The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Rizwan Virk | The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Physics & Mysticism

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Rizwan Virk built games downloaded millions of times, invested early in Discord, and taught at MIT. Then he put on a VR headset in Sausalito and nearly fell over reaching for a table that didn't exist. That five-second moment sent him down a rabbit hole connecting quantum physics, Eastern mysticism, and video game design — and he's not sure he's found the bottom yet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's a new work day. Today we're sitting down with Rizwan Verk, MIT computer scientist, Stanford MBA, video game pioneer, and one of the early investors in Discord. Early investor in Discord, huh? So he's the reason my guppy's rubber tram, screaming at strangers in Fortnite.

I have questions for this man. His book, The Simulation Hypothesis, is now out in a fully revised second edition. It argues that quantum physics, ancient Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games, are all pointing at the same unsettling truth, that what we call reality may not be reality at all. Hang on, hang on, hang on,

I say reality isn't real and people call me crazy. This guy says it and gets a book deal? Oh, well, he lays out a better case than you do. Does he say how to lizard people run the simulation? No. Pff. There with you. Today we're covering the Observer Effect,

the Mandela Effect, NPCs versus RPG characters, and why UFOs might be avatars, projected into this reality from somewhere outside it. Oh, and Riz got to talk to Philip K. Dick's wife, Tessa. She told him something about JFK that stopped the show cold. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Rizwanberg, welcome to the basement. Thanks so much for having me here.

I'm excited that you're here. Since you're an old computer nerd like myself, what was the bod rate of the first computer you're had that could connect. Wow, good question, because, you know, originally we had a Commodore 64. At the 64. We even had a Calico Adam. I don't know if you remember this.

Of course, it was the plug-in. Yeah, and then there was a tape. It used the tape drive. That's right. But then the tapes, if you left them on top of it, they would erase the tape. That's right. I think we eventually got an Apple 2, Apple 2E, I think it was, which was the portable model.

And I don't think we really connected until, you know, much later. But it was like 2,600 bod modems, like way back in the day. Yeah. I think mine was a VIC-20, 1981 with 150 bod connection, and the cassette tape is where you loaded everything. Oh, right. Yeah, I remember those. I can't believe it.

Well, you know, I started learning the program in my math class. And we were living in the Midwest. And our math teacher allowed myself by my best friend, we'd finish the math problems quickly. He's like, okay, why don't you guys go play on this TRS 80? He used to call it a trash 80, and they had an adventure game, which was like, it wasn't Zork, it was like the original adventure text game. And I realized you could actually modify the code and, you know, the characters would

say something different than, you know, what they were supposed to say. And that was my introduction, really, to programming. That was an amazing, the TRS 80 was an amazing machine. That was Radio Shack invented that thing. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and then later they called it a trash 80. They did.

But it was a good machine for its time. What was the programming language on that? It was just basic. Yeah. I mean, that's how I learned a program was basic there. And then one day my dad took us to his work and they had just bought like an Apple two. It was before we had one at home. And he was like, here, why don't you guys?

My older brother is like a year and a half older than me. I think kind of like you and Gino in terms of age. He just took us in there and left us and we started to program a tick-tack toe game because we saw you could draw a line. So that was the first game that I ever wrote from scratch was just. It's a simple tick-tac-toe game on the Apple 2 at my dad's office. Apple 2, is that basic on there as well? Yeah, it was called Apple Soft Basic.

That's right. In the end, it was Microsoft Basic behind the scenes, which was how Microsoft started as a company. Right, back when they got along. That's right, yeah. Did you go to Apple 2GS with color? No, because I think by the time that came out, one, it was expensive. Yes, it was. We didn't have it.

We went to friends' houses. Yeah, exactly. Like, very few of our friends actually had like a... expensive computers. I mean, I'd pull it out to try to type a report, you know, in high school, and then print it out. And then when I got to college, I went to MIT, and they had a whole computer lab, which was the Sun workstations. Oh, yes. Which had pretty good graphics capability. Yes, they did. Yeah. So I ended up using the computer lab. And very few people actually had laptops in their, you know, dorm rooms. In fact, one of my best friends had like a Mac, one of the very

early Macs. I forget which one. But you know what the little floppy drives? Sure. The three and a half inch floppy drives. But mostly we would spend, you know, all our time doing our assignments and writing games in the computer lab. So, like using Solaris? Yeah, I was using Solaris and it used something called X Windows. Yes, of course. X is still a right. You can't get rid of X. You really can't. Yeah, it's like really solid infrastructure that it was built on. So I actually learned to use Windows, X Windows on Unix before I actually used the Windows PC, believe it or not. I mean, obviously I'd seen a Mac. And we would say, each other messages. It was called Project Athena at MIT. It was one of the first kind of networked

computer labs. Because if like my brother went to the University of Michigan and you go to the computer lab and each computer was kind of, I mean, they're connected to the printer, but they were kind of doing their own thing. Whereas with Project Athena, they were investigating or experimenting with, you know, writing software where you would communicate with each other and we would just sit there and send trashy, you know, instant messages to each other. Before I.m. was available on, you know, on PCs and stuff. So, in fact, one of my friends started the company that became MSN Messenger. They were bought by Microsoft.

And so a lot of the instant messaging stuff that we've seen over the years, you know, had its origins and like these old MIT things that people had just built. That's part of this program. Built on, built on, like, Solaris and X. Yeah, built on Solaris and X. Oh, I love that. Programmed in C. In C, right, basically, right?

I love it. Programming it. My first love is SGI Irix. I go back. I still have an SGI box. I just love that. Oh, yeah. The big blue box.

I used to love it. Is that how you got started, that's how you got interested in video games? Yeah, well, I got interested in video games around the same time that I was learning to program because we had an Atari. The 260? Yeah, the 2,600. Yeah, the original Atari system.

And we had games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. an obscure one called Yars or Revenge that I always thought was cool. Yes. And there was a racing game. I think it was pole position. And it was while I was playing like the racing game, I would look at the guys in the bleachers, which were just like these little squares.

Sure. It was like eight-bit graphics we're talking. And then there'd be like a mountain, and it would look like there's something out there. And I always start to wonder, well, what would happen if I drove the car past the bleachers and past the mountain? Of course, you weren't able to. But I always wondered, like, is there a little,

world in here with all these kind of straight lines. So that's when I really started to wonder about the intersection of video games and a virtual reality. That is an interesting game to choose because I think pole position is one of the first games back then in 8-bit to actually use background parallax, where it started, where things started to move it at different, I think it was a three or four level parallax, but it looked kind of real. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I have the slide that I show sometimes, which shows whole position as an 8-bit racing game, and then it shows like a 16-bit racing game for the Nintendo,

and then it shows like a 32-bit for the PC, and then it shows like the modern games. And you can just see how much more realistic it got just by adding a few bits. Sure. Right? And it's gotten to the point where you look at these racing games, and even though you can tell the characters

are graphical and virtual characters designed by game designers, the city looks so realistic. that you literally could not tell if that was a real city or not. In fact, I don't know if you saw the recent Matrix movie, the fourth Matrix movie. I did. It wasn't that great of a movie, but... No, but the tech was good. The tech was good, but just when they came out with that,

they came out with a demo on the Unreal Engine. Sure. Which I know you know about. I'm an Unreal guy, so yeah, I have it. Absolutely. And so they used the Unreal Engine, and they came out with this demo called The Matrix Awakens. And it wasn't of like a full game. It was like a mini game.

But it started with a guy that looked like Neo, you know, kind of getting the message on his computer, 1999 computer, wake up, Neo. And of course, this was 21, so we're talking five years ago now. So the graphics were not nearly as good as they are today. But he would get up and go with Trinity, and there were scenes where you almost thought it was really

Canter Reeves or Carrie Ann Moss, but the city they were driving around, like I think they filmed that one in San Francisco and Berlin, and it looked like a combination of those two cities. And it had just gotten ultra-realistic. The car chases looked real. Like as soon as you pulled away from the kind of the uncanny valley, those cinematic shots of like the car tearing around the corner and flipping over, that looked pretty good. Yeah, it did look pretty good.

And, you know, the key is you stay away from the humans and everything looks realistic. There's a reason why, so Toy Story was built or made by Pixar, which actually came out of Lucasfilm, George Lucas's, you know, special effects company and his film company. And there's a reason why the first fully computer-generated film was actually about toys. It was Toy Story because it's much easier to make those look realistic than it is to get humans. There was a film based on one of the final fantasy games, Spirits Within, and they spent like a $200 million budget, and they spent like 50 million of it on the hair. On the hair.

Just trying to get the hair right. And so this is all before AI. Now we're seeing a world where AI is making the generation. of realistic characters very easy to do. Yes. But that's kind of how I've seen the technology evolved, you know, just in my lifetime. Sure. We'll take us back to how your first game.

I mean, you couldn't program a game for $2,600, right? Because it was cartridge. No, you couldn't, yeah. But on the C-64, you could. Yeah. And so, again, I would make these little graphical games like Tick-Tac-Tow and, you know, other little games that kind of try to imitate some of the cool arcade games. that I had seen.

And then we got an Apple 2, and then I started to look at more from a game design perspective. There were these adventure games. Like, have you ever played Kings Quest? Sure. Which was super popular. But there was a whole series of these types of adventure games, and they were on the big floppy disks. Yes. Not even the small floppy disks, which are pretty old now.

Yes, they are. Kids today have no idea. Kids today. They were five and a quarter inch. They were huge. Yeah, they were huge. Exactly. And so what would happen is you'd put in one of the days.

and it would bring up, you know, a picture of, I don't know, a city, let's say, and then you'd say move the character around. They were kind of like the text adventure games like Zork, but with some graphical pictures. And then you would go to the next one and the next one. Kind of like a graphic novel, Choose Your Own Adventure, almost. Yeah, almost, right? And the innovation that Kingsquest made was they actually added like a character that you could actually go to the left or to the right.

It was bananas. And it looked like it was real, yeah. And Sierra Online, the company that made that. that was really considered one of the pioneers in graphics. In fact, they were the first to make a game, a graphical game for the Apple 2 that was called Mystery House. And it was just line graphics.

And it was a husband and wife team, and she was the artist and he was the programmer. And they figured out how to get 74 of these, or 78, some number in the 70s, of these line graphics onto a single floppy disk. That's crazy. That was considered a huge innovation back then. Because every other game,

you had to keep taking out the discs and put in the next one. Yeah. And I remember thinking, well, how is it that they can compress these images, which are really big, and get so many of them. And it turns out it's because they use, you know, a compression technique or they actually use just vector graphics, which are commands that tell it. So you don't actually store all the pixels. Right.

You store the directions. Yeah. So if anybody's ever done this, I mean, they have a picture of a J-Pag. Right. If you, let's say it's 300 kilobytes or something. 500K. So it's less than a megabyte. And if you uncompress that,

I mean, we're getting kind of geeky now, so I don't know how far we want to go down this room. This is a geeky audience. Okay. So, you know, if you uncompress it and save it as a TIF, an uncompressed Tiff, it'll be something like 100 megabytes for that one picture, right? And if you think of a film or a TV show like Game of Thrones,

I mean, the reason I can stream it on my phone is because it's not sending 100 plus megabytes per, frame, it's compressing it down. And so I began to think about compression really early as an optimization technique for games. And there was this one program, I think it was called like the graphics magician. It was like a hundred bucks and I couldn't afford it. And I went to my parents, because you could take images and compress them down and you could create like a little adventure game.

And I think I entered a programming contest where we could go to different planets. In fact, this is funny. It wasn't even that graphical because it was mostly text. But I called it the simulation machine. No way. In high school, I've completely forgotten about this. And the reason I did it was so it was like a little bit of text you could change. And then the user has to figure out where they are.

And maybe you could add a graphic or two as well. But I actually used to call it the simulation machine. Oh, synchronicity is happening all over your life. I haven't thought about that in years, actually. We went to the University of Michigan where they had a big programming competition there. Do you still have all that stuff? No. When my dad died recently, we ended up

cleaning up things in that house and selling it because my mom stays with my siblings now. But we did still have the Apple 2C sitting there. So who knows, maybe there were some old floppy disks still sitting around. It's possible. I love it that you were thinking about compression that young.

That's amazing. I can remember writing programs on the C-64 before we can afford a hard drive and just printing them out, just printing out pages, lines of code before we get re-enter them then you re-enter them until the 1541 drive came out and then the world changed like we'll never be able to fill this up so so where do you go from from there how old were you when you started when you entered that contest uh that was in high school so it's probably like 16 17 somewhere were you thinking this is what I want to do yeah I was thinking that computer

science is definitely what I want to do and in fact and this ties to a larger theme we can talk about later But if you had asked me kind of later in high school when I was old enough to kind of know something about the world or even early college, like, what is it you're going to do with your life? I would have told you I'm going to be a software entrepreneur. Okay. And then I'm going to be a writer. And then, you mean later on? Later on when I was really old, like 28, because back then I thought I was in high school, I thought 28 year old was really old. You know, I'll make my millions and then I'll go be a writer.

And it's odd when you think about it because I believe we all may have these scripts for our lives. that we're unaware of at a conscious level. But somehow unconsciously, they seep through sometimes, and they come out. But I definitely wanted to program computers because I was good at it. And I think then I got to MIT, and I found MIT we had some really smart people. And there were guys that were really good at physics. And they were guys that are really good at chemistry. There were guys that were really good at Aeroastro.

And I think it was a wake-up call for most people who went there because they were like, either valedictorians or they were, you know, top of their class, and you're around these people, and every now and then you have somebody who's really good at X or Y. And so people say, is MIT hard? And I say, well, it depends. If you're really good. If you're the guy that's really good at physics, then MIT's not that hard.

Right. But if you're everybody else, then physics is really hard at MIT. And I was the guy for whom computer science was just really easy. Well, then why book? What book did you want to write? I wasn't sure at that point. I just knew that I like to write stories and I wanted to write something someday. It was just a sense that I had that I would be a writer.

Going back to the fourth grade when I wrote a little story about a dwarf that lived in some kingdom, magical kingdom or something like that. Well, you were writing story-based games. You weren't really writing shooters. You were writing story games. Yeah, well, I finally got into the video game industry was much later. So after MIT, I did enterprise software for a while. So I kind of went in this other direction.

And it wasn't until I moved to Silicon Valley that I, got back into games and into the game industry. And that was when the iPhone was relatively new, right? So it was like, wow, we have a gaming platform. Now, Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple, they didn't realize when they were designing the iPhone. They built this thing called the App Store, which, okay, everybody knows what it is now,

but back then it was, you know, big innovations. You could just write your program and upload it into the store, and people can just download it on their phone. Because before that, the games on mobile phones were like, you know, these little line games. or TikTok, and you had to go through a big giant publisher, and then Verizon had to approve your game. There was very few games you could play on the old phones.

And with iPhone, anybody could upload an app. And so what Apple didn't anticipate was that games would become so popular. They didn't see that coming? They were actually surprised by it. And for the first 10 years of the App Store, let's say 2008 to 2018, the number one top grossing games of grossing apps were all games. Of course.

Even now, if you look at it, probably, you know, some of the top 10 are probably still games. And so it took off as a gaming platform. So then with each, you know, new hardware released, they ended up increasing. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to BetMGM Casino

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Our real games are these big AAA games. But it turns out today, the mobile part of the gaming industry basically dwarfs the console and the PC games. So it's the biggest segment of the entire video game industry. And it's bigger than movies and sports combined. Yeah, and add record. And music combined. All of those combined.

Video games is a bigger industry. So I really saw that evolve from zero to a pretty major. industry because back then you could a couple guys could just write a mobile game and then you know we ended up building games that were they were called simulation games but not not in the sense that sure talking about the simulation hypothesis it was like if you've ever played farmville sure there were games on facebook where you simulated having a farm or you simulated running a cafe and we had a game called tap fish uh which i guess with your your hucklefish might be appropriate but you basically had your own fish tank and you would like, you know, raise little baby fish and breed them and you'd

have different species. And that ended up being the number one grossing game in the app store for a while. And then we sold it to a big Japanese company. Now, since you brought it up, we got to get into, what was the Daily Show beef with tapfish? Because you handled it so well. Didn't they sandbag? Didn't they kind of? They totally sandbag. Right. Yeah, that's what I learned. You have to be a little bit careful with people who are, you know, Hollywood types. Uh-huh. In general, because until then I was kind of naive, you know, and they basically came in and, you know, kind of sandbagged me and kind of edited this piece.

What did they say? They want to interview you about this popular game? Yeah, about the popular game in the industry. Oh, that's not what they did. Yeah, no, no. So they ended up basically, we were one of the games that were the first free-to-play games out there. And what happened was Apple,

made it so that, you know, if somebody had a password, you know, you could just buy stuff in the game. And what would happen is some kids ended up spending, like not just in our game, I mean, you name it these games. And this is when the industry was actually pretty small. Today, you have Fortnite, which is like doing, I don't know, a million dollars a day, probably, if not more than that. So we're talking very small numbers.

But what would happen is you'd have people whose kids would end up spending like $1,000 on Farmville. And so they sandbagged me by having a parent of a kid actually, you know, call me and have a call with us. And then they edited out the part where the parent thanked me for what I said and tried to explain to him how it works. Turns out he had given his kids his password and they had used the password. And they made it seem like we were the villains.

Yes, they did. And they edited out the part. They even had a part where, you know, if you want to buy, you have to like, enter the password, they edited that part out and made it seem like, oh, you don't even need passwords. And so they made me look like the bad guy. So that was my introduction to, well, what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up. But you, I think it might have been the next day. Didn't you, you posted a rebuttal on your blog, which I think is still there about here's what really happened.

Yeah, I did. But nobody read the rebuttal. Well, yeah. A small number of people read the rebuttal, but many people saw the episode. And so that's when I started to really think about, okay, what I talk about today is what I call the hard simulation hypothesis, which is that the physical world is a kind of simulation. But there's also the soft simulation hypothesis, which is more like the narrative matrix, which is what we've been told. Perhaps not everything that we've been told is as we've been told on TV, whether it's the wars, whether it's who to make fun of.

You know, in 1984, they had the two-minute hate, which was, who are we going to hate today? We'll get everybody together in a room and we'll put them up there and we'll make everybody They hate them. And of course, we go through that now in the media all the time. Sure. But it was kind of a rude introduction, which is why I like doing podcasts, because in podcasts, they're not going to edit. I mean, they may edit some things in, but it's really a conversation.

Yes. And people are able to see our whole conversation. They won't just see like a little part made to look like somebody said something that they didn't say. Yeah. That annoyed me when I read that story, but it didn't surprise me. Eventually, we're going to get to Sausalito and your VR experience. but can you tell us what's happening

between, like, leading up to that? Were you working on the industry? Yeah, I was working on different games. We did a game company where we built games for TV shows. There was a TV show called Penny Dreadful and a show called Grim. You remember? Sure. I love Grim.

Yeah, grim is great. And so it was like a... In fact, I designed... Not many people know this because it was a small game, but I designed probably one of the first, if not the first card battle game on a phone. because the phones were much smaller back then and people didn't know how you were going to do

a whole card battle game there and I did one called Titans versus Olympians so we had like the Greek you know the Greek Titans and then the Greek Olympians like Zeus and you would play this game and for so many turns and then eventually we ended up creating a card battle engine which we could use this was now a different

company we sold off our game company to a big Japanese company and then we did some games for TV shows and I became more of an investor and advisor to a different companies. Didn't you do Game of Thrones? One of the companies that I was an investor in did a Game of Thrones game. My mom has spent a fortune

on that game. Yeah. I was an investor in Telltale games as well which had the Walking Dad game that was huge. It was and it was great. And Telltale was story-based games. It's really back to the same thing. It's like a graphic novel that you play. Yeah, exactly. Now Telltale eventually imploded. So this happens a lot with game industries where game industry companies where you have a big hit

and then you try to do too much and then the whole thing implode. So that wasn't good for me as an investor, but it was good. But the industry, because Teltel then broke up and all these people went out and started new game companies. So there's all kinds of interesting games out there now

that were from people who used to work at Teltail. So at that point, we're talking maybe 2010, 2011? Yeah, I also invested in a small company that's now called Discord. Yes, I'm aware of that. Which was a game company, actually. It wasn't really.

Yeah, they started as a MoBA game, kind of like League of Legends, but on an iPhone. And I knew Jason Citrin, who had founded Discord because he was in the mobile game industry. So we all kind of knew each other back then in San Francisco Silicon Valley. Like a lot of the big AAA games were in L.A., but a lot of the mobile games came out of the San Francisco Bay Area.

And so, you know, when he started this company, he was like, okay, I'm going to do either a 3D printing company or another game company. So he ended up doing another game company and I ended up investing in his first round. But then what happened was that the game wasn't that successful. And these guys hated Skype. So they wanted to build something other than Skype

for talking to each other while they're playing their mobile battle arena game. And then eventually they ended up releasing that as a separate app at Discord. And I remember we had lunch and he said, oh, you know, the game's not doing so well, but this app is doing well. I was like, really? He goes, yeah, we have like 100,000 downloads. It's pretty good. Like per month?

He's like, no, per week. And I said, wow, how much marketing are you spending? Dollars are you spending to get these downloads? Because there was an advertising industry that often mobile developers used to get people to download their apps. And he was like, zero. People are just dragging their friends into it. And of course, now Discord is huge.

It's huge. Sure. We use it. You guys use it. Yep. It's used all over the place now. But it started off just for gamers, you know, and then it eventually expanded. How did you get into investing in these companies?

Well, if you're just part of that ecosystem, You kind of know a lot of different entrepreneurs. And when you sell your company, you're like, okay, how do I, you know, help along the next generation of entrepreneurs? And then I went to MIT and ran a startup program there for a couple of years. Okay. Which was based on not all games, but it was at the MIT Game Lab, which is like within the Media Lab complex there. And that was a lot of fun. So I did that for a little while as well.

Were you still writing code during this time? No, by then I had kind of stepped back from writing code. I think you'd miss it a little bit, don't you? I do miss it, but I don't have the time for it. I hear you. Which is why now with AI, it's gotten pretty good. Like a couple years ago, I said, I think this was like maybe a year and a half ago.

I said, okay, let me see if chat GPT can write a simple Pac-Man game. And it got something up and running pretty quickly. But it wasn't quite right. You know, the Pac-Man wasn't pointing in the right direction. And I found I had to like do so much, you know, vibe coding and extra prompts. Eventually, I just went in the code and just started changing it myself to fix, you know, the direction of the Pac-Man, for example. But now I hear that it's gotten so good that you don't have to go into the code yourself anymore.

So I may get back into it. We'll see. Even though you had to go in and tweak that code back then, I still bet you got it working faster than Williams did in 1981. Way faster. Right. In fact, that was the benefit was you get something up and running quickly with AI. Now, if you added the total amount of time it took me to get it right, it would probably

have been similar, but I wouldn't have had anything you could really. really see until like, let's say, 50% of the process. Here I had it, like 10% of the process was the initial getting the game up and running, and then the rest of it was tweaking. So it's a different, I think, you know, people who are building games today now are dealing with a much better set of tools. Yes, they are. Than we had, or certainly, then the guys had who did like these original game, arcade games. Sure. Whatever. Not even 64K. No. I think of the Atari memory on those, you know, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wrote a game called, I think it was called Breakout for the Atari cartridge.

And Steve Jobs got paid for it, but he actually had Wozniak coming in and write it for him. Did they write Breakout? That was the one when you hit the bricks? Yeah, I think it was that one. Don't quote me on that, but it was definitely something like that. It was a very early one of those cartridges. It was, but it was a groundbreaking game because of the physics,

which was really cool. Yeah. Here's an aside on Atari. Please. Having been in the game industry, there's a great book called Eight Bit Apocalypse. If you've ever played the game Missile Command. Of course.

Which we've all played, because that was a really popular game. Yes. I mean, by today's graphics, you know, it looks very primitive. I doubt I could get my nephews interested. I don't know. It's pretty playable still. It is. I haven't tried it lately.

Yeah. But the guy who wrote it was researching ICDMs and nuclear war. and he started to have dreams and nightmares about a nuclear war. And so, you know, this book, Eighth Fit Apocalypse is all about his, you know, his kind of moral dilemma in writing this game and what he went through. Because back in the 70s and 80s, I mean, that was a real thing, as you remember. Of course, every day we thought it was going to be a nuclear war. We live with that every single day. Yeah, absolutely.

All right, so Sausalito 2016. Tell me what was going on that day before you throw on the video. headset. Was VR a thing? Did someone invite you over and said, we got this idea? Yeah, so what happens is virtual reality has gone through a bunch of different waves over time. Even back when I was in college back in 92, 93, it was a novel called Snow Crash. And there was a wave of VR. In fact, the term itself was coined in like, I think, 1987 or 1988 by a guy named Geron Lanier. And the movie Law and Moor Man was very loosely based on him, as I understand it. But that wave kind of went away, and they had a glove even, if you think of like Ready Player 1.

That's right. They had a glove way back in the late 80s and 90s, and then it kind of went away. And what happened was in 2012, there was a new wave of VR. Oculus was one of the first startups. Consumer headsets, right? Because until then, they were unaffordable for consumers. And so there was a whole series of headsets like the HCC V, et cetera. And I had sold my last video game company.

And one of the companies that actually took over some of the games was in Sausalito, a company called Free Range Games. And they were working with HTC to create sports games there. And so we went over to their office just to kind of meet the people and find out more. It was a beautiful day in Sausalito, if you've been there, people who've been there will know. On a beautiful day, you can see the San Francisco skyline. And I think it's one of the prettiest views that we have in any of our. major cities out there. And so they were literally right on the bay,

so you could, from their offices, we could see the skyline. And they said, hey, you got to come upstairs and try out this new VR headset thing. And so it was going through one of these waves. Some of my academic research that I've done is about how innovation goes through waves.

And a bunch of venture capitalists, you know, jump in and a bunch of entrepreneurs jump in. And that's what happened in the mobile game industry. It was a new wave. A bunch of entrepreneurs started to build games and then a bunch of investors started to invest in that. Tell me a few more of those waves.

That's interesting. Yeah, so, you know, these waves happen over time. I mean, we're obviously in a major wave now. The AI wave. But this isn't the first AI wave. The first AI wave happened in the 80s, and it was with this thing called expert systems. Okay.

And these were rule-based system. So they tried to take like an expert who's like really good at, I don't know, let's say machine debugging or diagnosis of problems in the industrial setting. And they try to codify those rule sets into a big knowledge system. And the idea was you could just ask the knowledge system what's wrong, and it would guide you through the whole thing. Now, that turned out to be not manageable.

It was too many rules. And it's just like having a lot of code that you have to manage. Because they were coding these rules, often by hand. And that took too long. And so there was a company called Symbolics in Cambridge, Massachusetts or on MIT was a big hub for this AI wave. So that AI wave kind of went, went away. And then we had another AI wave back in the 2000s,

which was starting to be based on deep learning and big data. Yes. Which is this idea of neural nets and multiple, you know, multiple layers of neural nets and then they make the decision for you. Neural nets have been around for a while. Sure, machine learning. Yeah, we know that big blue and chess and all of that. Yeah, yeah, although most of that was still rule,

still rule-based. Believe it or not. Really? So, I mean, the guys who won, like the Turing Prize, a guy named Jeff Hinton, he was, I think it was at University of Waterloo in Toronto and Canada. Anyway, they kept it alive because people weren't using neural nets for much. Like, even when I was a student in MIT, they showed us how a neural net worked and how we could use it to train it to, like if people with the number two or the number three,

we would feed it examples. And these were like really simple neural nets. They didn't have many layers. But they weren't. I mean, back then, but nobody was using them for anything. And it wasn't until they scaled them massively. That was the difference. That's where machine data, big data and machine learning comes from.

It's like you just run it on huge sets of things. Is that when Jeff Hinton started to panic? Because he doesn't like where things are going. He doesn't like where things are going now, right? Well, then, but eventually he did because people took up you know, his ideas. Yeah. He'd Google Deep Mind.

Yep. Playing games like chess is an interesting example because deep mind had, you know, the ability to play the game Go. And they had the AlphaGo platform, which was one of the first platforms that could actually beat like a human champion of the game Go. And it's much harder than chess. Much harder. Yeah.

But they had coded some rules and then they used the machine playing a human. and then eventually they had the machine just play itself, like a million times. Sure. And so it learns the patterns. Like you don't actually have to code the patterns. And there's a guy named Claude Shannon. And again, we're kind of geeking out on the information side of this now. But Claude Shannon was considered the father of information science.

He was at Bell Labs and he became an MIT professor. And part of the reason we can ship information across the wire is because of his work. and he wrote a paper about computers and game playing way back in the 1950s and 40s. And he said, you know, there's different stages that it could go through, one of which is you can tell it the rules and it'll play the game. And there's a little picture of him and his wife sitting with like a big box that has a chessboard on top. And it was one of the first chess playing computers. But it was a little physical machine and it would light up. where...

I know it. I know the machine. Yeah. And somebody had to physically move, like the pawn or the horse to that place. And so, but he said eventually machines will be able to learn the rules of the game. And that's what happened with, you know, there was like AlphaGo and then there was another version where they didn't even teach it how to play Go. They just said, play and we'll just tell you if you're one or not.

And eventually it learned the rules. So that's machine learning. That's machine learning. So we kind of got to kind of have to have a hand. hint of that in, I think it was 1985 with war games, right? We're just playing Tic-Tac Toc, over and it. It's learning. That's right. Yeah, that was a great

fictional representation. That was, I think, an era defining movie for many of us. Yeah, for me it was. Yeah, I mean, both you saw AI, where it might end up, and how it can learn from itself. Yes. And I think that's an important lesson. I wish they would re-release

the movie today, especially with autonomous weapons. Yes. a race for using AI within the military. I'm less of a believer that AI will take over the world necessarily, but more that AI can be used for nefarious ends, whether it's censorship, whether it's automated, you know,

autonomous drones that are basically killing people on behalf of other humans. That's true. We'll get to that. That's in here for sure. Phone call. You got to come upstairs. You've got to check this thing out.

Yeah. So back to the story. Yeah. So they had built a whole VR sports suite. In fact, I think it was just called VR sports. And so they said try this on. And this was not like today's headsets, which they're still big and uncomfortable, but back then they were really big and uncomfortable.

Oh, they were worse. They were worse. I mean, literally there were wires coming from the ceiling onto the headset because this was, there weren't even that many wireless headsets. In fact, I don't know if there were any Oculus itself was you had to hook it up to a PC. This was the HDC. So put on this headset. We used to joke that it was called a toaster on your face.

It was like having a toaster on your face. Because it also got pretty hot. Yeah, it got pretty hot and it was just so big. It was kind of heavy. In fact, okay, this is a random aside, but one of the first VR headsets ever built was by a guy named Ivan Sutherland back in 1968, somewhere in Harvard or in Massachusetts.

And it was this big giant thing that you put on your head that was connected, not just with wires, but physically connected. And they called it, sword of Damocles, which is like this old Greek myth. That the sword's always above your head because it felt like it was going to snap your neck. Right. It's so heavy.

I never heard of that. That's wild. That was one of the first ever, like real computer controlled virtual reality type of things. And so in this case, it was pretty uncomfortable. And I started to play this table tennis. Now, hold on. Before tennis, you put it on. Do you look around first and you get a sense?

Yeah, you look around. So what are you thinking? Like, this is pretty good. Yeah. So first of all, the room was empty. It was actually about the size of this room. Okay. And I look over and there's like a ping pong table.

Graphically, you can tell it was graphically generated. In fact, I have a screenshot of it in my book, the simulation hypothesis. And you can actually, you know, you saw it. And then there was an opponent on the other side. Now, the opponent didn't look very realistic. It was just like a bunch of, you know, like circles and angles and squares and stuff. And but they said here, you know, put the controller on your hand. and you can start to play.

And so the ball would come across and I would start to hit the ball. And the best thing about that game was the responsiveness of it. Like the physics engine was so good that if I, like, move my hand fast versus if I move my hand slow, the ball would go faster,

it would shoot across or not shoot across. And you weren't feeling latency. There was no latency. That was the best part. There was latency in kind of the overall graphics of like, that's why they had a very simple opponent. They didn't have a photo realistic opponent.

The physics was dialed in. The physics engine was really good. And that's key for a sports game. Of course. Yeah, even for a shooter game, right? It's key. You want to be able to figure out who shot first. But it was so realistic that for a few moments, it fooled my body into thinking that I was

playing a real game of table tennis. So much so that I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table, just like this, really, like I might do at the end of a game of table tennis. Now, of course, there was no table. it was an empty room. And the VR table was about this size, but it was an empty room. So what happened was the controller fell to the floor.

And I almost fell over and I did a double take. I was like, whoa, wait, what just happened? Oh, of course. There's no table. Did you hear cheers around you? Who was in the room? It was just like one or two other guys. So it wasn't like...

They had to give you a smile. Like, you get it now, right? You get it now. And it's the kind of thing, you know, even back then, you had to really just try on a headset in order to understand what's possible. And the headsets are. still too big these days. So we're not kind of at the point of mass consumer adoption.

Getting there. Getting there. Yeah, we're getting there. But that got me thinking. And that's really what got me down this rabbit hole. And that's one of several strands of thinking that got me down this rabbit hole. But I started to wonder how long would it take us to build a game or a virtual reality that was so realistic that we would forget, not just for a couple of moments, which is what

happened to me. Obviously, I knew it was a game. but you would forget for an hour and then you would forget for a day and then could you forget like the Matrix basically where Neo had lived in this virtual reality his whole life and he didn't really know

that he was in a virtual reality. Rises knows a thing or two about great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously. But there's more than one way to Rises. From indulgent Riesas Big Cups with caramel to crunchy Reese's pieces and Ries's miniatures,

there's a delicious Rises for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So, whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. So I got down in the rabbit hole by looking at how technology might evolve over the next few decades. And we can talk more about that if you like. I was called, I called it the simulation point. But then I stepped back and I started looking at the quantum physics side of things. Oh, we're going to get to that later.

Yeah. But I just want to summarize to say, it turns out that the quantum physics is, was telling us that the world isn't really as real as we think it is. It's not. And then I did another thread, which was looking at the various religious and mystical traditions. And I realized, oh, they're also telling us that the world is not really real, at least not the way we think it is. And I realized that there was a universal idea here that tied together Silicon Valley technology

with physics and science, but looking at it from the point of view of an information based world or video game designer and mystical experiences which are the basis for the world's religions and so that's really what got me down to this rabbit hole in a big way and writing the book as well. This is a perfect segue to my next question

is you were sort of living a double life because you were going to the Monroe Institute you were learning meditation drum drum circle I mean all this kind of stuff yeah so what happened was when I was entrepreneur back in the 90s is when I did my first startup pretty much as soon as I graduated like within a year but most of my career has been as an entrepreneur so during the day I would deal with

things like you know code reviews right builds engineers managing engineers hiring salespeople which really sucks if you're like a technical guy and investors and customers and a lot of our customers were big fortune 5,000 companies today and this was in Boston so it was actually much more conservative in the financial industry than, like, say, in Silicon Valley, where the guys were sitting around smoking weed, you know, as part of their startups. Like, that wasn't happening in enterprise software startups in Boston. But at the same time, I started to learn about different types of meditation techniques, and I started to explore different aspects of consciousness. What true to that? You know, I've always had a bit of an interest in it, but I will say that

initially, I just thought, hey, if I can learn to meditate, I can be a better computer programmer because then I can concentrate. Of course. I can be a better entrepreneur because I can visualize what I'm trying to build. But then the more you got into it, the more you realize that it's not so much about that stuff, right? It's not about the selfish thing. And what I eventually got to realize, and I wrote my first book, it was called Zen

Entrepreneurship, about this time when I was living this double life. And like every chapter, you know, one chapter is about a problem we had with our startup and, you know, the customer canceling on us. And the next is about me jetting off to the moment. Roe Institute, you know, for a week to try to do auto body experiences. Or I started doing lucid dreaming. And there was a guy named Carlos Costaneda who wrote about this way back in the 70s. Sure.

A lot of young people today have no idea who he is. They should learn. They should learn. And he was on the cover of Time Magazine. Sure. Okay. Time Magazine would be like, I don't know, what would it be? It would be like.

We don't have those anymore. We don't have those anymore, right? It'd be like being, you know, Joe Rogan's top guest for the year. year or something like that this year. I don't know what you would put in today's terms. But basically, he was called the grandfather of the New Age movement and he talked a lot about, initially, about psychedelics. But eventually he was talking about dreaming and different states of consciousness. And some people, there's some controversy about, did he really find a Mexican shaman that taught him this or is he borrowing other people's ideas? But the interesting part of his teachings

for me were about his dream experiences, which it almost didn't matter if he was imagining this while he was in un-psychadelics or while he was dreaming because that's what it was all about, but it was realizing there's something different about our reality. This really got me into thinking about alternate models because, okay, I'll give you a startup example because I know you've been in the computer startup world. One day, I had a dream about this competitor of ours. And I was like, that's odd. I've never dreamed of this guy before. One, never. Two, I hadn't even heard from him or his company. Is this Mark?

Yeah, this is a guy named Mark. Okay, I like this story. Okay, so it was a guy named Mark. He had a company called Edge Research, and I had a dream where I was in a business conference, and I started chatting with him about it. And I woke up, I thought, that's weird. Like, why am I dreaming about this guy? We haven't heard from his company for a year.

And we had software that was connecting IBM products to Microsoft and Oracle products. So we were like a big partner of IBM back in those days using a product called Lotus Notes. Probably too much information for the audience there. But basically I went in the office that day and I get a call, like right in the morning from a product manager at IBM. And he says, oh, hey, we're going to do a big announcement today. And I just want to tell you, let you know, because you've been a good partner to us, but this new product we're going to release is probably going to kill your product. I was like, great.

Thanks. Because we had a product that, you know, worked on top of their product. And I said, well, how come I've never heard of this product before? Because, I mean, IBM's a big company. Sure. I'm sure it would have leaked somehow. He's like, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, who had this company called Edge Research?

We bought them like a year and a half ago, and they've been working on it in secret up in New Hampshire. And now we're going to do the big announcement today. And I thought, okay, that's weird. I had the dream in the morning. The phone call came after, right? Some people think, oh, it's not a big deal because it happened the other way around.

No. The dream came first out of nowhere. It was almost like a pre-concour. cognitive sense, right, that this guy was going to show up again today in some significant way. I believe it was. What was the dream? The dream was just was not that. It was more like I was at a conference like I used to go to and he was at one of the boots. And I was asking him, hey, we haven't seen you in a while. What he's been working on? And, you know, we were just having that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody who's in your industry. But he was cagey about

something in the dream. He was. But he was always cagey. So, okay. As I recall, you know, this is 30 years ago now. So we're getting into details I may not even get right. But I do remember being a little KG. And it was sort of par for the course because when we had built our product, our first product and announced it, he had called me and he was being a little bit cagey. He didn't, he was asking me about it and didn't tell us he was going to have a competitor.

A competitive product. But that to me was one of many wake-up calls that I had around dreams and the nature of reality. that, in fact, we may be getting clues about things that haven't happened yet. And our idea of time as being linear may not be correct. And only getting information from a materialistic point of view may not be correct either. There may be other ways to get information. So that was one example. Once I ended up lucid dreaming and that, hey, let me go visit my girlfriend at the time

was still my partner now in Cambridge. I was like, let me fly over to her apartment. And I looked over there in the living room and there was this weird light on the couch. And I thought that's weird because, you know, the middle of the night, you should probably be sleeping in the bedroom. But there was this weird light on the couch.

And I didn't really think much of it because then the lucid dream goes away. So if you've ever tried lucid dreaming, it's hard to stay in it. It's hard to stay lucid and it just goes away. And then I told her about it the next day. And she said, oh, yeah, I was sleeping on a couch last night. And I would have these little confirmations like that.

Like I would be flying around Cambridge and they had all these ultra-realistic glass, you know, high skyscraper-type buildings, but we didn't have that many back then. I remember thinking, okay, what's going on here? And then recently I went on a trip back to Cambridge because I still have a place there. And if you go to Kendall Square now,

which is just outside of MIT, they've got all these tall skyscrapers that are like these glass buildings and stuff. So you were seeing the future? I might have. Like, it's hard to see. say because I don't remember exactly what the buildings looked like, but it was definitely the tenure of the tenor of the future. Well, at Monroe, were you able to get out of body? So I tried it. So the Monroe

Institute, they did they did hemisync. Hemisink. What it does is it puts in like different rhythm beats and it gets your brain into a certain rhythm. Yep. I found that it wasn't quite working for me to get out of my body. But I did have an actual experience where I was, today I would call a shamanic journey. So later I learned how to do this with just drumming and just breathing. You can get into an altered state. And you can do what chomans do, which is they have almost like a visualization that you're aware you're doing something in another reality, but you're also aware of your physical body. So this is the experience that I had at the Monroe Institute where I saw this guy, kind of looked a little bit like me, brown guy, but he had a beard and he was a sadu sitting against a tree in India

somewhere like years ago. I thought, hey, this is interesting. And I felt somehow connected to this guy. And so this is like a vision I'm having while I'm in, you know, with a hemisink. How present are you in the real world? Are you like, oh my God, this is happening? I was present where I was still aware of my body. But it was enough. And this is, for me, this is very close to what happens with shamanic journey. Yes. It's you, you're aware that there's some other reality, really, something happening there. You're still aware of your body, but it's almost like you're not paying attention to your body. Is this like samadhi?

No, it's not quite samadhi. This is more like you're leaving, your consciousness is leaving your body and going somewhere else, but it's not like a full lot of body experiences. It's like just a part of you is going out to this other place. This other place could be a real place. It could be an imaginary place. It could be a place where multiple people can validate things.

I'll tell you about that in a second. We used to have those kind of experiences too. But in this case, the guy was sitting against the tree, kind of like I am now, but maybe leaning back a little bit more. And he's like, you're doing it all wrong. What do you mean I'm doing it all wrong? He goes, look, if you want to get out of your body, don't you remember you learn this like in a past life or something?

He goes, this is what you do. You don't lay down. You like sit against, because if you lay down, you go to sleep. You sit back against a tree. That's what he was doing. I don't know how many years ago this was, if it was even real. And he goes, you go up to your third eye. And I could, like at that point, I felt like I was him for a second.

and you would leave your third eye and you would go out and then you would come back and when you left I could see him like you know sitting his body sitting there he's like that's how you're supposed to do it you saw that I saw that in my vision right wow and I was like that's wild and there was a time after that when I got back home where I was sitting at a desk coding or something it was the middle of the afternoon you know you get the you get tired in the afternoon and I started to doze off and I remembered this and I went up and I basically went out of my body and I saw my physical body and then I came back. But for me, what happened in these dreams is I would just wake up somewhere else, like in a lucid dream that became an out-of-body experience. Rarely have I had

the kind of experience where somebody actually just seized themselves sleeping in the bed. And you brought up that you had out-of-body experiences with other people? Yeah, so what happened was after that I found an easier way for me to do that was using shamanic drumming. So I studied with a guy named Robert Moss who wrote a book called Conscious. dreaming. Really interesting guy, Australian guy who somehow has gotten tied into all these Aboriginal and

Iroquois and Native American dream practices and he kind of pulled it together and so we would get into a group and you know somebody would do drumming. It's a certain beat of the drumming and anybody can look it up, look up shamanic journey, you'll see what the beat is. It's like a t-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-d-d-

And what it does, it's very similar to the binoral beats. Oh, okay. It puts your mind and your breathing and your... Oh, it's frequency related. Yeah. So it puts you into kind of this altered state and then you basically have an intention

that says, hey, let's all go to... Riz had this weird dream last night at a business conference. Let's all see what we can do. And we would all go into there and try to... We'd all look around and then we'd come back and say, hey, what did you see?

Hey, what did you see? And every now and then, there would be like a lot of correlation. And, you know, I have a skeptical engineer side. Sure. as well as this kind of intuitive side where I'm intrigued by all of these things. Of course. Kind of like you, I'm sure, right?

Absolutely. And so, but the times... I study Monroe. I knew lucid dream. I do all this stuff. Oh yeah, that's great. Could you see each other or no? Sometimes, not necessarily.

Some people could, but... They could? You know, some people were better at it than others. Of course. But for me, one of the most interesting ones. And again, you might go to what Robert used to call a stable place in the dream world. Like, meaning it's, it's... my dreams are subjective, your dreams are subjective.

90% of our dreams are, and I write more about this in my book, Zen Entrepreneurship and my book Treasure Hunt, which is about dreams in the business world. Not so much in the simulation books, but it's a fun topic anyway. And so one day he said, we're going to journey to serious. I was like, what does that mean, journey to serious? What are we talking about? Let's just do it.

We started the drumming, set the intention, and then you say what you saw. And I remember going to this weird planet that maybe was orbiting serious. Again, this was, you know, a vision I was having, so hard to say, how realistic it was. I saw these giant buildings, but they were on stilts. It was just bizarre to see these giants, and it was like ruins of an ancient civilization, but there was an even more ancient civilization that had ruins at the bottom. And so that's why these big buildings were on stilts. Wow.

And then I went off to the side, and it looked like Superman, you know, like did you ever see? in the original movie, do you remember the fortress of solitude? Of course. So there were like all these little points. And so afterwards. White crystals and stuff? Yeah, white crystals. And then there was this group of people that were looking out over like different planets.

But like living beings? There were some living beings there too. But they weren't like they weren't there physically. It was it was a little bizarre. Let's leave that part off for now. Fair enough. Because that I might have then transitioned to something else. I just love this story.

Yeah. So I went and described all these details to Robert and. some of the other people who went on the journey with us. And they were like, they were like something like 17 points that many of us, including the suit right down to the Superman crystalline structures and buildings on stilts. They saw that? Yeah. There's no way.

Several of them saw that. Like 100% of the people don't always see it. But that's why you do it in a group and you say, okay, what are the correlations we can make? Now, is that a shared dreamscape in an imaginary world? Could it be like an actual planet on Sirius? Could it be something else? You know, my skeptical mind kicks in and says, well, okay, I don't know. But there certainly was something going on here, whether it's an archetypal thing.

But the fact that there were so many instances where this would happen. The Stilts is very, that's a very strange detail. It was very specific. Because anyone could say futuristic buildings or something. The Stilts is very specific. Yeah, and it was stilts on top of like an ancient ruins almost. like an older civilization. And that's why they built on stilts

so that when they didn't build a new building, you wouldn't ruin like the old buildings, you know. And that was the reason why. And then eventually, I think the second part of it was they had moved off the planet and they were somewhere monitoring what was going on in different parts of their local quadrant of the galaxy.

So now it gets into a little more Star Trek. So that would just be my sci-fi self coming out at that point, right? But whatever it was, there's something there. And we'll talk about that more with simulation. Before we go to break, can we talk about the assailant synchronicity and how weird that was? Sorry, which one? Assailing Jacques Valet, Jeffrey Krippel, and Morpheus.

Oh, yes. Yes. So the Matrix Synchronicity at the SELN Institute. Yes. So those people who don't know, ESLN is like this kind of a hippie commune set up and Big Sur north of L.A., and they have conferences there. And so Jeffrey Krippel is a professor at Rice University.

He's one of the few academics that's been looking into UFOs and mysterious subjects. In fact, I just wrote a paper that I put a preprint of online, which is, I wanted to call it aliens over Harvard. It's actually called aliens over Harvard and Stanford, but it's actually called UFOs in academia,

a case study in stigma, boundary work, and the edges of legitimate science. So I interviewed a whole bunch of professors about who had studied the UFO subject openly about why is there a stigma about studying this seriously in some way. That's a great idea for a paper. Is that out yet? Yeah, the preprint is available online. If people search for it, they can find it or they looked at my Twitter account, which is at Riz Stanford.

I guess it's called X now. I keep calling a Twitter still. Yep, me too. But so I interviewed people. And it turns out, you know, going back a little bit, I graduated from MIT in June of 1992. And there was one other major interesting thing that happened in MIT in June of 1992. There was an abduction, alien abduction conference at MIT in June of 1992. And I heard about it.

What a strange place to have that conference. It was an invite only conference. John Mack, who, you know, from Harvard. Many people will know from Harvard was one of the co-chairs, along with a physics professor from MIT. and I remember thinking, this is weird. Why are we having an abduction conference here? And I mean, I didn't go to the conference because it was invite only.

Bud Hopkins was there and all these guys. Wow, the big names. And that was like the last serious abduction conference in that phase. Because, you know, John Mac got in trouble for studying the subject. But so I went back and I interviewed people like David Pritchard, who's the MIT professor who hosted it.

John Mack has passed away, but Roth Blumenthal, who is his biographer, who wrote a book on him. and Jeff Kreppel actually kept, you know, these alive with these secret conferences that, you know, were invite only. And so they used to happen at Esselin. And so at Esselin, I came out with the book The Simulation Hypothesis on March 31st, 2019, which was the 20th anniversary of the release of The Matrix. Yep. Intentionally or no?

Intentionally. Okay. Yeah. Nice. And that's why I ended up self-publishing the first version because there's no way. publisher could have got it out on time because I only finished it in December and I was like, okay, I'm going to get this out.

The second edition was Penguin Random House so they did all the usual publishing timeline things. So I had met Jacques Valet who I'm sure your audience knows him. Very well, but what does he like as a person? He's a super nice guy and he's really

what's the word of when he's used? Thoughtful, I think. And that's what I like about him is he'll present, you know, what he's heard, what people have told him, but he won't necessarily present his conclusions. So I think he's one of the few people in the entire UFO world. And for those who don't know him, he was part of the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And he's been involved since Project Bluewood, but he's a computer scientist at heart, which is how we connected. Really nice guy. He even wrote a foreword for the French edition of the simulation hypothesis in French. He did? Yeah, he did. What an honor. It really was an honor.

And again, it was just in that French edition. But it was really awesome that he did that. He's a very important person. I think so. Yeah. And he's getting up there now. Highneck passed away many years ago, so I never got to meet him. But, you know, Jacques has lots of stories.

But he started telling me about some of the overlap between, well, he started telling me about UFO cases that led me to start thinking about the overlap between the UFO phenomena. simulation theory. But so there was a really interesting synchronicity that happened right when my book came out, and Jacques had given me a little blurb for the English version of the book, and I heard about this afterwards. So I actually wasn't there, but it was a synchronicity involving me. And he said, Jacques gave a presentation at Esselin at one of these conferences that they have there, and it was just before, let's say, lunch. And his last slide had a picture of my book, and he was talking about Rizwan Verk and the Matrix, and it probably had a picture of the Matrix. And so they left it as the last

slide. And they all said, oh, that's interesting, because the book had literally just come out. And so then they left the classroom and they walked over to the cafeteria. If you ever been to Esselin, they're not that far. It's right on Big Sur, beautiful. They walk into the cafeteria and who's there, but Morpheus. I mean, they literally see Lawrence Fishburn sitting there in the cafeteria, you know, while they had just been talking about the Matrix and my name. And so I heard this from multiple people, including Jeff Kreppel and other people who were there. They're like, hey, you know, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book. And I was like, oh, damn, I wasn't there.

But it was an interesting synchronicity. It is. I mean, the simulation is always listening. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk simulation theory. We're back. So you've had this VR experience, pre-cognitive dream, a weird synchronicity. And then I think you start to realize that simulation theory is not just,

a thought experiment that technology, physics, and religion are all starting to point in the same direction. Yeah, that was the realization that I came to was that there's no way in just a pure materialist model for some of these weird things to be happening. Not just the things that have happened to me, but things that others have reported. And so I really first wrote an article about simulation theory. I was actually visiting Sri Lanka. And in Sri Lanka, there was a famous science fiction writer who lived there, Arthur C. Clark, who, you know, anybody who's into Science Fly knows Arthur C. Clark, he wrote 2001 in Space Odyssey.

And his office is still well preserved there. Really? Yeah. Okay. It's technically not a tourist attraction, but a buddy of mine was there. He's like, no, you can go. You just slip the guy a few rupees. I didn't know that.

Awesome. So a buddy of mine from MIT had started a company in Sri Lanka. I had invested in his company and I was helping him out. So I went out to visit him and I really want to see Arthur C. Clark's office. So I went there and his desk is preserved and it's got all these books behind him and it's got like 2001, 2010, but it's got like different versions. Wow. And so I see this and sometimes I think we have a recognition of something. It reminded me of something.

And I was like, yeah, that's right. I was supposed to be a writer. Like you kind of have this vision. and it flashes in your mind, and you don't know all the details, right? It's like you remember the storyline and somehow it dawned on me that I needed to do more writing.

But at that point, I had gotten this idea that the video game was a good way to explain this idea of the physical world being virtual. And I had also spent a lot of time in a game called Second Life, which was from a decade before that.

Sure. But it was a virtual world. So the difference between, a virtual world and a game is in a game you're trying to score points and you're trying to win. But in a virtual life, you're just kind of living there. And people would like have jobs inside second life. Like they would come home from their real job and then they would log in to be a bartender at a club. That's right.

In second life. And so I'd ask them like, why are you doing this? They're like, well, because it's fun. Because they got paid in Linden dollars. This is pre-Bitcoin, which were worth peanuts. So they weren't doing it for the pay, even though technically, they were being paid. It was like that was part of their virtual life, their character's life. And people would have relationships and get married. And, you know, that made an impression on me as well.

But I decided to write an article, a long article, about why I think we might be living inside a video game. And I tried to pull in some of the elements that I'd been thinking about. So that article allowed me to pull together these different ideas. And I wrote it, I think of 2017, beginning of 2018, partly because, of, you know, the Arthur C. Clark experience. And it was just a flashpoint that said, oh, I'm going to have a bunch of books that are going to be translated in a bunch of languages.

At that moment. At that moment, like it was like, but I got to get busy. You're doing my writing. And so I wrote the article and I said, oh, that's enough for now. You know, I'm done. I was running this program at MIT.

I'm doing other stuff. But that got me into talking about the technology side of it initially. more because when I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix, I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which is I define it as a type of technological singularity. Now, most people know that term because they think of like, you know, sky net, superintelligent AI, going to kill us all and take over the world.

So the AI singularity is what? When AI superceiv... It exponentially grows to the point where it's become super intelligent or... Beyond us. Beyond us. That's one example. Right. But the guy who coined the term, the technological singularity, was actually a guy named

Werner Vinji, who was a science fiction writer and a computer science professor. And he defined it in many different ways. So it wasn't just AI. He said it could be computers networking with each other to become intelligent or us merging with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about, the merger of biology in silicon. but Vinji was relying on an earlier famous guy named Uyulom John von Neumann. Of course. Whose famous Hungarian mathematician, they basically defined the von Neumann architecture

that all of these computers still pretty much used the von Neumann architecture. The guy really was a genius. And he borrowed the term singularity from physics, because in physics, you know, singularity is when you're approaching that line like at the center of a black hole. And he said it's the point at which technology grows exponentially such that everything is different for the human race. And you can't come back from a singularity. Yeah.

That's the it. Yeah. At that point, everything is different. Yes. And so Vinji wrote the paper and then Kurzweil wrote a book about it. So a technological singularity is when technology gets to the point where you can't come back. And so I started to think, well, if we were to build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality, then we would have reached what I call the simulation.

we need. And if there are AI characters inside there, that you can't tell if they're AI characters or not, then we're basically able to create a full virtual world. And there's something called the Turing test, which most people have heard of. It's again going back to 1950, back in the time of Claude Chan, and it was actually Alan Turing. He wrote a paper called The Imitation game. Actually, that's what he called it. And for people who don't know, most people have heard of it by now, But there's a computer behind Curtain A and a person behind Curtain B, and you're passing messages back and forth. Now, how did they pass messages back in those days? They didn't have cell phones.

It was teletype machines. Sure. That was how he decided to do it. And he said, if you can't tell the difference between the AI, now, again, back then they thought AI was physical computer. So if you can't tell the difference between a computer and the human, then the computer has passed the Turing test. And of course, today many people think with chat GPT and Claude and Google and all and Grock that we've pretty much passed the Turing test for text because the chatbot is all a text-based interface.

There used to be a prize called the Lobaner Prize, which was set up in the 90s. And it was for the chatbot that actually came closest to passing the Turing test. And there was a chatbot named Alice that was one of the winners of it. It was the first chatbot that actually took on like a personality of a young woman. I don't remember Eliza. I don't remember Alice. Eliza was even before that. Yeah.

So Eliza was like in the 1960s. So this was like 90s or so, like 90s. And there was a guy, a Hollywood guy who saw this chatbot like back in the 2000s. He's like, huh, a chatbot that has the personality of a young woman. And his name was Spike Jones. Yeah. And he decided to write a script called Her, which became the film, you know, with who is it, was it,

Joaquin Phoenix? Joaquin and Scarlet Johansson played the voice. And so you see what's called the science fiction feedback loop at work where science fiction inspires technology

and then technology inspires science fiction. And then when Sam Altman and these guys came out with, I think it was Chat GPT3 or 3.5, one of the versions they came out with,

they like started referencing her and there was a big blowup because the voice of the woman who sounded like the guy's girlfriend and the video sounded like Scarlett Johansson. There was just someone to sound like her. He promised it wasn't her.

Yeah, it was just someone kind of like her. Right, right, right. Was it Samantha? I think in the film was her character. Yeah. And so he literally referenced the movie her, so you start to see the science fiction feedback loop over time. But coming back to what I was talking about was in my book, the second edition of simulation hypothesis, I defined something called the virtual touring test or the metaverse touring test. And we're not quite there yet.

And that is if you're inside a multiplayer game or a virtual world, like a second life or World Warcraft or Fortnite, I'm sure there's a lot more recent examples now. And your avatar is controlled by you, and there's two other avatars, one of which is controlled by a human player and one of which is controlled by an AI. And if you can't tell the difference between those two, and you can do anything you want in the virtual world, you can drive cars, you can fly on dragons, you can go skiing, you can you can, you can, you can, you can, talk to each other, you can flirt, you can have virtual sex, whatever you want. And if after, say, an hour, you can't tell which of those avatars and you're talking too. So there's voice element, which of course today, you know, if you've seen any of the latest AI, they can have. They can have a voice.

In fact, I got a call from an AI not that long ago. Could you tell it was AI? They made it so that they told you it was AI. Oh, okay. It was called Bordy. It was an AI venture capitalist. who basically was like, well, as an AI venture capitalist, I can talk to every single founder on Earth, right?

Because it's just making calls and it's automated. But it was actually pretty good. I mean, in taking what I said, it's an example of where they're putting in, you know, the LLM is behind the scenes, but it's basically the brain that's driving the character. And in fact, we were talking about the Matrix, awakens, and that was a virtual city.

and there was a guy, he put a smart NPC engine into it, which basically has an LLM behind it. So that all the NPCs in that city, they were kind of dumb NPCs in most games, but now we have smart NPCs. And so he walked around this virtual world and he started telling people, you know, you're in a video game. Yep, I remember this.

You're an NPC. And some got upset, didn't they? Yeah, some were like, you know, that's ridiculous or somewhere like, I got to go to work. I don't have time for it. this crap. Others were like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more. And this was back in like 22, right? So looking at how fast, looking at how fast AI technology evolves and we're already many generations beyond that. But they reacted kind of like real people might. And so we're not

quite at passing the virtual or metaverse turning test yet, but I think we will be eventually. And that's one of the stages of these 10 stages to get to the simulation point to build a matrix. And another would be like BCIs, putting in brain computer interfaces, like in the matrix. So before we go too far down, one thing, I don't think I've seen anyone else do this is your NPC verse RPG inside the simulation. But before we get there, take us back to your paper. And what was your argument for this could be a simulation? I mean, the actual technology. Yeah, so the technological argument was that video games can get to be so good that we will reach the simulation point at some point. And it could be soon, it could be 100 years, could be 1,000 years.

It really doesn't matter that much as long as we get to that point. And so if we will eventually be able to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds, that we can't distinguish if we're having the real experience or not. And one of the stages also included like false memories, like Philip K. Dick. We can talk more about him. I hope so. Yeah, because he's one of my favorite authors. And in Blade Runner, for example, you had the Android that had Rachel, who remembered being a little girl growing up. She didn't think she was AI, but she had those memories implanted in her.

But if we can have those experiences and you can't tell the difference, then how do we know for sure that we're not inside a virtual world right now? That was the crux of the argument, but it was built on the idea that technology is developing and people like to have virtual lives. And then the quantum physics was part of the argument as well. So I don't know if we want to get into that. In just a second, because I want to dispel something. And this was in my episode about simulation theory. Physicists will argue this can't be a simulation because to simulate all this material,

all consciousness, down to the quantum level, you would need a simulation bigger than the universe itself. And my response was, that's not how simulations work. Right. Exactly. I mean, the way that simulations work is you simulate the parts that you need. Right. And you, so physicists love the law of big numbers. They love to say infinity. Oh yeah, it's infinite or there's an infinite number of particles. But computer scientists, we hate infinity because we are always dealing with limited resources. Right. So it's all about optimization. And I tell people, so in the book, There's a, we mentioned Kingsquest, so I'll bring it up again. If you look at Kingsquest, you'll see that each of the screens, when that guy is walking,

it almost looks continuous, but it's really not. All the pixels of all the screens are laid out, which means they're called raster images or bitmap images. But they're basically rendered. Like the pixels are sitting there on disk, and it's just a matter of loading it. Now, back in the 80s, and you know this because you're around, if you tried to build something like World Warcraft, or a Fortnite or a CS Go, which is a first person shooter, you wouldn't be able to do it because there's too many pixels to keep track of. And they didn't know how to compress that down in such a way

that you could render it on the fly. The hardware wasn't that good either. But the thing that I learned as a computer scientist is that, yes, the hardware gets better, but it's the algorithmic improvements that really make the order of magnitude difference. Like hardware might go from one to two, but if you want to go from, from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, you need to change the way that you're doing things. And so the reason we can render a World Warcraft today is we don't need all the pixels for all the castles to be on your computer.

What we do is we generate it through 3D models based upon where you're looking. And the first game that got really popular that did this was Doom. Of course. Back in the 90s. I mean, they had Castle Wolfenstein and before that as well. But the game that really got popular, and it simulated a first. person perspective. And so it basically, you know, just showed you what your character could see. And the rule of thumb was, only render that which is observed. And by the way, that's what

You sounds familiar. It sounds familiar, right? And that's what we do with Zoom too. Like if you and I, I mean, we happen to be in the same room, although how would the audience know that we're not in the same room? But if we're on Zoom and I'm in, you know, Phoenix and you're in Los Angeles, then my computer doesn't have to render all of Los Angeles. It just renders your background. And similarly, your computer doesn't have to render all of Phoenix. It just needs to show the part that is visible from the camera. So that castle that's way out in the distance is really just a few pixels. That's all we're rendering until you get there. And then we give you more and more information.

Yeah, and it's rendering it on demand. Yes. And this is a key feature of how 3D, particularly 3D video games are built. And the information for that castle is still out there. And so, And sometimes even that is generated on the fly. There was a game in 2016 called No Man Sky. Oh, procedural, yes. Procedural, right? And it had 18 quintillion planets. That's an interesting number, actually.

It is, right? You probably know why. I do, but you have to explain it. But that's an interesting number. Yeah. But first of all, it's a really big number. Yes. So it pretty much seemed infinite at that point.

And the way video games used to be designed is you would have to have your design team, design every one of those planets. Now, there's no way that anyone could design 18 quintillion worlds. It's just too much. So what they did was they used procedural generation. Which is what? Which is basically code that runs and generates the scenery for you as needed. So when you get to the planet, it would generate like the trees, the forests, the landscapes, the mountains, using a whole bunch of algorithms. And there's a whole bunch of algorithms that, you know, there's algorithms that can simulate water. Sure. There's fractal algorithms. If you've ever looked at how, like, you know, you can have trees being generated. In fact, in my second simulation book, the simulated

multiverse, there's a whole chapter on like these types of algorithms and how it looks like nature is algorithmic. It does. In nature. Nature is algorithmic in nature. No pun intended. Because, you know, you look at like the seashells. Right, the Fibonacci numbers are there. The Fibonacci numbers, but you see all these similar sequences of things or algorithmic generation or fractals, right? Which are, fractals are when you have self-similarity

at different levels. Right, no matter how close or far away, it looks the same. It's very similar. Right. Because it uses a similar algorithm. Right. Even though there might be some randomness in the algorithm. Sure.

And fractals came from a guy, I think, was his name Mendel brought to it was a guy in the 70s who said how long is a coastline so if you were to measure a coastline how long would it be like say in England well it depends on the scale because if you're measuring it from satellite

you'll see kind of like almost like a straight line sure but if you go into the bays and nooks and crannies it'll be longer because now you're going like this well if you got really small you would start to see even within one rock you would see all of these little

variations, right? And so it depends on what scale you're at, but there's some self-similarity at larger scales. And so all of these algorithms. So that's what this game was known for. It's still out there now, but it was considered a boring game when it first came out, but now they've added, supposedly I haven't played it in a long time. Me neither. But supposedly it's gotten better. But it was known for this large number of worlds and almost infinite generated on demand. Like, that's the key phrase that we need there. And so why 18 quintillion? Well, it's because it's two to the power of 64.

Right. Right. That's why it's that very specific number. So this is 64 bits. You had 64 bits that kept track of, you know, how many worlds do you want to keep track of? Now, there's no reason that's the limit. I mean, they could also have used 128 bits. Sure.

But it was very convenient to use like 64 bits because that's a commonly used size of what's called a word. which is like multiple bytes within coding. And so you see this very interesting number. It's also, by the way, a big number related to the chess, the chess story from ancient India. Yes, it is. Now you have to tell that story. It's a great one.

I'll tell that story. And later we'll tie it to exponential problems in quantum computing. But for now, I'll just tell the story because we're talking about that number. So there was a king in India who loved to play chess. And he beat everybody and there was this wise man or sage. And he's like, I want to play chess. with you. And the stage goes, nah, I don't really want to play. King goes, really, I'll give you anything you want if you'll just play chess with me.

Anything? Anything. And the wise man goes, okay, if I win, meaning if the king loses, you'll give me one grain of rice for the first square in the chessboard. And then you'll give me two grains of rice for the second square and then double it to four and double it to eight, double it to 16 for all the squares of the chessboard. King will look, okay, and that's not a very big price to pay. There's only 64 squares. Yeah, and I told you, I'd give you anything. This is all you want? Well, of course, the wise man wins the game of chess. And then the king realizes when you go two to the power of 64, you double it 64 times, it was more grains of rice than would fit at all of India. That's right. And that's an example of a big exponential problem. Yes. And how it grows.

And so what we do as computer scientists is we optimize and figure out how much of that do we really need at any given time and we cash it. So that's, I think, ties together this idea of how video games only render that which is observed. So tell us by caching and lazy loading as well. Yeah. I mean, should we draw the analogy first to the quantum physics? However you want to do it. Yeah.

So in quantum physics, there's this thing called the observer effect, which I think everybody has heard of. And it's based on the double slit experiment where the light goes through two slits. And if it's a particle, if a particle is solid, you can really only go through one of those slits. Yeah, go through both. but if it acts as a wave, it basically spreads out with this weird interference pattern, and it's like it's going through both.

And what quantum physics is telling us is that it's not until it's observed or measured that the particle decides which slit it's going to go through, or even which slit it just went through. Now, that's a weird kind of thing, because if it's a particle, it could only have gone through one, but quantum mechanics has a thing called superposition. And the superposition says it's in multiple states. Or in all states? In all states.

At the same time. It's a superset of all the possible positions, if you will. That's where the term comes from. It's also used a lot in quantum computing, which we can talk about later if we have time. But it's in a state of superposition, and then when it gets observed, it gets rendered. Now, this is usually where I bring up Schrodinger's cat. We can if you want to. people have heard it.

People have heard it. And Schrodinger was trolling because he didn't like this. But we can use it. We can use it. Shrodinger thought it was bizarre and didn't like it. And he said, look, it's ridiculous to say that a cat is in superposition. Right. It's either alive or dead.

We won't get in the details. Right. But it's in the superposition until you open the box. Now, common sense says, no, no, hold on. It's either alive or dead already. We just haven't looked in the box. So we don't know if it's alive or dead. But no, that's not what quantum indeterminacy is actually saying.

Right. It's saying it's in both of those states. That's why he was wrong. Yeah, he was wrong. Yeah, he ended up being wrong. And there's an aside to this if we get around to talking about multiple timelines with Schrodinger that we'll get. We have to. Yeah.

But I looked at that as a guy doing video games and a guy who's been optimizing code all my life. And I realize, oh, the rule of thumb there is only. render that which is observed. Until then, it stays as a set of information and a set of probabilities. And I thought, that's just like how we build video games. We render the part of the world that gets observed. Now, in the old Newtonian model, the world just exists. All the particles are there and we move through it. It's kind of like Kingsquest, where you can move the guy around, but all the pixels are there. But in quantum mechanics, it's like the pixels are generated dynamically.

And so that was a big insight for me, that, oh, quantum indeterminacy is so bizarre. Why would it possibly exist? And I said, well, because it's an optimization technique. That's right. If you have limited resources, you only need to render that, which is observed.

Now, that brings up all kinds of questions about what happens if there's multiple observers, are different people seeing different things, but there's also something called caching in computer science. And what we do is if I have just been to this world and it gets generated or this room, let's say, and then you bring your avatar into the room, well, your computer is going to render it faster because the data is already there. But more than that, the next room is cached.

And so is the next room over there on the left and the right? Because there's a probability that you might go into one of these places. So you can sort of preload the algorithm. Yes, it's preloading. Right. It's like, oh, he didn't go in there. So that's fine. We have this one preloaded. So render that. Right, exactly. So you render it quickly. So it's all about performance because there are operations which are slower or more expensive and operations which are quick. And in a multiplayer game, the most expensive operation is to go from your computer to the server on the internet. That's the slowest part of the whole process. Right. And then bring information back. Now imagine there's a million players all.

doing this. Well, you have to kind of optimize in such a way that assets can be loaded. It was funny. A few years ago, these filmmakers called me, called me up. It's been a while since I've talked to them. And they said, hey, we're trying to develop this show for Netflix. And it's called, these guys are living in a little small town and they look up and they see this dialogue box that says, Sky Not Found, which is like an asset. What happens in video games when it can't find your assets. Yes. But so caching is basically, a way to save what's needed. And so in this model

of using the observer effect like a video game, as long as there's at least one observer, then you still have that rendering there. And then you also have multiple levels of what game designers would call LODs just in case, right? Yes.

So that LOD is a level of detail. So we'll show it to you, but just as much as you need to Right. Especially like we're talking about things off in the distance. right and then you can go in and the assets can become higher and higher resolution kind of like I don't know if people remember this but like when jpags used to load on old web browsers sure you know that was an expensive operation today we think oh it's no big deal I'm going to download

a whole video like on wireless but back then it was a big deal and so the text would load first and then slowly it would fill in yep you know the actual images over time and that's it's an optimization technique so and now that's called lazy loading Yeah, and so lazy loading is a good way to think about it. And in fact, there's an underlying concept called lazy evaluation, which goes down to the code level. So it basically says, don't execute any code unless you absolutely need to. So what is it holding on to?

So what it does is it looks for references. Oh. So it's actually a timing issue more than... Right. So before we're talking about optimizing the number of bits you send, we're talking about optimizing your GPU, your graphics processing unit for drawing things, but this is optimizing the CPU. And what it says is if you had like a really long equation,

X equals 1 plus 2 to the power of this plus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you never use that variable X later in the program. It's not needed. Now maybe it's used, you know, a couple days later, the program's running, and now it needs X. Okay, I'm going to go back and calculate that big long equation because that's an expensive operation. Right.

And so lazy evaluation is actually built into a lot of programming, you know, languages and compilers and virtual machines like Java, et cetera, which says basically only run the code that you really need to run. It's like having comments. Like when you have comments in code, again, coding is becoming a lost skill now because of AI. But the comments aren't part of the actual program. They're not really needed.

So when it gets compiled, it doesn't compile. the comments, it just gets rid of them. And it's just compiling the code parts. Now, when you're running it, I remember I was back at MIT and we did a, I had a professor who was studying parallel processing at the time. I think later he became CTO of Sun, Sun Microsystems and a bunch of other things as well. But he was like trying to come up with a way when you have multiple processors. And like with AI today, GPUs are the constraining factor.

You see video games in most technology advances. Like AI uses GPUs. Cryptocurrency, you know, mining uses GPUs. And GPUs were developed for graphics and video games. Is this why most games are built on engines? Because a lot of that math has already been handled. Yeah, because engines make it much easier to build a game because what would happen is in the old days,

everyone had to write everything from scratch, including the physics engines. Sure. The loading engine, like the things we just talked about, you'd have to write, you know, how do you take a 3D model and put like the rendering or the textures, which is like putting the clothes and the skin on top of the person. Particle systems. Yeah, particle systems.

All that stuff has been built over many years. And in the old days, every team had to write all that themselves, which would just take way too long. Right. Now there's Unreal and there's Unity. Unity became big partly because the mobile game industry. Yep. because it was a way of doing a game on iOS and on Android once, write the code. Because before that, people used to write their games directly in C or Objective C or Java for the other one.

But so the whole engine makes it easier to build new worlds on top of it. And then some companies like, you know, the Unreal, they made their engine available to other people as a product so they can build games on. I think it was the Unreal tournament initiative. Yeah, it was. It was built as, right? Yeah, and then it became, you know, a pretty solid engine. It's probably one of the best ones out there. My favorite.

Oh, yeah, you guys use it here, right? Yep. And so where were we going with this? Parallel. Yeah, the parallels between quantum mechanics and the way that we write code. Because the big question is not just does this happen, because I think, you know, quantum mechanics has been validated. Yes. This stuff happens.

We don't know why it happens. and we don't know how to think about it or interpret it. Now, there's another, so the first most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation, which basically says that all these probabilities exist and then the probability wave collapses down when an observation or a measurement has been made. Right. That's the wave function collapse.

The wave function collapsed. And that, to me, reminded me of what I've just been talking about. Yes. Which is the optimization and the lazy evaluation and the caching and the rendering and the first person point of view. You didn't need to know the position yet. Right. Yeah, we didn't really need to know. No, it was there. What's going on? Right. And you can calculate it. You can calculate what might have happened before then as well. This will get more interesting if we talk about multiple timelines. Please. I'll come back to that. And so, so the other popular interpretation

of quantum mechanics with it with physicists is, now they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer. No, they didn't. Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler. Mine too.

Yeah, he was a great. Delayed choice, yes. Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, but he was also the supervisor, a PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman. Yep. It was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion.

Was it the Challenger or Columbia? Challenger in 1986 when he like took the little O-rings and put him in ice water and said, look, let's look at what happens to these. That's right, yeah. Yeah. And this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper. There's an interesting story here about how quantum computers came about.

But we'll come to that later for the time. And so Wheeler was a supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett, who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions. get separated. And that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happened. So that became known as the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation. Right. Is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it.

No. And Boer, Niels Bohr, who was the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn't like it either. And so Wheeler said, take out this stuff about there being multiple physical worlds. Just stick to the math. And so if you ever needed a job, and he's like, okay, fine, I'm just going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. But that became the basis for a lot of great science fiction today. Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like, I know that they didn't really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it? Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation?

Because you can still have your block universe theory just in a different universe. I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications because, you know, he had his, the universe, God does not. play dice. That's right. That's true. With the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like, it wasn't that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation. And he tried to disprove it. Yeah, he couldn't. And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. And then Boer didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called a Copenhagen interpretation because Boer was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him. And a bit of ego.

And of it, of it. Of course, yeah. That happens a lot in science. Yep. And so that's the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics. Where do you land? So this is what's interesting, is when I looked at both of those, and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer.

There's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem. It's like it goes from all these possibilities to this one. and nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic. It's like magic. There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board

writing a whole bunch of equations, step one, and then over here, step two, and then step three's got the answer. And his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs.

That's what happens. That's what happens, right? But if it's a video game, well, then we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game.

Now, the big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. You've probably seen the Spider-Man meme where you've got like the, sure, sure. The three Spider-Man's, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who's the third one? Toby, Toby McGuire. Yeah, they're all pointing at each other. Well, you know, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse. Right. That's what we're told.

That's how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a science point of view is they say it's not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much faith. You're creating a new world, not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point and each choice. Which would be at the plank scale. At the plank scale and maybe even at the plank time. at the plank time.

Which, you know, by the way, the plank scale is another reason why, I think, you know, same. Physics is showing us that we have pixels in the universe. Sounds like pixels. It's the smallest measurable distance. And plank time sounds like frame rate. Exactly. A clock speed or frame rate.

Yep. Which is, and now we do know that the universe is probably quantized. Scientists don't agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought, like, you know, a MacBook or that's, like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don't know what that means. What it means is Hertz is instructions per second or cycles.

Right. Per second. And so you can only do so many and you can't really do anything in between that minimum time. Right. And that's what the plank time is like the amount of time it takes speed of light to get through the plank length, basically. And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those, and it's more likely we live in a,

in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program. That's a lot of universes. That's a lot of universes. So it's not parsimonious, and you have to create all these universes. Right. But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami.

He wrote, what did he write? It was the conscious universe. I forget his book, but he wrote a few really. He's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his, his talks. And you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don't think about until later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities in the sense that we think of them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again. This episode is brought to you

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So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don't know if it was Pascal, one of these French mathematicians to begin with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice, and he asked him, hey, can you quantify how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea. He said, if you have one die, a single die,

a single dice, a die, has six possibilities. He called him six possible futures. I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it's evenly weighted, you know, we're in Vegas. So he's a gambling analogy. If it's properly weighted is one out of six. but you can't really have a probability

until you've tried something multiple times. Like, you know, you could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times. Right. And so... A lot of times. A lot of times.

You need to get up to a certain number. And then it got me thinking, well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run as many times as you wanted. You also didn't have to infinitely run every single possibility. Okay, why? Because you would,

basically, if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding, this is the problem with it being infinite, you could prune large parts of the tree. Like the universe has

something called fine tuning, which is if a certain number of constants like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off by like 1%. The planets would fly apart. The galaxies wouldn't stay together.

And there's like so many of these so people can look them up. There's at least 12, and there's probably more than that. Sure. But it looks like the universe is fine-tuned. And, well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times, and then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree.

That's right. Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation. So let's just focus on this subset of possibility. So you tune Avagadro's number until it's just about right. Or most constant or speed of light. It's like this is what works.

Right. Throw that stuff out. Right, exactly. And you tune that stuff. And that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book because I have the second edition. And also I interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife.

Tessa Dick? Tessa Dick, yeah. Wow. What was that like? It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone, but she had so many stories, you know. Oh, wow. And she's still around.

And, you know, she would tell me these stories. And I interviewed her because the Wachowski's, who made The Matrix, were inspired by Philip K. Dick. Of course. In fact, she told me, I asked her what would, you know, what would Philip think of the Matrix? And she said, well, first he would like it. That's the first reaction movie. This is awesome because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money.

Probably good. For using his ideas. I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk in Mets in 77. Yeah. So she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk. And there's a written version. Everyone should. It's amazing.

And there's a famous line from it where he says, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. And so when I originally, I was just interesting the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer program reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone's like, what? I love it. They think they're going to see a sci-fi author talk and they're getting this philosophical.

It's so important that talk. It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out her name is Joan Simpson. She was his friend. She went with him to the conference and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, The rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay, so he must have added it in his notes while he was flying over there.

But if you read the rest of the speech, the next line is we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate paths. And his most famous book while he was alive was actually the man in the high castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don't know,

they may have seen, some of you may have seen the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. I talked to his wife, she said he would have loved that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War II, and they end up splitting America between them. and you have kind of a police date on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened where the Axis Powers won the war.

And now we're on a different timeline. And he said at some point, all the memories came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book, too, by the way. Was he? That's what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because there were such bleak memories in that timeline. Yeah, he saw it.

He said this happened. but somewhere the variable was changed. Exactly. Who changed it? He called it the programmer and counter-programmer. So, you know, he used this idea of orthogonal time, which he compared it to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit, you can try on the other suit.

But what he also said, so Tessa encouraged me to read his speech, and I looked at that speech, and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. he also said we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate time. And of course, back then, it was hard to do that. But now we have this thing called the Mandela Effect. And whether you believe in the Mandela Effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible history. Well, let's talk about that because people love it.

Mandela Effect never worked on me until there is one that got me. otherwise the Berenstein bears all that fruit of the well you tell the story yeah what's a mandela effect so the Mandela effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past and the it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the 80s and of course he didn't in our timeline right he actually you know was released from prison He became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize and died, I think, at like, 2013 or something.

They remember his funeral on TV. Yeah, they remember details. Yes. Winnie, his wife, taking over the ANC. They remember all of these. And then Fiona Broom was the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Star Trek, at a Comic Con convention in Atlanta. It was called it DragonCon.

And it was a Star Trek panel. And the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trek, You know, they know their, they know their stuff. They know their stuff. They know their episodes. And people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this, Mr. Spock did that, and maybe Mr. Sulu did that. They're like, no, we never shot such an episode.

And multiple people in the audience who remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore. She used to find all these different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me, and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way. Same. if you asked me what it was. I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there.

But a friend of mine from MIT, who typically, you know, a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left-brained about these things. He said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen. And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip Gay-Dick talking about it and him talking about it,

I couldn't get this out of my mind that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines. And so I categorize these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one.

Then there's things like movies is another category. The events. The Moonwrecker one is the one that got me. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. The Moonraker one. That she doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces. Right.

It was Jaws who had the steel teeth. Right. He meets, was there named Dolly? Dahlia. At the end, and I remember that too. You remember the braces? I remember the braces too. I mean, that was the whole point of that.

That one got me. Yeah. And so there's a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein Bears one. And what I like to say is if someone has proximity or significance to an event, and they remember it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online. I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the simulated multiverse book, where she was a journalism student,

and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated, probably back of the 80s now, and was working for NPR. So again, she was in the news industry. And she heard that Nelson Mandela had died. Now, you're not going to get that wrong. if you went there to meet the guy. No. You're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy,

Stephen Vico, which is the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance, and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square.

Do you remember that? Of course. The tank boy? Yep. And the tank went. What do you remember? I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him.

That's how I remember it as well. But I started asking people about this, and there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw. Yes. On the news, like, they were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it's like 10 to 20% in a group.

I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Hynick, and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember him being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do, does anyone remember Tank Boy being run over? Nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this audience doesn't happen.

This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards. And she said she lived in Beijing at the time. And she remembers him being run over there, but she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, why are the Bernstein?

Like, why are they Jewish bears to their parents? Now, they're not going to get that wrong. No. The rest of us might get it wrong. Sure. And so, and then there's the Bible verses. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse? Yes, I know the verse. So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb. Yeah, that's not the verse. It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that one. The lion lays with the kid. The wolf lays with the lion, the leopard lays with the kid. Yeah. So that's a Mandela effect? That's a Mandela fact, because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even like, you know, people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb and say Isaiah.

Yeah, that's not it. One 11. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture. Right. Because they remember. And I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at, you know, one that happened to translate it. But people are telling me, no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with a lamb.

And the physical object has changed. So recently I met someone who's actually another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Brooks. She said, she went to her Catholic priest. And she said, do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion? He goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up. And he looked it up. And he's like, what?

So you have a Catholic priest. Again, somebody who's closer to it. And there's another interesting scriptural element, which we'll come to in a second. But the other one that really got me was the thinker. The statue? Yeah, the statue. So if you look at it today, and there's a cast of it at Stanford, so I happened to be in Silicon Valley, so I went to look at it.

You know, where's his hand. Do you remember where his hand was? On his chin. And was it clenched or was it kind of like this? I don't remember that. I thought it was kind of fisty. Yeah, if you look at it, it's kind of like not really clenched too hard. Right, right.

But there are all these people who took pictures standing next to the thinker. like this with their hand on their forehead. That's weird. And there are people who remember it that way. But if you look at the pictures, it's not there. And so again, I thought, okay, maybe they're pranking us. Like, what's going on? Why are these random people putting these pictures?

Because usually when you take a picture next to a statue. And you get the pose. You're trying to do the actual pose. And then, turns out, there's a picture, an actual picture of George Bernard Shaw. So, G.B. Shaw was a, you know, he's a well-known guy in England. He also modeled for Rodin. and for other people.

And they were doing the London release of the thinker. And they were unveiling it in London. I forget what year, like 1900 something, 90, 1901, maybe it was 1910. And they took a picture of him, this one photographer, and it says the title of the picture, you can find it online, is G.B. Shaw in the pose of the thinker. And guess where his hand is? It's up on his forehead.

Wow. And that picture is still. there in museums, and there are plenty of, you know, people can find it online. And so is, is it possible that some variables are being changed in a way? And so I began to think. Well, which one's got you? So that one got me. The thinker?

Not because I didn't remember it. I mean, I remembered it. I wasn't that close to it, so I didn't think too much about it. But seeing the physical evidence of this picture really got me. That's one that got me. I mean, the Jaws one was another one that I remember. I mean, Jiffie peanut butter wasn't that big of a deal to me. There's a famous one about in Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back, where, you know, Luka, I am your father.

Again, I think that could be just faulty memory. I think so. Collective faulty memory. I mean, there's so many now that I've come across. And chick filet is another one. Does it have a K in the Chick-fil-A? That's right. That's right.

That would probably get me. And I read an interesting theory about Jaws that made me feel a little better is sometimes when you're remembering, especially if it's a long time ago, your brain fills in what would be most logical. Because that joke works better if she has braces. Right. Yeah. So that made me feel better, but that was one that blew my mind. Because I was like, I remember all this stuff perfectly. No, I don't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many of these. So I was looking around at explanations. And so we'll go down the quantum rabbit hole again in a second. Please. But I began to the scripture stuff really got me too, not because I remembered the scripture. I mean, I remembered

the lion, well, I would lamb too, but I'm not that religious. I began to wonder if there's other scriptures that have changed. And in Islam, the Quran, right, Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity. The Quran is memorized, word for word. And you can think of the reason why, and the exoteric or normal reason why is probably just a lot, a lot of people could read back then. But they literally recited it word for word. And there's even a designation of a guy who knows all of that. And I looked around to say, hey, is anyone claimed that this has changed at all? And there's one Sufi Imam.

And again, the exoteric reason is because not everybody has a physical book. The esoteric reason he gave, he said that there are beings that are allowed to go back in time and change objects. But they are not allowed to change your memory. I know these beings. Tell us about these. These beings are called the Jit. Vision, yes. In Middle Eastern lore.

And you go to the Middle East and people take, you know, these beings very seriously. Oh, yeah. I mean, people get possessed by these beings. There are, I mean, when I was born in Pakistan, and, you know, it was kind of like the boogeyman. Like, you know, there's a gin over there. Right, right. Don't pee on that tree.

But then it turns out there are actual people who, like, poor scalding. Jacques Valet told me a story of a guy in Saudi Arabia. a kid who like poured scalding water and then got possessed. And supposedly there was a gin and a priest had to come in and do kind of like an exorcism, but he had to talk the gin out of it saying he's just a young kid. He didn't know what he was doing. And the gin was like, okay, and then it released him. Wow.

There's so many interesting stories. That's like he was a different rabbit hole to go down. But I got into it, I think, though. Yeah, it's so in tune. And I got interested in it because it became a way to think about simulation theory as if you have run this more than once, you could have changed things along the way. Now, it's very easy for us to think of multiple possible futures.

Like, okay, I go to New York, I go to London, I go to live in L.A. Those are three different possible futures. But we're not used to thinking of multiple possible paths. I mean, that sounds weird to say there could be more than one past. Well, it turns out there's something called the Delayed Choice Experience. I was hoping this was going to come back to John Wheeler. Yeah, so we're going to come back to John Wheeler. Actually, can we take a quick break?

Yeah, take quick break and we'll talk about how the past is not really the past. Yeah, let's do that. Take some photons, shoot them at two slits, you get two lines. Observe it, you get an interference pattern. Got it. John Wheeler said, wait a second. What happens next? Yeah, so he came up with what's called the delayed choice double slitting experiment.

Okay. And, you know, what it's telling us is that time is not what we think it is. that the present and the past and the future are different from the way we think about it. I mean, we think of the past as being linear. We know what happened, right? It's just one timeline. This is what's happened along the way. And the delayed choice experiment opened up an opportunity that the past could also be in superposition.

Now, the best way to understand this actually is not so much the slits, but it's what we would recall the cosmic delayed choice experiment. Okay. And he said, suppose there's something like a quasar, which puts out a lot of light, and it's really far away from us,

like a billion light years. And so that would be outside the galaxy, beyond the enderometer galaxy, and how long would it take for the light to reach Earth? Let's see, Earth is here. It's going to take a billion years. Right.

But suppose right in the middle, there's a big black hole or some other big gravitational object. And the light has to make a decision about whether to go to the left or to the right. Ah, okay. And that's kind of like two slits. Yeah. And we can have telescopes here on Earth that will measure through what's called polarization

of light, whether it went this way or that way. Right. Okay, so the measurement happens now, but it has to go one way or the other, like, let's say it's halfway. So how long ago would the decision have to have been made? It would have been half a billion years ago. Right. So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs now at this point, right? Far before.

Yeah, before the dinosaurs. It's kind of like saying if you're going to go to San Francisco from New York, are you going to go up towards Chicago or are you going to go down through Tennessee, Arkansas? You have to make that decision like well before you get to San Francisco. Yes. Now what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that, it's when the measurement of the light is done today on earth that the decision gets made on whether the light went to the left or to the right of that black hole.

Okay, that's weird because now we're saying that the past isn't fixed, that the past is in superposition. And it's only when the measurement is done here. It's like an observer effect, but for time, not just for space. Those photons went back in time to make the decision about today's observation. Well, that's one interpretation of it. Okay. The other interpretation is that both of those existed as possibility, and they didn't get fixed until today.

So, again, did Germany or Japan win World War II? Germany and Japan, did the Allies win World War II? Right. What if that decision isn't made until somebody observes the result, and then that result is cashed now so that everybody is on that timeline for some period of time. And this to me was an interesting revelation because it reveals that there could be a simulated multiverse of multiple timelines. Because what if what we're really thinking about is we ran the simulation one way and we also ran it the other way. And we are basically pulling the past in on demand.

Now, you'll appreciate this because not only do we optimize resources with lazy evaluation, but we also say, you know, don't run something until it's needed. Right. Right. And so in a computer game, let's say like FarmVille or Minecraft, okay, kids still play Minecraft. Today they have crops that grow. And what happens is you log in and you see that the crops have grown since you logged in yesterday or four hours ago or whatever the case is.

And now, what happens during the time that you're not logged in? And the answer is nothing. Nothing. Because it would take too many resources to sit there and calculate every single growth of every single blade of grass or of wheat, you know, for that time. So what the computer does is it's when you log in, it basically renders what might have happened over the last X period of time. Right.

Let's say 24 hours. And it uses a database of probabilities to say, what's the probability that your crops were destroyed by locust? What's the probability that your neighbor came in and stole some of your crops or that the fox got in and ruined a few crops? And you see it as this is what's happened. Now my crops are all grown. I can now sell my crops.

But what just happened there was that the past was generated on demand. So it's not so much that you're changing the past because physicists don't like that. Physicists don't like when you say retrocausation. It's that you are filling in the past based upon the observations as it's made. And there could have been multiple possible versions of that. Oh, I like this. So that's a different way to think about time. Now, is it possible that some of us are remembering one version of the Mandela effect? And we talked about ones that got you, like the Jaws one. You know, there's another one.

There's a famous one about Simbad being in a movie. Oh, yeah, that's right. Shazam, and it turns out it was Shaq and Kazam. That's right. But so many people, you know, would swear they had a VHS tape, and the story was like this, and the kids are asking the genie about his dad that Simbad actually recorded in, like, 2017,

a little clip from this movie that never existed as kind of a joke to say, okay, here's the scene you guys all say you saw, but never existed. Right. But people remembered it. You know, so many different versions and Mandela effects. Gino has one for you that I can't reveal to you. Oh, okay.

He's going to tell you later. Okay. But is it possible that we are all remembering a different version? Now, I thought, okay, that's the Delay Choice experiment. Wheeler proposed it as a thought experiment. He couldn't do it at the time. It required like pretty complex setup. And so, you know, is it just a thought experiment?

Well, it turns out no. People have actually run this experiment. They have. Now, obviously, they haven't run it for like, you know, the cosmic version, but what they've done is they've gone through two slits and they've sent a particle up to a satellite a thousand miles away. And so the question is, when they measure the particle, or say the light using our example, from the satellite, it was a thousand kilometers from the slits themselves.

And the question is, is the decision made about which slit to go through, like here, like when it first starts out in the slits, or is it made after the light travels a thousand miles? And a thousand miles is not that far in the scope of things, but when you're talking about, you know, nanoseconds, it takes a lot of nanosecences. Sure, you can measure it. Yeah, you can measure it. It's very measurable by today's instruments, is the point. And they did this experiment, and they found, in fact, that it was in superposition

until it was measured by the satellite. Okay, so then I said, well, how come more physicists talk about this? And so I went back and I found an obscure speech by our favorite quantum founder Schrodinger. This was an obscure speech he made in the 1940s. I think it was a Caltech. And nobody talks about this for some reason. People talk about the multiverse, which was, you know, late 50s, early 60s. People talk about the Copenhagen interpretation.

He said that in effect, once the observation was made, we would not just be deciding the state, the superposition, but we would be choosing from one of several simultaneous, one of multiple simultaneous histories. So literally Schrodinger is telling us there are multiple simultaneous histories. And it's like when you choose, look at the cat, you're not just choosing whether it's dead or alive. Sorry for bringing the cat back. That's okay. But what did the cat do before it jumped in the box? Did it come from the living room or did it come from the dining room before that was it in the backyard or was it in the front yard it's like you're choosing this history and that is the one that is now being part of our

simulation is what i would say i've got to read that speech yeah it's very obscure and i have i have a reference to it in the simulated multiverse uh but i've never heard anyone else talk about it i found it you know when i was looking around online for the earliest references to the multiverse and again we think of the multiverse as you know branching out this way there's a good there's a series on apple TV called a dark matter I didn't I did it was based on a book by Blake Crouch and when I was researching the multiverse had read that book along with many others and basically you know this guy has multiple versions of his life and one of what happens is he gets kidnapped by somebody and he gets taken away and he wakes up in a whole other university then he was

working at, and he finds out who it was that kidnapped him, it was himself from another version of the multiverse who had made different choices. And that guy, although he was almost like a Nobel prize winning physicist, he didn't have a family and kids. And so that guy's taking over his family and kids. I won't tell the rest of the book, but that's pretty much described, even if you just look at the series, you'll know that's what it's about. But so the multiverse, I think, brings up this idea that we could run multiple processes. And maybe they're running to try to see what the outcomes are. And maybe the outcomes that are less than ideal,

just like I talked about with pruning. Maybe we prune, we, meaning whoever runs the simulation, runs these different things, because you never run a simulation just once, do you? No. Simulation of the weather, simulation of virus, simulation of financial or whether an asteroid is going to hit us.

There's something called the three-body problem to that. It's when we have three bodies that are kind of circling each other. The question is, will they stay in a stable orbit or will one day one of them fly off? And it turns out we don't know the answer to that. Because there's no shortcut. You have to just keep running it to see. And there's a term that came from a physicist turned computer scientist named Stephen Wilfrum.

Called computational irreducibility. Right. And Wolfram was pioneer in many things. He wrote to the Mathematica software. but he also was a pioneer in cellular automata, which for those who don't know, they're like simple rule sets. It's like you can have one row of squares,

and the squares would light up or not, depending on if the next square is lit up or not, and it'll go dark following these rules. So these are very simple rules, a very deterministic version of reality. And then there's what's called the Game of Life, which is a two-dimensional grid. And if you watch it, and nowadays, you know,

we run it on computers, but the guy Conway came up with it. He literally had a grid sitting at the University of Cambridge and his mathematical students would like erase squares and fill in squares. Well, what would happen is you get these very complex arrangements. Every now and then you'd get a stable arrangement, which means you know it's going to stay this way or it flips back and forth. But they have what they call complex or chaotic results or processes. And those you don't know what's going to happen. This is kind of the basis of complexity theory. And the game of life is just quickly the rules are if you're too close to you if you're if the next square is lit up and the one next to it is lit up then you light up right and if the way be the one on top of it I'm making up

these rules but these are the types of rules sure and the one below it is lit up then you go dark right and so at each step every square follows these rules so it's a very simple computer program now for complex and chaotic processes and you would think we could predict what's going to happen but it depends on the initial conditions and this is what led to the whole science of chaos theory. Sure, and Lorenz and all of that. Yeah, Lorenz and also, you know, people remember Jurassic Park with Ian Malcolm, who's a cation. That's right. The point was with the butterfly effect where, you know, they say the butterfly flaps its wings in, let's say, Hong Kong and the stock market crashes in London. There's a whole chain of events that has to happen along the way. And so what computational

irreducibility means is you don't know what's going to happen at step 1 million until step 999-999. 99, you know, and then you don't know what's going to happen at that step until you go to 998 and it's a 997 and all the way back. So you have to run the computer program. And so even for a deterministic process that has no free will, okay, you don't know what's going to happen for chaotic and complex processes. And I believe our simulation would qualify as a complex or chaotic process. And so Philip K. Dick believed that the timelines were altered and I asked his wife, well, did you tell you any other examples of this? And she said, yeah.

She goes, they told him. And I said, well, what do you mean they? You know, did you see them? She goes, I looked like he was talking to somebody, but it looked like a little blur to me or something. Like the they that runs the simulation? People outside did they look like, did they look like gray aliens? Did they look like?

She's like, I couldn't really tell, you know, because only Phil could see them, but she could tell there was something weird that he was talking to, like an entity. And she said they told him, that they prevented the assassination of JFK in Dallas. But then he was assassinated in Orlando. Wow.

And then they prevented it in Orlando, and then he was assassinated somewhere else. And every time they changed it, it resulted in a worse outcome, like a nuclear war. Right. Just ended up dying somewhere else. So he had to be assassinated.

Yeah, it's kind of like if you've ever read that book by Stephen King or, you know, the miniseries, 1122. 63 where that goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination. I won't give it away, but you have to read it to see like how the past doesn't necessarily want to be changed. But for me, that's like it's very similar to what we would do. If we were running a simulation, we would run it. And we'd get to a point and say, okay, that's enough on this time.

Now let's run the next one. Now let's run the next one. And so it provides, simulation theory provides a bridge between the Copenhagen interpretation, the collapse of the probability wave because there's an observer who's playing the game. And the multiverse idea because it doesn't require an infinite multiverse. So it's like people often ask me what's the purpose of the simulation. This is. Well, sure, who's running it and why?

Who's running it and why? And in the new addition to simulation hypothesis, I have a, there's about 100 new pages for those who read the overall. Oh, wow. It's a pretty big update because all the AI stuff happened. All the brain computer interfaces to the technology side. And then I went deeper on the religion, but there's about 20 pages of FAQs, which are the most commonly asked questions over. Since the 20th anniversary, I ended up writing this on the 25th anniversary of the Matrix. And one of those questions were, you know, what's the purpose of the simulation?

Who's running the simulation? And I say, look, let me ask you a couple questions back. One, why do we run simulations? And two, why do we play a video game? And I believe the answer to those two questions gives us an answer for why we might be in a video game type simulation, a personal purpose, and a bigger societal. purpose. And the reason we run simulations is to see what is the likely outcome under this set of variables. And then we would change the variables. And we also want to know what is the most favorable

outcome, right? We're like, hey, if we do this to the asteroid, what will happen? Will it miss Earth or will it hit the moon? And that's just as bad as it hitting Earth. Because if the moon gets really smashed, then we'll be screwed or whatever the simulation is. So it's to find the most likely the outcome, the most favorable, and maybe to avoid the least favorable outcome. And to do that, you have to run it multiple times. But at the personal level, why do we play video games? Entertainment. Entertainment.

We want to have fun, so we want to experience certain things. Like, I can't, as much as, you know, I used to read Lord of the Rings, you know, when I was a teenager. Still, now I just watched the movies, but I used to read it every so often. I can't jump on a dragon and shoot, you know, arrows at orcs in this particular reality, but I can do it inside a virtual world. and it's a safe, a safe quote-unquote way to do it. And to have bad experiences, too.

Like, I don't believe the purpose of the simulation is grand theft auto, right? Probably not. Yeah. So anyway, that ties to some of these bigger questions around. Why would there be a simulated universe in the first place and why would there be a multiverse? But that's projecting our sense of morality and intent onto some greater consciousness. So what do you think their end game is? Are they looking out for us?

Because there's a lot of suffering. There's a lot of suffering in this world. I often just say, people say to me, well, I can't be in a simulation because if I was, I would be a billionaire and I would be an actor. My kid wouldn't have got cancer. My kid wouldn't have got cancer,

you know, Holocaust, all these things, right? But it depends on the nature of the game and what we're trying to experience. Like when we run a simulation, the better they get, we're going to run, you know, very bad scenarios through the simulation. What happens if the virus spreads to everybody? Right. Right.

And we want it to be as realistic as possible eventually. Now, this gets back to the NPC versus RPG version. Yes. Which we started talking about. Yes. And I think it ties to this bigger question. Because in an NPC version, of course they're going to have suffering on us because that's why you build simulations and that's why you run NPCs.

That doesn't imply that we couldn't be in a simulation. just because there's... Now, in the RPG version, it gets even more interesting, in my opinion, because there, people are choosing roles that might have bad experiences,

bad, quote-unquote, or suffering. Now, you know, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. Same. Right back before... Now it's popular again because of stranger things.

Right. But back in the day, when we used to play it back in the 80s, you know, we do it with pencil and paper, and you would choose your character. You would choose the race. You would say it's an elf, dwarf, or human, let's say. And then you would choose the general profession, thief, cleric, warrior.

A paladin. Paladin. Oh, yeah, that's right. And it's not that you couldn't, you know, the wizard couldn't also be a good fighter. It's just that that's not their skill set. So you're choosing almost like aptitudes in a sense. And you're choosing a storyline or a profession. And then you choose the campaign that you're going to be on.

But you also choose the morality, whether evil, good, chaotic evil, all that stuff. That's right. Yeah, there's all of this stuff that you're choosing. And some of those roles are not good roles. No. Yeah. But that, to me, gets back to this idea, whether you can treat the simulation theory in one of two ways. And again, it's an axis.

Just like NPC and RPG is an axis, because you can have both NPCs and RPGs in the same game. It doesn't have to be 100% of one or 100% of the other. In fact, most games have both. And I'm assuming the audience might be familiar with that term, but if they're not, NPC stands for a non-player character or non-playable character. And it actually comes from Dengens and Dragons. Sure.

The tabletop game. Because, you know, you had to interact with a bartender at the inn. You had to interact with a guy at the armory who's selling you, you know, the plus five crossbow or one of these other, you know, items. And there's going to be enemies there that you have to fight as well. Which are we? Were you the NPCs or were we the RPGs? Well, that's an interesting question.

And I like to say that we're, we may be both because there's something in between, okay, which is that we choose roles and we are playing the roles, but we also go into NPC mode for other people in that. We are playing certain role. Like there are people who may have had a role in your life. That's a relatively small role or a major role. But, and one woman came to me once and said, you know, I think my husband is an NPC. Oh, no. I said, that's not a healthy way to think about it. No.

In fact, it's better to think about everyone as a source player with their own storyline, their own difficulties, and their own quests. But they're going to play roles for us, which could be they're going into NPC mode because that is a role that we have agreed to. Kind of like in a film. Now, I like to say that the other way to think about the simulation hypothesis is a metaphor for reality. So one way is it's literally code running on a machine.

And if we really get into it, I think it's closer to a quantum computing device than a regular digital computing device. But the other way is to say the video game is a metaphor for this idea that we are coming into this fake or hoaxed reality and that we are playing a role. And we have agreed to forget that we're playing that role. So there's consciousness out there that we're not even aware of that's driving this reality? Yeah, so it could be that we're a player. Wow. And we, so AJ, Riz, you know, Joe, all these guys. We are the avatars of our consciousness, which is sitting outside of the simulation

and playing the game. Now, in the Matrix, you know, Neo-Morphius and Trinity existed outside of the Matrix. And, of course, they look the same because if you're going to hire Keanu Reeves in a movie, you want them to be the same character. But in a game, when you choose, your avatar, you don't have to look like that. It doesn't have to be, you would choose the role that the character has, and outside you could be something else entirely. This feels like reincarnation a little bit. It does. Like you respawn. You respond as a new character, but you

may have some of the skills that you learned. There's evidence of that. I'm playing, right. There's like the work of Ian Stevenson in particular with the children who, you know, have marks where they claim, you know, they were killed violently. For sure. There's people who remember languages. Zena Glossi, Yep. Life Between Lives by Michael Newton talks about it. Yes. So I spent a lot of time looking at Life Between Lives and I, you know, when he talks about the in-between time. So what he did was he hypnotized people and also Dolores Canon did the same thing. I was about to say Dolores Claymore, that's a, I mentioned Stephen King earlier. That's probably why. But there's a period just before you go into the life, which first there's life selection.

And they lay out, here's the possible trajectories that you might take in your life. And here's the major decision points you might make. Now, you're still free to choose to go this way. You'll live in California or you live there. But if you go there, how are you going to meet this other care player who's going to be your wife or your husband? But there's different challenges. and these are the quests or challenges that you're going to deal with in this life.

That's very interesting. So if you think of games and how they're built today, you have difficulty levels of quests. We have like a quest tree typically, where you start off with simple quests and then you unlock the more difficult quests. That's very interesting because Michael Newton talks about, and many researchers, about soul groups

that always sort of reincarnate together. And that makes me think it's just a bunch of nerds around a table saying, all right, let's play again, reset the table, I'm going to do this, you do that, and we'll start rolling dice. Exactly. Or like, hey, we're all going to meet on Tuesday at this castle to have a raid, right? And Michael Newton even talks about these little clues that you're going to, I mean, I call them clues. I forget what he called them exactly, but they were like signs that, oh, when you meet this person,

you're going to recognize them because, you know, she's going to be on a red bike or she's going to have an earring and you just can't stop looking away from that earring, right? Have you ever had that experience? Of course. Deja vu or, you know, where does it come from? Is it because we made an agreement to meet that person at this point in time? Now, that helps us to reframe the idea of suffering as well. Because another metaphor that was used in spiritual traditions.

So in the Hindu traditions, they talk about the Lila, the grand play of the gods, and Maya, which is an illusion. The world is an illusion. Right. It's a hoax. And the Buddha talks about. the world is a dream. I mean, Buddha literally means wake up, woken up. Like, I have awoken. Like a woman said, what are you? And he said, I am both. And what did that mean? It meant he was awake, which

meant the rest of us were asleep and dreaming. And, you know, Shakespeare had his metaphor of the world's stage. So Swami Yogananda, who was one of the first Hindu swamis to come and live in the U.S. He wrote autobiography of the yogi, which was passed around during the hippie generation. And it was Steve Jobs' favorite book. So much so that at the end, after his death at his memorial service at Stanford, everyone got a little brown box, and they opened it up, and there was a copy of Autumagraphieva Yoga in there.

So it really introduced a lot of Westerners to these Eastern ideas. Now, Yogananda had a challenge. It was 1920s. This is a brown guy with long hair. He's here, and he's trying to teach about yoga and karma and Maya, and he needed to translate it into newer technological metaphors. So he used the metaphor of the film projector.

Because that was new technology. Right. So back in 1920, films were relatively new to the audience, to the world. And he said that we are like actors in this film, and they're suffering happening to those characters. But the actors aren't dying, but they choose the role with suffering. But there's a part of us that's outside and you have to look away from the screen to see the light. It's just a projection of all of that on top. to the screen.

And so he would use that metaphor. And I believe if he were alive today and actually wrote a book called Wisdom of a Yogi about his teachings, they asked me to write it. HarperCollins India emailed me one day and said, will you write this book about Yoganana? Why do you want me to write the book about Yoganana? Four Indians, like young Indians, professionals.

A Pakistani American with an Islamic background. Who grew up in Michigan? From Michigan. I was like, are you serious? They're like, yeah, we want you to write it. I was like, why is that? They said, because, you know, and I do reference, you know, Yogananda, I reference other mystics.

Like in the subtitle, there's quantum physics and Eastern mystics. But they said because, you know, you use these technology analogies that younger people, meaning like young professionals will understand. And I thought about it. And I thought if Yogananda were alive today, he would say, we're like in a film, but we're the actors and we're the characters. We all have our scripts and these roles we're supposed to play. But we can change those scripts.

We have free will. We're also the audience that's sitting there watching us. or you could say like a game where you're sitting on a table, deciding what to do. And what does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It does.

Speaking of Yogananda, can you tell us about the experience you had in Encinitas? Oh, yeah. So I was asked to write this book, and I said, okay, I'll write this book. And I started writing it, and this was during COVID.

And I was hitting a little bit of a writer's block because, you know, it's like this big responsibility. you're writing about this well-known and loved spiritual figure. And, you know, I just, for those who haven't read Audubim Phi Vyogi, it's chock full of stories of, like, saints that are like levitating in the air, by location, you know, this guy's over here sitting and meditating and somebody sees them in the park.

You've got, like, you know, the perfume saint who can make any perfume odor up here on his hand. You've got this mysterious guy in the mountains who supposedly has been living there for 800 years. You've got this fat 300-pound Swami that was 180 years old when he died supposedly who's really well-known. So you got all these stories. And I kind of like these stories. You've got a guy with a gin

who's controlling what I refer, what I think is a gin. He's a Muslim fakir who's controlling an invisible entity that's making, you know, like this cup appear and disappear. And so I was like, this is all great, you know, but I got like, I got like, write me serious and write, you know, some serious lessons. And I wanted to go visit the place where Yogananda wrote autobiography of Yoga.

And that was in Encinitas. He has a hermitage there. And he actually had some, you read Autobarbibh, Phoebe Yoga, and you think, wow, man, everything goes well for this guy. He just says, Divine Mother, give me this, and it all happens. And if you read about his life, you realize he had many, many challenges. And at one point, his entire organization fell apart. And he's like, oh, man, I just want to go to India and meditate in a cave. And the message you got was, no, you need to stay in the West.

You know, you're here in America for a reason. And so then he decided to go to Encinitas and write this book for about 10 years or so. It took him to write the book. And so I wanted to go to the Hermitage, which is beautiful if anyone's ever been there. It's like overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There's a beach. He used to walk now. It's literally called Swami's Beach.

That's the formal name for it. And so I wanted to go there and check it out. But it was during COVID. And it was, you know, closed to the public. And so through another series of coincidences, I got to meet some of the people at SRF, told him I was writing this book and they said, okay, for you, we'll open it up. And so literally I went down there and they had, you know, some of the monks or monastics who lived there, you know, gave me a little private tour. We sat around and talked and I got to go to Yogananda's office where he wrote the book.

Wow. Just by myself and they're like, here, just, you know, relax, do whatever you want. And I decided to meditate and I'm like, okay, I need a, you know, so this is inspiring me and it was. And that's something I got a vision of Yogananda. Now, again, it's one of these visions where you're kind of present and you're still sensing this vision. Is it like the man by the tree? No, sort of lives similar to that, but this is a vision of Yogananda.

Wow. Similar. And he's sitting there with a stack of papers, which is how they wrote books back then, you know, and it was typed out. And he's kind of looking at me,

but it was this mischievous grin. And, you know, I always thought of him as a very serious kind of guy, but if you talk, you know, you read some of his other people wrote about him, he was very mischievous. He would play practical jokes

on his students and stuff. And he's like, kind of glint in his eye. And I was like, yeah, wow, that's him writing Ata Barfi Yoga. I'm having a vision of it here. And he kind of smiled at him and he took those papers and he opened the French doors or whatever that go out to the ocean and he tossed them all out there.

And they flew everywhere and I was like, no, stop, what are you doing? Like back then, once you lost the papers, that's it. You don't have to go rewrite the book. And he smiled and he laughed. And I was like, okay, what is he trying to tell me? He goes, watch the papers. And each of the papers turned into these little white doves

and they floated off to carried his words to different parts of the world. And somehow that totally got me out of my writer's block because he was also saying, have fun with it. Like, don't treat it so seriously, and it's our words that we leave behind, but say what you want to say and just have fun. And so I just started writing about all these yogis

with these superpowers, right? And the book just flowed from there, and it went on, and it did quite well in India as well. Let's say everything that you've talked about is right and really are in a simulation. What does that mean for us regarding free will? Does anything matter? Yeah. Well, sometimes people say, if I'm in a simulation, nothing matters.

Well, that depends on the nature of the simulation. If we are here to learn lessons and have certain quests and achievements, then if you don't make the quest, what do you do? You're going to have to do it again. That's right. It's not you just give up, and then you may have more difficult quests afterwards. And so when we have difficult situations in our lives, whether it's financial, health-related, relationship-related, war, suffering, we can view it as a more difficult quest that is part of our storyline.

And perhaps, you know, we can give meaning to these problems to say, okay, this is a terrible thing that's happened. but if I view it as a higher difficulty quest. And in fact, maybe the people whose lives are easy are the early players and the ones who are having, you know, the more difficult lives, maybe they're the advanced players. I believe that. You know, along with, I mean, you've probably heard the telepathy tapes. Of course.

With Dr. Diane Hennessy. And, you know, she was working with these autistic kids who were telepathic. So she called me up a few years before the telepathy tapes came out. And she said, oh, you know, this is my work. I've been working with these autistic savant's children, and, you know, like Rain Man type, where they can, you know, calculate these numbers.

And she goes, I don't think they're calculating. I think they're looking it up in a database. And I think this is an information-based reality. And so one of the best explanations she could come up with at the time was that this is some kind of a simulation. And so she actually sponsored a conference on autistic savants and simulation theory. And, you know, now these autistic kids are showing us,

abilities that the rest of us don't have, but maybe we view them as having a physical handicap, because they're nonverbal, one, meaning most of them can't speak, but they can point to things. They also don't have fine motor controls, right? They have gross, they can move their arm, they can put their finger here, but many of them, you know, don't have the fine motor controls to be able to write, like by hand. Of course, today you don't have to as much, but. And so I began to think about that in this context and realized, well, what if the rest of The rest of us are in the full body suit of the video game or like Ready Player 1. And we have the headset on and all we see is this first person perspective.

But because like with a glove, I've got like full control. I can, you know, do every little thing that I want. But if I was half in or half out or if I was sitting there with a mouse, okay, I can move my character around. I could point at things, but it's going to be really hard. Right. But I can see stuff from a. third person point of view that you can't see. That's right. I can put the virtual camera over here.

I can message my friends. I can use private messaging. And then, you know, one of, one of the autistic children, her name is Lidu. She's been at some of these conferences with her mother, Dahlia, who's also demonstrating a lot of amazing capabilities like mindsight and stuff. But Dahlia came up to me and she said, Lidu wants to tell you something. Oh, well, what does Lidu want to tell me? He goes, when she's communicating with her friends, it's like they're video game is what she said, and they can help her, and she can see what they're doing, and she can help them. Wow.

So it's like they're all in a video game together. And so for me, this was a different way to think about many of these things. Like they're closer to the source code than we are. Yeah, they're closer to the source code, and they have control of the virtual camera. Yes. They're not locked in, and there's some disadvantages to that, but they're actually perhaps the more advanced players who are trying to get the rest of us to wake up, that there's more to this reality than we know.

That's right. I can get behind that. Last thing for you, what questions or answers do you need to be sure this is a simulation or be sure it's not? What are those things? Well, it's a good question. And again, I think it depends on where you are on this axis. So I mentioned the axis from the NPC to RPG version. That's one axis that's important.

The other axis is do you view this as a literal computer simulation or do you view it as a metaphor? for something very advanced. And I like to say that it's really four propositions that I'm proposing or asserting in these set of books. The first is that the world consists of information and not physical matter. Now, I met just the last year or the year before. In fact, when I was writing the second edition,

I spent a semester over at the University of Cambridge in one of their AI groups. In fact, the guy that I work with, Henry Shevlin, was just hired as the philosopher for Google Deep Mind, and the story went viral, that Google Deep Mind is looking at consciousness by hiring a philosopher that specializes. It's very interesting.

That is really interesting. But while I was there, I met a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the 70s, and I was telling him these propositions. You can't name him? Oh, yeah, Brian Josephson. Oh, okay. He's actually fairly well-known.

Something to do with one. I'm telling, I forget what he won the Nobel Prize for back then, but he's also very into different models of consciousness. and he also says that his colleagues didn't want to talk about this stuff and he had a lot of stigma from his colleagues just for investigating it but when I told him that first proposition he goes you know what that's not controversial anymore that the world consists of information it's not 30 years ago's physicists would have said yeah that's controversial because

there's a whole branch of digital physics there's a amount instead of just talking about conservation of energy in conservation of momentum we're talking about conservation of information like does information get lost Does it get destroyed? So, I mean, sure, some people might disagree, but for the most part, the idea that we live in an information-based reality. Now, John Wheeler, his other favorite phrase was it from bit. Right. And that's why, that's when he became my favorite businesses from the 20th century.

And what he was saying was he was looking for this thing called a particle. And we think of a particle as hard, right? It's a physical object. But he couldn't find it. it's like those Russian dolls. I think they're called the Matrojska dolls. Yeah, yeah. Or the babushka dolls, if they're male or female.

There's different versions. But he kept opening up this thing and looking for this thing at the bottom and it was just empty at the bottom level. And so he said what he, the conclusion he came to at the end of his life was that the only thing that distinguishes one particle from another

is an answer to a series of yes, no question. And what is that? That's a bit. I mean, the basis of information theory is a one or a zero. Yep. And so he came up with his phrase that said, anything that's physical like this coffee cup or mug

actually consists of bits of information. And so I think that's a perspective that's gaining traction. Let's put it that way. You can argue with it, but, you know, I think it's not, you know, that hard. But then that information is getting computed over time. We see evidence of algorithms in nature for it. The second proposition is,

kind of obvious but really hard to prove. And it is that the world seems physical so it gets rendered for us. The bits are rendered in a way that looks real and feels real. When we think we're touching the wall, we're not really touching the wall. There's like electrical signals,

like the basis of the universe is electromagnetic. Right, it's mostly empty. It's 99.9% empty space. You've got on the molecules, it's 99.9% empty. You look at the atoms. It's 99.9% empty space. You go down to the subatomic particles.

And in the end, what you have is a set of information, and that is just like a video game. Now, they're making argument by analogy. That's not necessarily a formal argument, but it's an informal one, just like the Copenhagen interpretation. Nobody knows how the Copenhagen interpretation works. Nobody knows how the collapse works.

And I'm saying that basically, like a video game, there's no castle there. There's no dragon. Those are just bits of information coming to your machine, and they're rendering it, for you. The third gets into the metaphysical side, you know, which is that this universe is a big hoax. A big hoax. A purposeful hoax. Maya. Like Maya and illusion. So this is what gets into the religious and the

Maya. I was reading about Roger Ebert, you know, the film credit. Yeah. So he died not that long ago. Unfortunately from throat cancer, but his wife was with him when he died naturally. And she talked about his death. And she said the last thing he said just before he died was, oh my God, it's all a big hoax. Wow. And she said that meant that the physical universe that we think is real is all a big hoax. And other people, you know, that get close to that boundary, you start to hear similar things. You do. Talk to people so that the physical world is not just information. It's like a big hoax. Like Maya means illusion, but it also means kind of an illusion that you agree to walk into. and to fool yourself, right?

We're here in Vegas, there's like, you know, the magic shows with, I don't know who the latest, David Copperfield, Chris Angel, whoever the latest musician is. You go to a, and that's the best analogy I've heard for Maya. They say, you go to a magic show, and you know that guy's not really sawing the woman in half, but that's what makes it exciting is it's like magic, right? You don't know how it's done, but it's an illusion.

It's a sleight of hand. You know, and the Buddha eventually came to this conclusion, you know, where he talked about, everything is like a reflection in a very clear mirror, devoid of inherent existence. So you can buy that or not by that proposition, but certainly the spiritual traditions buy that. And then the fourth one, which is similar, is that you agreed to be here and play a character, which is the video game proposition. You know, pure materialists don't like that at all because they'll say, well, there's nothing

beyond this physical world anyway. But to me, if you take all of those together, that encompasses why I wrote this book was so that I can talk to physicists at MIT about now. They may not agree with that it's a simulation or a computer simulation, but they're willing to talk to me about these ideas. I can't go in there and say, I want to talk to you about, you know,

guys leaving their body, floating around and seeing apparitions and haunted tours or UFOs. They'd be like, ah, we're just going to dismiss this out of hand. But they're willing to talk about the world being a simulated reality and if it is, well, then maybe there are entities that exist outside of our visibility that exist outside of the simulation that would seem supernatural to us. Like UFOs? Like UFOs. Or angels.

Or angels. Could UFOs that we are seeing be part of the simulation somehow? I think so. So there's two different ways. So one way is even if they're extraterrestrial, which I think many of those of us who have studied it, realized that there's much more going on, in order to explain the data. Like if you want to really be scientific about it, you want your observations and data to match your explanation. Yes. But on the one hand, when you have a multiplayer game, you're not just going to have one planet.

You're probably going to have multiple planets. So, in fact, part of the purpose of the simulation could be do you get off the planet? Do you destroy yourself? What's called a great filter? Or maybe we're all trying to get to the point when these civilizations meet. But then it gets weirder.

And I'm your show. I'm sure you've covered some of these weird phenomena. But when I met with Jacques Valet, he started telling me about these cases where like one person would see the UFO and the other person would. All the time.

I began to think about that and I thought, huh, that's interesting. And he said there was another case where this UFO came down in a 45 degree angle and it landed in a clearing and supposedly left some mark. So everybody went, Mufon went

and they're looking at the clearing and he said, well, wait a minute, if it came down at a 45 degree angle and this was in like Pacific Northwest where they had these big trees. It's like, it would have had to have cut through the trees. But the trees aren't cut. I mean, they're still there.

They said, yeah, I did. It went right through the trees, but we don't want to say that because we sound crazy. Right. So they're censoring their observations. I thought about that too. And then you see these observations where these things move around,

like from here to here. It's almost like they're projected into our reality like a light or a holographic projection. And so when you res inside a game, or you're resing, you can kind of move through walls because everything's not fully rendered yet. But once it's rendered, they're physical.

And so is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us in that we are technological civilization, aliens make at least some sense to us, right? More than the gin, like the nuts and bolts aspect. So in this paper that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show about, stigma in academia, the stigma is getting less because of the government in the New York Times article.

It's still there, but it's getting less, but only for part of the UFO phenomenon. And that is the nuts and bolts part of the phenomenon. Not the consciousness, not the consciousness, not even the alien abduction. No. Because that would require acknowledging beings and beings that are more powerful than us. And it gets into all of that. And, you know, there's this kind of boundary there. But we can, at least we can accept that, okay, maybe there could be aliens because we know now there are other planets around other solar systems.

And so maybe they're presenting themselves to us as aliens because that is a technology that would make sense to us at this point in time. Whereas in the 50s, all these contactees are like, they told us they're from Venus, right? Right. Okay, we know they're probably not from Venus. Okay, assuming they exist, first of all, we know they're probably not from Venus. they're probably not from Mars, but that was what they told them. Why? They were lying to them. Why? Because they could wrap their minds around it. Imagine if you had said we're from Zeta reticuli. No.

A thousand years ago. I would be like, what are you talking about? Couldn't understand it. They couldn't understand it. And angels, they could understand. Yes. The thousands of years they could. Gin they could understand. Yes, they could. The Faye, they could understand. And is it possible that, that, so there's what's called the avatar theory of UFOs or the avatar hypothesis. There's two different versions of Gary Nolan talks about one version. I talk about the other version. This is a good time to say that you're on the board of the Galileo project with Avi.

Yeah, I'm on the advisory board, yeah. And you work with Gary Nolan's. Yeah, I've worked with the Soul Foundation. I wrote a white paper on venture capital investment in UFO. So I'm deep in the topic. So you're in the top. In fact, in the academic world, because I went back to get my PhD after, you know, I have about 15 years between my bachelors and my master's and another 15 years between that and the Ph.D. and they're like, you know, I wouldn't talk about this UFO stuff too much if I were you.

I'm like, I already wrote a book saying the world isn't even real. Yeah, you're fine. You know, UFOs, you know, it's not even that weird to me. Like, at least the alien explanation is not that weird. The other stuff may be. But so one of the avatar interpretation, I think, is Gary talked about it. And, you know, had to look with the film Avatar. In the film, he was controlling his avatar, the alien, but he was controlling it.

And so are these beings controlling the ships and even the beings that we see remotely? My interpretation of the Avatar is an avatar inside a video game is your character in the game. And you can change that characteristics if you want. But you are projecting into a virtual reality from outside.

So it's not just from another planet. It's being projected into. And supposedly, you know, people have been seeing these different beings for thousands of years. Like the gin art, is it, they were just presented themselves a certain way

because that would make sense to the people at the time. Today, aliens is an interpretation that would make sense to us. And so that, is it like in a video game, you render the avatar? And in some games, you can change your avatar. Sure.

Is it possible that they have unlocked that feature where they can change how it appears to us? Or could you take DMT and see kind of behind the curtain a little bit? Right. Yeah, and people who've taken DMT start to talk about things like, you know, a waiting room, right? Or they talk about different types of beings, like the different, I don't know, I'm not a DMT person. Right.

The machine elves. The machine elves. You've got like the insectoids. Yes. You've got like all these different versions of beings that are there. You know, and there's the work of Danny Goller, who was a guy who project the laser on the wall. Yes. And you saw the code, what looked like code, kind of like matrix code, but he said it's not exactly that.

and other people took it, and many other people can see it as well. I started hearing about this right after I wrote the first edition of the book, in 2019, people are like, oh, yeah, I've seen the grid lines of the simulation on DMT. And so it's very interesting to me how that kind of lines up, because perhaps it's suppressing whatever mechanisms we have in our brain to be able to perceive this other reality. So, yeah, so there's a lot of relationships there. But, you know, my favorite explanation for the simulators for UFOs is that they're being projected into this world in some way to get us.

And this came from, you know, my conversations with Jacques Valet, where he talks about how maybe they're not extraterrestrial at all. Him and John Keel, I think, were among the first saying they've been here all along. And then the materialist version of they've been here all along is, you know, lost civilization in the bottom of the earth. But a non-maturellness explanation would be like they're still. here and but they're projecting in they can see us but we can't see them and that sounds a lot like you know these stories that we've been hearing for thousands of years about the fe and the celtic traditions they can take you into their world in in the middle east um there's uh there's even stories of uh of like hybrids human gin hybrids a man marrying a gin woman and then having

children and then taking that that child gets taken the bible the same stories or Uriel taking somewhat up above the clouds and seeing seeing them the whole thing. Right, right. And so I think with that, some of that could be going on, you know, with the UFO phenomenon. Personally, I believe there's something there as opposed to many of my academic colleagues who are like, eh, that's all, you know, it's all flatter-at stuff, right? They kind of, and they kind of put it all together, Bigfoot, flat earth UFOs. And it's not the same thing.

It's not the same thing, yeah. And especially, in fact, I wrote an article for NBC News years ago saying, you know, The government is taking UFO seriously. Why aren't isn't Silicon Valley in academia? And academia still isn't, although more are. That's why I wrote that specific article about stigma. Very important work. Riz, thanks so much for coming in.

This has been so much fun. I can keep you here another couple of hours, but I know you've got to get out of here. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a fun conversation. You're right. We could go on for a few more hours, I'm sure.

Okay. Bye, everybody. So that was Rizwan Verk, Dr. Riswan. Simulation theory, quantum physics, the Mandela Effect, UFOs as avatars, whether we picked our character before we logged into this life. Let's try to untangle some of this. Well, first, Philip K. Dix's 1977 speech in Metz, France. That's documented.

You can find it online. I talk about it all the time. He stood in front of a room of science fiction fans and said, we are living in a computer program reality. He said a lot of great stuff. in that speech. Definitely watch it. John Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. That's real physics.

In 2017, a team took it to space. A satellite about 1,000 kilometers from the slits, peer-reviewed journal, the whole thing, and the result held up. The particle was in superpositioned until it was measured. So that means at the quantum scale, the past genuinely doesn't appear to be fixed until somebody observes it.

Think about that for a second. At the quantum scale, there is no time. But here's what I keep coming back to. The idea that only rendering what's observed isn't just a video game trick. It might be the underlying logic of physics itself. Quantum mechanics already works exactly the way a game engine does. What RIS is actually doing isn't selling simulation theory as a certainty. It's something quieter.

It's more interesting. He's showing that quantum mechanics, ancient mysticism, and video game design, all point at the same strange logic, that reality might be rendered, not built. And you don't have to buy the conclusion, but it's a fact that three completely unrelated fields approached by serious people keep landing in the same uncomfortable neighborhood.

His book is The Simulation Hypothesis, Second Edition on Amazon. He's also written the simulated multiverse if you want to go deeper on the multiple timeline stuff. Also find him on X at R-S-Stan-F-O-R-D. and I covered simulation theory in episode 186, links down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind,

and none of you are appreciated. Inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should. And it never ends. No, it never ends. No, it never ends. truck of being only with shadow people name was cold

and with a dark watcher