How Quantum Physics, Religion, & NDEs are Linked By A Theory That’s Growing in Popularity. MIT Scientist Explains Simulation Theory.

Summary

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Mayim Bialik's Breakdown: How Quantum Physics, Religion, & NDEs are Linked By A Theory That’s Growing in Popularity - MIT Scientist Explains Simulation Theory

Date: September 2, 2025
Host(s): Mayim Bialik, Jonathan Cohen
Guest: Dr. Rizwan Virk (MIT scientist, video game pioneer, author of "The Simulation Hypothesis")

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the provocative intersections of quantum physics, consciousness, spirituality, psychic phenomena, and near-death experiences—all through the lens of Simulation Theory. Mayim, Jonathan, and expert guest Dr. Rizwan Virk explore whether reality itself is a kind of video game-like simulation, how this idea resonates across ancient traditions and modern science, and what it means for understanding consciousness, suffering, and the possibility of clues or "glitches" in our lived experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Rizwan Virk’s Journey: Health Crisis as an Initiation

• Dr. Virk shares how a borderline heart attack and subsequent surgeries became the turning point for shifting his life’s focus from Silicon Valley entrepreneurship to writing and exploring consciousness.
  • [06:48] Rizwan: "Every time I tried to ignore that message... I would end up back in the hospital... It was a forced course correction."
• He describes receiving "visions" during hypnagogic, semi-conscious states that featured monks by an alpine lake, showing him life paths and urging him to write, rather than pursue a standard post-tech career.

2. Simulation Theory: Bridging Science and Spirituality

• Simulation Theory postulates that we exist within a complex information-based simulation, analogous to advanced video games.
  • [21:19] Rizwan: “It provides a bridge between a techno-scientific view of the world... and a mystical or spiritual view of the world.”
• The theory resonates with ancient notions of “maya” (illusion), soul forgetfulness at birth, and notions from Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and even Judaism (such as the angel touching your lips so you forget your pre-birth knowledge).

3. Core Propositions of Simulation Theory

• Dr. Virk outlines four core propositions:
  1. The world is fundamentally made of information, not just matter (it from bit).
  2. Information is constantly computed (rendered).
  3. A rendering engine displays only what’s necessary for the “player” (parallels to the quantum observer effect).
  4. All of this is a purposeful hoax or illusion, echoing ancient religious concepts.
  • [25:18] Rizwan: “You don’t have to believe all those propositions, but it’s useful to talk about each of those... rather than either embracing it fully or dismissing it fully.”

4. Quantum Physics Parallels

• Observer Effect & Rendering: Just like a video game renders only what the player sees, quantum physics shows particles exist in "superposition" until observed.
  • [46:27] Mayim: “So in World of Warcraft, if your avatar is looking this way... but another player enters... you have a completely different proscenium that I’m then part of.”
• Scientific consensus is shifting toward the primacy of information in physics.

5. Life as a Spiritual/Video Game Quest

• The gaming metaphor: Life’s challenges are likened to quests within a game, tailored to one's skill level to maximize growth.
  • [35:17] Mayim: “How does my life change if I conceive of the fact that this may be a simulation?”
  • [36:02] Rizwan: “You may have turned your difficulty level up higher.”
• Multilayer quests and avatars: The simulation adapts experiences, presenting “clues” (synchronicities, obstacles) to nudge players along planned story arcs.

6. Glitches, the Mandela Effect, and Alternate Timelines

• Mandela Effect: Divergent memories shared by groups imply possible parallel timelines or a simulation being run multiple times with different variables.
  • [52:06] Mayim: “Luke, I am your father... That’s not what he said.”
  • [53:00] Mayim: “Mirror, mirror on the wall... Apparently people remember that as ‘magic mirror on the wall.’ That just sounds dorky. What do you remember?”
• Dr. Virk suggests simulation theory provides a unique explanation for these shared misrememberings, seeing them as artifacts of multiple or altered runs of reality.

7. Precognitive Dreams & Synchronicity

• Dr. Virk recounts a dream about a competitor that, upon waking, proved to be linked to a real-world event, suggesting information can leak from "the future" or broader awareness.
  • [59:16] Rizwan: “Normally if it was just garbage collection, the dream would happen after I had heard of it. So it fits into that area of precognitive dreams.”
• Mayim and Jonathan discuss whether such events are expanded capacities of the player or true evidence of a simulated realm; the theme is to take these phenomena seriously as possible clues rather than to instantly dismiss them.

8. Near-Death Experiences and the Life Review

• NDEs often feature a “holographic review” of life from one’s own and others’ perspectives.
  • [68:19] Rizwan: “He got to see what it was like to be shot and killed by himself... seeing what happens to that black guy’s wife and children after he was killed—so you start to see the effects of your actions.”
• Dr. Virk connects this to video game session replays, suggesting all life events are recorded and can be replayed or reviewed beyond the current experience, reflecting similar themes in religious traditions (e.g., angels recording deeds).

9. Updating Ancient Metaphors

• Ancient religious texts use metaphors appropriate to their technological literacy; today, simulation and video game metaphors may be more resonant and accurate.
  • [72:14] Mayim: “And it's a kabbalistic concept as well.”

10. Plato’s Cave & The Nature of Reality

• Dr. Virk aligns Plato’s cave allegory, mystical experiences, and simulation theory: most people only see “shadows,” and those who glimpse beyond may struggle to communicate the wider reality to others.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [16:41] Dr. Rizwan Virk: “I don’t know that I would still be alive today if I didn’t fulfill the wishes of my soul.”
• [21:19] Dr. Rizwan Virk: “It also, I think, provides a bridge... between a techno-scientific view of the world... and a mystical or spiritual view of the world”
• [31:26] Dr. Rizwan Virk: “In almost every tradition, ancient traditions, there is this idea of forgetfulness that happens as you incarnate... Sufi traditions... the 70,000 veils between you and ultimate reality.”
• [35:17] Mayim Bialik: “How does my life change if I conceive of the fact that this may be a simulation?”
• [36:02] Dr. Rizwan Virk (game challenge metaphor): “You may have turned your difficulty level up higher.”
• [41:29] Dr. Rizwan Virk: “There are, you know, different scientific groups trying to look for evidence... I laid it out as a series of problems, propositions... How would you test that?”
• [68:11] Mayim Bialik: “We had a recent NDE survivor and she said she could feel the entire pain of everyone around her, not just how it impacted her, but what they were experiencing.”
• [73:45] Dr. Rizwan Virk: “The fourth proposition is this whole thing is a kind of purposeful hoax... it's like we have a game that we were playing together... cross the veil of forgetfulness and get into it.”

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–07:55 – Dr. Virk’s background, health crisis, visions, and shift in life path.
• 15:32–19:59 – Course corrections in life, clues and synchronicities, the “writer’s room” metaphor.
• 21:19–27:20 – Four core propositions of simulation theory, bridging science and spirituality.
• 28:32–32:03 – Video game technology as metaphor for immersive reality, observer effect.
• 35:02–39:47 – Life as a quest/game, choosing challenges and quests in advance, multiplayer elements.
• 41:29–50:38 – Glitches and the Mandela Effect; how to test for simulated reality.
• 53:11–59:16 – Mnemonic effects, neural nets vs. brains, precognition and dream clues.
• 63:36–68:47 – NDEs and the life review as evidence for information recording and revisiting.
• 72:12–73:45 – Updating metaphors (film, Kabbalah), Plato’s cave, simulation as purposeful illusion.

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Episode Wrap-up and What’s Next

The episode concludes with a preview of Part Two, where the team will tackle questions about what (or who) might be "behind" the simulation, implications for God, connections to aliens and future humans, and the role of love as a purpose within (or beyond) the simulation.

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Listen for If:

• You are fascinated by the intersection of consciousness studies, quantum physics, and spirituality.
• You’re curious about Simulation Theory as both a scientific and mystical framework.
• You wonder about the nature of deja vu, precognitive dreams, or the Mandela Effect.
• You love rich, metaphor-driven explanations that update ancient spiritual ideas for a technological age.

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For more, check out Dr. Rizwan Virk’s book, "The Simulation Hypothesis," and stay tuned for Part Two of this discussion.

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Transcript

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Is it possible that we would be able to build something so immersive that it was like the Matrix? We might be in some kind of simulated or false reality. I started to research quantum physics, different religions. Basically we're inside something like a massively multiplayer online role playing game. Dr. Rizwan Virk is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, video game pioneer and best selling author.

[Mayim Bialik]

Changing our understanding of how reality really works.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

There's a lot of suffering in this world. The financial situation, relationship issues, physical health issues, emotional abuse. It can be a comforting thought to think that we can get over this particular challenge. And maybe even my player has had a hand in choosing this. And that writer's room is coming up with, okay, what do we need to throw at this character in order to get them to get to the storyline that we had planned out for the whole season?

[Mayim Bialik]

When we're in the game, we're not aware that we're in the game.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

In almost every tradition, there is this idea of forgetfulness that happens as you incarnate. It's a really interesting way to talk about this idea of multiple timelines, the Mandela effect. I used to just dismiss it as bad memory. When you run a simulation, you often run it more than once. And when you do, you change variables. Small changes can cause big changes down the road or lots of little changes.

[Mayim Bialik]

Long story short, this might be a video game.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

The scientific community, they'll dismiss God, religion. NDEs aren't really real. And yet those of us who've talked to people who've had NDEs know that there's something there.

[Jonathan Cohen]

If the simulation is processing constantly, then it wants to reveal itself.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It's almost a way to encourage the

[Mayim Bialik]

awakening process that brings into question who's behind the simulation. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

[Mayim Bialik]

And welcome to our breakdown. We're going to be talking today about something that I've been nervous to talk about because I didn't know how it could apply to our actual lives, our decision making, our purpose. We're talking about simulation theory today, but we're talking about it in a very, very specific way that is incredibly global.

[Jonathan Cohen]

There could be something across every spiritual and religious tradition that is giving us signs and information that we need to know now.

[Mayim Bialik]

And it all gets connected through a very, very sophisticated and scientific and mystical analysis of simulation theory. There's no better person to do this with than Dr. Rizwan Virk, author of the Simulation Hypothesis. The second edition just came out. He's a graduate of MIT and Stanford. Just got his PhD. He's an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist. He's lived in the world of Silicon Valley video game pioneering. But he also has taken a deep dive into the mystical cultural and anthropological influences that have created the reality that we all live in. And the simulation hypothesis is a fascinating approach to understanding the messages that we might be getting about what is meant for us, including an entirely new way to approach challenges and really assess what is possible for. You were especially excited to talk about this because the notion of entanglement, there was a Nobel Prize in physics that was awarded in 2022 for entangled photons and the. The notion of particles being linked. The simulation hypothesis kind of expands that out. And what Dr. Virg's going to do is he's going to pull in all of this information and research from so many different religious traditions, mystical traditions, transcendental experiences. We're going to talk about NDEs, and all of it relates to a notion of a really kind of cosmic entanglement that can be approached from the lens of AI and really technological advances that we're all actively living and testing out. So is it a simulation? He's going to explain why it might be. We're very excited to have Dr. Rizwan Verkh in the podcast studio, in the breakdown studio.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Welcome.

[Mayim Bialik]

Break it down.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Thanks for having me here. Great to meet you in person.

[Mayim Bialik]

Were one of the first to call you doctor, correct?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

That's right. I just defended my PhD dissertation a few months ago, and I don't technically have the diploma yet, but in the U.S. you can call someone doctor.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's right. The second you hand it in. That's right, yep. So you were telling us that this book came about as part of kind of a shift in your health status. What was the clinical diagnosis that you were given?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It was a borderline heart attack, meaning they weren't sure, but basically I had to have heart surgery because of clogged arteries. And so this obviously set me back significantly. And they said, oh, it'll just take a couple months. You'll be back on your feet, everything will be fine, like they often do. And turns out that wasn't the case. Six years later, I'd say I'm still recovering, but it caused a massive shift in my priorities in life. And it was during that time afterwards that I that I started to try to jump back into my Silicon Valley activities, which is what I'd been doing for the past decade before that, where I had a video game company, had sold it then I was an investor in different Video game companies. I was actually at MIT teaching a startup program for video game companies at the MIT Game Lab, which is part of the Media Lab. And at that point I had this realization that I had a life plan that I had already laid out. And in fact, if you had asked me in high school, what was I going to do with my life, I'd say, well, I'm going to be a softer entrepreneur, and then I'm going to become a writer when I get older. And at the time, I thought older was like 28. You know, that's like old when you're in high school. But I was actually 48 when this happened. And I clearly got the message through a series of visions while I was recovering and through a series of incidents that I was supposed to get busy with the second part of my life plan, which was to be a writer. And every time I tried to ignore that message, I call them clues that are coming into us in the simulation from the life we may have planned for ourselves. I would end up back in the hospital, and then I ended up having to get a stent and then having to get another stent. And yet I had just enough energy during those nine months to take a Uber to Starbucks. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time. I was supposed to return to California, but I couldn't at the end of the summer because, you know, I didn't want to be too far away from the doctors at that point because there were complications. But I had enough energy to go to Starbucks for a few hours a day and to write on my laptop. And that gave me energy. It actually made me happy. And that's how I knew, okay, this is something that I've been wanting to do for a while. It's not that I hadn't written anything before. I had written a couple of books over nine years. I had written two books over nine years, but. But then in this case, I finished two books in nine months. So in a way, the book itself was a summary of the things that I had been exploring throughout my career, which started in technology. As an entrepreneur, I was also quite interested in quantum physics. But I also was living a bit of a double life where I used to go out, like, I'd be running a company during the day, and then I'd go out and explore different aspects of consciousness in the evenings or on the weekends, where I'd go to, like, the Monroe Institute, which does out of body experiences, or shamanic journeying, not necessarily with psychedelics, but with drums, lucid dreaming. So I'd be exploring all of these different things, but they were separate from my day job. Although there was a lot of intersection. And the first book I ever wrote was called Zen Entrepreneurship, which was a little bit about how that intersection happened. But it was really when I wrote this book that I was able to bring all of these threads together with the simulation.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, and that's very, it's very clear. And we kind of want to get into every component of what you just talked about. We want to talk about sort of the gaming and game aspect of it. We do want to get into the quantum physics of it. And then obviously the spirituality, the mysticism and all those things. But I wonder if you can just. You mentioned the word visions. What was your experience of having a vision of kind of what your life was supposed to look like? Did it come in a dream state? Did it come in a meditative state? How did, how would you distinguish a vision from, I don't know, imagining something?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Sure. Well, so, you know, there's dreams and then there's dreams. You know, if you look at the history of dreams, it's probably a subject that's been written about more than any other in human history. Just because everybody dreams pretty much, you know, unless you have certain conditions. But for the most part, everybody dreams. And it's really the yogis and the mystics who have define different gradations and types of dreams. So one of the things I talk about in the book is Tibetan dream yoga where you are trying to wake up inside a dream, what we would call lucid dreaming today. But the point is to recognize it. And then they also say you have ordinary karmic trace dreams, which are just dreams that are regurgitating stuff you saw during the day. Maybe there was something on TV that you saw that shows up in your dreams. But then there are clear dreams. And in different shamanic traditions there's this idea of big visions or big dreams that you might have within the Native American traditions, for example. And so in my case, it happened. It wasn't a traditional near death experience because when I was out during the surgery, I didn't. I can't say what happened because I don't remember.

[Mayim Bialik]

You would have been the perfect person to have an nde like I want you to have one and then come back and be totally fine. But you're exactly the person that should have had one so that you could write an entire other chapter.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Absolutely. Well, I've talked to enough people about NDEs that I'm pretty familiar with the different stages that they Go through. For me, it was while I was recovering. And what would happen is I'd fade in and out of consciousness. And it was in that kind of hypnagogic state, if you will, that's kind of in between. And I knew that state a little bit because I had been doing this. I mentioned shamanic journeying using the drum. The point of the drum is more to get your breathing in a certain way. And there's kind of these signals that your body has as it's falling asleep, kind of. Also, when you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, there's like, certain clues. And maybe we all feel it slightly differently, but we can kind of recognize it. And in this case, I would recognize I was in that in between state. And I would start to see visions. And in these visions were these monks, Tibetan monks, in a building by an alpine lake. Now, later I realized that was also a image that was created personally for me because I had spent a lot of time studying that tradition. That wasn't necessarily what they were. They weren't actually Tibetan monks living by an alpine lake. Because later I was able to expand and explore the vision and see, oh, there are all kinds of buildings in different places that have been set up for different people. I call it kind of the Monks at the Borderlands. But during that time, they were trying to heal me. But it was in conversations with them that I started to see. They started to show me different paths that I might have taken in this lifetime. Kind of like with the chessboard. So if you and I were sitting here with a chessboard and we turned it diagonally and each choice. Yeah, I have a graph like that in the book, which is interesting. But they were kind of showing me, you know, different places. And I can't say I remember everything that happened during that time, because just like with dreams, they're hard to remember after a few minutes. But it was clear to me from the conversations that they were saying, write. That's what you're supposed to be doing. You're supposed to be writing, and now you'll have the time and energy to write. Which is what they didn't say was I didn't have the time or the energy to do anything else at that point. But it was like what certain shamanic traditions might call a wish of the soul, if you will. So that's how I interpreted it. And that's when I wrote, as I said, the first edition of this book. But also I decided to pull back from being so heavily involved day to day in the business of making money, which really Silicon Valley is about technology, but day to day it's the business of making money using technology. And I had kind of lived that life for a while. And every time even since then, as I thought of getting back in. My plan originally was to create a big venture capital fund. That's kind of what you do after you sell your company. You start to become an investor and then maybe you raise a big venture capital fund. But then I realized that that was just part of the conditioning that I had in Silicon Valley. Just like I'm sure here in Hollywood, there are certain conditioning and certain goals. You got this kind of group think going on or people I know in the financial industry. You know, they've got their little hierarchy of what they're supposed to do next. And I realized that that was maybe the standard path, but that wasn't the path for me.

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

I'm fascinated by the fact that every time you tried to go back to the life that you had been previously living, your body shut down and gave you a clear signal and you ended up back in the hospital.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, and for me, I call this a course correction. Right. It's a forced course correction. And it's almost as if we One of the things that I talk about in the book is this idea of NPCs versus RPGs. We can talk more about that later. But AI is conditioned off of what it's been trained off of today, which are like LLMs, large language models. And so you could say that there's a part of me that was trained by the experiences that I've had in this life, which were, in my case, there was technology in Silicon Valley and all of those types of experiences. And my conscious mind was kind of reacting in the same way that an LLM like chatgpt might what should I do next? And it would prompt you based upon that. But there was this other element that was saying to me, you're on the wrong track now. You weren't necessarily before because you got what you needed out of that experience and now it's time to do something else. And so my body was forcing this course correction because if it didn't happen, I would probably have Jumped back in to the game industry and would probably.

[Mayim Bialik]

Would you have died?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

I may have, actually.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, like, I'm being serious.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

No, and I'm being serious, too. I don't know that I would still be alive today if I didn't fulfill the wishes of my soul to.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's. There's the quote of the episode that's unbelievable.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So, I mean, that's the theory behind this, of course, which I'm a full believer in, is that we're all here for some purpose and that it's our job to uncover that purpose along the way. And often huge amounts of stress or physical breakdown is a sign that we aren't getting the messages that are guiding us to how it is that we're supposed to show up for the reasons that we're supposed to be here.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right? Yes. And I think those are what I like to call the strongest clues. Like if we think of our life as a treasure hunt, which is one of the metaphors I like to use sometimes. And basically, if you think of an Indiana Jones film like Raiders of the Lost Ark, he doesn't get the whole map to the Ark of the Covenant right away. What he gets is a clue, and he follows that clue and that takes him to the next clue. But sometimes he has to back up because he interpreted the clue wrong. And so I almost view these as clues while we're here for our conscious mind. But in this case, it was a major clue or a massive clue, and one that couldn't be ignored. Usually we can ignore. Ordinary clues are like synchronicities where you think of something and then there's something that happens in the world that is related to what you thought internally. So it's what Jung called an acausal connection between an internal and an external event. Even that, I think that ties into my ideas of simulation theory because there's something called a technological synchronicity. It was a term I got from, I think, Diana Pasulka and Jacques Vallee. But the basic idea is that there's maybe an information substrate that's creating situations for you based upon what needs to happen next in the gaming world. We'd call it a question engine. But like, the other day I was shopping for a backpack online and a specific brand of backpack, and I almost bought it, but I decided to hold off. And then later I was on the phone and. And there's an ad on Facebook for that exact backpack. Now, if I knew nothing about computers, I would say, look, these two things are completely unrelated. It's like Magic. It knew what I was thinking.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's what my mother says.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Mayim Bialik]

Like literally every day I get a text like that.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. But if, you know, there's an information substrate behind the scenes. And in fact, I was in the advertising industry and we used to call it registering your intent in a database. And then later the database would link it. But then something has to create that ad based upon what was there. So normally clues are created for us, I think, based upon intentions or other ideas or things that are going on. I almost view it as if there's a part of us that's watching this, like a writer's room, if you will. The player, and we're the characters in the game, the avatars, and that writer's room is coming up with, okay, what do we need to throw at this person next or this character in order to get them to get to the storyline that we had planned out for the whole season?

[Jonathan Cohen]

So in many ways, our advances in technology are simply mirrors of the underlying construct and rule structure of the larger universe that has created this thing that we're all in.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It could be, yes. I mean, that's one of the things that I'm saying is that that's very. It could be very much so.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's a lot of presuppositions that one needs to sort of take into account when we talk about something that, to be quite frank with you, I didn't want to talk about, and I forced her. So Jonathan's been talking about simulation theory for years. And to be honest, it was something that I really just sort of like, kept pushing away. It felt abstract, which it is. You know, it felt out of reach, which it is. And it felt presents a problem that has no kind of solution except a version of mental masturbation. And many of us don't like to roam in there. Right. And so I kind of, you know, I sort of kept pushing it aside. But what I found in your book is a really, really intricate and complicated and scientifically based conversation about possibility, about probability, and about kind of potential. And it intrigued me. And so we're very excited to kind of get to talk to you about many aspects of simulation theory. But the first thing I'm gonna ask you is why should we care? Why should we engage in these kinds of conversations?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Well, you know, the simulation hypothesis, I found over time as I've explored this rabbit hole and it went deeper and deeper, tends to touch on a lot of different disciplines. Like, I taught a course at ASU about this topic, and the title of the course was simulation theory, but it was science fiction, technology, religion and philosophy. And so it was about as interdisciplinary a course as you can get. Usually it's hard to do courses in university because you have to house it in one department or another, and that has to be the key. But because of that, I found it also touches on many aspects of human experience. It also, I think, provides a bridge. And this is actually one of the motivations that I had to write this book was it provides a bridge between a techno scientific view of the world, which many of us in academia have, and certainly many of us in Silicon Valley have as well, and a mystical or spiritual view of the world, which many people in the general public, I mean, you know, 70% of people believe there's more out there than just this. And so by using the simulation hypothesis as a techno scientific narrative and, or possibility, as you just said, we can build a bridge between these two worlds. What happens often now is that within the scientific community they'll dismiss all this stuff. Yeah, God, religion doesn't really exist. You know, none of that's real. And NDEs aren't really real. And yet those of us who've talked to people who have had NDEs know that there's something there. And if a thousand people have been to China, they might all describe it slightly differently, but you can kind of intuit that there is some underlying, you know, place called China. Maybe some people in the mountains, maybe some people went down, you know, to Shanghai near the coast. So they might have seen slightly different things. But it's similar enough that it's worth not dismissing it more than that. I found that simulation theory, for particularly younger generations, is a way to cut and connect different religious faiths as well. You know, my family is Pakistani, and of course you have Pakistan and India, you know, that are always kind of going at it with each other. And the whole separation happened primarily because of religion and people's ambitions. And, you know, long story there, but I found that using this metaphor was a way to connect the younger generations of different faiths as well, to say, once again, what if all of these faiths are saying something that is ontologically true, but you can't take it literally because all these texts were written thousands of years ago. So they had to use language that would have been understandable in the culture of the time and with the technology of the time? And that's where I think it's a useful metaphor. On the scientific side, there's also this idea, one of the propositions there's like Four or five propositions. I don't think I spell them out so much in the book, although I mentioned them, which make up the simulation hypothesis. And the first is that the world consists of information, not physical. We can talk more about that. The second is that information gets computed. And there's a number of scientists who've talked about that, like Stephen Wolfram and many others. So those are like, you know. The third is that it gets rendered for us somehow. And it looks like this table is physical. It looks like we're all here physical. So there is a rendering engine like a video game. And then finally, the fourth proposition is that all of this is some kind of purposeful hoax which gets into like the idea of illusion, Maya, Buddhism and Hinduism. So you don't have to believe all those propositions, but it's useful to talk about each of those, I think, rather than either embracing it fully or dismissing it fully. And I think in the book I try to do that. I try to talk through from a technoscientific lens.

[Mayim Bialik]

So what I'm hearing is that simulation theory has the potential to unite the world in peace, love and harmony.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Absolutely. There you go. Nice summary.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It could also cut across disciplines and help people understand what has been previously talked about in silos, which doesn't give us an accurate portrait of physics. It doesn't give us an accurate portrait of religion, because you can dismiss each of these or only have, you know, half or quarter views. We like to also connect what we're hearing from different guests on similar topics in similar areas. If I go through the four propositions, information exists and information gets computed. You know, Thomas Campbell, in our episode with him, talks about consciousness as a data stream.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, he's talking about a theory of everything, which essentially this is another version of a theory of everything.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, absolutely. And I know Tom Campbell and you know, he invited me to speak at his conference back in Huntsville. He's great. And he's been working on, you know, these ideas longer, longer than most people, I think. But yeah, I mean, you can connect the ideas of a lot of different people into each of these, you know, different propositions. My favorite physicist of the 20th century was a guy named John Wheeler. And he not only was the supervisor for Richard Feynman, Nobel prize winning physicist, as well as Hugh Everett, who came up with this idea of the multiverse, but he also had lots of interesting thought experiments and towards the end of his life he came up with this proposition it from bit. And what he said was, when you try to look for this thing Called a particle. Even the word particle, it makes it seem like it's a solid object, but yet we know everything is 99, 0.9% empty space. And he says when you keep looking down, like with those Russian nested dolls, you go all the way down. He said, the only thing that's down there to define one particle versus another is a series of properties and a series of answers to yes, no questions. And that's basically bits. That one bit is zero or one. And he said basically that everything is made up of bits of information. And so that ties to that first level of the world, the physical world, being information.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We also talk a lot about how people interact with consciousness, both to help them navigate these clues in their life using intuition. We talk a lot about the science of precognition and opening up people's understanding that there can be more, whether that's more taking them, helping them pursue their path, getting out of whatever emotional construct they're in, whether it be even very practically in getting ahead in life and making sure that they have some sort of security and stability. So you know what? I like this idea of information being rendered for us, because then that, to me, speaks to our consciousness, and that if it's being rendered for us, can we participate in the interpretation of that

[Mayim Bialik]

rendering before we even kind of, like, get into more specifics? I feel like there's this question that we haven't given you the opportunity to answer and talk about. So there's so much in this book and so much to what you do. But long story short, this might be a video game, and I'm supposed to think about this like, I'm taking the red pill now.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, my doorway to this idea was, in fact, because I was in the video game industry. I visited a company in Marin, and they're like, oh, here, try this on. And they put on a virtual reality headset, and they had built a sports game, a ping pong game. And I started to play this game, and this was like a bulky headset. And we used to call it a toaster on your face. That's how big it was. And there were wires coming from the ceiling. And the graphics were terrible. So there was no mistaking that here I am inside a video game. But what happened was that the physics engine was so good, it was so responsive, that it fooled my brain for an instant and my body into thinking I was playing a real game of table tennis. So much so that I tried to put the paddle on the table and I tried to lean against the table, just like I might do at the end of a game of table tennis.

[Mayim Bialik]

Were you drunk?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

No, I was not. I was fully awake. Now, this was only for an instant. So what happened was the controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over and I did a double take. That's what happened. And then I realized, oh, this technology of immersive video games has the potential to become fully immersive at some point.

[Mayim Bialik]

And what you're talking is about an altered state of consciousness, basically meaning your. Your ability to maintain your consciousness in your corporal being is temporarily suspended.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right. Because of the sense impressions that are coming in and you take those to be real. And that, of course, reminded me of the Matrix, which is the most popular media representation.

[Mayim Bialik]

I've seen it 86 times.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

86 times, great. But we just did a screening in Boston at an independent theater, and I'll be probably doing one in Phoenix soon as well, where I talk a little bit about the idea and then we end up watching the movie. But really, I began to ask myself, is it possible that we would be able to build something so immersive in the future that it was like the Matrix? That's what got me to this idea of the simulation point, which we can talk more about as well. But that's what got me into it as I this was my background in video games. And then I started to pull in, I started to research quantum physics even further with the observer effect. And then I started to research what different religions were saying. And then I started to research what nd years were saying. And I realized, oh, they're all saying the same thing, which is basically that we're inside something like a video game, basically a massively multiplayer online role playing game where we are individual characters in the game. And then I realized there's two versions of this idea. There's the NPC version, which scares people because in that version everyone is just AI characters. And then there's the RPG version, the role playing game version where we actually exist outside of the game as a player. And then inside the game we have a body which is our avatar.

[Mayim Bialik]

And when we're in the game, we're not aware that we're in the game because we're just in the game.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right. If you remember, in the Matrix, they put in the brain computer interface, or you can think of the virtual reality headset. In almost every tradition, ancient traditions, there is this idea of forgetfulness that happens as you incarnate. And the Greeks have Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, that you have to Cross. In the Chinese traditions, you have Meng Po, the goddess of forgetfulness, and she brews the tea of forgetfulness that you drink. And within the Sufi traditions, you have the 70,000 veils between you and ultimate reality, between you and God. And so there's this idea of forgetfulness.

[Mayim Bialik]

In Judaism, we have Lilith who an angel places their finger here. So you forget everything you learned in the womb.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

That's good, because I've been looking for what is the Jewish equivalent.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, I'm happy to fill you all in.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's great. Because part of where I ended up was to realize that these ancient stories, I mean, they weren't trying to say necessarily that there's one angel named Lilith who goes to every single 7 billion babies, but it's more like a function. The angel is more like a function that gets computed, for lack of a better term, or that runs like a subroutine on every person. And that function in this case is the function of forgetfulness. And so many of the angel stories, and even like the minor gods in the Hindu pantheon, they're describing a function or a metaphor more than an actual physical being of a specific angel. Otherwise you'd have to have billions of. But like my name, Rizwan, actually is the Islamic equivalent of St. Peter. And so again, we have it in both of these, you know, the world's two largest religions, Christianity and Islam, you have this idea of an angel that sits at the gate of heaven. I don't think they meant there's an actual one person.

[Mayim Bialik]

There's so many good jokes about what the angel angel says when you get there. Like, I thought that's what it's for.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

That's really what it's for. Absolutely. But it's. You have to put it into a language that the people of the time would understand.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sure.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And so they would understand the idea of an angel because it's sort of easier to personify that if mind biox

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Mayim Bialik]

We're not just thinking for thinking's sake, which I love doing. How does my life change if I conceive of the fact that this may be a simulation?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Well, that's a good question. And some people say not at all. But I actually find it an interesting way to think about challenges in life. So coming out of the video game industry, there's actually a rule that was put forth by a guy named Nolan Bushnell who was the founder of Atari. So we're going back, way back when I was a kid. Those are the games I used to play, like the Atari. And it was more like a rule of thumb. It wasn't a rule per se, and it was make the game easy to play but difficult to master. Because if it's easy to master, you're going to stop playing it. You're going to get bored with it. If it's too difficult, you're also going to get bored with it. And so you have to kind of tailor the game to the difficulty level of the player.

[Mayim Bialik]

My life is too difficult. I would like out.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. You may have turned your difficulty level up higher.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yes, the God I believe in has cranked it way up.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. And so by viewing life as a series of challenges and quests. So the way we design video games now is you have this kind of a quest map and achievements, set of achievements. They guide you through the storyline. You still have the ability to make choices. Like if we think of like when I was a Kid, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons, which has had a resurgence because of Stranger Things in the last decade or so. But there you have a character sheet. You kind of roll the dice, but, you know, you do make certain choices of. This is the race, it's an elf. And this is the profession. A thief, a warrior, a wizard. And you choose the adventure you're gonna go on. So you have a storyline, but you also have a lot of little bits of randomness. You have, like, you know, some people have more charisma, some people have more strength. Some people have different physical characteristics. Some people have weird combinations.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's like, I remember lyrics, but not where I put my keys. There you go.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

That's one of those attributes. It was between remembering keys and lyrics.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yours was, sometimes I cast spells and he thinks I'm a witch. Other times I can't open the oven.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But so with that character selection, I think it's an interesting point. You get these quirks, but you also have a series of challenges. And so when we have challenges in our lives, like I had with this health crisis that actually got me to actually go ahead and finish writing this book, which I had thought of before, but I hadn't really put in the time to do originally back in the first edition, it gives us this ability to think, okay, well, if it's a quest, it's not going to be too difficult for me. It might seem extremely difficult, but at least I should be able to handle it. And maybe even my player has had a hand in choosing this, in actually saying, okay, we need to put you through this difficult situation. Why? Okay, that's. Now we're in metaphysical space. We can speculate on why, especially when people go through very difficult situations. And we go through financial situations, we go through relationship issues, we go through physical health issues, which is what I had in this case, emotional abuse, all kinds of issues. But it may also be that they're multiplayer quests. So the way that quests work in online mmorpgs is you choose and you say, okay, I'm gonna go on this quest. We're gonna raid the, you know, the Goblin King's Treasure at 8pm tonight, and we're gonna meet and we're gonna do it. And then we, you know, we may be having. There's a friends list. And in a friends list in a game, there's the visual world, which I call the rendered world. But then there's all this other stuff. There's like a little chat box on the side.

[Mayim Bialik]

The chat box is very noisy.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And you may be sending each other messages all the time.

[Mayim Bialik]

Think it's a child, but it's a grown man. That often happens too.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Well, there's that element as well. That was a challenging part of the game. Yep, part of the game. So anyway, by thinking of it as a game, not that you don't take it seriously, because obviously we go through, I mean, the nature of this world. There was a. A yogi who was one of the first to come over from India to the US about 100 years ago in 1920, named Swami Yogananda. He wrote Autobiography of Yogi. And he basically said, the nature of this world is not ceaseless joy, that there's a lot of suffering in this world. And so how do we deal with it? I think it can be a comforting thought to think that, hey, we can get over this particular challenge and we can continue on and it becomes part of our story. Maybe we can turn these bad situations into something positive for us moving forward.

[Mayim Bialik]

I think one of the things that I'm most interested in in terms of if we're gonna go down this thought pattern, right. If we're gonna go down this road of what if this is a simulation? Of course, the thing that I most am interested in is proof or evidence. Right. And it's hard not to use the Matrix as a reference for so many aspects of this conversation. But, you know, many of us kind of colloquially will say, like, oh, glitch in the Matrix.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right, right.

[Mayim Bialik]

You have deja vu, which, you know, as a neuroscience person, I have a little bit of a different perspective. But, you know, in terms of synchronicity, certain aspects that do get into the more mystical or spiritual. Right. For many people, it would be like, oh, it's meant to be. We're meant to be together. Whereas if you look at it from a simulation perspective, there is this notion of, is it a glitch? Can I find evidence that there are things that do not line up except in the framework of something that is somehow orchestrated, viewed, or manipulated by some sort of outside force? So I wonder, before we get to the source of that outside force, what are some of your favorite or preferred examples of kind of glitches in the Matrix or things that might give us, I don't know, a stronger indication that this is not simply a thought experiment, but one that actually might practically be something we should engage in?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Well, there's a lot of different ways to look for proof that we might be in some kind of a simulated or false reality. And there are, you know, different scientific Groups trying to look for evidence. And that's why I laid it out as a series of problems, propositions, because you can go to each of those propositions and then you can say, okay, how would you test that? The first is, is the world information or is it physical? And I think today most physicists will acknowledge that as not being a controversial statement, whereas 30, 40 years ago that would have been a controversial statement. In fact, I was at, in the UK last year at the University of Cambridge at their AI group and I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist and he, so I walked him through this and he goes, yeah, that's not controversial anymore. There's like a whole area of physics called digital physics, which, you know, when I was growing up, we learned about conservation of momentum, conservation of energy and others, conservation of information. So the first question is, is the universe physical or is it not? And I think there are indications that it may not be. This is useful when you get to the second proposition, which is that the universe is computing and what we think of time is really the processing of these instructions. Like if you were inside a simulation, you would end up having discrete discretized pixels that would define the physical world. And you might even have discrete time intervals, which is like the clock speed of a simulation. Now there's a guy named Steven Wolfram and he's put together this whole theory that basically time is operating of different types of computer programs. And he's been able to derive, you know, various aspects of relativity, for example, in this model where spacetime becomes an emergent property. And there's a lot of other people who have talked about space time not being fundamental, but it's emergent of some type of an information algorithm or compression. And for me this ties to the observer effect, which is one of the, the most interesting clues, if you will, that reality is not what it seems. And that we don't live in a Newtonian classical physics world, even though it appears that way on a day to day basis.

[Mayim Bialik]

The notion that matter exists as both a particle and a wave, and by a wave, meaning you can't know exactly where it is at any point in that wave, cause it's a wave function and when it acts as a particle, it has a discrete location. This is here. But the problem, I'm telling you, because, you know, the problem with this is that it's only once we observe something that we can actually know where it is. Which means when we're not observing it, it could be any number of places. So Schrodinger's cat At any given time that you put it in the box, it's alive or it's dead. The only time we know what it is is when we look at it. Except what happens when we weren't looking at it. This is the observer. Is that like. Did I do okay?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah. I think that was a good, good explanation of the observer effect. And the basic idea is common sense tells us that the cat. Like if we use Schrodinger's cat as it. As a way to explain the double slit experiment, where with double slits, you have two slits and the light going through, if it's a particle, it would have to go through one of those slits.

[Mayim Bialik]

So like a piece of paper, two slits. If it's a particle, it's just gonna. It's gonna be either here or it's gonna be there. Those are your choices.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But until then, we say it's in a state of.

[Mayim Bialik]

I'm your assistant right now.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Oh, yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah. We say it's in a state of superposition.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Which means there's two different positions and we don't know. And so the cat is both alive and dead. And this is what quantum mechanics is telling us, which is the opposite of common sense. Common sense tells us we just haven't looked in the box. But it's either alive or dead. It can't be both, but it's both. And so the rule seems to be only when there's an observer. And there's some debate on what type of observer it has to be, whether it has to be measurement or some type of interaction. But basically, when I looked at that, I thought of how we build video games. And the reason we can build MMORPGs today, like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or any of these three dimensional games, is because we don't have to render the whole world. We only have to render the part of the world that your character, your avatar, is in. Now, notice you guys both have sort of computers or tablets in front of you. And if this were a video game, your characters might be in the same room, but you're actually rendering it separately. And there's a server that's keeping track of things.

[Mayim Bialik]

Like, I have my perspective. Right, and you have your perspective. So in World of Warcraft, if your avatar is looking this way, that's your proscenium. Yes, but if another player enters, you have a completely different proscenium that I'm then part of.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right. But you don't have to render in a game like no man's sky, which is a game that has 18 quintillion planets. You don't have to render 17 quintillion or 17.999.

[Mayim Bialik]

It only matters if someone's there, if

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

someone's there to observe it. And there might be multiple observers, in which case we have something in computer science we call caching, which basically we store the information like C A C

[Mayim Bialik]

H E. C A C H E. Like clear cache.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's exactly what that is. It's because the browser is caching, meaning it's storing some value so that it doesn't have to go to the server to get them, it's got them locally. That's what a cache is. But it's used in all areas of computer science these days because there are certain operations that are more expensive, meaning they take more time, they take more cpu, they take more GPU rate. And so the name of the game in computer science is optimization. Whereas physicists kind of love big numbers, infinity. But we're always dealing with limited resources. And so if you try to build a game like Fortnite or World of warcraft in the 80s when I was a kid and we had like Commodore 64s and Apple IIS and, and we had eight bit Ataris and later Nintendo came about, you couldn't do it. One, the processors weren't good enough, but two, you couldn't keep track of all those pixels. And so These techniques around 3D modeling and perspectives and occlusion, which means like, okay, I can't see behind that wall, so I don't have to render that right now on my computer, I might still have the information for it, but

[Mayim Bialik]

someone else could be. So when I've watched my kids play Fortnite, if they're behind a wall that they can't see behind, another player is behind that wall.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yes, it could be. Yes.

[Jonathan Cohen]

But they're getting it from a separate server.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Correct, but they're rendering it on their device.

[Mayim Bialik]

But they have a shared reality.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

They do have a shared reality.

[Mayim Bialik]

They have a shared reality because when they burst down that wall and shoot my child, then that world becomes joined.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right? And so to me, this idea of the observer effect or quantum indeterminacy, one of the interpretations of that is called the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that you have a probability wave and then when it gets observed, it collapses to one of those probabilities. To me, that sounded like an optimization engine. Because the question no physicists have been able to ask is why would the universe work in this weird way if it was just a Real physical universe, there's no need for all this stuff. You would have just a physical universe and that's that.

[Mayim Bialik]

Like, why wouldn't the theory of relativity explain everything, right? Or by the same account, why wouldn't Leibniz and Newton be able to explain everything? Why would we then need relativity, right? I mean, to me, it's sort of like this is the evolution of our brain capacity, our humanity, like the amazing things that happen in an evolutionary process which is cultural and epigenetic and, you know, also genetic. But that's a different way to look at it that we're all trying to figure out all of these boo boos, right?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Boo boos, or even glitches, right? In a sense, we're trying to come up with a theory. So when I was at mit, my professors would tell me, look, we're not really teaching you about reality, we are teaching you about models of reality, right? And if the model is useful, like Newton's laws of physics, I mean, they're quite useful for shooting off rockets to a certain point. To a certain point, exactly. And then there's exceptions, but the models are only useful to a certain point. The map is not necessarily the territory, to use an old expression, but for example, when I like to use the example of when scientists thought that reports of rocks falling from the sky were ridiculous. Why? Because there are no rocks in the sky, therefore how could they possibly fall?

[Mayim Bialik]

They called people crazy and people said, I'm seeing rocks, they're falling in my yard.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. And then it wasn't until there was a mass sighting outside of Paris. Then the Royal Society sent a scientist out there who talked to enough people, they said, okay, this sounds like it could be real. And this ties back to glitches, right? Because it's when you have enough reports of these glitches that I think they should start to be taken a little more seriously. So now I can answer your question about glitches.

[Mayim Bialik]

Let's start with Berenstain Bears.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Okay, you wanna start with the big one, Mandela effect?

[Mayim Bialik]

I do.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Okay.

[Mayim Bialik]

I wanna start with the Mandela effect, which we literally were fighting with my children about.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

For people who don't know, the Mandela effect is when a subgroup or a minority of individuals remember something historically that the majority do not remember or remember having occurred differently. And it was named after Nelson Mandela, who many people remember dying in prison. Now, what's interesting, the blogger who named this back in 2010, I think it was, was a woman named Fiona Broome, and she was at a Comic Con convention. So, like Dragon Con.

[Mayim Bialik]

All the good things happen there.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

All the things. And she was in a room with the Star Trek actors, like the original series of Star Trek actors. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure, you know, you've had your interactions with Star Trek fans. They know their stuff.

[Mayim Bialik]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

They know their episodes. And the guys.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's why we never talk about it, because I'm afraid I'll say something wrong. And.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But members of the audience remembered this specific episode, and they're like, don't you remember this happened? And this happened. And other people chimed in and said, yeah. And then this happened. And the actors on stage were like, we never shot an episode like that. What are you talking about? And so that gave her the idea that there may be groups of people remembering things differently. And so then this phenomenon, which is called the Mandela Effect, has taken off online. So it's become an online phenomenon. Phenomenon.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, Luke, I am your father. That's the most famous one of the Star wars nerds. I always knew that's not what was happening.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Okay.

[Mayim Bialik]

Because that's not what he said. So I was not one of those people.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Okay, so you were in the majority.

[Mayim Bialik]

Correct. The Fruit of the Loom logo has never had a cornucopia. Everybody thinks it has a cornucopia.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Some of us remember it as having had a corner.

[Mayim Bialik]

Correct.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And the Bernstein bears is another one.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, the Barons. So people say Berenstein Bears. I just think because there's other. There's other Steens in our culture. There's Leonard Bernstein. You know, there's all these Steens. It was assumed that it would Leonard was Leonard. It was assumed that it was the glitch in the Matrix. It was assumed that it was the

[Jonathan Cohen]

AI controlling you will not allow you Bernstein Bears.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's Berenstain. It's spelled Berenstain, like, everywhere. Another one. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Apparently people remember that as magic mirror on the wall. That just sounds dorky. What do you remember?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Mirror, mirror.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, I remember mirror, mirror.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But if you look today, it's magic mirror.

[Mayim Bialik]

No, it's not.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yes, there you go. You are part of the. In this case, perhaps even majority who remember it differently than what it is today.

[Mayim Bialik]

The Internet is wrong.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But my point is that the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon in that people remember things differently. Now, what is the source of that phenomenon and how seriously should we take it? I used to just dismiss it as

[Mayim Bialik]

bad memory or collective mis memory.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Collective mis memory. But then a colleague of mine from mit, he said, you know, simulation Theory might provide an interesting explanation because when you run a simulation, you often run it more than once. And when you do, you change variables. And there's this whole idea that small changes can cause big changes down the road or they can cause lots of little changes down the road. So if you were to run these events again, I'll give you another example.

[Mayim Bialik]

I mean, magic mirror on the wall is blowing my mind.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

There's one that's blowing your mind because

[Mayim Bialik]

it's blowing my mind.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

You're pretty sure what it was and so am I. I mean, that's the one that I do remember now where it gets interesting for me because some of these. Yeah, it's a letter here. It's a letter there is when people have proximity to a subject, like the Star Trek fans.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sure.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Okay. Or it has significance in their lives. Like for example, the, the Reverend Billy Graham died in. I forget what year he died in. But there, there are people who claim their parents are followers of the Reverend Billy Graham, a evangelicals. And they remember him dying years before. And they got magazines and the paper, what. And so, you know, that's when I think it becomes interesting, is when you're closer to it. And that's why some of these I kind of discount as bad memory or faulty memory. But when you start talking about major events, like for example, there's one blogger that I came across who was a journalism student who went to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.

[Mayim Bialik]

No.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And she couldn't get in because he was ill. And she went back and then she worked for like NPR or something after she graduated, a few months later. And then she says he died. Now, if you went to South Africa to see Nelson Vandel, you're not going to mistake him for Steven Vico or another African leader.

[Mayim Bialik]

He's pretty well known.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And then you get into scripture. Okay, Biblical scripture in particular. You've probably heard of the Isaiah line about the lion and the lamb.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It's not there. Search for says wolf will lie with the lamb.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's right, yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And there's something about a lion later in the verse, I think, or something like that. But people remember this line very clearly.

[Mayim Bialik]

Now. The lamb lies with the lion is what?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Later on it's like the wolf will

[Mayim Bialik]

lie, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

But people don't remember it that way. And so when it comes to scripture, people tend to memorize this stuff, don't get me started. Right? Yeah, exactly. For good or for bad, they tend to memorize. And so that's what got me to take the idea more seriously. And then I began to look for. And there's another interesting one. Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Do you remember the tank?

[Mayim Bialik]

Yes. Yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

What happened to that guy in front of the tank?

[Mayim Bialik]

I don't remember. I mean, my choices are he was run over.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

He was run over. He wasn't running run over. What do I remember him as? Not being run over.

[Mayim Bialik]

I remember him as not being run over.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I remember him as being run over because otherwise, like, what's the uproar? Like, obviously, it's a bad massacre, but, like, I thought that was the heroic thing that, you know, was like the tipping skill.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

So, okay, Here we have 30% remembering it one way. And in kind of informal surveys I've done, I was on a panel the other day. There were five of us. One person remembered the tank running him over. Now, it's not just that they remember the tank running him over. It's that they remember it vividly. Like, oh, my God, it was the bloodiest thing I ever saw on TV.

[Mayim Bialik]

Dr. Raz Amir Raz talks about this. You know, he's a mentalist. He's a neuroscientist who's also a magician. And he said the power of suggestion, and especially in groups like this, it's alarming.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It could be.

[Jonathan Cohen]

So the question is, or.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Is it suggestion or is it some external control? Are. Is the processing and the interpretation of the data flawed on the human side, or is the data actually being changed? And we're all remembering it accurately as it's been portrayed to us, but it's been portrayed to each of us differently.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right. Well, I. So I wrote another book called the Simulated Multiverse that delves heavier into this idea because now we're into this idea of multiple timelines. And what happens is when you run a computer process and then you run another process, the old information is there in memory until it needs to be cleaned up. So there's actually a process called garbage collection that takes place when needed.

[Mayim Bialik]

That's called thinking in the human brain.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Or some people think dreams as a form of garbage collection.

[Mayim Bialik]

So I was just going to say the human brain does a lot of the things that we're talking about.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yes.

[Mayim Bialik]

And many of your descriptions of a potential simulation is also not just the way that computer programming works. Computer programming. I mean, I would say it's based on the best computer that we've Got. Which is the human brain that evolved without any need of us doing anything. Right. So when you talk about storage.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Broadly. Broadly.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, when you talk about storage and when you talk about history and you talk. I mean, to me, I hear a lot of the mechanisms for memory in particular, as, I don't know, some version of the organic processor that we all walk around with.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right, right. And I think, you know, neural nets are based on kind of a simplified version.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sure.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Of. Of neurons. And so like today's AI is very.

[Mayim Bialik]

I don't like the word simplified because like this came before this.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, no, no, I'm saying that the neural net is the simplified version of the neuron is much more complex.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

As far as I understand.

[Mayim Bialik]

Sure.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

That it would. There was a simple idea of what the neuron did, and that was what was used in the perceptron, which was the first.

[Mayim Bialik]

Right.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Kind of.

[Mayim Bialik]

So. So if we think about sort of the ability of the human br. Intuition to dream, to identify synchronicity, to feel connected. Right. In ways that drive decision making, you could say that this is also information that we have stored that we are also then able to recall.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

You could. But then again, you know, you're so. First of all, I don't believe in every Mandela effect, but I think it's a really interesting way to talk about this idea of multiple timelines, lines, and because in a simulated world, there's no reason you can't run. In fact, you would run the simulation more than once. And so during. During the writing of this book, I interviewed the wife of Philip K. Dick, Tessa B. Dick, and she said to look closely at this speech that he gave in Metz, France, back in 1977. And there's a famous line from that speech which inspired the Wachowskis to make the Matrix, and many other individuals were inspired by it. And he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. But she's encouraged me to go back and read the rest of the speech or watch it, because he actually ad libbed that line. It wasn't there in the written version of the speech. And if you listen to the rest of it, he says, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. We would have a sense of deja vu, that we were saying the same words again, that we were hearing the same words again. And basically that speech was about this idea of parameters being changed and the simulation being run forward. And so again, we can try to dismiss all of these glitches. You can Dismiss near death experiences, you can dismiss out of body experiences, you can dismiss precognitive, yet they still happen. So scientists dismissing it is not making them go away. It just makes us more comfortable that we know the explanation when we may not know the explanation. Explanation. So that's, I think an interesting way to think about multiple timelines. So let's talk about precognitive dreams. So you were asking about glitches. So here's another one that many people have experienced. And I experienced this myself. It was sort of one of the reasons that I got interested in exploring different aspects of consciousness. Like for example, I had a dream one day. I was running a startup and I had a dream one day about a competitor of my startup. And I wrote about this in my first book, Zen Entrepreneurship. And I thought that was really weird. Okay. I've never dreamed about this guy before. It's just a bizarre dream. And I hadn't heard from this competitor of ours for like at least a year, maybe even two years. So I assume they're just gone. So I walk into the office that day and I get a call from IBM, who was our business partner, we built products for their platforms and I get a call from them saying, oh, we're going to release a new product today. You've been a good partner. We kind of want to let you know before we do the announcement later today. By the way, unfortunately this product is going to crush your product. But we just wanted to let you know. And so I said, well, okay, how come I've never heard of this before? IBM's a big company, leaks all this stuff. He goes, well, do you remember that competitor of yours, you know this guy Mark from such and such company. We bought his company about a year and a half ago and we're just now announcing the product and we kept it secret this whole time. And so the dream happened in the morning, the event happened afterwards. And to me that's a kind of glitch, right? Normally if it was just garbage collection, the dream would happen after I had heard of it. So it fits into that area of precognitive dreams. And people have these dreams all the time. It's just not, it's just something that happens. So that's a kind of a glitch.

[Mayim Bialik]

Okay. We happen to have recently spoken to an expert in precognitive dreams. We spoke to Dr. Julia Mossbridge and she has been kind of specific criteria. I don't mean to burst this bubble, cause I think there's something very interesting. But what she talks about Is, I mean, first of all, it's not like you had. I'm just gonna like, play with this for a second. If you had dreamt like about a distant friend's grandmother, right, and then you found out that she had entered the sector and come to like take over your business, you. That would be more surprising than someone who.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

What do you think?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Okay, I'm going to.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Meaning the chances of that happening so rare on that day, on that morning.

[Mayim Bialik]

It's very rare.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It's unlikely, 100%.

[Mayim Bialik]

Julia Mossbridge would say we need more conditions.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I don't think so. I think Julia would say that is a high likelihood of a precognitive event. My, my question is actually, is that a glitch in the Matrix or an expansion of the capability of the player?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Right. And that's an interesting question. And so if we view. So these things, I don't think can be explained in a purely materialist paradigm, we can argue that if you want. What I try to do in this book is say, okay, let's take these guys seriously for a moment. Let's assume that's the case. Is there a model? Because rather than science just dismissing everything, which is kind of what happens, most scientists, not all like Julia Mossbridge, there's others that look into these phenomena. Thomas Campbell talks about out of body experiences. That was how he got started. So there's a lot of different scientists who take these phenomena very seriously. Near death experiences. I think he had Bruce Grayson on recently. But most scientists just dismiss it. But I like to take the approach to say, well, in a materialist world, you would dismiss it just like the rocks falling from the sky. Because you say there's no mechanism for that. That's just people acting crazy. That's just what people do. It's just the brains of peasants who imagine things. But I might say, well, what if we expanded and looked at a different way of modeling? Because again, our science is just models. It's not reality. These are models that we can understand of the universe. And so if you think of a player outside the game and a character inside the game, the player can see what's coming next. He can also project, you know, run different scenarios. He can try to send messages to try to direct their character to do certain things. Now, what would be the purpose of a precognitive clue? In my case, there was nothing I could do about it. So, I mean, I've known. I studied with a guy named Robert Moss and he was the one who did like shamanic dream work. He's steeped in like the aboriginal culture. He's a former Australia, but also the Iroquois cultures in upstate New York. And we would have groups of people who would share their dreams. And there are many times when people have had a precognitive dream of a potential crash around a particular, say, curve in the road with a certain car in front of them. And then they recognize it and then they're just much more careful and it doesn't happen. There's an idea that dreams could be a kind of threat simulation, you know, running these things that might happen that could end up causing us bad things to happen. So it's a way to like run these simulations in our nighttime dreams. And so it's possible that the player could be directing us in a certain way and sending us clues. It could also just be glitches to show us that. In fact, for me, that dream set me down a path of wanting to explore more, more of these non traditional methods. I mean until then I would say I was pretty left brained. I was probably more in the camp than a neuroscientists are in. And a lot of my, all of my colleagues at MIT are in which is mystical experiences don't exist. It's just a bunch of random firings of neurons, et cetera. But for me, the clue set me in a different direction. And I think that is one way you could try to explain these types of glitches in a different model. Just like with the Mandela effect, if people are that close to something, they're just less likely to mistake it than, you know, I mean I would remember if say Mark Hamill died or Harrison Ford died, being a Star wars fan or Jean Luc Picard died. Right. But I wouldn't necessarily know when the Reverend Billy Graham died. It's just not something that I'm paying attention to. So I think these glitches happen. But if we expand our way of thinking about the world, my other favorite one is related to near death experiences. And this is where we tie to what the religious traditions have been telling us as well. And so I first learned about these through a guy named Dannie Brinkley. So he wrote a book called Saved by the Light. He was struck by lightning back in the 70s. He wrote a best selling book in the 90s called Saved by the Light. Raymond Moody, who defined the term near death experience. He was one of the guys that he talked to and he was one of the ones who had kind of the fullest near death death experience with all the different stages that we've heard about like hovering over your body, out of body experience, meeting a being of light. But what really struck me about his description was the life review, and he called it a holographic panoramic review or replay of everything that had ever happened in his life. And he used to be in the military and he was literally an assassin, so he had actually killed people. And so he got to see what it was like. So you replay the events, but you replay them from the other person's point of view.

[Mayim Bialik]

Yeah, we had a recent ND survivor and she said she could feel the entire pain of everyone around her, not just how it impacted her, but what they were experiencing.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

So emotionally as well. Right. And so in his case, he had to experience what it was like to be shot and killed by himself. But there's also something called the ripple effect, which is then seeing what happens to that black guy's wife and children after he was killed. So you start to see the effects of your actions. And now again, coming from techno scientific background, let's just take them at face value for a minute. I said, well, how could that work? The only way it could work is if we are recording everything.

[Mayim Bialik]

Well, if it's all laid out, right? Yeah, if it's laid out and accessible.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, if it's laid out and accessible, but it has to be recorded somewhere. And turns out we do that with video games. So what was happening around the time that I was playing the virtual reality ping pong game? There was another startup I was involved with and we put on a virtual reality headset. And what you would do is you would replay a game that you've already played, like Counter Strike Global Offensive. I don't know if you've ever heard of that game, but it's a first person shooter and we could basically put you at any XYZ position in the game world, X, Y, Z, T. Because you could go back to any time position as well, and you could see what it was like to shoot yourself. And for me, that drew an interesting connection because it's like, okay, so if this can be replayed in that kind of a world, it's very much like when we play, we record a whole session of a video game and we have it on YouTube and we have it available. Like among the most popular content on YouTube are replays of game sessions. You may know this.

[Mayim Bialik]

My children do this all the time.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And I started realizing it when my nephew was only like three, Said to his father, my brother, he said, I want to watch Star Wars. And so my brother said, oh, you want to watch Star wars movie? He goes, no, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star wars game. So it was a recording of the session. So to me, we're not there yet. We can't create virtual reality replays that incorporate feelings, for example, and emotions. But we can certainly do the visual part. It suggests to me that there is disability to have the whole everything that's happened as information and then have that information rendered for you and replayed for you. And so when I started looking at the scriptures, I realized, you know, there were descriptions of this in pretty much every major religion. And most mystical texts have this idea, but they use different metaphors. So in Islam, for example, you have the recording angels, and in fact, you have those in, I think, the Judeo Christian traditions, too. There's like a recording angel statue in Washington. Washington, for example, where they're looking at, you know, saying the books will be open, and then you record in the book of life. Well, in Islam, they're very specific. They have these two angels who sit there. One writes down all your good deeds, one writes down all your bad deeds. And then there's a specific verse that says, when you die or on the day of judgment, your book will be opened, and you have to read that book again. You have to see the consequences of your actions. And to me, I realized, okay, that's just a metaphor. It doesn't mean there's a physical book somehow. It means the information is being recorded somewhere, and the angels are just, you know, AI processes that are just recording, and you have to replay it and watch it. And so we have a new metaphor today. So that's why you can view the whole simulation hypothesis as a metaphor, if you like. You can view it as a literal thing about the world being information as well. But we need to update some of those metaphors. So, for example, I mentioned Swami Yogananda earlier when he came over in the 1920s. He did what mystics have been doing all along. They were using technological metaphors like the wheel of Samsara in Buddhism. And there's not. It's not a physical wheel. That's just a metaphor. It's probably one of the most important technologies ever built is the wheel. And so he tried to update some of the older metaphors for this idea of Maya and illusion. And he used modern technology at the time. What was new? The film projector. And he said, it's like we're projecting onto a film.

[Mayim Bialik]

And it's a kabbalistic concept as well.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Is it okay, yeah, there we go. And so you see this, this idea, this, this process of updating the metaphor today, if he were alive, I think he'd say, well, it's like a film. We're the actors, but we're also watching the film. And we have a script, but we can change the script. What does it sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role playing video games. So I think we can update the old metaphors and still be true to the ideas that I think they were trying to convey to us.

[Mayim Bialik]

How would you, how would you relate that to Plato's cave and the shadows?

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Oh, it relates very much. So, you know, most people have heard of Plato's cave, the allegory of the cave where the shadows are basically reflections from outside the, the cave and everybody is chained to one side of the

[Mayim Bialik]

cave and all they can see are the shadows that are being cast by people or images that, that are outside purview. Right.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

And so what happens is in if you read the whole allegory, there's actually a philosopher, Plato calls him, who breaks out of his chains, right. And he goes outside the cave and what does he see? Well, the first thing that happens is he's blinded because there's too much light. I mean, he's lived in a cave his whole life, so he just sees a lot of light. Which again, getting back to the mystical experiences, what is it that people.

[Mayim Bialik]

The blinding light, the blinding light.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

He comes back in and he tries to convince the people inside that there's more going on and we're just observing shadows on the cave. And what do they say? They say, nah, that's ridiculous. Right, because they're.

[Mayim Bialik]

You're schizophrenic, we're going to put you on medication.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. That's the next step. Right, but if they had light bulbs, he would have tried to use the light bulb as a way to try to explain to them, oh no, it's the sun is like a light bulb, but it's much bigger. And so they would try to put it in terms or language. And so the idea of the simulation as a metaphor, it gets to my fourth proposition. Remember, I had fourth. The fourth proposition is this whole thing is a kind of purposeful hoax. And afterwards we can review what happened. It's like we have a game that we were playing together and we decided to cross the veil of forgetfulness and get into it. And you know, you have people who report these types of things. And that's why I think this framework gives us at least some technoscientific language that lets us talk about it. To your earlier point about, can we use this to help connect individuals? I can go into the physics department at an MIT or a Caltech, and I can talk about the simulation hypothesis. They may not agree with it. They'll probably agree with the first proposition, maybe the second proposition, maybe not the third. And they certainly won't agree that this is the world is a hoax, the fourth proposition. But we can have an intelligent discussion. And similarly, I can go in, I mean, I gave a talk with an Ayatollah from Iran there about the simulation hypothesis, talking about the metaphor used in Islam in the Bhagavad Gita, for example, that the soul goes into the body, which is kind of a mysterious process. None of the religions really describe it in a way that would make sense to us. Like we put on a pair of clothes, the body in the Bhagavad Gita, they also talk about taking off the clothes and putting them back on for reincarnation. And so that metaphor is used across traditions. But if we think of that as a player putting on the headset or connecting in the Matrix, it's a way to describe that process of forgetfulness. So I can talk to hardcore people. I get pushback from both sides. I get pushbacks from the atheists, actually, very strongly, because the simulation hypothesis could be interpreted to validate some of the things, at least the mystical side of religion. Like, there's a real hate for religion in today's atheist community. But if we say, okay, let's strip away most of what the religion, probably 70%, is cultural. Let's go back to what is the cosmological model? What is it that they're trying to say? And, you know, like. Like some of you guys, I'm a big fan of science fiction. And, you know, there's a show called Battlestar Galactica and the Cylons or the AI, oddly enough, they're the religious people in this. They're like the religious fanatics. But one of them says, what is the most basic article of faith? And the answer is that this, meaning the physical world, is not all there is. And I think that's true across pretty much all of the religious traditions. Right? That's the most basic article of faith. That's also a key part of the simulation hypothesis.

[Mayim Bialik]

We're going to pause here. There's a part two of this episode that tackles the question, what's beyond or behind the simulation? Meaning, if this is a simulation, what does that mean for a concept of God? What does it mean for many of the theories regarding aliens, possible future humans? We're also gonna talk about why we might be running multiple simulations and what that means for all the possible choices that we might make.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We're gonna touch on the Interstellar Gardener theory, which is an explanation for why the world may have been created in the first place. And Mayim is gonna ask about love. What role does it play in each of our evolutions or reasons for being here?

[Mayim Bialik]

And how does love fit into the simulation? That's in part two of our conversation with Dr. Rizwan Burke. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you in part two.

[Dr. Rizwan Virk]

It's Maya Bialix, breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.