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The Peter McCormack Show
#188 - Rizwan Virk - Simulation Theory, Quantum Physics & The Impact Of AI
01:36:32
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- [00:00]
Rizwan Virk
Elon Musk came in 2016 and he had this famous clip online where he said, the chances that we're in base reality is one in billions. This physics engine was so good that it fooled my body for a moment into thinking I was playing a real game of table tennis. The controller fell to the floor, I almost fell over. And that's when I had to step back and say, well, where is this going? How long would it take us to build a virtual reality that was so convincing that it became indistinguishable from physical reality?
- [00:29]
Pete McCormack
Unless we are the first creation, we definitely get there.
- [00:34]
Rizwan Virk
We definitely get there.
- [00:35]
Pete McCormack
So if we definitely get there, then it becomes that question, did somebody already get there?
- [00:39]
Rizwan Virk
AI was making everything run faster and faster and so it seemed like we were going to get there a lot more quickly. And I asked the computer scientist, what are the chances we're in a simulation? He goes, oh, 100%. And he asked the physicist and he said, oh, zero percent.
- [00:54]
Pete McCormack
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Aaron. The AI Cloud for the Next Big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out aaron.com to learn more, which is irene.com rez this is a, this, this, this is a fascinating subject that I can't get away from. And now I'm sat here not just with some guys, smoked weed and things are in a simulation. This is an MIT guy, highly credible person who written a book on it. How have you become so convinced that we are living in a simulation?
- [01:36]
Rizwan Virk
Well, it happened over a period of a few years and part of it is, you know, before I started writing about simulation theory, I was an entrepreneur and in the video game industry. And then I also became a venture capital investor for a little while, ran a startup program at MIT about virtual reality and augmented reality. And during that time I was kind of living a double life where, you know, during the day I was dealing with the things that an entrepreneur and a tech industry person has to deal with. Employees, customers, investors, headaches, fighting fires all the time. But then on evenings and weekends, I would try to explore different aspects of consciousness, which included different types of Buddhist meditation, shamanic dream work, lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, all of these different subjects that a lot of my classmates at MIT weren't into at all. So I kind of was living this double life between the tech industry and Sort of consciousness exploration, I guess I would call it. And then after I'd sold my last game company, I visited a startup in Marin county that was a game company. And they had taken on some of the games from my last startup. And we were doing games around TV shows like Penny Dreadful and Grim and a few other shows. And anyway, they said, okay, hey, you have to try on this virtual reality helmet. This was back in 2016, so this was literally 10 years ago now, actually, I think it was like August of 2016 or something. And so I tried it on. And back then, the headsets were pretty big, they were pretty bulky, and they had wires coming from the ceiling. So we used to joke that they were so uncomfortable. We called them having a toaster on your face because that's how big they were, and started to play this virtual reality ping pong game. And so I'm playing this game and the graphics weren't very good. Remember, this was 10 years ago, but the responsiveness was amazing. The physics engine was really well done. So within a video game piece of software, you have different engines that do different things, they handle different aspects of the game. And this physics engine was so good that it fooled my body for a moment into thinking I was playing a real game of table tennis. So much so that I tried to put it paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table, but of course there was no table. The controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over. And that's when I had to step back and say, well, where is this going? How long would it take us to build a virtual reality that was so convincing that it became indistinguishable from physical reality? And I laid out 10 stages of technology and how they would evolve over time. And the first third of the book is about these stages. And we were about halfway there. And so I became convinced that if we could get there, it's possible that someone else has already gotten to that point. And this gets to an argument that I actually hadn't heard at the time, which comes from Nick Bostrom at Oxford, the simulation argument. We can talk about that in a minute. But so as I got further down the technology rabbit hole, including AI, including augmented reality, including, including. What is the difference between physical and digital objects. I started to look into the quantum physics side of the equation and I realized that they were telling us something similar, that there isn't really a physical world, that something like this desk which appears physical actually consists of information. And then I stepped back and thought about all of the Things that I had done in the areas of consciousness. And I realized that most of the world's religions, particularly the mystics who started the religions and the mystical traditions within the religions, whether it's the Gnostics in Christianity, the Kabbalists in Judaism, the Sufis in Islam, they were all telling us something very similar, that the world isn't real. And so I realized that the idea of the world being a video game was both a powerful metaphor, it was a way of describing reality that was perhaps more accurate than the materialist model that is kind of our current standard model. And secondly, that it was built on top of information so we could literally be in a computer simulation that is then rendered for us to look like a video game.
- [05:59]
Pete McCormack
So on the technology front, how far away do you think we are in terms of years from being able to do this? Because I was watching, I don't know. Did you see it this week? The. The Claude integration with Unreal Engine?
- [06:11]
Rizwan Virk
I haven't seen that this week.
- [06:12]
Pete McCormack
It's like mind blowing. So it kind of builds on that GTA world that is built as you require it. And they did exactly the same. But Claude was building things live in this engine setting the lighting. And to me this was like, oh, this is. Especially with my use of AI recently, I'm realizing how exponential this is becoming.
- [06:32]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, it really is. Because you're starting to see in 2022 when ChatGPT came out, right, we didn't. We saw the first generative AI engines released to the public where you could really get it to generate text. And then we saw the ability to generate images through midjourney and through Dall E and various other platforms. And then, you know, OpenAI came out with Sora and they were able to use AI to generate realistic looking videos. Of course, AI OpenAI shut down Sora now because they're trying to compete with Claude on revenue. But you then, you know, had other platforms that came out. And not that long ago, Google came out with the Genie 3 platform and you could use that to basically create a virtual world that was persistent. And that virtual world, all you had to do was kind of describe it. So for example, I made a little virtual world where I said, it's an archipelago of islands with medieval and Greek architecture and there's some dragons flying around and the character is a wizard in a boat. And then I was able to use that boat to navigate the world. Now, back when we built video games, you had to build all of those worlds from scratch. Pretty much you had to do 3D models of the world. And so, in a sense, they were built beforehand and they were available for you to play through. But in the year 2016, there was a game called. Again, back 10 years ago, there was a game called no Man's Sky. And one of the interesting things about this game was that they had 18 quintillion worlds or planets that you could explore. Now, there's no way that if you took all the video game developers in the world and you put them together in one big building, that there's no way they could build 18 quintillion planets, even building a billion planets the old way. And so what they did was they used procedural generation. So it was code that was generating 3D models of the world, and then that basically that world would get rendered for you as you explored the world. And that's kind of how we build video games, is we only render that part of the world that you need to see. So, like, when I was a kid, I used to play games like Atari, you know, on Atari, games like Pac Man, Space Invaders. And, you know, a lot of these games that were built during that time that were adventure games on the early PCs, like the Apple II, for example, or the IBM PC. They were games like King's Quest, and they would basically lay out all of the. The scenes in the kingdom and the pixels were there on disc and you just had to load them. And when your character walked to the right of the screen, they would bring in the next set. And again, that approach is kind of like the materialist model, that the world exists as it is and we're just wandering around the world. But then later there were games like Doom, which came out in the 1990s, which was one of the first first person shooters where, you know, you could explore the world, but you're seeing it from the first person point of view of the main character. And today we have games like World of Warcraft, Fortnite. Now, all of these games are only possible because we only render the part of the world that your character or your avatar is in. And then when I looked at quantum physics, I realized that the observer effect, which has been talked about a lot, and this idea that you can have light going through two different slits. If it was a particle, it could only go through one. If it's a wave, it can go through both. But the quantum physicists say that it's in a state of superposition, which means it's going through both of the slits. Until such time someone observes or measures it.
- [10:07]
Pete McCormack
On the other side, it's kind of spooky.
- [10:09]
Rizwan Virk
It's kind of spooky, exactly. And then there's the other element of quantum physics, you know, quantum entanglement, which Einstein literally called spooky action at a distance. But this observer effect phenomenon is just so bizarre that it would make no sense in a materialist physical world. And that's why it's not really understood how this can relate to quantum mechanics. I mean, to Newtonian mechanics, which is much more of a clockwork universe where you just have these equations that are running. And so I looked at that and I said, that to me, looks like an optimization technique. So from a computer science point of view, we're always limited in the amount of resources that we have. I mean, why is Elon Musk building data centers, you know, that have 100,000 GPUs on Earth, and now he's trying to go to outer space? Why? Because we're limited by the resources that we have. But what we always try to do is we try to come up with algorithms. So one way to scale is you just have more hardware, right? But the better way to scale is to come up with better software and better algorithms that require less processing power. And so we do that in order to optimize. Now, you remember the old CPUs we used to have back in the 90s and 2000s, there was like the 286 and the 386. And intel wrote an internal paper that said, hey, if we keep going like this, the microprocessors where every year with Moore's Law, every year and a half to 18 months to two years, they doubled the number of transistors that you can fit on the hardware. They said the physical hardware is going to be hotter than the sun if we keep going, and therefore Moore's Law will have to have an end. Now, it hasn't really ended, but the reason why it hasn't ended is not so much because of the hardware, but because we came up with better ways to arrange all of these transistors. We started to have these microprocessors that had reduced sets of instructions, and so they required less processing power in order to accomplish the same thing. That's like a new algorithm, right? So it's the same way that, you know, we're training Claude and GPT here with large GPU clusters. And then the Chinese companies came out with Deep SEQ was the first one. And now there's another open source one, GLM 5.2, I think, came out very recently. But the idea Is that if you can reduce the amount of money you need for the training, you can do it through better amounts of training. And that is a key in computer science. So tying this back now to quantum physics, I looked at that and I said, well, that looks like an optimization algorithm. You only render that which is observed or measured. Like there are some physicists who'll say, well, it's not really the observation, it's the measurement. But somebody has to then read the measurement or look at the measurement. But if you abstract away from that, you say, it's only as needed. Basically, it seems that the universe renders only as needed. Now, there's a programming technique going back to my undergrad computer science days at MIT called lazy programming. Now, lazy programming doesn't mean your programmer is lazy. What it means is if you got a whole bunch of code you have to execute, and you take all of that code, which could run for like an hour or could run for a day, could run for a week, and you put all the values into, say a variable X, and then you never use that variable again, then what's the point of running all that code? So lazy programming says only run the code that you're going to need. So maybe a year later, if somebody accesses X, we can go back and run that code if we need to, but otherwise we won't need to. And so to me, it started to look like the universe itself was exhibiting a kind of lazy programming. And that would make sense if we were inside a video game or a computer simulation.
- [14:00]
Pete McCormack
Okay, I'm gonna be honest. I have never really been a skincare person. Most skincare has always felt a little bit over complicated to me. All the fancy branding and the celebrities and those 10 step routines. And you know what, half the time I wouldn't know what I'm buying or what it actually does. So when Oneskin reached out, I was a little bit skeptical, but they sent me the products. But they also did speak my language, which is science. The company was founded by longevity researchers, and they've been looking at how the body ages at a cellular level. And they've developed this peptide called OS1, which is designed to target those old damaged cells. They're called senescent cells. Basically, these cells stop functioning properly and contribute to skin aging over time. And they're not selling magic, they're not selling false promises. They're just trying to build products which are rooted in actual research. And so I have been using one skin for the last week. And you know what? It's been working I like the simplicity. My skin feels better, less dry, healthier overall, and it only takes seconds. I don't have to spend ages worrying about this before bedtime. And you know what? At my age, honestly, you need to start thinking about this stuff. I can either accept I'm getting old and my body's gonna fall apart slowly, or I can try and take better care of myself. So, yep, I'm going to be carrying on using one skin. So if you want to try it out, you can get 15 off at one skin just using the code. McCormack that is OneSkin Co McCormack McCormack Spell M C C O R M A C K and after you've made a purchase, they're going to ask you how you heard about them. So please support the show and let them know we sent you. But how far away do you think we are to be unable to kind of map this ourselves?
- [15:26]
Rizwan Virk
Back to your, back to your original question. Well, so when I first came out with the first edition of this book, it came out on March 31, 2019. So it was a few years after my ping pong experience. And that was literally on the day of the 20th anniversary of the Matrix, which was released on March 31, 1999, the last year of the 20th century. And at that time I had given this estimate that I think we're about 50% of the way to being able to build these highly realistic simulations, but I still thought it would be another 50 plus years to a hundred. So then a couple years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the Matrix, in 2024, Penguin Random House asked me to write a second edition of the book because things were moving so much faster.
- [16:11]
Pete McCormack
It's just the AI had changed everything.
- [16:13]
Rizwan Virk
The AI had changed exactly right. I mean, November 22nd or October 22nd is when ChatGPT came out. And so AI was making everything run faster and faster. And so it seemed like we were going to get there a lot more quickly. That said, if you look at my definition of the simulation point, which in the new edition now I have a formal definition of it, which is that basically it's a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the physical world with virtual or AI characters that are indistinguishable from characters that are being controlled by a human. And so now with AI, we are starting to get smart NPCs, right? So you mentioned, you know, Claude hooking up to Unreal Engine. So a number of companies have hooked up these LLMs to the NPC. So NPC stands for Non Player Character or Non Playable Character. It actually originally comes out of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game, like way back in the day. And it was the guys at Lucasfilm, which was George Lucas Company, they were pioneers in a lot of technology back in the 80s. In fact, they were trying to invent a graphics computer, which they eventually spun out as Pixar, which Steve Jobs bought. Pixar was meant to be like a physical computer, but, you know, the guys in that group just wanted to make movies, so they ended up making Toy Story. But there was another group that was building video games, and they built one of the first multiplayer games called Habitat. And it was multiplayer, but not massively multiplayer, because we're talking about the days of the Commodore 64, with modems that would dial up and so you could have like 10 people in a room.
- [17:51]
Pete McCormack
I was telling my son, we used to load computer games on a cassette.
- [17:55]
Rizwan Virk
That's right.
- [17:55]
Pete McCormack
Yeah.
- [17:56]
Rizwan Virk
When I started, too, we used to do that. And there was this platform called Coleco Atom. I don't know if you remember this, but you could store your program on the cassette tape, but if you left the cassette on top of it, it would erase it would end up erasing the tape. But then a lot of guys would just type in all the code again to play the game again. You'd get it from a Byte magazine. But so anyway, they were looking for a name to call this character on the screen, and they ended up calling it an avatar, which is a term we use today. But that term actually comes out of ancient Sanskrit. It's when a divine entity incarnates in a human body. So it's kind of like this big entity incarnating in what, from their point of view, would be a small body. And so these guys at Lucas Film who were building Habitat were like, feels like I'm squeezing myself into the telephone line. They were using modems, right? So you had this, the old connection. They felt like they were squeezing themselves into the phone lines into this little character. So they borrowed that term, you know, avatar, and they pulled it in. And so these 10 stages that I go through in the book includes, you know, these avatars or NPCs becoming much more like real persons. And that's already happening. People are already hooking up LLM engines so you can have entire conversations with the NPCs. And for people who don't know, the NPCs could be like, you know, the guy, the bartender in the game or the guy at the Armory that's selling you the Plus 2 sword so you can go on your quest against the dragon or the farmer. That gives you some clue and tells you the dragon came down and ate his sheep. So all of those characters are not played by real people. So they're not avatars of game players, they're just code. And so in the past in games like Telltale Games, if you've ever played any of those games, they had games like the Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, they would be like more modern adventure games. And you would talk to these characters, but you'd have to choose one of like three responses. That's all you could say back. And then they would say something. And then you get, you know, two or three more responses. So it was what we called a dialogue tree. And so now the dialogue trees are being replaced with LLMs. So these NPCs have entire backstories and you can like, you know, talk to them about whatever you want. Just like you can talk to Claude about whatever you want. And of course they have prompts that tell them, you know, that you don't see as the user. The prompts are, you are a farmer who has had, you know, this particular experience.
- [20:28]
Pete McCormack
It's what, it's a skill. Now we program them in the skills.
- [20:31]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, we put them in the skills files. Exactly, yeah. So which are plain text files that actually get translated as prompts that end up conditioning the whole LLM system behind the scenes. So it's pretty interesting, you know how that works. And there are hidden skills that you may not know about, but they've been prompted into the system itself. And so that's moving along much more quickly than I had expected. That said, there are things like brain computer interfaces. So if you looked at the Matrix, like in the Matrix they had like a little hole in the back of the head before you could plug in. And that's still a little ways away. I mean, we have Elon Musk. He's trying, man, he's trying. With neuralink, there's invasive, which is what neuralink is in that they implant a chip and then there's non invasive BCIs that are out there. I remember writing an article a few years ago about BCIs for video games. Because if you're playing like a first person shooter with a mouse, there's like 200 milliseconds or whatever between the time you decide on an action and your hand moves the mouse. And they would basically detect the signals coming down the arm and it would actually save like 100 milliseconds in a first person shooter game, but those that was non invasive, that didn't need a chip in your brain, but it would get you there more quickly. So I think we're at least 20 years away now, so I went down from at least 50.
- [21:51]
Pete McCormack
But hold on, isn't that plugging us into something that we're talking about there? The actual ability to recreate a world itself where we create the characters inside it, whereby they are just part of the programming, doesn't require that neuralink. Because they are programming, right? Yeah, yeah.
- [22:08]
Rizwan Virk
So that's one of the stages. So AI NPCs and the ability to create these worlds is moving pretty fast now.
- [22:15]
Pete McCormack
Like injecting us in seems like the hardest of the problems. Yes. Creating the world itself seems.
- [22:20]
Rizwan Virk
Yep, it seems like it's going to happen because it's happening much more quickly than that.
- [22:24]
Pete McCormack
Well, they already have it. It's just they're not totally advanced, they're
- [22:27]
Rizwan Virk
not at that level. Like, even with the Google Genie 3, which I mentioned, you know, you could only explore that world for like a short period of time. It's supposed to be persistent, but they haven't really released a version that's like a multiplayer version that sits there. Right. So there's still infrastructure.
- [22:43]
Pete McCormack
But hold on, so you've seen, is it Eon Project, the fly?
- [22:46]
Rizwan Virk
Yes.
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Pete McCormack
Yeah. Okay, so to that fly, it is a real fly inside its world. We observe that world from the outside and we know it's not the real world.
- [22:54]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah.
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Pete McCormack
What I'm getting at is the recreation of a world where inside there is a Riz and there is a Pete and they're set down at Podcast Studio. They touch it, they feel it, they look through a microscope in it and they see the detail, they look into space. Like the recreation of that world as a digital world. But for those, it's indistinguishable to our experience.
- [23:16]
Rizwan Virk
Right. And we're getting there. So one of the stages is the connectome mapping. Right. So what they did for this fruit fly is they. They mapped its brain and its connectome and then they were able to then put it, inject it into a digital world. And so if you look at the relative complexities of the brain and the number of neurons that we might have, I mean, we're still, personally, I think we're still at least a decade away from a complete human connectome in order to do that. The creation of the digital world part is much easier now because AI will do all of the work for us and through prompts. Right. In fact, one of the interesting things about AI, I mean, we've had a lot of AI agents recently, people talking about, you know, multiple. And now you had mythos and fable, this whole storyline where, you know, the US government ended up making it so they couldn't export it, and then Anthropic had to pull it back. But one of the unexpected aspects of LLMs that made this really interesting is that they were trying to create software that would generate English text. That was the language they wanted to generate. But it turns out that they're able to generate code really, really well. And that's what allows these agents to run. I mean, you talked about a skills file, right? You have all these little like MD or markdown files where people will just type in English text. And it's really good at translating that English text into a set of code behind the scenes. So like if you tell your AI agent, hey, every morning or every week, I want you to check my email and scan for emails that I haven't responded to. And then I want you to draft a response and then I want you to show me the draft to make myself approve it. That is kind of what we used to consider science fiction, but it's possible now, not just because of AI, but it's because of that specific part of AI, which is that it's really good at taking a kind of non formal language like English and translating it into a formal set of code because that code can then run behind the scenes. And so, you know, we used to, you know, I used to spend all nighters back at MIT writing code and I don't code too much anymore, but I'm thinking of getting back into it.
- [25:24]
Pete McCormack
You don't need to, man.
- [25:25]
Rizwan Virk
For that reason. Right? You don't need to. Now we used to be forced to write pseudocode first. And pseudocode was you would lay out in English the steps that you want your code to do and then you would go around and actually write the code so that next step isn't even needed. And it turns out LLMs are really good at a couple of things. One, generating lists. You ask a chatbot anything, it'll generate like a list for you. Well, that list then becomes the pseudocode for the code that it's able to write. And then you can have the agents talking to each other. So the creation of the world. Because we've already had great tools like the Unreal Engine and Unity that are great at rendering 3D objects, we can now generate those objects through a series of prompts. So we're less than five Years away from what I call the Metaverse Turing Test. So this is a new version of the Turing Test that I talk about in this version of the book. You can call it the virtual Turing Test, but the basic idea is that if you're within a game, and we may even be one or two years away from it, according to some people. Some people think we may already be there. Most people think we've already passed the Turing Test for text, for chatbots. I mean, there's a few people who think we haven't, but most ask them
- [26:40]
Pete McCormack
to tell a joke. You know, they're not there.
- [26:42]
Rizwan Virk
What's that?
- [26:43]
Pete McCormack
If you get a LLM to write a joke, you can tell them.
- [26:45]
Rizwan Virk
You can tell, right?
- [26:46]
Pete McCormack
You haven't got our sense of humor yet.
- [26:47]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, you start to give it some prompts about, you know, act like this comedian, and it can get there. But it depends on how long you talk to it. And it depends for how long. Even if you look at Eliza, which was like the first chatbot, this is back in 1965. 63. It was a long time ago. It was Weizenbaum, I think, the guy who built it at mit. If you just talk to it for a minute or two, you would think, oh, my God, it's like I'm talking to a real digital psychiatrist. But if you talk to it for five minutes, you knew it was just a pattern matching thing. And so five years.
- [27:25]
Pete McCormack
Five years from the Turing Test for the metaverse.
- [27:28]
Rizwan Virk
The metaverse, where it's basically you with two avatars, one of which is controlled by a human, and one of which is basically just a smart NPC that's controlled by an LLM behind the scenes. And it's not just about talking to them. You are now actually doing things in the virtual world. So it has to have a sense of three dimensional space. So there's a whole field now called spatial intelligence that is all about having AI be able to understand spaces. And they're all training within virtual worlds. So you could, like, you know, three of you run around, fly hang gliders, go swimming, you know, virtual dancing, virtual sex, whatever.
- [28:11]
Pete McCormack
And if.
- [28:11]
Rizwan Virk
If at the end of, say, an hour, and they can interact with each other, the two avatars, if you can't tell the difference, pick your time frame. 10 minutes, an hour.
- [28:20]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, I don't think five years, man. Just my experience of the exponential growth in this technology. I think it's much sooner.
- [28:28]
Rizwan Virk
Well, you know, the thing is, they've been predicting AGI every year for the last three years. As being a year or two away. And so what happens is a year or two away, predictions tend to become five years.
- [28:37]
Pete McCormack
But does it need to be AGI for it to work?
- [28:39]
Rizwan Virk
It doesn't need to be, but there are elements of AGI that would have to be there even more than just the cognitive AGI. Right. So most people, when they talk about AGI, they're talking about the cognitive tasks. Here you have DeepMind. A while ago they made news, this was probably even a decade ago with the whole playing the game Go, where they gave it the rules of go, and then they were able to beat some of the top human players and they came out with AlphaGo, where they didn't have to tell it the rules, they just said, run, play by your against yourself and we'll just tell you if you won or lost. And eventually it would play millions of games. And then they hooked up the AI to the old Atari games. So you've got like Space Invaders or Yar's Revenge. And instead of telling it what to do, it would just look at the score. And obviously there's a lot of trial and error at the beginning because they didn't know what the game was about. But it would realize that if you move this way when the alien is shooting you well then you're going to stay alive longer, therefore you're winning the game. And so eventually it basically figured these games out. But now we have to do that in a 3D virtual world. And so a lot of training, like Elon Musk keeps telling us. Yeah, fsd, you know, full fsd. You know, you've got the different scales for self driving. I think five is like the highest scale. You know, it's coming, it's coming next year, it's coming next year. So Elon Musk is usually right in direction. He's usually overly optimistic in terms of when we'll get there. And this is true of Silicon Valley in general. Having spent, you know, a decade plus out in Silicon Valley, there's a saying that generally speaking, we tend to be overly optimistic about what we're gonna, what we're gonna achieve in the short term, in the next few years. But we tend to be not optimistic enough about what we're gonna achieve, you know, 10, 20 years from now.
- [30:30]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, and I guess for the thesis, it doesn't, the timeline doesn't really matter. I mean, when did, when did we get pong? Was it 40 years ago? 50 years ago?
- [30:37]
Rizwan Virk
1972.
- [30:38]
Pete McCormack
72. So what's that?
- [30:40]
Rizwan Virk
50, 50 years ago?
- [30:42]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, 50 years ago. So 54 years, we've gone from Pong to where we are now, right?
- [30:47]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah.
- [30:48]
Pete McCormack
And so, like, we're talking about five years because of the excitement of finding out, but really, in another 50 years, I mean, where will we be? This.
- [30:54]
Rizwan Virk
Right.
- [30:54]
Pete McCormack
Yeah.
- [30:55]
Rizwan Virk
If you follow that along and there's a great.
- [30:57]
Pete McCormack
We definitely get there.
- [30:58]
Rizwan Virk
We definitely get there. Right. And so you can. You can argue timeframes. I mean, I'm saying probably not more than five years. It could be sooner, but usually what happens is you had Ilya, who's one of the guys from OpenAI, talking recently about how 2020-2025 was the age of scaling AI. All we had to do was just scale. More parameters, bigger models, more training. Whereas 2015 to 2020, it was all in the labs, because we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns on the scaling because we've scaled it so much already that now we may have to go back in the lab and come up with new algorithms and better ways of. Of doing things. I mean, we're kind of in what I like to call the second, and we're almost at the third AI wave, right? The first AI wave. Well, there was even one before that, in the 60s, when they came up with the idea of the. Of the neural network and the perceptron, which was a simple little model of how, you know, a neuron works. It gets inputs and it fires, and then you would lay them out in a row. And the interesting thing is, in the 80s, by the 1980s, they'd abandoned that idea. I mean, Marvin Minsky, who was one of the guys who helped come up with that idea, is like, this will never scale. So there was a whole wave of expert systems. If you look at all the AI companies in the 80s, there was a boom. I mean, everyone was predicting we're going to have AI that can do anything by the end of the 80s.
- [32:22]
Pete McCormack
Wrong in the short term.
- [32:24]
Rizwan Virk
Wrong in the short term. But we were also using the wrong algorithm. We were thinking of it, like, procedurally. And so you end up with these expert systems with thousands of rules, and they're like code, basically. And you would basically take what an expert knows how to do and you would encode it in a set of rules. But turns out that didn't scale very well. All these rules became problematic and didn't know how to have judgment in the rules. And then we started to go back in the 90s. It was basically a dead space. I know because I studied computer science at MIT in the 90s, and and they taught us how to do neural networks. I mean, they were showing us how to recognize handwriting with neural Networks back in 92. But of course, nobody was using it for anything out in the real world other than the post office. The post office was using it to read zip codes, basically. But then the data aspect and the scaling aspect came about in the 2000s and the 2000 teens. And so we were now in the wave of big data. Rather than rules specifying things, you didn't specify things just like the rules of AlphaGo eventually or of Go eventually. You don't even need to tell the system the rules. It figures out the rules through the data. And so LLMs are a result as well as generative AI around videos and are a result of the kind of big data machine learning wave. And then there's a third wave which is how do you combine these two? Where. Because some things are procedural. So for example, there's the example that somebody gave, like, I think it was just last year or the year before, said, if you ask an LLM how many Rs are in the word strawberry, it can't answer it for you because it can't do procedural logic. Well, last year I was with my class, so I'm at Arizona State University now. And I said, well, why don't we see if ChatGPT can do math? Because technically they're not supposed to be able to do math. And so we went in there and said, what's 1123 plus 2144, whatever? And it got the right answer. And I was like, oh, I thought we said LLMs can't do math. And so I asked ChatGPT, how did you do it? It says, well, I wrote some Python code that basically. So getting right back to what I was saying earlier is that LLMs unexpectedly became really good at writing code which is procedural. So now we have a gap between the data and the procedures. So we are now entering the third great wave of AI, which is you have to. And AI agents are, because of this ability to take procedural elements and logic, which LLMs can't really do, but they can generate English lists and those English lists can be thought of as logic.
- [34:57]
Pete McCormack
So unless we are the first creation, we definitely get there.
- [35:02]
Rizwan Virk
We definitely get there.
- [35:03]
Pete McCormack
So if we definitely get there, then it becomes that question, did somebody already get there? Which was a question about this. And is this in like the academic circles you mix in how serious is this now being taken? Or is it a split? Some people are taking it seriously or some people like, yeah, this is obviously nonsense.
- [35:22]
Rizwan Virk
Well, so the argument that you're making, and you've covered this subject a bit on your show already, is that one, if we can't distinguish between the physical world and the virtual world, what are the chances that we're in a physical world versus a virtual world? Well, they're at least 50. 50, because if you can't tell the difference. Right. But then Elon Musk came in 2016, and he had this famous clip online where he said, the chances that we're in base reality is one in billions. And how did he get to that point? Basically, he's saying the chances that we're in a simulation are billions to one. And his argument was basically Bostrom's argument.
- [35:57]
Pete McCormack
No, his chance we're in reality is billions to one.
- [36:00]
Rizwan Virk
Billion. It.
- [36:01]
Pete McCormack
No.
- [36:01]
Rizwan Virk
Is one in billions.
- [36:02]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, one in billions. Yeah.
- [36:03]
Rizwan Virk
So that means the chances that we're not in reality or that we're in. We're in a simulated world is billions to one. Overwhelmingly. Basically, 99.999%.
- [36:13]
Pete McCormack
He's playing the game.
- [36:14]
Rizwan Virk
Well, that's right. He's kind of recognizing the game. Right. But so that was a simplified version of Bostrom's argument, where basically he said, if there's a billion simulated worlds and one physical world, okay, then what are the odds that you're in this versus those? It was just simple statistics. Now, it wasn't necessarily taking into account these other things like the observer effect and quantum mechanics and clues that we might actually be in a base reality, but we're definitely going to get there. And so if we're already there now in academic circles, it depends who you ask. And speaking of Elon Musk, it was funny, he actually said, last year, I had dinner with a physicist and a computer scientist. And I asked the computer scientist, what are the chances we're in a simulation? He goes, oh, 100%. And he asked the physicist and he said, oh, zero percent. And so what happens is you're coming at it from a completely different way of thinking about reality. And even physics, I think, hasn't. Physicists still are in a material mind, materialist mindset, even though quantum mechanics has been around for 100 years. And, you know, my favorite physicist of the 20th century was John Wheeler, who was at Princeton with Einstein. He worked with Niels Bohr. He was the PhD supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett, who came out with the multiverse theory. Of course, today we have multiverses in all the superhero.
- [37:39]
Pete McCormack
But interesting, the multiverse theory makes a lot more Sense in the simulation theory, in that like infinite simulations are being run.
- [37:49]
Rizwan Virk
Absolutely. Now the one objection that people have to the multiverse theory in a physical sense is that it's not parsimonious. It means that we're spinning off a new physical universe every, not every second, every like quantum decision. Right. So every nanosecond and say, well, that seems like a waste. But in a simulated world, you don't have to have an infinite number of worlds. You spin off the ones you need
- [38:13]
Pete McCormack
and parameters you want.
- [38:15]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah. And you, you trim the tree.
- [38:17]
Pete McCormack
Right.
- [38:17]
Rizwan Virk
So there's something called the anthropic principle in physics that nobody has really come up with a good explanation for, which is that the world seems, the universe seems fine tuned not just for planets and solar systems, but fine tuned for life to exist.
- [38:31]
Pete McCormack
Yes.
- [38:32]
Rizwan Virk
And if these constants, like the gravitational constant, the ratio of the proton to the, to the electron, the mass ratios, there, there are all these parameters. There's like at least 12 of them. Them that if they were off by like 1% or even in some cases even a fraction of a percent, that the planets would fly apart.
- [38:52]
Pete McCormack
Nothing would work.
- [38:52]
Rizwan Virk
Nothing would work. And so the only explanations you can come up with are intelligent design, which leads towards God, or the multiverse idea that there were lots of different universes and we just happened to be in the one that's fine tuned for life. But if you take that to its conclusion, a simulated multiverse basically would mean that you trim all of the universes that aren't fine tuned for life and then you only continue to run like as a computer scientist, you don't run every single possibility forever. Even a good chess playing program. If we go back to the days of, what was it, Deep Blue or whatever the IBM thing was called, those chess programs would basically project forward and say, if I do this and then this guy does that, then where will I end up? And then if I do this move, where will I end up? But even that had a limited number of what we call a depth first search in computer science. Like you're limited by resources and you would trim the tree. And don't bother otherwise with chess, you end up with an exponential growth problem which quantum computers are now starting to be able to solve, like 2 to the 60. Have you ever heard of the story of the Indian king and the chess playing chess?
- [40:04]
Pete McCormack
No.
- [40:05]
Rizwan Virk
So this is a good way for people to understand how these problems grow exponentially and why the multiverse becomes problematic if it's infinite. And basically there was a Indian back in ancient India. There was a king who loved to play chess, and nobody would play chess with him anymore. And there was this one sage or wise man or yogi, let's call him. He said, will you play chess with me? And he goes, no, I don't want to play chess with you. He goes, I'll give you anything you want. He goes, anything? Yeah. He goes, okay, if I win, if the, the, the wise man or the sage wins, you will give me one grain of rice for the first square in the chessboard, and then you'll give me two grains of rice for the second square and then double it to four grains of rice, then to eight into 16. And you got to do that for all 64 squares in the chessboard because it's eight by eight. King is like, sure. I mean, no big deal. Yeah.
- [40:53]
Pete McCormack
No exponential calculation in his head.
- [40:55]
Rizwan Virk
No exponential calculation. It turns out at the end, you get to 2 to the 64. And what is that? That's 18 quintillion the exact number of worlds.
- [41:04]
Pete McCormack
That's like. That weird thing is like if you could keep folding a piece of paper, it was like 50 times. Gets you to the sun or something crazy.
- [41:11]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, exactly. To the point where all of the grains of rice would not fit in all of India. India's a pretty big country at that point. And so that shows how these problems grow exponentially. But. So after I wrote the first edition of this book, I had interviewed the wife of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer who wrote the books behind the Movies for Blade Runner and Minority Report and the man in the High Castle. And his wife told me to go back and look at his speech from Metz, France, in 1977. And in that speech there's a famous line that gets quoted a lot in the simulation world. He said, we are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. And she said, well, read the rest of the speech. So I went back and I watched it and I read it. Turns out that line wasn't in the written version of the speech. It was ad libbed. I mean, he had it written down, but I think he just wrote it in himself because there's a textual version called if this world is bad, you should see some of the others. That's the essay. But what he was actually talking about was if you go back and change variables and rerun the program, the next line was right after. The only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. We would have the sense of replaying the same events, of saying the same things, of seeing the same things, a sense of deja vu. And turns out, what the speech was really about, at least from my interpretation, when I did a deep dive, was it was about the fact that the universe is not just that it's simulated, but that you can change timelines by changing parameters. Now, he came to believe. You can take this to an extreme. He came to believe that the man in the High Castle. I don't know if you've seen that
- [42:59]
Pete McCormack
series, but I started watching it. But I know the thesis.
- [43:02]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, the thesis is that Germany and Japan won World War II rather than the Allies, and they've broken up America and, you know, and the east coast is ruled by the Nazis and the west coast is ruled by the Japanese. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that had occurred because he claimed to have gotten. He said, he wrote. He wrote the book based on fragmentary memories of this slave state in America. But then later he had some experience. Forget, you know, if it was a psychedelic experience, but he had some experience where he said all the memories of that entire timeline came back to him. And his wife told me that he had written a sequel to that. He decided to abandon it once he got all the timelines. He was like, I don't want to spend any more time in those memories.
- [43:42]
Pete McCormack
That's wild.
- [43:43]
Rizwan Virk
It's really wild. But what he was talking about was changing variables and rerunning the simulator, which is just like a multiverse. So I wrote a second simulation book called A Simulated Multiverse based on this idea that what if the universe actually is not just a simulation? Because if you can run a simulation, you'll run it more than once, possibly you may run it multiple times.
- [44:05]
Pete McCormack
So the weird thing is, since we. I mean, Connor will appreciate this since we've been starting looking at this as a subject, and I don't know if you found this as well, but I'm becoming a lot more cognizant of what's going on around me. And I'm seeing things in my life that feel like a simulation that ascended me towards something it wants me to do. Now, some people will say that's God. I'm just. I'm starting to notice I'm getting a lot more deja vu. I'm experiencing a lot more deja vu, but I'm definitely in the. I think it's more likely a simulation than it's not.
- [44:42]
Rizwan Virk
Right.
- [44:43]
Pete McCormack
My question with that is, though, Is like, has this impacted how you think about life, how you operate? Are you considering you're in a game now? Yes, you are.
- [44:53]
Rizwan Virk
I consider myself to be in a kind of game.
- [44:56]
Pete McCormack
Right. Yeah.
- [44:56]
Rizwan Virk
It doesn't mean it's sitting on a 286 computer.
- [44:58]
Pete McCormack
No.
- [44:59]
Rizwan Virk
It's probably more like some kind of quantum computing device that can explore different possibilities. But if you think about what you just said, which you're noticing deja vu's more. You're getting what I call. And so Philip K. Dick actually talked about deja vu's being glitches. And in fact, the. The filmmakers of the Matrix, the Wachowskis, were inspired by Philip K. Dick. In fact, I asked his wife, what would he think? Is he passed away in 1982 or was it 84? It was just before Blade Runner came out. And I asked her, what would he think of the Matrix? And she said, well, he'd have two reactions. The first reaction is he'd love it because it's all based on his idea that the world isn't real. That was his first reaction. His second reaction would be to call his agent to see if he could sue these guys to make a little money from it. But. But more and more people, I think, are noticing either deja vu moments or glitches or synchronicities. I don't know if you've heard the term synchronicity.
- [45:55]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, yeah, of course.
- [45:56]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, yeah. Carl Jung defined that term and he defined it as an acausal connection between something internal, something that you think, and something that happens in the physical world. Now I believe that that can be explained if we're in a simulation from the perspective of information technology, that there's an information substrate. And a good example is, okay, last year I was shopping for a backpack, a very specific backpack. Cause my friend had told me about it. And I went to the website and I put it in the shopping cart. And then I decided not to buy it. That was on my laptop. Then I'm on my phone a couple days later, a week later, and I see an ad for that exact laptop or the exact backpack on my phone. Now, suppose you knew nothing about information technology. Suppose you didn't even know there was a thing called a database on the Internet. You would look at that and you would say, oh my God, it's magic. I was just thinking about this and now it's happening. Or in that world, the rationalist would say, yeah, it's just a coincidence. Right. Or the mystic would say, oh my God, it's magic, it's divine, it's God. But having been in the online advertising industry, I know it works. We know exactly how it works. And in fact we even called it when you put it something in the shopping cart and then you abandon, we call it shopping cart abandonment. And that is a registering of intent in the database and then that database is used to serve up the ads. Is it possible that we are registering our intent in a information based reality? And then the questing engine. So I mentioned the physics engine earlier. The way video games work now is there's quests and achievements and usually these are like the next few challenges and, and it'll create the situations based on if you accept this quest and usually you can only go after the quests that are at the level of difficulty that you're at in your phase of your character's development in life. If you're level two, you can't go and get a quest for a level 50 player right away because you'll get killed right away or something, you know, you won't be able to handle it. And so if there's an information substrate, it actually gives us clues to the fact that this is going on. And because I've spent a lot of time investigating in the spiritual traditions and the mystical traditions, there's lots of things that happen that you can't explain. People have precognitive dreams. Something happens that day. I mean, my first book was called Zen Entrepreneurship and it was about my first startup during the day doing tech stuff and then in the evenings I'd be exploring these techniques. And one day I had a dream about this particular competitor of ours that I had never, you know, hadn't seen in a year. I hadn't thought about him, I never had a dream with him. And I woke up in the morning, thought that's odd. Why am I having a dream about this competitor? I go in the office, like on this day I go in the office at like 9:30, 10am or whatever time it was, I get a call from IBM who is our big business partner and they say, hey, we're going to release a new product today. We're going to announce it, but we wanted to call you first because you're a, you know, good partner of ours. We used to build products that worked with IBM's products. And they said, but this new product is going to crush one of your products. Sorry, but we just wanted to let you know. I was like, great, thanks, thanks for letting me know. And then I thought, well, how come I've never Heard of this product. I mean, IBM's a big company, there's leaks. He goes, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours? We bought them in secret a year and a half ago and nobody knew about them. And we're now, a year and a half later going to release the product. And I thought, well, that's odd. I had the dream in the morning, this happened later, that it wasn't the other way around. It wasn't like something happened during the day that I had the dream. And it's like things like that happen and people can't explain them. But if it's an information based reality or simulation, you can explain it. So that's one of the ways that I actually think we're in a video game. But I think that questing element is actually quite an important part of the video game of life. So if you play a video game at the beginning, you are going to choose your character. There's a character selection. And like with Dungeons and Dragons, we used to play it with.
- [49:58]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, I hope I wouldn't choose to be a podcaster. I want to choose, I don't know, Guitarist for Guns N Roses.
- [50:04]
Rizwan Virk
That's right. Some people say, I know I'm not in a simulation. Why? Because if I could choose, I would choose, you know, I'm going to be a billionaire or I'm an NPC and I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be a famous actor. It's like the scene in the Matrix. If you remember the guy who betrayed Morpheus and Neil and he's having, you know, he's having that, that steak dinner and he goes, I don't want to remember nothing and I want to be somebody important like an actor, right? He's like. But at the same time, if you choose a character, you choose a race, you choose like, you know, an elf, a dwarf, a human, then you choose a broad profession, right? You choose, you're a thief, you're a warrior, you're a cleric, or what they call a character class. And then you choose the particular campaign or set of challenges that you're going through, right? And those are really important. Again, if, if your character is ready for those challenges, you choose that particular set of challenges and then you jump into the game. Now what the spiritual traditions tell us is that when we come into this world, we go through a process of forgetfulness. And it turns out this is there. Now in the Matrix, it was because they plugged into that bci, the back of the head and then they did it. So young that they forgot, they didn't realize the whole lives were spent in a virtual world. But in the spiritual traditions, I mean, go back to Greeks, Plato, in the myth of er, talks about how the soul has to cross Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, when you incarnate. And in the Chinese traditions, you have Mengpo, the goddess of forgetfulness, and she brews the tea of forgetfulness. And so I started to realize these are just metaphors trying to describe a process. I was on a podcast last year with this woman who was in the Big Bang Theory, this actress, Mayim Bialik, and I was telling her this, and she goes, oh, we have that in the Jewish traditions too. We have a metaphor. So what's that? We have an angel called Lilith. I looked it up later. I think it's actually called Layla. But that angel goes to every baby just as it's about to be born, the fetus. And first you learn everything, so you know everything. And then she presses on your upper lip, you know, there's a little cleft that we have here. And when she presses you there, you forget everything. And you're born as a baby, you forgot all the stuff you chose. You forgot everything you learned.
- [52:21]
Pete McCormack
The reset button.
- [52:22]
Rizwan Virk
The reset button. And I thought, well, that. I don't think that they meant there's one angel with wings that flies around just like Santa Claus would fly to every house. What they meant was there's a process that's running. So. So I came up with this idea that what we consider angels and minor gods and goddesses in the mythical traditions are actually like NPCs who are performing functions within the physical world itself. And then it turns out in the Sufi traditions, the term for a human being is in insan. And insan literally means prisoner. Prisoner of what? Well, there's another Arabic world word called nisiyan, and nisyan means forgetfulness. So we've gone through this element of forgetfulness when we get here, and I believe that there's a questing engine that's creating situations. And sometimes we have real difficult situations in our lives and in our professions, in our work. My first startup actually failed, and that was heartbreaking because I had spent four or five years working on it and to see all. And of course, we didn't really sell a lot of stock along the way. This was back in the 90s, you couldn't really do much of that. And it was heartbreaking. But it actually led me down this path of writing my first book about business and spirituality, which I probably would not have done. If I hadn't had that, and if you had asked me in high school, what am I going to do? I would have said, well, I'm going to be a computer entrepreneur and then I'm going to be a writer. It was almost like a script that I had chosen. Now, how did I know that there was no logical reason for that? None of my siblings wanted to be writers, you know, and that's almost what happened. But what happened was after I'd sold my various companies, I became an investor. I was running a startup program and then I was kind of in what I call NPC mode. And I think in every industry or geographic location, you basically get into the cycle of doing what everybody else is doing around you. In Hollywood, you've got the Hollywood mode. In Silicon Valley you've got either you're going to now go off and start a billion dollar company and build a unicorn or you're going to go start a big venture capital fund. Right? That's like the. It's in the air. And I had a huge personal tragedy. I actually had to get heart surgery right before, like my program at MIT was about to end and I had to give this big speech. And as I was recovering, I had a series of visions in the icu. And in the visions, you know, they kind of appeared as Tibetan monks, but that was just like a mini simulation from my perspective. It was like a mini dream or a mini simulated world where they were just appearing to me because I had studied Tibetan Buddhism. So they appeared to me as these Tibetan monks. But basically one of them explained to me, don't you remember your plan? Why are you still working on making money? You've already done that. You were supposed to get to part two and become a writer. And then for the next nine months, every time I tried to jump back in the video game industry, like I tried to jump back in and do games around the Walking Dead, I would end up back in the hospital. But I had just enough energy to go to Starbucks for a couple hours a day, take an Uber there and right. And that's when I wrote the Simulation Hypothesis, which became a bestseller. And then I wrote a book called Startup Myths and what yout Don't Won't Learn in Business School. It's supposed to be called what yout Won't Learn at Stanford Business School, but Columbia Business School published it, so they took out the word Stanford.
- [55:43]
Pete McCormack
Do you know what's interesting? Because I hadn't. I've made the connection recently, but I hadn't made it at the time is that like my job? I've been a podcaster, right. For 10 years, go around and I interview people and I absolutely love it. But it also maps, would you say it maps to my personality fairs? Like, yeah, it's very talkative. Yeah. We'll go into a bar and. We were in Orlando a couple of days ago and I walk into a bar and we have a drink, watching the football and the guy behind the bar is a. This like punk rock playing. We end up chatting about punk rock for an hour. We're talking about the bands we like. But everywhere I go, I just talk to everyone. Just talk, talk, talk, talk. And so to do this as a podcast is interesting. I had a 10 year hiatus where I worked in the advertising industry, the digital side, building websites or whatever.
- [56:25]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah.
- [56:25]
Pete McCormack
But when I was a kid, when I was 15, I set up a punk rock fanzine and I used to go to concerts and interview bands.
- [56:32]
Rizwan Virk
Really?
- [56:33]
Pete McCormack
It was my first, what I would say, career job, not paper round or in a shop. A first career job that I made for myself and I loved it. And for whatever reason, I went away from it. And I've come back full circle into this and I know it's what I'm meant to do. Like every other thing I did is distraction. I know this is what I'm meant to do. Maybe not even this. I know I'm just meant to talk. I don't think I've got much to say that's interesting. I think even better, I'm meant to ask questions. Yes, I think I'm just meant to ask questions. And I don't know why, it feels like a purpose. It's almost like even when I look at the lens of politics, if I try and give my opinion or if I try and talk too much on the podcast, I know I'm not that interested, but I'm good at asking questions. I'm good at saying tell me. I'm good at getting the guest to explain things. That's good for the audience. So I think my skill is asking questions.
- [57:26]
Rizwan Virk
That's it.
- [57:27]
Pete McCormack
And when I drift from that, I get lost, I go into other projects, I get stumbled on my words and
- [57:34]
Rizwan Virk
you almost need a course correction back to that path that is the most meaningful path for you.
- [57:39]
Pete McCormack
Yeah. If I try to give a big opinion on this now, what we're talking about, I'll stumble on my words and I'll start to sound like an idiot. But if I just stay in on the questions, yeah, it's fine. Like where Are you at now, is it 80%?
- [57:52]
Rizwan Virk
75. 75. When I wrote the second edition, it was around 67%, 2/3. And now I think we're getting 75 plus. I mean, there's still a few things that we're underestimating the technical difficulty of, but we're going to elements of it. We're going to get there.
- [58:08]
Pete McCormack
And how do you grade that?
- [58:09]
Rizwan Virk
Well, I was grading it because I lay out the 10 stages to the simulation point.
- [58:13]
Pete McCormack
Right. Okay.
- [58:13]
Rizwan Virk
What percentage of each stage have we achieved? And the AI stage turned out to be a much bigger stage than I had originally. I was projecting what was going to happen with it, but it turned out to move much faster than I thought. And so that stage, I think within a couple of years we'll be getting almost to 100%.
- [58:30]
Pete McCormack
See how much more fluent, asking questions and give an opinion. Yeah, and it's funny thing, you go in the comments on the podcast, sometimes people like, shut up, Pete. We're not here for your opinion, we're here for the guest. There's more direction, but like, perhaps, perhaps you're right with that. Okay, I just want to go back onto the academic point. So I don't think I got a proper clear answer from you on how serious.
- [58:49]
Rizwan Virk
And you're good at bringing us back to the question.
- [58:50]
Pete McCormack
Well, no, no, it's what I want to know and hopefully the listeners want to know the same. But how serious is this being taken in the academic and scientific world? I know we have the 100% on the computer code and the 0% on the physicists, but you mix in these circles.
- [59:05]
Rizwan Virk
I mix in these circles. But to answer that, the way I like to describe the simulation hypothesis today is as a series of four assertions. And each of those assertions are taken more or less seriously.
- [59:18]
Pete McCormack
Okay.
- [59:18]
Rizwan Virk
And so the first assertion is that the universe doesn't consist of physical matter, it consists of information. And I mentioned John Wheeler. Wheeler had a phrase, called it from bitter. And basically he said anything that's in it, like this desk is actually made of bits. He was looking for this thing called matter, like those Russian dolls, and he kept opening them up and he said at the bottom level, the only thing that really defines a particle, like we think of a particle as being a physical solid object. Well, that's what we thought an atom used to be. Right?
- [59:49]
Pete McCormack
The atom, it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't touch each other.
- [59:51]
Rizwan Virk
Right? It's a bunch of stuff that doesn't. It's 99.9% empty space, right? And you go down underneath that. And he said at the bottom level, it's like you're basically answering a series of yes, no questions. Okay? Like ones or zeros.
- [60:05]
Pete McCormack
Like binary.
- [60:05]
Rizwan Virk
Like binary it from bit. And now there's a physics professor who's a quantum computing guy at Oxford named David Deutsch who updated to say it from qubit, but it's the same idea. And qubit is like a quantum bit that can explore. Remember we talked about the exponential growth. It can explore all of those theoretically 18 quintillion possibilities to come up with the right answer. But that assertion was controversial 50 years ago. Now even most physicists would say that's not so controversial anymore because there's a whole aspect of digital physics, not just talking about conservation of energy and momentum, you're talking about conservation of information. Does information get destroyed in a black hole? Right. So there's a whole world of physics around information. So that is actually not just. That is a very valid point of discussion. So even the physicists will agree with that. A lot of computer science scientists. The second assertion is that this information gets rendered for us to look as if it's real, right? Like if you're playing a game with a castle, there's no castle. It's just bits of information, zeros and ones. And if you know how computers work, if you're looking for, like, okay, my Microsoft Word file of this book, it's not all stored in one place. It's just a bunch of bits that are stored in a whole bunch of places, but you bring them together to look like a castle or to look like Microsoft Word with paragraphs, et cetera. That this gets rendered for us in such a way as to appear real. Now, this is where, you know, we talked already about the observer effect, how I think that is an optimization technique and it gets rendered for us. That makes more sense. Now, there are different theories on that. Like, neuroscientists will agree that we live in a simulated world, but not necessarily a simulation. They're saying it's in our heads. It's just information we're getting into our heads. And so everything we see is like a mini simulation that's kind of like the Donald Hoffman root, if you've heard of him. He wrote a book called the Case Against Reality. And he says evolution teaches us that we don't evolve to actually perceive reality. We're like building an interface on reality. So that one is definitely. You can discuss it with people on all sides. They may agree, they may not agree, they may still go towards a materialist interpretation of that, but they'll generally agree that we're not seeing the real world. We're seeing some. Some formulation of the data that we're getting into. Now, the third and fourth get into metaphysics. So I think those first two generally are very acceptable points of conversation, respectable conversation amongst academics. The third and fourth, you're getting into metaphysics. And the third is that the whole world is a kind of hoax that was created for us. And I like to use the example of film critic Roger Ebert. I don't know how well known he is over in the.
- [62:50]
Pete McCormack
Tell me about him.
- [62:50]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, so he was, along with Gene Siskel, they were like, the two most famous film critics in the U.S. they had their own show on TV and, you know, they would, like, grade thumbs up and thumbs down different movies. But the reason I reference him in this context is he passed away, unfortunately, a few years ago from throat cancer, but his wife was with him and when he died, and she later, you know, told this to a reporter who put it in an article, and. And she said the last thing he said just before he died is, oh, my God, it's all a big hoax. Meaning that the. And she interpreted that as the physical world as a hoax. It's like a stage play. Right. You know, in those old Westerns, we see, like, all the stores, but it turns out they're just facades. There's no actual store. There's no general store there behind it. And that is much closer to the idea of Maya or illusion in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, or the idea of a enjoyable delusion in the Quran. And in the Jewish traditions, they have this idea that the world is a reflection of the words of God. Right. And so that you can talk about it with a religious studies crowd. Professors. Right. That is harder to talk about with the physicists. And then the fourth assertion, which is the one we were just talking about earlier, is that you choose to participate in a character in this game, and that gets to the heart of the NPC vs RPG Flavors of simulation theory.
- [64:18]
Pete McCormack
Well, yeah, because, I mean, there could be simulations around which are pure tests.
- [64:21]
Rizwan Virk
Absolutely. They're just NPCs, right?
- [64:23]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, just NPCs.
- [64:24]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah. And in fact, you know, I mentioned this earlier, we never run a simulation just once, like, if you're simulating the weather, you will run it, you'll change the variables, you'll rerun it. Again, getting back to Philip K. Dick's idea that it's. The whole timeline is just a run of the Simulation so you can run it. So that fourth assertion is closer to the RPG version. But I suppose you would have an NPC version, which is, we're running this simulation for a purpose and we want to see what will happen. And we're injecting different variables into it. So that would be like depending on where you fall. Now, it turns out these aren't two mutually exclusive things.
- [64:58]
Pete McCormack
You know, if.
- [64:59]
Rizwan Virk
If you play a video game, you have NPCs and you have avatars. There was a great movie that came out in the same year as the Matrix, but it didn't get as much attention. That was about simulation theory. It was called the 13th Floor, and it was based on a novel called Simulacran 3, which was made into a German TV miniseries called World on a Wire. But in that they were running a simulation. It was in 99, so they were running a simulation of 1937, Los Angeles. And this guy could go in there. One of the people who worked in the. I mean, it was actually a noir mystery because somebody died and they're trying to figure it out. And there was a clue inside the virtual world as to what happened. But he goes in there and he starts interacting with all these NPCs from 1937. And he's like, they're as real as you or me. So you could have NPCs, but he was able to inject himself in there as a character, as an avatar, if you will, from the outside world. So it's a continuum. You could have 100% NPCs, which is just simulations running to test out timelines or to test out the Great Filter. Will we ever get off the planets? Will we end up creating AI that destroys ourselves? Will we destroy ourselves with nuclear war? In fact, there was a great TV show based on the Stephen King novel called 1122 63. I don't know if you've heard of it, but Stephen King lives in Maine. He's a horror writer, but this is more of a time travel novel. And in Maine, a guy realizes he can go back to 1960, and eventually they decide to go and try to prevent the assassination of JFK, which was in 1122 63. That was the date in Dallas. And this is interesting because, I mean, it's kind of an old book, an old miniseries. But he comes back and he realizes that even if you prevent it, things are not quite better and he has to go back and reset the timeline. And Philip K. Dick's wife told me that he believed the simulators told Him, Okay. So that they had actually prevented JFK's assassination in Dallas, but then he got assassinated in Orlando. And then when they tried to prevent that, he got assassinated somewhere else, or it led to a nuclear war. So it's like they're running these things.
- [67:01]
Pete McCormack
It's the butterfly effect.
- [67:02]
Rizwan Virk
It's like the butterfly effect. Yeah, yeah. In fact, chaos theory is this whole idea of sensitivity to initial conditions. It's basically the butterfly effect, where the butterfly flaps its wings in Hong Kong and the stock market crashes in London. But you don't know that unless you run the simulation exactly what's going to happen. It's very difficult to predict what will happen. There's a computer scientist, physicist turned computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram.
- [67:27]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, I know.
- [67:27]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah. And he came up with this term because he was studying cellular automata.
- [67:31]
Pete McCormack
Hold on, is that Wolfram Alpha guy?
- [67:32]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, the same guy. Yeah. And so in the 70s, he started really heavily studying. Not only did he create, you know, Wolfram's software Mathematica and then Wolfram Alpha, but he started studying the cellular automata, which are really simple rules. If you've ever seen the game of Life, it's like a grid. And then basically each square has a rule that says, if the square next to me is lit up and the one next to me is lit up, then I have to light up. But if the one on top of me is not lit up and the one underneath me is not lit up and the one on the left is not lit up, then I have to dim the square. And so you watch this. And it creates these complex patterns over time through really simple deterministic rules. So you would think if it's deterministic, you know exactly what's going to happen. And he came up with a term called computational irreducibility. And what he says is, some problems. The only way to know what's going to happen is to actually run the program to get there. And the three body problem, which is a physics problem about three bodies in space that are circling each other, it's step 2 million or 2 million years from now, will one fly off or will they remain stable? And it turns out you can't really figure that out with a shortcut. You have to actually run the calculations over 2 million years to figure it out.
- [68:46]
Pete McCormack
So the simulators might be like, we're experiencing this in our time. The simulators might be running this at super speed.
- [68:54]
Rizwan Virk
For them, it's super speed because inside a program or a computer program, right. You have a series of steps that are running or a video game like Minecraft or, you know, I don't know if you remember farmville, which is.
- [69:06]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, of course.
- [69:06]
Rizwan Virk
Which was huge back in the day. That's when I was doing mobile games. And in farmville, what'll happen is, you know, for people who don't know, you plant your crops and then you leave, and then you come back and then you see what happens with the crops. Now you might come back two hours later, but it'll say, okay, a day has passed, or, you know, two days or a week has passed, and it'll tell you what happened. This is a whole nother rabbit hole. I don't know if we want to go down. But it basically renders the past for you on demand. It tells you what happened while you were away from the computer. But basically time inside the program doesn't have to have anything to do with time outside of the program. I mean, the fruit fly simulation is the sim, not the sophisticated one. I'm talking about really simple fruit fly population simulations that people were the first simulations ever created on computers where you have a certain number of fruit flies. This is the death rate, this is the birth rate. And you say, okay, run it for a year. That's just one step. It tells you what the pipe. And you run it another year. So years for the fruit flies are seconds to us who are running.
- [70:05]
Pete McCormack
Well, the one I like to fuck with Connor's head on is I say to him, by the way, the simulation only started this morning. Everything you thought happened yesterday is just programming for us.
- [70:13]
Rizwan Virk
And that is so in my second book, the Simulated Multiverse, I really get into this idea that perhaps the past is not what we think it is. The past could have actually been generated for us in the present. And that's why some people might remember different things happening in the past. Like the Mandela effect.
- [70:32]
Pete McCormack
Yeah.
- [70:32]
Rizwan Virk
Which is a whole nother app. But there is a quantum physics experiment that John Wheeler, back to my favorite physicist, came up with, called the delayed choice double slit experiment. Have you ever heard. Have you heard of this? So the easiest way to explain it is through what. What Wheeler called the cosmic delayed choice experiment. And the idea is, if light is coming from, say, a quasar, a billion years away. Billion light years away, it's going to take how long to get here? Billion years. Because it's a billion light years away. And there's something in the middle, like a black hole or let's say a galaxy, something that's a very strong gravitational object. The light has to go to the Left or to the right of that. And that's kind of like two slits, if you think about it. But if it's halfway between us, when is the decision made about whether the right go. The light goes to the left or to the right? It would be half a billion years ago. Like, we're talking like before the age of the dinosaurs, 500 million years ago. So that is the past. Right. But if we have telescopes here that measure the light, and you can measure it, you can say it's polarized this way or that way. What he conjectured in this delayed choice experiment was that it's not until you actually measure the light today that the decision about whether to go left or right is made in the past. Okay, so you are kind of pulling the past on demand. This is why I use that term as needed. Right. You are filled. Just like with farmville. You fill in what happened to the crops over your 20. The last 24 hours. They weren't necessarily running all the time. There was a 10% chance that your crops were going to fail. So there is actually a physics experiment, and they've done this experiment now. Now they've done it on, like, sending a particle from the Earth to, like, a satellite that's a thousand miles away and takes, you know, fraction of a second to get there, but that's enough. And what it shows is it's not till the measurement is done that whether the particle went to the left or right slit is decided. So in the future, you decide the past. Now, that really blows people's minds.
- [72:34]
Pete McCormack
I mean, I had an interview a few years back with a guy who's talking about quantum computing, and he was saying the thing about the quantum computers is that we can't open it up and look inside of it, because if we look inside of it, it ruins the experiment. And I was like, what? It's like, Yeah, I don't know what it is. The quantum. Things change.
- [72:51]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah.
- [72:51]
Pete McCormack
And he's explaining to me, I was like, I don't understand this.
- [72:54]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah.
- [72:54]
Pete McCormack
I don't understand how I looking at something changes it. And it's the weirdest part of all of this. It adds a better argument towards the simulation theory. Yeah, but it just makes everything so weird.
- [73:07]
Rizwan Virk
It makes everything really weird. And that's why I think even in. Even physicists who know about these experiments, I mean, their physics, they even teach about them, they don't. They haven't really internalized what that would mean.
- [73:21]
Pete McCormack
Have you?
- [73:22]
Rizwan Virk
Well, I've started to think of it that way and. And that in Fact, in a simulated multiverse or simulated universe, this would make more sense that we collectively are generating the past on demand. And then we go into what's called coherence with other people, okay, so that we're all seeing the same past. But some people may have collapsed the set of probabilities down in a different way, so their memory is different of the past than everybody else. And so there's a whole. Now, the way that works in a video game is if I'm playing with and you're playing, and we're in the same field. Turns out we're not really in the same field. Like your avatar and my avatar, you're rendering it on your computer, and I'm rendering it on my computer. And so we're both rendering these pixels. Now, as long as there's one person in that room, it has to render that room, and then it has to make it consistent. So the server is responsible for making sure that it's consistent between us. But if nobody is looking at it, then it can let those bits go, and then it can regenerate it later if it needs to. But if it's regenerating it, how do we know it's regenerating it? The exact same way. It could actually put, like, if you're a level 30 character, you could see a dragon because you have the spell, you know, view invisible dragons. And I'm a level two character. I'm looking at my screen and I'm like, there's no dragon there. And you're looking at it, and it goes right there, right above our heads. How could you not see that? It gets into a lot of weird areas, but simulation theory at least gives us a framework that would explain how this stuff works, because you're actually filling in the past as it's needed within the current time frame when the player is logged in.
- [75:11]
Pete McCormack
All right, let's be honest. How much random shit are you carrying with you every time you leave the house? A massive wallet full of cards you don't use and receipts you don't need. And what about your keys? How many are on your set that you don't even know what they open anymore? Now, listen, I travel all the time for my podcast. Football meetings, events, and I, too, carry way too much stuff. And so this is where Ridge comes in. Now, I first heard about Ridge on the Dave Smith show, so I bought one. So when they reached out to me and they were like, can we sponsor the show? I was like, guys, I've already got it, and I love it. So Then they asked me if I have the key case and I was like, guys, tell me more. So this is the Ridge wallet and it holds all my cards, which I'd previously been hiding in my iPhone case, which is pretty dumb, really. And this is my key holder, which sounds stupid until you use it and realize how annoying loose keys really are in your pocket. And this is it. This is all I carry around with me. These are my phone. No big wallet. And no losing my card because I left it in the back of my iPhone case. And no stupid big bunch of keys jangling around in my pocket. Now I know some of you are going to be like, no, P, I need that wallet and all that useless crap. Trust me, as someone who switched to Ridge, you really don't. So if you want to check it out, Ridge, or offering listeners of my show 10% off, just head over to ridge.com McCormack and use the code McCormack that is ridge.com McCormack and you can get 10% off. How do you deal with the simulation kind of inception model whereby there could be multiple levels, but eventually, if you go up the levels you eventually have to get to, there must be a base reality. And so what created that base reality? And what is that base reality? And does it have its own set of physics? I know we can't know, but it would have its own set of physics which would then make an argument that they're in the simulation. So, like, how do you deal with those kind of levels?
- [76:57]
Rizwan Virk
Well, so I don't take a strong view on what's outside of the simulation, but I do list the possibilities because it's sort of like Mario and Luigi knowing about us. Yeah. Talking about what physics is like in our universe and saying, hey, there's only so many barrels that we can process barrels per second or mushrooms we can jump on. That's within that world. That said, there are lots of different ideas about that. Right. I mean, Bostrom's original simulation argument was that it was mostly an NPC simulation and what he called an ancestor simulation. And that was the actual term he used. If you go back to his paper, that would be like us running a simulation of ancient Rome or Greece or India or China or whatever. And he. So he thought it was us in the future. So it was a physical world like ours that is running a simulation. And maybe you can run multiple simulations in that. So others say it's aliens, like it's nothing like the physical world, or it's like the physical world, but it's aliens from another planet. Others say it's nothing like our physical world at all. This is where the spiritual traditions come into play where they say it's consciousness and souls, but they exist as energy outside and they only materialize physically here. So it's a non material world. But what does that mean for those of us stuck in the material world? That's pretty hard for us to be able to define what that is. We can use the terms that we know, like soul and angels and God. All I like to say is that this is an information based substrate and there could be multiple levels outside of that, but I don't think it's endless. Right. So going back to the film the 13th Floor is a good way to investigate this. The guys from 1937 were upset. One of the guys learned that they were just a simulation in 1999. And at the end of the movie, spoiler alert, it's 25 year old movie, the guys in 1999 realized that they're in a simulation from the year 2024 in the future. Yeah, but I don't think it's infinite because I think one you may have, you don't necessarily have infinite computing power. I mean physicists love infinite, like the multiverse, just infinite. But computer scientists don't. And so I think there would, there is some level of base reality. But what that base reality looks like, it's hard for us to say what, what that might look like outside of
- [79:22]
Pete McCormack
this physical reality and what created that base reality.
- [79:27]
Rizwan Virk
Right, right. And is it a guy in his basement learning a simulation or is it God? Right now you're back in the metaphysical world because it's at that point. But just because we don't know what's out there doesn't mean that we can't try to figure out whether we're in a simulation here. Some people object to the idea of being in a simulation because they say it's non falsifiable.
- [79:48]
Pete McCormack
Do you believe that?
- [79:50]
Rizwan Virk
I believe that it's impossible to prove we're not in a simulation. So yes, but because anything we found we could say, well that's just a better simulation. But that doesn't mean we can't find clues that we are in a simulation. You know what I'm saying?
- [80:07]
Pete McCormack
Clues and evidence are different, like provable facts. What do you think the strongest evidence that isn't based on thesis that there is that we're in a simulation? Is there anything?
- [80:18]
Rizwan Virk
Well, there's different, there's different threads and ways to look for evidence. And I personally think that the, you know, the observer effect in quantum physics is providing us with the strongest evidence, something. But there's evidence that the world is information based. That's out there. There's. There's a guy actually you had Melvin.
- [80:37]
Pete McCormack
Yeah, it's great.
- [80:38]
Rizwan Virk
On your podcast. Yeah, he's doing a little digital physics conference that I'll be speaking at later this summer. It's online. But you know, he came up with this idea that gravity itself is like an optimization of data. And so it's an optimization technique so we can look for those types of signs in the physical universe. I think there was a saying by a famous venture capitalist named Marc Andreessen like 15 years ago, and he said software is eating the world. And you know, in my book, I like to say information science is eating all of the other sciences in that we think biology is about physical stuff. Well, the idea of the gene that can reproduce actually comes from John von Neumann, who's a computer scientist. And he was looking at how do you have some information that can reproduce itself? And he came up with this whole idea of cellular automata and the von Neumann machine. And then later they discovered DNA, which actually has that genetic code which can reproduce itself.
- [81:34]
Pete McCormack
And they can edit it.
- [81:35]
Rizwan Virk
We can edit it. Well, now we're getting to the point where we can. Yeah, hopefully we can edit it without side effects. That's, I think, the problem. If you don't understand something that well and you're like mucking with it, it's
- [81:44]
Pete McCormack
just a factor of time.
- [81:45]
Rizwan Virk
Think of the butterfly effect on that. Right. If you think of the number of.
- [81:49]
Pete McCormack
Well, they had it. I mean, cloning Dolly the sheep, she didn't live too long, but again, function of time, not yet.
- [81:55]
Rizwan Virk
Over time we'll understand it.
- [81:56]
Pete McCormack
And so the point is, it is editable code. DNA is code, right?
- [82:01]
Rizwan Virk
Yeah. I mean, I was talking to a chemical chemistry PhD student. He said all he does is on the computer. He's running simulations all the time.
- [82:07]
Pete McCormack
Time.
- [82:07]
Rizwan Virk
Right. And physics is now starting to have, you know, digital simulations and you know, cars, self, self driving cars. Where do they learn? They learn within, you know, virtual simulations as well, because it's a lot easier if it makes a mistake there before you deploy it to the real world. And so you have to run lots of those simulations. So I think the idea that information is underlying our reality is indication and some of that could be classified as evidence. There's a guy named Tom Campbell who was working with a group at Cal Poly and they were trying to run some experiments. Basically quantum physics delayed choice type experiments to try to show that it's like a video game. It's when the observer. I think the experiments weren't conclusive because they couldn't quite get everything in the right frame. I visited them and it was like getting a single photon in a dark room. To have one photon at a time was difficult enough, but when you start talking about having these. These experiments. But basically they wanted to show that it requires a conscious observer in order for that collapse of the probability wave to happen. So I think there's a set of experiments around there. In the end, it may not be fully knowable, it may be more of a metaphysical question, but I think we can find evidence that something like this is going on. So I mentioned the NPC versus RPG axis. There's also what I call the literal to metaphorical access. At one end, we're living in a literal simulation that is running on a computer somewhere. And on the other end, we're using the idea of the video game as a metaphor for reality, when in fact it's something much more complicated than what we think of as a video game today. It's more like a quantum computing device that is rendering out of many different possibilities, but it's still all within this spectrum of whether we're in some kind of a simulation.
- [83:59]
Pete McCormack
What do you think of the stuff that Danny's doing with the lasers?
- [84:03]
Rizwan Virk
That's really interesting to me, right, that he said he saw this writing. Looks like katakanaka. Katakana. Now, some people tried to write that off and say, well, katakana is what they use in the Matrix, and therefore it's conditioned him to think that way. But he says, no, it wasn't actually katakana. It. Which is the Japanese writing, it just looked something like it. And he was able to get consistency across, you know, so many different. Hundred. 100 people.
- [84:27]
Pete McCormack
No, it's. Dude, it's thousands now.
- [84:28]
Rizwan Virk
Oh, it's a thousand.
- [84:29]
Pete McCormack
Thousands of people have seen exactly the same thing. He said, it's about 30% can't see it. Yeah, but. But thousands of people and they're seeing exactly the same thing.
- [84:38]
Rizwan Virk
And so, you know, I got interested in this because right after I had written the first edition Back in 2019, I was sitting with a group of guys in LA. In fact, this guy, Sean Stone, who is Oliver Stone's son, who has a podcast as well, and he said, oh, I know we're in a simulation. And I said, well, how do you know? I just wrote a book about it. I'm not 100% sure. And he said, well, because when I go on dmt, I can see the grid lines of the simulation of the Matrix. And then I started to hear more and more stories.
- [85:04]
Pete McCormack
Have you done the dmt?
- [85:05]
Rizwan Virk
I haven't done. So I haven't done any psychological test myself. People keep asking me that. At some point I might, but I got to be a little bit careful with pharmacological substances because. Okay, you know, so for that reason I've held off, but I'm. I'm quite curious and I've been. I've informally started to collect stories of what people have seen. And now the question is, is what they're seeing objectively there, or is it us interpreting something that's there that may not look exactly like it? Like in a video game, you can. You can render things as avatars, right. And you can change the avatar. In fact, I put out a paper article recently called the avatar hypothesis of UFOs, which is this idea that the beings that people are saying they've been abducted by or that have come into their bedroom, who can go through walls, they're more like avatars or projections in a simulated world. And that in the past, whether it's the Celtic traditions where people talk about the fae, or in the Middle east, they talk about the jinn. These beings that come into our world, it's almost like they're projecting themselves to look a certain way in our world because it's something that we could understand. Like a thousand years ago we could understand this is an angel. Today, they're projecting themselves as a ufo, a spaceship, because we know about other planets now. In the 50s, they always said they were from Mars or Venus. It's almost like the whole thing is a deception of some kind. Maybe Danny is seeing code and he's interpreting this thing as code. Maybe it's just binary data or maybe it's some other substructure or substrate.
- [86:36]
Pete McCormack
It's funny on the alien stuff. Did you ever play SimCity?
- [86:40]
Rizwan Virk
I've seen, yeah. Back in the day, way back when.
- [86:42]
Pete McCormack
Yeah. You build the grid, you build a network, you set up your electricity and it all comes running. And then you get a bit bored and you can send in the disasters or you can send in Godzilla. If this is a game, this is just them sending in Godzilla.
- [86:55]
Rizwan Virk
Right. To see what would happen. Right. What will these guys see if we send them a bunch of insectoids?
- [87:00]
Pete McCormack
Yeah. Hit some aliens. What are they? What are they going to do?
- [87:03]
Rizwan Virk
So whether they're aliens or not is an open question. It's A weird. It's a phenomenon out there. And I've actually participated in the Galileo project at Harvard, which is trying to build new telescopes. Avi Loeb runs it was just put on the White House Advisory Science Council. But there's an overlap between these subjects and that's how I end up talking about all these different things.
- [87:22]
Pete McCormack
So what does this mean for you then, personally? Because, you know, if I bring it back to me, I have a son, I have a daughter, I have a life, have goals and ambitions. I certainly think about it differently. If it's a simulation, am I real? Am I not? What does love mean? Question all these things, what has it done for you?
- [87:41]
Rizwan Virk
Well, if you're playing a video game and you're interacting with someone from Japan and they teach you Japanese, have you learned Japanese? Yeah, you still have learned some Japanese. So it's not that the interaction wasn't real, it was that it was inside a virtual world. For me personally, it means when I have difficulties in life, I start to think of those as quests more difficult. You know, you have higher difficulty quests and lower difficulty quests. I mentioned earlier how, you know, people say, well, I'm going to be, you know, the billionaire and I'm going to be the famous actor if I get to choose my character. Well, when do actors win Academy Awards? It's for the more difficult roles, the characters that had the most suffering. And so for me, it's a way to reinterpret some of these things and it's a way to think about the world. And then finally, how is the game? If you think of it as a video game, how is the game measured? I don't think we're in Grand Theft Auto where your goal is to abuse everybody else. In fact, I've spent a lot of time with people that have had near death experiences and many of them describe what's called a life review. They call it a panoramic holographic life
- [88:51]
Pete McCormack
flashes before your life flashes.
- [88:53]
Rizwan Virk
But more than that, it's like interactive where they get into the replay and they're the other people in their lives. So one guy was an assassin who shot people in Vietnam and he had struck by lightning. Guy named Danny Brinkley. He said he had to relive what it was like to get a bullet coming at him and feel what it was like for that guy to die and then feel what happened to that guy's wife and kids. He said he saw all of that almost like a holographic projection. Now I'm a computer science guy. So I say, well if that could be replayed, then it means it's all being recorded just like we do in video games. Or at the end of a football game. At the end of a football game, the coach will or soccer game, they'll project it up and say, hey, you know, we should have done this better, this play better or maybe we shouldn't have done that. Next time let's do it this way. Perhaps we're all doing that and watching the replay of our game. So for me the game is less about nihilism, which I think you could go in that route if you go on the NPC version. But in the RPG version you realize you are here to have experiences with other people. That is the game, that is the nature of the game. It's how you treat each other because that's what you find out afterwards. And he said, and not just this guy, thousands of people have said this, that you're judging yourself based upon how you made other people feel. And you're like, oh, I should have done better, I shouldn't have treated this person that way. So for me it can be a spiritual way and a way to deal with difficult situations. That's my personal view.
- [90:23]
Pete McCormack
Does it make it easier to explain evil the badgered in the world?
- [90:29]
Rizwan Virk
It potentially does because you may have. So I like to say for you though, yeah, for me personally it does make it because you have suffering in the world and then you have people who are choosing to inflict that suffering. And so I have. Now you can view those as NPCs that are here in order to do that, or you can view those as players who are given a choice, that's their quest. Are they going to choose the negative thing and inflict suffering or are they going to choose the positive thing? And so for me it makes it a little bit easier to bear. There's something that I call NPC mode. I mentioned it earlier, which is we forget why we're here, we forget that we're a player. And so we just act on, you know, these logical rules like what will make me more money, what will give me more territory, right? We have the Middle east always in a mess because of all this stuff. And I feel that suffering. I mean we're now back to age old metaphysical questions, right? In Buddhism, right, they talk about the world of suffering. And there was a guy named Swami Yogananda who came over from India in 1920, wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which was Steve Jobs favorite book. In fact, you know, it was the only book on his iPad. When Walter Isaacson visited him and at his memorial service at Stanford, everybody got a little brown box. And they opened up this brown box and there was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi in there. Now, what Yogananda said in 1920, he used technology as a way to explain this ancient concept. And he said of Maya or illusion, he said, look, it looks like we're suffering. I mean, this world is not a world of ceaseless joy. There's a lot of suffering in this world. But in a film. He said, the world is like a film projector and the characters suffer, but the actors don't necessarily suffer. Right. And the characters die, but the actors live on. And so I was asked to write a book about his teachings in India by HarperCollins India. And I said, well, you know, I grew up in Michigan. I haven't really spent a lot of time in that. That part of the world. Do you really want me to be writing a book for Indians about, you know, Swami Yogananda? He said, we want you to use your. Your simulation idea and your video game ideas because it's something people understand. I thought about it and I thought, well, if Yogananda were alive today, he would use the latest technology as a way to describe this. He would say, we're in a film, we're the actors, but we're also the audience. We're sitting there watching ourselves, and we have a script, but we're free to choose to change the script with each other. What does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role playing game where we're all creating it together.
- [93:00]
Pete McCormack
This could just be level one.
- [93:02]
Rizwan Virk
This could just be level one.
- [93:03]
Pete McCormack
If you think. Have you read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying?
- [93:08]
Rizwan Virk
Parts of it.
- [93:08]
Pete McCormack
Okay, yeah, same. So I've read the start. I think I've talked about this in the pod before. I've read the first three chapters three times, and I always get enough from that. I try and start chapter four and I'm done. But what I took from that is they base their life on preparing for death.
- [93:24]
Rizwan Virk
Right.
- [93:25]
Pete McCormack
And to not leave this life with regrets, Enemies. Yeah. So the whole of life is about preparing for death. Yeah. And so in some ways, there are many distractions in life that you could be one of these people inflict suffering because there's a financial gain or a power gain. It's like, how do you get. Maybe it's all just one big test.
- [93:44]
Rizwan Virk
I think so. And so in this book, there's a whole section on tying some of these religious ideas into simulation theory. And I often get flack from like scientists. They're like, okay, the quantum physics stuff, fine. Computer science stuff, great. Why did you include all this stuff about the mystical stuff? The rules, it's. Yeah, those are the rules of the universe. And I have karma as a kind of database. And so as you're doing these evil things, you're basically adding to your database. And so with the Buddhists, what they say is that which is subject to arising is subject to cessation. And it's almost like you're building up this database and the first thing the Buddha says is stop putting stuff in that database because you got to come back and you got to run it again to take care of all that stuff. So most of us are growing our database of things when we should be reducing it. And that's where the whole idea of non attachment comes in. And you know, the Buddhists have a whole chapter in there about Tibetan dream yoga and how they use that to wake up inside a dream, lucid dreaming. And for them that's a spiritual thing because if you can recognize in the middle of a dream that it's not real, it's a dream, supposedly you can do that again when you awake.
- [94:54]
Pete McCormack
Wow. So, okay, final question. If you had to choose, would you rather we were base reality or a simulation?
- [95:04]
Rizwan Virk
Well, getting back to the problem of evil and suffering, I would prefer to be in a simulation because of all the things that happen here. Yeah, yeah. And I would rather that, that we come out of this and say, oh, okay, you know, they were killing all those children, but those children are still alive and they went through some suffering and those people made bad choices. Who. And they're going to go back and have to learn it again.
- [95:28]
Pete McCormack
It's wild, man. I'm really, really looking forward to reading this now. It's. It's wild. And I'm really grateful for you giving me the time to talk about this. I've gone from the first time I heard about it going, this is just this mental, what do you want about. Of course it's a reality. I can feel myself.
- [95:46]
Rizwan Virk
Right.
- [95:46]
Pete McCormack
But everything is explainable away. And now I'm just there with a open heart and open mind that, let's see, tell me what it's about. So thank you. The simulation hypothesis, people go and check it out. Yeah, Appreciate you. Where do you want to send people?
- [96:03]
Rizwan Virk
So they can go to my website, which is zen entrepreneur.com or they can find me on Twitter x@ Riz Stanford, like the university or on Instagram at Riz. Cambridge, like the city or university as well.
- [96:16]
Pete McCormack
And we're out in Boston, people wondering why the studio is a bit weird. We could have such a good chat at the car, though.
- [96:21]
Rizwan Virk
I hope.
- [96:21]
Pete McCormack
Riz. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. We love you all. See you soon.
- [96:23]
Rizwan Virk
Bye.