The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1239: Rizwan Virk | The Real Mysteries of the Simulation Hypothesis

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Reality might be rendered, not real. The Simulation Hypothesis author Rizwan Virk explains this wild idea and why even physicists take it seriously.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1239What We Discuss with Rizwan Virk:The simulation hypothesis suggests our physical reality is actually a computer-generated virtual world like The Matrix, but potentially without any "real" versions of ourselves existing elsewhere outside the simulation.Some fundamental limits in physics — like the speed of light and quantum indeterminacy — could be computational features rather than bugs, suggesting the universe operates more like a sophisticated program with rendering constraints than pure physics.If we can build realistic simulations ourselves, the odds we're already in one increase dramatically to 99% — because any civilization older than ours would likely have already created countless nested simulations.We're approximately 70% of the way to building Matrix-level simulations ourselves, with AI advancing faster than expected and brain-computer interfaces developing rapidly — potentially achieving this within 50-100 years rather than millennia.Whether or not we're in a simulation, the important question is how we play within it — curiosity, humility, and treating each other well matter regardless of whether reality is "real" or rendered, making the ethical implications more significant than the metaphysical ones.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Quiltmind: Email [e-mail] to get started or visit quiltmind.com for more infoUncommon Goods: 15% off: uncommongoods.com/jordanChilipad: 20% off: sleep.me/jordan, code JORDANApretude: Learn more: Apretude.com or call 1-888-240-0340Homes.com: Find your home: homes.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, investigative journalist, tech luminary, or hostage negotiator. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.

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or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what if reality isn't real? I don't mean that in a stoner dorm room, like, whoa, dude. Literally, what if the universe, us, you, me, this podcast, we're just running on someone else's hardware. Today, we're talking with

Rizwan Verk, MIT-trained computer scientist, venture capitalist, and author of The Simulation Hypothesis about why the idea that we're living inside a computer simulation might not actually be as crazy as it sounds. If this all makes you think of the Matrix or Star Trek or something like that, you're not alone. Those are exactly the kinds of sci-fi ideas that first got me thinking about this, and other people I would assume as well. But hey, this isn't just movie fuel. from Elon Musk to Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken this hypothesis seriously enough to say, yeah, the odds might not be in favor of base reality. So today we'll unpack what simulation really means, and it's not just we're living in a video game. We'll explore what the evidence says from physics

and computing, how close we are to building our own simulated worlds, and whether deja vu, UFOs, or that weird Mandela effect might actually just be hints that our code is showing. Verk argues that some of the most fundamental limits in physics like the speed of light, quantum indeterminacy, could be features of a computational universe, not bugs. We'll also look at what it would take to prove or disprove any of this and why the implications might matter for ethics, spirituality, how we live our lives day to day, because if it is a simulation, what does that say about free will, meaning, morality? And if it's not, why does this idea feel so intuitive somehow? So grab your controller or your prayer beads or whatever and let's boot up reality with

Rizwan Verk, right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. So the simulation theory stuff is always, it started off in my mind a little bit like crackpot maybe, but it turns out to not be a crackpot theory. Why don't we back up a little bit? Can you define what simulation hypothesis even is for the layman? Because I think a lot of people have never even thought about this. Yeah, sure.

So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of is the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all the physical reality is actually part of a virtual world, a computer-generated world. And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film The Matrix, because Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but it turns out he was actually in a virtual world. Now, there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. So, for example, in the case of Neo and Morpheus in the Matrix, they existed as players outside of the Matrix, and then they had an avatar or character inside the matrix.

And I call that the RPG version or the role-playing game version of the simulation hypothesis. And then there's another flavor, which I call the NPC version, which NPC stands for non-player characters. Anyone who's played video games knows that terminology. And in that scenario, everybody in the game is AI, so it's just code. that's controlled by, you know, computer programs. And, of course, those two are not completely exclusive, mutually exclusive, because you can have player characters or avatars, and you can have NPCs within a virtual environment.

So I think of it more like an axis. And, you know, I use the metaphor of video games that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game because that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley before I came to write this book. but when some academics and scientists refer to simulation theory, they're talking more about the NPC version where we're all running on a computer and you don't exist as a player. You're just one of the beings being simulated. I see. Right. Okay. So to clarify this, the first version,

the Neo and the Matrix version is there's a real version of us somewhere else, but we're just not necessarily, we're not the person that I am right now. I'd be, by the way, it'd be pretty pissed if this is my avatar. Like, I could have been anything. They gave me this. This is bullshund. shit, Rizwan. But, but, but the, so it must be the other one. Otherwise, that they're just too cruel. The other version is we're just, we're all running on essentially silicon or, or something like that, quantum, whatever.

Yeah. In that version, we'd be running on some much more advanced computational system, which could be some type of a computer, a quantum computing system. There have been a number of physicists who aren't looking at the world as information now. And so there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics, uh, instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. You're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be in, you know,

whatever computational substrate is being used to run the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. That said, to your earlier point, when you play a video game, your avatar doesn't have to look exactly like you, right? In fact, when we play a video game, oftentimes we'll choose like a race, like an elf or a dwarf or a human, and then we'll choose a profession like a wizard or a thief, et cetera. And so in the Matrix, they wanted to use the same actors, obviously, right? They wanted to use Keanu Reeves inside and outside the simulation. So their avatars were what I call identomorphic. They looked just like the player. But in reality, even if this were a multiplayer video game or an NPC simulation,

It's hard to say what the world outside of the simulation might look like and what we might look like outside of the simulation. I guess, and we'll get to this, but like whoever's running this, it seems most likely to me. Look, I am no expert, obviously. My expertise comes from having read your book three days ago, so here we go. But it seems like wouldn't we just be likely to be the ancestors or the primitive race of whatever's simulating us, right?

Like, are we just like the monkey in a cage version of the advanced society's civilization race, whatever that's right. And they're like, wow, this is, wow, humans, these early humans who aren't in the year 10 million are just ridiculous. They just look at porn online and play stupid things on a screen and they walk around and they buy food and they get fat. It's so dumb, right? Yep, and they share cat videos on their stupid, primitive internet. It's just unbelievable the stupidities people get up to. And they're just watching us in real time or watching, you know, the Truman Show version. And they're like, look at these. Why do we even bother running this stupid simulation. Look at these like inbred, you know, monkeys essentially.

Like, and I don't mean that. That sounds insulting to monkeys essentially. But I would imagine looking back at early humans, we would also be like, so you just picked your butt and ate food with it. Gross. You are, you're revolting. That's kind of what we probably look like to them. It's very possible. And so, you know, the term you mentioned, an ancestor simulation is an important one within the simulation world. And it was defined by an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom. And what he basically said was that if a civilization got much more advanced than we are today, and he wrote this paper back in like 2003. So it was a couple years after the matrix, but really before today's AI, chat GPT, LLMs, all this stuff. But he basically said that if a

civilization ever gets to the point where they are post-human, or what I call the simulation point, where they can create a fully immersive virtual reality with AI characters that are indistinguishable from physical characters, that if they reach that point, they would create what he called ancestor simulations or simulations of their ancestors. And like you said, that could be like us creating a simulation of caveman or of ancient Rome or ancient Greece, for example. This is like Westworld kind of, right? Yeah, similar to Westworld in a way, right? If you think about it, Westworld is a simulation of our past, right, from the 1800s. In that case, though, there's the physical robots that we can

get into. In the simulation theory, it's more like a virtual world where you would put on a virtual reality helmet if you wanted to go in there. But yeah, the AI characters in there are very similar to the ones that you might see in Westworld. So the simulation point is essentially where I put on my VR helmet and I don't even remember that it's on because you look just is real to me at the simulation point as I, if I took my helmet off and you were sitting in front me, like it's basically like you said, indistinguishable. So I might remember that I have my helmet on or I might, there might be some clue eventually that I could do. I don't, what was it in Inception where the thing keeps spinning and that's how they know they're in the dream? Right. Yep. You call it

their totem, right? And he has a little top in that case. So you might have something along the lines of that or maybe there's a, maybe there's a way to get a status bar to appear in the top of the screen, you know, or whatever. Pause. But, um, but, um, but everything else is just you're in there. So you're saying if the technology evolves to that point, and that's the simulation point, well, okay, now I'm talking myself in circles, which is going to happen a lot in this episode

because it's a lot to wrap your mind around. But it seems like if a civilization has the technology to get to the point where they can create a simulation that's indistinguishable from their reality, doesn't the probability approach 100% that we are in a simulation? Yep, that's exactly right. Okay.

So the way that I started to think about this was because I was building video. games here in Silicon Valley. And after I had sold my last video game company, I ended up at a video game firm that was located in Marin County. And, you know, they had an office in Saucco and they were looking out over San Francisco Bay, beautiful landscape, beautiful, yeah, I think it's one of the most beautiful cities on a nice day. But then, you know, he said, here, you got to try this. So I put on a virtual reality helmet and we started to play virtual ping pong game. And the game itself wasn't very realistic. Like the graphics were pretty crappy. This was back in 2016 or so.

and the VR headset had wires coming from the ceiling, so it wasn't even wireless at that point. So there was no mistaking that I was inside a virtual reality. But what happened was that the physics engine was so good that it really felt like I was hitting the ball with a paddle and I had to move it just right. And so much so that it made me forget just for an instant that I was in virtual reality and not playing a real game of table tennis

and I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table just like I might do, right, at the end of a game. But, of course, the controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over. And then I started to think, well, how long would it take us to get to that point where we could create these types of simulations? And that's why I laid out these 10 stages simulation points. So that's what got me to go down this rabbit hole.

Now, what Bostrom's simulation argument was, was that if anybody ever gets to that point, and he was more concerned with creating AI characters in these simulations, then they would create lots of simulations, not just one. And so there would be, let's say, a billion simulated worlds. And there's only one physical world. And he said those simulations could likely be ancestor simulations. So they would create simulations of their ancestors to see how civilization might have evolved, maybe even to see how it might have evolved differently than it actually has. And so his point was that if that's possible, then let's say there's 999 million simulated worlds in 99 and one physical world.

So he said the odds that you are in a simulation is basically billions to one. Right, right. That's what Elon Musk is quoting. I see. I see. Of him online. Yeah, right. Because if there's a billion worlds and 99 million of them are virtual, or virtual, what are the odds that this is the one that's real?

Right. Exactly. Pretty much zero. Yeah, pretty much zero. Now, I say that it's at least 50 percent because at that point you can't tell the difference, right? I mean, there's still the chances that you are in the physical world, but you can't tell the difference. So it's somewhere between 50. Now, that is if those worlds can be created.

Now, it's possible no civilization ever creates those worlds. Why? Because maybe it's not possible, although with the rapid progress of AI today and the rapid, if you've seen some of these latest videos, there's just this week or last week, there's a company called World Labs. And you could take a picture, and it would basically create this navigable video of space where like a video game, you can kind of wander around. In the photo.

In the photo. So it's basically extrapolating using AI to create the world. And this exists in 2025. So what are the odds if you add a zero to the end of the year? Where at the year 20,250? So like, I mean, you're just, what are the odds that they can't do something slightly better than that? I mean, look, maybe it's not slight. But the other thing is I've done a lot of shows about the brain.

I've just done a lot, a lot, a lot of shows about the brain with guys like David Eagleman. And it doesn't make me a brain scientist. But one of the things that they put across pretty clearly is your brain. brain is just making sense of information that's being put inside it, right? So your eyes aren't seeing anything. They're just, your brain is creating the picture from photons that go into your eyes. If you got rid of the brain, you just took the information from the optic nerve, it would just be a bunch of white dots on a black background, for example, right? There's nothing else going on there. It's just data, right? Right. It's just data. So your brain can really create an image based on anything,

and that's why blind people can get electric signals through, say, their tongue, and their brain will create a basic picture of it. And if you were blind from birth and you used a really advanced device, there's a really good chance you'd be able to navigate the world pretty much just as well as somebody else who was born cited. I mean, look, the world is built for the equipment that all 8 billion of us have. So you'd be at a slight disadvantage, of course, but it's not impossible. So the idea that your brain has to have, we don't have to have graphics that are as good as reality. Your brain would just simply adapt to it and eventually you would forget what reality looks like. And if you were born into it, never seeing the physical world, you would never have any

idea that you were in a simulated one. Right. Exactly. And there's an old philosophical thought experiment called the brain in a vat. And the basic idea is that you put the brain in the vat and you have all the signals coming into it that are the same signals that we're getting from our eyes, like you were saying, from our ears, from our senses. And the brain would never know the difference, theoretically. Now, we don't know how to do that yet, but again, that's another kind of earlier flavor of simulation theory. Now, there's a new flavor of simulation theory that came out just within the last few months called prompt theory. And this shows you how fast AI is moving. I mean, I mentioned World Labs, and Google also has something called Genie 3, which lets you type of prompt,

and it'll create the world that you can kind of move around it. And if you change the world, like if you spray paint something on the wall, it'll still be there when you go back. So it's really creating this virtual world based on prompts. But so there's some videos online, if anyone just searches for prompt theory, where they basically prompted these characters using Google V-O-3. It was one of the first video engines that did a really good job with, not just video, but with sound with virtual actors that look like real people. In fact, I showed a clip of this at a conference, and I told people, these are AI-generated

characters. And afterward, they came up to me, and they said, was that really AI-generated? because it's getting the point where you can't tell the difference. But the basic idea is prompt theory is you create these videos and you tell these characters in the movie and the videos to basically talk about whether they're based on prompts. And of course, they're saying things like, I'm not a prompt.

Clearly, this is real. I mean, look how beautiful the world is. This can't be ones and zeros. Or, you know, a woman saying if a guy starts talking about the prompt theory, forget, you know, that date's not going anywhere. Yeah, right. It's funny. It's pretty funny to see how these characters react

then how realistic they look. So I think we'll get there. And I think, you know, most people in the technology world would agree that we could get to the point where we can simulate an entire world. I'm definitely curious how far away we are. But I'll get to that in a minute. I guess for now where people I think might be getting hung up is they're like, well, I play Grand Theft Auto and there's a limit. You know, eventually you go so far west, you hit a river. Do you go so far east?

You hit, I don't know, a mountain range or whatever it is, right? They limit the map. but that's because it's designed by the designers of the game. I don't play a lot of video games, but I think aren't there video games? Aren't things like Minecraft kind of infinite because they're being generated by users or even they're just generated as you walk in that direction?

Right. So there's something called procedural generation. And what that does is it creates the landscape for you. If you think of like really old video games, like I used to play when I was a kid like, you know, Pac-Man, there was a limited screen. Yeah. You go to the right and you come out of the left.

And that's if you're lucky, right? Yeah, if you're lucky, right, if the ghost don't get you. Right. But then you think of the side-scroller games, like they've got various Mario games that are like side-scrollers. They just kind of keep going, right? And eventually what happened was video game designers learned to use procedural generation to create worlds that might seem realistic. So there was a game called No Man Sky, which came out in like 2016. So again, almost 10 years ago now.

And it had 18 quintillion worlds. Right. So that's like way more than any human game design team. I don't even know how to, like my brain doesn't know how to deal with that kind of number. Yeah, that number is just so huge that it's effectively infinite, right? And why 18 quintillion? Well, it turns out it's two to the power of 64. So it's like a memory limit on the current?

Yeah, just in terms of how many worlds they want to keep track of. But now, I mean, you could say, okay, we're going to use 128 bits, which suddenly gives you to not double the number, but two to the one. 28, and these numbers are eventually get to the point where there's more worlds than there are physical particles in our universe as these numbers grow exponentially. And so effectively, you can create what seems to be an infinite world, but it's not because the whole world is not rendered. Now, this is one of the key points that I try to make in the book. And the simulation hypothesis, the subtitle is an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern Mystics agree we're in a video game. Now, the quantum physics part of it is the whole observer effect,

which most people have heard of. Tell us anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are washing dishes right now, and they're like, I'm not going to access that part of my brain to remember what this is. I'm looking for the soap. The easiest way to understand it is, I mean, it came from the double slit experiment

where if light is a particle, it would go through either one of the slits or the other slit. Can't go through both, right? If it's a particle, you can just go through one of those. Another way to think about it is Schrodinger's cat, which was the thought experiment. Right, the dead cat that's also alive depending on whether or not you open the box?

Is that what it is? Yeah. So there's a box that's some poison in it. And after an hour, there's a 50% chance the cat is alive and a 50% chance the cat is dead because of the poison might be released or not. And so common sense tells us the cat is either alive or it's dead. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box.

Now, what's weird about quantum mechanics is that it's telling us that the cat is in a state of superposition, meaning it's in both of those states. It's both alive and dead until somebody observes it or somebody measure. it. And so that doesn't make any sense from a, you know, comment. I mean, like, okay, this, you know, my little water bottle here is here. My pea brain is not able to do anything with that particular theory. Right. But yet, it's one of these fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. And this is why Niels Bohr, who's one of the forefathers of quantum mechanics, said, if you're not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it. Because what it's saying is really

strange. It's saying that the observation itself actually is when the outcome is decided. But in a video game, that makes perfect sense, right? It's like, if you're walking around Grand Theft Auto, the only thing that the computer is doing, well, one of the only things the computer is doing, correct me if I'm wrong, is rendering drawing, the things that I can see on my screen that my character can use or interact with or view. The stuff on the other side of the map is just, it doesn't exist at that point. 18 quintillion minus one worlds don't have to be rendered on your computer. So some people use kind of what I call the brute force method of estimating.

And they say, well, there's too many particles. Our best supercomputer today couldn't keep track of all those particles. But the fact is that it doesn't have to render all of those particles. It only needs to render those parts which are being observed by one person. And then when they're observed by the next person, there's something we call caching, which is that we store it on the server. So now that's available to multiple people. So as long as people are there, then that gets rendered.

But only the parts that are necessary. So only that which is observed by your avatar is what needs to be rendered. And to me, looking at this weirdness of quantum mechanics and looking at what we do and how we build video games. Right, if you try to build Fortnite, a world of Warcraft or no man sky back in the 80s when I was a kid, you wouldn't be able to. It's just too many particles. But then they came up with this idea of 3D modeling. rendering and you've got things like what's obfuscated, don't bother, even if it's like behind this curtain, we don't need to necessarily render it. So computer science is often about optimization,

and there's something called lazy evaluation in programming. And lazy evaluation means you don't evaluate, you don't actually run the code unless you need to. So if you say X equals two to the one million power, but then you never use that variable X, that computation might take a long time to do. I mean, it's not that hard for computer to do, but you can think of a more complex. computation, but if it's never used, it'll just wait around until somebody needs X and then it'll go and it'll compute it. I see. So theoretically, there's no coffee machine behind this curtain, but when I open it and it's there, it was created the second that my eye... Yes, it could be. Now, in this case, because you've been living here, it's probably cashed,

so it's already there. Yeah, right, okay. Because that's the thing you might look at next, whereas you're not going to go to Mogadishu, you know, immediately. You'd have to get on a plane. you have to go all the way over time. There's a lot of time for it to render in my brain, yeah, or wherever it's being done. Now, that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it from a video game standpoint. But it says a lot about space, right?

I remember I had Michi Okako on this show a long time ago and I asked if we were in a simulation and he said, no, because weather is too hard to simulate, which I didn't find super compelling. I mean, no shade. He's obviously smarter than me, but I didn't find that completely compelling. One, sure, our computers today would have a hard time with weather. We're talking about a civilization that's maybe a million years advanced.

They could probably run the weather on their iPhone, right? Or whatever. Exactly. I mean, it's like saying, can you run chat GPT on a 286 or a Pentium processor? No, you need the GPUs from Nvidia. But more than that, you need the LLM training and the algorithms, which couldn't have been done. The other thing is you don't really need to worry about the way. If we're talking about rendering and caching, you don't need to run the weather for the whole earth unless something is perceiving that weather.

right? So it doesn't really have to be done. All the storms that are 3,000 miles in the middle of Antarctica, they don't need to render. We just need to theoretically know that they're there. If nobody's there to observe these, then it doesn't matter. And that's where it gets even a little bit stranger. Okay. So I talked about not needing to render it until it's observed. That makes sense when we talk about, okay, you're going to go to Antarctica. We're about space, though. It's so far. No, nothing's there. Well, we don't know. But if you look at it, it looks almost infinite, right? And yet, How do we know that's not being procedurally generated beyond a certain point? Yeah, I guess we don't.

As we get better and better at looking at it. Now, that doesn't rule out the fact that there could be other civilizations in a simulation. I mean, in many multiplayer strategy games, you have people on different planets. And maybe the purpose of the game is to wait to see when these guys are going to interact with each other. But there's something even weirder. And that is with time. Now, we're used to thinking, okay, the future, I can think of multiple possible paths in the future, right? I moved to San Francisco.

I moved in New York. Those are two different paths along the way. But in the past, I'm used to thinking of I have only one past, which is that I moved to the Bay Area, I was a video game developer, et cetera. But in quantum mechanics, there's something called the delayed choice double-slit experiment. And that's even weirder because what it's saying is not only are you deciding whether the cat is alive or dead, but when you render it, you are also deciding the history of, of the cat. Like, did it come in from the backyard or the front yard? Before it came from the

front yard, you know, was it across the street or was it in the backyard? So you're basically choosing from one of these historical paths. Okay, now this is like even more confusing. And I talk about this in this book, I talk about a little more in my book, The Simulated Multiverse. You ever see Donnie Darko? You know that movie? Long time ago. So it's been like 25 years. So give me a break here. But I think Jake Gyllenhaal, he sees this weird guy in a rabbit suit or something. like that. It's got this mercury or liquid thing flowing through it. And eventually you kind of figure out, I think that that's time and it goes forward and backwards. The whole thing is like his, him screwing with that kind of quantum idea of time. So it sounds like that's what you're saying,

right? So this, at the time the cat is rendered, the history is rendered before that it didn't exist. Right. Is that what you're saying? Right. Yeah, basically. And a good way to think about it is what's called the cosmic delay choice experiment. And that is when, let's suppose we have light from a quasar that's a billion light years away. So it's pretty far away. It's going to take the light a long time to get here, a billion years, because that's how far it is. But suppose in the middle there's a black hole or a galaxy, something that's a gravitationally large object. And so the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object to get here. And we have telescopes here on Earth that can measure whether it went left or right. So this is a thought experiment

that was proposed by my favorite physicist of the 20th century, a guy named John Wheeler. And so he said, well, when would the decision have to be made about whether the light goes to the left or to the right? And suppose it's halfway between us and the quasar. So suppose that's a half a billion light years away. So the decision would have had to have been made half a billion years ago, so 500 million years ago. We're talking about the past, but the deep past. We're talking about dinosaur age, right? Maybe even before the dinosaurs.

But what this experiment shows us is it's not until the light is measured. here on Earth, and we measure what's called its polarization, which is the same as saying whether it went left or right, that the decision about whether it goes left or right is made. Now, it's made now when we measure it. Now, that's just really bizarre, because that's saying there's more than one possible past. And so I wasn't sure I was interpreting this right. And I went back and I found an obscure quote from Schrodinger, who was, again, one of the forefathers of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger wave equation. And he said, in an obscure speech, he said, effectively when we're collapsing the probability wave, which is one of the interpretations of what happens for the observer

effect is that you have all these probabilities and then you come down to just one. That's the one you observe. The cat is alive. That's it. But Trudinger said we're also choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories, which just gets really bizarre. Now, why do I go into this kind of detail when I'm talking about simulation theory? Well, if you've ever played a game like Farmville, which was popular, you know, 10, 15 years ago when I got in the video game industry with Facebook. Wasn't my thing, but yeah. Yeah, but it was like extremely popular.

And today, Minecraft is extremely popular. That's right. And so they have crops that grow in Minecraft. While you're not there, yeah. While you're not there. Now, the question is, are they actually growing when you're not there? What happens is when you log in, the computer figures out what happened while you were gone. Right.

You were gone for two days, so it's going to be 40 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Not only are they, you know, have they matured, but some locusts came by because there was a percentage of possibility that that might happen. and they destroyed half your props. Now, that's the past, right? But it's figured out when you render the game.

So is it possible that we are choosing from multiple simultaneous histories? Now, it doesn't mean we're choosing, like, all the time, but it could, in fact, be that's a more efficient way to simulate things. So in computer science, we're always looking at ways to optimize and do things more efficiently. Like today, Sam Altman just announced OpenAI

is getting $100 billion from a video. Why? Because they don't have enough computer. And they just want to, again, use the dumb brute force method, which is they just want to add more hardware. But in computer science, the way you should really do it is look for better algorithms so that they use less compute. They're probably doing that too, right? Yeah, they're probably doing that too. It takes time.

It takes time. There's a short term. Short term, the only thing they can do is. Let's throw money at this for now and then later on worry about the efficiency, right? Right, right. But then you've got other guys trying to figure out these. Because remember, their current models are based on research that was done five, ten years ago. I mean, a lot of this was in Google research labs.

You know, back in the day, they just hadn't implemented it fully. Wow. It's crazy to think that in theory this is old tech, right, that we're using, because it is quite amazing what it can do. I mean, yes, it's fancy autocomplete, but also it saves me a shitload of time, so I'm not complaining. Yeah, it's very fancy autocomplete. So $100 billion from now, I mean, I'm stoked.

I want to see it. After bending your mind for a little bit here, let's take a breath and ground ourselves in something simple and real. Consumerism. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust, teaching you how to build the same thing for free over at six-minute networking.com.

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Come on and join us. You'll be in Smart Company where you belong. Again, the course is all free without any shenanigans over at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Riswan Verk. At what point do the in-game characters think that they're real? Maybe it's less important whether I actually think I'm in Grand Theft Auto 6. It's probably more important that the characters in Grand Theft Auto 6 think they're in Grand Theft Auto 6 and they don't, they can't tell the difference, right? Is this a decent question or am I? No, no, that's a good. Great question. And so, you know, in the past, we had what were called dumb NPCs, right? They were just basic NPCs that you could interact with. If you've ever played like an old video game from, I was an investor in a company called Telltale Games years ago, and they used to create like a game of Thrones and a Walking Dead game. And when you wanted to talk to the character, the character would basically, you know, tell you what they said. And then there would be these choices and you'd have to choose one of them. So it's basically a dialogue tree. So those were like simple dumb NPCs where the creators of the game, have laid out, you know, all the paths. Kind of like the old choose your own adventure. I remember those. I also, yeah, Skyron had something I've seen where it's like a meme, right, where someone gets blown up or whatever.

And the NPC goes, huh, must have been the wind, right? It's just like they don't have this advanced. Yeah, they're not very advanced. But today, we're starting to get smart NPCs. So what's happened with the Turing test, which was this test that Alan Turing proposed, way back in 1950, actually. And he was talking about AI as a computer, right? Today we think of AI as software, but he was basically saying, look, if you are passing messages

behind two curtains, curtain A and curtain B, and one of those has a computer, again, he's thinking a physical computer, and one of those is a human, and you can just pass messages back and forth. Now, back then he was thinking of teletype machines. But, you know, we could think of it as text messages or just a chatbot today. Then if you can't tell the difference, then that computer has passed the Turing test. He actually called it the imitation game in his paper, which was the name of a movie about him, which was not about the Turing test. at all. It was about his other work, his code-breaking work. But so most people believe today that we've

passed the touring tests in that many of these chat GPT like LLM engines, it's very difficult to tell if a human is behind it or not. That said, I mean, if you, you know, you can kind of tell when something is AI generated more because of the length of what they're doing and the patterns that are there. A human would never put up with me for as long as chat GPT has had to put up with me. That's how I know it's a robot. Yeah, so you can tell from the, you know, more or less still, but there have been experiments done now. There was a prize that was set up by a guy named Lobner back in the 90s called the Lobner Prize for which chatbot is closest to passing the touring test. And it went on for many years. In fact, there was a chatbot called Alice back in the early, late 90s, early 2000s,

that was supposed to have the personality of a young woman. And it was getting pretty good. I think it was the winner of the Lobner Prize. But no one won the granddad. grand prize, and it went all the way through 2019, and it became defunct. And now they're doing, running these experiments where, you know, they have a thousand people talking to chat GPT. And so most scholars think we're pretty closer, we've already passed the Turing test. But in my book simulation hypothesis, I talk about the Metaverse Turing test. And it gets back to the point that you just made about no human would put up with me for that long. But the idea is, if you're inside a video game, there's you, your character, there's an NPC, and then there's an avatar

are controlled by a human, and you can go do whatever you do inside the video game, like inside second life, you can go have a swimming pool, you can go to Starship Enterprise, you can do whatever you would do, you can go dancing, you can have virtual sex, whatever. And then if you can't figure out whether which one is the NPC and which one is controlled by the human, then it would pass what I call the metaverse or the virtual touring test. Now, we haven't passed that yet, but we do have smart NPCs now. So what people are doing is they're hooking up like an LLM engine like ChatGPT to an avatar, and they're bringing the two together. I don't know if you ever saw the film Her.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, great film. Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, I think. Yeah, that's right. And so it turns out the guy who wrote the film and directed at Spike Jones, he had seen the Alice chatbot back in the 2000s, and he came out with this film in 2013. And then when OpenAI released one of their recent versions of ChatchupT, you know, they tried to hire Scarlett Johansson to get her voice, but they used the movie Her as kind of a way to think about how you could have a virtual girlfriend or boyfriend. And now there are companies that specialize in like virtual girlfriends, boyfriends.

I mean, I'm not against people using it if it makes them feel better. It's just sad to me that they need to do that. But it wouldn't surprise me, look, it depends on the use case, I suppose, right? If you're elderly and you don't have companionship, it's a little bit less pathetic than a 20-something-year-old guy who's just opted out of the dating game to talk to a computer. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Well, it does seem sad in its way.

But they've been around for a while now. There's a company called Replica, for example, that has been around since, I don't know, 2015, 16. And of course, people are now using chat GPT and variations of it, and there's character. There were a whole bunch of these companies that were just specializing, you know, in this. But getting back to your question,

which was, would the AI, the NPC, not know that it's an NPC? And so we're getting closer. So there was a, if you remember, there was a fourth Matrix movie that came out in 2021. I don't think I saw it. I pulled the plug at some point. Yeah, it wasn't that great, according to most Matrix fans. It was sort of deep, if you think about it,

but it just didn't have the same tenor of the earlier films, I think. But when that came out, the Unreal Engine, which is one of the big gaming engines that's used for building very realistic landscapes today, they came out with a demo called the Matrix Awakens. And it was basically kind of a mini-game, if you will. And it was a city, and they had a Neo that looked like, Keanu Reeves, and they had his voice in there, and they had Trinity with Karyad Moss. And the city that you moved around looked real. It was kind of like a mixture of San Francisco

where they shot part of the film in Berlin, but it was all virtual. And so the landscapes were so good that you couldn't tell the difference. Now, that city was filled with NPCs. Initially, they were dumb NPCs. But then what one guy did, there's a video of this online. He hooked up an LLM engine into the NPCs, and he made them smart NPCs. And then he had his character walk around in this virtual city and say to them, hey, you're in a video game. Hey, you're an NPC. And they reacted the way that people might react.

Some of them were like, I don't have time for this. I got a job to get to. Others were like, really? Tell me more. And so it was interesting to see. And that was in late 21 or early 22, probably. So just around the time the chat GPT came out. So today, there are smart NPCs,

and I think they will get to the point where they may not know. Now, that's not the case today. I mean, if you walk around New York, there's a good chance somebody would want out to you and say you are in a simulation or you are in a video game. And now the question is, are they crazy? Are they crazy or is this my moment, right, to take the red pill?

I don't know. Yep. Okay. So anomalies are something that I remember from the Matrix, a little bit anyway. And I would love to talk about anomalies in the real world, deja vu, other kinds of glitches, or even UFOs, right? It might be one that's apropos lately. What do you think is going?

If we had to plug that into the simulation theory, how does this, that fit in at all? It does because in any simulation you end up with glitches, but you also end up with an information substrate that you can't see normally, but it's driving what happens. And so this could be driving glitches, like whether it's a deja vu or where you feel like you've actually experienced this before. In fact, I quoted Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer who wrote the books behind Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, I interviewed his wife while I was writing the first edition of this book a few years back. And he had a speech in Metz, France in 1977 where he said, we are living in a computer

programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. Now, that's become a very famous quote. In fact, the Wachowski's, who made The Matrix, were inspired by Philip K. Dick. But he went on, and that's the famous line, but if you read the rest of his speech, what he said next was, we would have the sense of reliving the same events, of saying the same words. We would have a sense of deja vu. Such an impression is a clue that some variable had been changed in the past. And so one way that it fits in with deja vu is it's very possible that we have done this before,

because if you run a simulation, you might run it multiple times to see what is the best outcome, the worst outcome. perhaps you are running it yourself in dreams, for example. Some people have had precognitive dreams, for example. It's a real phenomenon, and it's weird because you can't really explain it from a normal point of view. I'm not much of a believer in any of this, but I will say that this stuff has happened to me, too, of course. Well, one, Deja Vu happens to everybody pretty much, but two, I've definitely, I mean, I remember very clearly having dreams and telling my mom about it, and then I'd be like, this is the thing that happened to my dream, like a week or two later. And she's like, whatever, you're a kid and you don't know what you're talking about. But I remember very clearly being like, no, I told you that this was a thing.

And it's happening right now. And she, you know, she didn't believe me. And rightfully so, because it sounds insane. It sounds insane. Yeah. I didn't believe it until I had it happen to me in the business world. It was really weird. I had a startup back in Boston.

We worked with IBM as one of our key partners. And we had a competitor who this guy named Mark and his company was called Edge Research. And they disappeared like a year ago. We weren't sure what happened to them. And I just hadn't thought of this guy in a year. Never had a dream about him. One morning I had a dream, and there's my competitor, Mark, you know, from Edge Research. And he's like, hey, how are things going?

And I just woke up, and I thought, that's bizarre. Why am I dreaming of this guy now of all days? Haven't heard from him in a year. Never, ever had a dream about him. And then I walked in the office and I got a call from IBM. And they're like, hey, we're calling you because before we do this announcement today, because you're one of our partners, but we're introducing this new product. Unfortunately, it's going to compete with your product.

It's going to probably crush your product. but you're a good partner, so we thought we'd let you know beforehand. I was like, great, thanks. But then I was like, wait, how come I hadn't heard of this product before? IBM's a big company. I mean, I'm sure I would have heard of it. He goes, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, from Edge Research? We bought his company about a year ago, and they've been working in secret in New Hampshire,

and it's just coming out now. And it was like, of all the times for me to have that dream, it was just so, and it happened before I got the phone call. So this kind of thing would start to happen. So that's another kind of glitch in the Matrix. That doesn't mean all dreams are pre-cognitive. of course. Of course.

Or just, you know, spicy pizza as one of my mentors. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be flying around with Bruce Lee over the Manhattan skyline anytime soon, right? Yeah, yeah. But there is an element of dreams. There's lucid dreaming where you recognize that you're actually. This happens to me all the time. When I was a kid, this happens to me constantly.

It was basically every night. Oh, interesting. All the way through maybe high school. Yeah. Yeah. And then I started getting like really stressed out about it. I remember once school got kind of real and really stressful, it basically stopped happening.

Oh, interesting. Now, how did you know you were in a dream? Oh, so this is interesting. I would love to do a full episode about this at some point, but I knew I was in a dream because, one, they were almost always recurring dreams. So it would be like, oh, I'm swimming with my neighbor Michael again, like I have for the last 20 nights in a row.

And then I would go, all right, this is a dream. Or I would do something where I would be dreaming and I would do maybe it was a nightmare and something was chasing me. And I would go, huh, wait a minute. I've had this dream before, I think. Also, this doesn't make. sense that I can't run. Why would my feet be stuck to the ground? This must be a dream. Well, if it's a

dream, then I don't have to be stuck to the ground. In fact, I can fly. So I would jump over the Mazur. And then I would be like, well, I'm not just going to jump over this dumb monster. Forget about that. I want to explore. I'm flying. So then I would go fly over the neighborhood, over cities I had never been to before. And then the next night or a few nights later, I would have another dream. And I go, oh, my God, I can't run because my feet are, oh, wait, no, no, no, no, no. I've been here. So usually, it was a recurring thing. And it was always like, I've had this dream so many times that whenever I feel this way, it's just a dream. Okay.

So you had like little clues. And getting back to Inception, he had the little spinning thing that was his to figure out if it was a dream or not. So the totem thing. So this is, I wasn't going to share this, but I might as well because it's apropos. There would be, when I was starting to become a little bit more of a young man, I would go, if this is a dream, I could probably make these women that are in the dream disrobe. I mean, when you were a teenager, right? Yeah.

And then I would be like, wow, they're all wearing bikinis now. I'm definitely in a dream. This is amazing. Well, what else can I do? That was my, that was my, it's like the best holodeck from Star Trek. Yeah. But it would be like, wow, oh, man, that girl from my classes, wait a minute, I can make her get into a swimsuit. Oh, wow.

So you had that much control. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I remember being able to, like, choose the color of the swimsuit, everything. It was just like I could control every element of this dream. It was awesome. It's interesting. So what we call lucid dreaming, which is what you were doing there in modern times, it's a deviation. of what, like, the Tibetan monks called dream yoga.

And in dream yoga, what would happen is they would train the monks through meditation during the day, but then they, while they're falling asleep, to try to keep, because, you know, we have a waking consciousness and we have a dreaming consciousness, and you kind of, there's a wall in the middle. That's why it's hard to remember. You can remember a dream when you first wake up, but then over time, you don't remember it. But they train the monks to recognize that they're in a dream.

And I used to do a lot of lucid dreaming, too. and flying was one of my clues that, okay, this might be a dream if I can fly. I can't tell you the number of times where I was sitting with somebody in a restaurant or something, and I thought, well, this is obviously not a dream. I'm not going to try to fly. That would be stupid. And then I floored it up off my chair, and turns out it actually was a dream. But so they would train them.

But the reason they would train them is because then the monks would remember their waking life, and they would remember that this is a false world. And in Buddhism, that's basically one of the main tenets of, you know, the, not just the spiritual practice, but of the cosmology is that the world is Maya or an illusion, which is the term that Eastern Mystics use from Sanskrit. And basically they said, look, if you can wake up in the dream, you should be able to wake up here and remember there's a part of you that's outside the dream. It's what the Hindus call the Admon, or what we would call in the West the soul, or what I would call the player.

And the player, it could be one-to-one matching or it could be somebody who's running the simulation. But that's another type of glitch if we think of the world as a type of dream. Another is synchronicity. I'm sure if you've heard the term, some people are skeptical about it. Young coined the term synchronicity. And he said it's basically when an inner thought and some outer event coincide. So in a sense, the dream that I talked about was kind of a synchronicity. But there's also a new way of thinking about synchronicity.

So what happens is when that happens, you think of somebody calls you, the more scientifically minded of us say, well, that's just coincidence. No big deal. Yeah, this happens quite a bit. It's like what you said about the dream and your competitor, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm always surprised by this because it happens so often.

And look, some of remembering that is selection bias or survivor by whatever it is. Confirmation bias, actually. That's the most common one, right? So the amount of times I think about somebody and they aren't thinking about me is probably 100 to one. But it does happen so often. I'll send someone a text and they'll go, I'm having lunch right now talking about you with someone else. And it'll be like, again, not. a family member, not a friend, not a close friend.

Someone you don't even. From four years ago, I'm like, hey, do you still run that company that does bottle manufacturing? And they're like, who is this? And I'm a Jordan Harbinger. They're like, dude, my friend is telling me about your podcast at a meal right now. And I haven't talked to this guy since a conference in 2016. Right. It happens often enough. I was in the UK in Cambridge last year doing some research on AI at their AI center. And I was meeting a friend. And I was telling her, oh, you know, there's this guy who's got this, He's talking about religion and AI and his name is this, and I've never met him. And she goes, wait a minute.

And she wasn't from the University of Cambridge. She just happened to be in London and visited so we could have coffee. And she goes, wait a minute, his sister was my best friend. And it was just like a weird, you know, like 20 years ago. It wasn't even like recently because she didn't even live in the UK anymore. And so this kind of thing happens a lot. But from simulation hypothesis perspective, you can think of it as there's an information substrate. And so there's a term called a technological.

called Synchronicity, which is a term that a guy named Jacques Valet, who, speaking of UFOs, he was involved in UFO research back at Project Blue Book. And if you've ever watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was the inspiration. Maybe 20 years ago. Yeah, he was the inspiration for the French scientist. So Jacques was a French scientist who came to the US, got his PhD in computer science, and then got into this UFO world at the time. But anyway, he defined this term. But the idea is that there's an information substrate that organizes things so that what seems like a coincidence is just how we organize information.

And I like to describe it by using an example from online shopping because I used to be in the online advertising business. And so the other day, I was shopping for a backpack on my laptop and my desk. And then it was a specific backpack. And I was about to buy it and I said, let me hold off on buying it.

And then I'm on my phone, you know, outside on Facebook or something. And I see an ad for that exact backpack. Probably not magic. It's probably not magic, right? But if I didn't know anything, about databases. Oh, I was going to say, don't tell me you think that this is, okay,

now I got you. No, no, I'm saying. I know exactly what it is. I see where you're going. So, in fact, we even call it registering your intent in the advertising industry. When you put the thing in the shopping cart

and then you abandon it, that we put that in a database. And so we keep track of it behind the scenes. And so there's an ad generator that is like, oh, you're the guy that had the intent to do this, and we put it to you. But my point is, if you didn't know

anything about the internet, you would say, oh, either it's magic. It's a sign. I meant to buy this back there. Or you would say, it's just a coincidence. That's the scientific point of view. That's bullshit because we can't see any cookies. Come on, you're making this stuff up.

Lives in some database in a cloud. You've got to be kidding. That's a good point. This is a really good analogy. Yeah. So if there's an information substrate and our thoughts are somehow getting things from the database and putting things in the database, it's very possible that we're getting hints about that.

That's why it might come up in a dream. Or if we're thinking of someone, it's, very possible that that could remind them and then they do it to us, as long as we don't think of the world as a material, physical world. And so that's kind of, it's become a kind of religion in many ways, I think, in our society. And people get as offended when you tell materialists that something else could be going on that they can't see as people who, like, you tell them, oh, Jesus didn't really resurrect. They'll be like, you know, Christians could be fist at you. And so it's become kind of a religion that says that that doesn't fit my worldview. Therefore, it's not

possible. I mean, I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to all this stuff. Yeah. It's okay to be a skeptic. I'm just saying that at the same time, there are things that happen that we can't explore. That's for sure, true. And so there may be a scientific explanation, as opposed to a divine one. That would be great, actually. Yeah, I would actually rather find out that we're all living in a simulation than some of the other stuff is real. I'd rather that be. So what about, and again, at the risk of sounding like I'm just trying to get a clip for stoners on YouTube, what about the UFOs? Like, How does that fit into simulation theory? Or how does simulation theory make UFOs make more sense as opposed to?

Well, it's interesting. And I have spent a little bit of time investigating the UFO phenomenon. There's a guy at Harvard named Avi Logue who started the Galileo project. And I'm an advisor to the project. And then there's a guy from Stanford named Gary Nolan who started the Soul Foundation. And I wrote a white paper for them on venture capital investment in UAP technology, which would be potentially technology that can move a lot fast. or kind of far future technology.

The way we would have thought of AI 50 years ago, right? It's something that almost seems like Arthur C. Clark said, any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But when you think of UFO sightings and how they might fit in, this is where it gets a little weird. So science fiction has kind of influenced

the way we think about UFOs. Like in Close Encounters the Third Kind, it was a spacecraft. It came from an alien planet, presumably. And that's pretty much the narrative that you see in science fiction. But what happens is with UFO sightings, they get weirder and weirder, and things seem to plop in and out of existence, they change shape. So I was with Jacques once, and he told me about this case where one person saw the UFO and the next person

standing next to them didn't see it. So again, that doesn't make any sense from our standard material point of view. It's either there or it's not there. But if one person is seeing it and the other person isn't, that's really weird. And then I heard of another case. There were two people sitting next to each other in the car. One saw like a large cylinder and one saw like a donut. Like it was weird, different enough. And they were sitting right next to each other in the car

that it was just strange that they could do that. And then there were reports of UFOs popping in and out of existence. I mean, I've had people tell me they're like, it was a clear blue sky. There was nothing there. And suddenly it slowly materialized. And to me, that sounds a lot like brezing or rendering within video games.

happens is you and I, like if we were doing this on Zoom or we were both sitting inside a virtual reality room like in Second Life or Meta's Horizon Worlds or whatever or VR chat, we might think we're sitting together, but we're not, right? I'm rendering you on my computer and you're rendering me on your computer. Right. Right. We happen to be sitting across from each other, although, you know, we could fake it. Well, I'm still rendering you on my brain, right? Yeah, that's right. You have another level on the computer. So basically at some level, we're are both rendering this scene. Like, I'm rendering the scene of the studio, and so are you, on your computer.

I put that in quotes because it doesn't have to me. It's still cashed. It's still there? Yeah. But that would explain how you could have a phenomenon that seems both physical and non-physical and changes shape and appears differently. Because in a video game, you could be at level 30, and I can be at level two. And you could have the C-Dragon spell, and I couldn't.

We can be standing in the exact same field and looking up here, like, look at the dragon. There's no dragon there. What are you talking about? Right. It's just a different. So it could be these objects that are being rendered into our reality. Now, why are they being rendered into our reality? That gets, you know, much more complicated.

There was also a case where Jacques told me where there was this group that said this UFO came down at a 45-degree angle and landed in a clearing in northern California, southern Oregon. If you've been up there, you know, there's a lot of redwood trees and big, you know, evergreen trees. And they said it landed here. And so people went to investigate and they were trying to find physical evidence. And Jacques said, well, if it came down at a 45 degree angle and it landed here in the clearing, it would have had to go through those trees, like literally cut through the trees. And they were like, yeah, that's what happened, but we didn't want to tell anybody that because then we sound like we're crazy.

Right. So again, you have this weird thing that almost looks like it's a holographic projection into our reality. And then it becomes physical, just like when you read something in a video game, you can kind of walk through walls and things when they're not fully erratic. but then when they're fully raised, you have the laws of physics in the world. So is it possible that UFOs are, in fact, not extraterrestrial, but are somehow extraditional, and they're being projected in this reality? That's not to say some of them couldn't also be hoaxes.

Some of them could be extraterrestrial. I mean, there's the Fermi paradox in scientific circles where they say Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and I think he was a Nobel Prize winner too, but he said, look, if there was life in the universe, and even if they didn't have work, So they couldn't travel fast and speed of light. Over like 100,000 years, they could colonize most of the galaxy, certainly over a million years.

And the universe is billions of years old. So where are all the aliens, right? Now, UFO, people in that world would say they're here. We've seen them. We see them all the time. Navy pilots have seen them. But if we take that perspective, then it would be weird to have this entire galaxy

of whatever, 100 billion stars and, you know, how many, was it, two trillion galaxies each or something like that, without other life, unless they're all being generated for us to make it look like we live in this infinite world. Interesting. Oh, you mean the stars and planets are just being generated as we observed them, like you said before. Yeah. And there might be some where there are aliens on there, and that world is also being rendered for that specific group of players. And where the whole point of simulation could be wait until we meet each other openly, whereas in the UFO world, there's this idea of a concealed contact. Like, contact

has happened already. It's not been admitted by the government. And I've talked to people in some of these top secret programs. There's something weird there. They're hiding something. Now, we don't know what they're hiding, whether it's extraterrestrials, it's time travelers, it's top secret technology that Lockheed Martin built in Skunkworks. I'm going to go with that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's like I think where most people would go. But then I talk to people who've been at Lockheed and have been in these programs and they're like, well, we're reverse engineering something. Now, I don't know where they got it from, what they're reverse engineering. make a piece of metal. Could have been a civilization on Earth a million years ago

that's completely like all traces of it have vanished now. But there's still stuff that they find and they're like, hey, let's figure out how this thing works. Hey, if we're all NPCs, I'm at least trying to be the kind that makes good recommendations. Here are a few you should actually click on. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show,

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with Rizwan Verk. Okay, so a lot of people are wondering, why do I care if I'm simulated? It doesn't change my behavior or should it. It depends on if we're in the NPC version or the RPG version. That actually does make a difference, I think, because some people are like, well, I don't want to be in a simulation because if I'm just an NPC,

then I don't really matter. But that doesn't mean things aren't real to you as they're happening. I mean, there's a philosopher in NYU named David Chalmers, and he said, look, what happens in the virtual world is real while you're in the virtual world. It's like if you learn a skill, if you learn a language online, have you really learned it just because it was virtual? Yeah, you still learned it. In the RPG version, you're a player in the game. And how do we build video games. We build video games with increasing quests, increasing difficulty of quests

and challenges, and you choose sort of the next challenge. And some people choose to have lives that are, you know, with a lot more difficulty level, and others choose to have very easy games or when you first start playing. People often say to me, look, if I was in a simulation, I would choose to be a billionaire and

a movie star and have all these, you know, like you were saying, have the girls all in bikinis at my Hugh Hefner Palace. I mean, that 12-year-old me was super into that. Yeah, yeah, 12-year-old would. 45-year-old me could take it and leave it. Yeah, exactly.

It's like a dog chase in a car. What are you going to do when he catch the car? Yeah, exactly. And so it's possible as we go through life, we all face real significant challenges. And if we think of ourselves as players in a video game, then what it does is it gives us this ability to say, okay, even at first I don't succeed, I'm going to keep trying.

It helps maybe to put perspective into very difficult situations. That doesn't mean there isn't real suffering in the world. There absolutely is. If you take the NPC version, you could say, well, it doesn't matter.

If you ever seen that movie, Free Guy, it came out a couple years ago. It was like an NPC, and it was at Ryan Reynolds, I think one of the Ryans. Ryan Reynolds, I think it was Ryan Reynolds, who was an NPC in a video game, and it was a video game

kind of like Grand Theft Auto. So the players had like abilities that the NPCs didn't have. He was just a guy, worked at a bank or something, and he realized these guys had these glasses. And when he put on the glasses, he started to see all this extra information in the world around him. And then he started to realize he was an NPC. And some of the people in the game were actually characters of avatars of real people. But they abused people, you know, when they came in the game. Because

why not? Some people say, well, we can't be a simulation. There can't be any creators because then why would they create so much suffering in the world? It's like, well, what do we do when we create video games? Right. Yeah. They make Grand Theft Auto, which is worse than real life, right? Which is worse. Yeah, they actually make it worse in order to have suffering or that you want to simulate what's going to happen in a nuclear blast if there's a World War III. Like you would literally make the people suffer in order to see what would happen. So that's at a civilizational level because people always say to me, well, what's the purpose of the game?

And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do we play video games? And then why do we run simulations? Now, the second question is kind of that nuclear war scenario. We run simulations to see what would happen, what's the most likely outcome, what's the worst outcome, what's the most favorable outcome, and then you tweak the variables and you run them again and again. The reason we play video games is maybe to have experiences

that we can't have outside of the physical world. And so it's very possible that we are choosing to be in a video game with a character. Like, when do actors win Oscars? It's when they play roles that are, like, extremely difficult. Right, yeah. Tom Hanks and was it Philadelphia, the movie? Oh, yeah.

And that was when he won in his first Oscar, is because that was a very challenging life that he played. It was AIDS, I think. Yeah, I think it was a gay man with AIDS, and this is like an 80s movie, so it's extremely controversial. It's very controversial. But pointing out the difficulties that they went through were a brave heart with Mel Gibson. That's what makes the story interesting. Those are the choice roles. And so it's when we have some difficulties in our lives, if we think of it from the perspective of, okay, this is a challenge that either was chosen for me or that I chose, but I need to get through it. It's a more difficult challenge maybe than that guy's having.

And, you know, I wrote this book when I had a very challenging episode in my life, which was I ended up having heart surgery back in like 2018. And I was at the height of my entrepreneurial career. And it was during that time that I had gotten some intuitions while I was recovering. I mean, I didn't have a traditional near-death experience, but I had some intuitions that I had a plan and a storyline for my life, which was I was supposed to be an entrepreneur, make a lot of money, and then go be a writer. But instead of doing that, I went on. And if you had asked me in high school, I would have said, yeah, you know, I'm going to

an entrepreneur and then I'll be a writer. Like it was sort of this knowing that that was part of the story. And I think the things that we are naturally attracted to again and again, and I had written a little bit, but I was still doing entrepreneurial stuff. I was still investing. I was still kind of worried about venture capital and making money. And then after that, what happened was I literally couldn't do anything in the business world for nine months.

And every time I would like jump back in, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go out and health start another video game company. Once I'd recovered, I would end up back in the high. hospital. And it would happen again and again. But when I did have enough energy to go and write for a couple of hours, I would take Uber to Starbucks. And it gave me energy. From the hospital? Not for the hospital. Not for the hospital. They wouldn't let me go. Yeah, they'd let you do that. No, no. I was in the ICU and it was when I got home. I'm talking about months where I was still recovering it. You know, modern medicine is great at very specific things, but they're not always great

at predicting side effects. And so it took a long, a way longer recovery than they had told me. But during that time, I found that I was being steered and motivated to do this other part of my story. And I wrote two books in nine months during that time while I was recovering. One is an academic book about startups for Columbia Business School, and one was the first edition of this book. The second edition just came out. But by thinking of that as a different kind of challenge, it was almost like the difficulty level was increased and it got me on one of these different choose your own adventure paths. maybe not if I had to consciously choose, I would not choose that as a way to go, you know,

probably not. But we can think of ourselves that way. And then finally, there's what I call the life review. Now, as a skeptic, you may or may not believe this idea, but it's interesting using a virtual reality metaphor. It actually becomes understandable and it can help us in how we go through the game. So I don't think we're in Grand Theft Auto. Some people may think that's the game we're in.

But you can evaluate a game based upon how you're measured out. afterwards. And what people who've had near-debt experiences report, I mean, they report many things in common over, you know, many decades now, thousands and thousands of reports. You know, they're floating above their body. They see a light. There's a being of light. But one of the things that they report really caught my attention. And it's called a Life Review. And it was this guy named Daniel Brinkley. He was struck by lightning back in the 70s. And he had a near-death experience. He wrote a book called Saved by the Light. Interesting guy, but he used to be in the military and used to shoot people. And he said, I had a life review, which was like a holographic

panoramic replaying of everything in my life. But from the point of view of other people, and he used to like beat up kids when he was in school, he had to experience what it was like to be beat up by himself. He's like, oh, that's what it felt like, man, I shouldn't have done that. And then he had to experience what it was like to be shot by himself. And then he had to see the ripple effects on that guy's family, the guys he shot in, say, in Vietnam or someplace, when he was in the military. And it gave him a different perspective and how he treats people. And so I looked at that and I said, you know, that is something we do in video games. We can replay the entire video game.

And we can replay it from any XYZ coordinate. And so there's a game called CSGO CounterStrike Global Offensive, which is a first-person shooter. It takes place in, I don't know, the desert Iraq somewhere. And I was involved with the startup right here, actually not far from here, Cupertino, where you would put on a virtual reality helmet and you would replay the CSGO session, the game that had been played. but you would see it from any XYZ coordinate so you can wander around. You could literally see what it was like to shoot yourself.

And I thought, oh, that's interesting. That's kind of like what these people have been describing. So if we are in a virtual reality, there's no reason you can't move what we call a virtual camera to any XYZ coordinate and any XYZT coordinate and you can replay it. And, you know, kids today watch video game replays on YouTube all the time. That's true. I mean, my nephew, he was only like three years old and he would say to my, his father, my brother, he would say,

Dad, I want to watch Star Wars. He goes, oh, you want to watch Star Wars movie? He goes, no, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star Wars game. And so if we think of it as that type of game, as a multiplayer game, you know, we might treat people differently if we know that we're going to review what happened afterwards. Isn't that that's a tenet of most major religions, though, right? I think it's Islam that has, like, you get a review of the book of deeds or something. It's called the Scroll of Deeds. And so I was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in the UK.

with these scholars from Cairo, they're like Islamic scholars. And I'm like, you sure you want me to speak there? You know, I read about, you know, virtual reality and business and video games. And there was an Ayatollah there, which just means like a cardinal. It wasn't like the guy.

Not the guy from Iran? It wasn't like, he was from Iran. Oh, okay. But he wasn't like the guy, like Ayatollah Khomeini or Hamani's supreme leader. It was like, think of one of a bunch of bishops, right? And so here I was telling them, well, the Quran describes this thing called the scroll of deeds. It says you have these angels who, sit there and write down all your good deeds and your bad deeds, and even gives them names.

And then it says at the end, your book will be open, read it. You yourself are sufficient as a reckoner by reading your own book. And I said, okay, those are technological metaphors. We don't think of books is technology, but it is. I don't think they meant, which is why many of us in the technoscientific world don't take religion. Seriously, they didn't mean that they were like literally angels sitting there with feathered pants writing things down. But maybe what the essence of what they're trying to tell us is that everything

is being recorded and we are going to replay it. And the only way they could describe it to people 2,000 years ago is, oh, it's a book. It's a record-keeping device. And so angels are actually AI. These angels are not angels. They're just processes that are running, that are recording everything. And then it gets replayed not as a book, but as a holographic panoramic point of view. And then turns out they have that same idea in the Bible. There's the book of life where they write down who gets into heaven and who gets into hell. And they say, your books will be opened. And each of you will be judged according to your teeth. Well, again, I don't think that, if we take it seriously for a moment, if we just say, suppose they're telling some truth, we don't know what truth it is, then probably

that would not be a physical book with billions of people. And then turns out in the Hindu traditions, I just learned this recently. I don't even know if this made it into this edition of the book. There's a guy named Chitra Gupta, and they say, who's Chitra Gupta? He's a minor god. Well, turns out he's called the record keeper, and he sits next to Yama, the god of death. Why? So that Yama doesn't make a mistake in terms of where he sends you, and this guy writes down everything that you do. And again, that's a metaphor. It's just an accounting metaphor that we use to try to, what these guys could actually be in a simulated world is just processes. All the minor gods and all the minor angels. Now, I'm not trying to, I don't want to get in trouble with anybody's religion. I'm not saying the art angels,

art individuals. It's my inbox that I'm worried about, not yours. That's right. But actually, I find religious people very open to this. Yeah. Because it turns out, you know, they've been trying to use metaphors to try to describe something that is outside of this world and how do you describe something outside of this world? You can't. You have to use metaphors, you know? If you ever watch Battlestar Galactica?

I have not. It was a science fiction series kind of post-Iraq days was the version I'm thinking of. And they had these AI robots who, oddly enough, became religious fanatics. I don't know why. as opposed to the rest of the people, but one of the guys has a line, and he goes, what is the most basic article of faith? She goes what? He goes, that this is not all there is. And that actually is true of the simulation hypothesis as well. But with the simulation hypothesis, we have a techno-scientific metaphor and a way to describe how that can happen. Like, for example, Genesis seems ridiculous if we

try to take it at face value. God spoke, there was light. And then he said, create the water. He said, create the land. Okay, now create the forests and the trees and the fruits. Okay, now create the animals, now create the people in six days. Again, from a modern time to be, you're like, yeah, okay, either we dismiss it or we say it's some kind of metaphor for something. But turns out we can do that now. If you look at the holodeck in Star Trek, the way they programmed it was they basically told it, create a street in Paris, make it.

And now with AI and prompting, we can create entire virtual worlds. Just by saying, okay, now create the water. There was a demo of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago. This is even before Chad JPT was released with a product called Builderbot. He was like, Builderbot, make an ocean. And it made an ocean. And he was standing there with his avatar. Okay, now I have a little island on it.

Okay, now put some trees up. Now add some clouds. Now do this. Right. AI could generate an entire world for us. So it could be that all the major religions of the world, and in the Eastern traditions, you almost don't even need to use metaphors. I mean, in the reincarnation, you take on this character, you play the character,

you die, you go back, you come in, you play another character. I mean, it's basically like a video game. I mean, those guys, and that's why I say Eastern Mystics, in the subtitle, but even Western mystics, in Islam there's this idea of forgetfulness. There's like the 70,000 veils when you incarnate and you forget about them. And in the Greek traditions, there's the river of forgetfulness. You have to cross it when you incarnate. And I was on a podcast recently, the woman who was running it was for the Big Bang

theory. she was a, she's Jewish and she's telling me, oh, we have the same thing. We have this angel. So, Mayambialic? Yeah, it was a Mayambialic, yep. When she puts, she goes, we have this angel who, you know, Layla, I think, who puts their hand on your upper lip here. And that's why we have a cleft.

But the reason she does it is you know everything and then you forget everything when they presses it. So again, that's a metaphor. I don't think that was meant to say there's a real angel that actually is sitting there. So I think many of the things in the religious traditions can be reinterpreted from, from a simulation point of view, and that at least gives us a way, a new way to think about it, that maybe we shouldn't just dismiss them because, you know, here we are in Silicon Valley, people tend to be, you know, either they're religious or they're kind of materialists and apis.

Sure. But maybe there's something in between. Maybe. I know we're running out of time. I do want to leave with this, though. Well, how far away are we, do you think, from creating these realistic enough simulations where we can't tell the difference? Like, how many years away?

Well, you know, when I thought about this originally, like, when I started writing back in 2019, I thought we were maybe, you know, 50% of the way there, we're just getting basic virtual reality, augmented reality. And AI was kind of in the future. It was in the labs, but it hadn't really come out. But now AI is moving so fast that I think we'll get to that point much more quickly. And certainly within the next 50 years, 100 years at the max. But I think we're actually almost 70% of the way there in terms of all of the stages that I lay out.

Now, you don't need all of those stages, but I lay them out so that you can build the matrix fully, like including brain computer interfaces where you can go in and you would be embedded within it and you would completely forget. So that's one of the ones that we're starting with, but we haven't mastered yet. So that one's pretty far. But AI has moved so fast. It was actually stage nine out of ten stages when I first started thinking about this. It's actually one of the ones that's moved faster than stage seven and eight, which are all about not just reading thoughts, but implanting memories, like in science. fiction films. So that stuff is going to take a while. So I don't think it's like next year.

Yeah. But I do think within a few decades, certainly within 100 years, we'll be there, but I think probably even within 50 years. Wow. So we don't need a 1 million years technology advanced to build something like this. It's 100 years, 50 years will definitely be there. Incredible. So, okay, so if we get there and we build a simulation, then doesn't that dramatically increase the odds? One, that we're in a simulation, but two, that we're in a simulation that's in a simulation, that built a simulation? Possibly, yes. So when Bostrom laid out a simulation argument,

you had three possibilities. Let's just reduce them to two. There are no simulations or there's a billion simulations, right? If you get to that point, you're going to make a lot of simulations. If you never get at that point, fine, you don't build any simulations at all.

But basically, so you might think the odds are 50%. There's two options. But if we show that it's possible to get there ourselves, then it's very likely in a physical world that is older than ours,

a million years older than hours, hours that someone has already gotten there. So it increases the chances dramatically to like 99%. I think that we're inside some kind of a simulation. It's at least 50. I put it, you know, at about 70 now, because we're at about 70% of the way to get to that point as well. So I'm sort of reducing, you know, the probability. Like once that gets to 100% that we can get there, then it's pretty close to 100 that we're already inside a simulation. Could be from the future, like you said. And perhaps there's more than one timeline. I mean, perhaps this is being run to see if we destroy ourselves, and then we're going to go back and rerun it again. And those people would have deja vu and say,

hey, didn't we have this podcast before already? Dan, you and I spoke it already? Yeah, I just remember the host was much better looking last time. Rezwan Verk, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. This has been great fun. The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75% still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans, built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen. 71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that 75% is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary.

Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a $10 million birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle for it on technology. It was kind of like Oceans 11, where I basically got to go around the world and say who is the best person for expedition management?

Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to be. wanted to do it. That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries, but I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear and I don't leave it to other people. I want to be at the control.

When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together. Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank. And things did go wrong, eventually. You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware, and you need to mitigate those risks. What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach?

To find out, listen to episode 1089 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. So, are we living in a simulation? I'm not saying go unplug your toaster and start looking for a glitch in the sky, but as Rezwan reminds us, even asking that question, forces us to think differently about reality, meaning, and what it means to be human in a world that might just be running on code. Whether this is base reality or somebody else's grand experiment, the lesson is kind of the same. Curiosity still matters, humility still matters, and how we treat each other in this game definitely

matters. Maybe the real test isn't finding the code, it's how we play within it. All things, Rezwan Verk will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter every Wednesday we bit wiser. It's very specific. It's very practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. It is a short under two-minute read. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. in, and this show, it's created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Tadasidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in simulation theory, video games, computer programming, they might be interested in this one. Definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what

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