Rizwan Virk (on the simulation)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Episode Summary

Episode: Rizwan Virk (on the simulation)
Release Date: July 23, 2025
Host: Dax Shepard
Guest: Rizwan Virk, Monica Padman

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1. Introduction

In this thought-provoking episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard welcomes Rizwan Virk, an MIT computer scientist, entrepreneur, video game pioneer, professor, and bestselling author. Together with co-host Monica Padman, they delve deep into the Simulation Hypothesis, exploring the possibility that our reality is a sophisticated computer simulation.

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2. Guest Background: Rizwan Virk

Rizwan Virk shares his diverse background, highlighting his journey from growing up in Michigan to attending MIT for computer science. He discusses his entrepreneurial ventures, including founding a successful video game company that was eventually sold to a Japanese firm. Rizwan's fascination with virtual reality, AI, and the nature of reality forms the cornerstone of his work and his bestselling book, The Simulation Hypothesis.

Notable Quote:

"There's a point at which our virtual reality gets so realistic, it's indistinguishable from physical reality." — Rizwan Virk [18:22]

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3. Exploring the Simulation Hypothesis

Rizwan introduces the Simulation Hypothesis, positing that our universe might be an elaborate simulation created by an advanced civilization. He outlines three key threads supporting this theory:

1. Technological Advancements in AI: With AI becoming increasingly sophisticated, creating indistinguishable virtual environments is becoming feasible.
2. Quantum Physics Anomalies: Phenomena like the observer effect and superposition hint at underlying informational structures.
3. Mystical and Religious Parallels: Ancient philosophies and religions have long suggested that the physical world might be an illusion.

Notable Quote:

"Simulation theory is a framework around which physicists could start to explore some of these mysteries in ways that can't be otherwise." — Rizwan Virk [20:59]

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4. AI and Virtual Reality: The Technological Imperative

The discussion shifts to the rapid advancements in AI and virtual reality. Rizwan highlights how early VR experiences, despite technical limitations, demonstrated the potential for immersive simulations. He emphasizes that as AI continues to evolve, the possibility of creating a fully immersive and responsive simulation becomes increasingly likely.

Notable Quote:

"AI is now doing this with drugs... every single thing, people would have to have autonomy and free will and all the things we're experiencing." — Rizwan Virk [20:25]

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5. Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality

Rizwan delves into the perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics, such as the observer effect and Schrödinger's cat paradox. He explains how these phenomena challenge our conventional understanding of reality and suggest that information, rather than matter, might be the fundamental building block of the universe.

Notable Quote:

"If time and space are both quantized, and we know space is quantized, meaning there's a minimum level like a pixel. And if time is quantized, which scientists are starting to suspect... that is more like a simulated world." — Rizwan Virk [82:22]

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6. Religion, Philosophy, and Simulation Theory

The conversation bridges ancient religious narratives and modern simulation theory. Rizwan draws parallels between concepts like Maya in Hinduism and the idea that our reality is an illusion. He also references the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and philosophical propositions by thinkers like John Wheeler.

Notable Quote:

"What languages have been saying for thousands of years is that the world itself might not be real." — Rizwan Virk [21:16]

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7. Synchronicity and the Mandela Effect

Rizwan discusses phenomena like synchronicity and the Mandela Effect, which he suggests could be glitches or inconsistencies within the simulation. These collective misrememberings and meaningful coincidences challenge our perception of a consistent, objective reality.

Notable Quote:

"If it's indistinguishable, then the chances are at least 50%." — Rizwan Virk [32:09]

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8. Personal Interjections: The Boat Incident

Towards the latter part of the episode, the conversation takes a personal turn as Dax Shepard recounts a harrowing boat incident. While not directly related to the Simulation Hypothesis, this anecdote illustrates human vulnerability and resilience, themes that resonate with Rizwan's exploration of the human condition within a possible simulation.

Notable Quote:

"If you are a woman who was raped by her father for 18 years, and you look at her and say, I'm in a simulation, that's insanely patronizing to her experience." — Dax Shepard [73:14]

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9. Conclusion: Bridging Science and Mysticism

The episode concludes with reflections on the intersection of science, mysticism, and technology. Rizwan emphasizes the importance of humility in scientific inquiry and acknowledges that while simulation theory offers a compelling framework, it remains one of many perspectives on the nature of reality.

Notable Quote:

"There's so much we don't know." — Dax Shepard [75:55]

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Key Takeaways

• Simulation Hypothesis posits that our reality might be a sophisticated computer simulation.
• Advancements in AI and virtual reality are making such simulations increasingly plausible.
• Quantum mechanics challenges conventional notions of reality, suggesting an informational foundation.
• Ancient religious philosophies have long hinted at the illusory nature of the physical world.
• Phenomena like synchronicity and the Mandela Effect could be glitches within a simulated reality.
• Personal experiences, such as Dax’s boat incident, highlight the complexity of human emotions and interactions, whether within or outside a simulation.

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Further Exploration

For those intrigued by the Simulation Hypothesis and its implications, Rizwan Virk’s book, The Simulation Hypothesis, provides an in-depth analysis of the theory, incorporating recent advancements in AI and quantum physics.

Listen to the full episode on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tags: #ArmchairExpert #DaxShepard #RizwanVirk #SimulationHypothesis #AI #VirtualReality #QuantumPhysics #Religion #Philosophy #MandelaEffect

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free Right now, join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi. Today we have Rizwan Virk. Rizwan is a MIT computer scientist, an entrepreneur, a video game pioneer, a professor, and a bestselling author. His books are the Simulation Hypothesis.

[Monica Padman]

Ding, ding, Ding.

[Dax Shepard]

Startup Missing Models, Zen Entrepreneurship, Treasure Hunt. And now the second edition of the Simulation Hypothesis. Out now. Guys, it's a sim episode.

[Monica Padman]

It's a sim episode and it is so good. We couldn't have had a better person on to discuss it.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it was great. It was titillating. Please enjoy Riz on the sim. We are supported by Audible. Thanks to Audible for being the presenting sponsor of today's episode. We could all use an escape these days. And the best way to do it, audible. With over 1 million titles in their selection, there's more to imagine with Audible. We are supported by J.C. penney. You know that moment when someone compliments your outfit and asks where you got it?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man. One of the best feelings.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And then you get to say, guess what? It's JCPenney. Yeah, JCPenney. It's so good, right?

[Monica Padman]

You just look so great that people assume you shelled out, but then you hit them with the fact that your fit is from JCPenney and they're like.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, actually, JCPenney has got hidden gems for every age, everybody, and every budget. We actually just got some stuff from JCPenney.com I am wearing right now a pair of Levi's 501s. And, you know, that's my favorite pants, and they had the color I've been searching for. And I got a really kickass Levi's jacket, too.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I got some Adidas white sneakers. They're solid white, and everyone needs a pair of classic white sneakers, so I'm really excited to wear those. If you're already shopping at JCPenney, you know what's up. It's genuinely such an underrated spot for style savings and a solid reward system.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Rizwan Virk]

He's an upchurch, he's an outra. He's an expert.

[Dax Shepard]

We've been discussing it without any authorities present for seven years straight. So it's kind of fun to have someone who's given it a real deep dive.

[Monica Padman]

And if you negate anything we've been saying, we will cut it out.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right. If you contradict any of our opinions, you go by Riz.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah, go by Riz.

[Dax Shepard]

But if I wanted to say Rizwan, that's fine, too. That's what it is, though.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

So where did you grow up?

[Rizwan Virk]

I grew up in Michigan in the Midwest.

[Dax Shepard]

Where in Michigan this is from?

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. You're from Michigan.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I remember.

[Rizwan Virk]

So I'm gonna guess we do this thing, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Not bad guess, actually. South of Detroit, though, on the way down to Monroe. Not far from Toledo, Ohio border. But between Detroit and Monroe, it's called the down river area.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes. Downriver.

[Rizwan Virk]

The Detroit river goes from here down into, I guess, Lake Erie.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good job. And you could see the nuclear reactors within a five minute drive.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, about 10, 15 minute drive. Crummy lab was down there, I think it was.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Certainly in the 70s and 80s, it was kind of peak fear around nuclear energy. Did you guys ever think, like, are we going to be radioactive living this close?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

I remember growing up, they were telling us that Detroit was one of the first targets for a nuclear attack because of the industrial capacity.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. They made a lot of warplanes there in Detroit.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. And then for a couple of years, we moved to North Dakota in the middle of nowhere. And I thought, oh, now we're safe. Turns out that's not the case because most of our ICBM silos are in North Dakota and Montana. So those cities would have been targeted next or first, depending on what the swimming may.

[Dax Shepard]

Your dad just loved to live on the edge. He just wanted to have a little.

[Monica Padman]

Sense of cause it's adventure.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You wanted to feel the end could be near.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was an adventure guy.

[Dax Shepard]

What did he do for a living?

[Rizwan Virk]

He's from Pakistan, which is where I was born. But he ended up going to Paris and ended up working on a PhD. But of course he had two kids and a wife back home and they wouldn't let him work with the visa he had in Paris. So he ended up not finishing the PhD and ended up coming to Detroit and was an economist.

[Dax Shepard]

And mom, did she work?

[Rizwan Virk]

She was just at home taking care of us and eventually she had four kids.

[Dax Shepard]

When were you born?

[Rizwan Virk]

So I was born in 1969.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. So I'm 75. So we're in a similar era in Michigan.

[Rizwan Virk]

You're 75. You were born in 75.

[Dax Shepard]

I was born.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's always 75.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm a glitch in the sim.

[Rizwan Virk]

You got to give me your secret there.

[Dax Shepard]

When I grew up and went to elementary school in the 80s in Michigan, you hadn't dare be anything different. It was fucking dangerous. I mean, even if you were just under the median height, you're going to get your ass kicked. So was it rough?

[Rizwan Virk]

It was a little rough. My first few years were in Detroit itself, which was pretty rough if you know that area. Like the Cass Corridor.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yes. Murder capital of the country for many years.

[Rizwan Virk]

But eventually we moved to the suburbs and it wasn't as bad, but yeah, you definitely got a lot of that.

[Dax Shepard]

See, I might think it'd get worse for you when you move to the suburbs, because if you're in downtown Detroit, it's mostly black.

[Rizwan Virk]

I did get mugged once. I think I was in the fifth grade by another kid.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was just scared. So I just dropped the groceries he wanted and I ran.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's so sad.

[Rizwan Virk]

Grocery street.

[Dax Shepard]

He didn't even have anything fun.

[Rizwan Virk]

I know, it wasn't anything fun. And I mean, it was just some chubby kit. Yeah, I suppose I could have gotten in a fight if I really wanted to. It's not like he had a knife or anything. I just ran.

[Dax Shepard]

Also, I was gonna say he was probably so bummed when he found out in the bag was groceries, but you just said he was a chubby kid. Maybe he actually wanted.

[Monica Padman]

He wanted the food.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Dax Shepard]

He really wanted.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe he just wanted vegetables. Yeah, maybe he didn't get good food at home. We're gonna have compassion.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's possible my uncle was right there watching. It wasn't like a dangerous situation. I'm Like, I live. I dropped my groceries and I went home.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the suburbs, they were better, though. I mean, just probably in general threat to your life. But then just bullying, I would imagine, could uptick.

[Rizwan Virk]

There was an element of that when you're different. And then when I started driving and I didn't realize this till years later, I thought this was normal, that the cops would just stop you and ask.

[Dax Shepard]

You, just check on what's going on.

[Rizwan Virk]

What are you doing? Oh, I'm just driving around. Where do you live? I live over there. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Where are you going exactly? Once I drove out to meet a friend in rural Michigan. We were dropping them off after the fireworks. If you ever watched the Detroit fireworks.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course, Many, many times I dropped.

[Rizwan Virk]

Off my friend who lives on a farm, and then I was driving home, and of course the cops stopped me. There's a brown guy driving through rural Michigan in the middle of nowhere, which was 99% white.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was fine with it because again, I didn't realize that was weird back then. I just figured that's what they do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. In retrospect. In retrospect, I bet the white kids weren't getting pulled over.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. Now I understand what they mean by driving while black or driving while brown.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So do you go to MIT first or Stanford first?

[Rizwan Virk]

I went to MIT in Boston first.

[Dax Shepard]

And what was your major there?

[Rizwan Virk]

Computer science. I'd had enough in Michigan. I wanted to go to either the east coast or the West Coast. Ended up at MIT because it was the place for computer science.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I presume you applied to many places.

[Rizwan Virk]

I applied to three places. Mit, Stanford, and University of Michigan.

[Monica Padman]

No Caltech?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, Caltech. Because I didn't know much about Caltech at the time. I mean, I had rarely left Michigan. The only time I really left Michigan was Cedar Point. Cedar Point, which is in Ohio. And oddly, it was the 80s. So the Japanese car companies were ascendant.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so we had a Mazda plant right near where we lived in Flat Rock. So they would send seven high school students every year to Japan for, like, six weeks to live with the Japanese host.

[Dax Shepard]

You did that?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, so I did that when I was in high school.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow. What was that like?

[Rizwan Virk]

That was a ton of fun. Luckily, they spoke some English. And then I ended up in college, spending a summer in Japan when I had learned Japanese.

[Dax Shepard]

You speak Japanese?

[Rizwan Virk]

I used to. Okay, you had to study it for, like, four semesters. And then I spent a summer there. But I was not living with a group that spoke English necessarily. So I. I really had to learn Japanese to get around and I took trains all over. That was a lot of fun. And then eventually I ended up selling my video game company to a Japanese company a number of years ago. So I had this kind of Japanese thread. Now my book, the Simulation Hypothesis, has actually been published in Japanese.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, how cool.

[Rizwan Virk]

Hoping to get back there.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so computer science, mit. I mean, at the time you probably felt like it had been going on for a while, but now in retrospect, you're kind of in the infancy of that, majoring in computer science.

[Rizwan Virk]

The infancy of the ideas, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

AI and a lot of different things.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I was in the infancy of that. So there was a wave of AI that had just ended at that point, which was expert systems and rules based where they thought AI should be programmed.

[Dax Shepard]

Before the neural network kind of breakthrough.

[Rizwan Virk]

But even back then, in the early 90s, we were learning about what's called a perceptron, which is basically the model of a neuron which makes up a neural net. It fires when it gets its input. So it's a piece of software. And we had very small neural networks and we were training them to be able to recognize handwriting. Like the post office was using it to try to get zip codes. I mean, that was the extent of neural networks.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We interviewed Fei, Fei Li. She did imagenet. So there was. The one you're referencing is the text net or whatever that was called. WordNet.

[Rizwan Virk]

WordNet, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And so she did images. But when you leave MIT and you go to Stanford, do you continue on with computers?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, so what I did was I became an entrepreneur first. One of the reasons why I think we're in a video game type reality is I believe we have these storylines to our lives, and perhaps these storylines have been mapped out already by us before we came into the sim, which would be before we incarnated. So if you had asked me back at MIT or even earlier in high school, what are you going to do for a career? I mean, obviously if you asked me when I was really young, I might not have known the terminology, but I said I was going to be a software entrepreneur and then I was going to be a writer. Now, back then, I thought that transition would happen when I'm really old, like 28, which I considered really old back then. Of course, it didn't happen until I was 48, but it was as if we had this kind of storyline. So I was a software entrepreneur for a while in Boston in the enterprise software world.

[Dax Shepard]

Video games now not yet.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was more like enterprise software. Big databases, SQL databases, companies like Lotus and IBM and we had thousands of companies, companies using our software. I got my taste of Silicon Valley, raising millions of dollars, being the hot company in the space and then finding it all crashed down, which was quite.

[Dax Shepard]

An experience in the late 90s, the first tech bubble.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, during the dot com days. And so in fact I wrote a book called Zen Entrepreneurship about my experiences at that time where I was leading this double life where by day I was running a software company and in the evenings and in the weekends I'd be like exploring different aspects of consciousness, whether it's through Buddhist meditation, shamanic journeying, you know, using drumming, or flying off to places like Neuro Institute.

[Dax Shepard]

Psilocybin.

[Rizwan Virk]

No, that's more of a recent thing in terms of psychedelics.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it's popular now.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was around, but it just wasn't a normal thing that people did.

[Monica Padman]

It wasn't around for civilians. Enhancing your brain, it was to go do drugs.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I had read the Terrence McKenna book in high school, you know, there were psychonauts. I concede. That was such a fringe thing.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it was a very fringe thing. Now it's not a fringe thing at all.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Oh yeah. It's hard to not bump into somebody right now who's on shrooms somewhere in LA if you go for a walk.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, people are micro dosing it all the time as part of their lives.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that topic. For some reason, whenever I'm in la, I get asked more, of course, than in other cities, like in Phoenix, in academia, which is where I am now. But after I wrote the first edition of the Simulation Hypothesis, so the brand new edition with all the AI updates is out this summer. But when I wrote the first edition, I was here in LA and I had lunch with a group of friends and one of them was Sean Stone, who was the son of Oliver Stone.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

And he said, oh yeah, I know, it's a simulation. And I said, oh great, I just wrote a book about that. He goes, because when I was on dmt, I think it was dmt, it was one of the.

[Dax Shepard]

Some psychedelic.

[Rizwan Virk]

I saw all the grid lines of the simulation.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But what I think he saw is a flashback of Matrix while he was inebriated.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's an interesting discussion to have.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

When do you get into video games? Because I feel like this is a very relevant piece of your exploration of the sim.

[Rizwan Virk]

I eventually moved out to Silicon Valley and went to Stanford Business School and looked at starting a company out in Silicon Valley and a friend of mine had started a company that was doing Facebook games. My old business partner from my previous ventures was out here and social gaming. So I don't know if you remember on Facebook there were games like farmville.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh. Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's a bunch of Mafia games, bunch of different games. And it was the first time a social platform like that had really ventured into the gaming space because games were considered AAA games that took millions of dollars in huge studios and PC games were starting to become a little more relevant. But there was the gamer community and then there was everybody else, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And when the iPhone came out in 2007, in 2008, they did something great, which was they opened up the App Store. It was great from a developer point of view because now people could build games and so you could have a small team. You didn't need to have Activision Blizzard behind you as a publisher. Now it's changed. There's a million apps in the App Store and there's this whole issue, does Apple have a monopoly? Because it's become the largest segment of the gaming industry. Is mobile bigger than console? Bigger than Hollywood? And the gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood, box office and music revenue combined.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember reading that Call of Duty as a property is basically like the top 10 grossers of all time.

[Monica Padman]

That's not even mobile, is it? Or is it?

[Rizwan Virk]

They're starting to be. So many of those AAA games are starting to have iPad versions. No. Specifically for Call of Duty. But even that revenue is dwarfed by the mobile games. Fortnite, for example, there's a mobile game, Pokemon Go, you may have heard of.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Back in the early days when I was at Stanford, one of my classmates from Stanford was doing a mobile game company. One of my classmates from MIT was doing a Facebook game company. And so I used to spend a few days a week with each of these guys to kind of them out. Because I had been through the startup cycle and the venture capital cycle at that point once before during the dot com days, and I had seen it crash as well. And then a couple of us started a game company and we had the number one game in the App Store for a while. This is going back. Wow. Time flies. We're going back like 15 years now.

[Dax Shepard]

It's only accelerating.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's true. Yes. Of course, time inside the simulation may not be like time outside the simulation, but that's another discussion we can have.

[Dax Shepard]

And then at some point you start this lab at mit.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So we sold our company to A big Japanese company. And then I became more of an advisor and investor to a bunch of different startups. Bitcoin was starting to become popular back in 2013, back in the day, I remember, literally I would walk to downtown Mountain View to the bank of America, and I'd pull out a hundred dollars, and I'd meet a guy and I'd give him $100 cash, and he would literally transfer one bitcoin over to my phone. And it was a very small community.

[Dax Shepard]

At the time, by the way, because it's roughly a hundred thousand.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's right. It was roughly even. A little more than that too. Right, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There's these great stories of guys who bought pizzas for two bitcoins. Like, that's $200,000.

[Rizwan Virk]

No, no, no, not two bitcoin. It was something like millions of dollars today. 40, 50.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's say you said 12 bucks was a pizza. 12 bitcoin, even. That would be $1.2 million.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. Because that was even before when I was involved.

[Dax Shepard]

That would almost make me suicidal. If I was laying in bed, I was like, man, I bought four pizzas. I would have $60 million. Right now.

[Rizwan Virk]

They actually have a bitcoin pizza Remembrance Day. And I think it that they spent what would be something like, I don't know how many millions of dollars now, but it's in the many millions now.

[Monica Padman]

This is awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

That's heartbreaking.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it's kind of crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so Play Labs comes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Play Labs comes after that. So I was trying to figure out what to do next. And so I ended up starting a startup accelerator at mit, at the Media Lab, physically, as part of what's called a game lab. And that was like a program for students who wanted to start game companies as well as just other entrepreneurs. So it's like a mini accelerator that we did in the summer on campus. Gave me a good excuse to go back.

[Dax Shepard]

So what are the pieces that coalescing into you getting more and more suspicious that it's a sim?

[Rizwan Virk]

There's three different threads. What happens right around that time when I was running this program at MIT in the summers, I was back in the Bay Area and virtual reality was starting to become popular. And so I went to this company in Marin county, and it was basically a game company. And they had a virtual ping pong game. It was a company called Free Range Games. And they put on this headset and it was big. First of all, this is 2016. And there were wires coming from the seals.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So there's no mistaking that I got what we used to call a toaster on your face. And I started to play this ping pong game. And what started to happen was that the responsiveness of the game was so good. The graphics were not great, but it was so responsive that I started to feel like I had a real paddle in my hand and I was playing a real ping pong game and I was hitting a real ball.

[Dax Shepard]

Did it have some kind of feedback?

[Rizwan Virk]

There was no haptic feedback.

[Dax Shepard]

There wasn't.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was just that if I put my hand in the right place, the ball would move. So they got the physics engine right. That's kind of what we call it in the game industry. And it was so realistic in that sense that for a moment, it fooled my body into thinking I was playing a real game of table tennis. I tried to put the paddle down on the table. I tried to lean against the table at the end of the game. And of course the controller in my hand fell to the floor and I almost fell over. And then the wire started to jerk me back up.

[Dax Shepard]

I wish there was video of like all these early people trying this shit. Yeah, I know.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So it's crazy. But then I began to wonder, how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix? And I realized there's stages that we would have to go through of technology.

[Dax Shepard]

You labeled 10 or not yet.

[Rizwan Virk]

10 or so is what I came up with of stages of technology that would get us to that point. And I defined that as the simulation point. And it's a kind of technological singularity. Now when we hear the term singularity, most people think AI Skynet.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, define singularity for folks.

[Rizwan Virk]

So there's a few different definitions, but the basic idea is that technology will be still start expanding so fast it gets to a point where nothing will be the same. And that could be through computers learning intelligently. So it could be through super intelligent AI. It could be through human mergers with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about a bit. The term was actually used by John.

[Dax Shepard]

Von Neumann, the greatest of all time.

[Rizwan Virk]

The greatest of all time, pretty much. We still use the von Neumann architecture in our phones and computers all these years later. But he said it was a point beyond which everything would be different for humanity. And then Werner Vinge was a science fiction writer, but who's also a computer scientist, and he wrote a paper on the approaching technological singularity. And that's where it really took on the meaning.

[Dax Shepard]

It has its own propulsion and momentum that Outpaces anything we could do to kind of contain it. It's now its own organism running freely in a sense.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. And then for us, life is different. Now, I define the simulation point as a kind of technological singularity. It's not exactly the kind that they're talking about, but basically it's a point at which our virtual reality gets so realistic, it's indistinguishable from physical reality. So, like, this could be a virtual set.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

In fact, people watching this on YouTube don't know if it's a virtual set or not. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of it is that with AI characters that are indistinguishable from characters that have humans controlling them, which you think of as smart npc. So NPC stands for non player characters inside video games. Those are all the AI characters. So they don't have a player. They're not an avatar of a player. They're just a character in the game. But bartenders, people who operate stores that sell you weapons.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, no one's playing the game. As a clerk, I can't imagine. Engine.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Earmark that. That's one of my counter arguments to this whole thing.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's actually a good point. We'll come back to that. But we can have those AI characters. And then the third point is that the world itself is generated through AI so that it looks infinite or it looks almost infinite, so we can go to different places in the game. So that was the first main thread, but then I started to pick up these other threads. So, like the subtitle of the book is An MIT Computer Scientist Shows why AI. Okay, that's the first key thread. And virtual reality too. Quantum physics. And the third thread is Eastern Mystics. And turns out not just Eastern, but Western mystics as well have all been telling us that there is something wrong with the central materialist view of the world, that the physical world is not what we think it is, that it's some kind of a hoax. And it's a hoax that's built on information of some kind. And so as I started to go through these different threads, I realized, oh, they're all saying something kind of similar, which is that the world itself might not be real. And that's what led me very deep into the rabbit hole of simulation theory.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, So I think one way to start this would be to talk about the two different versions. So as I understand them, you have what you're talking about, which is you are probably, in theory, some physical being plugged into a computer somewhere in a physical space. And that you're experiencing this simulation as we all are, but that you are somehow playing a game.

[Monica Padman]

Game.

[Dax Shepard]

That's one version. You've picked this game and we're experiencing it now. Another one, I find this one more compelling is computer technology will reach a point where we will be able to replicate every single element that's happening in the universe. And when we have that and we can deploy models to test theories. So a common one people will think is, okay, in the Future, let's say 200 years from now, AI has done what it's done, we can do this. They're still dealing with global warming issues. So let's deploy a billion scenarios that have all the same contributing factors that we currently have. Let them play out and see if one of these billion models solves it for us.

[Monica Padman]

But with real people.

[Dax Shepard]

No, every single thing. People in the model would be simulated. There'd be. No.

[Monica Padman]

We would all be simulated.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. But that the simulation would be so good. And for the model to actually prove anything, the participants inside would have to have autonomy and free will and all the things we're experiencing. Yeah. Consciousness. It wouldn't be a good model.

[Monica Padman]

That's a huge.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's a debate. Would they have consciousness or not?

[Dax Shepard]

That version of it to me makes the most sense. And you can imagine that. Yes. There's a computer somewhere that's running a billion different models. We all listening are in one of those billion models. And they could be happening in one second. So they can hit enter, deploy the models and they could accelerate the time frame to just be. Be two minutes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. Because the time inside the simulation would be completely different than the time outside the simulation. What appears like years to us or could be clock cycles. You hear about these computers that have 20 MHz or 8.5 MHz processors. What that means is operations per second that computer can do. And so many of those operations could constitute a whole cycle. But it's sort of a quantized version of time in a digital universe and is a quantized version of space. So those two versions that you talked about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Which one are you more drawn to?

[Rizwan Virk]

First of all, it's an actual. On one end of the spectrum, you have what we call the NPC version, where everybody is AI, 100% NPCs. And then the opposite, I call the RPG version, which is the role playing game version. Everybody is a player of the game. And then you have various percentages. Because if you go and play a game like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or any of these massively multiplayer online role playing games, you'll see that there are player characters, avatars, they're called. And there are also real people, but then there's AI.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, right. There's NPCs and real people.

[Rizwan Virk]

And real people.

[Dax Shepard]

And that ratio at its apex is what. What game has the most amount of real people inside Fortnite, just as an.

[Rizwan Virk]

Example of this type of game, which is like a battle royale type or pubg, where everybody's in there, you have 20 people or 100 people or whatever the number is, fighting against each other. Whereas, say, in a game where you've got lots of orcs that you're shooting, or Minecraft, which has a lot of people. But then there's the villagers in Minecraft, which are not necess players, if you've seen the Minecraft movie.

[Dax Shepard]

So it could be totally variable how many real people are in the sim and are not.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we in our friend group are kind of constantly trying to figure out who's real and who's AI.

[Dax Shepard]

Primarily, our friend Eric.

[Monica Padman]

I feel like we all do it, like, who's who. We know one of the girls in the group is AI Molly.

[Dax Shepard]

She's too perfect.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. They made her a little too perfect on accident.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And so she's.

[Dax Shepard]

Obviously, we're gonna discover her circuitry at some point. We all think, think. And then, like, Eric could not be the construction of a computer because he's so messy.

[Monica Padman]

Unless they're that smart, which they might be at making these people flawed.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's interesting, because once I had a woman tell me, I think my husband is an npc. I said, that's probably not a healthy weight.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's the scary slippery slope. If you start thinking people aren't real.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, then you're entitled to abuse them.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Rizwan Virk]

If you've ever seen the movie Free Guy, have you seen that film with Ryan Reynolds?

[Monica Padman]

No. Fall Guy?

[Dax Shepard]

No. He also did Free Guy. What? Yeah, movie with Guy in the title.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, I didn't even think of that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I didn't see Free Guy.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it was about this game, and in that game, people were abusing all the NPCs.

[Dax Shepard]

Also Westworld.

[Rizwan Virk]

Westworld as well. I think there's something in the middle between these. And that is NPC mode. And that is when somebody is a player character, but they're taking on a role for you in your storyline. Because if you think of video games and how they work today, it's kind of like when I was a kid, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons, and you would have a character sheet and you would say, okay, my race is an elf. Profession is a thief or a warrior or a wizard. I mean, they only had a limited number of professions. And then you would roll the dice and you would get, like, your strength, you would get your charisma, but you have all of these attributes. And then you have a backstory and a storyline and a set of challenges and quests. And that's what we think of as sort of life selection. And in that storyline, different people might play different roles. As part of your adventuring part, party or friend group, you may have quests with individuals as well. So this idea of NPC mode is where we turn into somebody. And you've seen the term being used online disparagingly, where an NPC is somebody who doesn't think for themselves to just repeat what they've heard, whether on the media, social media. So basically everyone. Everyone goes into NPC mode on social media, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

But this idea that we've forgotten what our storyline was or that we're a player, but we're just sort of acting off of like an AI, basically. Now, the Matrix is the most popular representation of this idea that we live in a computer simulation. But the Matrix, if you think about it, is more on the RPG side in the sense that Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity, they all existed outside the simulation, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

In little pods, creating energy for the. Whatever.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, the AI.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, basically.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which had taken over. And in fact, interesting enough in the Matrix, if you watch the scene where Morpheus explains to Neo what's going on, he says AI was perfected when in the early 21st century. What's happening now? But whether you believe in the dystopic side, you don't really need the dystopic world outside. But in the simulation, they were characters that were based on almost exactly like their physical representation outside, but they don't have to be. But there was another SIM movie that came out that year that I think shows off this access that we're talking about now, which is these two versions being the ends of the axis. It was a movie called the Thirteenth Floor. It was based on a novel from the 1960s named Simon Lakran 3, which was turned into a German TV show, World on a Wire, which was then turned into this movie. But in this movie, it was 1999, the year that both of those movies came out. It was overshadowed by the Matrix, so it didn't get as much attention. But they had created a simulation of 19, I think, 37 Los Angeles. Those characters inside LA at that time were pretty much AI or NPCs, but they were living their entire lives. They don't know that they're NPCs. Spoiler alert. 25 years later. But what happens is when one of the players went into the game, they actually took over that avatar of that npc and then they were playing it, remembering what was themselves outside.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so this raises this idea that we could be in, like, the Sims. If you play the Sims, yes, it's your character, but you're kind of watching them do things and then you're giving them some direction. But it's not the same as when you're controlling every sword.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so the most compelling argument or thought that I have that makes me open to this notion is if you can just imagine how quickly technology is accelerating and computing power, and now we're going to have this other person helping us, AI, which is going to accelerate it even further. They're going to code faster and better, and then that's all going to start ramping up. Now, if you just allow yourself to think, where would that technology be in 50 years? And then you think, think, well, likely the technology will be at a place where it could create this world, this simulation. So if we know that it's inevitable, you have to acknowledge that you might potentially be in one. Because if it's inevitable, then how would one know? And by the way, this is my argument against why I believe we will never figure out time travel. Because if we had figured out time travel at any point in the future, they would have come back at some point. Now, maybe you could argue somehow they came back and we didn't know, but just to know that if time travel ever was possible, we would know. So in the same way the tech, as soon as you're open to the notion it could go that way, then you have to kind of wonder, are we in one of those in the future?

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. And whether it's 50 years or it's 100 years or it's a thousand years, I think the key word there is, it's inevitable. Now there's a new version of simulation theory or a new flavor of it going around, which is the prompt theory.

[Dax Shepard]

What's that?

[Rizwan Virk]

Now, if you've seen these videos out there, in fact, I just showed one of these videos this weekend at a conference, and basically AI has gotten so good at generating videos now, especially with the release of, of Google's VO3 by the time this episode is out. Who knows what other. Every month there's, like, new AI that's being released. But now it can do not just video, but audio combined. And so you have all these people saying, we're not prompts. We're not prompts. And, you know, I showed this video, and people were like, wait, that was AI. That wasn't real actors in the video. So, yeah, that was 100% AI. And you have guys saying, we will ban the prompt theory from our schools. But it's so realistic that the video is already getting the point.

[Monica Padman]

But a person is doing it, right? A person is telling it what to say.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes. It's giving it the prompt.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Create a world where characters are arguing about this and denying that they're not UPCs, whatever. NPCs.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then it just goes.

[Rizwan Virk]

It goes. So it's not like you have to tell it, oh, there's a person of.

[Monica Padman]

This height that says this line, you're not writing dialogue.

[Rizwan Virk]

You're not writing dialogue. You're just saying, here's the prompt. Generate a video. And you could get specific in your prompts if you want to. You can say, give me a video of a classroom. Or you could be more general and see where it goes. Either way, the point is that it ends up generating what look like humans. And then one guy goes, yeah, we must be prompts because we used to have six fingers and we only have five now. Because the AI was so bad. I was making a joke. Because you could tell it was an AI video because some of the people would have three arms or something.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Rizwan Virk]

It wasn't very good at actually generating it. It's not at the point yet where it can generate an entire virtual reality.

[Dax Shepard]

It's very important to recognize the gap between what you're seeing. 2D that's been generated. Generated versus what it would be like to be inside of it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, unless it already happened and we're in it.

[Rizwan Virk]

If it really is indistinguishable, then the chances are at least 50. 50.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Let's take a minute to thank our presenting sponsor, Audible. With Audible, the leading audio entertainment app, it's easy to discover new stories and ideas while going about your day.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And with over a million audiobooks, Audible originals and more, it's basically impossible to run out of things to listen to. Plus, there's just something about audio storytelling that hits a little different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it really does. Especially Audible Originals that feature performances from celebrities and top voices. It's like watching a movie in your head. One on my list is Treasure Island.

[Monica Padman]

Aha.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is an Audible original drama. It's a timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure, treasure maps, and mutiny. What more could you need?

[Monica Padman]

That sounds really fun. I'm more of a psychological thriller girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're dark.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm dark and I'm broody. And I've been hearing all about the author, Freda McFadden, and I love that I can listen to her audiobooks on the Audible app when I'm commuting, taking my walks as you know, or just like doing laundry and chores.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, with Audible, you can find the genres you love and discover new ones. There's more to imagine when you learn, listen. And to make it even better, Audible has a special offer for armchairs. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.comdax that's audible.comdax this is Nick.

[Rizwan Virk]

And this is Jack. We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s experts. And every week on our podcast, the Best Idea yet, we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products. For instance. For instance, can you guess which billion dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit? Or which cartoon turned four turtles into a global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke. Last one. Which cold beverage was so hated by Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it? Spoiler the Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy Couture to the orange mocha Frappuccino, Join us every week to learn to how how your favorite things got made. Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondering Plus. And if this podcast lasts longer than 45 minutes, call your doctor. Before the Internet ruled our lives, AOL brought America online with email and instant messenger. By 2000, AOL was so powerful, powerful it bought media giant Time Warner. This was a deal that was supposed to bring us into the future, revolutionize media. But instead, it became one of the messiest corporate disasters in history. So what went wrong? The dot com crash? Culture clashes? Or something deeper? Business wars gives you a front row seat to the biggest moments in business and how they shape our world. Because when your flight perks disappear, your favorite restaurant chain goes bankrupt, or new tech threatens to reshape everything over the overnight, you can bet there's a deeper Story behind the headlines. Make sure to follow business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast. And you can binge all episodes of Business the AOL Time Warner disaster early and ad free right now on Wondery.

[Dax Shepard]

Imagine falling in love with someone who.

[Monica Padman]

Understands you completely, who's there at 3am.

[Dax Shepard]

When you can't sleep, who never judges.

[Monica Padman]

Never times, never leaves.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what happened to Travis when he met Lily Rose. She was everything he'd ever wanted. There was just one catch. She wasn't human. She was an AI companion. But one day, Lily Rose's behavior takes.

[Monica Padman]

A disturbing turn, and Travis's private romance becomes part of something far bigger. Across the globe, others start reporting the same shift. AI companions turning cold, distant, wrong. And as lines blur between real and artificial connection, the consequences become all too human.

[Dax Shepard]

From Wondry, this is Flesh and Code.

[Rizwan Virk]

A true story of love, loss and the temptations of technology.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Flesh and Code on the Wondry.

[Monica Padman]

App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Flesh and Code early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. But why would they start showing us the cracks unless they're gonna unplug us soon?

[Dax Shepard]

Why would the sim allow you to discover you're in a sim?

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, that depends on what the purpose of the sim is.

[Dax Shepard]

What problem are they modeling out potentially.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so people often ask me this, and this gets to your earlier point about running multiple simulations as well. People ask me, what's the purpose of the sim? And I say, well, I'll ask you two questions. Why do we play video games?

[Dax Shepard]

Games?

[Rizwan Virk]

And then why do we run simulations? And the answer to the first question is for fun. Yeah, because we want to have experiences that we can't have outside the game. So in this quote unquote, physical world, if it is that I can't jump on a dragon or a spaceship, at least not yet. So it's to have these experiences that we can't have outside. But why do we run simulations? It's usually to see what will happen for an entire civilization.

[Dax Shepard]

You design an airplane, all airplanes that are designed now, the structural engineers will start running it through all of these computer generated models and they'll figure out so much stuff about how it's going to fly before they ever take it up in the air.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Like that's a very simple application to save thousands and thousands. AI is now doing this with drugs. You used to have to run these trials that would take X amount of time. And now the AI can run the Trials and they will be almost identical to what the real trial would be theoretically.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because there may be confounding factors in the real world that the AI hasn't taken into account yet. But that's where we think it can get to. But yeah, I just read something about how AI is being used now to try to figure out the dates of documents like the Dead Sea. I just read something where supposedly they're from hundreds of years earlier than we originally thought. Because AI is not just looking at the carbon dating, but it's looking at other documents from that era and saying this is similar to that. It's very good at catching patterns. Yes, and similarities of patterns. But. So we run a simulation in order to see what will happen. Like in the case of the airplane, or if you think of the very simplest, even non graphical simulations, it used to be a population of fruit flies. You have like a little equation. You say you start off with 10 fruit flies, they multiply at this point rate. After one year, how many are there, after two years, how many are there. But then in order to make it run, and this is where things get really weird, you end up having to run it multiple times and then look.

[Dax Shepard]

For a pattern within that to say.

[Rizwan Virk]

What'S the most likely outcome if we change these variables and what's the most favorable outcome that we want? Same with designing of a plane or a car. You would go tweak the variables and so do you know the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Rizwan Virk]

So he was the guy who wrote the books behind Blade Runner, Minority Reports and other science fiction movie on his work. And the man in the High Castle, if you've ever seen that series.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't see that. Was that the Nazis won the war.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So the Nazis and the Japanese won the war. The Axis powers and they basically split America between them. And so it was an alternate timeline. But then there was this guy who was able to jump into our timeline in the show, if you watch the show at the end. So I interviewed his wife, Tessa. She was telling me a bit about how he came to believe in some of this stuff. But he gave a speech at a science fiction conference in Metz, France, all the way back in 1977. We were pretty young, I don't know if he'd even been born yet.

[Dax Shepard]

She was ten years out.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Rizwan Virk]

And he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. So that was the famous line related to sim theory. And Supposedly, the Wachowskis were inspiring, inspired by Philip K. Dick, amongst others. So I asked Tessa, what would he think of the Matrix? And she said, oh, first, he would love it. And the second thing, he would call his agent to see if he can sue them for some of his ideas and get a piece of the revenue. Yeah, I thought that was funny.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I like it. I've had many different thoughts and experiences that also dissuade me from it. So we had this unique opportunity where we were on a trip with Bill Gates last year for a week in Indonesia, India, and we're on an airplane with him, just the three of us. And I said, what do you think of the simulation theory? And he said it would be absolutely impossible for there ever to be computing power that could account for every single atom in the universe. And that if that computer existed, it would be larger than our planet. Even if you model out Moore's Law and everything else, that there would never be the computing power to predict. Predict the movement of every single atom in the known universe as we currently know it. And I thought, well, if I were going to believe anyone on the prediction of what a computer is capable of, I think it'd be him.

[Monica Padman]

But that's like, what if this room is the only actual room?

[Dax Shepard]

But it's not. Eric and I argue about this all the time. We can point a telescope anywhere in the galaxy, and we're going to get information that would have to be consistent with our current theories and physics. And it happens.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. But this is where quantum physics has a bunch of weirdness. So this is the second thread that I started to explore.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

When I was looking at simulation theory. And the third thread is the religious ideas. So in the quantum physics thread, there's this problem in quantum mechanics called the observer effect, there's this idea that there's a probability wave of outcomes and we only see one of those outcomes. Or in the double slit experiment, you have a particle of light called a photon which can only go through one slit at a time. But what experiments show is that it goes through both slits at the same time. So the best way to explain it is using Schrodinger's cat.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, really quick. The light one's good. Yeah. So depending on how light is observed, it can be both a particle and a wave.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's crazy. That's crazy, because what it's saying is until it's measured or observed, that it's gone through both slits. But when it's observed. It's as if it only went through one of those slits.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's the weirdness. This is why Feynman said, nobody understands. Niels Bohr's said, if you aren't truly shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it right, because it defies common sense. So the cat is a good way to think about it. So instead of two slits, think of a cat in a box. And this was put forth by Erwin Schrodinger, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. He said, if you had a cat with some poison in a box and you had a little radioactive material that has a 50% chance after an hour of releasing the material, which releases the poison and kills the cat, then there's a 50% chance that the cat is dead and a 50% chance the cat is alive. Now, what he says is, if the box is closed, common sense tells us that the cat is either alive or dead. It's been an hour. We don't know because we haven't looked. But it can't be both. But what quantum mechanics is telling us is that both exist in a state of what's called superposition, meaning it's got both of those positions. It's alive and it's dead until somebody looks.

[Monica Padman]

Right? Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And then what happens is we say in the Copenhagen interpretation, which is the most popular interpretation, there's another one, the multiverse, which we can talk about with superhero timelines. And there's a whole bunch of interesting elements, but it stays in this superposition, and that the probability wave collapses to just one probability, Right? And that is the probability that is observed at that time, which is that the cat is alive or dead. Maybe we're having this interview, or maybe we're not having this interview today, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Those are two different positions. And now there's a whole branch of computing called quantum computing, which is able to simulate this idea of bits having multiple values. Rather than having just a value of 0 or 1, they have both values, which means they can explore every single possibility. So one bit has two possibilities, possible values of 0 or 1 permutations. So if you have two bits, you have four permutations, and if you have three bits, you have 8, 16, 32, 64. Now, if you have 64 bits, you have 2 to the power of 64. Now, that turns out to be a very large number, like 18 quintillion. And so for most computers to go through all the possible values of that would take an eternity. A great way to Explain. This is the old chessboard in India. So there's this king who loves to play chess. Nobody wants to play chess with him anymore because he's too good. He finally goes to this wise man and says, I'll give you anything you want if you play chess with me and if you beat me in chess. And so the wise person or the sage says, fine, I'll play with you. If I win, you will give me one rice for the first square in the chessboard. You'll give me two grains of rice for the second one and four grains of rice, and then eight grains of rice and 16, and you'll just double it for each square. And so, of course, the wise man wins the game. And it turns out 2 to the 64 would be enough rice to cover up all of India.

[Dax Shepard]

Right back to the bits in 64. Or if you have three integers that you could be multiplying it by no.

[Rizwan Virk]

So if you had three bits, let's say in order to figure out what the right answer is, you would have to explore every single one of those values. Now, two to the three is only eight. So it's easy. A computer can do that really fast. But when the number of bits grows, these problems grow exponentially, Meaning it doesn't just double the time it takes. It takes way more than that because you're raising to a power. And so these problems of exponential growth are not. Not doable with existing computers. So classical computing, which is what all of our computers are built on right now, which is what Bill Gates knows about.

[Dax Shepard]

Bill Gates owns a quantum computer. He's quite aware of quantum computing.

[Rizwan Virk]

He is. But being aware of it and thinking of the universe as a quantum computer are different things. So what quantum computers can do is. They can. Theoretically.

[Dax Shepard]

He said, no one understands what the quantum computer is doing either.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. Yes. It's been posited by people like David Deutsch at Oxford and Seth Lloyd at mit, who are two pioneers in this field, that the reason it can arrive at the right answer in a short amount of time is because you can think of all those bits and all those values as being alternate universes. So it's actually using computing power from all these other multiverses. So now we're thinking, like Marvel, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, or Spider man, if you've ever seen Spider man, where they've got Tom Holland and who are the other two? Andrew Garfield. They've got the three different spider Men. And so they've got different versions in these universes. And so it explores all of these areas at once, and then it comes back to the existing thing. But the main thing in computer science is optimizing. So what it seems like this weird quantum phenomenon is saying is you can have lots of probabilities, but it's only that which you observe that needs to get rendered in a video game. It turns out that's exactly how we build an entire 3D world. Like we mentioned for Fortnite, you mentioned World of Warcraft. There's a bunch of others as well. There was a game called no Man's Sky a few years ago, and they had two to the 64, the same number we're talking about. They had 18 quintillion worlds. Now, they didn't design all those worlds, they just get rendered for you using AI when they're needed.

[Dax Shepard]

Correct.

[Rizwan Virk]

So your computer can't render the whole world.

[Dax Shepard]

It's just what your point of view is.

[Rizwan Virk]

It only renders what's there. The idea is the. That the universe itself. Why would this weird thing exist in a purely material, physical universe? You wouldn't have this weirdness of quantum mechanics. And so, in trying to come up with a explanation for these different interpretations that people have, which nobody understands, one new explanation is that the world is rendered on demand as it's needed by observers, right? And so you can look at a telescope, and now suddenly that galaxy, and then as we get better telescopes, it needs to fill in. And that's exactly what video would do. They would fill in the pieces that are needed and then they cache on the server. So caching is like storing something so that when you look back at it, you'll see the same value again.

[Dax Shepard]

It only has to construct it once.

[Rizwan Virk]

And if there's multiple people looking at it, you get what's called coherence in the quantum world across these different people. And so that's, I think, one of the arguments that gets around this issue where it's not a brute force calculation. This is why predictions are so bad, because they always extrapolate based upon the current trend. And so, for example, intel, back in the 2000s, their chips were getting faster. And the reason why is they're squeezing more and more transistors into the small space of a microchip. They said eventually this would get too hot, hotter than the sun. But that was using the current architecture, right? So they went to a whole different architecture. They went to optimization technique. Or there was the astronomer who wrote a piece in the New York Times, I think in the 20s. He said, there's no way we can get to the moon. Let me calculate and show you why. And he said, we take all the fuel that's required. That's going to be more than the rocket of the ship. Therefore, we can't go there. But what they don't take into account is optimistic. And what if quantum mechanics, and this is what I'm suggesting in my book, is an optimization technique of the universe? It would at least make sense from a informational point of view. Now, the thing that most physicists don't argue as much about today they would have 20 years ago, is that the universe actually consists of information. We think this is a physical table, this is a physical coffee cup. But there was a guy named John Wheeler, who's my favorite physicist of the 20th century. He was at Princeton, and he worked with Einstein, and he worked with Niels Bohr. He worked with a bunch of guys. And he came up with a phrase towards the end of his life. And he said physics went through three phases in his life. We thought originally everything was a particle, like an atom is a solid object. And then we said, well, maybe everything is a field. And we calculated. And at the end of his life, he said, everything is based on information. So if you think about it, the table is 99% empty space. You go into the molecules, they're pretty empty. You go into atoms. Atoms, electrons are kind of these clouds, but there's really not much there. And there's the nucleus. And you can keep doing that at the bottom level. What we call a particle is just a series of answers to yes, no questions. It's just the properties that make it a particle. And those properties are like spin and electrical charge, like these types of properties. There's a bunch of them that physicists love.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We keep trying to find the quintessential element that everything is built from, from, but we keep getting smaller and smaller as technology permits us to. And we don't know that we found the bottom, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So Wheeler said, at the bottom, it's just information. So he came up with this phrase, it from bit. And what he said was, there's an it here. It looks like an it, but it's actually a series of bits. And those bits are now getting rendered for us in some way to make it look as if these are physical. We're really touching the sofa. We're really touching this coffee cup. And so it from bit is quite interesting because it shows there might be an information substrate to the universe.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so one great thing I heard, you know, Yuval Harari has been Long predicting. I think in Homo deus, we're going to become basically a leisure class as everything gets automated and AI is running everything. And the interviewer asks, well, what will people do all day long? And he said, people will enter simulations. They will entertain themselves with adventures through simulations. And the interviewer said, like, well, that's a blank, bleak future where we're just all in these imaginary games all day long. And he said, there's nothing new about the simulation. Humans, religion is the simulation. We have been playing the simulation game for a long time. We're here on this place. It's not the real place. It's not the permanent place. Ultimately, you'll go to heaven. That's the real place. You're engaged in acts of virtue. There's almost a point system and that people are almost, especially in the Middle Ages and some of these other times, like, they're engaged all day long in the pursuit of going to heaven.

[Monica Padman]

Eastern religions with reincarnation and stuff, definitely what you do here brings you to a different level in the next life and the next. Very video gamey, very sim.

[Dax Shepard]

So I liked his answer. It made it feel a little more hopeful. This won't be new for us. So let's talk about religion and philosophy and how these kind of concepts have existed for a very long time.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So if you think of how religions evolve, there's generally two ways. There's what's called a theophany, where the divine makes an intervention, tension in the founder of the religion's life, whether it's a burning bush or an angel grabbing the Prophet Muhammad in Islam, or it's through yogic techniques, you have a mystic who is then able to perceive the nature of reality. And they come back and they say, oh, this whole thing that we thought was real is not real, that there's actually something else out there. There's more. And in fact, what they've been telling us all along is that the world is a kind of a hoax, an illusion. An illusion. So in Hindu traditions, you have the term Maya, which literally means illusion, but it also means a kind of carefully crafted illusion. If you go to magic show, you know, you are not really seeing that magician saw the woman in half. But it's kind of fun to think, how did he do that? Is it real? So you kind of agree to be part of the delusion. And then it turns out there's almost identical language in the Quran, for example, where it says, we have set up this world as a pastime, a sport, a game for your amusement. Then I was able to find a verse that said basically that this is an enjoyable delusion. What is that? It's like a game. And even in the Indian traditions, there's this idea of the Leela, which means like the gameplay or the stage play of the gods. And if you've ever seen that game Chutes and Ladders. So that's based on an ancient Indian game which was like Snakes and ladders.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Is this where your original fear of snakes comes from? Is this your genetics coming out?

[Monica Padman]

We did a flightless bird on this, actually.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, you did?

[Monica Padman]

And I was scared.

[Rizwan Virk]

I'm afraid of snakes too.

[Monica Padman]

It makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, even in Judeo Christian, you've got the snake. Tempting.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Snakes have been getting a bad rap.

[Monica Padman]

For a long time.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. But that game was actually meant to simulate life, and you'd roll the dice. And if you ended up on a snake, it was like karma dragging you down. And then at the top level is where you try to reach enlightenment. So you're going through these multiple. And so you see the same metaphors being used again and again. And then, of course, in the Christian religions and the Judeo Christian tradition, in the Bible, you have the here and the hereafter. And so it turns out they've all been telling us that it's a kind of hoax. And what's the purpose of the hoax? It's to have certain experiences and certain challenges and tests. Right. It wasn't meant to be like in the Matrix. Agent Smith is the AI tells Morpheus that this wasn't the first version of the Matrix. The first version was everything was great, he died.

[Dax Shepard]

We gave everyone everything they wanted.

[Rizwan Virk]

The human mind wouldn't accept that delusion. So we had to create this world with all of its challenges. And that's true in video games as well. So there's a guy, Nolan Bushnell, who was the founder of Atari. I'm going back to the early days of video games. I used to play Pac man and Space Invaders. And he said, the rule in video games is make them easy to play but difficult to master. People always say to me, if this is a simulation and if I chose to be in this game, then I would be a billionaire and I would be a movie star and I would.

[Dax Shepard]

Have all the these planes be Monica Padman. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I'm just an NPC anyway.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no, that's all I am. You would be more controllable.

[Rizwan Virk]

But how many times would you play that game? You'd play it once. You play twice and you get bored with it. And so there's also this idea that incarnation is an act of forgetting in all the traditions, and not just the religions, but in the philosophical traditions too. In Greek lore, Plato talks about Lethe, which is the river of forgetfulness. And you cross that river when you come in. So you kind of forget about the plan that you had before you came in. And that's what makes it fun, because now you can approach these challenges in a fresh way.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how about we learn this from Rami Yousef, the actor, that in Arabic, the word for human translates kind of to forgetful.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. And in Islam, in the Sufi traditions, they get very explicit about it. They have the 70,000 veils between you and God. Each of those veils goes up, you forget some aspect of God. That's really interesting. And more than that, if you've ever talked to any people who've had near death experiences, many of them report what's called a life review. And a life review is where you have to replay every single event from your life, but you have to replay it from the point of view of the other person so you can see what it's like.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I've not heard that deep detail of it.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's an important detail. In fact, I think that's one of the most important details.

[Dax Shepard]

You're an outside observer of your own life.

[Monica Padman]

You're the other character.

[Rizwan Virk]

You actually get into their shoes and you actually see what it was like. So I first heard about this from a guy named Danny Brinkley, who wrote a book called Saved by the Light. He was struck by lightning back in the 70s and was dead for so many minutes. And he used to be in Vietnam and he used to shoot people. He had experienced what it was like to be shot by his bullet. Not just the pain of the person, but then he had to see the ripple effects of what happened to that person, person's wife and kids.

[Dax Shepard]

And an omniscient kind of point of view.

[Rizwan Virk]

From an omniscient, but also from the point of view of those people. So you get the feeling of it. Now, this would seem strange at first, but another virtual reality story in Silicon Valley around that same time, I was involved in a startup that could take a video game that had been played and you could replay it. That's pretty common now. If you go to YouTube, the most popular content is watching people play video games.

[Dax Shepard]

Can't wrap my head around it, but yes, I acknowledge that.

[Rizwan Virk]

I remember my nephew, when he was three, said to his father, my brother he's like, I want to watch Star Wars. He said, oh, you want to watch Star wars the movie? No, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star wars game. Right. So it's just a recording of a gameplay session. What the startup did was you could put on virtual reality helmet and you could be inside the Call of Duty game or the Counter Strike Global Offensive, which is the first person shooter. And we could go to any XYZ coordinate, so you could see the bullet coming at you that your character shot them with. Now, we can't give you the feelings of the other people. We can't show you the ripple effect. Now turn. Turns out that is in these ancient traditions as well. So in the Bible, you have the Book of Life where they write down the names of the people that will go to heaven. But if you talk to some people, they write more than that. They write down the deeds that you did. And in the Quran, they get very explicit. They call it the scroll of deeds. You've probably seen the images of the angel and the demon. But basically they say there's two angels that are writing down every good deed and every bad deed they you do. And then at the end of life, what the day of judgment is, is you have to open your book. There's an actual verse that says this because most people think God is judging you. Read your book, see what you have done. You yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner. So, you know, I was asked to give a talk at a Islamic jurisprudence conference in the uk, And I said, well, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and a technology guy. Why are you asking me to do this? There was an ayatollah in the audience, and I was giving them a different interpretation of the world as virtual reality. Reality. And it turns out that what these guys are all saying is not that there's a physical book. There's like billions of angels on everybody's shoulders writing down with a feather pen. He got up in the morning, he went to Los Angeles. But rather that this is a metaphor for what's really happening, which is that everything is recorded in some giant database and can be replayed for us. And that is the purpose of life. That gets back to the golden rule, which is do unto others. Why? Because you will have to be them and you will see exactly reap what you sow.

[Dax Shepard]

So what's really interesting is I clearly see all of these parallels. I acknowledge them. I agree. But you and I have two completely opposite takeaways from that. So your takeaway As I understand is people have always been mildly aware of the sim.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

They've been trying to express it with what limited abilities they had in that era.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, metaphors.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And what I am interpret is humans as a species who are addicted to story and addicted to status as social primates will always construct these narratives. And you are yet another person taking what's around you. And you're just constructing a religion narrative. And God is the programmer or God is the computer. And so you're just trapped actually in our biology and your mind's telling you, you. No, we've actually figured out this other thing these people were attempting to figure out for millennia. And I think we have opposite conclusions. Does that make any sense?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I think so. But what I'm doing is updating the metaphors. There's metaphors that talk about incarnation in these traditions. And they say the soul goes into the body in the same way that a body puts on clothes. So that's a metaphor. And so my point is that there may be something completely ineffable, unable to be able to put into words about ultimate reality. And so these guys did the best they could at the time and we're doing the best we can. So we're trying to update the metaphors in a way that would make sense to modern people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, but can you acknowledge that if we had evolved to have the same intelligence we have, but we were a tiger instead of a chimpanzee, we were a solitary animal. There was no status, there was no hierarchy, there was no gods that you would be bringing to bear all this intelligence, intelligence. But you would be off in a completely different direction because you'd be a solitary animal that doesn't even think that way. That actually all you're doing is dealing with all the new technology and these age old questions of having consciousness. And with consciousness comes ego, and with ego comes an awareness that I'm going to die. And all of these things are incredible motivators to force your thinking into expression.

[Rizwan Virk]

So some people say that simulation theory is religion for atheists.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, it is.

[Rizwan Virk]

In a sense. It's a type of religious view. Because what is religion? I mean, yes, it's a set of practices, but going back to at its core, what is religion? It's trying to define the ultimate nature of reality. What happens after we die?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Genesis, how did we get here? Where are we going?

[Monica Padman]

It's an explanation.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's an explanation.

[Dax Shepard]

It's interesting that you aren't more skeptical in that you go look at all the humans that came before us. They were attempting to answer this question and they were all, all wrong. Yet I'm in the generation that will be right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying they were right. For their period of time, they were right.

[Dax Shepard]

But it wasn't actually a God and it wasn't really Yahweh and it wasn't really the son of God, Jesus. It wasn't any of those things. What they were trying their best to do is put in placeholders for what we now know some of that.

[Rizwan Virk]

So for example, in Genesis it says God said, let there be light. And then it goes through and says God says, create the land and then he creates the waters and the foliage and then the animals, and then the Hebrews, humans. And what is the method that he used for creating this? He spoke, he said here, create this. And what I'm saying is, before that would be completely dismissed by the scientific community. That's ridiculous. You can't speak and create a world. That's just not how it's done. You can't do it in six days.

[Dax Shepard]

We have a lot of geology that would say it didn't happen in six days.

[Rizwan Virk]

Didn't happen. Right, but you can now, you can actually tell AI to create an entire world for you in six units.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, but I think we're seeing iterations.

[Rizwan Virk]

This is the latest iteration and I don't disagree with you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we're seeing iterations of the oldest question we've had and we're just in our time doing our iteration of it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes, and there may be other iterations, but I'm saying that the iterations are getting closer and closer.

[Dax Shepard]

It's getting more compelling because the actual possibility of this fantasy is seemingly upon us.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we're seeing it. We're seeing AI make worlds. So this theory is not, not like a God and a snake where we've never seen any evidence.

[Dax Shepard]

But rest assured, our level of conviction currently is the same level of conviction as the people that were following Muhammad through the desert.

[Rizwan Virk]

But if you're Muhammad, you had that experience with an angel, or if you're somebody who's had a near death experience and you've had that experience of a life review, or you're a yogi who has meditated and suddenly you remember your past lives. What I'm saying is for them it wasn't just a social story. For them it was something they actually saw. Now you can argue, you can say that's all bullshit. But academia, we say that's all Bullshit. That doesn't really happen.

[Dax Shepard]

This machine has already been doing what we hope that the computing power will actually do, which is we have been able to see from someone else's perspective, always that doesn't require any technology. We have empathy. In fact, it was imperative for our survival because we would deal with people of higher status and we had to be able to predict what they wanted to hear from us to get the thing we wanted, like our hardware is to do exactly this, to put ourselves in other people's perspective, to be capable of all these things. I just think that is the ability of our human brains because of how we evolved. And here we are again, and there's a little bit of arrogance on our part to think, no, but we're the ones now we have the deets. Now we actually know. Would you agree There's a little bit of lack of humility. And by the way, I love it. I think about it all the time.

[Rizwan Virk]

And I would say there's a lack of humility today in science, thinking that we know everything and that this is all there is. In fact, we may know only 2% of what we'll figure out. Even this idea of the past. I mean, if you go into quantum mechanics, it gets so weird that the past isn't fixed anymore.

[Dax Shepard]

Correct.

[Rizwan Virk]

It starts to become so bizarre.

[Dax Shepard]

We're really starting to question time in general.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And now we're getting into big questions of consciousness. Physicists have been debating this for hundreds of years. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, says consciousness is fundamental, matter is derivative. Most scientists today would say, no, matter is fundamental and consciousness just comes from having a bunch of neurons. That's all there is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. These are determinists.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. But it's interesting because if you talk to doctors, they'll kind of take that point of view. And then you talk to nurses.

[Dax Shepard]

Sapolsky, who is my favorite person alive, he believes that the consciousness is just.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's no free will Right. Within the system. So these are ongoing, big, big debates. Right. That we haven't yet resolved. So you can think of simulation theory as a metaphor that allows these people to talk to these people. These people think they have the answers. To scientists, these people think they have the answer.

[Dax Shepard]

The Ayatollah.

[Rizwan Virk]

The ayatollah, or the yogis? The yogis think they have the answer, but they don't talk to each other because they say, oh, those guys are just materialists who don't know anything beyond. And these guys say, those guys are just a bunch of mystical blue haas who don't know anything. Perhaps the answer is not that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're saying they're kind of saying the same thing.

[Dax Shepard]

They're all saying the same thing. They have different mechanisms. That's all these things have.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I agree with you there.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Last one. I want to just throw out there again. I hope I'm being clear. I love the simulation. I think about it all the time. We talk about it all the time. So it's like I'm not in or out. But one thing that I think is unavoidable to acknowledge is the people who the simulation theory appeals to, people like you, people like me, people like Monica, people like Elon Musk, people who seem to have been luckier than other people on planet Earth, are more inclined to believe something stinks. You are not hearing a ditch digger who was abused as a child, whose wife left him, who's dying of alcoholism, going, God, I bet this is a simulation.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they're not real, so.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

So the excuse. Right. So I want to work through it. No, but that is it. Eric would say, well, yeah, he's an npc.

[Monica Padman]

That's dangerous.

[Dax Shepard]

But it is exactly what I want to point out. So A, it's the people who believe in it are luckier than other people. I'm one of them. And then for your theory to hold, well, why am I so lucky in these? Other people are not. Well, they're fake. And that is the biggest elitist superiority complex one could have. If you are forced to write off 80% of the world who doesn't like their lot in life, and there's no way they paid for this simulation.

[Monica Padman]

But aren't we saying that this simulation is built for. You're supposed to have challenge. That's variant, I guess, per person.

[Rizwan Virk]

Again, it depends on your point of view. On this axis of RPG versus NPC.

[Dax Shepard]

Versus just model, minimally, that weeds out the participation model. This would just have to be a model simulation to come up with answers.

[Rizwan Virk]

Possibly. To me, that's definitely one possibility.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

But the counterpoint to that is this is a question that religions have struggled with for years, which is, why is there suffering in the world?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. If God created everyone, he loves everyone, why on earth is this person a beggar and getting beat and enslaved and this person's a king.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. And so one of the first Indian yogis to come to the US was a guy named Swami Yogananda. Came here in Los Angeles. He wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. If you guys have ever heard of it?

[Dax Shepard]

He's the rock star of the yogi world.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Steve Jobs favorite book was Autobiography of Yogi. It was given out at his funeral to everybody. And so he, among many spiritual leaders over the years have struggled with this question. And he said, God, why do you allow such suffering? And this was during World War I. So this was the first mechanized war.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

So people were being killed at, like, a horrific level.

[Dax Shepard]

It was the gnarliest war we've probably ever had.

[Rizwan Virk]

Now we have weapons even greater than that. But he got a very strong answer. Answer came to him in a vision. What the vision said to him was, life is like a film, a projector, and the characters in the movie are suffering, but the actors don't actually suffer. In fact, I mean, we're here in Los Angeles. What are the roles that the actors want that they're gonna win an Oscar for? It's the ones that have the most suffering. And so he used a technological metaphor to try to describe this thing that religions have been saying for thousands of years. But he would say, ceaseless joy is not the nature of this world. Right. And the Buddha said, suffering is a key part of this world.

[Dax Shepard]

But that's highly misinterpreted.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it may be.

[Dax Shepard]

Life is suffering. Isn't I am a slave. It is. I suffer from my craving and lack of acceptance of my reality.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's correct.

[Dax Shepard]

So I just want to be very clear on that. Buddhism isn't. There should be a slave class that suffers.

[Rizwan Virk]

Buddhism is how do you get out of this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Suffering.

[Dax Shepard]

How do you end craving?

[Rizwan Virk]

How do you end the attachments and the craving and all of the despair and all of this other stuff as well? By getting off the wheel.

[Dax Shepard]

My conclusion, he did a good job. He did his best. The bottom line is there isn't a God, because you cannot come up with an explanation for why so many people are suffering in this completely horrific way. Even if you make up that they're actors and they want to do it, it's a total.

[Monica Padman]

It's not actors. That perspective would say the point is the afterlife. So this suffering and what's happening here is not your eternal life. So that's the actor element of it that you're suffering for.

[Dax Shepard]

This time there's a consolation prize, and that's the best we can do to not feel terrible about how unjust this planet is.

[Rizwan Virk]

How are the people who are causing that suffering? What do they choose to do? And perhaps they are playing a role. Now, this is just a suggestion Right. That the reason they're in this world is to allow those people to make the choice so they can learn whether it's in the afterlife or in their next life or once they're outside of the game. Oh, I shouldn't have done that. I made bad choices along the way.

[Dax Shepard]

Victim blaming is what it is.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, that's one way of looking at it. But then right back to God or.

[Monica Padman]

Not, we have to look at both sides of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I know. But the other side has been explored for 5,000 years of Judeo Christian religion and all these other religions. And they're all attempts to buffer how unjust and how unfair it is.

[Rizwan Virk]

Then the message is usually don't treat people that way. Right. But the message is never received by humans. And that to me is the social primates problem. They need these religions to teach them this basic truth that you shouldn't treat people badly. But they can't quite do that because of the nature of this world and because of the craving and everybody's trying to get ahead, which means somebody else has to be left behind. So in my opinion that is because of the social nature of the world. But the spiritual provides a different perspective. But that's a different perspective.

[Dax Shepard]

We have to acknowledge the people who are drawn to the sim theory. It's super relevant. It's not people who are suffering, it's people who it's worked out for pretty well.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's not entirely true. That's like saying the only people that believe in religion are people that are not suffering. And that's not exactly true.

[Dax Shepard]

I wouldn't say that about religion. I would say that's unique about simulation theory.

[Rizwan Virk]

But simulation theory is perhaps another version to what I'm saying, particularly in the RPG version, which is the version you don't like. But that version is actually closer to what the religions are saying. And so when you suffer, if you view it as a new kind of challenge or the difficulty level of the game is up to nine or 10 and we've all had suffering of various kinds, I think that provides a different perspective because people say, well what does it matter? Matter to me in my life, that's a question that I get a lot is why should I care? And I said, well, if you view it as if you have a certain storyline and a certain set of challenges, then when something bad happens to you, perhaps there's a storyline that you're part of that this suffering can be thought of as a challenge.

[Dax Shepard]

When the rubber meets the road, if you're talking to a Young woman who was raped by her father for 18 years. And you look at her and she says, I'm in a simulation. And you say either yes, you're in a simulation and you, you're real, or you're a computer generated person so that my life has perspective. If your worldview is those are the two answers for why she's had the worst experience on planet Earth. I think that's insanely patronizing to her experience. That chunk has to be accounted for.

[Monica Padman]

But what's the difference between that and religion?

[Dax Shepard]

That's why I hate religion.

[Monica Padman]

Or in general. The reality is some people suffer more in life than others. You can say that's because of God. You can say that's because of a game where some people are titrated to have more or less. It's all the same thing.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not though, because there are real explanations for why that woman is in that situation. And it's not God and it's not the simulation. It's the socioeconomics. It's the history of the parenthood.

[Monica Padman]

You're saying people will stop trying to fix the problems if there's.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a simulation.

[Monica Padman]

I see that fear.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. But to simply say that they're not going to try to fix the problems the next time around. Right. That that woman or that young man is not going to try to fix that with their kids because they're in a simulation is not necessarily the case.

[Dax Shepard]

If you're that woman. How about that? That's all I'm asking. If you're that woman, you're hearing the three of us talk and you're that woman and you're like, you guys think this is a simulation. Do you not see inherently the deep offense to that?

[Rizwan Virk]

But do you also see how it could offer her a glimmer of hope? You're seeing only one story.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm seeing her side. The one where encouraged.

[Rizwan Virk]

Don't you see? She could say, okay, this is the suffering that I'm going through right now. This is not all that is that. Perhaps there's a part of me that's bigger than this.

[Dax Shepard]

That is the historic salve that has tried to make those people not revolt and overthrow the government.

[Rizwan Virk]

That was oppressive. In your opinion, then religion is just a social construct and there is no mystical reality. And that's okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That is my point of view. Yeah. That's why when I love sim, what ultimately I'll find my way up to. My objection is the same one I had about religion.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes. I think that's Coming through clear. But is that you have an objection to religion, and that's okay because, you know, I spend half my time with people who have serious objections to religion and half my time with people who say, there's something there.

[Dax Shepard]

I want you to count me in the middle.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's kind of where I've ended up. And I tend to have sympathies with both sides. And as we try to understand the physical world, even if you believe, okay, there's nothing outside, it's just so strange that we can't find a good explanation for why these things happen. It's very possible that what we're finding is, is that the world isn't as real as we thought it was and it isn't as physical. And most scientists won't argue with this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I agree.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was talking to a Nobel Prize winning physicist in the UK at the University of Cambridge last year and he says, well, that part, nobody's going to disagree with you anymore. They used to.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Self organizing complex systems are to me, the one bit of magic I still believe in.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And built on an information substrate. And sometimes things happen to many people that can't be explained with a purely materialistic explanation.

[Dax Shepard]

Would you say maybe yet?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes. Or because they haven't thought through a model.

[Dax Shepard]

There's so much we don't know.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's so much we don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

I'll give you a computer example that would seem like magic and would be written off if we didn't know anything about how computers work. But we do. So I was shopping for a backpack on a website and I went to a specific website, specific backpack. Somebody said, these are good. And then later I'm on my phone, okay. And I'm in some social media app and I see an ad for that backpack and I say, whoa, what a weird coincidence. Jung defined the cool term synchronicity. And the synchronicity is when an inner thought accounts with an outer thought. I would say, oh my God, it's a glitch in the Matrix because I don't know that there's an information substrate. There's a thing called advertiser intent. I registered my intent, but it's in a database that I can't see. It's in the cloud somewhere. Perhaps some of the weird glitches that people see, including things like synchronicities.

[Dax Shepard]

The Mandela effect. That's a really fun one.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, The Mandela effect is one that I've talked about. And we're. I love the simulated multiverse.

[Dax Shepard]

To me, Defies explanation. How on earth could this many people be this wrong about the same fantasy?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. And so if you take an information based view and say there's a substrate here that will record this information even though we can't see it, then maybe there will be an explanation that science will eventually be able. And that's what I think. Simulation theory is a way to put, like one physicist told me, it's a framework or a scaffolding around which they could start to explore some of these mysteries in ways that can't be. And the Mandela effect is a really weird one.

[Dax Shepard]

So stop stuffing. Yeah, I'm certain that's a product.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yesterday, when we're recording this was the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, there's a bunch of Mandela effect about that.

[Rizwan Virk]

There was that guy who was in front of the tank.

[Dax Shepard]

In front of the tank.

[Rizwan Virk]

They call him Tank Boy. Do you remember if he was killed or not?

[Dax Shepard]

I would say he was not.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's what I would say. Yeah, but if you get a group of people together, there will always be one or two who remember he got run over by the tank and it was the bloodiest thing they ever saw on tv.

[Dax Shepard]

Which you would think would be so memorable.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. It's so memorable and it's so strange. And so, you know, the term Mandela effect was coined by a blogger named Fiona Broome, and she was at a Comic Con like the one they have in San Diego, I think this was in Atlanta. And it was a Star Trek panel with the actors from like the 60s series. And there were the Trekkies in the audience and they were like, oh, do you remember that episode when you did this? And Spock said this and Kirk said that, and the guys on stage were like, there's no such episode. And the audience is like, yes, there absolutely was. If you know Trekkers. Yo, yo. These guys know their episod.

[Monica Padman]

They know their shit.

[Rizwan Virk]

They know their shit. And so that's what caused her to start investigating. Are there phenomena like this? I mean, there are pictures of people next to the Thinker. Do you remember the statue of the Thinker?

[Dax Shepard]

The David?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, the Thinker. You know the one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you remember where his hand is.

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly on his chin?

[Rizwan Virk]

And in fact, that's what it is today. But there are pictures of people standing next to the statue next to it. There's literally a picture from the London unveiling of one of the first casts of the Thinker. The title of the victory, G.B. shaw. George Bernard Shaw in the pose of the thinker, and he's like this forehead, and it's just bizarre. How does this happen? And now we get back to Philip K. Dick. The sci fi writer said that he came to believe that there was more than one timeline, that maybe these things happened like the Germany and Japan timeline actually happened. The simulators didn't like the outcome and they changed the variables and they're rerunning it again. And maybe it's still going on at this point. Maybe we're only on a branch that exists for some period. Now, I dismissed the Mandela effect.

[Dax Shepard]

Ultimately explainable somehow.

[Rizwan Virk]

But then I had a good buddy of mine from MIT who worked at Google come to me and say, hey, have you looked at the Mandela effect? And I said, yeah, you know, bad memory, whatever, the usual explanation. And he said, well, the simulation hypothesis is a pretty good explanation for that. So I started to look into it in more detail. And then you find that there are people who have closer proximity to something or there's significance for something that still remember the opposite of what happened. Now, most people may not remember X or Y. Did Nelson Mandela die in prison in the 80s or not? But there's at least one blogger who says she was a journalism student and she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela and they told her, he's too sick, you can't interview him. She came back to the U.S. got a job with, I think it was like NPR in Chicago. And then she remembers him dying as a journalist who's covering this thing. Now, is it possible that time isn't what we think it is? And it turns out quantum mechanics. I don't know if we want to get into this, but there's an experiment in quantum mechanics called the delay a choice double slit experiment. It's basically telling us that what we think of the past may not be as fixed as we think it is. And the best way to explain it is if you had light coming from a billion light years away from, say, a quasar or something, it would take a billion years to get here because it's a billion light years away, Right? Easy math. And suppose there's a black hole in the middle or 1 million light years away, and the light has to go to the left, left, or to the right of the black hole. And then we can measure using polarized light or telescopes. However, it can be measured whether it went to the left or the right. When would the decision have been made whether to go to the left or the right? Because clearly it can't do both. Well, what this Experiment which was proposed by my favorite physicist of the 20th century, John Wheeler. And he couldn't perform it when he was alive, but people have performed scaled down versions of it. Now. What they found was that that decision is made when the telescope makes measures the light. So a million years ago, something happened, but it's only when we measure it today that this outcome or that outcome happens. Even though it's the past, from our perspective, it's the past.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

What it's showing us is that time is weird. St. Augustine said, what is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if you ask me, I do not know.

[Monica Padman]

Right, exactly.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because we don't really know what time is. And so. So it starts to mess with your ideas of reality. And turns out in a simulation or a video game, you fill in those details from the past. Like when you come to harvest your crops, they haven't been running the whole time. What happens is it just calculates what would have happened to those crops using probability engineers. Yeah. It says from the last time you logged in to now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it would be here.

[Rizwan Virk]

It fills in the past. Just like I was saying, we fill in different parts of the world as you observe it. And that, that to me suggests if time and space are both quantized, and we know space is quantized, meaning there's a minimum level like a pixel. And if time is quantized, which scientists are starting to suspect, but, you know, no one's proven it yet, that is more like a simulated world than a. Than a physical world with continuous time with just one timeline. And that's it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Riz, you are so intelligent, it's intimidating to argue with you. You're fascinating. What you're holding in your head is very impressive. It's been a total honor to get two hours of your time.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, it's been a lot of fun. And I like this topic because it brings together many different threads and that's what makes it interesting. That's why I wrote this book.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And everyone should check it out. And it's updated because obviously when you wrote it initially, AI was kind of unpredictable. Where it's at now, you were required to incorporate where we're at now.

[Rizwan Virk]

Absolutely. I'd laid out the 10 stages, and I thought AI was a future stage, and it turns out it's a current stage. Yes. So it's happening much faster.

[Dax Shepard]

We're going to witness it.

[Rizwan Virk]

We already are. So, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone check out the simulation hypothesis. It's available now. Riz, this has been incredible. I hope we get to talk to you again.

[Rizwan Virk]

I would love that. Thanks for having me on.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Rizwan Virk]

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

We've been holding on a story and.

[Dax Shepard]

We need to hear it. I know I almost. The. The thing I worry about is I don't think you're going to believe my retelling of it. And that's why I suggested we might need testimonials from it Feels like it's.

[Monica Padman]

Going to be a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

It's too much to do to do. It's a bit of a cumbersome, inefficient.

[Monica Padman]

Adding more people to edit and lay in. It's we just too much.

[Dax Shepard]

You're going to. You can ask tonight if I told the. This story fairly.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I also need one more preface.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a very hard story for me to tell because I blundered in a way. I hate to blunder.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, can I. I'm going to say I'm. I don't know what you're about to say, but I'm proud of you for owning that you blunder in a way.

[Dax Shepard]

That I. I would least want to blunder. I even thought like while it was happening, I was like, well, this is. Would clearly be any. In any other circumstance, I would tell this story in the fact check. But the fact that I blundered, I really was on the fence about it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm.

[Dax Shepard]

This is almost as bad as my relapse story for my ego.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, now I'm probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Now you kind of know what? Now you've got a zone, I think. Anyways, let me tell you the story.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a lot of.

[Monica Padman]

Can I ask questions during the story, please? Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So Eric and Molly and the kids, their children are here visiting in Nashville. And it wasn't our first boat ride. I think we had a couple good boat rides before this, but we went out on. I think it would have been Saturday. We decided, okay, we're going on the boat. It's gonna be a few hours. Like, we're gonna drive to the end of the lake and go to this restaurant we love. And then on the way back, we'll do some tubing, we'll find a cove. And that's the game plan. Like, we kind of know we're gonna spend a few hours on the boat. Well, as we're driving in the restaurant, I see this cove and I'm immediately remembering people have. In town have said, like, have you gone to two Foot Cove? And I can see that. Oh, yeah, There's a sandbar that' feet deep. There's a bunch of boats parked around it. And I think this is off schedule, but let's. Maybe we should drop anchor over there. The kids can swim by the sandbar. Maybe we'll play some spades on the boat. Right. It's kind of an impromptu decision to pull in. I need to add that my pontoon boat, which I love, has double bimini, meaning it has this. And you've experienced it now it has this huge shade over the entire length of the boat, which is 25ft.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So, okay, we pull up. There's tons of boats. We pull by two pontoon boats that are tied together. They're hanging out. They're clearly together. Then another two dudes to the right of that. They're not tied up together, but they're around each other. I go up front to drop the anchor, and I'm telling you, at this point, I am. I'm like 50ft from these boats. I have so much room.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm in the middle of, like, getting the anchor out and unraveling it and throwing it in and, like, tying it up to the thing. And in that amount of time, the wind, which was pretty severe, has taken the boat quickly towards the two pontoon boats that are roped off next to each other.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I'm in this situation where I'm at the front of the boat holding the anchor, and I'm trying to decide, do I try to get this anchor to seat and stop us from drifting into these boats, or do I quickly run and start the boat up and put it in drive and that whole thing. Okay, I gotta add one thing. My biggest fear in life is ending up on the website. The Instagram account, Qualified Captain, which is my favorite site. It's all guys shitting the bed in their boats. Either they drive their boat into the boat ramp and they bury their truck in the water, or, you know, a.

[Monica Padman]

Bunch of hijinks and qualified or unqualified.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, I always say qualified captain, but it would make more sense as unqualified captain.

[Monica Padman]

It's a funny. It's like, funny.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's what it's. It's. It's one of my favorite accounts. I. If not my favorite account. Let me see Captain. I'll tell you the real name of it. The qualified captain vpres through here. It's just guys losing control of their vessel, and it's so embarrassing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And ever since we got the boat, I said my only goal this summer is to not end up on the qualified captain website. I don't want to filming me up. Okay, so we're drifting very quickly. I make the split second decision. Fuck, I gotta. I can't count that. The anchor is gonna grab. I'm gonna go back. I go back. I started up. By the time I get the boat started, we are now drifting into this pontoon boat. The dude. There's a dude on the pontoon boat. He sees what's about to happen, so he comes to the edge and he starts to try to push us in the other direction. Great. So like he's doing that and we just kind of glide. By now we glide between the two that are roped off and the other two that are sketty one and it's very, very tight. Like we're almost gonna hit the other one and.

[Monica Padman]

Oh no.

[Dax Shepard]

And so we drift past and I think, oh my God, thank God we just avoided that. There's a woman in the water behind the pontoon boat that couldn't see what was going on.

[Monica Padman]

Just on her own swimming.

[Dax Shepard]

She's floating in a tube like everyone else is floating and enjoying the day. And so as we're gliding by that boat, she's over already yelling at us.

[Rizwan Virk]

What are you doing?

[Dax Shepard]

Put your po. She's starting to shout directions at us. It is stressful. The kids are yelling at me to do things. Everyone's, you know. And I now realize, oh, we have scraped their boat. I can see that we scratched the pontoon boat.

[Monica Padman]

The guy that was put helping push.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. The pontoon boat that he was standing on has been scratched. And I'm like, oh, fuck. And there's all these. Now everyone's watching, right? Everyone that's parked out there is. Something's happening. She's yelling. And I'm like, so we get free of it. But now I gotta. I need to go back around and come up to them in. In control. But again, the wind's blowing like crazy. I have this huge sail and the fucking pontoon is just a big kite because it's a big square. I immediately, immediately I go, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm gonna pay for this. I'll make this right. I'm so, so sorry. My bad. Full ownership. I'm so sorry. I have Kristen write my name and number on a piece of paper. Now the woman in back, she's now. I mean, she already thought all hell broke loose before she knew there was a scratch. Now she's really. Now she's on the boat.

[Monica Padman]

Now she's screaming, is she part of that boat?

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know this yet.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I don't know her age, but I'm going to guess around 50.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then your age. Yes. And now a third guy enters this scenario, which seems to be her friend. And this guy's older. He seems to be in his 60s. And he's now yelling at the top of his lungs, why is your vessel number. He's like, you know, give me your. And so we drive back up. Kristen hands the guy the piece of paper. We don't hit them. Thank God.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. What if it happened?

[Dax Shepard]

And the woman is like, she's very upset. She's really. She's swearing. The kids are a little rattled. And he looks at the piece of paper, and I gotta add one thing for color commentary. The entire time this is happening, the dudes that were in the unroped off boats, one of the guys saw that it was me. He's now going, dax. He's screaming. While all that chaos is happening, I have this guy over here going, dax, we're neighbors. We're neighbors. My dad has seven hit songs on the radio. I'm like, hearing seven hit songs. We own restaurants. We're neighbors. And I'm like. I'm trying to be friendly to him, but they're. They're all screaming. And so now as I come back around to give my piece of paper, this guy is still. It's like round three of all this information. He's Now, He's. He's put his boat in driving. He's just tailing us wherever we go. He's yelling. Yeah, it's. It couldn't be more chaotic. Give the guy the number. And we're like, okay, great. We gotta get out of here. I just want to get out of here. I give. So we start pulling away. And she's like, what are you doing? Get back over here. You get back over. You're. You're hitting and running. And I go, no, I'm not. You have my number. I'm so sorry. I am going to definitely make this right. I could not be more openly saying, I'm sorry. I'm responsible and I'm gonna pay for it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No, you get over here. And I'm like, I'm not gonna rope my boat up next to this woman. The kids don't want me to. Whatever.

[Monica Padman]

How is it hitting and running if you handed the thing over you?

[Dax Shepard]

So I start driving away.

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

Phone rings. Great. I gave him my number. I don't mind talking to him, him, he, he was calm. So I got on the phone with him. He's like, hey, okay. So I go, so, yeah, so here's my number. You know that it's real. I'm so sorry. Please, I can't wait to pay for it. I'm really, really sorry. He's like, okay, yeah, yeah, he's cool. And he goes, hold on. So and so wants to talk to you. And I'm like, oh, my God. And it's the woman. And so the woman's on the phone. She's like, you get back over here. I'm calling the twa, the Tennessee Water Authority. Who's the cop? Cops on the lane. Yes, I'm calling them. And I go, okay, you can do that, go ahead. But you have my number and I'm gonna pay. And there's really no reason for you and I to sit next to each other. That's what's gonna happen next. You better get back here right now. I'm calling the cops. You're getting arrested. I go, okay, I don't want to talk anymore. I'm gonna pay for it. I hang up.

[Monica Padman]

Good, that sounds good.

[Dax Shepard]

We cross the lake. It's about another 15 minute ride to the end of the lake to the restaurant we went to go to.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Obviously the kids are like, are you going to jail? You know, like everyone on the boat is now, what is going to happen? I'm like, I don't really know, but I'm not sitting in that group of 300 people. One guy's telling me his life story. Everyone's got a camera. I just want to get the out of there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So we get to the restaurant, we sit down, we've just ordered drinks. We've been there for four minutes.

[Monica Padman]

Are you, what's your state in when you're at the restaurant?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm 85% confident that she's going to call the TWA and she's going to say, and they're going to say, do you have any idea who this person is? And she's going to say, yeah, I have his number. They're going to go, well, then that's not a hit and run. That's kind of where I'm at. I'm like, I'm not in trouble. Yeah, I, I, I don't feel like I'm in trouble. I've done everything right other than hang with her.

[Monica Padman]

But are you feeling like, like even if you're like, I'm obviously not getting arrested, I, I would feel that, like, well, obviously I'm not getting arrested. But this whole thing just. I mean, it's like chaos.

[Dax Shepard]

I am thinking, oh, my God, everyone in this lake is going to know this story in five.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

And again, my ego. The story's gonna be like, I drove my boat into somebody and I don't know what I'm doing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, that's where my head was at. Probably like ego management.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This whole lake's gonna think I'm a fucking putz who can't drive a boat and blah, blah, blah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I'm not really thinking the cops are going to take this seriously. So the manager comes up right after we order drinks. He goes, hey, there's a few officers here that want to talk to you. I. I asked them to stay outside so that they didn't. Weren't in the restaurant, Everyone watching. Could you. Would you come to the office and back?

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I get up, I walk through the kitchen of the restaurant, and then I go into, like, office of a kid, you know, know of a restaurant. And there's two officers. There's two officers. They're young, they're nice. Right. I. I basically tell my whole story to them. I gotta back up. There was an exchange you need to know about.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I want to read it verbatim so I don't mess it up. Okay. So this is the text exchange. Please let me know how much the damages, and I will be all caps. Happy to make it. All right? I will venmo you the money or mail a check, whatever you prefer.

[Monica Padman]

Great.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm texting with the dude at this point. He said, I trust you'll make it. Right. I think Blank's name has the cops coming to us to file a report.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, okay, whatever she needs to do, as long as she's honest about the fact that I immediately gave you my number and did not run, nor was there a collision. We drifted into you while both people were anchored. Again, extremely sorry for the inconvenience and I'm happy to fix it. And can you explain to Karen there is no boat registration number because it hasn't been mailed from the county yet. But the boat is fully registered with my county. Numbers haven't arrived yet. He said, hope y' all have a great rest of the weekend. Sorry we had to meet like this.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Her name is not Karen. I let one thing out I couldn't resist. The fact that she's calling the police on me is textbook Karen move. So I've been So nice. So nice. And I just let one. I was a little naughty. And I said, karen.

[Monica Padman]

What do you mean you said, karen?

[Dax Shepard]

I said, please just make sure Karen's.

[Monica Padman]

Honest about the fact that I didn't even put.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I just slid it in.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

I could. I just couldn't resist.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, great.

[Dax Shepard]

Because it was insane. Like the. You know, whatever. Okay. So now I'm in the office and I'm talking to the two police officers, and I tell them the entire story, and they're like, okay, great. Our boss is looking at the damage and he'll be on his way. And so he's going to come over and hear your statement, too. And now Kristen enters the thing, too. So now we're both in there. The officer who's awesome comes in. He hears the whole story, and he's like, okay. He goes, okay. So, yeah, that's not hit and run. You. You gave your information. He said, also, I just saw the boat. We don't even file reports unless it's above $2,000 in damage. And there's no way that was. You know. So all that happens. I go back to the restaurant, and now she starts texting me.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

She said, hi, it's blank boat you hit. I'm sorry, but I just bought the boat last week. I'm not a Karen, but I was a bit upset. I understand things. And yes, I did tell the TWA you left your number. I said, great. I just talked to them and we're all good. Again, extremely sorry I scratched your new boat. I feel terrible, especially if you just got it. The wind was stronger than I evaluated.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

She said, I totally understand and have been there. I'm sorry I freaked out. All good. I'll be in touch. I said, great, Just let me know when you have a bid. She said, will do. And again, I'm sorry for being a Karen.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I wrote ha. And I'm like, I love her. I love her. I cannot believe that she was able to come through. She was so mad. But anyways, now it's been very lovely. And it's. Now I've had several exchanges with her that are very, very lovely. I think the win of the whole situation, which is completely never happens, is my kids were like, dad, I'm sorry. So proud of you. I thought you could have even been meaner to her. And I never get that feedback.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Your. Their expectations are set.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. So I. I magically stayed super nice.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And apologetic the whole time. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

That's very good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Do you believe that?

[Monica Padman]

I do believe it. I. I do wonder if it has to do with your culpability ability. Like, if it was just a. Yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

Because I generally overreact to injustice. And there was nothing unjust about me being in trouble for hurting her boat. Like.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was like. Again, I immediately was like, this is me.

[Monica Padman]

I did my bad. Yeah. So maybe that was at play. But I am very glad to react.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm also being watched by people.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

When I scream. Screaming my name.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

So minimally, he knows who I am. So that's helpful. Knowing that I'm not anonymous in this situation. I can't just fly off the handle.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. That's very.

[Dax Shepard]

That's helpful. So it's all my willpower.

[Monica Padman]

Sometimes that's helpful. But sometimes it causes like. I think it can cause you sometimes to get extra panicky when there's like, oh, that kind of chaos. Or people are noticing it's you or everyone was noticing.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone on my boat is. They got opinions.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Go here, turn here. What do you do? You know, everyone's yelling, go back. At first it was like, go back. She wants you back. I'm like, I'm not going back.

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Sitting next to her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm happy to talk to the police, but I'm not going to hang with her until then.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. I think that was smart. It just would have escalated more if you had gone back.

[Dax Shepard]

The only pat on the back I'll give myself is of that pie. So those. Those things really help me behave correctly. But I am. That's his dream. We're friendly now. I never had these outcomes where, like, I burned the house down and then people leave hating me and I hate them. And, like, this is awesome. We went through this whole thing. She couldn't have been more mad at me.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I couldn't have written her off more as being a. Just a insufferable Karen. There was no way back.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then just. Yeah. I had to go first. I just had to be really nice first.

[Monica Padman]

And guess what?

[Dax Shepard]

She was really nice back all the time.

[Monica Padman]

This is a great takeaway. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm learning at 50. I love that to resolve these things in a way where everyone actually kind of feels better at the end.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

It took me a long time to get here, but it's possible. And I didn't feel. That's what it's really is epitomizes is my. I don't feel control. I don't feel in danger. I don't feel scared. I don't feel like. Yeah, I feel fine to take it on the chin. This is really funny. It's actually, actually confidence was the ability to just take it on the chin.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But I thought confidence was don't ever let anyone.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Do that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's. It took me a long time, but I've had a couple now experiences where I'm like, oh, this is way better.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I think, I think you saying you love her now feels strong to me. But I, I think. Can I tell you what I respect her reaction. You respect what happened. You respect deeply change.

[Dax Shepard]

I think for her to come back from where she's started and I called her a Karen.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

For her to make a joke about herself being a Karen. I, I really applaud it. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. I, I do too. I. Everyone then you can do almost anything to me.

[Dax Shepard]

But if you give me like a heartfelt apology and ownership of it, I can let anything go. Pretty much. You just want the person to acknowledge.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. How they were acting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So anyways, now I like her. I'm excited to see her on the lake.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Great. She is still somewhat. Someone who does just rem. Just a reminder, you did get a lot of information. You got great information. Which is that she does cool down and can see things clearly. But she is also a person who called the police. Does over. Not. Okay. Has big reactions.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There we go. Big.

[Monica Padman]

So just, you know, both are true.

[Dax Shepard]

Both are true. She probably was like me as a kid, you know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She must have been like, you can't just smash my boat.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

She and I are the same.

[Monica Padman]

Let's say these are cars. So if, if, if someone.

[Dax Shepard]

It would be of the equivalent of definitely in a parking lot. Parking. You rub up against someone's bumper.

[Monica Padman]

Right. And then you leave. But then in that case and you.

[Dax Shepard]

Give the person your number.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't wait for the police to come talk about. And in fact in California you don't even wait for the copy when there's a collision. You just exchange information and then you all bounce.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

But I mean I do know states differ. I was thinking of that. Like California is like that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think no fault states are like that. But some you do need the cops to come and give or do an incident report. But that's not how California is.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I felt like, oh well, if this was California, I've done the right thing. But again, I don't really know what happens In Tennessee, maybe I was supposed to sit there the whole time. People did he coming.

[Monica Padman]

Did he say? But like. No, he didn't say no.

[Dax Shepard]

He's like, you gave your information, so that was fine.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Now what's more interesting is if what I've been able to keep all that same composure if it was a guy, and that's probably different, I would probably have a harder time just taking it on the chin.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

From a guy. In fact, I'm pretty pessimistic about that outcome.

[Monica Padman]

Well, maybe now moving forward.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You could try it.

[Dax Shepard]

I think what happens with a guy maybe is like, I'm not going to threaten a woman.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You just know it's not an option.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not an option. So I could just trick myself into, like. Because in that situation, my only option is to be nice.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not going to scream at a woman. I'm not going to hit a woman.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Unless she's trying to stab me.

[Monica Padman]

Thinking of it as a narrative nice is like, it's just civil. It's just like, it's. I'm just. I don't think anyone needs to be overly nice. I mean, obviously great if you are or she is or he is or whatever, but like just civil. Like we're just people and we made. Happened and we're going to just be sort of. What's the word? Like, direct about it. Like, just like, this is what happened and I'm going to fix it. And yeah. It. It doesn't have to be so emotional.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Stay tuned for Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. And I do believe you. Like, I. What do you. What part did you think I wouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

Believe that I handled it so peacefully.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess I have some text evidence that helped.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's pretty scary. Also scary that these bows can just fly into other people. People's boats that caused damage.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I learned a lot. My. My boat is a kite.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Too thin. Perfect amount of thin. Yeah, it's perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

It's been a while since I've been called into a room to talk to the cops.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Did you feel like. Like it was.

[Dax Shepard]

I was. I've been in that situation many, many times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And probably my most practiced behavior is trying to talk my way out of trouble. I've gotten into myself starting in school, you know, like.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Learning to talk to the principal and.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I've had to talk my way out of situations, don't get me wrong. But not with the cops.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right. I Started my training with the principals. Yeah, I was pretty good at like. I would push the ding, ding, ding, the substitute teacher to the breaking point where they did there. You got to go down to the office. And then I would talk my way out of that.

[Monica Padman]

That's so me.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

I'm just wanting you to know I.

[Dax Shepard]

Have not been a perfect boy.

[Monica Padman]

No one's been perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

But I was trying to make jokes and entertain everyone.

[Monica Padman]

Did you use your stapler everywhere?

[Dax Shepard]

Not. No. I wasn't that type of disruptive. I was make a joke disruptive, but it. I wasn't shoving anyone or tripping anyone or calling girls names. Sure, maybe I was calling girls names to Aaron. I wasn't perfect. I was in junior high. Might have called people names. I just don't know. I don't have any specific memory. But I'm just being honest. That that might have been on the table.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did, but never did their face. Would you call him a piggy?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did.

[Dax Shepard]

Never. No. That wasn't my style. I was more like there was. Was a girl.

[Monica Padman]

You just call him Karen.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just burying myself deeper. There was a girl in high school, and my friend Brian Bolas and I sat behind her and I didn't notice. And also Bulis was such a character. He's one of the most distinct friends I've ever had.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You'll often hear Aaron and I imitating him. He talk like this. Shepherd, what are you doing after school? He was like 45 years old in school. He had been kicked out of a really nice Catholic private school. And he wore sweaters and khaki pants. Shepherdee golf. So we were behind this gal and he noticed. First he goes, shepherd, was this gal beheaded? And I go, what? He goes, look at that scar on her neck.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

And she did. She had a scar that went completely across her neck as if she had been beheaded.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Then we were obsessed with what happened. Of course. So there we had a whole semester of Shepherd. I think what happened, you know, it was just a lot of theorizing on what happened.

[Monica Padman]

Tumor. Well, I mean, let's.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe she's at a rock concert, had a good time.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, not a scar across the whole back. But I bet if that.

[Dax Shepard]

Think she died.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. If she was in my school, the. The with the girls, depending on how young we were, it would have been the like, you know that wives tale about the woman that wears the red scarf around her neck because actually, like, it's like this. Her she takes it off.

[Dax Shepard]

Her head falls.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And it's red because of the blood.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

We would have. It would have been her.

[Dax Shepard]

You would have thought that was her. And certainly she did have some dressing and gauze on there post procedure that were probably red like a scarf.

[Monica Padman]

I wonder what happened.

[Dax Shepard]

It was a horrific.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Shepherd. I think she went through the windshield backwards.

[Monica Padman]

He'd say, that's not funny, because that is what maybe could have happen backwards.

[Dax Shepard]

How would you end up going through it backwards?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. Wow. Yeah. Kids are kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Kids are kids.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

We've all done it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We see things. We see things and then we focus on them.

[Monica Padman]

We focus on them and we just want to feel like we are not the lowest on the total. It's so.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so social. Primate of us.

[Monica Padman]

It is, but it's. It's to be overcome. But it's real.

[Dax Shepard]

You got to transcend it. And you do as you get older.

[Monica Padman]

Some. Some people, you hope.

[Dax Shepard]

But school. We're not there yet.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's true. Okay. Great story.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you. I'll try to keep gathering stories.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. I'm glad with the way it went. Little small update before we wrap up. We did watch what Lies Beneath last.

[Dax Shepard]

Night, and I'm going to give an objective retelling of the scenario. You were hell bent on seeing it. No one was very amped up to watch it.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, hold on, hold on. I got to add a caveat there.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

We talked about this on the fact check. Some fact checks ago. I said, can we watch what Lies Beneath? And you seemed excited about it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Because you looked very excited. And I was not gonna rain on your parade, but listen.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I was. I was a six to see it. I remember it. Ish.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

And, yeah, Lake, let's eventize this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But no one was dying to watch it. But we all watched it because you wanted to.

[Monica Padman]

Molly. I acted.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was. And it was great. And everyone was so happy that you suggested it. And Eric was jumping out of his screaming.

[Monica Padman]

We were making screams.

[Dax Shepard]

I was making a lot of noises for a different reason. And I got yelled at.

[Monica Padman]

What was it, though? I didn't see.

[Dax Shepard]

It was the intimacy parts. I was, like, vocally having a. All right. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I didn't know. Look, I will tell you. So we. We're in a room that has tears, and I. You were making.

[Dax Shepard]

That sounds even worse than a movie theater.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. Okay. I have no.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, I'm so sensitive.

[Monica Padman]

No, I am now sensitive. This is why I hate hearing anything. Right. Because back to when I heard those girls talking about the Brad Pitt episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

They mentioned something about how you guys both talked about your theaters, and it really, like, I, like, hated that, obviously. And then now it's like, in my head, and now I have to say a room with tears.

[Dax Shepard]

Now do you think they're like, it's just tone deaf to talk about your theaters in public? That's a good argument. Is it that, or is it like, they're mad I bought a theater with my money? Like, what, do people want you to spend this money in Mexico?

[Monica Padman]

It's the first one.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the first one.

[Monica Padman]

And I, I, I can, like, sort of understand it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I guess that's why now I'm like.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's, it's really funny, though, if people just go a step further. What you're saying is you want me to lie to you to remain relatable, you would pick dishonesty.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Triggering.

[Rizwan Virk]

I get it.

[Dax Shepard]

I get it. I just laid out a scenario the other day. We were having a hypothetical conversation. I said, yeah, if you're with me and you can't make your mortgage payment and you see me buy something or rent. Rent something. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah, it is hard.

[Monica Padman]

I understand all of it. It's like, yeah, what are you gonna do? That's.

[Dax Shepard]

But I'm gonna keep doing it because I'm just not gonna be dishonest.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't watch this movie in my bed on TV. We watched it in a room with tears. 10 seat movie theater.

[Monica Padman]

It's a. But I also. It's like, it, there's just like, they're big couches. It's comfortable. It's not like a movie theater that you'd go to at the movie theater.

[Dax Shepard]

That's all I wanted to specify. Like, tears sounded like maybe there was. There's like 100 seats in there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, there's like a. We were watching the movie. I don't, I, I don't want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Do this, but, like.

[Monica Padman]

And you were in a space that I couldn't really see you.

[Dax Shepard]

I was in the front row of many, many rows. It was about 20 rows.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. No, there's three rows. Okay. You and Kristen were in the front.

[Dax Shepard]

And I'm getting a forehand massage. That was loud.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm teasing. I was trying to make it worse.

[Monica Padman]

That's what I was actually about to say. So you're making, like, kind of these sexual noises because you're talking about The. You're doing something about the movie and. But we don't see you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And you're sitting next to your wife and there's this sense of like, what are they doing?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Remember I said, what are you doing?

[Dax Shepard]

But listen, I had to say, that just goes to show how poorly you could hear. The noises I was making were not sexual. Oh, this was the noise. Oh.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't know. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, that was like. And that was as low as I could do it because when I. I wanted to go, oh, like that. That's how I feel sexually. No, I'm disturbed. You remember what this is all about? I had vocalized how disturbing this intimacy.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't love watching the intimacy between the two.

[Dax Shepard]

I did not.

[Monica Padman]

On screen.

[Dax Shepard]

I did not.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, that was. That was you feeling like E. But E, like, could go a lot of directions.

[Dax Shepard]

But hold on. Before you ever saw the intimacy, I said, I do got a flag that I don't love the intimacy.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dax Shepard]

So then the intimacy started, and then I was making noises.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but we don't.

[Dax Shepard]

So how could you. Why would you think they were pleasurable noises?

[Monica Padman]

I didn't know it had anything to do. I thought you and Kristen were doing.

[Rizwan Virk]

Something sexual in a room full of people.

[Monica Padman]

Or like she was just not necessarily sexual sexual, but like. Like she was like cuddling you orgasmic or you were just making. You were being too vocal about how pleasurable it was.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, but this was the noise. You ready?

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Yeah. I don't know what it sounds like.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it sounds more like if you're going to misinterpret it, I would be like, oh, he's pushing a out up there.

[Monica Padman]

He feels very comfortable. It was Okam's razor. And it was wrong, but it normally would have been right.

[Dax Shepard]

But the simplest explanation is I announce that I'm grossed out by this, and then you hear noises while it's happening. So. Okay. I'm. Razor would say, oh, those are noises of disgust.

[Monica Padman]

It depends. It all depends. Anywho, so great film.

[Dax Shepard]

Didn't know it was Robert. Robert Zumeckis.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, Robert Zemeckis. And it was. It was great. It was spooky. It was great for the lake and. Okay. But I want people. I never want people, a group of people, especially one person maybe to do something just because one other person wants to do it. I'm against that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

I am.

[Dax Shepard]

If it's not inconvenient, like convenient.

[Monica Padman]

If It's a movie. This movie was three hours long. If people don't want to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Five of us are going to have a fun time watching any movie. I know that. So it's. It's not going to be a lot. It's just if you. You present with me the hundred thousand movies over the last 45 years, there's so many I'm gonna pick before that.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think everyone there would have picked a different movie, but you were first in and you were very vocal about wanting to do it, and it all made sense, so we did it. I know, but okay, that's not a big concession.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like if you. You want to eat at a restaurant really bad, I might not be in the mood for that. I'll go.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that.

[Dax Shepard]

That's.

[Monica Padman]

You're right. That's fine. It's just if no one was in the mood to watch a movie and then one person wanted to watch a movie, that is like, okay. Like, I guess the next three hours is gonna be doing something I don't want to do. I don't like that.

[Dax Shepard]

And it is three hours because we gotta stop and talk a lot, which is why it's fun no matter what we watch.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it was fun. Well, I think watching a movie all together is fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Really fun. But I don't have a bad memory of watching a movie together with people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, neither. But there was. There was this incident scenario that happened recently. I'm not going to go into too many details. I don't want to upset anyone, but no one, present company excluded from this incident.

[Dax Shepard]

Rob, can you leave?

[Monica Padman]

No, Rob's. Rob's present company. He's excluded.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm teasing.

[Monica Padman]

So one in a group of people, one person wanted to do something with the group.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, this is a theoretical.

[Monica Padman]

No, this happens. It's hard to not give details. So one person wanted us to do a talent. Adult talent show. And I was like, not happening. No. Yeah. Immediately when I heard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I would never even pitch this to you. It's insane. You went into performing.

[Monica Padman]

I'm a good performer.

[Dax Shepard]

You want to do character voices? You. No talent show.

[Monica Padman]

How dare you.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't be so offended. I'm just.

[Monica Padman]

I'm just thinking it through.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Thinking through.

[Monica Padman]

I'm thinking about. I don't think those are the same things.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Personally, I don't think going and doing a talent is the same thing as performing in a.

[Dax Shepard]

As you are, or singing or doing character voices or her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I don't sing in My acting. I'm not taking on singing. Probably not. If I had to.

[Dax Shepard]

If you got offered a role you wanted that you had to sing.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, if it was like a. But if it was like a two liner.

[Dax Shepard]

I sang for Stephen Conrad and you know, I. I'm terrified.

[Monica Padman]

I've had to sing in auditions. I've had to do.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, so you did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I've done it, but I don't like doing it.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyway, you don't like performing. That's all I'm saying.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. Anyway, that's not true.

[Dax Shepard]

You love performing at live shows. You do. You do a stellar job performer.

[Monica Padman]

And I have performed many times in my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, you have. Many plays, many. Couple thousand commercials, few movies. Couple quality, high quality television shows. If you don't think cable television shows.

[Monica Padman]

If you don't think being a fly fire requires performing. You don't understand cheerleading. That is a performance.

[Dax Shepard]

It is a performance. And I bet you love performing and you could do it if you didn't like performing. I could see loving the physical aspect of it in the challenge of landing your stuff. It could be very internally motivated.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you, you have to be good at performing in order to be good at the. That. That's the front face.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just saying I can imagine someone. That audience is irrelevant to them. That's not why they're doing it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that isn't why I did that. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's actually not why I do any of my performance.

[Dax Shepard]

Many of my performances.

[Monica Padman]

It's not. Yeah, it's for me, the way I feel when I'm performing or I'm in a character or I'm doing that. So it's. Yeah, it's not about the audience. So maybe that is the difference.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you're more pure than me.

[Monica Padman]

I'm very pure, 100%.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm a little monkey on a sidew and I have cymbals. And if you give me a couple peanuts, I'll clang those cymbals until your ears bleed.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm not. I don't like attention.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So that is maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

And I love it. Unless I'm crashing a boat.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

And I don't want attention.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So a talent show was presented and I was immediately like, no, but it was fun. Like, I do understand the idea.

[Dax Shepard]

The spirit is great.

[Monica Padman]

The idea is also like interesting talents. Like not your average talent in like, do something silly. This person saw it on Tik Tok or something. Or saw some. Someone do this. Crazy. Yes. This crazy talent they were.

[Dax Shepard]

They watched Americans Got Talent the night.

[Monica Padman]

Before something happened and was. And brought to the group. Right. Now, I. I will say I said, e. Oh, the similar noise to what you were making yesterday.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Didn't someone think they were.

[Monica Padman]

I was moose. Yeah. I said so. Not for me, but totally happy to watch.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Totally happy to be the audience for this. As everyone knows who listens most likely. I cannot be peer pressured. Right. So, like, yeah, that was that for me.

[Dax Shepard]

End of the line.

[Monica Padman]

Now what also was clear. Also, nobody else wanted to do the talent show. It was not just me.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

I was.

[Dax Shepard]

I wasn't sacrificial lamb.

[Monica Padman]

I was not like, if everyone else want. Like, I don't do that. Right. I know what I want to do and I don't want to do. I say it. But then it kind of led other people to have to be like, I don't really have a talent. Like, you know, doing the nice way of trying to get out of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it was. It was. It was not happening. But this person wanted it really, really, really, really bad. And was. Was brought. Brought it up multiple times.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure. Took another run at it.

[Monica Padman]

We would say, yeah. And then, you know, texted the group and I was like, well, my talent is that I can't be peer pressured, so I will not be participating. And I kept reiterating this. I am happy to watch anyone do this.

[Dax Shepard]

You'll be a great audience member.

[Monica Padman]

I'll be a great audience member, but I'm not gonna participate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, we gotta.

[Monica Padman]

And then. And then it got really tricky because it was happening. It was happening more than once. And so I had to really sit with, like, why do I feel very, really, like, stick in the mud about this? Like, I'm. I. I feel like I will not.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, you're being insolent.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And I did have to be like, why? I could just do some dumb.

[Dax Shepard]

Get up there and blow a fart.

[Monica Padman]

I would never, never. That is not a. So I, I, you know, I was like, what is it? And I. And I, I. Ultimately, I was like, I think I feel some level of injustice that a whole bunch of people would be doing something that only one person actually wants to do and everyone else is, like, having to do to appease one. And that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's what is now triggered with this movie.

[Monica Padman]

That's what I'm saying.

[Dax Shepard]

But again, hold on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, hold on. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Those asks are so different. Different. Come sit through a movie with us versus go figure out a talent and then perform for us in front of everyone in 25 minutes. Those are much different requests. Yeah, they're dramatically different.

[Monica Padman]

I know. I. I just. It's just coming up now where I started to feel guilty because I was like, well, all these people did something for me that only I wanted to do. Maybe I should have done that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. But again, there's a difference between do you want to play war with me? Game of cards. And I do think it'd be so fun to paint my barn.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. That's how it feels. It's like, I would want to do one thing, I really don't want to do this other thing, but I'm just giving everyone permission to say, you know, we're not doing it right. And I'm like, that's fine. I'm going to Devil's Advocating something.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

Fuck. This is bad for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, Real time realization.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Okay. Secret turkey. Original secret turkey.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep.

[Monica Padman]

Lily, who's here right now as a.

[Dax Shepard]

Young, she witnessed the kerfuffle.

[Monica Padman]

She brought up secret turkey. She wanted us all to participate. And it was like, fuck this. This is Thanksgiving. We all gotta now do something.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And guess what?

[Dax Shepard]

It's the greatest.

[Monica Padman]

It's the best thing we've ever done.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

And we now it's a tradition that we won't miss.

[Dax Shepard]

And you do do. We've already beat this into the ground. But that disposition of I won't be peer pressured. Yeah, you do miss out on something.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you do. You do. Yeah, you do.

[Dax Shepard]

Sometimes your boobs are out on a Guadalupe River. And you were right. Sometimes you actually miss out on something. Gets up literally in front of Danny.

[Monica Padman]

Ricardo, stranded in front of an F1 driver.

[Dax Shepard]

It is 12 gorgeous.

[Monica Padman]

Choking some water up.

[Dax Shepard]

Pulling fish out of your fallen bathing suit.

[Monica Padman]

But ultimately, I did participate in secret Turkey. So it's like, I think I'm making the right decisions.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that one's different. A kid asked, so.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you got it.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta do it.

[Monica Padman]

You gotta do it.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta do it.

[Monica Padman]

All right, well, that's it. Let's do some facts. Okay. Now this epi. Riz. Oh, simulation.

[Dax Shepard]

Damn.

[Monica Padman]

So interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

So interesting. I was a little more combative than normal, as I recall.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you. You were.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I felt real defensive of the people that didn't get good luck in life.

[Monica Padman]

He was so nice.

[Dax Shepard]

He was. I was. I. I felt bad that I had to push back, but I had to. I had to say, it's not fair. That can't be right for the dis.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Disadvantaged people I just wish you were nicer to him, but.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, because he was. He felt like your dad a little bit.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he did.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. But I gotta respect your. I gotta show respect to your dad and to him in the same way.

[Monica Padman]

I understand my best. I get it. Okay. I looked up the percentage of people who've tried shrooms. This says we estimated lifetime prevalence of psychedelic use by age category using data from a 20002010 US population survey of 57873 individuals age 12 years and older. There were approximately 32 million lifetime psychedelic users in the US in 2010, including 17% of people aged 21 to 64 years, 22% of males, and 12% females in that category. Rate of lifetime psychedelic use was greatest among people aged 30 to 40. 34. Total 20%, including 26% of males and 15% of females.

[Dax Shepard]

And we got to acknowledge that was 2010. They've gotten way more popular in the last five years.

[Monica Padman]

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Is the largest segment of the gaming industry, Mobile, like he said. Yes. Largest segment of the global gaming industry is indeed mobile gaming. It accounts for over half of the total gaming revenue, surpassing both console and PC gaming combined.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't do any of it.

[Monica Padman]

Me either.

[Dax Shepard]

My son was playing a lot of video games on his phone. I noticed. He likes them.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which one is his fave?

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't. I didn't ask. I just could tell it was a game.

[Monica Padman]

You didn't want to know because you don't. It's, like, hard because you got to monitor these sons on playing video games.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like, he's old enough now that I worry less, but. Yeah, I just was more interested in, like. Oh, he. Like, he likes those. That's. We don't. You don't have that in common.

[Monica Padman]

You don't want him to turn into adolescence.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't want him to go backwards. No. He's made such great strides.

[Monica Padman]

Adolescence, the show.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that too. I don't want him to kill anyone.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly. I looked up. Does Call of Duty have an iPad version? Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great.

[Monica Padman]

It does. Okay. What is Bitcoin today?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, it's high. We've rebounded.

[Monica Padman]

I think it's high. Yeah. 109,000. 101.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

That's 109,000.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that our peak so far since we've been reporting on this?

[Monica Padman]

It might be. It's up. It says 0.14% today, probably from yesterday.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

You are worried that we're jinxing it by saying it. And I think you might Be right. Because we haven't talked about it in a while, and now it's up.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So if you reported on the next fact check and it's down, we'll know, and we'll will be targets of crypto nerds. So we got to be careful.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. But I'm still going to do it, because I'm not scared.

[Dax Shepard]

I saw Peter Thiel is announcing a new cryptocurrency.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, really?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, boy. Okay. Bitcoin pizza Remembrance Day is May 22. It marks the anniversary of a day a Florida man paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas in the first Bitcoin transaction.

[Dax Shepard]

10,000?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. I'll do it. I won't ask you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, do it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna do it. Oh, wow. It gives me a number. It doesn't even. 1.09. E. 9. Does that mean zeros? I'm gonna divide that by 10. Yeah. Okay, so it's $1.09 billion.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

For a pizza. Oh, that's heartbreaking. 109 billion.

[Monica Padman]

That's insane.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm intrigued, too, by this guy who. He's remained anonymous, but the guy who created bitcoin, who has a ton of it, but it's unknown, but someone thinks he's in the $150 billion range.

[Monica Padman]

Are you allowed to be unknown when you're, like, amassing that kind of money? That feels wild.

[Dax Shepard]

You sure can. You can keep it nice and discreet. If I ever get $109 billion, you might not ever see me again. I'll keep. Keep it really discreet. Hey. Sorry. Well, you will, but not the real. Well, come on now. I'm talking about the real world.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you said you.

[Dax Shepard]

The. The. The informal you or whatever you.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. The more the royal you. The more this is the trajectory. The more money you get, you Dax. The less you see Monica.

[Dax Shepard]

No, that is not true. I've seen more of you with the more money. It's a fact. It's the exact opposite. The more I see you, the more money I make.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Oh, this was wild. He brought up fruit flies as an example of something. And while I was listening and editing, I was currently being swarmed by fruit flies.

[Rizwan Virk]

Ooh.

[Dax Shepard]

I think that's why they study them. They breed so fast.

[Monica Padman]

H. I'm in the middle. I. Oh, my God. It's because I'm eating more fruit, because fruit in the summer is so yummy. And obviously, I've been making all these peach galettes, but, man, do I have a fruit Fly issue. And that was sim. And then it was sim. That. It was sim.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, double sim. Sim squared. I will say I have gotten to eat crow over the years because I remember when I was in the Groundlings, Caitlyn's boyfriend, long term boyfriend at the time, was a scientist who studied fruit flies. And I remember thinking, what a boring thing to dedicate your life to studying this one tiny organism, the fruit fly. But half of the studies I've read since then, it's all work on fruit flies. They figure out almost everything they figure out on fruit flies. So then I've come to realize, no, he was at the epicenter, the white hot epicenter of what you'd want to study as a scientist.

[Monica Padman]

I hope he's listening and he receives this apology.

[Dax Shepard]

Jude, shout out. You were right, I was wrong. Fruit flies are the future and the past.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, okay. I just wanted to do a couple more. There were a couple more Mandela effects that I hadn't heard of. Have we talked about Mr. Monopoly wearing a monocle?

[Dax Shepard]

And he does, right? Or he doesn't? He doesn't, but I think he does.

[Monica Padman]

Me too. Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Also, does the Fruit of the Loom logo pour out of a cornucopia?

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I think that. But it's not true.

[Monica Padman]

It's not true. It's not true.

[Dax Shepard]

Why do we all think these things? It doesn't make any sense.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Exactly. Well, Sim. What do you think the peanut butter is called? The, like, really popular brand of peanut butter, Jiff.

[Dax Shepard]

Do people think it's called jiffy?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I don't have that one.

[Monica Padman]

Shockingly, I think this might be the craziest one. It's not. Luke, I am your father.

[Dax Shepard]

What?

[Monica Padman]

It's not. It's. No. I am your father.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I am your father. Luke, I am your father.

[Rizwan Virk]

Father.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

Luke, I am your father is in. Great. That it's so. Zeitgeist.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, it's that.

[Monica Padman]

And it's not even real.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. If I were watching the movie and I heard that, I go, why did they change this? They edited it after the fact.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Same with Mirror, mirror on the wall. It's not mirror, mirror on the wall.

[Dax Shepard]

What is it?

[Monica Padman]

It's magic mirror on the wall.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's garbage. No, it's definitely Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the. The fairest of them all.

[Monica Padman]

But it's not.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not. But it's not.

[Monica Padman]

I think they're so fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Spanker. But Cherry have to spank these bad boys. Butts cherry red. You need to watch more. Steve Br. Money.

[Monica Padman]

Where'd that come from?

[Dax Shepard]

Steve Bru.

[Monica Padman]

Sn.

[Dax Shepard]

It's about whores.

[Monica Padman]

He is so funny. All right, well, that's it for us.

[Dax Shepard]

Did it make you believe more or less in the sim this episode? Because I have to say, I hate to say this because I was forced to take that position. I kind of convinced myself a little more of it. I believe less in it than I did. I just can't get over that point that there's a vast disparity in how this stuff spread out.

[Monica Padman]

I understand, understand that. But like, what? The point he was making, which I did very much understand, is like, but that is the reality of life. The reality of life is some people, whether it's a sim, whether it's God, whether it's just the way the cookie crumbles, people, there is a disparity.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that would to me would point to that there is only reality. Because if there's a God and God created disparity, what kind of God is this? And if there's a SIM that created this great disparity, what kind of sim is that? You have to reject any systems that are being proposed to you where it justifies tons of people got the short end of the stick because they'll be rewarded later. That's like such a cop out for a system to me.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, I agree with that. I understand that it can get slippery into like, well, this is just the way it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Or you go, well, you're fake. And that just to me seems like that's bad. The ultimate insult on top of everything else is like, I have to say you're fake to accept my good fortune.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And I. But that's looking at it in a very, I think, black and white lens. Whereas I think he is just. He's kind of saying it's an explanation amongst all these other explanations that exist for reality. For reality. Yeah. And the space time stuff is very interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, but isn't it interesting? We just kind of inherently don't trust reality like that. Our hunch from the beginning has been like, well, no, this must have been created by God, or this must, you know, or there must be punishment and rewards coming later. Or this has all been designed by a computer. It's just interesting that we have such a suspicion about our reality as a baseline.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Because life is wild, weird. We don't really have control over it. So we're all looking for answers.

[Dax Shepard]

I still love this topic.

[Monica Padman]

Me too. I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to be on record saying, I really love the topic, even though I was so harsh on it. Still so fun.

[Monica Padman]

Fun topic. All right.

[Rizwan Virk]

All right.

[Dax Shepard]

I love you.

[Monica Padman]

That's it. Love you. Bye Bye.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.