Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Are we living in a Simulation? with Guest Rizwan Virk - Episode 121

Starting point is 00:00:00 We have a very, very special interview today. We're going down the rabbit hole today. And this is in the world of the simulation hypothesis. And we have the author of that. And his name is Rizwan Verk. And I just want to share with you a little bit about this guy before we get started. He is a really, really impressive individual. And I have devoured his books like I like to devour pizza.

Starting point is 00:00:25 So Rizwan Verk is a successful entrepreneur. He's an investor, a futurist, best. selling author, video game industry pioneer, as well as an indie film producer. He received his BS in computer science from MIT. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. And an MS in management at Stanford's GSB. He's currently working on his PhD, Arizona State University's College of Global Futures, researching Metaverse and Virtual Worlds. So Riz, as he lets me call him now, was the founder of what was called Play Labs at MIT. And it was a startup accelerator held on campus at MIT Game Lab.

Starting point is 00:01:04 He also runs Bayview Labs and is a venture partner with Griffin Gaming Partners. One of the largest gaming VC funds. And he's also the advisor to Ridge Ventures. Riz is an advisor to so many startups. He's been involved in Silicon Valley. He's just an amazing guy. He's involved in blockchain organizations and private foundations. His interest and expertise ranges from startups of VC industry, video games,

Starting point is 00:01:32 Metaverse, all of that stuff. When I looked at him, I said, man, this guy is amazing. His podcast, which is called The Simulated Universe, which is the name of one of his books, I've read two of us books now, explores many of these issues like UFOs and the intersection of science and science fiction, religions and UFOs and all that stuff. So as a Silicon Valley angel investor, he's invested in, many startups, including tapjoy, telltale games, discord, one billion tech, and many, many others.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Unbelievable guy. Riz is also an indie film producer, as I said before, and prolific author. His books include startup myths and models, the simulation hypothesis, which I read, the Zen Entrepreneurship, which is next on my list, the treasure hunt, which is really, really cool concept, the treasure hunt, follow your inner clues to find true success. That's the treasure hunt. The second book I read was the simulated multiverse, which is super, super cool. So Riz has been featured in things like Inc. Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street

Starting point is 00:02:35 Journal, TechCrunch, NBC News, and many other places. He has been interviewed extensively ranging in The Daily Show with John Stewart, Inside Edition, digital coast-to-coast AM, CBC's Tapestry everywhere, the History Channel, and he's also on Gaya TV. I don't know if you know what Gaya TV is, but Gaya is a subscription-based internet channel. channel that I use, and it's just awesome. I feel like personal growth, self-discovery and stuff like that. It is my honor and privilege to introduce somebody that I just, in awe of, really, really speaks to me and he'll speak to you as well, the amazing Rizwanberg. So pleased and honored to have you here with us today. Great to be here with you. And where are you located right now?

Starting point is 00:03:16 Where are you living? Well, it depends on the time of year, but in the summer I'm in Boston. at other times I'm either in Arizona at ASU where I'm doing some doctoral work or the Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interesting choice of locations. So what I'd love to do, first and foremost, I just want to let you know. I mean, my followers know a lot about this. I talk a lot about simulation hypothesis. And it's also leading into the current reality of like the potential duplication of it ourselves with the metaverse and everything like that. But I found Rizwan's work, and he's an extraordinary individual.

Starting point is 00:03:54 We're going to go in a little bit into his past. But I was reading a little bit up on the amazing Philip K. Dick, and I learned about this really cool guy that did an interview with his wife. No, that was a pivotal part of your journey as well. But anyway, I found these two books that I've already highlighted on my show many, many times, specifically simulation hypothesis and simulation multiverse. And I was explaining to him in the pregame that reading his books is kind of like eating pizza in the sense that like I don't usually just eat a slice of pizza. I usually like to eat the whole pie.

Starting point is 00:04:28 So, you know, I just devoured these books and I'm so, so excited to finally get to meet the guy that wrote them. So Rizwan, if you could, I want to go a little bit into your past, specifically your MIT days. And then when you came out of there with this desire to get into the video gaming industry from the program, programming perspective. I mean, this guy's done a lot of stuff. You heard that in the intro. I'd love to tee it up where your fascination for this simulation hypothesis came from and make sure we get that ping pong story in there. Sure. Well, my fascination with this idea of living inside a video game started back when I was young. And I'm old enough that I used to play the Atari video game system, you know, back in the early 80s as a kid. And we had classic games like

Starting point is 00:05:15 space invaders, Pac-Man. And there was a racing game called Pole Position. And I remember looking at the track, and as the car went around on the track, there were these bleachers, and then there would be mountains or a city beyond. And I always wondered, what was beyond the screen that I could see?

Starting point is 00:05:31 Was there a virtual world in there? And, of course, there wasn't with those Atari games. Those were eight-bit, very simple games. Later, when I went to MIT and learned all about programming, I learned more about how these games were built. and of course, games got more sophisticated with Nintendo. They became 16-bit games. And then, after graduating, I was an entrepreneur,

Starting point is 00:05:53 started a few enterprise software companies, which is a little more boring. But then I moved to Silicon Valley and got into the video game industry when the mobile device was becoming the new popular platform. So, you know, the iPhone had just come out. We made a game called Tap Fish, which was the number one game in the app store back in the day.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And we were creating this little world where the fish would live, you know, inside the game. And I started to learn more about how these video games were built and how they were designed. And today we have massively, you know, multiplayer online role-playing games like Fortnite on the phone. But back then, it was very difficult to get information on 3G out to the phone. And so I started to think about it a little more.

Starting point is 00:06:32 But it was really after I sold my last video game company, I was visiting a startup in Marin County, which is just across the bay from San Francisco. And so, you know, I had this beautiful view of the San Francisco skyline. But the people that were there, like myself, we were all geeks and we wanted to see the latest technology. And there was this virtual reality headset and game that they were building. So we put on the VR headset and I was playing this ping pong game. And the game was so realistic that I forgot that I was actually in virtual reality.

Starting point is 00:07:01 And it wasn't even the graphics. Like the graphics were still kind of crude by today's standards. This was back in like 2016, I think. It was the responsiveness of, you know, when I moved the paddle, it really felt like I was hitting a ball. So it was really the physics engine and the responsiveness that fooled my brain into thinking that I was actually playing a real table tennis game so much so that at the end of the game I tried to put the paddle down on the table and then I tried to lean against the table. And of course, there was no table. And the controller fell to the floor and I almost fell over. And I had to kind of do a double take. And that's when I started to wonder, well, how long will it be before we can build fully immersive technology that will make. make us completely forget that we are in the real world. I mean, obviously, I knew I had a VR headset on at the time, but I still kind of forgot. And so I came up with these 10 stages of technology development, which by the way, pretty much looks like, you know, the roadmap of the

Starting point is 00:07:57 metaverse as meta and other companies, you know, want to make it. But that's how I got deeply into this topic. As I explored these stages to figure out, when would we get to what I call the simulation point, which is the point at which we could create virtual worlds that were indistinguishable from physical worlds. And then that led to opening up a whole host of philosophical issues, issues around quantum physics. I had also done a lot of meditation and yoga in the past. And so I was interested in consciousness. And I realized that this topic, simulation theory, actually ties science, technology, consciousness, these big questions from religion altogether. And so that's what led me really deep down this rabbit hole. And actually interviewing Philip K. Dick's

Starting point is 00:08:41 wife, Tessa, was a part of that. I knew he had a famous speech in Metz, France, in 1977, where he said, you know, we are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. We would have the sense that we were reliving the same events again and again. And so he was one of the first in the modern era to really talk about the world being some type of computer program or simulation. It's so fascinating to hear that story because what it unfolds is that this is all based on curiosity. And one of the things that I find very interesting about this concept, and some people are closed to it. You mentioned religion before. My observation is that somebody that's closed to this and says that's impossible,

Starting point is 00:09:27 which means that they've never actually looked into it, right? If somebody says this is impossible, they just don't understand what possible means. Because what's so fascinating about this work is that it can't be disproved, right? So from that platform, that's where my interest is, is that I'm open to anything that is hypothetically possible, hence the name, hypothesis. But what's interesting about all of this concept of curiosity, I remember pole position. I had Atari. Same age, yeah. So, like, I'm kind of in the same boat where I just, I'm curious and I look at all these things. And what I find is interesting about it. And if you have something to say on this, I'd love you to speak to this, is the whole concept of perception that human beings have plays a big role in the outcome of our life.

Starting point is 00:10:18 If we have this programmed perception to think things are as we see them and we're not open to the hypothesis that you're talking about, we will rely on our knee-jerk reactions all the time. But what I love about your book, and I don't know if you've ever looked at your book as a tool to, who empower human beings from a personal growth standpoint. But I just want to share that when you go through these 10 stages and you look at this idea of reaching the simulation point and you just open yourself up to it, what it does is it arms you with the ability to not buy into everything that you see and think that it could be something else. So are you aware of that from a personal growth self-development standpoint, like that idea of empowering people with this possibility? Yeah, you know, I had thought about that, you know, because the questions that I often get asked,

Starting point is 00:11:13 you know, when I speak about it, you know, first are, you know, how can I prove it's real or not? And then that opens up a whole rabbit hole. But then the next question they often get is, okay, how does this matter to me? Would it make a difference if I was in a simulation or not? And, you know, some people say, well, I'd be afraid if this was a simulation. I'd be terrified. Now, I'm just some AI wandering around in this virtual world and I have no control over anything and I have no free will. And so some of the more traditional religious people I talk to first object to the simulation hypothesis from that perspective.

Starting point is 00:11:45 But then when I go into a little more detail and I say, well, there's what I call two versions of the simulation hypothesis. They're not really completely different versions. It's more like a spectrum. There's the NPC version, which is the non-player character version, where everyone in the game is an AI or an NPCs, what we call them within video games. And then there's the RPG version

Starting point is 00:12:05 or the role playing game version where just as, you know, when I play World of Warcraft, I have an avatar and I define that character, just like, you know, we used to do with Dungeons and Dragons back in the day, which is popular again because of stranger things, right? You have a character sheet

Starting point is 00:12:20 and you'd say, okay, these are the different attributes that I have, but then you inhabit that role for a period of time. And so in that case, you are a player of the game. You are consenting to be in the game. And I believe that can be very empowering because particularly when big challenges come into our life. And so the guy who created, you know, the Atari and really the first major video games that were widely available was Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. And I met him,

Starting point is 00:12:47 you know, a few years back. And, you know, he had this phrase that he used to use with his game designers. And he said, you know, the game should be easy to play, but hard to master. And I think that's a great metaphor for the game of life. It's easy to play, but it's not so, you know, it can be difficult to master. And, you know, when you play a video game, you have to have these challenges. Otherwise, you'll get bored with the game. And so these challenges are actually a key part of what makes the game interesting. And if you don't make the challenge the first time, well, you can go do it again. And you can keep playing at the game until you get there. And so when bad things happen to us, it can be a different perspective that can be pretty empowering

Starting point is 00:13:25 to think that we have, I mean, each of us has characters and storylines. I'm a big fan of the personal growth field, but sometimes I feel like we lose perspective that perhaps each of us has multiple storylines that we have planned. If I'm playing Grand Theft Auto versus Lord of the Rings Online,

Starting point is 00:13:46 I'm looking for a different type of experience, right? And in my case, I've always been drawn to computers and computer programming and video games, and I knew that was always a part of my storyline. But I also had this sense, if you asked me when I was a kid, I'd say, well, I'm going to be an entrepreneur, and then I'm going to become a writer. And now, how did I know that? I almost feel that we have these possible storylines, not that they're fixed, but they are adventures that we might want to have.

Starting point is 00:14:14 And then sometimes, you know, we need to be pulled back from what we're doing because we're missing out on some storyline that we were supposed to be working on, but we didn't necessarily get there. I mean, I'll share a story with you. I haven't talked about this too much, but it ties directly to my writing these books. And so I spent most of my career as an entrepreneur and an investor and a venture capitalist, and we've invested in some well-known companies like Discord,

Starting point is 00:14:39 which many people use today. But the writing was more of a hobby, it was sort of pushing it off. And then a few years back, actually about four years ago now, I ended up having some serious medical issues, related to the heart. And it basically upset my entire plan for what I was going to do next. And I found myself in a very long recovery period from this surgery. And I basically couldn't do all the things

Starting point is 00:15:04 that I was planning to do in my mind. I was going to start a venture capital fund and do all of these things. And basically, the only thing I could do was right for a while. And so, you know, this tragedy that kind of upset what I thought I wanted actually ended up having a higher purpose and guided me back to something I've always wanted to do, but I just wasn't spending enough time on, which was much more meaningful to me, which is my writing. And so pretty much the last four years,

Starting point is 00:15:29 mostly I've been a writer, and then the business stuff has been kind of my hobby on the side. So it flipped. And so, you know, there's an example where we can, if we think of the game of life and the storylines that were here to play, we can get a different perspective, thinking of simulation theory. Yeah, it's interesting.

Starting point is 00:15:45 If you look at any components of personal growth, There's all these amazing quotes that if you're open to it, lend to everything that you just said. One of them that comes to mind right now is this idea that if you change the way you look at things, things you look at change. So you could say that to a room full of people and they all get it. They'll say, oh yeah, so, you know, words of affirmation and all of these laws of the

Starting point is 00:16:09 universe that for some reason people buy into. But then when you say something like this, like, hey, this is potentially a simulation. and there's a kid in some sort of advanced civilization with a laptop and a program called Planet Earth, and everything is programmed into that. That's where all of a sudden I think, and I think it's rooted in our programming from our mother, father, teacher, preacher, and our religions and all that stuff. One of the things that we've always done in our family is embrace all religions, almost like we're devouring and consuming personal growth, just because they all have such cool little things.

Starting point is 00:16:45 one of the things that really attracted me to this. And as a kid, even as a kid, I was just an observer. And I know that you speak a lot about this. And what's fascinating to me is like, so like if this is a simulation and it's been programmed, and let's just hypothetically say that we are, we are all some sort of like advanced AI that is so advanced, we don't even know that we're AI, right? Why are some people gifted, perhaps, with the ability to see? see and be open to things in the simulation and some are not. This is an interesting concept for me.

Starting point is 00:17:22 Like you and I, we could go out and have a couple drinks and talk about this all night and just have a ball with it. But the masses would actually reject it. And I know that it's because they're rooted in it. But why in the simulation, and I don't know if you can answer this, but why in the simulation have certain people been gifted with a level of consciousness to the possibility that it exists and some aren't. Well, you know, that's a good question and not one that's easily answered, but, you know, my sense is that the more we play, the more, you know, we become conscious of the meta game, right?

Starting point is 00:17:58 So it's like when you play a video game, the first time you're just trying to master the mechanics of what's in the video game. But as you start to realize more about how things are put together, there's something we call the meta game, right? So within a card collecting. game, right? There's, you know, people are sharing cards, but they kind of step back and say, okay, what is this really about and what are the other things that make up this game that are not in what I call the rendered world? So, you know, I think that those of us who are more curious about

Starting point is 00:18:27 it have been playing the game, but we now have played it enough times with enough challenges and quests, right? Another aspect of this personal development tying it to a simulation or a video game is that we may have quests that we have to overcome. And that's how video games are built. Otherwise, they get boring, right? And you have to accept those quests and move up on those quests. And it could just be that the quests that most people have signed up for are just the quests around daily life, survival, nuts and bolts, which of course has its satisfaction and its happiness as well. And there could be those of us who decided, okay, well, now there's these other quests called thinking about the nature of things and moving beyond that. And

Starting point is 00:19:08 things. And so I think that has something to do with it as well. But I don't know that there's any particular pattern you can discern on that, right? Sometimes people get there from being really successful in the physical world, and sometimes people get there from, you know, not being very successful in the physical and stepping back. I think it's more about stepping back, really, and trying to get a perspective of not just what's on the screen, right? It's kind of like in that scene in the matrix, right, where when Morpheus, who's named after the Greek god of dreams, you know, finally gets Neo to wake up, and then he puts him in a little simulation, right, which if you remember, there's a famous scene where there's like a kind of a red chair

Starting point is 00:19:47 and he's sitting on it and there's a white background and he's like, whoa, you know, Neo's like, whoa, is this real? And Morpheus says, well, what is real? You know, reality is really a series of electromagnetic signals that are being sent to your brain. And so I think, you know, those of us who have thought about being in a slightly different version of things would be more likely or more open to thinking about this, I think. Folks, you know, when you read books like this, it's probably going to be prompted by you having some sort of curiosity and fascination with it. But if that fascination and curiosity has just been awoken, his books, and I hope that I can call you Riz at this point. Yeah, please do.

Starting point is 00:20:27 His books are very, very deep, but also very easy to understand because he takes the time to go through the stages. So I highly recommend one of your first steps if you want to go down this rabbit hole would be to check that out. It's one thing to identify that this is a simulation. And my concept behind that is, so what?

Starting point is 00:20:47 Whether it is or isn't, it's what I think is real. And accepting it as a simulation is just saying my real is simulation. And I'm fine with it. You know, like I was walking with my wife this morning. And we always joke whenever we because we're all about not letting anybody dampen our fire.

Starting point is 00:21:06 So whenever we meet somebody that maybe has a bad look on their face or road rage or anything like that, we always call them cartoons. We always say, oh, they don't even exist, which can get you in trouble. But then my wife will challenge me and she'll go, well, then, so are you saying, I'm not real? And I go, well, that depends, like Morpheus said to Neo, that depends on what real is. But I just want you to know that whatever you are, I like it. That's what I say to my way. So, you know, I've had a friend who came to me one day and she said, I think my husband's an NBC. And I said, well, let's not go down that route too far.

Starting point is 00:21:41 Because if you imagine a multiplayer game, then, you know, your husband is also a player who has his or her storyline, right? Each of our storylines are evolving together. And that's what an MMORPG is all about. But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there. No, no, you're absolutely right. And when we say that people are cartoons, what I'm saying is, is, oh, those are just NPCs. You know, you can choose to interact with them or not. Because one of the things that I notice in the program, in the simulation,

Starting point is 00:22:07 is that certain people are susceptible to everything that the NPCs have to say. And certain people have the ability to not render them, perhaps. You know, it's like they don't, like somebody that's got their, their shit together in life. And, you know, I'm really focused on what they want and what they can and can't control. And that's something that I practice a lot. I don't notice the NPCs as much as other people. So it's interesting to think about what level of control we have, because I would assume that if I'm AI,

Starting point is 00:22:40 something about my programming and my advancedness of AI give me the ability to control what I see and what I don't see. Well, yeah, now you get to the levels of the AI, right? And if you think of a video game, you can think of level five characters versus level 50 characters in that game. And level 50 characters, like if I have a level 5 character, I might be in a scene with you, and you're a level 50 character. You might see things that I can't see, right?

Starting point is 00:23:08 And they're just rendered inside your particular rendering device, just like today. We're not really having a conversation right now. I am talking to my computer and your responses are being rendered on my local computer and my responses are being rendered on your local computer. Who's the NPC here? I prefer to think of it as the MMRP version, right? Where each of us has our own storylines evolving and we're interacting with each other. And that's one of the things that's going on.

Starting point is 00:23:38 Another way to approach it is to say, what is this NPC trying to tell me, right? Are they trying to get a reaction from me, right? If there's a road rage or something, are they trying to get me to yell back at them, right? What is actually, if this were an NPC, not necessarily saying that everybody is, but why is it coming to me at this point in time? And how do I level up from this interaction? Yeah, that you just made me think of the Hunger Games and Katnus Everdeen and how the people would float down some sort of elixir or something to heal her.

Starting point is 00:24:10 That's an example of that because there's another perspective to this. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you is looking at this possibility, and we haven't even gotten into the multiverse because I don't want to have people like hemorrhage and melt their brains yet. but like the multiverse would be the idea that this is actually happening multiple times and multiple realities. Like I was telling my wife the other day and I'm like another level of this. She didn't like this was the idea that there's another reality where you and I didn't meet, you know, and all that stuff. But what's fascinating to think about, and this is a question I have

Starting point is 00:24:44 for you is, and this would just be getting your opinion on it. You know, there's not going to be any science behind this, just somebody that's done a lot of the work. Taking into account that this is a simulation and taking into account and accepting the fact of what our role potentially would be, right, whether we're an NPC or, you know, role player game or whatever, just being open to the fact that we might be one of those things. Because when you look at the idea of rendering, and I'll talk about that in a second, that kind of explains what consciousness might be, different levels. But what is our purpose? What I'd love to dig into your mind is like, from all the work that you've done, what's your hypothesis? Like the next book should,

Starting point is 00:25:24 be like our purpose hypothesis in the simulation or something. Like, what do you think? Well, it's an interesting question, and I do get asked it, you know, why would somebody make a simulation? Why would somebody be in a simulation? And I always say, well, think back to why do we run simulations and why do we play video game? And so when we run simulations, we try to see what will happen. We want to know what is the likely outcome, but we also want to know what is the best outcome. So simulations of the weather, we're trying to figure out with all these factors, what will happen. Pandemic modeling and simulation, we're trying to figure out what would happen with these variables. But the only way that type of simulation is useful is if you run it multiple times, right?

Starting point is 00:26:08 And so you run it multiple times to see what might be the likely outcome. And so that ties into this idea of the multiverse and with Philip K. Dick. And actually, you know, originally I thought his famous statement in that Met speech was about being in a computer program simulation, and it sort of was and wasn't, and that's why I wrote the second book. Actually, what he was really talking about was changing variables and rerunning the simulation as if, you know, you said you would be saying the same words, hearing the same words, you have feelings of deja vu that some of these things might have happened before. And, you know, his wife told me that he came to believe the man in the high castle, which is a popular series

Starting point is 00:26:48 on Amazon now. It was his kind of best received book while he was alive. about the Germans and the Japanese winning World War II. He came to believe that that was a real timeline that ran forward, and then they came back, and then they ran it forward with different parameters so that the Allies won the war. And perhaps this is a better outcome than that. Although, who knows, we may just be in another brand.

Starting point is 00:27:10 So that's one aspect of what's the purpose of the simulation. But the second question that I often say is, why do we play video games? But we play them to have experiences that we can't have outside the game, Some might say in the real world, but I put that in quotes because we may be in a game, but I can't fly around on a dragon and shoot orcs in this physical world. That's not the nature of this game, right? But I can do that within a video game. I could be an NBA star. I could have, you know, if in the Sims, people have experiences, they have relationships,

Starting point is 00:27:42 they're married, they have kids, right? There are all these different experiences. And there was a virtual world called Second Life that was sort of Metaverse 1.0 back in 2007. When it was really popular, I spent a lot of time in it, just observing what people did. And I was surprised at the depth of the social relationships. It's like, oh, well, they wanted to go have this experience of being a Star Trek character or visiting a BDSM module or having a relationship and being married to somebody else or having a job and they would literally have to show up every night to work at this as a bartender in this virtual bar inside Second Life and they'd get paid.

Starting point is 00:28:15 But it was like they treated it as real in some ways as the physical reality. And so the idea is perhaps there are experiences that we can have here that we can't have outside the simulation. And that's actually what some of the religious people have been telling us, right? That this is, in the Quran, for example, there is a statement about this whole thing is a kind of game that we have set up for you to play so you can amuse yourselves and do various things. And then, of course, that ties to other aspects like reviewing what you did in the game and the life review. We can talk about that if you want, or we can go in a different direction. And that's one of the things I want to get into right now. I'm looking at my notes and I realize that there's no way I could ask you another 40 questions.

Starting point is 00:28:57 But there's so many just different components to this. But to respect time, yours and everybody else's, one thing I want to get into is I've always noticed something strange about myself that I always found that I was an observer, meaning the masses would have said my parents would say something like my head was in the clouds, right? But I always found myself looking at things differently, like looking at architecture and things like that. And at some point in my life, what I realized that I was doing was that I was looking for glitches. I was curious, like, what the hell is all of this? You know what I mean? Like, why am I looking at this when everybody's looking over there? So for me, I have my own impressions.

Starting point is 00:29:41 Some of them, if I explain them, might get me locked up. But I started to notice weird things. and some standard ones would be like the Mandela Effect. Look up the Mandela Effect, watch the movie, but Riz does a great job of reminding us of all of these weird things that we might have just let go by us that affected us, like different names and things like that. Things like Dejavu, Mandela Effect,

Starting point is 00:30:04 or even just like this idea of how sometimes people talk about the flow state right now. But part of the flow state is losing track of time. And then there's the whole concept of time. So because this is where the research is, you know, in order to prove this, we would have to prove that there's glitches. Because if there's glitches, that's the platform we could say, hey, what's going on here? So just talk a little bit about that kind of stuff. I mean, what I want to ask you is why does that stuff happen? But it does kind of support this, doesn't it?

Starting point is 00:30:35 Yeah, you know, I became curious about different types of glitches. And, you know, in fact, I wrote a book a few years ago called Treasure Hunt, which is about following the clues to find true success. And the clues in this case, that was a term that I used for things like synchronicity. And the synchronicity is when you have an inner event and an outer event, and they correspond in ways that that can't be explained logically. And then it's something you notice and you can follow. Or like within dreams, I'll see something. And then the next day, that thing will happen or something related to it,

Starting point is 00:31:08 like uncannily close to what I saw in the dream the previous night. And that's not supposed to happen. It's supposed to work the other way. when you think, you know, from a scientific perspective, or there's this feeling of deja vu, like you've done this thing before. In fact, in the movie The Matrix, that's seen which they called a glitch was,

Starting point is 00:31:26 you know, the cat was going across and then it went across again. And, you know, that's part of what led me into looking at this and why I was really intrigued by Philip Gay Dick's speech because he actually said he had a situation where his wife told me that, you know, he went into this bathroom that he'd been to 100 times and he had pulled a light switch or the chain

Starting point is 00:31:44 to turn on the light and on. and the chain was no longer there, and there was a light switch instead. And it was just one of these moments, like a weird moment, like what the hell happened? I've done this before and things are different now. And so, you know, he came up with this whole idea that perhaps there were people changing little things and rerunning things. And when you rerun it, things might look a little bit differently each time. In fact, that's what led to his idea for a story called The Adjustment Team, which was made

Starting point is 00:32:11 into a movie called, a great movie called The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon. I don't know how that movie got away from people, but first of all, it's Matt Damon. A lot of people, I tell people about that. And by the way, I didn't know about it until I read your book. And we're a huge Matt Damon fans. What an awesome movie. It was a really interesting movie. And they have this, I mean, they change some things from his original story.

Starting point is 00:32:33 But in the movie, they have these little books that are like little, like laptop or like, you know, like little big iPhones or whatever. But they have like these little maps and things are changing in real time as people make. decisions. And that like totally reminds me of this idea of what I call the multiverse graph, which is as you make these different decisions, you may, you know, end up in different places. And so, you know, I think that these, these glitches are an interesting part of showing that perhaps there are things going on that, you know, we're not aware of. And science tends to ignore these glitches and say, well, yeah, that's just somebody's faulty memory. And the Mandela effect was quite interesting because you have a group of people that remember a different timeline, right?

Starting point is 00:33:16 They remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80s or 90s. And, you know, before the internet, this wouldn't have really gotten out there, right, because you were able to corral people who have a certain memory. Or people remember in Tiananmen Square. Remember the guy in front of the tank, they call him tank boy, and the tank kept trying to go around. Well, many people remember him getting run over and being killed, whereas I think in the main timeline, and the one that is the consensus reality, as Philip K. Dick might call it, he wasn't run over. Now, that really got me thinking about, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:50 are we remembering perhaps different versions of ourselves? Like, there was a time many years ago when I was walking at Stanford University in the Bay Area, and when I was in high school, I wanted to either go to Stanford on the West Coast or MIT in the East Coast, I ended up going to MIT, but I had this strange vision, while I was there, of an alternate version of me.

Starting point is 00:34:11 Like, in this life, I've been an entrepreneur, video game designer. That's where I spent my career. But a more academic version of me that was like teaching a class, some technical class. And I looked different and I was with different people. I had a different life, but it was like very vivid. And then I began to wonder,

Starting point is 00:34:29 okay, is this an actual alternate timeline that might have actually played out and might have been one of these pieces of the story that I could have chosen to follow, but I didn't. in this life. And now what's interesting is years later, I did end up going to Stanford University for Business School. And now I'm actually finally at the age of 51 going back for a PhD, whereas in that timeline I went, you know, when I was in my 20s like most people do, like after they graduate. And so it's almost like, you know, bringing together or converging of different segments of different timelines. So anyway, I think, you know, this idea of glitches and synchronicity in particular,

Starting point is 00:35:05 There's an author named Diana Psoca, and she wrote a book called American Cosmic. And she and Jacques Valet, who's one of the people who's computer scientists who's been investigating UFOs going all the way back to the 1960s in Project Bluebook. If you ever saw close encounters in the third kind, the French scientist was actually based off of Jacques Ballet. And they talk about this idea of a technological singularity. It's kind of like a cookie that we have on our browsers. Have you ever had the experience where you're shopping for something? And then you go to Facebook and suddenly there's an ad for that same thing that you were shopping for on a different... Now, if you didn't know that there was this technical way to track what you had been doing, right, it would seem like magic.

Starting point is 00:35:47 And that's why scientists say, well, these circumstances don't exist. That's just magical thinking that because you saw this and that, there's no connection. Right. But if you knew that it was a simulation or a computer program, you could see that there is actually a way for that information to be. track and that's what brings up, you know, us noticing certain things during the day. So anyway, I guess that's a long-winded way of saying. I think that, you know, glitches in the matrix are a very interesting aspect of simulation theory that often gets ignored a lot. I love it, man. I can listen to you talk forever. This is like my jam. You know, another interesting

Starting point is 00:36:22 thing, and I bring this up in my book, is that like all of this conversation is usually centered around like our point of view. Like as if in the simulation we're the most important part. Like we're trying to figure out why we think the way we think and what our role is and stuff like that. But I have another theory that says that we are the most insignificant part of the simulation. The master controller of the simulation is actually nature. And we're just an extension of it.

Starting point is 00:36:53 I have this one migration theory that I came up with that does that human beings have just evolved from nature and our purpose is just to find a way to get the hell off this planet to another planet. Anyway, so fascinating. Last question, because what's interesting about you, Riz, is that you can go heavy, heavy, heavy with this, but you're also a very smart businessman and he's an angel investor and it's been involved in a lot of stuff. So I know that you are very, very much aware of the manifestation of AI, ER, but also the metaverse and crypto and NFTs, this idea that we're basically a simulation that for some reason is trying to create a simulation. So, you know, what I find most fascinating about this, that for me is not a glitch,

Starting point is 00:37:41 but it really makes me feel even more confident in the hypothesis, is that what we're seeing is that we're actually trying to create right now. If you look at our kids, they're very comfortably moving into the metaverse. They don't even, they're already in the metaverse. So if you look at it from that standpoint, we're creating this simulation. Like I think 10 years from now, you're going to be able to get most people to agree that there is a simulation coming. But the idea is that maybe we're a simulation, creating a simulation, and that brings up the idea that there's potentially thousands and thousands of them, turtles all the way down. So what do you think about what is happening at this?

Starting point is 00:38:24 It's an interesting time for your books and all of that. Maybe that's because it's being rendered now. We're reaching some sort of new conscious stuff. But what do you see happening with that? And how do you explain that? Yeah, well, you know, I do think that this is what really got me thinking about, seriously about being a simulation, is when I laid out the stages of technology that we needed to get to, which included not just MMORPGs, not just VR and AR, but also brain computer interfaces,

Starting point is 00:38:54 you know, which we'll be able to project into our brains, kind of like, in the matrix, as well as AI that is conscious that we're getting closer to. Finally, to downloadable consciousness, where you could map the neurons and the neuralinks of the brain and then download yourself into a computer. There's a show called Upload, which is kind of a comedy, but they're kind of moving in that direction. But my basic conclusion was we would be able to get to this point where we can create these simulations that are indistinguishable from physical reality.

Starting point is 00:39:28 certainly within 100 years, maybe 200 maximum. Some people think we can get there in a couple of decades, right? And all of the stuff that you're seeing today with the Metaverse, NFTs, and AI, right, you may have heard of the Google engineer who thought this chatbot was sentient, right? And so there's been a big debate about whether we're there already with sentient AI or not. I think most technologists would say we're not. But we're getting closer and closer each time. And so my point was that if we can get there in 100 years, there may be other civilizations that

Starting point is 00:40:01 have already got. And turns out there was a professor at Oxford named Nick Bostrom who wrote a paper all the way back in 2003 laying out what he called a simulation argument, which is that if a civilization is ever able to make these simulations, they wouldn't make just one. They would make lots and lots of them. So imagine having billions of simulated roles, each with billions or trillions of simulated beings within them. And so he made a statistical argument that said, okay, if any civilization ever gets there, then there's going to be a hell of a lot more simulated worlds than there are physical worlds. There's only one physical world, let's say. And there's a lot more simulated beings than there are physical beings. So if you're a being in a world, which are you more likely

Starting point is 00:40:44 to be? One of these, there's a lot or one of these. He said you're more likely to be simulated. Now, that all predicated on the idea that a civilization could get there and create these sophisticated simulations. And so it became clear to me that if we can get there within a few decades or a century or two, imagine what a civilization that's at 10,000 years or a million years to develop their computer systems would be able to do, which means somebody has probably already gotten there, which means there are many more simulated worlds and beings than there are physical worlds, which means you are most likely in a simulation. I know that a lot of our listeners are just like saying, like, whoa.

Starting point is 00:41:26 You know, you don't need to get high guys. Just listen to Riz. So just one, you know, just to kind of loop things up and I have one final thought on this. You know, this is his latest book, simulated multiverse. And, you know, you're listening to a guy that is not only interested in this, but he's a very intelligent guy that puts a lot of his time. effort into translating this stuff to the average ordinary person. So, you know, I mean, you will thoroughly love his books. I would start off, you know, if you want to get right into this,

Starting point is 00:41:56 I would start off with the simulation hypothesis and then go to the to the multiverse. And, you know, one of the things that I just want to, you know, to wrap it up in a bow, I think the value, the main value of the work that you're doing in this concept is that it helps us overcome one of our biggest challenges, and that is to try not to take things too serious. You know, you mentioned before this idea of like backing up, cognitively distancing yourself from things that you perceive or receive, and maybe grabbing a more logical, rational perception of it, thus maybe giving you a better response. So what I love about this the most is that it gives me the ability to entertain that this is a game. That doesn't scare me.

Starting point is 00:42:44 me, it actually helps me not take things too seriously, you know. And, and what you'll notice when you read Riz's books is a lot of stuff. Now, you're going to have to do whatever you can to let go of whatever you were told is reality, you know, through, through religion or whatever, propaganda. Like, if you've bought into that and you want to fight with people like us, this is not going to be good for you, right? But if you're open to the possibilities, you know, what it'll do for you is it'll give you the ability to back up and distance yourself from something because it'll give you something else to think about before you buy into something. And that's what your book did for me and it does for others. So, Riz, thank you so much. God, I have so many more things I want

Starting point is 00:43:27 to talk to you about. But can I like officially say that maybe I'm like a friend now? Absolutely. Yep. Okay, great. Simulated friend. That's right. I don't know how serious it is. But in my simulation, Rizwan Burke is like one of my best friends. So thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful. I know everybody's going to love this. All necessary links to his books

Starting point is 00:43:49 and many other books and some of his projects and his website and stuff will be in the notes. And love and appreciate everybody for listening. Makes sense.

Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Are we living in a Simulation? with Guest Rizwan Virk - Episode 121

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