are, again, going out of from the rationalist perspective, it's us, it's future humans, that are running what is called an ancestor simulation. Like if we were running a simulation of Rome, of ancient Rome or ancient Greece, we would be running a simulation of our ancestors. There's the idea that it's aliens or other non-human species. I mean, I tend to go towards the more spiritual view that it's us,

but a less physical version of us that's outside. So I almost like to view it using the analogy of the film. We're all sitting in a theater. We're actually more like balls of light sitting there. Each of us is tapped into this multiplayer game and we can, you know, as we start to remember,

we can come out of it, but we also are coordinating with each other. But today we use technological metaphors, and so there's part of us that's just sitting there watching this almost as if it's a big movie screen. But in reality, we're all kind of seeing different parts of this virtual world on our own consciousness. So I would say that it's individual souls, if you will,

are like the players. And then there might be a level beyond that where all the souls are connected. But I think the simulation is crafted by us in many ways outside of the simulation. So getting back to the question of why do we run simulations and why do we play video games, is to have these experiences. And now sometimes we will play games that other people have designed, which is what most people do. But then now we have mods in games or modification.

so individual players can start to modify things and change things. So they're not just selecting. They're actually changing the actual code of the game and making it different. So I think we can do that too. You say that kindness is not commanded in this worldview, but it's enforced by its architecture. So we spoke a bit about this earlier. But if this is the way that things are,

what does that mean about the way in which we should relate to all life especially other people? Well, you know, Yogananda once said that ceaseless joy is not the nature of this world. And he called it the warp and woof of Maya. And he said, you know, we are always taking the beatings of the world. And then we have to go back and meditate to get ready for the next set of beatings that we're going to get in the next And, you know, most people think Yogananda had kind of a charmed life, but in fact, he had serious challenges along the way. And so I've kind of pulled elements of that story as well. Like, he wasn't the most qualified person to come to the West. I mean, he had never given a speech

in English. He barely squeaked by in a two-year associate's degree where he had to learn a little bit of English, but he couldn't speak it very well. And yet he ended up having this task placed before him to come to the West and try to bridge the gap between these big traditions. But yeah, I think, you know, kindness is part of the purpose of the game, and we're here to learn that. And each time we go through the game, we realize, oh, this is places we weren't kind. This is places where we treated people badly, and we should have been more kind. And that's something that we can do better in the next time, you know, that we play the game. So I'd almost say it's geared towards teaching us that eventually.

but it's hard to teach that without having an environment where you don't have the free will to actually do things that are unkind. So you almost need that as a teaching environment. There's the whole thing about tell it to me and I'll remember it for an hour, show it to me, I'll remember it for a day, but let me experience it and then I'll remember it forever.

And I think that's the nature of the game is we have to come in and experience both sides of that, to be treated unkindly as well as to have the opportunity to be kind, but then not, you know, having made choices out of our programming in the world to not be kind and then to have to review that afterwards and say, okay, perhaps we should do something different next time. How does this, if you zoom in on the very practical experience of your with your spouse or a friend or colleague, and they do something which you do not like, it very well may harm somebody,

have very real implications and consequences. The way that you're sharing the perspective of simulation hypothesis and bridging it with the Eastern traditions and how kindness is sort of enforced by the architecture, to me it's like almost viewing individuals as more like phenomena unto themselves. Not that we don't have any agency or will, but that to agree there's an impersonal aspect

of these forces that are happening with, and that can be really tough pill to swallow or actually put into practice when something happens you don't like. But I'm curious how that actually changes the way that you respond to difficulties in relationship dynamics, for example. Well, you know, that's a tough one. Relationships in general are tough. But I think one way to approach it is if the person is open, to these ideas, and not all people are, is to remind them of what that would be like in the life review. And sort of in the moment, if you remind them,

or you remind yourself, first of all, but then you remind them, well, what do you think is going to happen if you had to review that from the other person's point of view? And so that's one way to think about it. Another way, though, is that sometimes people have to be free to make, if we call it, mistakes in this particular sense, because that's kind of what they learn from. So not everyone, in the same way that many people just need an exoteric set of rules, not everyone is ready to examine their own behavior.

And we have so much conditioning in this life. I mean, if you look at karma itself, we just think of it as one thing, but there's like, I don't know, at least six or seven different types of karma if you look in the traditions. There's the karma from this life, the karma from the past life. There are all these different aspects to it. And our programming in this life

causes us to react a certain way. And if people aren't willing to examine that to say that, hey, this is a repetitive behavior, I always encourage people to look for patterns in their lives. And a pattern is when something happens, it happens once is probably a fluke. If it happens twice, okay, now you're seeing something.

If it happens 30 times, then it becomes a pattern. Right. So I knew people in the business world who would have the same kind of experience with different people they've hired. They'd start off trusting them too much and then they would end up being pissed off at them and fired them.

And this would happen repeatedly. So it's when it happens repeatedly, you realize, oh, that's part of your external pattern, which is based on an internal pattern. And so if they can observe these patterns, or we all know a young man or young woman who maybe gets into a relationship and it runs its course

and then into another relationship, which seems different, but then it ends up running a similar course. It's like it becomes a pattern that is manifesting itself. And I think part of the reason we're here is to learn about those patterns. And that gets back to the Vassanas

that we were talking about earlier. But if those are the... What happens in a video game if you don't complete a quest? You do it again. You do it right again. And again. So perhaps the universe, the questing engine, is creating more situations for you to do the same thing until you stop the groundhog day, kind of doing it again and again.

But yeah, it's very difficult with self-analysis too. Not just your partner. With yourself, it's even more difficult, I think, to do that. Yeah, definitely brings in a lot of compassion to the picture. A couple last little closing questions. Are UFOs interstellar, are the interdimensional? What are your high-level thoughts there? Well, my high-level thoughts are both,

in that there's certainly no reason some of them couldn't be extraterrestrial. And in fact, if you were to create a game this big with this many planets, wouldn't you want to have civilizations on different planets evolving and then meeting to see what might happen next? So you have civilizational level games that are at different levels of technological advancement.

That said, Fermi paradox. Yeah, Fermi paradox. But again, probably the best answer to Fermi to paradox is at some point in Earth's $4 billion history, we've probably been visited. We just don't necessarily have records of it. But if you look at people's UFO accounts, and I've spent a lot of time now with people in this world as an advisor to the Galileo Project at Harvard. I've worked with the Soul Foundation, which was Gary Nolan's group out of Stanford. And if you look at these sightings, they show us perhaps that reality itself is a little more complex than we're thinking.

So I just wrote an article. People can find it on my substack called the Avatar Hypothesis, which is a term that I think I heard Gary originally used, but it's really the merger of the simulation hypothesis and UFO sightings. And it talks about the idea that perhaps what we see as UFOs are in fact rendered elements from outside of the simulation, and they're able to render in its specific XYZ coordinates. And like your avatar in the game, you can change the appearance of the avatar. And there have been instances where one person sees the UFO and the person standing next to them doesn't see it.

And there have been instances where one person sees like a circle and another person sees like a big rod but they're right next to each other so it's not like they're viewing it from far away where they might have a different perspective so that raises the question are we all rendering this on our own individual screens

and I think simulation theory gives us a way that at least that's possible I could have the UFO show up because I have the C UFO skills and you might not see it there And so it gets back to this question of, is it really there or not?

And I think with the beings, it becomes even more interesting because as you look back at the spiritual traditions of the world and the folklore, you find that every civilization has its own set of other beings that supposedly are here on earth with us,

but they pop in and out of our reality. You have the Faye in the Celtic traditions. I mean, we think of them as little fairies like Japan, but really, I mean, there's like a whole civilization within the Irish and the Scottish and the Celtic traditions of these civilizations having wars. And in the Middle East, we have the Jin, which are these beings that live here on earth with us. They can perceive us.

We can't always perceive them. But they can render themselves into our reality. And I think perhaps these other beings are presenting themselves as aliens or technological society as a way to interact with us, because that's our dominant cultural mode. And in the past, maybe we interpreted those as angels. You know, you have Ezekiel's wheel. You have stories going back hundreds or thousands of years of things in the sky that couldn't really have been there.

But they're interpreted through the technological cultural lens of the time. We are now interpreting these weird things through our current technological lens, which is about craft, spacecraft. We've just become a space-faring organization. So we're saying, oh, they must be extraterrestrial. They must be from another planet. because that's all we can understand.

In fact, that's not even that weird outside the materialist paradigm, even though many scientists think there's no way to get here. They don't know how they could travel faster than the speed of life. But that's 21st century, 20th century, 21st century physics,

so we don't really know how it work. But it's possible that we are interpreting them that way. Like, if you talk to contactees in the 50s, you know, they've been told that these beings that they interact with. If you believe that they interacted with an actual being, they're from Venus or Mars

because that's what they could kind of understand at the time. Today they're from Zeta Reticuli or some other star or the Pleiades or some other star system. Well again, that makes sense within our paradigm and we can understand that but they could certainly be lying to us

if you look at the work of Jacques Valet who was part of Project Blue Book and has been in the space for a while he really made an impact on me when I was talking to him about these different sightings that are just bizarre which show that they may be something non-physical that gets rendered into the physical world. Which would, yeah, be more interdimensional.

It would be like an interdimensional type of thing, yeah. And that's why they can pop in and out in any X, Y, Z coordinate. If you think in a video game, how do you get from one planet to another? You don't have to go all the way necessarily. You can pop. You can de-render here, and you can render at this other set of X, Y, Z coordinates.

Do you ever feel like these perspectives are a perspective of privilege and where a logical mind really wants to have a reason their way to a theory of everything? Whereas a mother raising a child in a struggling village in Africa, like these. these perspectives can quickly become so theoretical and almost literally take you off of the ground of the suffering of humanity. Do you ever catch yourself in that inquiry? Well, yeah. I mean, they certainly can be that way. I mean, people who talk about the simulation hypothesis tend to be from a more affluent culture. People who played video games.

that said, I think this is where tying it to the spiritual traditions of the world actually makes it more tangible because of this idea that we're having suffering in the world. How are we going to ascribe meaning to that? I mean, there's the problem of what they call the odyssey, which gets back to a statement I made earlier that I often get from, particularly the atheist podcasters, you know, they're like, because they're suffering in the world, it can't be a God because what kind of God would allow the suffering. But I think religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, the physical world, but also what might be beyond the physical world. And I think science is also trying to make sense of the physical world.

For me personally, I find the simulation hypothesis combines those two. We're trying to figure out how the world works, what are the rules for how the world works, but we're also trying to figure out what is the purpose, what's beyond the physical world, and how does that relate to the things that are happening to us on a day-to-day basis. So when I talk about quests, I don't mean it to be in an abstract way. I mean the actual challenges that you have of being in a village in Africa where you don't have enough water and you're a mother with kids, what are you going to do? Well, that's a pretty challenging situation. So I think if we bring it down to that level, then it's something that actually makes sense because people in those environments tend to

gravitate towards the religion of the region or of the tribe or whatever, even if it's not a former religion, whatever beliefs that there are, which were the attempt thousands of years ago to try to make meaning out of this. So I think we're still engaged in that same process today, but I think our analogies and metaphors today, using what we know about the science of the world and our technology metaphors are more sophisticated. They allow, they're closer to what reality is. They're not quite reality yet. That's why I say it doesn't mean it's a game sitting on a 386 processor in some guy's basement.

That's not what I'm saying. It would be the entire universe is like a quantum computing device that is generating these things. And then the logic behind it is based on the database and whoever designed it and each of our particular choices in the world. I love this conversation. It's been so fun. Yeah.

intellectually simulating but also connected to the heart. I think it can, on that axis, there's definitely that spectrum too, and it can quickly go only in one or the other. I like the synthesis between the two, Dr. Riz. Is that cool? Yeah, that's cool. It's been a lot of fun, and that's partly why I point out the access. Because I think people tend to just be on one side or the other,

and they don't know about the X's itself. We're on the spectrum, baby. That's right, the spectrum. Simulation spectrum. That's good. That's good. I'm going to use that. This show is my own love on the spectrum season. We'll leave links down in the description where people can stay connected to your work.

But is there any, before I ask you the very last closing question, you want to point people towards? Yeah, so my website is zen entrepreneur.com. And it's got information about my books. I've got a new book coming out in about a month. called the Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream. So it's building on this idea that the challenges that we have in the business world are actually part of our spiritual growth.

The subtitle is an MIT grad's Adventures in Business and Consciousness, but I informally call it how I made my first million and lost my first love in Silicon Valley on the search for enlightenment. But they can also find me on social media on Instagram at Riz Cambridge, like the city, or on X Twitter at Riz Stanford, like the university. Amazing. Thank you. If you had 60 seconds to answer this question, what would you say? If this really is a game we came to play, what is one truth you would wish we would all keep as a reminder and carry with us in it?

I would say that challenges are integral to the nature of the game. So when something bad happens, we can view it as misforci. or we can view it as an integral part of the game itself. It's an experience. It may not be a pleasant experience, but it is an experience. And if we remember that, I think we can both enjoy the game more, but also take some of these things a little less seriously,

which helps with our mental health as well, I think. Well said, thank you. Until next time. Thanks so much for having you. This has been so much fun. Yeah. Thank you, everybody, for tuning into this episode of the Know-Li-Self podcast.

next time, take care, be well, and enjoy your game. Thank you, man. We did it.