1239: Rizwan Virk | The Real Mysteries of the Simulation Hypothesis

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan Harbinger Show

Episode 1239: Rizwan Virk | The Real Mysteries of the Simulation Hypothesis
Date: November 13, 2025
Guest: Rizwan Virk, MIT-trained computer scientist, entrepreneur, author of The Simulation Hypothesis

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Episode Overview

In this engaging and mind-bending episode, host Jordan Harbinger is joined by Rizwan Virk, a veteran of Silicon Valley, game development, and the author of The Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse. Together, they explore the provocative idea that reality as we perceive it might be an advanced computer simulation, delving into the philosophical, scientific, and technological arguments behind the hypothesis. The conversation covers different versions of the theory, scientific clues from quantum physics, the rapid progression of AI and video game technology, and the implications for free will, ethics, spirituality, and the nature of consciousness.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Simulation Hypothesis

[04:20]

• Rizwan Virk: The simulation hypothesis is "the idea that what we think of as the physical world... is actually part of a virtual world, a computer-generated world."
• Two main types:
  • RPG Version ("The Matrix"): Real selves exist outside the simulation and control avatars inside.
  • NPC Version: All characters, including ourselves, are artificial creations (no "player" outside).
• Analogies to modern video games (MMORPGs) clarify how avatars and NPCs might both exist in a simulated environment.

Notable Quote:

"There’s a whole branch of physics called digital physics. ... Some have even said the world itself is basically a quantum computer."
— Rizwan Virk, [06:33]

2. Ancestor Simulations & Probability of Our Reality

[09:10]

• Discusses Nick Bostrom’s argument: If advanced civilizations can make ancestor simulations, there will be vastly more simulated worlds than real ones.
• Probabilistic Argument: If a billion simulated worlds exist for every "base reality," the odds we're in the one true reality are infinitesimal.

Notable Quote:

"So he said the odds that you are in a simulation is basically billions to one."
— Rizwan Virk, [13:39]

• Jordan humorously applies this logic to his own situation:

"I'd be pretty pissed if this is my avatar. I could've been anything!"
— Jordan Harbinger, [06:03]

3. Technological Trajectory: How Close Are We?

[13:39], [18:31], [78:10]

• The exponential progress of video games, VR, and AI is diminishing the gap between real and simulated worlds.
• Procedural Generation: Technologies like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky use algorithms to generate nearly infinite worlds, showing how simulations can be vast without rendering everything at once.

Notable Quote:

"There was a game called No Man's Sky... it had 18 quintillion worlds."
— Rizwan Virk, [19:17]

• AI and generative models are making simulated experiences nearly indistinguishable within decades. Virk now estimates we’re "about 70% of the way there" and predicts human-created, indistinguishable simulations within 50-100 years, possibly sooner. [78:10]

4. Scientific & Quantum Clues

Rendering & The Observer Effect
[20:14]

• Quantum observer effect (e.g., double-slit & Schrodinger’s cat): Reality is determined upon observation—a concept eerily similar to video game rendering only what's needed.
• Video games only "render" the visible world to conserve computing power, analogous to reality only being "rendered" upon observation.

Notable Quotes:

"Only that which is observed by your avatar is what needs to be rendered."
— Rizwan Virk, [23:40]

"In computer science, there's something called lazy evaluation... you don't evaluate [or render] unless you need to."
— Rizwan Virk, [23:20]

The Simulated Multiverse & Time
[25:34]

• Delayed choice experiments in quantum mechanics suggest the past may not be fully determined until measured—mirroring how games generate histories/events only as needed.

5. Game Characters, AI, and Self-Awareness

[34:36], [36:28]

• Classic NPCs were limited, with fixed conversational paths. With modern AI (LLMs like GPT), NPCs can become dynamic, adaptive, and potentially self-reflective.
• The Turing Test (passes when you can’t tell if you’re talking to a human or computer) is nearly passed; a "Metaverse Turing Test" could soon determine if we can distinguish between avatars controlled by humans and by AI.

Notable Moment:
Jordan: "A human would never put up with me for as long as ChatGPT. That’s how I know it’s a robot."
— [36:28]

• Experiments in games like Matrix Awakens have shown AI NPCs convincingly denying (or questioning) their own simulated status.

6. Anomalies, Glitches, and Phenomena (Deja Vu, Dreams, Synchronicity, UFOs)

[41:09], [53:19]

• Deja Vu: Might be a trace of "variables changed" or re-runs in the simulation.
• Precognitive Dreams & Synchronicity: Potential "glitches" or signs of deeper informational connectivity in the simulation, akin to database cross-referencing in online advertising.
• UFOs: Some reports (objects visible to some but not all; objects seeming to render from nothing) resemble video game rendering and suggest "intrusions" from other simulated layers or dimensions.

Notable Quotes:

"He had a speech in 1977 where he said, 'We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality.'"
— Rizwan Virk, quoting Philip K. Dick, [41:29]

"If you didn't know anything about databases... you'd say it's magic. But we [in tech] call it registering your intent."
— Rizwan Virk, on technological synchronicity, [51:41]

7. Simulation and Spirituality/Religion

[64:33], [72:19]

• Simulation theory offers a modern framework for interpreting religious stories (e.g., the "scroll of deeds" in Islam and "Book of Life" in Christianity as metaphors for a digital life review).
• The idea of "forgetting" when incarnating (from Hinduism, Greek, and Jewish traditions) fits neatly with the simulated-world concept.
• Virk notes that, interestingly, religious audiences are often quite open to these concepts, seeing technological metaphors in ancient stories.

Notable Quote:

"If we think of ourselves as players in a video game, then... even if at first I don’t succeed, I’m going to keep trying."
— Rizwan Virk, [64:41]

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Ethical, Practical, and Existential Implications

[63:29], [79:33]

• Does Knowing We're Simulated Matter?

  • The answer hinges on whether we're "NPCs" (with no continuity outside the sim) or "players" (avatars with an external "self").
  • Even if simulated, how we behave matters for experience and in-game relationships; "real" learning and moral choices persist.
  • The classic religious tenet of life review/reckoning may just be a form of post-game analysis.

• If/When We Build Simulations…

  • Every step toward realistic simulation increases the statistical probability that this has already happened—that is, that we ourselves are simulated. This leads to simulation "stacking" (simulations inside simulations).
  • Virk gives updated odds: "Once that gets to 100% that we can get there, then it’s pretty close to 100 [percent] that we’re already inside a simulation." ([79:44])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "If you’re not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven’t understood it." — Niels Bohr, paraphrased by Rizwan Virk, [21:22]

• "I think, in many ways, materialism has become a kind of religion in our society." — Rizwan Virk, [52:22]

• "Curiosity still matters. Humility still matters. And how we treat each other in this game definitely matters." — Jordan Harbinger, [82:45]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Simulation hypothesis intro & definitions: [04:20]–[07:56]
• Probability & Ancestor Simulations (Bostrom): [09:10]–[14:32]
• AI, VR, and procedural generation in games: [18:31]–[24:38]
• Quantum physics and the observer effect: [20:14]–[23:40]
• AI NPCs, Turing Test, and 'Metaverse Turing Test': [34:36]–[38:59]
• Glitches/anomalies, deja vu, dreams, and synchronicity: [41:09]–[53:19]
• UFOs and simulation rendering: [53:19]–[59:17]
• Practical/ethical consequences, religion, and life review: [63:29]–[74:49]
• How close are we to creating a realistic simulation?: [78:00]–[79:33]
• Simulation stacking and closing thoughts: [79:33]–[80:57]

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Conclusion: The Real Test

Jordan wraps up by highlighting the practical takeaway: Regardless of whether we live in "base reality" or a simulation, curiosity, humility, and ethical treatment of each other continue to matter. Perhaps the real test isn't in finding the code—but in playing the game well, wherever it may be running.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Rizwan Virk]

Foreign.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, investigative journalist, tech luminary or hostage negotiator. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, Crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show. What if reality isn't real? I don't mean that in a stoner dorm room, like, whoa, dude, literally, what if the universe, you, me, this podcast, were just running on someone else's hardware? Today we're talking with Rizwan Virk, MIT trained computer scientist, venture capitalist, and author of the Simulation Hypothesis about why the idea that we're living inside a computer simulation might not actually be as crazy as it sounds. If this all makes you think of the Matrix or Star Trek or something like that, you're not alone. Those are exactly the kinds of sci fi ideas that first got me thinking about this and other people I would assume as well. But hey, this isn't just movie fuel. Everyone from Elon Musk to Neil Degrasse Tyson has taken this hypothesis seriously enough to say, yeah, the odds might not be in favor of base reality. So today we'll unpack what simulation really means. And it's not just we're living in a video game. We'll explore what the evidence says from physics and computing, how close we are to building our own simulated worlds, and. And whether deja vu, UFOs or that weird Mandela effect might actually just be hints that our code is showing. Virk argues that some of the most fundamental limits in physics, like the speed of light, quantum indeterminacy, could be features of a computational universe, not bugs. We'll also look at what it would take to prove or disprove any of this and why the implications might matter for ethics, spirituality, how we live our lives day to day. Because if it is a simulation, what does that say about free will, meaning morality? And if it's not, why does this idea feel so intuitive somehow? So grab your controller or your prayer beads or whatever and let's boot up Reality with Rizwan Virk right here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So the simulation theory stuff is always. It started off in my mind a little bit like crackpot maybe, but it turns out to not be a crackpot theory. Why don't we back up a little bit? Can you define what simulation hypothesis even is for the layman? Because I think a lot of people have never even thought thought about this.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, sure. So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of is the physical world. You know, like this table, this chair that all of physical reality is actually part of a virtual world, a computer generated world. And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film the Matrix, because, you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but turns out he was actually in a virtual world. Now, there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. So, for example, in the case of Neo and Morpheus in the Matrix, they existed as players outside of the Matrix and then they had an avatar or character inside the Matrix. And I call that the RPG version or the role playing game version of the simulation hypothesis. And then there's another flavor which I call the NPC version, which NPC stands for non player characters. Anyone who's played video games knows that terminology. And in that scenario, everybody in the game is AI. So it's just code that's controlled by, you know, computer programs. And of course, those two are not completely exclusive, mutually exclusive, because you can have player characters or avatars and you can have NPCs within a virtual environment. So I think of it more like an axis. And, you know, I used the metaphor of video games, that the world is a type of massively multiplayer online video game, because that's sort of. My background was in building video games in Silicon Valley before I came to write this book. But when some academics and scientists refer to simulation theory, they're talking more about the NPC version where we're all running on a computer and you don't exist as a player. You're just one of the beings being simulated.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see. Right. Okay. So to clarify this, the first version, the Neo and the Matrix version is there's a real version of us somewhere else, but we're just not necessarily. We're not the person that I am right now, by the way. I'd be pretty pissed if this is my avatar. I could have been anything. They gave me this. This is bullshit, Rizwan. But, but the. So it must be the other one, otherwise they're just too cruel. The other version is we're just. We're all running on essentially silicon or, or something like that. Quantum whatever.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. In that version, we'd be running on some much more advanced computational system, which could be some type of a computer quantum computing system. There have been a number of physicists who aren't looking at the world as information now. And so there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. Instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at Conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be in, you know, whatever computational substrate is being used to run the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. That said, to your earlier point, when you play a video game, your avatar doesn't have to look exactly like you, right? In fact, when we play a video game, oftentimes we'll choose a race, like an elf or a dwarf or a human, and then we'll choose a profession like a wizard or a thief, et cetera. And so in the Matrix, they wanted to use the same actors, obviously, right? They want to use Keanu Reeves inside and outside the simulation. So their avatars were what I call identomorphic. They look just like the. The player. But in reality, even if this were a multiplayer video game or an NPC simulation, it's hard to say what the world outside of the simulation might look like and what we might look like outside of the simulation, I guess.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And we'll get to this. But, like, whoever's running this, it seems most likely to me. And look, I am no expert, obviously, my expertise comes from having read your book three days ago. So here we go. But it seems like, wouldn't we just be likely to be the ancestors or the primitive race of whatever's simulating us, Right? Like, are we just like the monkey in a cage version of the advanced society, civilization, race, whatever, that's running? And they're like, wow, this is.

[Rizwan Virk]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Humans, these early humans who aren't in the year 10 million are just ridiculous. They just look at porn online and play stupid things on a screen, and they walk around and they buy food and they get fat. It's so dumb, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yep. And they share cat videos, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

They share cat videos on their stupid primitive Internet. It's just unbelievable, the stupidity these people get up to. And they're just watching us in real time or watching, you know, the Truman show version. And they're like, look at these. Why do we even bother running this stupid simulation? Look at these. These, like, inbred, you know, monkeys, essentially. Like, and I don't mean that that sounds insulting to monkeys essentially, but I would imagine looking back at early humans, we would also be like, so you just picked your butt and. And ate food with it. Gross. You are. You're revolting. That's kind of what we probably look like to.

[Rizwan Virk]

Then it's very possible. And so, you know, the term you mentioned in Ancestor simulation is an important one within the simulation world. And it was defined by a Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom. And what he basically said was that if a civilization got much more advanced than we are today, and he wrote this paper back in, like, 2003, so it was a couple years after the Matrix, but really before today's AI ChatGPT LLMs all this stuff. But he basically said that if a civilization ever gets to the point where they. They are post human, or what I call the simulation point, where they can create a fully immersive virtual reality with AI characters that are indistinguishable from physical characters, that if they reach that point, they would create what he called ancestor simulations or simulations of their ancestors. And like you said, that could be like us creating a simulation of cavemen or of ancient Rome or ancient Greece, for example.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is like Westworld kind of, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, similar to Westworld in a way. Right. If you think about it, Westworld is a simulation of our past right from the 1800s. In that case, though, there's the physical robots that we can get into. In the simulation theory, it's more like a virtual world where you would put on a virtual reality helmet if you wanted to go in there. But, yeah, the AI characters in there are very similar to the ones that you might see in Westworld.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So the simulation point is essentially where I put on my VR helmet and I don't even remember that it's on, because you look just as real to me at the simulation point as if I took my helmet off and you were sitting in front of me. Like, it's basically, like you said, indistinguishable. So I might remember that I have my helmet on, or I might. There might be some clue eventually that I could do. I don't. What was it in Inception where the thing keeps spinning? And that's how they know they're in the dream, right? Yep.

[Rizwan Virk]

They call it their totem. Right. And you have a little top in that case.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you might have something along the lines of that. Or maybe there's a. Maybe there's a way to get a status bar to appear in the top of the screen or whatever.

[Rizwan Virk]

Pause.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But everything else is just. You're in there. So you're saying if the technology evolves to that point, and that's the simulation point. Well, okay, now I'm talking myself in circles, which is going to happen a lot in this episode, because it's a lot to wrap your mind around. But it seems like if a Civilization has the technology to get to the point where they can create a simulation that's indistinguishable from their reality. Doesn't the probability approach 100% that we are in a simulation?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yep. Does this make sense? That's exactly right. So the way that I started to think about this was because I was building video games here in Silicon Valley. And after I'd sold my last video game company, I ended up at a video game firm that was located in Marin County. And, you know, they had an office in Sausalito, and they were looking out over San Francisco Bay. Beautiful landscape. Beautiful. Yeah. I think it's one of the most beautiful cities on a nice day. But then he said, here, you got to try this. So I put on a virtual reality helmet and we started to play a virtual ping pong game. And the game itself wasn't very realistic. The graphics were pretty crappy. This was back in 2016 or so. And the VR headset had wires coming from the ceiling, so it wasn't even wireless at that point. So there was no mistaking that I was inside a virtual reality. But what happened was that the Physics Engine was so good that it really felt like I was hitting the ball with a paddle and I had to move it just right. And so much so that it made me forget just for an instant that I was in virtual reality and not playing a real game of table tennis. And I tried to put the paddle down on the table, and I tried to lean against the table.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

Just like I might do right at the end of a game. But of course, the controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over. And then I started to think, well, how long would it take us to get to that point where we could create these types of simulations? And that's why I laid out these 10 stages simulation points. So that's what got me to go down this rabbit hole. Now, what Bostrom's simulation argument was was that if anybody ever gets to that point, and he was more concerned with creating AI characters in these simulations, then they would create lots of simulations, not just one. And so there would be, let's say, a billion simulated worlds, and there's only one physical world. And he said those simulations could likely be ancestor simulations. So they would create simulations of their ancestors to see how civilization might have evolved, maybe even to see how it might have evolved differently than it actually has. And so his point was that if that's possible, then let's say there's 999 million simulated worlds in 999 and one physical world. So he said the odds that you are in a simulation is basically billions to one.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right, Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's what Elon Musk is quoting. Video clip of him online.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Ye, Right. Because if there's a billion worlds and 999 million of them are virtual or virtual, what are the odds that this is the one that's real?

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Pretty much zero.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, pretty much zero. Now, I say that it's at least 50% because at that point you can't tell the difference. Right. I mean, there's still the chances that you are in the physical world, but you can't tell the difference. So it's somewhere between 50. Now, that is if those worlds can be created now, it's possible. No civilization ever creates those worlds. Why? Because maybe it's not possible. Although with the rapid progress of AI today and the rapid. If you've seen some of these latest videos, there's just this week or last week, there's a company called World Labs. And you could take a picture and it would basically create this navigable video space where like a video game, you can kind of wander around in the photo. In the photo.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it's basically extrapolating using AI to create the world.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And this exists in 2025. So what are the odds if you add a zero to the end of the year, where at the year 20,000, 250. So I mean, you're just. What are the odds that they can't do something slightly better than that? I mean, look, maybe it's not slight, but the other thing is I've done a lot of shows about the brain. I've just done a lot, a lot, a lot of shows about the brain with guys like David Eagleman, and doesn't make me a brain scientist, but one of the things that they put across pretty clearly is your brain is just making sense of information that's being put inside it. Right. So your eyes aren't seeing anything. They're just. Your brain is creating the picture from photons that go into your eyes. If you got rid of the brain and you just took the information from the optic nerve, it would just be a bunch of white dots on a black background, for example. Right. There's nothing else going on.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's just data, Right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, exactly. And there's an old philosophical thought experiment called the brain in a vat. And the basic idea is that you put the brain in the vat and you have all the signals coming into it that are the same signals that we are getting from our eyes, like you were saying, from our ears, from our senses. And the brain would never know the difference. Theoretically. Now, we don't know how to do that yet. But again, that's another kind of earlier flavor of simulation theory. Now there's a new flavor of simulation theory that came out just within the last few months called prompt theory. And this shows you how fast AI is moving. I mean, I mentioned World Labs and Google also has something called Genie 3, which lets you type a prompt and it'll create the world that you can kind of move around in. And if you change the world, like if you spray paint something on the wall, it'll still be there when you go back. So it's really creating this virtual world based on prompts. But so there's this some videos online, if anyone just searches for prompt theory, where they basically prompted these characters using Google VO3 was one of the first video engines that did a really good job with not just video, but with sound, with virtual actors that look like real people. In fact, I showed a clip of this at a conference and I told people these are AI generated characters. And afterward they came up to me and they said, was that really AI generated? Because it's getting to the point where you can't tell the difference. But the basic idea is prompt theory is you create these videos and you tell these characters in the movie, in the videos to basically talk about whether they are based on prompts. And of course they're saying things like, I'm not a prompt. Clearly this is real. I mean, look how beautiful the world is. This can't be ones and zeros or you Know a woman saying, if a guy starts talking about the prompt area, forget, you know, you know, that date's not going anywhere. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's pretty funny to see how these characters react and how realistic they look.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

So I think we'll get there. And I think, you know, most people in the Typhology world would agree that we could get to the point where we can simulate an entire world.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm definitely curious how far away we are, but I'll get to that in a minute. I guess for now, where people I think might be getting hung up is they're like, well, I play Grand Theft Auto and there's a limit. You know, eventually you go so far west you hit a river. Do you go so far east you hit, I don't know, a mountain range or whatever it is. Right. They limit the map, but that's because it's designed by the designers of the game. I don't play a lot of video games, but I think, aren't there video games aren't things like Minecraft kind of infinite because they're being generated by users or even they're just generated as you walk in that direction.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

And that's if you're lucky, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, if you're lucky.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

If the ghosts don't get you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But then you think of the side scroller games, like they've got various Mario games that are like side scrollers. They just kind of keep going. Right. And eventually what happened was video game designers learned to use procedures, procedural generation, to create worlds that might seem realistic. So there was a game called no Man's sky which came out in like 2016, so again, almost 10 years ago now. And it had 18 quintillion worlds. Right. So that's like way more than any human game design team. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't even know how to. Like, my brain doesn't know how to deal with that kind of number.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that number is just so huge that it's effectively infinite. Right. And why 18 quintillion? Well, it turns out it's 2 to the power of 64.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's like a memory limit on the current.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Tell us anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are washing dishes right now and they're like, I'm not going to access that part of my brain to remember what this is. I'm looking for the soap.

[Rizwan Virk]

The easiest way to understand it is, I mean, it came from the double slit experiment where if light is a particle, it would go through either one of the slits or the other slit. Can't go through both. Right. If it's a particle, you can just go through one of those. Another way to think about it is Schrodinger's cat, which was the thought experiment. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The dead cat that's also alive, depending on whether or not you open the box. Is that what it is?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So there's a box with some poison in it, and after an hour, there's a 50% chance the cat is alive and a 50% chance the cat is dead because of, you know, the poison might be released or not. And so common sense tells us the cat is either alive or it's dead. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box. Now, what's weird about quantum mechanics is that it's telling us that the cat is in a state of superposition, meaning it's in both of those states. It's both alive and dead until somebody observes it or somebody measures it. And so that doesn't make any sense from a common. I mean, like, okay, this, you know, my little water bottle here. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My pee brain is not able to do anything with that particular theory right now.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. But yet it's one of these fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. And this is why Niels Bohr, who's one of the forefathers of quantum mechanics, said if you're not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it because what it's saying is really strange. It's saying that the observation itself actually is when the outcome is decided.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But in a video game, that makes perfect sense, right? It's like if you're walking around Grand Theft Auto, the only thing that the computer is doing, well, one of the only things the computer is doing, correct me if I'm wrong, is rendering, drawing. The things that I can see on my screen that my character can use or interact with or view. The stuff on the other side of the map is just. It doesn't exist at that point.

[Rizwan Virk]

The other 18 quintillion minus one worlds don't have to be rendered on your computer, right? So some people use kind of what I call the brute force method of estimating. And they say, well, there's too many particles. Our best supercomputer today couldn't keep track of all those particles. But the fact is that it doesn't have to render all of those particles. It only needs to render those parts which are being observed by one person. And then when they're observed by the next person, there's something we call caching, which is that we store it on the server. So now that's available to multiple people. So as long as people are there, then that gets rendered. But only the parts that are necessary. So only that which is observed by your avatar is what needs to be rendered. And to me, looking at this weirdness of quantum mechanics and looking at what we do and how we build video games, right? If you tried to build Fortnite, a World of Warcraft, or no Man's sky back in the 80s when I was a kid, you wouldn't be able to. It's just too many particles. But then they came up with this idea of 3D modeling and rendering, and you've got things like what's obfuscated. Don't bother. Even if it's behind this curtain, we don't need to necessarily render it. So computer science is often about optimization. And there's something called lazy evaluation in programming. And lazy evaluation means you don't evaluate. You don't actually run the code unless you need to. So if you say x equals 2 to the 1 million power, but then you never use that variable X, that computation might take a long time to do. I mean, it's not that hard for a computer to do, but you can think of a more complex computation. But if it's never used, it'll just wait around until somebody needs X and then it'll go and it'll Compute it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see. So theoretically, there's no coffee machine behind this curtain, but when I open it and it's there. It was created the second that my eye.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes, it could be. Now, in this case, because you've been living here, it's probably cached. So it's already there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Right. Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because that's the thing you might look at next. Whereas you're not going to go to Mogadishu immediately. You'd have to get on a plane. You have to go all the way over.

[Jordan Harbinger]

There's a lot of time for it to render in my brain. Yeah. Or wherever it's being done now. That actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it from a video game standpoint. But it says a lot about space. Right. I remember I had Michio Kaku on this show a long time ago, and I asked if we were in a simulation and he said no, because weather is too hard to simulate. Which I didn't find super compelling. I mean, no, shade. He's obviously smarter than me, but I didn't find that completely compelling one. Sure. Our computers today would have a hard time with weather. We're talking about a civilization that's maybe a million years advanced. They could probably run the weather on their iPhone. Right. Or whatever.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. I mean, it's like saying, can you run ChatGPT on a 286 or Pentium processor? No, you need the GPUs from Nvidia. But more than that, you need the LLM training and the algorithms, which couldn't have been done.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The other thing is, you don't really need to worry about the. If we're talking about weather rendering and caching, you don't need to run the weather for the whole Earth unless something is perceiving that weather. Right. So it doesn't really have to be done. All the storms that are 3,000 miles in the middle of Antarctica, they don't need to render. They just. We just need to theoretically know that they're there. If nobody's there to observe these, then it doesn't matter.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's where it gets even a little bit stranger. So I talked about not needing to render it until it's observed. That makes sense. When we talk about, okay, you're going to go to Antarctica.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What about space, though? It's so far no one. Nothing's there.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, we don't know, but if you look at it, it looks almost infinite, Right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And yet how do we know that's not being procedurally generated beyond a certain.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I guess we don't, as we.

[Rizwan Virk]

Get better and better at looking at it. Now, that doesn't rule out the fact that there could be other civilizations in a simulation. I mean, in many multiplayer strategy games, you have, you know, people on different planets. And maybe the purpose of the game is to wait to see when these guys are going to interact with each other. But there's something even weirder, and that is with time now we're used to thinking, okay, the future. I can think of multiple possible paths in the future, right? I moved to San Francisco, I moved to New York. Those are two different paths along the way. But in the past, I'm used to thinking of I have only one past, which is that I moved to the Bay Area, I was a video game developer, et cetera. But in quantum mechanics, there's something called the delayed choice double slit experiment. And that's even weirder because what it's saying is not only are you deciding whether the cat is alive or dead, but when you render it, you are also deciding the history of the cat. Like, did it come in from the backyard or the front yard? Before it came from the front yard, was it across the street or was it in the backyard? So you're basically choosing from one of these historical paths. Okay, now this is even more confusing. And I talk about this in this book. I talk about a little more in my book. The Simulated Multiverse.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You ever see Donnie Darko? You know that movie?

[Rizwan Virk]

Long time ago.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So it's been like 25 years. So give me a break here. But I think Jake Gyllenhaal, he sees this weird guy in a rabbit suit or something like that, and it's got this mercury or liquid thing flowing through it. And eventually you kind of figure out, I think, that that's time, and it goes forward and backwards. The whole thing is like him screwing with that kind of quantum idea of time. So it sounds like that's what you're saying, right? So this, at the time the cat is rendered, the history is rendered. Before that, it didn't exist, Right? Is that what you're saying? Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, basically. And a good way to think about it is what's called the cosmic delay choice experiment. And that is when let's suppose we have light from a quasar that's a billion light years away. So it's pretty far away. It's going to take the light a long time to get here. A billion years, because that's how far it is. But suppose in the middle there's a black hole or A galaxy, something that's a gravitationally large object. And so the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object to get here. And we have telescopes here on Earth that can measure whether it went left or right. So this is a thought experiment that was proposed by my favorite physicists of the 20th century, a guy named John Wheeler. And so he said, well, when would the decision have to be made about whether the light goes to the left or to the right? And suppose it's halfway between us and the quasar. So suppose that's a half a billion light years away. So the decision would have had to have been made half a billion years ago. So 500 million years ago. We're talking about the past, but the deep past. We're talking about dinosaur age, right? Maybe even before the dinosaurs. But what this experiment shows us is it's not until the light is measured here on Earth, and we measure what's called its polarization, which is the same as saying whether it went left or right, that the decision about whether it goes left or right is made now. It's made now when we measure it. Now, that's just really bizarre because that's saying there's more than one possible past. And so I wasn't sure I was interpreting this right, and I went back and I found an obscure quote from Schrodinger, who, again, one of the forefathers of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger wave equation. And he said, in an obscure speech, he said, effectively, when we're collapsing the probability wave, which is one of the interpretations of what happens for the observer effect, is that you have all these probabilities, and then you come down to just one. That's the one you observe. The cat is alive. That's it. But Schrodinger said, we're also choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories, which just gets really bizarre. Now, why do I go into this kind of detail when I'm talking about simulation theory? Well, if you've ever played a game like Farmville, which was popular 10, 15 years ago when I got in the video game industry with Facebook, wasn't my.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Thing, but, yeah, I know what you're doing.

[Rizwan Virk]

But it was extremely popular, and today Minecraft is extremely popular.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so they have crops that grow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In Minecraft while you're not there.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, while you're not there. Now the question is, are they actually growing when you're not there? What happens is, when you log in, the computer figures out what happened while you were gone, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

You were gone for two days, so it's 48 hours.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah. Not only are they, you know, have they matured, but some locusts came by because there was a percentage of possibility that that might happen and they destroyed half your crops. Now, that's the past. Right? But it's figured out when you render the game. So is it possible that we are choosing from multiple simultaneous histories? Now, it doesn't mean we're choosing like all the time, but it could in fact be that's a more efficient way to simulate things. So in computer science, we're always looking at ways to optimize and do things more efficiently. Like today, Sam Altman just announced OpenAI is getting $100 billion from Nvidia. Why? Because they don't have enough compute and they just want to again, use the dumb brute force method, which is they just want to add more hardware. But in computer science, the way you should really do it is look for better algorithms so that they use less compute.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're probably doing that too, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, they're probably doing that too. It takes time. It takes time. There's a short term, short term, the only they can do.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Let's throw money at this for now, and then later on worry about the efficiency.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, right, right. But then you've got other guys trying to figure out these, because remember, their current models are based on research that was done five, 10 years ago. I mean, a lot of this was in Google research labs, you know, back in the day, they just hadn't implemented it fully. Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's crazy to think that in theory this is old tech, right, that we're using. Because it is quite amazing what it can do. I mean, yes, it's fancy autocomplete, but also it saves me a shitload of time, so I'm not complaining.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it's very fancy. Autocomplete.

[Jordan Harbinger]

$100 billion from now. I mean, I'm stoked. I want to see it. After bending your mind for a little bit here, let's take a breath and ground ourselves in something simple and real. Consumerism. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Quilt Mind. Most people lurk on LinkedIn. Hardly anyone posts. I didn't for years either. Which is why the folks who do well, they pop. They get the lowest effort. Visibility. Win out there. Anytime I share something, even a quick thought, I get a wave of DMs and ads and stuff like that on old colleagues. They crawl out of the woodwork. Dude, that story landed. And that's the magic. You stay top of mind so when opportunities show up, podcasts, partnerships, interviews, you're the first call. It's not luck, it's visibility. Enter Quilt Mind. They make posting effortless. They take your ideas and they turn them into tight, scannable posts that actually get engagement written in your voice so you show up consistently without burning hours. It's not just a bunch of AI slop. It's not vanity. It's relevance. We pay for the gym to look good, in part, so why not invest in your professional presence as well? If you've ever thought, hey, I should post more, but you never follow through. Quilt Mind is the bridge between intention and action, and the upside could be bigger than you expect. Curious what I'm sharing? Go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn. If you want to start making quality posts like me, message me or email jordanaudienceuiltmind.com that's jordanaudienced.com this episode is also sponsored by Uncommon Goods. Alright, the Holiday Shopping Countdown is on. If you don't know where to start, check out Uncommon Goods. This is a goldmine of unique, high quality gifts you won't find anywhere else. Something the recipient will say oh my gosh. Where did you find this? I love it. For example, and I hope he's not listening to this. My brother in law who is impossible to shop for is obsessed with pickleball and I got him a Christmas ornament of a pickle playing pickleball. His girlfriend is getting pickleball paddle earrings. It's the perfect mix of thoughtful and oh wow. Where did you find this? Let me put it that way. They've got something for everyone. Your foodie friend, your dad who's impossible to shop for, your kid who's already got every toy known to man, and every purchase supports small creators, which is cool. Plus they donate a dollar from every order to a nonprofit that you choose. They've already given over 3 million, which is pretty amazing. So don't wait. Cross those names off your list before the rush and Jen's gonna tell you how to get a discount. To get 15% off your next gift.

[Rizwan Virk]

Go to UncommonGoods.com Jordan that's UncommonGoods.com Jordan For 15% off Uncommon Goods, we're all.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Out of the ordinary. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network. The circle of people I know, like and trust me teaching you how to build the same thing for free [e-mail]. this is about improving your relationship building skills. It is not cringy, it is not awkward. It is very down to earth. It's not going to make you look like a jerk or worse. It'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in whatever reality you're living in. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, the course is all free without any shenanigans [e-mail] now back to Rizwan Virk. At what point do the in game characters think that they're real? Maybe it's less important whether I actually think I'm in Grand Theft Auto 6. It's probably more important that the characters in Grand Theft Auto 6 think they're in Grand Theft Auto 6 and they don't. They can't tell the difference. Right. Is this a decent question or am I?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. And so in the past, we had what were called dumb NPCs, right? They were just basic NPCs that you could interact with if you've ever played like an old video game from. I was an investor in a company called Telltale Games years ago, and they used to create like a Game of Thrones and a Walking Dead game. And when you wanted to talk to the character, the character would basically, you know, tell you what they said. And then there would be these choices and you'd have to choose one of them. So it's basically a dialogue tree. So those were like simple dumb NPCs where the, the creators of the game have laid out all the paths. Kind of like the old choose your own adventure.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I remember those. Yeah. Skyrim had something I've seen where it's like a meme, right, where someone gets blown up or whatever and the NPC goes, huh, must have been the wind, right? It's just like they don't have this advanced.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, they're not very advanced. But today we're starting to get smart NPCs. So what's happened with the Turing Test, which was this test that Alan Turing proposed way back in 1950 actually. And he was talking about AI as a computer, right. Today we think of AI as software, but he was basically saying, look, if you are passing messages behind two curtains, curtain A and curtain B, and one of those has a computer, again, he's thinking of physical computer and one of those is a human. And you can just pass messages back and forth. Now, back then he was thinking of teletype machines, but, you know, we could think of it as text messages or just the chatbot today. Then if you can't tell the difference, then that computer has passed the Turing Test. He actually called it the Imitation Game in his paper, which was the name of a movie about him, which was not about the Turing Test at all. It was about his other work, his code breaking work. But so most people believe today that we've passed the Turing Tests in that many of these chatgpt like LLM engines, it's very difficult to tell if a human is behind it or not. That said, I mean, if you, you know, you can kind of tell when something is AI generated more because of the length of what they're doing and the patterns that are there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

A human would never put up with me for as long as ChatGPT. Exactly put up with me. That's how I know it's a robo.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So you can tell from the, you know, more or less still. But there have been experiments done. Now, there was a prize that was set up by a guy named Loebner back in the 90s called the Loebner Prize, for which chatbot is closest to passing the Turing Test. And it went on for many years. In fact, there was a chatbot called Alice back in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, that was supposed to have the personality of a young woman. And it was getting pretty good. I think it was the winner of the, the Loebner Prize, but no one won the grand prize. And it went all the way through 2019 and it became defunct. And now they're doing, running these experiments where, you know, they have a thousand people talking to ChatGPT. And so most scholars think we're pretty close or we've already passed the Turing Test. But in my book Simulation Hypothesis, I talk about the Metaverse Turing Test. And it gets back to the point that you just made about no human would put up with me for that long. But the idea is, if you're inside a video game, there's you, your character, there's an npc, and then there's an avatar controlled by a human. And you can go do whatever you do inside the video game, like inside Second Life, you can go have a swimming pool, you can go to Starship Enterprise, you can do whatever you would do, you can go dancing, you can have virtual sex, whatever. And then if you can't figure out whether which One is the npc and which one is controlled by the human, then it would pass what I call the metaverse or the virtual touring test. Now we haven't passed that yet, but we do have smart NPCs now. So what people are doing is they're hooking up like an LLM engine like ChatGPT to an avatar and they're bringing the two together. I don't know if you ever saw the film Her. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, Great film, right?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, I think, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Rizwan Virk]

I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Well, it does seem sad in its way, but they've been around for a while now. There's a company called Replica, for example, that has been around since, I don't know, 2015, 16. And of course people are now using ChatGPT and variations of it. And there's character AI. There were a whole bunch of these companies that were just specializing, you know, in this. But getting back to your question, which was, would the AI, the NPC not know that it's an npc? And so we're getting closer. So there was a, if you remember, there was a fourth Matrix movie that came out in 2021.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I don't think I saw it. I pulled the plug at some point.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it wasn't that great according to most Matrix fans. It was sort of deep if you think about it, but it just didn't have the same tenor of the earlier films, I think. But when that came out, the Unreal Engine, which is one of the big gaming engines that's used for building very realistic landscapes today. They came out with a demo called the Matrix Awakens. And it was basically kind of a mini game, if you will. And it was a city. And they had Neo that looked like Keanu Reeves, and they had his voice in there, and they had Trinity with Carrie Anne Moss. And the city that you moved around looked real. It was kind of like a mixture of San Francisco, where they shot part of the film in Berlin, but it was all virtual. And so the landscapes were so good that you couldn't tell the difference. Now, that city was filled with NPCs. Initially, they were dumb NPCs, but then what one guy did, there's a video of this online. He hooked up an LLM engine into the NPCs, and he made them smart NPCs. And then he had his character walk around in this virtual city and say to them, hey, you're in a video game. Hey, you're an npc. And they reacted the way that people might react. Some of them were like, I don't have time for this. I got a job to get to. Others were like, really? Tell me more. And so it was interesting to see. And that was in late 21 or early 22 probably. So just around the time that ChatGPT came out. So today there are smart NPCs. And I think they will get to the point where they may not know. Now, that's not the case.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, if you walk around New York, there's a good chance somebody will run up to you and say you are in a simulation or you are in a video game.

[Rizwan Virk]

And now the question is, are they crazy?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are they crazy, or is this my moment, right, to take the red pill? I don't know.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yep.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay. So anomalies are something that I remember from the Matrix a little bit anyway. And I would love to talk about anomalies in the real world. Deja vu, other kinds of glitches, or even UFOs, right. Might be one that's apropos lately. What do you think's going. If we had to plug that into the simulation theory? What's. How does. Does that fit in at all?

[Rizwan Virk]

It does, because in any simulation, you end up with glitches, but you also end up with an information substrate that you can't see normally, but it's driving what happens. And so this could be driving glitches, like whether it's a deja vu or where you feel like you've actually experienced this before. In fact, I quoted Philip K. Dick, the science fiction Writer who wrote the books behind Blade Runner, Minority Report, the Man in the High Castle. I interviewed his wife while I was writing the first edition of this book a few years back. And he had a speech in metz, France in 1977 where he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. Now that's become a very famous quote. In fact, the Wachowskis who made the Matrix were inspired by Philip K. Dick. But he went on, and that's the famous line. But if you read the rest of his speech, what he said next was we would have the sense of reliving the same events, of saying the same words. We would have a sense of deja vu. Such an impression is a clue that some variable had been changed in the past. And so one way that it fits in with deja vu is it's very possible that we have done this before because if you run a simulation, you might run it multiple times to see what is the best outcome, the worst outcome. Perhaps you were running it yourself in dreams, for example. Some people had precognitive dreams, for example. It's a real phenomenon and it's weird because you can't really explain it from a normal point of view.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm not much of a believer in any of this, but I will say that this stuff has happened to me too, of course. Well, one, deja vu happens to everybody pretty much. But two, I've definitely, I mean, I remember very clearly having dreams and telling my mom about it. And then I'd be like, this is the thing that happened in my dream like a week or two later. And she's like, whatever, you're a kid and you don't know what you're talking about. But I, I remember very clearly being like, no, I told you that this was a thing and it's happening right now. And she didn't believe me, and rightfully so, because it sounds insane.

[Rizwan Virk]

It sounds insane. I didn't believe it until I had it happen to me in the business world. It was really weird. We had a startup back in Boston. We worked with IBM as one of our key partners and we had a competitor who this guy named Mark and his company was called Edge Research. And they disappeared like a year ago. And we weren't sure what happened to them. And I just hadn't thought of this guy in a year. Never had a dream about him. One morning I had a dream and there's my competitor Mark from Edge Research. And he's like, hey, how are things going? And I just woke up and I thought, that's bizarre. Why am I dreaming of this guy now of all days? Haven't heard from him in a year. Never, ever had a dream about him. And then I walked in the office and I got a call from IBM and they're like, hey, we're calling you because before we do this announcement today, because you're one of our partners, but we're introducing this new product. Unfortunately, it's going to compete with your product. It's going to probably crush your product, but you're a good partner. So we thought we'd let you know beforehand. I was like, great, thanks. But then I was like, wait, how come I hadn't heard of this product before? IBM is a big company. I mean, I'm sure I would have heard of it. He goes, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, from Edge Research? We bought his company about a year ago and they've been working in secret in New Hampshire and it's just coming out now. And it was like, of all the times for me to have that dream, it was just so. And it happened before I got the phone call so this kind of thing would start to happen. So that's another kind of glitch in the matrix. That doesn't mean all dreams are precognitive. Most dreams are just spicy pizza. As one of my mentors used to.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Say, I don't think I'm going to be flying around with Bruce Lee over the Manhattan skyline anytime soon.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right? Yeah, yeah. But there is an element of dreams. There's lucid dreaming where you recognize that you're actually.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This happens to me all the time when I was a kid. This happens to me constantly. It was basically every night. Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, interesting.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, interesting. Now, how did you know you were in a dream?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, so this is interesting. I would love to do a full episode about this at some point. But I knew I was in a dream because I 1. They were almost always recurring dreams. So it would be like, oh, I'm swimming with my neighbor Michael again, like I have for the last 20 nights in a row. And then I would go, all right, this is a dream. Or I would do something where I would be dreaming and I would. Maybe it was a nightmare and something was chasing me. And I would go, huh, wait a minute. I'VE had this dream before. I think, also, this doesn't make sense, that I can't run. Why would my feet be stuck to the ground? This must be a dream. Well, if it's a dream, then I don't have to be stuck to the ground. In fact, I can fly. So I would jump over the muzzer, and then I would be like, well, I'm not just gonna jump over this dumb monster. Forget about that. I wanna explore. I'm flying. So then I would go fly over the neighborhood, over cities I had never been to before. And then the next night or a few nights later, I would have another dream and I'd go, oh, my God, I can't run because my feet are. Oh, wait, no, no, no, no.

[Rizwan Virk]

I've been here.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So usually it was a recurring thing, and it was always like, I've had this dream so many times that whenever I feel this way, it's just a dream.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay, so you had, like, little clues getting back to Inception. He had the little spinning thing that was his to figure out if it was a dream or not.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So the totem thing. So this is. I wasn't gonna share this, but I might as well, because it's apropos. There would be. When I was starting to become a little bit more of a young man, I would go, if this is a dream, I could probably make these women that are in the dream disrobe.

[Rizwan Virk]

I mean, when you're a teenager, right? Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And then I would be like, wow, they're all wearing bikinis now. I'm definitely in a dream. This is amazing. Well, what else can I do? That was my design.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's like the best holodeck from Star Trek.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But it would be like, wow. Oh, man. That girl from my classes, wait a minute. I can make her get into a swimsuit.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, wow. You had that much control.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And I remember being able to, like, choose the color of the swimsuit, everything. It was just like I could control every element of the stream.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was awesome. It's interesting. So what we call lucid dreaming, which is what you were doing there in modern times, it's a deviation of what, like, the Tibetan monks called dream yoga. And in dream yoga, what would happen is they would train the monks through meditation during the day, but then they. While they're falling asleep to try to keep. You know, we have a waking consciousness and we have a dreaming consciousness, and you kind of. There's a wall in the middle, and that's why it's hard to remember you can remember a dream when you first wake up, but then over time you don't remember it. But they train the monks to recognize that they're in a dream. And I used to do a lot of lucid dreaming too. And flying was one of my clues that, okay, this might be a dream. If I can fly, I can't tell you the number of times where I was sitting with somebody in a restaurant or something, and I thought, well, this is obviously not a dream. I'm not going to try to fly. That would be stupid. And then I floated up off my chair and turns out it actually was a dream. But so they would train them. But the reason they would train them is because then the monks would remember their waking life and they would remember that this is a false world. And in Buddhism, that's basically one of the main tenets of not just the spiritual practice, but of the cosmology, is that the world is Maya, or an illusion, which is the term that Eastern mystics use in slight from Sanskrit. And basically they said, look, if you can wake up in the dream, you should be able to wake up here and remember there's a part of you that's outside the dream. It's what the Hindus call the Atman, or what we would call in the west, the soul, or what I would call the player. And the player could be one to one matching, or it could be somebody who's running the simulation. But that's another type of glitch if we think of the world as a type of dream. Another is synchronicity. I'm sure you've heard the term. Some people are skeptical about it. Jung coined the term synchronicity, and he said it's basically when an inner thought and some outer event coincide. So in a sense, the dream that I talked about was kind of a synchronicity. But there's also a new way of thinking about synchronicity. So what happens is when that happens, you think of somebody, somebody calls you, the more scientifically minded of us say, well, that's just coincidence, no big deal.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, this happens quite a bit. It's like what you said about the dream and your competitor, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I'm always surprised by this because it happens so often. And look, some of remembering that is selection bias or survivor bias, whatever it is, confirmation bias. Actually, that's the most common one. Right. So the amount of times I think about somebody and they aren't thinking about me is probably a hundred to one. But it does happen so often. I'll send Someone a text, and they'll go, I'm having lunch right now talking about you with someone else. And it'll be like, again, not a family member, not a friend, not a.

[Rizwan Virk]

Close friend from four years ago.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'm like, hey, do you still run that company that does bottle manufacturing? And they're like, who is this? And I'm like, jordan Harbinger. They're like, dude, my friend is telling me about your podcast at a meal right now. And I haven't talked to this guy since a conference in 2016.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. It happens often enough. I was in the UK in Cambridge last year, doing some research on AI at their AI center. And I was meeting a friend and I was telling her, oh, you know, there's this guy who's got this. He's talking about religion and AI, and his name is this. And I've never met him. And she goes, wait a minute. And she wasn't from the University of Cambridge. She just happened to be in London and visited so we could have coffee. And she goes, wait a minute. His sister was my best friend. And it was just like a weird, like, 20 years ago. It wasn't even, like, recently because she didn't even live in the UK anymore. And so this kind of thing happens a lot. But from simulation, hypothesis, perspective, you can think of it as there's an information substrate. And so there's a term called a technological synchronicity, which is a term that a guy named Jacques Vallee, who, speaking of UFOs, he was involved in UFO research back at Project Blue Book. And if you've ever watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was the inspiration maybe 20 years ago. Yeah, he was the inspiration for the French scientist. So Jacques was a French scientist who came to the US, got his PhD in computer science, and then got into this UFO world at the time. But anyway, he defined this term, but the idea is that there's an information substrate that organizes things so that what seems like a coincidence is just how we organize information. And I like to describe it by using an example from online shopping, because I used to be in the online advertising business. And so the other day I was shopping for a backpack online on my laptop on my desk, and then it was a specific backpack, and I was about to buy it, and I said, let me hold off on buying it. And then I'm on my phone outside on Facebook or something, and I see an ad for that exact backpack. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Probably not magic.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's probably not magic. Right. But if I didn't know anything about databases.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, I was going to say. Don't tell me you think that this is intent. Now I got you.

[Rizwan Virk]

No, no, I'm saying I know exactly what it is. So in fact, we even call it registering your intent in the advertising industry when you put the thing in the shopping cart and you abandon it. That we put that in a database and so we keep track of it behind the scenes. And so there's an ad generator that is like, ooh, you're the guy that had the intent to do this and we put it to you. But my point is, if you didn't know anything about the Internet, you would say, oh, either it's magic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I meant to buy this background.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Or you would say, it's just a coincidence. That's the scientific point of view. That's bullshit because we can't see. And cookies. Come on, you're making this stuff up. It lives in some database, in a cloud. You gotta be kidding.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a good point. It's a really good analogy.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah. So if there's an information substrate and our thoughts are somehow getting things from the database and putting things in the database, it's very possible that we're getting hints about that. That's why it might come up in a dream. Or if we're thinking of someone, it's very possible that that could remind them and then they do it to us. As long as we don't think of the world as a material, physical world, you know, and so that's kind of. It's become a kind of religion in many ways, I think, in our society. And people get as offended when you tell materialists that something else could be going on that they can't see as people who, like, you tell them, oh, Jesus didn't really resurrect. They'll be like, christians could be pissed at you. And so it's become kind of a religion that says that that doesn't fit my worldview, therefore it's not possible.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to all this stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it's okay to be a skeptic. I'm just saying that at the same time, there are things that happen that we can't explain.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's for sure true.

[Rizwan Virk]

So there may be a scientific explanation as opposed to a divine one.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That would be great, actually.

[Rizwan Virk]

Ye.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I would actually rather find out that we're all living in a simulation than some of the other stuff is real. I'd rather that be. So what about. And again, at the risk of Sounding like I'm just trying to get a clip for stoners on YouTube. What about the UFOs? Like, how does that fit into simulation theory? Or how does simulation theory make UFOs make more sense as opposed to.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, it's interesting. And I have spent a little bit of time investigating the UFO phenomenon. There's a guy at Harvard named Avi Loeb who started the Galileo project, and I'm an advisor to the project. And then there's a guy from Stanford named Gary Nolan who started the Sol foundation, and I wrote a white paper for them on venture capital investment in UAP technology, which would be potentially technology that can move a lot faster, kind of far future technology, the way we would have thought of AI 50 years ago. It's something that almost seems like Arthur C. Clarke said, that any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But when you think of UFO sightings and how they might fit in, this is where it gets a little weird. So science fiction has kind of influenced the way we think about UFOs. Like in Close Encounters, the third kind, it was a spacecraft. It came from an alien planet, presumably. And that's pretty much the narrative that you see in science fiction. But what happens is with UFO sightings, they get weirder and weirder and things seem to plop in and out of existence. They change shape. So I was with Jacques once and he told me about this case where one person saw the UFO and the next person standing next to him didn't see it. So again, that doesn't make any sense from our standard material point of view is it's either there or it's not there. But if one person is seeing it and the other person isn't, that's really weird. And then I heard of another case. There were two people sitting next to each other in the car, and one saw like a large cylinder and one saw like a donut. Like it was weird. Different enough and they were sitting right next to each other in the car, that it was just strange that they could do that. And then there are reports of UFOs popping in and out of existence. I mean, I've had people tell me, they're like, it was a clear blue sky, there was nothing there, and suddenly it slowly materialized. And to me, that sounds a lot like reszing or rendering within video games. What happens is, you and I, like, if we were doing this on Zoom, or we were both sitting inside a virtual reality room like in Second Life or Meta's Horizon Worlds or whatever, or VR chat, we Might think we're sitting together, but we're not. Right. I'm rendering you on my computer and you're rendering me on your computer.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

We happen to be sitting across from each other. Although, you know, we could fake it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, I'm still rendering you in my brain.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that's right. You have another level of computer. So basically, at some level, we are both rendering this scene. Like I'm rendering the scene of the studio, and so are you on your computer. I put that in quotes because it doesn't have a coffee machine.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's still cached.

[Rizwan Virk]

Is it still there?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

But that would explain how you could have a phenomenon that seems both physical and non physical and changes shape and appear differently. Because in a video game, you could be at level 30 and I could be at level two, and you could have the sea dragon spell and I couldn't. We could be standing in the exact same field and looking up. You're like, look at the dragon. I'm like, there's no dragon there. What are you talking about?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. It's just a different.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it could be these objects are being rendered into our reality. Now why are they being rendered into our reality? That gets much more complicated. There was also a case where Jacques told me where there was this group that said this UFO came down at a 45 degree angle and landed in a clearing in Northern California, southern Oregon. If you've been up there, you know, there's a lot of redwood trees and big evergreen trees. And they said it landed here. And so people went to investigate and they were trying to find physical evidence. And Jacques said, well, if it came down at a 45 degree angle and it landed here in the clearing, it would have had to go through those trees, like, literally cut through the trees. And they were like, yeah, that's what happened. But we didn't want to tell anybody that because then we sound like we're crazy. Right. So again, you have this weird thing that almost looks like it's a holographic projection into our reality, and then it becomes physical. Just like when you rezz something in a video game, you can kind of walk through walls and things when they're not fully rezzed, but then when they're fully rezzed, you have the laws of physics in the world. So is it possible that UFOs are in fact, not extraterrestrial, but are somehow extra dimensional and they're being projected in this reality? That's not to say some of them couldn't also be hoaxes. Some of Them could be extraterrestrial. I mean, there's the Fermi paradox in scientific circles where they say, Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and I think he was a Nobel Prize winner too, but he said, look, if there was life in the universe, and even if they didn't have warp speed so they couldn't travel faster than the speed of light over like 100,000 years, they could colonize most of the galaxy, certainly over a million years. And the universe is billions of years old. So where are all the aliens right now? UFO people in that world would say they're here, which, we've seen them. We see them all the time. Navy pilots have seen them. But if we take that perspective, then it would be weird to have this entire galaxy of whatever, a hundred billion stars and, you know, how many, was it 2 trillion galaxies or something like that, without other life. Unless they're all being generated for us to make it look like we live in this infinite world.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Interesting. Oh, you mean the stars and planets are just being generated at as we observe them, like you said before?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And there might be some where there are aliens on there, and that world is also being rendered for that specific group of players and where the whole point of the simulation could be, wait till we meet each other openly. Whereas in the UFO world, there's this idea of a concealed contact. Like, contact has happened already, just it's not been admitted by the government. And I've talked to people in some of these top secret programs. There's something weird there. They're hiding something. Now we don't know what they're hiding, whether it's extraterrestrials, it's time travelers, it's top secret technology that Lockheed Martin built in skunkworks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I'll go with that.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, and that's like, I think where most people would go. But then I talk to people who've been at Lockheed and have been in these programs, and they're like, well, we're reverse engineering something. Yeah. I don't know where they got it from, what they're reverse engineering. Make a piece of metal. Could have been a civilization on Earth a million years ago that's completely like, all traces of it have vanished now, but there's still stuff that they find, and they're like, hey, let's figure out how this thing works.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Hey, if we're all NPCs, I'm at least trying to be the kind that makes good recommendations. Here are a few you should actually click on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Sleep Me. I've gotten pretty serious about optimizing my sleep lately because it affects everything. Focus, mood, energy, really how patient I am with my kids. I wish it wasn't the case, but it sure is. And one thing that's made a huge difference for me is the chili pad from Sleepmate Me. It's a water based cooling system. It fits right on top of your existing mattress. It lets you control your exact bed temperature. I set mine cool, Jen sets hers warmer. We both get our ideal sleep temps. We're both cozy and comfy. And I'm not exaggerating when I say this, it's one of the most valuable things that I own. I sleep deeper, I wake up feeling more rested, and when I travel without it, I miss it every single time. If you're serious about feeling better and performing better, start with your sleep. And the chilipad by Sleep Me is worth every penny. Visit Sleep Me Jordan to get your chili pad and save 20% with code Jordan. This special offer is available for listeners of the Jordan Harbinger show, but only.

[Rizwan Virk]

For a limited time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Plus it ships free and you can try it risk free for 30 days with flexible payment and financing options. And if you don't like it, return it at no cost. That's Sleep Me Jordan, because when you optimize your sleep, you optimize your performance. This ad is brought to you by Vive Healthcare, the makers of Apretude Caboteg Review. You never skip your SPF and you carry hand sanitizer like an accessory. But what are you doing for HIV prevention? One way to help protect yourself from HIV is Apretude, a prescription medicine used to reduce the risk of getting HIV in adults and adolescents weighing at least £77. You must be HIV negative to receive Apretude and get tested before each injection. If you think you are exposed to HIV or have flu like symptoms, tell your doctor right away. More HIV testing may be needed. Apretude does not prevent other sexually transmitted infections. Practice safer sex to reduce your risk. Get Apretude as scheduled. Missing doses increases your HIV risk. Don't take aperitude if allergic to it or taking certain medicines that may interact. Tell your doctor about your medical conditions, liver problems and mental health. Serious side effects include allergic reactions, a rash, liver problems and depression. If these occur, get medical help right away. The most common side effect is injection site reaction. Bring your A game and talk to your doctor. Learn more at apprtude.com or call 1-888-240-0340 I've Got Homes.com is a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you got kids, it's also schools, nearby, parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in depth information they need to find the right home. It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood, complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know, all in1place.homes.com We've done your homework. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the [e-mail] deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. Go ahead and email us jordanordanharbinger.com we're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Rizwan Virk. Okay, so a lot of people are wondering, why do I care if I'm simulated? It doesn't change my behavior, or should it?

[Rizwan Virk]

It depends on if we're in the NPC version or the RPG version. That actually does make a difference, I think, because some people are like, well, I don't want to be in a simulation because if I'm just an npc, then and I don't really matter. But that doesn't mean things aren't real to you as they're happening. I mean, there's a philosopher at NYU named David Chalmers, and he said, look, what happens in the virtual world is real. While you're in the virtual world, it's like if you learn a skill, if you learn a language online, have you really learned it just because it was virtual? Yeah, you still learned it in the RPG version. You're a player in the game. And how do we build video games. We build video games with increasing quests, increasing difficulty of quests and challenges and you choose sort of the next challenge. And some people choose to have lives that are with a lot more difficulty level and others choose to have very easy games. Or when you first start playing, people often say to me, look, if I was in a simulation, I would choose to be a billionaire and a movie star and have all these, like you were saying, have the girls all in bikinis at my Hugh Hefner palace.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I mean, 12 year old me was super into that, But I think 12 year old me, 45 year old me could take it or leave it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's like a dog chasing a car. What are you going to do when you catch the car?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. And so it's possible as we go through life, we all face real significant challenges. And if we think of ourselves as players in a video game, then what it does is it gives us this ability to say, okay, even if first I don't succeed, I'm going to keep trying. It helps maybe to put perspective into very difficult situations. That doesn't mean there isn't real suffering in the world. There absolutely is. If you take the NPC version, you could say, well, it doesn't matter. If you've ever seen that movie, Free Guy, it came out a couple years ago, it was like an npc. And it was at Ryan Reynolds, I think one of the Ryans, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Reynolds, I think it was Ryan Reynolds who was an NPC in a video game. And it was a video game, kind of like Grand Theft Auto. So the players had abilities that the NPCs didn't have. He was just a guy who worked at a bank or something. And he realized these guys had these glasses. And when he put on the glasses he started to see all this extra information in the world around him. And then he started to realize he was an npc. And some of the people in the game were actually characters of avatars of real people. But they abused people when they came in the game because why not? Some people say, well, we can't be in a simulation, there can't be any creators. Because then why would they create so much suffering in the world? It's like, well, what do we do when we create video games?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right? Yeah, they make Grand Theft Auto. Which is worse than real life. Right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is worse. Yeah, they actually make it worse in order to have suffering. Or that you want to simulate what's going to happen in a nuclear blast if there's a World War 3, you would literally make the people suffer in order to see what would happen. So that's at a civilizational level because people always say to me, well, what's the purpose of the game? And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do we play video games? And then why do we run simulations? Now the second question is kind of that nuclear war scenario. We run simulations to see what would happen, what's the most likely outcome, what's the worst outcome, what's the most favorable outcome. And then you tweak the variables and you run them again and again. The reason we play video games is maybe to have experiences that we can't have outside of the physical world. And so it's very possible that we are choosing to be in a video game with a character. When do actors win Oscars? It's when they play roles that are extremely difficult. Tom Hanks and was it Philadelphia, the.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Movie where he played?

[Rizwan Virk]

I mean that was when he won his first Oscar is because that was a very challenging life that he played. It was aids, I think.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I think he was a gay man with AIDS. And this was like an 80s movie. So it was, yeah, it was like.

[Rizwan Virk]

Late 80s, very controversial, but pointing out the difficulties that they went through were a brave heart with. With Mel Gibson or that's what makes the story interesting. Those are the choice roles. And so it's when we have some difficulties in our lives if we think of it from the perspective of, okay, this is a challenge that either was chosen for me or that I chose, but I need to get through it. It's a more difficult challenge maybe than that guy's having. And I wrote this book when I had a very challenging part episode in my life, which was I ended up having heart surgery back in 2018 and I was at the height of my entrepreneurial career. And it was during that time that I had gotten some intuitions while I was recovering. I mean, I didn't have a traditional near death experience, but I had some intuitions that I had a plan and a storyline for my life, which was I was supposed to be an entrepreneur, make a lot of money and then go be a writer. But instead of doing that, I went on and if you had asked me in high school, I would have said, yeah, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and then I'll be a writer. It was sort of this knowing that that was part of the story and I think the things that we are naturally attracted to again and again. And I had written a little Bit, but I was still doing entrepreneurial stuff. I was still investing. I was still kind of worried about venture capital and making money. And then after that, what happened was I literally couldn't do anything in the business world for nine months. And every time I would jump back in, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go out and help start another video game company. Once I'd recovered, I would end up back in the hospital and it would happen again and again. But when I did have enough energy to go and write for a couple of hours, I would take a Uber to Starbucks. Oh, wow. And it gave me energy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

From the hospital?

[Rizwan Virk]

Not from the hospital, but when I was recovering. No, not for the hospital. They wouldn't let me go. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They let you do that?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, no, I was in the icu and it was when I got home. I mean, I'm talking about months where I was still recovering. It. You know, modern medicine is great at very specific things, but they're not always great at predicting side effects. And so it took a long, a way longer recovery than they had told me. But during that time and I found that I was being steered and motivated to do this other part of my story. And I wrote two books in nine months during that time while I was recovering. One is an academic book about startups for Columbia Business School. And one was the first edition of this book. The second edition just came out. But by thinking of that as a different kind of challenge, it was almost like the difficulty level was increased and it got me on one of these different choose your own adventure paths. Maybe. Now, if I had to consciously choose, I would not choose that as a way to go. Probably not, but we can think of ourselves that way. And then finally there's what I call the Life Review. Now, as a skeptic, you may or may not believe this idea, but it's interesting. Using a virtual reality metaphor, it actually becomes understandable and it can help us in how we go through the game. So I don't think we're in Grand Theft Auto. Some people may think that's the game we're in. But you can evaluate a game based upon how you're measured afterwards and what people who've had near death experiences report. I mean, they report many things in common over many decades now. Thousands and thousands of reports. They're floating above their body. They see a light. There's a being of light. But one of the things that they report really caught my attention. And it's called a Life Review. And it was this guy named Danny Brinkley, he was struck by lightning back in the 70s and he had a near death experience. He wrote a book called Saved by the Light. Interesting guy, but he used to be in the military and he used to shoot people. And he said, I had a life review, which was a holographic panoramic replaying of everything in my life, but from the point of view of other people. And he used to beat up kids when he was in school. He had to experience what it was like to be beat up by himself. He's like, oh, that's what it felt like, man, I shouldn't have done that. And then he had to experience what it was like to be shot by himself. And then he had to see the ripple effects on that guy's family, the guys he shot, say in Vietnam or someplace when he was in the military. And it gave him a different perspective and how he treats people. And so I looked at that and I said, you know, that is something we do in video games. We can replay the entire video game and we can replay it from any XYZ coordinate. And so there's a game called csgo Global Offensive, which is a first person shooter. It takes place in, I don't know, the desert, Iraq somewhere. And I was involved with a startup right here, actually, not far from here, Cupertino, where you would put on a virtual reality helmet and you would replay the CS Go session, the game that had been played, but you would see it from any XYZ coordinates. So you could wander around, you could literally see what it was like to shoot yourself. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. That's kind of like what these people have been describing. So if we are in a virtual reality, there's no reason you can't move what we called a virtual camera to any XYZ coordinate and any XYZT coordinate and you can replay it. And kids today watch video game replays on YouTube all the time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's true.

[Rizwan Virk]

I mean, my nephew, he was only like 3 years old and he would say to his father, my brother, he would say, dad, I want to watch Star Wars. He goes, oh, you want to watch Star wars movie? He goes, no, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star wars game. And so if we think of it as that type of game, as a multiplayer game, we might treat people differently if we know that we're going to review what happened afterwards.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Isn't that a tenet of most major religions though? Right? I think it's Islam that has like, you get a Review of the Book of Deeds or something.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's called the Script scroll of Deeds.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in the UK with these scholars from Cairo. They're like Islamic scholars. And I'm like, you sure you want me to speak there? I write about virtual reality and business and video games. And there's an Ayatollah there, which just means like a cardinal. It wasn't like the guy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Not the guy from Iran.

[Rizwan Virk]

It wasn't like he was from Iran, but he wasn't like the guy, like Ayatollah Khomeini or Khomeini Supreme Leader. It was like, think of one of a bunch of bishops, right? And so here I was telling them, well, the Quran describes this thing called the scroll of Deeds. It says you have these angels who sit there and write down all your good deeds and your bad deeds and even gives them names. And then it says at the end, your book will be open. Read it. You yourself are sufficient as a reckoner by reading your own book. And I said, okay, those are technological metaphors. We don't think of books as technology. But it is. I don't think they meant. Which is why many of us in the technoscientific world don't take religion seriously. They didn't mean that they were like literally angels sitting there with feather bands writing things down. But maybe what the essence of what they're trying to tell us is that everything is being recorded and we are going to replay it. And the only way they could describe it to people 2000 years ago is, oh, it's a book. It's a record keeping device. And so angels are actually AI These angels are not angels. They're just processes that are running that are recording everything. And then it gets replayed not as a book, but as a holographic panoramic point of view. And then turns out they have that same idea in the Bible. There's the Book of Life where they write down who gets into heaven and who gets into hell. And they say, your books will be opened and each of you will be judged according to your deeds. Well, again, I don't think that if we take it seriously for a moment. If we just say, suppose they're telling some truth, we don't know what truth it is, then probably that would not be a physical book with billions of people. And then turns out in the Hindu traditions, I just learned this recently. I don't even know if this made it into this edition of the book. There's a guy named Chitragupta and they say, well, who's Chitragupta? He's a minor God. Well, it turns out he's called the record keeper. And he sits next to Yama, the God of death. Why? So that Yama doesn't make a mistake in terms of where he sends you. And this guy writes down everything that you do. And again, that's a metaphor. It's just an accounting metaphor that we use to try to. What these guys could actually be in a simulated world is just processes. All the minor gods and all the minor angels. Now, I'm not trying to. I don't want to get in trouble with anybody's religion. I'm not saying the archangels aren't individuals.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's my inbox that I'm worried about, not yours.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. But actually, I find religious people very open to this.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because it turns out they have been trying to use metaphors to try to describe something that is outside of this world. And how do you describe something outside of this world? You can't. You have to use metaphors. Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I have not, no.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was a science fiction series in kind of post. Iraq Days was the version I'm thinking of. And they had these AI robots who oddly enough, became religious fanatics. I don't know why, as opposed to the rest of the people. But one of the guys has a line and he goes, what is the most basic article of faith? She goes, what? He goes, that this is not all there is. And that actually is true of the simulation hypothesis as well. But with the simulation hypothesis, we have a techno scientific metaphor and a way to describe how that can happen. For example, Genesis seems ridiculous if we try to take it at face value. God spoke, there was light, and then he said, create the water. He said, create the land. Okay, now create the forests and the trees and the fruit. Okay, now create the animals. Now create the people. In six days. Again, from a modern scientific point of view, you're like, yeah, okay, either we dismiss it or we say it's some kind of metaphor for something. It turns out we can do that. Now, if you look at the holodeck in Star Trek, the way they programmed it was they basically told it, create a street in Paris. And now with AI and prompting, we can create entire virtual worlds just by saying, okay, now create the water. There was a demo of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago. This is even before ChatGPT was released with a product called Builderbot. And he was like, builderbot, make an Ocean. And it made an ocean. And he was standing there with his avatar. Okay, now have a little island on it. Okay, now put some trees up. Now add some clouds. Now do this right. AI could generate an entire world for us. So it could be that all the major religions of the world. And in the Eastern traditions, you almost don't even need to use metaphors. I mean, in the reincarnation, they say you take on this character, you play the character, you die, you go back, you come in, you play another character. I mean, it's basically like a video game, those guys. That's why I say Eastern mystics in the subtitle. But even Western mystics in Islam, there's this idea of forgetfulness. There's like the 70,000 veils when you incarnate and you forget about them. And in the Greek traditions, there's the river of forgetfulness. You have to cross it when you incarnate. And I was on podcast recently, the woman who was running it was for the Big Bang Theory. She's Jewish, and she's telling me, oh, we have the same thing. We have this angel, Mayim Bialik. Yeah, it was Mayim Bialik. Yep. When she puts. She goes. We have this angel who. Layla, I think, who puts her hand on your upper lip here, and that's why we have a cleft. But the reason she does it is, you know everything, and then you forget everything when they presses it. So, again, that's a metaphor. I don't think, like, that was meant to say there's a real angel that actually is sitting there. So I think many of the things in the religious traditions can be reinterpreted from a simulation point of view, and that at least gives us a new way to think about it, that maybe we shouldn't just dismiss them, because here we are in Silicon Valley. People tend to be. Either they're religious or they're kind of materialists and atheists, but maybe there's something in between. Maybe.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, you know, when I thought about this originally, like, when I started writing back in 2019, I thought we were maybe 50% of the way there. We're just getting basic virtual reality, augmented reality. And AI was kind of in the future. It was in the labs, but it hadn't really come out. But now AI is moving so fast That I think we'll get to that point much more quickly and certainly within the next 50 years, a hundred years at the max. But I think we're actually almost 70% of the way there in terms of all of the stages that I lay out. Now, you don't need all of those stages, but I lay them out so that you can build the matrix fully, like including brain computer interfaces where you can go in and you would be embedded within it and you would completely forget. So that's one of the ones that we're starting with, but we haven't mastered yet. So that one's pretty. But AI has moved so fast. It was actually stage nine out of ten stages when I first started thinking about this. It's actually one of the ones that's moved faster than stage seven and eight, which are all about not just reading thoughts, but implanting memories like in science fiction films. So that stuff is going to take a while. So I don't think it's like next year, but I do think within a few decades, certainly within a hundred years, we'll be there. But I think probably even within 50 years. Wow. So we don't need a 1 million years technology advance to build something like this. It's 100 years, 50 years. We'll definitely be there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Incredible. So, okay, so if we get there and we build a simulation, then doesn't that dramatically increase the odds, one, that we're in a simulation, but two, that we're in a simulation that's in a simulation that built a simulation?

[Rizwan Virk]

Possibly, yes. So when Bostrom laid out a simulation argument, he had three possibilities. Let's just reduce them to two. There are no simulations, or there's a billion simulations. Right. If you get to that point, you're going to make a lot of simulations. If you never get to that point, fine, you don't build any simulations at all. But basically, so you might think the odds are 50%. There's two options. But if we show that it's possible to get there ourselves, then it's very likely in a physical world that is older than ours, a million years older than ours, that someone has already gotten there. So it increases the chances dramatically to like 99%. I think that we're inside some kind of a simulation. It's at least 50. I put it at about 70 now because we're at about 70% of the way to get to that point as well. So I'm sort of reducing the probability once that gets to 100% that we can get there, then it's pretty close to 100 that we're already inside a simulation. Could be from the future, like you said. And perhaps there's more than one timeline. I mean, perhaps this is being run to see if we destroy ourselves, and then we're going to go back and rerun it again. And those people would have deja vu and say, hey, didn't we have this podcast before already? Dan, you and I spoken already?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I just remember the host was much better looking last time. Rizwan Verkh. Thank you so much.

[Rizwan Virk]

Thanks so much for having me. This has been great fun.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75% still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans. Built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen.

[Rizwan Virk]

71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that 75% is completely unexplored.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's extraordinary.

[Rizwan Virk]

Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there. And it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explain. Explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for, is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a $10 million birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Ocean's Eleven, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management? Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it. That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. But I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear. And I don't leave it to other people. I want to be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together. Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank. And things did go wrong eventually. You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware and you need to mitigate those risks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 1089 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. So, are we living in a simulation? I'm not saying go unplug your toaster and start looking for a glitch in the sky. But as Rizwan reminds us, even asking that question forces us to think differently about reality, meaning, and what it means to be human in a world that might just be running on code. Whether this is base reality or somebody else's grand experiment, the lesson is kind of the same. Curiosity still matters, Humility still matters, and how we treat each other in this game definitely matters. Maybe the real test isn't finding the code, it's how we play within it. All things Rizwan Virk will be in the show [e-mail], advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter every Wednesday Wee Bit Wiser. It's very specific, it's very practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. It is a short, under 2 minute read and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at sixminutenetworking.com I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. It's created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in simulation theory, video games, computer programming, they might be interested in this one. Definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins. You've probably heard of Vital Proteins. They're the number one brand of collagen peptides in the us and for good reason. A lot of people, myself included, take it pretty much daily to support things like Healthy Hair, skin, nails, bones, joints. All the good stuff that starts to matter more the longer you've been walking around on this planet. But now Vital Proteins is shaking things up. Literally. You can tell a dad wrote this copy with a brand new collagen and protein shake. And this isn't your average protein shake that tastes like chalk and sadness. This one's light, chocolatey, super smooth, and it's got something pretty unique going for it. High quality protein, 30 grams of it, plus collagen. That's pretty good, Roi. Usually you're choosing one or the other, but Vital Proteins gives you both a ready to drink shake you can toss in your bag or fridge. Zero added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, and no carrageenan. And I don't know what that is or if that's even how you say it, but you're supposed to avoid that if you're already taking collagen or you're just curious about how it might support your hair, skin, nails, joints and you don't want any. Carageenan. This is a super easy, tasty way to try it. Get 20% off by going to vitalproteins.com and entering promo code Jordan at checkout. Extra value meals are back for just $5. Get a savory and sweet sausage, egg and cheese McGriddles plus hash browns and a coffee only at McDonald's for limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.