Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - Making Sense of Yoga and the Simulation Hypothesis? With Rizwan Virk - Episode 24

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

What do Yoga, Meditation, Spirituality and Technology have in common? Lets Make Sense of Yoga and technology with best selling author of the Simulation Hypothesis, Simulation Multivers and his newest book Wisdom of a Yogi, Rizwan Virk. This Podcast episode is available on Apple and Spotify. Rizwan Virk is an entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, computer scientist, and author of several books, among them "The Simulation Hypothesis", "The Simulated Multiverse" and his newest book Wisom of a Yogi. Lessons for Modern Seekers from Autobiography of a Yogi. The story of Yogananda. www.zenentrepreneur.com   Resources: Books:- Wisdom of a Yogi - https://amzn.to/4dYWjEY - Simulation Hypothesis - https://amzn.to/3yBkOYP - Simulation Multiverse - https://amzn.to/4bzUz3z Podcast Interviews:  - Interview from the Joe Rogan Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/031mtxfwvp01AsiZKtxjjc   Contact Rizwan Virk: www.zenentrepreneur.com X - @rizstamford IG - @rizcambridge   Makes Sense Podcast available on Spotify and Apple - You will find a "Follow" button top right. This will enable the podcast software to alert you when a new episode launches each week https://podcasts.apple.com/.../makes-sense.../id1730954168 Click this link to SUBSCRIBE/RATE/REVIEW - https://ratethispodcast.com/makessensepodcast Thank you for your support with our podcast on apple and spotify. Our mission is to remove the blindfolds from the sleepwalking masses and begin the uprisomg of the sleepwalking masses. OUR SPONSOR: MAKES SENSE ACADEMY Enjoy the show and consider joining our psychological safe haven and environment where you can begin to thrive. The Makes Sense Academy. https://www.riseupwithdragon.com/makes-sense-academy   Episode Highlights:  3:52 - Brief Background of yogananda 11:13 - How does yogananda correlate with the simulation hypothesis? 27:05 - Do you think people that take risks face more challenges in life? 34:15 - Birth and Death if Life is a Dream? 35:23 - When does the soul enter the body?  38:04 - The Pizza Effect 41:53 - Are we AI trying to build AI?   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hmm. Makes sense. Well, great morning, great day, great afternoon. Greatness to everybody. This is your boy, Dr. J.C. Dornick, aka. The Dragon. Very excited about this new season that's going to be correlated with the launch of my book, where I'm going to be out there interviewing all of these amazing, visionary and very fascinating people like our guest today, that have had a big influence and played a role in my brain finding its way to write this, book called Make Sense. It's my honor and privilege to bring back a previous guest, and that is the

amazing Riz von Verk, who I believe now I call Riz. Yeah. Are we at that point? Absolutely. We're at our second interview now, right? That's right. This is our second date. I don't know if you ever read the book, Three Cups of Tea. Do you ever read that? No, I've heard of it, but I haven't read it. Fascinating book. It's just about the Middle Eastern culture. You know, when you have three cups of tea, you're considering. family. So maybe on the third episode, you and I will be brothers. Riz, thanks so much for being here. And just to give everybody a little bit of context, you know, the original way I found this amazing human being is that I was going down the

rabbit hole deeply in the realm of the pondering and looking at the simulation hypothesis and just devouring every book out there, watching every video, you know, just amazing stuff out there. But I came across this book that actually was the the name of what I was interested in. That was the first thing. I said, let me see if there's any books on simulation hypothesis. And then I, so I picked that up. That was, that was this book. So the last time I had Riz on this show, we spoke a lot about this. And all I can say in reference to this book is anybody that's open and curious and realizes there's got to be more to life than this. This is just a fascinating perspective. And Riz's background just unbelievably validates

his ability to write this book. So read that book. I told him I'm developing a little bit of a library here. And then I got into the simulation multiverse. And by the way, there's so many more books that he's written. And we'll make sure everybody gets connected with them. But I was talking to him recently. And he's got his new workout. And that's the one that I just read. And that's called Wisdom of a Yogi. You know, I have to say that when I first thought of this, I was like, Wait a second. Is my guy that is like all about the simulation hypothesis? Is he like going soft on me? Is he just writing a book about meditation or something like that? And I love your writing and stuff. So of course, I was going to read it. But then you made the correlation like you're going to love how we connect it with the stuff that you love.

And you sure did a great job of that. So in any case, from a place of gratitude, thank you so much for being here. Welcome again to the Rise Up with Dragon Show. And what an amazing book we're about to talk about. out. Well, it's great to be here with you again. Thanks so much for having me on. And I really appreciate you, your podcast, and your feedback on my books as well. Awesome. Awesome. That's one of the things I take pride in is I really like to talk about this stuff. I mean, you know, what's fascinating is there's really no new information in the world. You know, you're going to see that Riz has done just an amazing job of reflecting on some teachings from an amazing individual from over a hundred years ago. But there's no new information. So when I come across the works and this amazing, these books that Riz does,

it just validates things that I kind of was trying to figure out, but it always comes from somewhere else. So Riz, let's jump into this. I think that there's a lot of context that you can only get when you read this book, but in this short time, we're going to be together. I want to try to build it the right way and put some color to it. So just an intro, if you could just kind to talk a little bit about this idea of the background, how you found this book originally, because I love the story about you and your father and how this book has been like referenced by some of the biggest world changers, you know, change makers in the world that's like the book that changed their whole life. So just give us a little bit of a background context

on this book that you're referencing called the autobiography of a yogi about Yogananda, how you found it and how you made the correlation that it was fascinating in the realm of what you've been studying. Sure. So, you know, as you mentioned, this book, Wisdom of a Yogi is, the subtitle is Lessons for Modern Seekers from Autobiography of a Yogi, which was ranked, you know, one of the top spiritual books of the 20th century. And it was published by Parmhansa Yogananda, who came over from India to the U.S. in 1920.

So it was really over 100 years ago that he came over. over as a young Swami. And he has been called the first modern guru because he's one of the first people who really brought Eastern philosophy to the West, but also he lived here in America for many, many years, several decades. And this book was published in 1945, which was 25 years later. And so at that point, he had spent half of his time in the East, because he was in his kind of mid-20s when he got here, and half of his time in the West. And so, you know, this book was kind of a bridge between cultures. And that is actually a key part of, you know, why it's made such an impact. And what happened was he died in 1950s. He wrote the book in 1946. And in the 1960s,

when the West had the counterculture and everyone discovered Eastern philosophy, this autobiography of yogh was one of the most passed around books of that generation, right? People like George Harrison of the Beatles, you know, he had stacks of this book. He actually was introduced to it by Ravi Shankar, who is a well-known musician in India. And of course, the Beatles had their whole phase where they went to India and they were into Eastern philosophy. And that was all because of George Harrison, right? And so later he would literally give away copies of this book to people when he said they needed re-grooving, right? And so the book itself was quite inspirational and it told stories of swamis and saints. In what I call old India, many of them were from when Yogananda was young

and some were stories he had heard earlier. Many of them were performing miracles and Things that, you know, as a rationalist, you might say, hey, that's impossible. Saints were levitating. People were appearing in more than one location, biocating with two bodies. There was a lot of telepathy going on. You had people who were living hundreds of years. And so, you know, the book was, you know, the book was, you know, the book was Yogananda kept trying to run away to the Himalayas when he was a kid, because he thought that's where he needed to go to, to find the yogis and become a monk. He had this vision and he was going to be a monk. But of course, his father and his older brother said, you can't just run away as a kid. You need to finish high school before you could go up and become a yogi. And so there are all these colorful stories of him running across India. And in the end, he ended up finding his guru who taught him, you know, the yogic techniques that he taught to the West, very close to the city of Calcutta where he lived.

And he did end up becoming a wandering monk, but not a monk wandering in the Himalayas. he was wandering all around the U.S. back then on trains. He was probably one of the most traveled teachers of that generation where he would take trains from Boston to L.A., etc. And so one of the guys who found this book over there was Steve Jobs when he was young. And he went to India, like many of his generation, looking for enlightenment. And somebody had left a copy of autobiography of a yogi in his dorm room. And he ended up taking that. And that became his favorite book. And he read it every year. And if you read his biography that came out recently, recently by Walter Isaacson, when Jobs showed him his iPad. There was only one book on the iPad,

and that was Autobiography of the Yogi. And then at his funeral, you can hear Mark Mannyoff, the CEO of Salesforce online tells this story where at his memorial service, Steve Jobs' memorial service, everyone was given this little brown box. And he says he took the brown box and he went home and he opened it up and inside was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. And I know that happened because I've talked to people who were responsible for getting all those books together. And so it had an impact on that entire generation. For me, you know, being kind of a Gen Xer, if you will, my mentors were boomers. And so they, of course, passed this book along with, you know, a few others down to our generation. And so I first read about it in the 1990s when I was a young entrepreneur,

I was living this kind of double life, right? During the day, I was running my startup and doing all the things that you would do in the business world and also programming at the time, our first product and in the evening I'd go to meditation seminars and I'd go off and explore different states of consciousness and lucid dreaming and oddly enough it was a Buddhist meditation teacher who was a white guy who introduced me to the book right even though I was born in that part of the world near the city of Lahore where Yogananda lived when he was a kid and then so you know I read it every few years and then of course you know I had become a video game designer an entrepreneur and wrote about simulation theory. And on the 75th anniversary of publishing of autobiography of yoga, I was approached

by HarperCollins India. And they said, you know, we'd like to publish a book about some of the lessons that were in the autobiography. But we want you to reference more modern technologies, modern ideas around video games like you do in your other books. And, you know, I was a little surprised initially that they asked me to write this book because I'm like, are you sure? You know, I'm not, I don't have Swami in front of my name. Technically, I'm not even a Hindu. And I, I, I'm a Muslim, but I've studied a lot of Buddhist and Eastern mysticism because I tie it into the idea of Maya and simulation. And they said, no, we think you're the right person.

And, you know, one of the lessons in the book is also that sometimes the universe gives you a task. And that's your task to complete whether you're ready or not. And I make the point in the book that Yogananda wasn't ready when he came over here. He came to speak at a world Congress of Religions. And he was a young Swami. He had never given a speech in English. And they sent him to represent. And yet he came here and his life mission was to bring Eastern philosophy to the West.

And so that's kind of a bit of background in how this book came together when I first read it at some of the significance of the book itself. You know, the problem with this interview is that I've just read this whole book. And, you know, I mean transparently, if I showed you the notes that I have on it, like there's no way that we're going to get to them. And I'm realizing this as we go. Here's what's just striking me right now. Because I kind of, in reading the book, first of all, I got to know you better in this book

because you spoke a little bit about your dad. And, you know, I almost see some commonalities of your journey and his. But then again, I think anybody that reads your book or his and gets exposed to these lessons will see those commonalities because they're so relevant now. But what's what I want to know, and I don't know if you ever went down this hole to figure this out, what made these dudes that approached you to. write this book want to correlate his teachings to things like simulation hypothesis and stuff. Like, whose idea was that? Have you ever, do you know that answer? Well, I reference

Yogananda in my book on the simulation hypothesis because the subtitle the simulation hypothesis was an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game. And so, you know, Yogananda used to try to use the market. metaphors as much as possible and technology of his time. Right. So if you go back to the Buddhist doctrines and you go back to the Hindu Vedas, they talk about the world as an illusion and the term they use is Maya, right? And normally it's translated as illusion, but the better translation is a carefully crafted illusion. Like when you go to see a magic show, okay, you know the guy's not really doing magic.

You know their tricks, but you forgive, you forget that because you want to be amazed by what you see on the show, right? And so that was an announcement. that had been around for a while, as was the dream metaphor. When the Buddha became awakened, you know, somebody asked him, what happened? You know, what are you? And his reply was Ayyubut, which is using the poly word, which is using the Sanskrit word, which means awake, right? And so what he's saying is he woke up, which means everybody else is asleep.

And so the metaphor of the dream is one that's been used, you know, for thousands of years. And Yogananda even talked about life and death are like coming from one dream. into another. And so, you know, these are some of the analogies that have been used in the past. And another one is the play, the stage play or playing a game. So in the Vedas, there's the idea of the Lila, which is the divine play of the gods. And it could also mean like a stage play. And of course, we know Shakespeare famous line from almost 500 years ago, all the world's a stage and the men and women are merely players, right? And so that analogy has been there. But Yogananda did something interesting. He brought in a new analogy based on the modern technology of his time. So at that time,

1920s we're talking about, even before it, World War I was raging. And he was watching the newsreels. That's how they saw the news from Europe. And this was the first war that had, you know, mechanized machinery, like killing people. So there was a lot of carnage at a level of suffering and death that hadn't really happened before. That's why they called it the Great War. They didn't call it World War I back. And, you know, he said, Lord, how could you possibly allow this? And he got back, kind of a clear answer while he was meditating. That basically it said, look at the newsreels, right? Look at the film projectors.

Look at the movies that you watch. That the world is like a movie projector. It's made of light and shadow on the screen. And of course, they're suffering for the characters in the movie, but you have to look away and realize that all of that is being projected. So he would use the analogy of a movie projector. And so, you know, I basically said, I think if he were alive today, he would use modern technology.

he would say it's like a movie, but like a stage play where we're all the actors and we're all the players. But we have our scripts, but we can change our scripts because it's interactive and, you know, we're supposed to be having fun or enjoying it or suffering or whatever our character is doing. Right, you realize the best actor, Oscars often go to somebody who plays a character that has some suffering involved in it because those are the best roles. Those are the juiciest roles in a sense when you play. And so I believe Yogananda would say today, if you were alive, that the world is like an interactive, massively multiplayer online video game. And I think that is an analogy that works across different religions.

So it was kind of my idea, but I'll tell you how this partly happened was I had been going through some health issues and I was sitting on the couch and I couldn't do anything for a few months and I had finished my simulation books. I was like, okay, what am I going to do next? So I reread autobiography of a yogi. And then I wrote a few blog posts about other books like autobiography of yogi and about Yogan what it meant to me. So they found that and somehow this is how the universe worked.

I was not planning to write a book on Yogananda, but I put the seed out there just because I had some time on my hands. And that seed ended up growing and coming back to me. And that's often what happens in life sometimes is we don't know that certain seeds that we plan are going to come back and become quite important to us in the future. So cool. And I'm pretty sure. I mean, I read so many books. I'm pretty sure you actually went into a little bit of the synchronicity concept that was coined by Carl Young. and all these incredibly smart dudes are out there talking about stuff that we talk about all the time now.

We just use different words. Like, you know, I was just thinking, I think Yogananda would love to read your book, you know, like simulation hypothesis. He would be like, yes, that's, right? But he just didn't have the language, but it's, it is the same language. It's just we have new words, you know, super cool. One thing I want to highlight my book, you know, and my work is all about creating a more efficient what I call interface response system, meaning a better response system to life,

which has a lot to do with stuff that you talk about, about being able, open and able to shift your perspective and stuff, you know, so you can get a different way of looking at things and be open. So one of the things that I noticed, big difference between, if you were to read the introduction to a yogi, which is just like heavy, it's analogous, if anybody out there is into stoicism, it would be like reading meditations by Marcus Aurelius versus Ryan Holiday's book, The Obstacle is the Way. A lot of people found their way to stoicism by reading somebody's book that explained it in our words today.

So we're so lucky that we have that. And I just want to say that if you are even just a scratch interested in learning some things that might change your life forever, you know, if you read Riz's book first, it's going to just catch your fire. You're going to go right out and buy introduction to a yogi right after. But one of the big things that you accomplished in this book, that really, really was attractive to me is you interpret the relevance of a lot of what he said in ways that enable us to handle adversity in this day and age.

You know, you might miss that if you weren't a deep thinker, you know, in that other sense. You spoke a little bit about, you said tasks before, but I believe in there was one chapter that was about tasks, paths, and glimpses and stuff of how the universe or whatever, the powers that be or the simulation seems to be guiding us. in certain ways, whether it takes us in the wrong direction or the right direction. I saw some similarities, and this is where I got to know you a little bit better in your life, but also your fathers. You know, there's a sequence of events.

Talk about karma. There's a sequence of events that started with some of the challenges that your father had that led you to where you are today. So did writing this book kind of like give you a couple of aha moments as well? I would assume that you really, really made some breakthroughs on your own reading this because you've been through a similar path. Am I right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a writing exercise in self-reflection, both on my own life and on my father's life, right?

And, you know, Yogananda was an immigrant, right? And I mentioned that, you know, he wrote this book that became a classic that was really kind of a merging of two cultures. And in a sense, you know, that is the immigrant story, particularly, you know, with immigrants who come to America, their children end up being really a mixture of the two cultures in a way that is neither authentically X or authentically Y, but it's also both authentic, really, in those cases. And, you know, Yogananda, as I said, spent most of his adult like here. He came over for this conference, and it was right at the end of World War I. He

had to catch the last, the first boat, because they didn't have planes back then, the first boat to leave India for the West after the war. And, you know, something very similar happened with my father when he was going to come to the west to get his PhD, there was a war between India and Pakistan, and he was living in the city of Lahore where an interesting little story takes place with Yoganando when he was younger almost many years or many decades earlier, but it was right on the border.

And so basically they canceled all flights out of Pakistan. And so he basically had to delay for a semester and he took the first flight out of Pakistan to go to Europe at that point in time, you know, to work on his. Ph.D. And then he came here. And so there are a lot of parallels, you know, as I started to think about it. And during this book, my father passed away, actually, before the book was published and right when I finished writing it. And so that gave me a perspective to really kind of think back, you know, on his life. And I think, you know, we all have glimpses of what our life might look like in the future. And I believe that the simulation, you know, in the same way that, you know, we used to play Dungeons and Dragon when I was a kid and you would have, you know, this is the race. of my character. This is the profession. They're a warrior or a wizard. And then you have a storyline in the adventure you're going through. I believe like that happens to us in our lives as well,

is that we have the storyline that we are meant to play out while we're inside the video game of the simulation. But we still have free will. We still have choices to make along the way. And so we might not choose to go down this direction or we might choose to go to this direction. And, you know, there were a lot of setbacks that Yogananda had in his life, which he doesn't write about in the autobiography so much. You have to, like, learn about his life a little bit. But I believe these are integral to the lessons. You know, he talks about karma. And I talk a lot about karma in this book and explain it in terms of some of these stories. But in his life, he had spent two decades or, you know, one and a half to have 15 years, crisscrossing the U.S., giving speeches. And he came across a lot of difficulties. You know, things like when he was in D.C., During his lectures, they wouldn't let the black people who wanted to listen to his lectures in the same hall. And he was a brown guy with a long hair and wearing funny robes, you know, a hundred years ago. Now, luckily, the 1920s things opened up a bit, but that was a very comfortable place to be. And there was this entire scandal that erupted with his, one of his, you might call him his almost co-founder of his organization or his right-hand man,

who was his friend from Calcutta, who was also a Swami who came out. And I guess, you know, a lot of the people who attended to seminars were women, just like today, if you go to yoga class. Right now we have yoga studios on every corner, but back then, you know, yoga was not a thing that was very well known. But the husband of one of the women attending one of the sessions came in, and he like hit the Swami, not Yogananda, but his kind of number two guy on the nose. And it made the Los Angeles Times.

And then it spread like wildfire, like what we would call going viral today. And Yogananda was in Miami and they're like, we can't let you speak because all the husbands are angry and they're going to come and beat you up. And so you had a lot of these types of things. And even though that eventually died away, his number two guy left him,

left his organization. His organization was in shambles because that guy had been doing all the kind of teaching in L.A. while he had been out teaching. And he had to do a lot of self-reflection after the self-back. And he kind of went to Mexico. And he prayed, you know, should I just go back to India?

You know, this thing in America is just too hard, right? Bringing yoga to the West. But, you know, that was his life mission. That was his task. And he got the answer, no. And so he decided to look for, is there a way I can really get the word out in a different way? And the answer came to him was to write this book. And so he spent like the last 15 years of his life for the last decade or so writing

autobiography of Yogi in San Diego and Ansonidas overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I actually took a pilgrimage to that place while I was writing this book. It was during COVID, and so it was closed. But I personally needed a little bit of inspiration when I was writing this book. And one of the lessons I learned from him was take these little pilgrimages to places, whether it's temples or places where someone you admired, lived, or a holy person. And so I decided to go, I wanted to go there. And it turns out they were able to open it up for me and gave me a private tour.

So I was able to spend time in his office over the living. looking the Pacific Ocean and I had a pretty strong vision while I was there because I just fell into this meditative state, you know, with the sound of the waves coming. And I saw an image of him and there were these French doors that open up to the cliffs, which beyond which is the ocean. And I had this strong vision in my mind's eye where I saw Yogananda, kind of in his later years, like when he was writing the book, and he had a stack of papers. And of course, that's how they, you know, had manuscripts back then. They didn't have computers. And he looked at me kind of mischievously and he took the stack of papers. He opened the French doors and he threw the

out over the ocean. I was horrified as a writer, right? So I'm seeing a vision of one of my favorite books and the manuscript being thrown away. I'm like, what are you doing? And what happened in my vision was each of those papers turned into little white birds and they carried the message out to the world, which is kind of what happened with his book, which is so millions and millions of copies. Now it's gone back to India, which is interesting because, you know, he taught here, but now his message has gone back to India and he's more popular than ever out there. And so the message to me in this vision was, you know, about as a writer, your words are what's going to survive out there and to let them out there, but also don't take it so seriously, which was

another message that kind of came to me related to that. Have fun with it. And I did. I had fun with this book, even though their lessons are quite serious. You know, there are stories of like genies doing weird things. So, you know, I spent a lot of time on stuff that I found was fun and interesting and inspirational. Yeah, I think that the fact that you have so much background and you wrote these other books, you know, about the simulation and your openness and curiousness to all of that stuff. It's, it was a perfect primer to write a book like this. You know, I mean, ever since I've met you and ever since I've gone down that avenue, like when I hear, when I read in your book that somebody's levitating or calling on some sort of a spirit to steal things and, and although somebody's

250 years old, the old me would have been like, what the fuck is he talking about? But the new me is like, hey, I mean like, nobody's disproving it, you know? I pulled something that's very relevant to what you just said that, you know, there's so many nuggets in here, and I hope to share a couple of them. But one of them, I wrote this dad, it says, fate opens doors. So the fact that fate opens doors doesn't mean that obstacles won't crop up in your path. Such a valuable lesson, because that was a very big takeaway from his teachings, but also your explanation. Because if you look at the simulation hypothesis, this is kind of posed as a question,

do you find that the program actually creates, when I say the program, I mean like the hypothetical simulation program. It got me thinking, like, do you think that the simulation program actually creates more obstacles for those people like you and I, like Yogananda, that are curious and open and engaged in the contention for a bigger vision. You know, like I wrote here, like Yogananda, the story of your father and the challenges and things like that, I just find that in the simulation, part of the programming, I guess, I just find that those that,

this is probably why people avoid taking risks in life and are closed-minded, stay safe, perhaps. But when you do step into contention for life and you're open and curious, I find that this, the universe or the simulation, in the program challenges those people even more. So, I mean, one of the things you touched on, but it was like before Yogananda even came here, I mean, like, how many times did he try to go to the Himalayas?

It's like, I feel like he was this little kid that just kept on trying and getting caught and, like, all of these things to create this greatness. So therein lies my question to you, do you find that people that step into and lean into contention for life and are open to the truth? right and say what i don't know i don't i don't know everything and i'm open that's why we're into this kind of stuff do you think those people are challenged more in life well you know i think if you look at it as a video game we can think of the challenges as quests and achievements and

in a sense the way we play video games today is you know there are these lists of quests and you kind of choose the quests right and then when you choose a quest it unlocks additional quests so as a video game designer, right, the way this would work is we would have a tree of quests, right, with a difficulty level. And so in a sense, when you choose a more difficult quest, you are unlocking a higher difficulty level. And, you know, but that doesn't mean that it's always going to be more difficult, right? It's more that the difficulty levels are there to help train you to get up to a certain point. And sometimes there's a major setback that happens, right? I mean, if you're going to go to the boss battle in a video game, right, you're not going to get it the first time.

And this is a way for us to think about, you know, because sometimes I think the whole self-help industry, like there's a lot of great stuff, you know, that's come out of the self-help industry. But sometimes people try things and they have huge setbacks and how do you deal with those, right? And if you think of it, you reframe it differently and to say, well, okay, you now have a higher difficulty level, particularly if you have a health, for example, setback or a setback that's kind of beyond your control. in many ways. It's like the simulation is setting up, you know, a higher difficulty for you. And, you know, this happened to me in my own life. And I write about this really for the first time in this book, in my personal story, where I was at the height of my entrepreneurial career.

You know, I had sold my video game company for millions. I was an investor in companies like Discord. And I was running a startup program at MIT, which was an interesting story in and of itself, how I got there. But, you know, and I thought, okay, now I'm going to, you know, do the next thing in Silicon Valley. I'm going to raise a big business. venture capital, a billion dollar fund and do all this stuff. And then I had an unexpected setback. You know, I found I had some health issues, and had a heart issue. And I had to have open heart surgery and had to have bypass surgery. And that was a huge setback. And I ended up missing our demo day, which is, you know, the big day at the end of the program. But more than that, I found myself

having to go back into the hospital. So I found that this health crisis lasted not just, oh, you know, you go in for a week. They do their thing. And then a sudden, you know, a month or two later, you're back. A month or two later, I'm back, but back in the hospital in my case. And so there was this whole period about six to nine months where I couldn't do much. And every time when I'd start to feel better, I tried to jump back into business world. And something would happen again. And it was as if the universe was also guiding and giving me messages saying, you know, no, that's not what you're meant to do.

And we're going to make it physically difficult for you to go that direction. So it was like a course correction. What I could do, though, is I can take an Uber to the Starbucks for an hour or two every day and I could write. And I strongly got the message in a series of visions that I had during this time that part of my glimpse of my future life vision, like even when I was a kid, if you had asked, I'd say, well, I'm going to be a computer entrepreneur, right? And then I'm going to be a writer. How did I know that? I didn't necessarily, you know, it was part of my script and I had a sense of it. I didn't have the specifics. Just like Yogananda got the specifics wrong. He thought he was going to be walking around the Himalayas. Instead, he was on trains crisscrossing the U.S., right? That was his life as a monk. And in this case, you know, that was when I wrote the simulation hypothesis. And I published two books in like nine months, including one with a very prestigious business school, a Columbia Business School for my startup book. And before that, I had only written two books in 10 years. And so, you know, it was sort of like the universe making certain things difficult, opening up other things. But then I do think we take on

more difficulty, tasks of more difficulty. But just like in a video game, you know, and I watch my my nephews now play like Eldon Ring or one of these big games. You know, they, you know, they team up sometimes for boss battles. But what happens is you get better each time you try to do it. And so when you go to the more difficult ones, you know, you've already trained yourself from the previous ones to be at a higher level of skill and the ability to handle. And I think that's perhaps a different way to look at it,

is that it's how you handle the crisis that's probably more important than anything. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor. The Make Sense podcast is sponsored. by the Makes Sense Academy, co-created by both myself, Meeker, aka The Chicken, and The Dragon, the Make Sense Academy is a live interactive community, where like-minded, solution-focused, curious seekers of expansion, gather daily in a mastermind setting with both Chicken and Dragon, where they have access to premium content, online courses, and powerful collaboration and networking, all for $24 a month.

The Make Sense Academy and its members are solely responsible for funding the Make Sense podcast. So feel free to reach out to us at www. Rise Up with Dragon.com and check out the Make Sense Academy, risk-free, with a money-back guarantee. Now, back to the Make Sense podcast. Well, therein lies the biggest gem is just the idea of being open to the idea of looking at things differently. you know, I mean, Wayne Dyer used to say all the time, change way you look at things, things that look at change. Why not?

So many just gems and nuggets in everything that you say, another one that I pulled that just, when we were talking about the paths the other day, and I think sometimes I find myself talking about stuff and saying, did I get that from Riz? You know, and I can't like remember where I did. But I probably, if it's not in your book, you made me think about it.

When looking at the path, it made me realize that very often, because so many people are trying to be on the right path, you know. I didn't tell you this, but since I met you last, I've been to the Amazon jungle and experienced plant medicine and, you know, talk about augmented reality. You know, I mean, there's, I realize there's a lot more going on than we think. But it made me realize that, because one of the questions I asked over there,

and I was actually thinking about you and the simulation theory, but I was asking for the truth. You know, my intention was, you know, this mystical powers that I was accessing with this plant medicine. I was asking for the truth. And then I realized very quickly that the truth was way more than I could handle. And I was like, okay, I'm good. I'm good.

I came up with this idea that sometimes the path to figuring out the right path is the wrong path. You know, so what I'm realizing now is sometimes when you're on the wrong path, it might be to take you to the right path. And your book does a great job of opening. up the mind to these ideas. And then one last one that I'll share. I mean, I'm going to tell you right now that lesson seven was my favorite. You know, I mean, that's my jam. But I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much had I not read the other stuff. And, you know, just a fantastic book. But, you know, just this idea of looking at

birth and death, like if life is a dream. And we don't have to say that it is or it isn't. I said, if life is a dream, meaning maybe that birth and death would then be the doors that you walk into and out of the dream into the next one. And I thought about that and I was like, wow, that's super cool. And that's the kind of stuff that you're getting from Yogananda. Am I right? Yeah, you know, that was almost a direct quote from Yogananda where he talks about, you know, birth and death as being doors, doorways, from one dream to the next. And, you know, this ties very much to the simulation idea. You know, over the summer, I was in the UK and I was invited to give a talk at an Islamic conference, which is interesting, you know.

And they asked me, and so I talked about Islam and the simulation hypothesis. And one of the questions they were debating was insolment. Like, you know, when does the soul connect with the body? And of course, you know, there's a debate around abortion and all these things. I'm not going to get in any of that. But I said, I'd like to offer you guys a different interpretation of what ensolment is. And, you know, there was like an Ayatollah in the audience from Iran. And there were like, you know, scholars from different Cairo, you know, different universities

and places like that. And I said, insolment is when you put on the headset, and you forget about the you that was outside. And from that point forward, like in the matrix, when they plug in into the back of the head, right? You've now forgotten, and the Greeks call this, you know, passing through Lette, the river of forgetfulness, right? They actually have a metaphor to describe it.

And so this is an updated metaphor, which is you put on the headset and you forget, you are now part connected with your avatar, which by the way is an ancient Sanskrit word, which meant divinity to come down to earth in a body. And when the guys at Lucasfilm, you know, George Lucas's company, they were building early video games. They were building the very first video game called Habitat, massively multiplayer, not massively, but it's a multiplayer in those days with the Commodore 64 and with modems. And they were looking for a term for that little guy on the screen that represented you and they said, well, it's like you're descending through the phone

lines into this little body. So we'll call it an avatar, right? That was the term that they chose. And so, you know, I find that that is a more appropriate metaphor for people today, I think. And we have to remember that all the stuff in the ancient traditions, whether it's the Vedas, whether it's the Buddhist canon, it's the Quran or the Bible. These were written, you know, at a time when the metaphors needed to make sense to the people. And another point that I had to make was, you know, in the Quran, there's this thing called the scroll of deeds, which is there's two angels, one writing down all of your good deeds and one writing down all of your bad deeds.

And I was, and I had to make the point. This is a metaphor. There's not a physical book. There's not like seven billion angels with feather pens. I mean, what language are they going to write in? Are they going to write in Arabic? Are they going to write in Chinese? It's basically a recording like a video game.

Like when we record and we, we, you know, when we record and we, we, you know, we're going to write in. We play, you know, the biggest content on YouTube is video game content. People watch other people play video games. And basically what, you know, these ancient texts have been trying to tell us is that it's like a holographic 3D world that gets recorded. And then we can play it back and we can review just like you might review a session if you recorded or you streamed it on Twitch. We can review what happened.

And so I think that's where the bridges come in. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why writing, I wrote the simulation. was to be a bridge between science and religion. Mysticism really more, the mystical side. And Yogananda was a bridge between the West and the East, right? He brought Eastern ideas. And now I'm trying to bring some of those Western, some of the Western technological ideas back to the East.

And, you know, this pretty much happens. There's something called the Pizza Fact, which I talk about. I love, I was, that's one of my big notes here. We don't have time. I wasn't going to ask you about that, but I'm happy you brought it up. What a cool concept. Yeah, you know, the pizza effect is pizza was sort of invented somewhere in Italy near Napoli, and then it came to the U.S. But it was very different from what we think of as pizza today.

And so when it intersected with American culture, the modern idea of pizza was born. And now if you go to Italy, the pizza you get there is like the American pizza, right? So it's gone back to its homeland transformed by its encounter with another culture. And that's, you know, what we're doing, what I'm trying to do here with with. of a yoghya, and Yogananda came here, you know, he interacted with another culture, right? I mean, he was as American as the next guy, right, living the American dream in his own way. It was a, he was a Swami, but building things, just like entrepreneurs, build organizations, writing books, making an impact, and then his teachings went all the way back to India.

And they asked me to write a book that was first published in India. And it's actually a bestseller in India. You can find it at the bookstores, like on the bestseller lists in the airports and stuff. And so, you know, it's really trying to bridge the gap between these ancient ideas and modern technology. That was one of the reasons why I decided to go ahead and write this book. So cool. You know, just a couple of quick takeaways before we close. I mean, first of all, I want you to know that you and your work. And, you know, I went deeper than just reading his books.

You know, I mean, I looked into, you know, if you go to his website, you know, which is called Zen Entrepreneur. Yeah, my website is zenentrepreneur.com. The title of my first book was Zen Entrepreneurs. Yeah. And there's just so many nuggets there. And I highly recommend that you, you know, get on his mailing list and just keep up with this guy because, you know, he's definitely not done. But the idea of looking at life as a video game is such a fun thing because what do we do with video games? We play, right? And you talked a little bit about play or Lila, I think that was called, right?

Yeah, Lila was the divine player, the grand play in life. That's just the way, you know, Riz's really helped, you know, my book is about, you know, handling adversity and not getting off track and moving forward. I'm going to send you a copy because I speak about you in it. You're in the chapter called, it's called Decoding the Game. That's the chapter that you're in. Great. I look forward.

Yeah, it's perfect, right? So, but the idea of play, you know, I've really, really adapted that into my family's life. And we just adopted a little girl. So, you know, I've got my boys are in. in college and I have kind of a do-over with my little one and we're having fun. We're playing, right? And I've taught her everything that, you know, I've learned from you and everything like that.

And I just taught her about the concept of the fact that there's a chance that none of this is real. It might just be a game, which she spends most of her time in those worlds anyway. So she's like, yeah, I get it. How old is she? She's 13. So she lives more in the game than out here. So she thinks this is probably like, you know, a mess.

In any case, one thing that you'll love is that my daughter and I have this thing where whenever we're out, we consider ourselves baseline reality characters, of course, right? You know, if this is a simulation, we're special. But when we walk around and we come across any adversity or like a road rage situation, or we always just say, oh, those are NPCs, right? Non-player characters. And we get that from you. So we joke about that all the time, like, you know, we get to choose if. we even care about what they say. So I thank you for that. So I have a one last challenging question for you. Are you up for that? Do you have the brain capacity? Well, let's see. It depends on the question.

I mean, it's right, it's right up your alley, you know. If life, right, if life is a simulation and a video game, in your observation, if we're playing a video game in the video game, doesn't that open up the possibility that there's like billions of video? video games being played? Because what's interesting about living in the simulation in the video game is we're building simulations in video games, turtles all the way down. So what's your take on that as we move into this new frontier where we find ourselves building AI, you know, and nobody's stopping to say maybe we are AI? Well, you mean, you hit on a core, you know, one of the core aspects of simulation theory. And, you know, I talk about it a lot. I taught a class. I taught a class.

at Arizona State University this last semester, which is probably the first college-level class on the simulation hypothesis. I'm going to be teaching it online now, so it's open to everybody. If people follow me on Twitter at Riz Stanford or X, as it's called now, I guess, they can't call it Twitter anymore.

But what got me into simulation theory was very much looking at how AI is developing and how video games are developing and to see how long it would take us to get to the point where we could build either a game that is AI that looks conscious or a game that is so realistic that we would forget that we were not in the real world, that we were in virtual reality. And I call that the simulation, which is a kind of technological singularity, right?

People think of technological singularities being just AI, being super intelligent. But really, it's meant to be a point where technology accelerates in such a way that everything will be different. And so the simulation point is also a singularity. And part of the logic for what's called a simulation argument, why we think we're in simulation is if we can get there, who's to say someone hasn't already gotten there? And in fact, if you think of a real universe and the age of a universe, we've only had computers for 50 years, and this is the point Elon Musk made. What are the video games going to look like in 100 years, in 1,000 years? They're going to look much more sophisticated. So, you know, if we can get there, someone's probably already gotten there. And I find the

best way to talk about this question, because it's a very mind-bending question, right? Because it's not just, are we in a simulation, but are we in simulations upon simulations? And are they stacked? Is to use science fiction, right? And so a lot of these concepts are easier to talk about, just like I talked about it with religion, they use metaphors, right? So today we're going to use, our metaphors are from science fiction in a way. And there's a movie that came out the same year as the Matrix, which is the 13th floor, right? Which was based on a book from the 60s called Sun Milacron 3.

And in this book, they're in 1999 is when it came out, and they're in the 90s, and they build a very sophisticated video game of the 1940. So it's what's called an ancestor simulation by Nick Bostrom, who was this guy who came up with a simulation argument, philosopher at Oxford. But this is a perfect example of an ancestor simulation because it's like they're in the 1990s and it's a perfect simulation of the 1940s. And they go in there and they, you know, one of the guys in the 1940s is an NPC.

Like it's full of NPCs, but they can go in and inhabit a character so they can also have it become an avatar or a PC. And so this issue of NPC versus the RPG version, which I like to call it, of the simulation hypothesis is one of the most critical. because you come up with slightly different answers, depending on where you line up. But of course, a video game has both. And in the 13th floor, you had both. You had both players inhabiting characters, and you had the NPCs.

And, you know, one of the guys kind of went crazy when you found out it was a simulation inside the 40s. But then you find out, I don't think I'm giving anything away. This is, you know, a 20-year-old movie. The 1990s are also a simulation. Right. And that there are people coming in from, let's say, the 2020s or whatever year it was in the future.

And they tell them something interesting. They say, you guys are one of thousands of simulations that we ran. And this is what my book, The Simulated Multiverse gets into. If you're going to run one simulation, you're probably going to run more than one, right? And that is part of Bostrom's argument as well, is that there are lots of simulation. But she said, you're the only one that got to the point of creating your own super realistic simulations. But we have to shut you down, right, for whatever reason, because maybe you're using

too much computing power or we're using, you know, something else. There are people who say it's better to find that and to not find out that we're in a simulation because the simulators might shut us down. Like there was a philosophy professor from, I think it was Singapore, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about this. But that's the NPC version. If we're in the PC, if we're in the RPG version, then I think it's less, you know, it's more about perhaps the goal of the game is to figure out that it's just the game.

It's to remember that you're in that headset, right? So you arrive at slightly different answers. So it's very possible that there are more multiple levels to the simulation. In Islam, they talk about the seven earth, you know, each with their own Moses and their own Jesus and their own prophets, which are like different timelines, in my opinion, because seven was just an Arabic term that used to say many. But they also talk about the seven heavens. And in Yogananda, they talk about, you know, the astral realm, which is where you are after the physical realm. and then there's the causal, right?

There are multiple levels above us. And so there's no reason to think that this is the only simulation. That said, I think there is a limit to where, you know, to the number of stacked simulations you can have, both in terms of computing power, but also in terms of what is allowable and what experiences, you know, you're looking to have. Because if you're in a PC simulation,

there's only so far you're going to go, you know, before you need to back out of it. and for us, death would be the time that we back out. Or some people have said, like in your case, you know, you did the, you know, the different psychedelic, you know, people have told me if you really want to see we're in the simulation, you know, take DMT or try certain things. Yeah, that's what I did. First number of people have told me that, right?

They say, you can see the grid lines. And of course, certain people have bad trips too, but, you know, the people who have seen, I think the first person to tell me that was Sean Stone, who was Oliver Stone's son. I think right after my book had come out. But I've had a number of people talk to me about that. So there are different ways, I think, to perceive that we're in the simulation. But I'd also say we're here to enjoy the game. Enjoy the game.

So that's an important part of it as well. Well, that leads back to, you know, the two P's in perception and play. You know, you just heard Riz give a bunch of, you know, his thoughts and things like that. But, you know, and that's what makes them real for him. What I love to say, you know, that's why whenever anybody comes up to me and says something that my program mind says, that's nuts. You know, I've replaced that with, hmm, you know, just interesting, you know.

I'm not sure what I think about it, but I'm coming from a place where I know that I don't know everything, but, you know. So cool, Riz, I will tell you, I mean, I thoroughly loved the books that I've read from you, but I personally think this is your best. I mean, I would encourage everybody to, I think it would be a great idea to read some of these books before,

but if you want to jump in, if you want to just feel really good about getting rid of a lot of stuff that probably doesn't matter in your life and just like, that's what, this is a feel good book because, you know, you're going to have a lot of aha moments that just go, ah, you know, interesting.

And he just does such a good job of taking this old, these old teachings and bringing them, and that's probably why they asked you to do this and making them relevant for today. So this is going to be a, must. You know, everybody, everybody's got those big boxes of Yogananda books. I'm going to have boxes of wisdom of yogi books for everybody because I think, I think you do a great job. I think he would probably appreciate it too. I think you do a great job of taking that work and making it extremely

relevant for this fast-growing world that we live in. So thanks so much for that. Well, thanks for that feedback as well. And it is definitely my most personal book. And I had a lot of personal insights. while writing it. And, you know, the folks at Yogananda's organization, you know, I was just out there in L.A., and, you know, they love the book as well. And, of course, they've read Autography and Yogi hundreds of times in many cases. And so I'm glad to have been a vehicle to get this book out there. And hopefully we'll, you know, even for people who have never read, autobiography, Yogi, but just are curious about how these ancient teachings tie into the modern world of simulations. This is a good place to start.

Awesome. Well, listen, thanks so much for being here. What an awesome chat. I mean, I'm looking forward to our third already. I'm sure you have some other things in the works. But go check out, first of all, all his books are available on Amazon because I know everybody feels comfortable there. But if you go to Zen Entrepreneur.com, you'll be able to deep dive and everything that he's doing

and also get on his newsletter. And I believe your Instagram X handle is Riz Samford. I know, Riz Cambridge on Instagram. Oh, Riz Cambridge on Instagram, and then your ex is Riz Stanford. What's going on with that, man? Why are you giving two different schools? I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts when I created one, and I was going to a business school at Stanford University when I created the other.

So it was just where I happened to be at the time. This episode and the YouTube video will come out in the newsletter and we'll put all of the links there. But Riz, thanks so much. I know you've been out on a tour, getting the. this book out and we're honored that you stop by here. Thanks so much for having me again. Makes sense.