The Basement: Rizwan Virk | The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Physics & Mysticism

Summary

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

Date: May 18, 2026
Host: The Why Files
Guest: Dr. Rizwan Virk (MIT computer scientist, video game entrepreneur, early Discord investor, author of The Simulation Hypothesis)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the intersection of cutting-edge simulation theory, quantum physics, video game design, and mystical traditions with guest Rizwan Virk. Blending personal experience, rigorous technology analysis, and metaphysical inquiry, Rizwan explores the provocative possibility that our reality could be a computer-generated simulation. He draws on the parallels between how games are made, the apparent “rendering” logic of quantum mechanics, and longstanding mystical descriptions of the world as illusory (Maya). Virk also shares insights from his conversations with luminaries like Jacques Vallee and Tessa Dick (widow of Philip K. Dick), and details hands-on stories about VR, the Mandela Effect, out-of-body experience, and the possibility that UFO phenomena are projections within the “simulation.”

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Early Years: Intro to Video Games & Programming

[02:02]

• Rizwan’s childhood fascination with computers: Commodore 64, Coleco Atom, TRS-80 (“Trash 80”), Apple II.
• First exposure to programming: editing text adventure games (“That was my introduction really, really to programming.” — Rizwan, 03:01)
• Key anecdote: Writing a tic-tac-toe program at his father’s office on an Apple II.

[06:35]

• Atari 2600 era, obsession with games like Pac-Man and Pole Position, questions about the world “beyond the bleachers” in early racing games.

[07:43]

• Advances in video game graphics—from 8 bit (Pole Position) to photorealistic modern titles.
• Discussion of technology limits, game compression, and early thoughts about “simulated worlds.”

[14:01]

• Teenage project called “the Simulation Machine”: a text-based adventure that let users alter their experience, hinting at his early fascination with simulation.

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Career Evolution: From Video Games to Silicon Valley & Investing

[15:01]

• Early commitment to be a “software entrepreneur and then a writer.”
• MIT days: computer science was far easier for him than physics.

[17:52]

• Entry into the video game industry and the rise of mobile games with the iPhone and App Store.
• Observation: Mobile gaming grew faster and larger than both PCs and console games, now a bigger industry than movies and sports combined.

[19:42]

• Creation of Tap Fish, success on the App Store, and being “sandbagged” on The Daily Show over in-app purchases, leading to deeper skepticism of media narratives (“...what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up.” — Rizwan, 21:19).

[24:43]

• Investments in game companies (including precursors to Discord), innovation of card battle games for TV tie-ins.

[26:16]

• Transition into investing and running MIT’s game startup program.

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VR, Simulation Point & the Seed of Simulation Hypothesis

[29:48]

• Inflection moment: VR demo in Sausalito (2016) with the HTC Vive. Sensory immersion so complete that Rizwan “tried to set the paddle down” on a virtual ping pong table and nearly fell.
  • (“I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table just like this...The controller fell to the floor, and I almost fell over...for a few moments, it fooled my body into thinking that I was playing a real game.” — Rizwan, 39:13)
• Sparks the thought: How long until technology creates realities genuinely indistinguishable from the physical world?
• Emergence of the “simulation point,” analogous to the technological singularity: the moment when human-made virtual worlds become indistinguishable from base reality.

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Layers of Reality: Quantum Physics, Mysticism & Personal Experience

Meditation & Mysticism

[42:29]

• Living a “double life”: Tech entrepreneur by day, explorer of meditation/Lucid Dreaming/Monroe Institute by night.
• Encounters with precognitive dreams and dreams verified by reality (e.g., about a competitor).
• “Realized there’s something different about our reality...we may be getting clues about things that haven’t happened yet.”

Group Dreaming & Shamanic Journeying

[53:40]

• Shamanic drumming for group dream-state exploration: sometimes multiple people “see” matching details in a shared dreamscape (e.g., buildings on stilts orbiting Sirius).
• (Memorable moment: “They were like something like 17 points that many of us, including the Superman crystalline structures and buildings on stilts… there's no way several of them saw that.” — Rizwan, 55:59)

Synchronicity

[57:30]

• “Matrix synchronicity” at Esalen: After Jacques Vallee presents on Rizwan and the Matrix, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) happens to be in the cafeteria.
• (“I heard this from multiple people… hey, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book.” — Rizwan, 62:19)

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Simulation Theory: Technological, Quantum, and Religious Arguments

Video Game Logic and Rendering Reality

[74:11]

• The “technological argument”: If we will soon create indistinguishable virtual environments (with false memories, interactive AI, etc.), how do we know it hasn’t happened already?
  • (“If we can have those experiences and you can't tell the difference, then how do we know for sure that we're not inside a virtual world right now?” — Rizwan, 74:46)

Addressing Physics Objections

[75:44]

• Critique of physicists’ argument that “simulating all particles would require a universe bigger than itself”:
  • Simulations only render what is observed (“only render that which is observed”), paralleling quantum observer effect.
  • Discussion of optimization, compression, LOD (level of detail), procedural content (e.g., No Man’s Sky’s “18 quintillion planets” generated with 64-bit seeds).

Key Quote

“The rule of thumb was only render that which is observed. And by the way, that’s what we do with Zoom, too....” — Rizwan Virk (77:49)

Quantum Mechanics as a Clue

[83:38]

• Observer effect, the double-slit experiment, and Schrodinger’s cat: The world exists in superposition until observed — like a game engine “lazy loading” content.

  • “The pixels are generated in dynamically... quantum indeterminacy is so bizarre. Why would it possibly exist?...because it's an optimization technique.” (86:37)

• Wave function collapse as a quantum version of “render on demand.”

• Many-Worlds Interpretation (Everett), the “multiverse,” and the computational infeasibility of an infinite number of universes: Pruning unlikely branches, only simulating what is “meaningful” for life.

Memorable Quote

“...if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times and then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life...let's just focus on this subset of possibilities.” — Rizwan Virk (102:19)

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The Mandela Effect, Multiple Timelines, and Reality Glitches

[103:43]

• Philip K. Dick’s claim that “the only clue we have [that reality is programmed] is when some variable has changed...deja vu as a clue that reality was rerun.”
• Dick’s memories of alternate timelines (e.g., Axis victory in WWII, JFK assassinaton).
• The Mandela Effect: Shared “false memories” as evidence for merged or rerun timelines (Berenstain/Berenstein Bears, Moonraker “braces,” Jaws, Tiananmen Tank Man, Thinker Pose, and scriptural changes).

Memorable Moment

(On the thinker statue)

“There's a picture of G.B. Shaw...titled ‘G.B. Shaw in the pose of the Thinker.’ Guess where his hand is? Up on his forehead...that picture is still there in museums...That's one that got me.” — Rizwan Virk (113:39)

Scriptural Protection from Simulation “Glitches”

[117:11]

• In Islam, the Qur’an is memorized in part because “beings (jinn) are allowed to go back in time and change objects, but they are not allowed to change your memory.”
• The Mandela Effect modeled as a consequence of simulation reruns with different initial settings.

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Time, the Delayed Choice Experiment, and Simulated Multiverse

[118:49]

• Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment: The past isn’t fixed until measured (“the past is in superposition...it’s only when the measurement is done here...that the decision gets made.” — 120:16)
• Real-life experiment with satellites confirming the effect.
• Schrodinger’s overlooked suggestion: Observation selects not just present states, but entire histories.

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Purpose: Why Run (or Play) a Simulation? NPCs vs RPGs

[133:41]

• Two types of simulation: NPC (non-player character; universe as “hard simulation”) vs RPG (player characters “choosing” storylines, perhaps with suffering, for learning or fun).
• Suffering and adversity as “high-difficulty quests” within a roleplaying scenario.

Notable Dialogue

Host: “Which are we, we're the NPCs or we the RPGs?”
Rizwan: “That's an interesting question. And I like to say that we're...we may be both...” (138:55)

• Reincarnation, pre-life agreements, and soul groups likened to “multiplayer game lobbies.”
• Life “clues,” déjà vu, and soul contracts in Michael Newton’s work connect spiritual frameworks with simulation theory.

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Information, Physics, and Consciousness: Final Propositions

[154:41]
Rizwan’s four key propositions:

1. The world consists of information, not matter.
   • Increasingly accepted among physicists (John Wheeler’s “it from bit”).
2. The world is rendered to appear physical.
   • We perceive “solidity” though most matter is empty; rendering is an analogy.
3. Physical reality is a “purposeful hoax” (Maya).
   • Supported by mystics, echoed in near-death experiences (Roger Ebert’s “it’s all a big hoax”).
4. We (as consciousness) agreed to play a character.
   • Simulation theory as a bridge between literal computing and metaphor for spiritually described “dream worlds.”

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UFOs, Conscious Entities, and Avatar Theory

[161:24]

• UFOs may be projections from outside the simulation—“avatars” injected into our reality, adapting their appearance to our current technological understanding (angels, fae, jinn, extraterrestrials).
• “The government is taking UFOs seriously. Why aren’t Silicon Valley or academia?”
• Gary Nolan’s avatar hypothesis & Rizwan’s extension: UFO intelligence as user-controlled entities in a simulation.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the optimization of simulation (video games and universe):

  “…physicists love the law of big numbers...but computer scientists, we hate infinity because we are always dealing with limited resources.” (75:44)

• On déjà vu and timeline alteration:

  “...when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality...we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past a variable was changed and reality was rerun.” (103:43, referencing Philip K. Dick)

• On UFOs as projections:

  “It’s almost like they’re projected into our reality like a light or a holographic projection...is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us...” (162:19)

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Segment Highlights & Timestamps

• [03:57] – Childhood programming and dream of simulating worlds
• [18:52] – Mobile games eclipse entertainment industries
• [39:13] – VR experience inspires simulation theory
• [63:14] – Realization: quantum physics, ancient mysticism, and game design converge on the simulation hypothesis
• [86:37] – Quantum observer effect as “render on demand”
• [103:43] – Mandela Effect, reality “rerunning,” and personal encounters with alternate memories
• [120:16] – Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment undermines the idea of a fixed past
• [133:41] – Why simulate? From anthropic reasoning to RPG learning and adversity
• [161:24] – The avatar theory of UFOs, projections into “our” simulation

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Conclusion

Rizwan Virk’s thesis is not dogmatic: he doesn’t insist reality is a computer simulation, but instead demonstrates that the fundamental logic found in quantum physics, mystic traditions, and game design all converge on a startling framework where reality is rendered, not built. Whether as a literal process on some cosmic computer, or as metaphor for consciousness playing through scripted roles, the simulation hypothesis offers a powerful model for making sense of synchronicity, timelines, UFOs, and the meaning of suffering. As technology continues to mirror—and sometimes overtake—nature in complexity and realism, the question “What if reality is rendered, not built?” becomes less easily dismissed.

Find Rizwan Virk:

• Books: The Simulation Hypothesis (2nd ed.), The Simulated Multiverse
• X/Twitter: @RizStanford

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Links referenced:

• Philip K Dick’s 1977 Metz Speech
• Episode 186: Why Files on Simulation Theory
• Riz’s Twitter/X

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Summary prepared for listeners who haven’t heard the full episode. Ads, musical outros, and banter skipped for clarity and depth.

Transcript

[Rizwan Virk]

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[Podcast Host]

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[Rizwan Virk]

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[Podcast Host]

Today we're sitting down with Rizwan Verk, MIT computer scientist, Stanford MBA video game pioneer, and one of the early investors in Discord. Early investor in Discord, huh? So I used to read my guppies are up at 3am screaming at strangers in Fortnite. I have questions for this man. His book, the Simulation Hypothesis is now out in a fully revised second edition. It argues that quantum physics, ancient Eastern mysticism, and the architecture of video games are all pointing at the same unsettling truth that what we call reality may not be reality at all. Hang on, hang on, hang on. I say reality isn't real and people call me crazy. This guy says it and gets a book deal. Oh, well, he lays out a better case than you do. But does he say how to listen? People run the simulation. No damage. Ya. Today we're covering the Observer Effect, the Mandela effect, NPCs versus RPG characters, and why UFOs might be avatars projected into this reality from somewhere outside it. Oh, and Riz got to talk to Philip K. Dick's wife, Tessa. She told him something about JFK that stopped the show cold. Let's go down to the basement. Doctor Rizwan Burke. Welcome to the basement.

[Rizwan Virk]

Thanks so much for having me here.

[Podcast Host]

I'm excited that you're here since you're an old computer nerd like myself. What was the baud rate of the first computer you had that could connect?

[Rizwan Virk]

Wow. Good question. Because, you know, originally we had a Commodore 64.

[Podcast Host]

The 64.

[Rizwan Virk]

We even had a Coleco Atom. I don't know if you remember this.

[Podcast Host]

Of course, it was the plug in.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And then there was a tape. It used the tape drive.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But then the tapes, if you left them on top of it, they would erase the tape. That's right. I think we eventually got an Apple II. Apple IIe, I think it was, which was the Port Portable model. And I don't think we really connected until much later. But it was like 2,600 baud modems way back in the day.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I think mine was a VIC 201981 with 150 baud connection. And the cassette tape is where you loaded everything.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, right, yeah, I remember those can't believe it. Well, you know, I started learning to program in my math class, and we were living in the Midwest, and our math teacher allowed myself and my best friend because we'd finished the math problems quickly. He's like, okay, why don't you guys go play on this TRS 80? Call it a Trash 80. And they had an adventure game, which was like. It wasn't Zork. It was like the original adventure text game. And I realized you could actually modify the code and the characters would say something different than what they were supposed to say. And that was my introduction really, really to programming.

[Podcast Host]

That was an Amazing. The TRS 80 was an amazing machine. That was. Radio Shack invented that thing.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And then later they called it a Trash 80. They did. But it was a good machine for time.

[Podcast Host]

What was the programming language on that? Was it basic?

[Rizwan Virk]

It was just basic, Yeah. I mean, that's how I learned to program. Was BASIC there? And then one day, my dad took us to his work, and they had just bought, like, an Apple ii. This is before we had one at home. And he was like, here, why don't you guys? You know, my older brother is like a year and a half older than me, I think, kind of like you and Gino in terms of age. He just took us in there and left us. And we started to program a tic tac toe game because we saw you could draw a line. So that was the first game that I ever wrote from scratch, was just a simple tic tac toe game on the Apple II at my dad's office.

[Podcast Host]

Apple ii. Is that BASIC on there as well?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it was called Apple Soft basic.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

In the end, it was Microsoft basic Behind. Which was how Microsoft started as a company.

[Podcast Host]

Right back when they got along.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Did you go to Apple iigs with color?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, because I think by the time that came out, one, it was expensive.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, it was. We didn't have it. We go to friends houses.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. Like, very few of our friends actually had, like, expensive computers. I mean, I'd pull it out to try to type a report, you know, in high school and then print it out. And then when I got to college, I went to mit, and they had a whole computer lab, which was the sun workstations.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which had pretty good graphics capabilities.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they did.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So I ended up using the computer lab, and very few people actually had laptops in their dorm rooms. In fact, one of my best friends had, like, a Mac, One of the very early Macs, I forget which one. But you know, with the little floppy drive. Sure, the three and a half inch floppy drives. But mostly we would spend all our time doing our assignments and writing games in the computer lab.

[Podcast Host]

So like using Solaris.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I was using Solaris and it used something called X Windows.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, of course, X is still. You can't get rid of X.

[Rizwan Virk]

You really can't. Yeah, it's like really solid infrastructure that it was built on. So I actually learned to use Windows X, Windows on Unix before I actually used the Windows PC, believe it or not. I mean, obviously I'd seen a Mac and we would send each other messages. It was called Project Athena at mit. It was one of the first kind of networked computer labs because if like my, my brother went to University of Michigan and you go to the computer lab and each computer was kind of. They're connected to the printer, but they were kind of doing their own thing. Whereas with Project Athena, they were investigating or experimenting with, you know, writing software where you would communicate with each other and we would just sit there and send trashy, you know, instant messages to each other. Of course, before IM was available on, you know, on PCs and stuff. So in fact, one of my friends started the company that became MSN Messenger. They were bought by Microsoft. And so a lot of the instant messaging stuff that we've seen over the years, it, you know, had its origins in like these old MIT things that people had just built as part of this program.

[Podcast Host]

Built on, Built on like Solaris and

[Rizwan Virk]

X. Yeah, I love that. Programmed in C, in C units, basically. Right.

[Podcast Host]

I love it. My first love is, is SGI Irix. I'll go, I go back. I still have an SGI box. I just love that. Yeah. Oh yeah, the big blue box. I used to love it. Is that how you got started? Interest. That's how you got interested in video games?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Well, I got interested in video games around the same time that I was learning to program because we had an Atari.

[Podcast Host]

The 2600.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, the 2600, like the original Atari system. And we had games like Pac Man, Space Invaders and an obscure one called Yars Revenge that I always thought was cool.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And there was a racing game. I think it was Pole Position. And it was while I was playing like the racing game, I would look at the guys in the bleachers, which were just like these little squares. It was like eight bit graphics. We're talking and then there'd be like a mountain and it would look like there's something out there. And I always start to wonder, well, what would happen if I drove the car past the bleachers and past the mountain? Of course you weren't able to, but I always wondered like, is there a little world in here with all these kind of straight lines? So that's when I really started to. To wonder about the intersection of video games and virtual reality.

[Podcast Host]

That is an interesting game to choose because I think Pole Position is one of the first games back then in 8bit to actually use background Parallax. Where it started, where things started to move at different. I think it was a three or four level parallax, but it looked kind of real.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I have this slide that I show sometimes which shows Pole position as an 8 bit racing game. And then it shows like a 16 bit racing game for the Nintendo and then it shows like a 32 bit for the PC and then it shows like the modern games. And you can just see how much more realistic it got just by adding a few bits. Sure, right. And it's gotten to the point where you look at these racing games and I mean, even though you can tell the characters are graphical, virtual characters designed by game designers, the city looks so realistic. The you literally could not tell if that was a real city or not. In fact, I don't know if you saw the recent Matrix movie, the fourth Matrix movie I did. It wasn't that great of a movie, but.

[Podcast Host]

No, but the tech was good.

[Rizwan Virk]

The tech was good. But just when they came out with that, they came out with a demo on the Unreal engine. Sure. Which I know you know about.

[Podcast Host]

I'm an Unreal guy. So yeah, I have it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Absolutely. And so they used the Unreal Engine and they came out with this demo called the Matrix Awakens. And it wasn't like a full game, it was like a mini game. But it started with a guy that looked like Neo, you know, kind of getting the message on his computer. 1999 Computer, wake up Neo. And of course you could. This was 21, so we're talking five years ago now. So the graphics were not nearly as good as they are today, but he would get up and go with Trinity. And there were scenes where you almost thought it was really Keanu Reeves or Carrie Anne Moss. But the city they were driving around, like, I think they filmed that one in San Francisco, in Berlin. And it looked like a combination of those two cities. And it had just gotten ultra realistic.

[Podcast Host]

And the car chases looked real. Like as soon as you pulled away from the kind of the uncanny valley, those cinematic shots of, like, the car tearing around the corner and flipping over, that looked pretty good.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it did look pretty good. And. And you know, the key is you stay away from the humans.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And everything looks realistic. I mean, there's a reason why. So Toy Story was built or made by Pixar, which actually came out of Lucasfilm, so George Lucas, you know, special effects company, and his film company. And there's a reason why the first fully computer generated film was actually about toys. It was Toy Story, because it's much easier to make those look realistic than it is to get humans. There was a film based on one of the Final Fantasy games, Spirits within, and they spent like, they had like a $200 million budget and they spent like 50 million of it on the hair. On the hair to get the hair. And so this is all before AI Right now we're seeing a world where AI is making the generation of realistic characters very easy to do. Yes, but that's kind of how I've seen the technology evolve, you know, just in my lifetime. Sure.

[Podcast Host]

Well, take us back to how your first game. I mean, you couldn't program a game for 2600. Right. Because it was cartridge.

[Rizwan Virk]

No, you couldn't. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

But on the C64 you could.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And so, again, I would make these little graphical games like Tic Tac Toe and, you know, other little games that kind of tried to imitate some of the cool arcade games, you know, that I had seen. And then we got an Apple ii, and then I started to look at more from a game design perspective. There were these adventure games, like, have you ever played King's Quest?

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which was, you know, super popular. But there was a whole series of these types of adventure games. And they were on the big floppy disks.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Not even the small floppy disks, which. Which discs, which are pretty old now.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they are.

[Rizwan Virk]

Kids today have no idea what kids today.

[Podcast Host]

They were five and a quarter inch. They were huge.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, they were huge. Exactly. And so what would happen is you'd put in one of the discs and it would bring up, you know, a picture of, I don't know, a city, let's say. And then you'd say you'd move the character around. They were kind of like the text adventure games, like Zork. Right. But with some graphical pictures. And then you would go to the next one and the next one.

[Podcast Host]

Kind of like a graphic novel. Choose your own adventure. Almost.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, almost. Right. And the innovation that King's quest made was they actually added, like, a character that you could actually go to the left or to the right.

[Podcast Host]

It was bananas.

[Rizwan Virk]

And it looked like it was real. Yeah. And Sierra Online, the company that showed that, was really considered one of the pioneers in graphics. In fact, they were the first to make a game, a graphical game for the Apple II that was called Mystery House. And it's just line graphics. And it was a husband and wife team, and she was the artist and he was the programmer. And they figured out how to get 74 of these, or 78, some number in the 70s, of these line graphics onto a single floppy disk.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Rizwan Virk]

That was considered a huge innovation back then because every other game you had to keep taking out the discs and put in the next one.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And I remember thinking, well, how is it that they can compress these. These images, which are really big, and get so many of them? And it turns out it's because they use a compression technique or they actually use just vector graphics, which are commands that tell it. So you don't actually store all the pixels, Right?

[Podcast Host]

You store the directions.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So if anybody's ever done this, I mean, they have a picture of a JPEG, right? Let's say it's 300 kilobytes or something, or 500K. So it's less than a megabyte. And if you uncompress that, I mean, we're getting kind of geeky now, so I don't know how far we want to go down.

[Podcast Host]

This is a geeky audience.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay. So if you uncompress it and save it as a TIFF, an uncompressed TIFF, it'll be something like 100 megabytes for that one picture. Right. And if you think of a film or a TV show like Game of Thrones, I mean, the reason I can stream it on my phone is because it's not sending 100 plus megabytes per frame. It's compressing it down. And so I began to think about compression really early as an optimization technique for games. And there was this one program, I think it's called, like, the Graphics Magician. And it was like 100 bucks, and I couldn't afford it, and I went to my parents because you could take, like, images and compress them down and you could create, like, a little adventure game. And I think I entered a programming contest where you could go to different planets and you could. In fact, this is funny. It wasn't even that graphical because it was mostly text, but I called it the Simulation Machine. No, way I've completely forgotten about this. And the reason I did it was so you could, it was like a little bit of text you could change and then the user has to figure out where they are. And maybe you could add a graphic or two as well. But I actually used to call it the simulation machine.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, synchronicities are happening all over your life.

[Rizwan Virk]

I haven't thought about that in years. Actually, we went to the University of Michigan. They had a big programming competition there.

[Podcast Host]

You still have that, all that stuff?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, when my dad died recently, we, you know, we ended up moving, cleaning up things in that house and selling it because my mom stays with my siblings now. But we did still have the Apple IIC sitting there. So who knows, maybe there were some old floppy disks still sitting around. It's possible.

[Podcast Host]

I love it that you were thinking about compression that young. That's amazing. I can remember writing programs on the C64 before we can afford a hard drive and just printing them out, just printing out pages, lines of code before.

[Rizwan Virk]

And then did you re enter them?

[Podcast Host]

Then you re enter them until the 1541 drive came out. And then the world changed. Like we'll never be able to fill this up.

[Rizwan Virk]

So.

[Podcast Host]

So where do you go from. From there? How old were you when you started, when you entered that contest?

[Rizwan Virk]

That was in high school. So it's probably like 16, 17 somewhere.

[Podcast Host]

Were you thinking, this is what I want to do?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I was thinking that computer science is definitely what I want to do. And in fact. And this ties to a larger theme we can talk about later. But if you had asked me kind of later in high school when I was old enough to kind of know something about the world. World. Or even early college, like what is it you're going to do with your life? I would have told you, I'm going to be a software entrepreneur.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

Then I'm going to be a writer.

[Podcast Host]

And then you mean later on, later

[Rizwan Virk]

on when I was really old? Like 28. Because back then I thought I was in high school. I thought 28 year old is really old. You know, I'll make my millions and then I'll go be a writer. And it's odd when you think about it because I believe we all may have these scripts for our lives that we're unaware of at a conscious level, but somehow unconsciously, they seep through sometimes and they come out. But I definitely knew I wanted to program computers because I was good at it. And I think then I got to MIT and I found mit. We had some really smart people. And there were guys that were really good at physics, and there were guys that are really good at chemistry, and there were guys that were really good at aeroastro. And I think it was a wake up call for most people who went there because they were like either valedictorians or they were top of their class. And you're around these people and every now and then you have somebody who's really good at X or Y. And so people say, is MIT hard? And I say, well, it depends if you're really good. If you're the guy that's really good at physics, then MIT is not that hard. But if you're everybody else, then physics is really hard at mit. And I was the guy for whom computer science was just really easy.

[Podcast Host]

Well, then why book? What book did you want to write?

[Rizwan Virk]

I wasn't sure at that point. I just knew that I liked to write stories and I wanted to write something someday. It was just a sense that I had that I would be a writer going back to the fourth grade when I wrote a little story about a dwarf that lived in some kingdom, magical kingdom or something like that.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you were writing story based games. You weren't really writing shooters, you were writing story games.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, well, I finally got into the video game industry was much later. So after MIT I did enterprise software for a while. So I kind of went in this other direction. And it wasn't until I moved to Silicon Valley that I got back into games and into the game industry. And that was when the iPhone was relatively new. Right. So it was like, wow, we have a gaming platform now. Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple, they didn't realize when they were designing the iPhone, they built this thing called the App Store, which, okay, everybody knows what it is now, but back then it was big innovations. You could just write your program and upload it into the store and people can just download it on their phone. Because before that the games on mobile phones were like these little line games or TikTok. You had to go through a big giant publisher and then Verizon had to approve your game. There was very few games you could play on the old phones. And with the iPhone, anybody could upload an app. And so they. What Apple didn't anticipate was that games would become so popular, they didn't see that coming. They were actually surprised by it. And for the first 10 years of the App Store, let's say 2008 to 2018, the number one top grossing games of grossing apps were all games of Course, even now, if you look at it, probably, you know, some of the top 10 are probably still games. And so it took off as a gaming platform. So then with each, you know, new hardware released, they ended up increasing the capabilities of the hardware to be able to play more and more games. And at that time, a lot of the big guys dismissed the iPhone games as, you know, no big deal. These are just, you know, little games you sell for 99 cents. You know, our real games are these. These big AAA games. But it turns out today the mobile part of the gaming industry basically dwarfs the console and the PC games. So it's the biggest segment of the entire video game industry, which is.

[Podcast Host]

And it's bigger than movies and sports combined.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And add records, music and music combined.

[Rizwan Virk]

All of those combined. Video games is a bigger industry. So we really saw. I really saw that evolve from zero to a pretty major industry because back then you could. A couple guys could just write a mobile game. And then, you know, we ended up building games that were. They were called simulation games, but not. Not in the sense that talking about the simulation hypothesis, it was like, if you've ever played farmville, sure, there were games on Facebook where you simulated having a farm or you simulated running a cafe. And we had a game called Tap Fish, which I guess with your heckle fish might be appropriate, but you basically had your own fish tank, and you would raise little baby fish and breed them, and you'd have different species. And that ended up being the number one grossing game in the App Store for a while. And then we sold it to a big Japanese company.

[Podcast Host]

Now, since you brought it up, we got to get into what was the Daily show beef with Tap Fish, because you handled it so well. Didn't they. Didn't they sandbag? Didn't they kind of.

[Rizwan Virk]

They totally sandbagged.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. That's when I learned you have to be a little bit careful with people who are, you know, Hollywood types in general, because until then, I was kind of naive, you know, and they basically came in and, you know, kind of sandbagged me and kind of edited this piece.

[Podcast Host]

What did they say? They want to interview you. About this popular game.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, about the popular game in the industry.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's not what they did.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, no, no. So they ended up, basically, we were one of the games that were the first free to play games out there. And what happened was Apple made it so that, you know, if somebody had a password, you know, you could just buy stuff in the game. And what would happen is some kids Ended up spending, like, not just in our game. I mean, you name it, these games. And this is when the industry was actually pretty small. Today you have Fortnite, which is like doing, I don't know, million dollars a day probably, if not more than that. So we're talking very small numbers. But what would happen is you'd have people who would. Whose kids would end up spending like $1,000 on FarmVille. And so they sandbagged me by having a parent of a kid actually call me and have a call with us. And then they edited out the part where the parent thanked me, of course, for what I said and tried to explain to him how it works. Turns out he had given his kids his password and they had used the password and they made it seem like we were the villains.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they did.

[Rizwan Virk]

They edited out the part. They even had a part where if you want to buy, you have to enter the password. They edited that part out and made it seem like, oh, you don't even need passwords. And so. So they made me look like the bad guy. So that was my introduction to. Well, what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up.

[Podcast Host]

But you, I think, might have been the next day, didn't you. You posted a rebuttal on your blog, which I think is still there about. Here's what really happened.

[Rizwan Virk]

But nobody read the Rev. Well, a small number of people read the rebuttal, but many people saw the episode. And so that's when I started to really think about. Okay, what I talk about today is what I call the hard simulation hypothesis, which is that the physical world is a kind of simulation. But there's also the soft simulation hypothesis, which is more like the narrative matrix, which is what we've been told. Perhaps not everything that we've been told is as we've been told on tv, Whether it's the wars, whether it's who to make fun of. You know, in 1984, they had the two minute hate, which was, who are we going to hate today?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

We'll get everybody together in a room and we'll put them up there and we'll make everybody hate them. And of course, you know, we go through that now in the media all the time.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

But it was kind of a rude introduction, which is why I like doing podcasts, because in podcasts, you know, they're not going to edit. I mean, they may edit some things in, but it's really a conversation. Yes. And people are able to see our Whole conversation. They won't just see like a little part made to look like somebody said something that they didn't say.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that annoyed me when I read that story, but it didn't surprise me. Eventually we're going to get to Sausalito and your VR experience, but can you tell us what's happening between, like, leading up to that? How were you working on this?

[Rizwan Virk]

So what happened was. Yeah, I was working on different games. We did a game company where we built games for TV shows. There was a TV show called Penny Dreadful and a show called Grim.

[Podcast Host]

You remember I love Grim.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, Grim is great. And so it was like a. In fact, I designed. Not many people know this because it was a small game, but I designed probably one of the first, if not the first card battle game on a phone because the phones were much smaller back then and people didn't know how you were going to do a whole card battle game there. And I did one called Titans versus Olympians. So we had like the Greek, you know, the Greek Titans and then the Greek Olympians, like Zeus. And you would play this game and for so many turns. And then eventually we ended up creating a card battle engine which we could use. This was now a different company. We sold off the. Our game company to a big Japanese company and then we did some games for TV shows and I became more of an investor and advisor to different companies.

[Podcast Host]

Didn't you do Game of Thrones?

[Rizwan Virk]

The. One of. One of the companies that I was an investor in did a Game of Thrones.

[Podcast Host]

My mom has spent a fortune on your. On that game.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Of sport.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was an investor in Telltale Games as well.

[Podcast Host]

Oh.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which had the Walking Dead game. That was huge.

[Podcast Host]

It was, and it was great.

[Rizwan Virk]

And Telltale was story based games.

[Podcast Host]

It's really back to the same thing. It's like a graphic novel that you play.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, exactly. Now Telltale eventually imploded. So this happens a lot with game industries where game industry companies where you have a big hit and then you try to do too much and then the whole thing implodes. So that wasn't good for me as an investor, but it was good for the industry because Telltale then broke up and all these people went out and started new game companies. So there's all kinds of interesting games out there now that were from people who used to work at Telltale.

[Podcast Host]

So at that point we're talking maybe 2010, 2011.

[Rizwan Virk]

He also invested in a small company that's now called Discord.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, I'm aware of that.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which was a game company, actually, it wasn't really. Yeah, they started as a MOBA game, kind of like League of Legends, but on an iPhone. And I knew Jason Citroen, who had founded Discord, because he was in the mobile game industry. So we all kind of knew each other back then in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. Like, a lot of the big AAA games were in la, but a lot of the mobile games came out of the San Francisco Bay area. And so when he started this company, he was like, okay, I'm going to do either a 3D printing company or another game company. So he ended up doing another game company, and I ended up investing in his first round. But then what happened was that the game wasn't that successful and these guys hated Skype, so they wanted to build something other than Skype for talking to each other while they're playing their mobile battle arena game. And then eventually they ended up releasing that as a separate app, Discord. And I remember we had lunch and he said, oh, you know, the game's not doing so well, but this app is doing well. I was like, really? He goes, yeah, we have like a hundred thousand downloads. That's pretty good, like, per month. He's like, no, per week. And I said, wow, how much marketing are you spending dollars are you spending to get these downloads? Because there was an advertising industry that often mobile developers use to get people to download their apps. And he was like, zero. People are just dragging their friends into it. And of course, now Discord is huge. It's huge.

[Podcast Host]

Sure, we use it.

[Rizwan Virk]

You guys use it. Yep, it's used all over the place now. But it started off just for gamers, you know, and then it eventually expanded into these other areas.

[Podcast Host]

How did you get into investing in these companies?

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Were you still writing code during this time?

[Rizwan Virk]

No. By then I had kind of stepped back from writing code.

[Podcast Host]

I think you miss it a little bit, don't you?

[Rizwan Virk]

I do miss it, but I don't have the time for it.

[Podcast Host]

I hear you.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is why now with AI, it's gotten pretty good. Like a couple years ago, I said, I think this was like maybe a year and a half ago. I said, okay, let me see if ChatGPT can write a simple Pac man game, you know, and it. It got something up and running pretty quickly, but it wasn't quite right. The Pac man wasn't pointing in the right direction. And I found I had to do so much vive coding and extra prompts. Eventually I just went in the code and just started changing it myself to fix the direction of the Pac man, for example. But now I hear that it's gotten so good that you don't have to go into the code yourself anymore. So I may get back into it. We'll see.

[Podcast Host]

Even though you had to go in and tweak that code back then, I still bet you got it working faster than Williams did in 1981.

[Rizwan Virk]

Way faster.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

In fact, that was the benefit was you get something up and running quickly with AI now, if you added the total amount of time it took me to get it right, it would probably have been similar, but I wouldn't have had anything you could really see till, like, let's say, 50% of the process here I had it like 10% of the process was the initial getting the game up and running, and then the rest of it was tweaking. So it's a different. I think people who are building games today now are dealing with a much better set of tools.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they are.

[Rizwan Virk]

Than we had or certainly than the guys had who did, like these original game arcade games. Sure, whatever. 60, not even 64K. The Atari memory on those, you know, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wrote a game called. I think it was called Breakout for the Atari cartridge. And Steve Jobs got paid for it, but he actually had Wozniak come in and write it for him.

[Podcast Host]

Did they write Breakout? That was the one when you hit the bricks.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I think it was that one. I don't quote me on that, but it was definitely something like that. Was. It was a very early one of those cartridges.

[Podcast Host]

It was. But it was a groundbreaking game because of the physics was really cool.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Here's an aside on Atari, please. Having been in the game industry, there's. There's a great book called 8 Bit Apocalypse. If you've ever played the game. Missile Command, of course, you know, which we've all played. Because, I mean, that was a really popular game.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

I mean, by today's graphics, it's, you know, it looks very primitive. I doubt I could get my nephews interested.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know. It's pretty playable still.

[Rizwan Virk]

It is. I haven't tried it lately, but the guy who wrote it was researching ICBMs and nuclear war, and he started to have dreams and nightmares about a nuclear war. And so this book, Eight Bit Apocalypse, is all about his kind of moral dilemma and writing this game and what he went through. Because back in the 70s and 80s, I mean, that was a real thing, as you remember.

[Podcast Host]

Of course, every day we thought it was going to be a nuclear war. We live with that every single day.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

All right, so Sausalito 2016. Tell me what was going on that day before you throw on the VR headset. Was VR a thing? Did someone invite you over and said, we got this idea?

[Rizwan Virk]

So what happens is virtual reality has gone through a bunch of different waves over time. Even back when I was in College, back in 92, 93, there was a novel called Snow Crash, and there was a wave of VR, in fact, that the term itself was coined in, like, I think 1987 or 1988 by a guy named Jaron Lanier. And the movie Lawnmower man was very loosely based on him, as I understand it. But that wave kind of went away. And they had a glove, even if you think of like, Ready Player One. That's right, they had a glove way back in the late 80s and 90s. And then it kind of went away. And what happened was in 2012, there was a new wave of VR. Oculus was one of the first startups.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

Consumer headsets, because until then, they were unaffordable for consumers. And so there was a whole series of headsets like the HTC Vive, et cetera. And I had sold my last video game company, and one of the companies that actually took over some of the games was in Sausalito, a company called Free Range Games. And they were working with HTC to create sports games there. And so we went over to their office just to kind of meet the people and find out more. It was a beautiful day in Sausalito. If you've been there, people who've been there will know on a beautiful day, you can see the San Francisco skyline. And I think it's one of the prettiest views that we have in any of our major cities out there. And so they were literally right on the bay. So you could, from their offices, we could see the skyline. And they said, hey, you got to come upstairs and try out this new VR headset thing. And So I was going through one of these waves. Some of my academic research that I've done is about how innovation goes through waves. And a bunch of venture capitalists jump in and a bunch of entrepreneurs jump in. And that's what happened in the mobile game industry. It was a new wave. A bunch of entrepreneurs started to build games and then a bunch of investors started to invest in those games.

[Podcast Host]

Tell me a few more of those waves. That's interesting.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Okay, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because they were coding these rules often by hand and that took too long. And so that there was a company called Symbolics in Cambridge, Massachusetts around. MIT was a big hub for this AI wave. So that AI wave kind of went, went away. And then we had another AI wave back in the 2000s which was starting to be based on deep learning and big data.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is this idea of neural nets. And you can have multiple, you know, multiple layers of neural nets and then they make the decision for you. Neural nets have been around for a while.

[Podcast Host]

Sure. Machine learning. Yeah, we know about Big Blue and chess and all of that.

[Rizwan Virk]

What's happening? Yeah, Alth most of that was still rules. Rules still rule based, believe it or not really. So I mean the guys who won like the Turing Prize, a guy named Jeff Hinton, he was, I think was at University of Waterloo in Toronto in Canada. Anyway, they kept it alive because people weren't using neural nets for much. Like even when I was a student at mit, they showed us how to, how a neural net worked and how we could use it to train it to like if people with the number two or the number three, we would feed it examples and these were like really simple neural nets. They weren't, they didn't have many layers, but they worked. I mean Back then, but nobody was using them for anything. And it wasn't until they scaled them massively that was the difference. That's where machine big data and machine learning comes from. It's like you just run it on huge sets of data.

[Podcast Host]

Is that when Jeff Hinton started to panic because he doesn't like where things are going?

[Rizwan Virk]

He doesn't like where things are going now, right? Well, not then, but eventually he did because people took up, you know, his ideas. Google DeepMind. Yep. Playing games like chess is an interesting example because DeepMind had, you know, the, the ability to play the game Go. And they had the AlphaGo platform, which was one of the first platforms that could actually beat like a human champion of the game Go. And it's much harder than chess.

[Podcast Host]

Much harder.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, but, but they had coded some rules and then they used the machine playing a human. And then eventually they had the machine just play itself like a million times.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so it learns the patterns. Like you don't actually have to code the patterns. And there's a guy named Claude Shannon. And again, we're kind of geeking out on the information side of this now, but Claude Shannon was considered the founder, the father of information science. He was at Bell Labs and he became an MIT professor. And part of the reason we can ship information across the wire is because of his work. And he wrote a paper about computers and game playing way back in like the 1950s, 40s, and he said there's different stages that it could go through, one of which is you can tell it the rules and it'll play the game. And there's a little picture of him and his wife sitting with like a big box that has a chessboard on top. And it was one of the first chess playing computers, but it was a physical machine and it would light up

[Podcast Host]

where I know it, I know the machine.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

So that's machine learning.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's machine learning.

[Podcast Host]

So that we got a kind of got a hint of that in. I think it was 1985 with War Games. Right. We're just playing Tic Tac toe over and over. It was learning that's Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. That was a great fictional representation. That was, I think, a era defining movie for many of us.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, for me it was.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. I mean, both. You saw AI, where it might end up and how it can learn from itself.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And I think that's. That's an important lesson. I wish they would have re released the movie today, especially with autonomous weapons race for using AI within the military. I'm less of a believer that I will take over the world necessarily, but more that AI can be used for nefarious ends, whether it's censorship, whether it's automated, you know, autonomous drones that are basically killing people on behalf of other humans.

[Podcast Host]

That's true. We'll get to that. That's. That's in here for sure. Phone call. You got to come upstairs. You got to check this thing out.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So back to the story.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Oh, they were worse.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Because it also got pretty hot.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it got pretty hot. And it was just so big. It was kind of heavy. In fact. Okay, this is a random aside, but one of the first VR headsets ever built was by a guy named Ivan SUTHERLAND Back in 1968, somewhere in, I think at Harvard or in Massachusetts. And it was, you know, this big giant thing that you put on your head that was connected not just with wires, but physically connected. And they called it the sword of Damocles, which is like this old Greek

[Podcast Host]

myth that the sword's always above your head.

[Rizwan Virk]

Above your head because it felt like it was going to snap your neck.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So heavy.

[Podcast Host]

I never heard of that. That's wild.

[Rizwan Virk]

That was one of the first ever, like real computer control, cold virtual reality type of things. And. And so in this case, it was pretty uncomfortable. And I started to play this table tennis.

[Podcast Host]

Now, hold on. Before tennis. Yeah, you put it on. Do you look around first and get a Sense.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. You look around.

[Podcast Host]

So what are you thinking? Like, this is pretty good.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So, first of all, the. The room was empty. It was actually about the size of this room.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

And I look over, and there's, like, a ping pong table. Graphically, you can tell it was graphically generated. In fact, I have us a screenshot of it in my book, the Simulation Hypothesis. And you can actually, you know, you saw it, and then there was an opponent on the other side. Now, the opponent didn't look very realistic. It was just like a bunch of, you know, like, circles and angles and squares and stuff, and. But they said, here, you know, put the controller in your hand and you can start to play. And so the ball would come across, and I would start to hit the ball. And the best thing about that game was the responsiveness of it. Like, the physics engine was so good that if I move my hand fast versus if I move my hand slow, the ball would go faster. It would shoot across or not shoot across.

[Podcast Host]

And you weren't feeling latency.

[Rizwan Virk]

There was no latency. That was the best part. There was latency in kind of the overall graphics of, like.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's why they had a very simple opponent. They didn't have a photorealistic opponent.

[Podcast Host]

Physics was dialed in.

[Rizwan Virk]

The physics engine was really good. And that's key for a sports game, of course. Yeah. Even for a shooter game, it's key. You want to be able to figure out who shot first. But it was so realistic that for a few moments, it fooled my body into thinking that I was playing a real game of table tennis. So much so that I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table just like this. Really like I might do at the end of a game of table tennis. Now, of course, there was no table. It was an empty room. And the VR table was about this size, but it was an empty room. So what happened was the controller fell to the floor, and I almost fell over, and I did a double take. I was like, whoa. Wait, what just happened? Oh, of course there's no table.

[Podcast Host]

Did you hear cheers around you? Who was in the room?

[Rizwan Virk]

It was just like, one or two other guys. So it wasn't like they had to

[Podcast Host]

give you the smile. Like, yeah, you get it now.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Getting there. Getting there.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, we're getting there. But that got me thinking and that's really what got me down this rabbit hole. And that's one of several strands of thinking that got me down this rabbit hole. But I started to wonder how long would it take us to build a game or a virtual reality that was so realistic that we would forget? Not just for a couple of moments, which is what happened to me. Obviously I knew it was a game, but you would forget for an hour and then you would forget for a day. And then could you forget like the Matrix, basically where Neo had lived in this virtual reality his whole life and he didn't really know that he was in a virtual reality. So I got down in the rabbit hole by looking at how technology might evolve over the next few decades. And we can talk more about that if you like. It was called, I called it the Simulation Point. But then I stepped back and I started looking at the quantum physics side of things.

[Podcast Host]

Well, we're going to get to that later.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. But I just want to summarize to say it turns out that quantum physics was telling us that the world isn't really as real as we think it is.

[Podcast Host]

It's not.

[Rizwan Virk]

And then I did another thread which was looking at the various religious and mystical traditions and I realized, oh, they're also telling us that the world is not really real, at least not the way we think it is. And I realized that there was a universal idea here that tied together Silicon Valley technology with physics and science. But looking at it from the point of view of an information based world or video game designer and mystical experiences which are the basis for the world's religions. And so that's really what got me down to this rabbit hole in a big way. And writing the book as well, this

[Podcast Host]

is a perfect segue to. My next question is you were sort of living a double life because you were going to the Monroe Institute, you were learning meditation, drum circles, I mean, all this kind of stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So what happened was when I was an entrepreneur back in the 90s is when I did my first startup pretty much as soon as I graduated, like within a year. So most of my career has been as an entrepreneur. So during the day I would deal with things like, you know, code reviews.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Builds engineers, managing engineers, hiring salespeople, which really sucks if you're like a technical guy. And investors and customers. And a lot of our customers were big Fortune 5000 companies back in the day. And this was in Boston So it was actually much more conservative in the financial industry than like, say, in Silicon Valley, where the guys were sitting around smoking weed, you know, as part of their startups. Like, that wasn't happening in enterprise software startups in Boston. But at the same time, I started to learn about different types of meditation techniques and I started to explore different aspects of consciousness.

[Podcast Host]

What drew you to that?

[Rizwan Virk]

You know, I've always had a bit of an interest in it, but I will say that initially I just thought, hey, if I can learn to meditate, I can be a better computer programmer, because then I can concentrate.

[Podcast Host]

Of course, I can be a better

[Rizwan Virk]

entrepreneur because I can visualize what I'm trying to build. But then the more you got into it, the more you realize that it's not so much about that stuff. Right. It's not about the selfish thing. And what I eventually got to realize and I wrote my first book, it was called Zen Entrepreneurship about this time when I was living this double life. And every chapter, one chapter is about a problem we had with our startup and the customer canceling on us, and the next is about me jetting off to the Monroe Institute for a week to try to do out of body experiences. Or I started doing lucid dreaming. And there was a guy named Carlos Castaneda who wrote about this way back in the 70s.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

A lot of, a lot of young people today have no idea who he is.

[Podcast Host]

They should learn.

[Rizwan Virk]

They should learn. And he was on the COVID of Time magazine. Okay. Time magazine would be like, I don't know, what would it be?

[Podcast Host]

It'd be like, we don't have those anymore.

[Rizwan Virk]

We don't have those anymore. Right. It'd be like being, you know, Joe Rogan's top guest for the year.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Like that. This year. I don't know what you. You would put in today's terms, but basically he was called the grandfather of the new age movement. And he talked a lot about, initially about psychedelics, but eventually he was talking about dreaming and different states of consciousness. And some people, there's some controversy about. Did he really find a Mexican shaman that taught him this, or is he borrowing other people's ideas? But the interesting part of his teachings for me were about his dream experiences, which it almost didn't matter if he was imagining this while he was on psychedelics or, or while he was dreaming, because that's what it was all about. But it was real realizing there's something different about our reality. This really got me into thinking about alternate models because, okay, I'll Give you a startup example, because I know you've been in the computer startup world. One day I had a dream about this competitor of ours and I was like, that's odd. I've never dreamed of this guy before. One, never. Two, I hadn't even heard from him or his company.

[Podcast Host]

Is this Mark?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, this is a guy named.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, I like this story.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay, so this guy named Mark, he had a company called Edge Research. And I had a dream where I was in a business conference and I started chatting with him about it. And I woke up, I thought, that's weird. Like, why am I dreaming about this guy? We haven't heard from his company for a year. And we had software that was connecting IBM products to Microsoft and Oracle products. So we were like a big partner of IBM back in those days, using a product called Lotus Notes. Probably too much information for the audience there, but basically I went in the office that day and I get a call like right in the morning from product manager at IBM and he says, oh, hey, we're going to do a big announcement today and I just want to tell you, let you know because you've been a good partner to us, but this new product we're going to release is probably going to kill your product. I was like, great, thanks. Because we had a product that worked on top of their product, product. And I said, well, how come I've never heard of this product before? Because, I mean, IBM's a big company. Sure, I'm sure it would have leaked somehow. He's like, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, who had this company called Edge Research? We bought them like a year and a half ago and they've been working on it in secret up in New Hampshire. And now we're going to do the big announcement today. I thought, okay, that's weird. I had the dream in the morning, the phone call came after. Right. Some people think, oh, it's not a big deal because it happened the other way around. No, the dream came first out of nowhere. It was almost like a precognitive sense that this guy was gonna show up again today in some significant way.

[Podcast Host]

I believe it was. What was the dream?

[Rizwan Virk]

The dream was just. Was not that. It was more like I was at a conference like I used to go to, and he was at one of the booths and I was asking him, hey, we haven't seen you in a while. What have you been working on? And you know, we were just having that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody who's in Your industry. But he was cagey about something in the dream. He was, but he was always cagey. So as I recall, you know, this is 30 years ago now, so we're getting into details I may not even get right. But. But I do remember being a little cagey. And it was sort of par for the course because when we had built our product, our first product, and announced it, he had called me and he was being a little bit cagey. Didn't. He was asking me about it and didn't tell us he was going to have a competitor, so a competitive product. So. But that to me was one of many wake up calls that I had around dreams and the nature of reality. That in fact we may be getting clues about things that haven't happened yet. And our idea of time as being linear may not be correct. And only getting information from a materialistic point of view may not be correct either. There may be other ways to get information. So that was one example. Once I ended up lucid dreaming and said, hey, let me go visit my girlfriend at the time, who's still my partner now in Cambridge. I was like, let me fly over to her apartment. And I looked over there in the living room and there was this weird light on the couch. And I thought, that's weird because it's the middle of the night, you should probably be sleeping in the bedroom. But there was this weird light on the couch and I didn't really think much of it because then the lucid dream goes away. So if you've ever tried lucid dreaming,

[Podcast Host]

it's hard to stay in it.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's hard to stay lucid. It just goes away. And then I told her about it the next day and she said, oh yeah, I was sleeping on a couch last night. Whoa. And I would have these little confirmations like that, like I would be flying around Cambridge and they had all these ultra realistic glass, you know, high skyscraper type buildings, but we didn't have that many back then. I remember thinking, okay, what, what's going on here? And then recently I went on a trip back to Cambridge because I still have a place there. And if you go to Kendall Square now, which is just outside of mit, they've got all these tall skyscrapers that are like these glass buildings and stuff.

[Podcast Host]

So you were seeing the future?

[Rizwan Virk]

I might have, like, it's hard to say because I don't remember exactly what the buildings look like, but it was definitely the tenure of the, the tenor of the future.

[Podcast Host]

Well, at, at Monroe, were you able to get out of body So I tried it.

[Rizwan Virk]

So the Monroe Institute, they did. They did Hemisync.

[Podcast Host]

Hemi Sync.

[Rizwan Virk]

Hemi Sync. What it does is it puts in, like, different rhythm beats, and it gets your brain into a certain rhythm. Yep. I found that it wasn't quite working for me to get out of my body, but I did have an actual experience where I was what today I would call a shamanic journey. So later I learned how to do this with just drumming and just breathing. You can get into an altered state, and you can have. You can do what shamans do, which is they. They have almost like a visualization that you're aware you're doing something in another reality, but you're also aware of your physical body. So this is the experience that I had at the Monroe Institute, where I. I saw this guy kind of look a little bit like me. Brown guy, but he had a beard. And he was a sadhu sitting against a tree. Who knows, maybe in India somewhere, like, years ago. I thought, hey, this is interesting. And I felt somehow connected to this guy. And so this is like a vision I'm having while I'm in, you know, with a hemisync.

[Podcast Host]

How present are you in the real world? Are you like, oh, my God, this is happening.

[Rizwan Virk]

I was present where I was still aware of my body. You were, but it was enough. And this is. For me, this is very close to what happens with Shamanic Journey. Yes. It's. You're aware that there's some other reality, really something happening there. You're still aware of your body, but it's almost like you're not paying attention to your body.

[Podcast Host]

Is this like Samadhi?

[Rizwan Virk]

No, it's not quite Samadhi. This is more like you're leaving your consciousness is leaving your body and going somewhere else. But it's not like a full Autobot experiences. It's like just a part of you is going out to this other place. This other place could be a real place. It could be an imaginary place. It could be a place where multiple people can validate things. I'll tell you about that in a second. We used to have those kind of experiences, too. But in this case, the guy was sitting against the tree, kind of like I am now, but maybe leaning back a little bit more, and he's like, you're doing it all wrong. What do you mean I'm doing it all wrong? He goes, look, if you want to get out of your body, don't you remember you learned this, like, in a past life or something. He goes, this is what you do, you don't lay down. You, like, sit against. Because if you lay down, you go to sleep, you sit back against the tree. That's what he was doing. This. I don't know how many years ago this was, if it was even real. And he goes. You go up to your third eye. And I could, like, at that point, I could be. I felt like I was him for a second. And you would leave your third eye and you would. Would go out and then you would come back. And when you left, I could see him like, you know, sitting. His body sitting there and he's like, that's how you're supposed to do it.

[Podcast Host]

You saw that?

[Rizwan Virk]

I saw that in my vision. Right. Wow. And I was like, that's wild. And there was a time after that when I got back home where I was sitting at a desk coding or something. It was the middle of the afternoon. You know, you get the. You get tired in the afternoon. I started to doze off and I remembered this and I went up and I. And I basically went out of my body and I saw my physical body and then I came back. But for me, what happened in these dreams is I would just wake up somewhere else, like in a lucid dream. That became an out of body experience. Rarely have I had the kind of experience where somebody actually just sees themselves sleeping in the bed.

[Podcast Host]

And you brought up that you had out of body experiences with other people.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So what happened was, after that I found an easier way for me to do that was using shamanic drumming. So I studied with a guy named Robert Moss who wrote a book called Conscious Dreaming. Really interesting guy, Australian guy, who somehow has gotten tied into all these Aboriginal and Iroquois and Native American dream practices. And he kind of pulled it together. And so we would get into a group and, you know, somebody would do drumming. It's a certain beat of the drumming and anybody can look it up. Look up Shamanic Journey. You'll see what the beat is. It's like a. And what it does. It's very similar to the binaural beat.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

It puts your mind and your breathing and your.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, it's frequency related.

[Rizwan Virk]

Frequency related, yeah. So it puts you into kind of this altered state. And then you. You basically have an intention that says, hey, let's all go to, you know, Riz had this weird dream last night at a business conference. Let's all see what we can do. And we would all go into there and try to, you know, we'd all look around and then we'd come Back and say, hey, what did you see? Hey, what did you see? And every now and then, there would be, like, a lot of correlation. And, you know, I have a skeptical engineer side. Sure. As well as this kind of intuitive side where I'm intrigued by all of these, of course. Kind of like you, I'm sure.

[Podcast Host]

Right, Absolutely.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so. But.

[Podcast Host]

But the time I study Monroe, I knew Lucid Dream. I do all this stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, yeah, that's great.

[Podcast Host]

Could you see each other or no?

[Rizwan Virk]

Sometimes. Not necessarily. Some people could, but they could. You know, some people were better at it than others, of course, but for me, one of the most interesting ones. And again, you might go to what Robert used to call a stable place in the dream world, Meaning it's like, my dreams are subjective. Your dreams are subjective. 90% of our dreams. And I write more about this in my book, Zen Entrepreneurship, and my book Treasure Hunt, which is about dreams in the business world, not so much in the simulation books, but it's a fun topic anyway. And so one day he said, we're going to Journey to Sirius. And I was like, what does that mean, Journey to Sirius? What are we talking about? Let's just do it. So he started the drumming, set the intention, and then you say what you saw. And I remember going to this weird planet that maybe was orbiting Sirius. Again, this was a vision I was having. So hard to say how realistic it was. I saw these giant buildings, but they were on stilts. It was just bizarre to see these giants. And it was like a ruins of an ancient civilization, but there was an even more ancient civilization that had ruins at the bottom. And so that's why these big buildings were on still. Wow. And then I went off to the side and it looked like Superman, you know, like. Did you ever see in the original movie, do you remember the Fortress of Solitude?

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Rizwan Virk]

So there were, like, all these little points and so.

[Podcast Host]

White crystals and stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, white crystals. And then there was this group of people that were looking out over, like,

[Podcast Host]

different planets, but, like, living beings.

[Rizwan Virk]

There were some living beings there, too, but they weren't like. They weren't there physically. It was. It was a little bizarre. Let's leave that part off for now because. Fair enough, because that I might have then transitioned to something else.

[Podcast Host]

I just love this story.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So I went and described all these details to Robert and some of the other people who went on the journey with us. And they were like. They were like something like 17 points that many of us, including the suit, right down to the Superman crystalline structures. And buildings on stilts.

[Podcast Host]

They saw that?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, there's no way several of them saw that. Like, not 100% of the people don't always see it. But that's why you, you do it in a group and you say, okay, what is the, what are the correlations we can make now? Is that a shared dreamscape in an imaginary world? Could it be like an actual planet on Sirius? Could it be something else? You know, my skeptical mind kicks in and says, well, okay, I don't know, but there certainly was something going on here that, whether it's an archetypal thing, but the fact that there were so many instances where this would happen.

[Podcast Host]

The stilts is very. That's a very strange detail. It's very specific because anyone could say futuristic buildings or something. But the stilts is very specific.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it was stilts on top of like an ancient ruins, almost like, like an older civilization. And that's why they built on stilts, so that when they built new buildings, you wouldn't ruin like the old buildings, you know, and that was the reason why. And then eventually, I think the second part of it was they had moved off the planet and they were somewhere monitoring what was going on in different parts of their local quadrant of the galaxy. Or so even now it gets into a little more Star Trek. So that should just be my sci fi self coming out at that point.

[Podcast Host]

But whatever it was there, there's something there. And we'll talk about that more with simulation before we go to break. Can we talk about the assailant? The assailant? Synchronicity and how weird that was.

[Rizwan Virk]

Sorry, which one?

[Podcast Host]

Jacques Valet, Jeffrey Krippal and Morpheus.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, yes. Yeah. So the, the Matrix Synchronicity at the, at the Esalen Institute. Yes. So those people who don't know Esalen is like this kind of a hippie commune set up and Big Sur north of la and they have conferences there. And so Jeffrey Kripal is professor at Rice University. He's one of the few academics that's been looking into UFOs and mysterious subjects. In fact, I just wrote a paper that I put a preprint of online, which is, I wanted to call it Aliens over Harvard. It's actually called Aliens over Harvard and Stanford, but It's actually called UFOs in academia. A case study in stigma boundary work and the edges of legitimate science. So I interviewed a whole bunch of professors about who had studied the UFO subject openly about. Why is there a stigma about studying this seriously in some way?

[Podcast Host]

That's A great idea for a paper. Is that out yet?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, the paper Preprint is available online. If people search for it, they can find it. Or they looked at my Twitter account, which is Rizz Stanford, I guess it's called Xdow. I keep calling it Twitter still.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, me too.

[Rizwan Virk]

But so I interviewed people and it turns out, you know, going back a little bit, I graduated from MIT in June of 1992. And there was one other major interesting thing that happened at MIT in June of 1992. There was a Abduction Alien Abduction Conference at MIT in June of 1992. And I heard about it.

[Podcast Host]

What a strange place to have that conference.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was an invite only conference and John Mack, who from Harvard, people will know from Harvard, was one of the co chairs along with a physics professor from mit. And I remember thinking, this is weird. Why are we having an abduction conference here? And I mean, I didn't go to the conference because it was invite only. Bud Hopkins was there and wow, the big names. And that was like the last serious abduction conference in that phase because, you know, John Mack got in trouble for the subject. But so I went back and I interviewed people like David Pritchard, who's the MIT professor who hosted it. John Mack has passed away, but Ralph Blumenthal, who is his biographer, who wrote a book on him and Jeff Kripal actually kept, you know, these alive with these secret conferences that, you know, were invite only. And so they used to happen at Esalen. And so at Esalen I came out with the book the simulation hypothesis on March 31, 2019, which was the 20th anniversary of the release of the Matrix.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. And intentionally or no?

[Rizwan Virk]

Intentionally.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, nice.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's why I ended up self publishing the first version because there's no way publisher could have got it out on time because I only finished it in December and I was like, okay, I'm gonna get this out. The second edition was Penguin Random House. So they did all the usual publishing timeline things, but so I had met Jacques Vallee, who I'm sure your audience

[Podcast Host]

knows him very well, but what is he like as a person?

[Rizwan Virk]

He's super nice guy and he's really. What's the word I want to use? Thoughtful, I think. And that's what I like about him is he'll present, you know, what he's heard, what people have told him, but he won't necessarily present his conclusions. So I think he's one of the few people in the entire UFO world. And for those who don't know him, he was part of the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and been involved since Project Blue Book. But he's a computer scientist at heart, which is how we connected. Really nice guy. He even wrote a foreword for the French edition of the Simulation Hypothesis in French. He did, yeah, he did.

[Podcast Host]

What an honor.

[Rizwan Virk]

It really was an honor. And again, it was just in that French edition. But it was really awesome that he did that.

[Podcast Host]

He's a very important person.

[Rizwan Virk]

I think so. Yeah. And he's getting up there now. Hynek passed away many years ago, so I never got to meet him. But Jacques has lots of stories. But he started telling me about some of the overlap between. Well, he started telling me about UFO cases that led me to start thinking about the overlap between the UFO phenomena and simulation theory. But. So there was a really interesting synchronicity that happened right when my book came out, and Jacques had given me a little blurb for the English version of the book, and I heard about this afterwards, so I actually wasn't there. But it was a synchronicity involving me. And he said, jacques gave a presentation at Esalen at one of these conferences that they have there. And it was just before, let's say, lunch. And his last slide had a picture of my book, and he was talking about Ridwan Virg and the Matrix, and it probably had a picture of the Matrix. And so they left it as the last slide, and they all said, oh, that's interesting, because the book had literally just come out. And so then they left the classroom and they walked over to the cafeteria. Have you ever been to Esalen? They're not that far. It's like, right on Big Sur. Beautiful. They walk into the cafeteria, and who's there but Morpheus? I mean, they literally see Laurence Fishburne sitting there in the cafeteria, you know, while they had just been talking about the Matrix and my name. And so I heard this from multiple people, including Jeff Kripel and other people who were there. They're like, hey, you know, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book. And I was like, oh, damn, I wasn't there. But it was an interesting synchronicity.

[Podcast Host]

It is. I mean, that the simulation is always listening. All right, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk simulation theory right back. So you've had this VR experience, Precognitive dream, a weird synchronicity. And then I think you start to realize that simulation theory is not just a thought experiment. That technology, physics, and religion are all starting to point in the same direction.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. That was the realization that I came to, was that there's no way in just a pure materialist model for some of these weird things to be happening. Not just the things that have happened to me, but things that others have reported. And so I really first wrote an article about simulation theory. I was actually visiting Sri Lanka, and in Sri Lanka, there was a famous science fiction writer who lived there, Arthur C. Clarke.

[Podcast Host]

Who?

[Rizwan Virk]

Anybody who's into science. I knows Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey, and his office is still well preserved there.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. It's technically not a tourist attraction, but a buddy of mine was there. He's like, no, you can go. You just slip the guy a few rupees.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know that. Awesome.

[Rizwan Virk]

So a buddy of mine from MIT had started a company in Sri Lanka, and I had invested in his company, and I was helping him out. So I went out to visit him, and I really want to see Arthur C. Clarke's office. So I went there, and his desk is preserved, and it's got all these books behind him. And it's got, like, you know, 2001, 2010, but it's got, like, different versions. Wow. And so I see this, and sometimes I think we have a recognition of something. Right. It reminded me of something. And I was like, yeah, that's right. I was supposed to be a writer. Like, you kind of have this vision, and it flashes in your mind, and you don't know all the details and. Right. It's like you remember the storyline. And somehow it dawned on me that I needed to do more writing. But at that point, I had gotten this idea that the video game was a good way to explain this idea of the physical world being virtual. And I had also spent a lot of time in a game called Second Life, which was from a decade before that.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

In Second Life. And so I'd ask them, like, why are you doing this? They're like, well, because it's fun. They got paid in Linden dollars. This is pre Bitcoin, which were worth peanuts. So they weren't doing it for the pay, even though technically they were being paid. It was like that was part of their virtual life, their character's life. And people would have relationships and get married. And, you know, that made an impression on me as well. But I decided to write an article, a long article about why I think we might be living inside a video game. And I tried to pull in some of the elements that I'd been thinking about. So that article allowed me to pull together these different ideas. And I wrote it end of 2017, beginning of 2018, partly because of, you know, the Arthur C. Clarke experience. And it was just a flashpoint that said, oh, I'm going to have a bunch of books that are going to be translated in a bunch of languages at that moment. At that moment, like, it was like, but I got to get busy doing my writing. And so I wrote the article and I said, oh, that's enough for now. You know, I'm done. I was running this program at mit. I'm doing other stuff. But that got me into talking about the technology side of it initially more because when I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix, I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which is I define it as a type of technological singularity. Now, most people know that term because they think of like Skynet, super intelligent AI going to kill us all and take over the world.

[Podcast Host]

So the AI singularity is what, when

[Rizwan Virk]

AI supersedes exponentially grows to the point where it's become super intelligent beyond us. Beyond us. That's one example. But the guy who coined the term, the technological singularity was actually a guy named Werner Vinge, who was a science fiction writer and a computer science professor. And he defined it in many different ways. So it wasn't just AI. He said it could be computers networking with each other to become intelligent, or us merging with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about, the merger of biology and silicon. But Vinci was relying on an earlier famous guy named John von Neumann, of course, who's famous Hungarian mathematician. He basically defined the von Neumann architecture that all of these computers still pretty much use the von Neumann architecture. The guy really was a genius. And he borrowed the term singularity from physics because in physics, singularity is when you're approaching that line at the center of a black hole. And he said it's the point at which technology grows exponentially such that everything is different for the human race and

[Podcast Host]

you can't come back from a singularity. That's it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. At that point, everything is different.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so Vinji wrote the paper, and then Kurzweil wrote a book about it. But so a technological singularity is when technology gets to the point where you can't come back. And so I started to think, well, if we were to build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality, then we would have reached what I called a simulation point. And if there are AI characters inside there that you can't tell if they're AI characters or not, then we're basically able to create a full virtual world. And there's something called the Turing Test, which most people have heard of. It's again, going back to 1950, back in the time of Claude Shannon. It was actually Alan Turing. He wrote a paper called the Imitation Game. Actually, that's what he called it. And for people who don't know, most people have heard of it by now, but there's a computer behind curtain A and a person behind curtain B, and you're passing messages back and forth. Now, how did they pass messages? Back in those days, they didn't have cell phones and it was teletype machines. Sure. That was how he decided to do it. And he said, if you can't tell the difference between the AI. Now, again, back then, they thought AI was physical computer. So if you can't tell the difference between a computer and the human, then the computer has passed the Turing Test. And of course, today, many people think with ChatGPT and Claude and Google and all and Grok, that we've pretty much passed the Turing Test for text, because it's all. The chatbot is all a text based interface. There used to be a prize called the Loebner Prize, which was set up in the 90s, and it was for the chatbot that actually came closest to passing the Turing Test. And there was a chatbot named Alice that was one of the winners of it. It was the first chatbot that actually took on, like, a personality of a young woman.

[Podcast Host]

I remember Eliza. I don't remember Alice.

[Rizwan Virk]

Eliza was even before that. So Eliza was like, in the 1960s. So this was like 90s or so, like late 90s. And there was a guy, a Hollywood guy who saw this chatbot, like, back in the 2000s. He's like, huh, A chatbot that has the personality of a young woman and his name was Spike Jones.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And he decided to write a script called Her.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which became the film, you know, with. Who is it? Was it Joaquin Phoenix?

[Podcast Host]

Joaquin and Scarlett Johansson.

[Rizwan Virk]

Scarlett Johansson played the voice. And so you see what's called the science fiction feedback loop at work, where science fiction inspires technology and then technology inspires science science fiction. And then when, you know, Sam Altman and these guys came out with, I think it was chat GPT3 or 3.5. One of the versions they came out with, they, like, started referencing her. And there was a big blow up because the voice of the woman who sounded like the guy's girlfriend in the video sounded like Scarlett Johansson.

[Podcast Host]

It was just someone who sounded like her. He promised it wasn't her.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it was just someone kind of like her.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Was it Samantha, I think in the film was her character.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And he literally referenced the movie her. So you start to see the science fiction feedback loop over time. But coming back to what I was talking about was in my book, the second edition of the Simulation Hypothesis, I defined something called the Virtual Turing Test or the Metaverse Turing Test. And we're not quite there yet. And that is if you're inside a multiplayer game or a virtual world, like a Second Life or a World of Warcraft or Fortnite. I'm sure there's a lot more recent, recent examples now. And your avatar is controlled by you, and there's two other avatars, one of which is controlled by a human player and one of which is controlled by an AI. And if you can't tell the difference between those two, and you can do anything you want in the virtual world. You can, you know, drive cars, you can fly on dragons, you can go skiing. You can. You can talk to each other, you can flirt, you can have virtual sex, whatever you want. And if after, say, an hour, you can't tell which of those avatars. And you're talking, too. So there's voice element, which of course, today, you know, if you've seen any of the latest AIs, they can.

[Podcast Host]

They can do it.

[Rizwan Virk]

They can have a voice. In fact, I got a call from an AI not that long ago.

[Podcast Host]

Could you tell it was AI?

[Rizwan Virk]

They made it so that they told you it was AI.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was called Bordy. It was an AI venture capitalist who basically was like, well, as an AI venture capitalist, I can talk to every single founder on Earth. Right. Because it's just making calls and it's automated. But it was actually pretty good. I mean, in taking what I said, it's an example of where they're putting in, you know, the LLM is behind the scenes, but it's basically the brain that's driving the character. And in fact, we were talking about the Matrix Awakens, and that was a virtual city. And there was a guy, he put a smart NPC engine into it, which basically has an LLM behind it, so that all the NPCs in that city, they were kind of dumb NPCs in most games, but now we have smart NPCs. And so he walked around this virtual world and he started telling people, you're in a video game.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. I remember this.

[Rizwan Virk]

You're an npc.

[Podcast Host]

And some got upset, didn't they?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Some were like, you know, that's ridiculous. Or some were like, I got to go to work. I don't have time for this crap. Others were like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And this was back in, like, 22. Right. So looking at how fast. Looking at how fast AI technology evolves. I mean, we're already many generations beyond that, but they reacted kind of like real people might. And so we're not quite at passing the virtual or metaverse Turing test yet, but I think we will be eventually. And that's one of the stages of these 10 stages to get to the simulation point to build a matrix. And another would be like bcis, putting in brain computer interfaces.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Like in the Matrix.

[Podcast Host]

So before we go too far down, one thing I don't think I've seen anyone else do, this is your NPC verse RPG inside the simulation. But before we get there, take us back to your paper. And what was your argument for this could be a simulation? I mean, the actual technology.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So the technological argument was that video games can get to be so good that we will reach the simulation point at some point, and it could be soon. It could be 100 years, could be a thousand years. It really doesn't matter that much as long as we get to that point. And so if we will eventually be able to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds that we can't distinguish if we're having the real experience or not. And one of the stages also included false memories, like Philip K. Dick. We can talk more about him.

[Podcast Host]

I hope so. Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because he's one of my favorite authors. And in Blade Runner, for example, you had the Android that had Rachel, who remembered being a little girl growing up. She didn't think she was AI, but she had those memories implanted in her. But if we can have those experiences and you can't tell the difference, then how do we know for sure that we're not inside a virtual world right now? That was the crux of the argument. But it was built on the idea that technology is developing and people like to have virtual lives. And then the quantum physics was part of the argument as well. So I don't know if we want

[Podcast Host]

to get into that in just a second, because I want to dispel something. And this was in my episode about simulation theory. Physicists will argue this can't be a simulation, because to simulate all this material, all consciousness, down to the quantum level, you would need a simulation bigger than the universe itself. And my response was, that's not how simulations work.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right? Exactly. I mean, the way that simulations work is you simulate the parts that you need. Right. And you. So physicists love the law of big numbers, right? They love to say infinity. Oh, yeah, it's infinite or there's an infinite number of particles. But computer scientists, we hate infinity because we are always dealing with limited resources.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it's all about optimization. And I tell people. So in the book, there's a. We mentioned King's Quest, so I'll bring it up again. If you look at King's Quest, you'll see that each of the screens, when that guy is walking, it almost looks continuous, but it's really not. All the pixels of all the screens are laid out, which means they're called raster images or bitmap images. But they're basically rendered like the pixels are sitting there on disk and it's just a matter of loading it. Now, back in the 80s, and you know this because you were around, if you tried to build something like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or csgo, which is a first person shooter, you wouldn't be able to do it because there's too many pixels to keep track of.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And they didn't know how to compress that down in such a way that you could render it on the fly. The hardware wasn't that good either. But the thing that I learned as a computer scientist is that, yes, the hardware gets better, but it's the algorithmic improvements that really make the order of magnitude difference. Like, hardware might go from 1 to 2, but if you want to go from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, you need to change the way that you're doing things. And so the reason we can render a World of Warcraft today is we don't need all the pixels for all the castles to be on your computer. What we do is we generate it through 3D models based upon where you're looking. And the first game that got really popular, that did this was Doom, of course, back in the 90s. I mean, they had Castle, Wolfenstein, and before that as well. But the game that really got popular and it simulated a first person perspective, and so it basically, you know, just showed you what your character could see. And the rule of thumb was only render that which is observed. And by the way, that's.

[Podcast Host]

Sounds familiar.

[Rizwan Virk]

It sounds familiar, right. And that's what we do with Zoom, too. Like if you and I, I mean, we happen to be in the same room, although how would the audience know that we're not in the same room? But if we're on Zoom and I'm in, you know, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and you're in Los Angeles, then my computer doesn't have to render all of Los Angeles. It just renders your background. And similarly, your computer doesn't have to render all of Phoenix. It just needs to show the part that is visible from the camera.

[Podcast Host]

So that castle that's way out in the distance is really just a few pixels. That's all we're rendering until you get there. And then we give you more and more information.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And it's rendering it on demand.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

And this is a key feature of how 3D, particularly 3D video games are built. And the information for that castle is still out there. And sometimes it's even that is generated on the fly. There was a game in 2016 called no Man's Sky.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, procedural. Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Procedural. Right. And it had 18 quintillion planets. Okay.

[Podcast Host]

That's an interesting number, actually.

[Rizwan Virk]

It is. Right. You probably know why.

[Podcast Host]

I do, but you have to explain. That's an interesting number.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. But first of all, it's a really big number.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

So it pretty much seemed infinite at that point. And the way video games used to be designed is you would have to have your design team design every one of those planets. Now, there's no way that anyone could design 18 quintillion worlds. It's just too much. So what they did was they used procedural generation.

[Podcast Host]

Which is what?

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is basically code that runs and generates the scenery for you as needed. So when you get to the planet, it would generate, like, the trees, the forests, the landscapes, the mountains, using a whole bunch of algorithms. And there's a whole bunch of algorithms that. There's algorithms that can simulate water, there's fractal algorithms. If you've ever looked at how you can have trees being generated. In fact, in my second simulation book, the Simulated Multiverse, there's a whole chapter on these types of algorithms and how it Looks like nature is algorithmic. It does in nature. Nature is algorithmic in nature. No pun intended. Because you look at like the seashells,

[Podcast Host]

right, the Fibonacci numbers.

[Rizwan Virk]

Fibonacci numbers. But you see all these similar sequences of things or algorithmic generation or fractals. Right. Which are fractals are when you have self similarity at different levels.

[Podcast Host]

Right. No matter how close or far away, it looks the same.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's very similar because it uses a similar algorithm. There might be some randomness in the algorithm. Sure. And fractals came from a guy, I think was his name Mendel brought. It was a guy in the 70s who said, how long is a coastline? So if you were to measure a coastline, how long would it be? Like say in England? Well, it depends on the scale because if you're measuring it from satellite, you know, you'll see kind of like almost like a straight line.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

But if you go in to the bays and nooks and crannies, it'll be longer because now you're going like this. Well, if you got really small, you would start to see, even within one rock you would see all of these little variations. Right. And so it depends on what scale you're at, but there's some self similarity at larger scales. And so all of these algorithms. So. So that's what this game was, was known for. It's still out there now. But it was considered a boring game when it first came out. But now they've added. Supposedly I haven't played it in a long time.

[Podcast Host]

Me neither.

[Rizwan Virk]

But supposedly it's gotten better. But it was known for this large number of worlds and almost infinite, generated on demand, like that's the key phrase I think that we need there. And so why 18 quintillion? Well, it's because it's 2 to the power of 64.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's why it's that very specific number.

[Podcast Host]

So this is 64 bits.

[Rizwan Virk]

You had 64 bits that kept track of. How many worlds do you want to keep track of now? There's no reason that's the limit. I mean, they could also have used 128 bits, but it was very convenient to use like 64 bits because that's a commonly used size of what's called a word, which is like multiple bytes within coding. And so you see this very interesting, interesting number. It's also, by the way, a big number related to the chess, the chess story from ancient India.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, it is. Now you have to tell that story. It's a great one.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Anything?

[Rizwan Virk]

Anything. And the wise man goes, okay, if I win, meaning if the king loses, you'll give me one grain of rice for the first square in the chessboard, and then you'll give me two grains of rice for the second square, and then double it to 4 and double it to 8, double it to 16 for all the squares of the chessboard the king will like. Okay, that's not a very big price to Pay.

[Podcast Host]

It's only 64 squares.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And I told you I'd give you anything. This is all you want. Well, of course, the wise man wins the game of chess, and then the king realizes when you go 2 to the power of 64, you double it 64 times. It was more grains of rice than would fit in all of India. That's right. And that's an example of a big exponential problem and how it grows. And so what we do as computer scientists is we optimize and figure out how much of that do we really need at any given time, and we cache it. So that's, I think, ties together this idea of how video games only render that which is observed.

[Podcast Host]

So tell us about caching and lazy loading as well.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I mean, do. Should we draw the analogy first to the quantum physics?

[Podcast Host]

However you want to do it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So in quantum physics, there's this thing called the observer effect, which I think everybody has heard of. And it's based on the double slit experiment where the light goes through two slits. And if it's a particle, if you have. If a particle is solid, you can really only go through one of those slits. Yeah, go through both. But if it acts as a wave, it basically, you know, spreads out with this weird interference pattern. It's like it's going through both. And what quantum physics is telling us is that it's not until it's observed or measured that the particle decides which slit it's going to go through or even which slit it just went through. Now, that's a weird kind of thing, because if it's a particle. It could only have gone through one. But quantum mechanics has a thing called superposition. And the superposition says it's in multiple

[Podcast Host]

states or in all states.

[Rizwan Virk]

In all states.

[Podcast Host]

And so it's at the same time.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's a superset of all the possible positions, if you will. That's where the term comes from.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's also used a lot in quantum computing, which we can talk about later if we have time. But it's in a state of superposition. And then when it gets observed, it gets rendered. Now, this is usually where I bring up Schrodinger's cat.

[Podcast Host]

We can, if you want to. People.

[Rizwan Virk]

People have heard it.

[Podcast Host]

People have heard it. And Schrodinger was trolling because he didn't like this. But we can use it. We can use it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Schrodinger thought it was bizarre, right? And didn't like it. And he said, look, it's ridiculous to say that a cat is in superposition, right? It's either alive or dead. We won't get in the details, right? But it's in the superposition until you open the box. Now, common sense says, no, no, no, hold on. It's either alive or dead already. We just haven't looked in the box. So we don't know if it's alive or dead. But no, that's not what quantum indeterminacy is actually saying. Right? It's saying it's in both of those states.

[Podcast Host]

That's why he was wrong, right? He was wrong.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. He ended up being wrong. And there's an aside to this. If we get around to talking about multiple timelines with Schrodinger, that we'll get.

[Podcast Host]

We have to.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, but I looked at that as a guy doing video games and a guy who's been optimizing code all my life. And I realized, oh, the rule of thumb, there is only render that which is observed. Until then, it stays as a set of information and a set of probabilities. And I thought, that's just like how we build video games. We render the part of the world that gets observed. Now, in the old Newtonian model, the world just exists. All the particles are there, and we move through it. It's kind of like King's Quest, where you can move the guy around, but all the pixels are there. But in quantum mechanics, it's like the pixels are generated in dynamically. And so that was a big. That was a big insight for me that, oh, quantum indeterminacy is so bizarre. Why would it possibly exist? And I Said, well, because it's an optimization technique.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

room over there, because there's a probability that you might go into one of these places. So you can sort of preload the algorithm.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes, it's preloading. Right, Right.

[Podcast Host]

It's like, oh, he didn't go in there. So that's fine. We have this one preloaded. So render that.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, Exactly. So you render it quickly. So it's all about performance because there are operations which are slower or more expensive and operations which are quick. And in a multiplayer game, the most expensive operation is to go from your computer to the server on the Internet. That's the slowest part of the whole process.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And then bring information back. Now, imagine there's, you know, a million players all doing this. Well, you have to kind of optimize in such a way that assets can be loaded. It was funny. A few years ago, these filmmakers called me, called me up. It's been a while since I've talked to them, and they said, hey, we're trying to develop this show for Netflix, and it's called. These guys are living a little small town, and they look up and they see this dialogue box that says sky not found, which is like an asset. What happens in video games when it can't find your asset? Yes, but. So code caching is basically a way to save what's needed. And so in this model of using the observer effect like a video game, as long as there's at least one observer, then you still have that rendering there.

[Podcast Host]

And then you also have multiple levels of what game Designers would call LODs, just in case. Right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes, Right.

[Podcast Host]

So that LOD is a level of detail. So we'll show it to you, but just. Just as much as you need to.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. Especially like we're talking about things off in the distance. Right. And then you can go in and the assets can become higher and higher resolution. Kind of like. I don't know if people remember this, but, like, when JPEGs used to load on old web browsers.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

You know, that was an expensive operation. Today we think, oh, it's no big deal. I'm going to download a whole video like on wireless. But back then it was a big deal. And so the text would load first, and then slowly it would fill in the actual images over time. And it's an optimization technique.

[Podcast Host]

And now that's called lazy loading.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And so lazy loading is a good way to think about it. And in fact, there's an underlying concept called lazy evaluation, which goes down to the code level. So it basically says, don't execute any code unless you absolutely need to.

[Podcast Host]

So what is it holding onto?

[Rizwan Virk]

So what it does is it looks for references. Oh, so it's actually a timing issue more than.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So before we're talking about optimizing the number of bits you send, we're talking about optimizing your gpu, your graphics processing unit for drawing things. But this is optimizing the cpu. And what it says is if you had like a really long equation, x equals 1 plus 2 to the power of this plus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you never use that variable X later in the program. It's not needed now maybe it's used, you know, a couple of days later the program's running and now it needs X. Okay, I'm going to go back and calculate that big long equation because that's an expensive operation. Right. And so lazy evaluations actually built into a lot of programming languages and compilers and virtual machines like Java, et cetera, which says basically only run the code that you really need to run. It's like having comments, like when you have comments in code. Again, coding is becoming a lost skill now because of AI. But the comments aren't part of the actual program. They're not really needed. So when it gets compiled, it doesn't compile the comments, it just gets rid of them. And it's just compiling the code parts now when you're running it. I remember I was back at MIT and I had a professor who was studying parallel processing at the time. I think later he became CTO of Sun, Sun Microsystems, and a bunch of other things as well. But he was like, trying to come up with a way when you have multiple processors. And like with AI today, GPUs are the constraining factor. You see video games in most technology advances like AI uses GPUs, cryptocurrency, you know, mining uses GPUs, and GPUs were developed for graphics and video games.

[Podcast Host]

Is this why most games are built on engines? Because a lot of that math has already been handled.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, because engines make it much easier to build a game. Because what would happen is in the old days, everyone had to write everything from scratch, including the physics engine.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

The loading engine, like the things we just talked about. You'd have to write. How do you take a 3D model and put the rendering or the textures, which is like putting the clothes and the skin on top of the person.

[Podcast Host]

Particle systems.

[Rizwan Virk]

Particle systems. All that stuff has been built over many years. And in the old days, every team had to write all that themselves, which would just take way too long. Right now there's Unreal and there's Unity. Unity became big partly because the mobile game industry, because it was a way of doing a game on iOS and on Android once. Right. The code. Because before that, people used to write their games directly in C or Objective C or Java for the other one. But so the whole engine makes it easier to build new worlds on top of it. And then some companies, like the Unreal, they made their engine available to other people as a product so they can build games on. I think it was the Unreal Tournament initially.

[Podcast Host]

It was.

[Rizwan Virk]

Is what it was built as. Yeah. And then it became a pretty solid engine. It's probably one of the best ones out there.

[Podcast Host]

My favorite.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh yeah, you guys use it here, right? Yep. And so where were we going with this parallel. Yeah, the parallels between quantum mechanics and the way that we write code. Because the big question is not just does this happen? Because I think, you know, quantum mechanics has been validated. Yes. This stuff happens. We don't know why it happens and we don't know how to think about it or interpret it. Now there's another. So the first, most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation, which basically says that all these probabilities exist and then the probability wave collapses down when an observation or a measurement has been made.

[Podcast Host]

Right. That's the wave function collapse.

[Rizwan Virk]

The wave function collapsed. And that to me reminded me of what I've just been talking about.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is the optimization and the lazy evaluation and the caching and the rendering and the first person point of view.

[Podcast Host]

You didn't need to know the position yet, right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, we didn't really need to know it was there. What's going on.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And you can calculate it. You can calculate what might have happened before then as well. This will get more interesting if we talk about multiple timelines. So please, I'll come. I'll come back to that. And so the other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with physicists is now they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer.

[Podcast Host]

No, they didn't.

[Rizwan Virk]

Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler.

[Podcast Host]

Mine too.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

He was a great delayed choice.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes, delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton, down the hall from Einstein, but he was Also the supervisor, PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman, was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was it the Challenger, Columbia challenger in 1986 when he took the little O rings and put them in ice water and said, look at what happens to these.

[Podcast Host]

That's right, yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper, this is an interesting story here about how quantum computers came about, but we'll come to that later. And so Wheeler was a supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions get separated and that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happened. So that became known as the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it. And Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn't like it either. And so Wheeler said, take out this stuff about there being multiple physical worlds, just stick to the math. And so Hugh Everett needed a job and he's like, okay, fine, I'm just going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. But that became the basis for a lot of great science fiction today.

[Podcast Host]

Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like. I know that they didn't really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it. Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation? Because you can still have your block universe theory just in a different universe.

[Rizwan Virk]

I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications because, you know, he had his. The universe. God does not play dice.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's true with the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like. He didn't. It wasn't that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation.

[Podcast Host]

He tried to disprove and he couldn't.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, he couldn't. And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. And then Bohr didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called the Copenhagen Interpretation because Bohr was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him

[Podcast Host]

and a bit of an ego, of course.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, that happens a lot in science.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so that's the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics.

[Podcast Host]

Where do you land?

[Rizwan Virk]

So this is what's interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer. There's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem, is it's like it goes from all these possibilities to this one, and nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic.

[Podcast Host]

It's like magic.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations. Step one, and then over here, step two, and then step three's got the answer, and his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs. That's what happens. That's what happens. Right. But if it's a video game, well, then we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists, that is, that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game. Now, the big. The big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. Probably seen the Spider man meme, where you've got like. Sure, sure, the three spider mans, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland and. Who's the third one? Toby. Toby McGuire. Yeah. They're all pointing at each other. Well, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Rizwan Virk]

That's that. That's what we're told. That's how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a science point of view is they say it's not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much. You're creating a new world, okay? Not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point, at each choice,

[Podcast Host]

which would be at the Planck scale,

[Rizwan Virk]

at the Planck scale, and maybe even

[Podcast Host]

at the Planck time, at the Planck.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which, you know, by the way, the Planck scale is another reason why I think, you know, same physics is showing us that we have pixels in the

[Podcast Host]

universe Sounds like pixels.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's the smallest measurable distance.

[Podcast Host]

And Planck time sounds like frame rate.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Per second. And so you can only do so many, and you can't really do anything in between that. Minimum time.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's what the plank time is. Is like the. The amount of time it takes speed of light to get through the plank length, basically. And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those, and it's more likely we live in a. In a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program.

[Podcast Host]

That's a lot of universes.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's a lot of universes. So. So it's not parsimonious, and you have to create all these universes.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami. He wrote. What did he write? It was the conscious universe. I forget his book, but he wrote a few. Really. He's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his talks, and, you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away, and you don't think about it till later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities in the sense that we think of them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again? If you kept doing it a bunch of times. Right. Then it's a probability.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician. I don't know if it was Pascal. It was one of these French mathematicians that began with a P. And some guy was rolling dice, he was playing dice, and he asked him, hey, can you quantify how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea. He said, if you have one die, a single dice, a die has six possibilities. He called them six possible futures. I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it's evenly weighted, we're in Vegas. So gambling analogy if it's properly weighted, is one out of six. But you can't really have a probability until you've tried something multiple times. You could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times.

[Podcast Host]

Right. And so yeah, a lot of times,

[Rizwan Virk]

a lot of times you need to get up to a certain. Right. And then it got me thinking. Well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run as many times as you wanted. You also didn't have to infinitely run every single possibility. Okay, why? Because you would basically, if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding. This is the problem with it being infinite. You could prune large parts of the tree. Like the universe has something called fine tuning, which is if a certain number of constants like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off by like 1%, the planets would fly apart.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

The galaxies wouldn't stay together. And there's like so many of these people can look them up. There's at least 12. And there's probably more than that.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

But it looks like the universe is fine tuned. And well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times and then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation. So let's just focus on this subset of possibilities.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So you tune Avogadro's number until it's just about right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Or moles constant or the speed of light.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Like this is what works, Right. Throw that stuff out.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Wow. What was that like?

[Rizwan Virk]

It was really interesting. I mean it was over the phone, but she had so many stories, you know. Oh, wow. And she's still around and, you know, she would tell me these stories and I interviewed her because the Wachowskis who made the Matrix were inspired by Philip K. Dick.

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Rizwan Virk]

In fact, she told me, I asked her, what would, you know, what would Philip think of the Matrix? And she said, well, first he would like it that's the first reaction would be, this is awesome, because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money. Probably good for using his ideas.

[Podcast Host]

I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk at Metz in 77. Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk. And there's a written version, everyone should.

[Podcast Host]

It's amazing.

[Rizwan Virk]

And there's a famous line from it where he says, we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable has changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. And so when I originally I was just interesting the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer program reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone's like, what?

[Podcast Host]

I love it. They think they're going to see a sci fi author talk and they're getting this philosophical. It's so important, that talk.

[Rizwan Virk]

It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out her name is Joan Simpson. She was his friend, she went with him to the conference and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that so speech, the rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay. So he must have added it in in his notes while he was flying over there. But if you read the rest of the speech, the next line is, we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate past. And his most famous book, while he was alive, was actually the man in the High Castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don't know, they may have seen some of you may have seen the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. I talked to his wife. She said he would have loved it, that adaptation. But in that Germany and Japan have won World War II and they end up splitting America between them and you have kind of a police state on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened where the Axis powers won the war. And now we're on a different timeline. And he said at some point all the memories came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book too, by the way was he. That's what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because there were such bleak memories in that time.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, he said he saw it. He said this happened, but. Yeah, but somewhere the variable was changed.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

Who changed it?

[Rizwan Virk]

He called it the programmer and counter programmer. And so he used this idea of orthogonal time, which he compared it to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit, you can try on the other suit. But what he also said. So Tessa encouraged me to read his speech. And I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. He also said we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate timeline. And of course, back then it was hard to do that, but now we have this thing called the Mandela Effect. And whether you believe in the Mandela Effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible histories.

[Podcast Host]

Well, let's talk about that, because people love it. Mandela effect never worked on me until there is one that got me otherwise. The Berenstain bears all that fruit loops. The. Well, you tell the story. What's the Mandela Effect?

[Rizwan Virk]

So the Mandela Effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past events or some object in the past. And it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the 80s. And of course, he didn't. In our timeline, he actually was released from prison. He became president of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and died, I think, in 2013 or something.

[Podcast Host]

They remember his funeral on TV.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, they remember details. Winnie, his wife taking over the nc. They remember all of these. And then Fiona Broom is the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Star Trek. At a Comic Con convention in Atlanta. It was called Dragon Con. And it was a Star Trek panel. And the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trekkies, they know their.

[Podcast Host]

They know their stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

They know their stuff. They know their episodes. And people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this, Mr. Spock did that, and maybe Mr. Sulu did that? They're like, no, we never shot such an episode. And multiple people in the audience remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore. And she used to find all these Different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me and I always thought it was just faulty memory. By the way, same if you asked me what it was. I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. But a friend of mine from MIT who typically a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left brained about these things. He said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen. And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it, and him talking about it, I couldn't get this out of my mind, that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines. And so I categorize these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one. Then there's things like movies is another category. The events.

[Podcast Host]

The Moonraker one is the one that got me.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh yeah. So yeah, the Moonraker one that she

[Podcast Host]

doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

It was Jaws who had the steel teeth and he meets. Was her name Dolly?

[Podcast Host]

Dolly meets Dolly.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And I remember that you remember the braces. I remember the braces too. I mean that was the whole point

[Podcast Host]

that would have got me.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. And so there's a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein Bears one. And what I like to say is if someone has proximity or significance to an event and they remember it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online, I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the Simulated Multiverse book where she was a journalism student and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela and he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated probably back in the 80s now and was working for NPR. So again she was in the news industry and she heard that Nelson Mandela had died. And now you're not going to get that wrong. If you went there to meet the guy. No, you're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Steven Vico. Which is what the standard explanation, most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. You remember that?

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Rizwan Virk]

The tank boy. Yep. And the tank went. What do you remember?

[Podcast Host]

I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's how I remember it as well. But I started asking people about this, and there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw on the news. Like they were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it's like 10 to 20% in a group. I was on a panel once at Contact in the desert. Paul Heineck and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember them being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do. Does anyone remember tank boy being run over? Nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this audience doesn't have it. This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards, and she said she lived in Beijing at the time and she remembers him being run over there. But she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, why are the Bernstein, like, why are they Jewish? Bears to their parents. Now, they're not going to get that wrong. No. The rest of us might get it wrong.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

And then there's the Bible verses. Okay. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse?

[Podcast Host]

Yes, I know the verse.

[Rizwan Virk]

So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's not the verse.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that verse.

[Podcast Host]

The lion lays with the kid, the leopard lays with the kid. The wolf lays with the wolf, with the lion, the leopard with the kid.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So that's a Mandela effect.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's a Mandela effect because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even, like, you know, people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb and say Isaiah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's not it.

[Rizwan Virk]

1:11. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture. Right. Because they remember. And I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at, you know, one that happened to translate it. But people are telling me, no, in Their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with a lamb. And the physical object has changed. So recently I met, met someone who's actually another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Fruxen. She said she went to her Catholic priest and she said, do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion? He goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up. And he looked it up and he's like, what? So you have a Catholic priest again, somebody who's closer to it. And there's another interesting scriptural element which we'll come to in a second. But the other one that really got me was the Thinker.

[Podcast Host]

The statue?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, the statue. So if you look at it today and there's a cast of it at Stanford, so I was happened to be in Silicon Valley, so I went to look at it, you know, where's his hand? Do you remember where his hand was?

[Podcast Host]

On his chin.

[Rizwan Virk]

On his chin. And was it clenched or was it kind of like this?

[Podcast Host]

I don't remember that. I thought, I thought it was kind of fisty.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, if you look at it, it's kind of like, kind of not really clenched too hard.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But there are all these people who took pictures standing next to the Thinker like this with their hand on their forehead.

[Podcast Host]

That's weird.

[Rizwan Virk]

And there are people who remember it that way, but if you look at the pictures, it's not there. And so again, I thought, okay, maybe they're pranking us. Like, what's going on? Why are these random people putting these pictures? Because usually when you take a picture next to a statue and you get the pose, you're trying to do the actual pose, and then turns out there's a picture, an actual picture of George Bernard Shaw. So G.B. shaw was a, you know, he's a well known guy in England. He also modeled for Rodin and for other people. And they were doing the London release of the Thinker and they were unveiling it in London. I forget what year, like 1900 something. 1901. Maybe it was 1910. And they took a picture of him, this one photographer, and it says the title of the picture, you can find it online, is G.B. shaw in the pose of the Thinker. And guess where his hand is. It's up on his forehead. Wow. And that picture is still there in museums and there are plenty of, you know, people can find it online. And so is, is it possible that some variables are being changed in a way? And, and so I began to think,

[Podcast Host]

well, which ones got you?

[Rizwan Virk]

So that one got me. The Thinker. Not. Not because I didn't remember it. I mean, I remembered it. I. I wasn't that close to it, so I didn't think too much about it. But seeing the physical evidence of this picture really got me. That's one that got me. I mean, there. The Jaws one was another one that I remember. I mean, Jeff, Jiffy Peanut Butter wasn't that big of a deal to me. There's a famous one about, in Star wars, the Empire Strikes Back, where, you know, your father again, I think that could be just faulty memory.

[Podcast Host]

I think so.

[Rizwan Virk]

Collective faulty memory. I mean, there's so many now that I've come across. And so Chick fil a is another one. Like, does it have a K in the Chick Fil A?

[Podcast Host]

That's right. That's right. That would probably get me. You know, I read an interesting theory about Jaws that made me feel a little better, is sometimes when you're remembering, especially if it's a long time ago, your brain fills in what would be most logical. Because that joke works better if she has braces, Right?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So that made me feel better. But that was one that blew my mind because I was like, I remember all this stuff perfectly. No, I don't.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's. There's so many of these. So I was looking around at explanations, and so we'll go down the quantum rabbit hole again in a second, please. But I began to wonder. The scripture stuff really got me too. Not because I remembered the scripture. I mean, I remembered Lion, William Lamb too, but I'm not that religious. I began to wonder if there's other scriptures that have changed. And in Islam, the Quran. Right. Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity. The Quran is memorized word for word. And you can think of the reason why. The exoteric or normal reason why is probably just because not a lot of people could read back then, but they literally recited it word for word. And there's even a designation of a guy who knows all of that. And I looked around to say, hey, has anyone claimed that this has changed at all? And there's one Sufi imam. And again, the exoteric reason is because not everybody has a physical book. The esoteric reason he gave, he said that there are beings that are allowed to go back in time and change objects, but they are not allowed to change your memory.

[Podcast Host]

I know these beings. Tell us about.

[Rizwan Virk]

These beings are called the Jinn.

[Podcast Host]

The Jinn?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yes. In. In Middle Eastern lore. And you go to the Middle East. And people take, you know, these beings very serious.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

I mean, people get possessed by these beings. There are. I mean, when I. I was born in Pakistan, you know, it was kind of like the boogeyman. Like, you know, there's a gin over there. Don't. Don't pee on that tree. Then it turns out there are actual people who, like, poured scalding. Jacques Vallee told me a story of a guy in Saudi Arabia or a kid who, like, poured scalding water and then got possessed. And supposedly there was a jinn and a priest had to come in and do kind of like an exorcism, but he had to talk the jinn out of it, saying he's just a young kid, he didn't know what he was doing. And the jinn was like, okay. And then it released him.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's so many interesting stories. That's a huge different rabbit hole to go down. But I got interested.

[Podcast Host]

It's in tune, I think, though.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it's so in tune. And I got interested in it because it became a way to think about simulation theory as if you have run this more than once. You could have changed things along the way. Now it's very easy for us to think of multiple possible futures. Like, okay, I go to New York, I go to London, I go to live in la. Those are three different possible futures. But we're not used to thinking of multiple possible paths. I mean, that sounds weird to say there could be more than one past. Well, it turns out there's something called the delayed choice experiment.

[Podcast Host]

I was hoping this was going to come back to John Wheeler.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, so we're gonna come back to John Wheeler. Actually, could we take a quick break?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, take a quick break and we'll talk about how the past is not really the past.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Be right back. Take some photons, shoot them at two slits. You get two lines. Observe it. You get an interference pattern. Got it. John Wheeler said, wait a second. What happens next?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So he came up with what's called the delayed choice double slit experiment.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

And what it's telling us is that time is not what we think it is, that the present and the past and the future are different from the way we think about it. We think of the past as being linear. We know what happened. It's just one timeline. This is what's happened along the way. The delayed choice experiment opened up an opportunity that the past past could also be in superposition. Now, the best way to understand this actually is not so much the slits, but it's what Wheeler called the cosmic delayed choice experiment.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

And he said, suppose there's something like a quasar which puts out a lot of light, and it's really far away from us, like a billion light years. So that would be outside the galaxy, beyond the Andromeda galaxy. And how long would it take for the light to reach Earth? Let's say Earth is here. It's going to take a billion years.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But suppose right in the middle, there's a big black hole or some other big gravitational object, and the light has to make a decision about whether to go to the left or to the right.

[Podcast Host]

Ah, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's kind of like two slits. Yeah. And we can have telescopes here on Earth that will measure through what's called polarization of light, whether it went this way or that way.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Okay. So the measurement happens now, but it has to go one way or the other. Like, let's say it's halfway. So how long ago would the decision have to have been made? It would have been half a billion years ago.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Rizwan Virk]

So we're back in the age of the dinosaurs now at this point. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Far before.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. Before the dinosaurs. It's kind of like saying, if you're going to go to, you know, San Francisco from New York, are you going to go up towards Chicago, or are you going to go down through Tennessee, Arkansas? You have to make that decision, like, well, before you get to San Francisco.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Now, what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that it's when the measurement of the light is done today on Earth that the decision gets made on whether the. The light went to the left or to the right of that black hole. Okay, that's weird, because now we're saying that the past isn't fixed, that the past is in superposition, and it's only when the measurement is done here. It's like an observer effect, but for time, not just for space.

[Podcast Host]

Those photons went back in time to make the decision about today's observation.

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, that's one interpretation of it.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

The other interpretation is that both of those existed as possibilities, and they didn't get fixed until today. So again, did Germany or Japan win World War II? Germany and Japan, did the Allies win World War II?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

What if that decision isn't made until somebody observes the result? And then that result is cached now so that everybody is on that timeline for some period of time? And this, to me, was an interesting revelation because it reveals that there could be a simulated multiverse of multiple timelines because what if what we're really thinking about is we ran the simulation one way and we also ran it the other way. And we are basically pulling the past in on demand. Now, you'll appreciate this because not only do we optimize resources with lazy evaluation, but we also say, you know, don't run something until it's needed. Right, Right. And so in a computer game, let's say, like farmville or Minecraft, okay, kids still play Minecraft today. They have crops that grow. And what happens is you log in and it. You see that the crops have grown since you logged in yesterday or four hours ago or whatever the case is. And now what happens during the time that you're not logged in? And the answer is nothing.

[Podcast Host]

Nothing.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because it would take too many resources to sit there and calculate every single growth of every single blade of grass or of wheat for that time. So what the computer does is it's when you log in, it basically renders what might have happened over the last X period of time.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Let's say 24 hours. And it uses a database of probabilities.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

What's the probability that your crops were destroyed by locusts? What's the probability that your neighbor came in and stole some of your crops? Or that the fox got in and ruined a few crops? And you see it as, this is what's happened now. My crops are all grown. I can now sell my crops. But what just happened there was that the past was generated on demand. So it's not so much that you're changing the past, because physicists don't like that. Physicists don't like. When you say retrocausation, it's that you are filling in the past based upon the observations as it's made. And there could have been multiple possible versions of that.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I like this.

[Rizwan Virk]

So that's a different way to think about time. Now, is it possible that some of us are remembering one version of the Mandela effect? And, you know, we talked about ones that got you, like the Jaws one. You know, there's another one. There's a. There's a famous one about Sinbad being in a movie.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Shazam. And it turns out it was Shaq and Kazam.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But so many people, you know, would swear they had a VHS tape and the story was like this. And the kids are asking the genie about his dad that Sinbad actually recorded in, like, 2017, a little clip from this movie that never existed as kind of a joke to say, okay, here's. Here's the scene. You guys all you saw but never existed.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Rizwan Virk]

But people remembered it, you know, so many different versions and Mandela effects. Gino has one for you that I can't reveal to you. He's going to tell you later. Okay, but is it possible that we are all remembering a different version? Now? I thought, okay, that's the delayed choice experiment. Wheeler proposed it as a thought experiment. He couldn't do it at the time. It required, like, pretty complex setup. And so, you know, is it just a thought experiment? Well, it turns out no. People have actually run this experiment.

[Podcast Host]

They have.

[Rizwan Virk]

Now, obviously, they haven't run it for, like, the cosmic version, but what they've done is they've gone through two slits, and they've sent a particle up to a satellite a thousand miles away. And so the question is, when they measure the particle or, say, the light, using our example from the satellite, it was a thousand kilometers from the slits themselves. And the question is, is the decision made about which lit to go through, like here, like, when it first starts out in the slits, or is it made after the light travels a thousand miles? And a thousand miles is not that far in the scope of things. But when you're talking about, you know, nanoseconds, it takes a lot of nano.

[Podcast Host]

You can measure it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, you can measure it. And it's very measurable by today's instruments, is the point. And they did this experiment, and they found, in fact, that it was in superposition until it was measured by the satellite. Okay. So then I said, well, how come more physicists don't talk about this? And so I went back and I found an obscure speech by our favorite quantum founder, Schrodinger. Okay, this was an obscure speech he made in the 1940s. I think it was a Caltech. And nobody talks about this. For some reason, people talk about the multiverse, which was, you know, late 50s, early 60s. People talk about the Copenhagen interpretation. He said that, in effect, once the observation was made, we would not just be deciding the state, the superposition, but we would be choosing from one of several simultaneous. One of multiple simultaneous histories. So, literally, Schrodinger is telling us there are multiple simultaneous histories. And it's like when you choose look at the cat, you're not just choosing whether it's dead or alive. Sorry for bringing the cat back.

[Podcast Host]

That's okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

But what did the cat do before it jumped in the box? Did it come from the living room or did it come from the dining room? Before that? Was it in the Backyard or was it in the front yard? It's like you're choosing this history and that is the one that is now being part of our simulation, is what I would say.

[Podcast Host]

I've got to read that speech.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, it's very obscure and I have a reference to it in the simulated multiverse, but I've never heard anyone else talk about it. I found it when I was looking around online for the earliest references to the multiverse. And again, we think of the multiverse as branching out this way. There's a series on Apple TV called Dark Matter.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know if you've seen it. I did.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's based on a book by Blake Crouch. And when I was researching the multiverse, I had read that book along with many others. Basically, this guy has multiple versions of his life and what happens is he gets kidnapped by somebody and he gets taken away and he wakes up in a whole other university than he was working at. And he finds out who it was that kidnapped him. It was himself from another version of the multiverse who had made different choices. And that guy, although he was almost like a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he didn't have a family and kids. And so that guy is taking over his family. I won't tell the rest of the book, but that's pretty much described. Even if you just look at the series, you'll know that's what it's about. So the multiverse, I think, brings up this idea that we could run multiple processes and maybe they're running to try to see what the outcomes are and maybe the outcomes that are less than ideal. Just like I talked about with pruning, maybe we prune. We, meaning whoever runs the simulation runs these different things. Because you never run a simulation just once do, you know, simulation of the weather, simulation of virus, simulation of, you know, financial, or whether an asteroid is going to. To hit us. There's something called the three body problem that it's when we have three bodies that are kind of circling each other, the question is, will they stay in a stable orbit or will one day one of them fly off? And it turns out we don't know the answer to that.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Because there's no shortcut. You have to just keep running it to see. And there's a term that came from a computer, a physicist turned computer scientist named Steven Wolfram called computational irreducibility.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And Wolfram was pioneer in many things. He wrote the Mathematica software. But he also was a pioneer in cellular automata, which for those who don't know. They're like simple rule sets.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's like you could have one row of squares and the squares would light up or not, depending on if the next square is lit up or not, and it'll go dark following these rules. So these are very simple rules, a very deterministic version of reality. And then there's what's called the game of life.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which is a two dimensional grid. And if you watch it nowadays, you know, we run it on computers. But when the guy Conway came up with it, he literally had a grid sitting at the University of Cambridge and his mathematical students would like erase squares and fill in squares. But what would happen is you get these very complex arrangements. Every now and then you'd get a stable arrangement, which means, you know it's going to stay this way or it flips back and forth. But they have what they call complex or chaotic results or processes. And those you don't know what's going to happen. This is the kind of the basis of complexity theory.

[Podcast Host]

And the game of life is just quickly, the rules are, the rules are

[Rizwan Virk]

too close to if you're. If the next square is lit up and the one next to it is lit up, then you light up. And if the one be the one on top of it. I'm making up these rules. But these are the types of rules.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

And the one below it is lit up and you go dark.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so at each step, every square follows these rules. So it's a very simple computer program. Now, for complex and chaotic processes, you would think we could predict what's going to happen, but it depends on the initial conditions. And this is what led to the whole science of chaos theory.

[Podcast Host]

Sure. And Lorenz and all of that.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, Lorenz. And also people remember Jurassic park with Ian Malcolm, who's a Kian.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

The point was with the butterfly effect, where, you know, they say the butterfly flaps its wings in, let's say Hong Kong and the stock market crashes in London. There's a whole chain of events that has to happen along the way. And so what computational irreducibility means is you don't know what's going to happen at step one million until step nine, nine nine nine nine nine nine nine. And then you don't know what's going to happen at that step until you go to 998 and to 997 and all the way back. So you have to run the computer program. And so even for a deterministic process that has no free Will, you don't know what's going to happen for chaotic and complex processes. And I believe our simulation would qualify as a complex or chaotic process. And so Philip K. Dick believed that the timelines were altered. And I asked his wife, well, did he tell you any other examples of this? And she said, yeah. She goes, they told him. And I said, well, what do you mean they? You know, did you see them? She goes, I looked like he was talking to somebody, but it looked like a little blur to me or something.

[Podcast Host]

Like the they that runs the simulator.

[Rizwan Virk]

That runs the simulator. People outside. Did they look like gray aliens? Did they look like. She's like. I couldn't really tell, you know, because only Phil could see them, but she could tell there was something weird that he was talking to, like an entity. And she said, they told him that they prevented the assassination of JFK in Dallas, but then he was assassinated in Orlando. Wow. And then they prevented it in Orlando, and then he was assassinated somewhere else. And every time they changed it, it resulted in a worse outcome, like a nuclear war.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Just ended up dying somewhere else.

[Podcast Host]

So he had to be assassinated.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. It's kind of like if you've ever read that book by Stephen King or, you know, the, the. The miniseries 1122 63, where that goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination, I won't give it away, but you have to read it to see, like, how the past doesn't necessarily want to be changed. But for me, that's like. It's very similar to what we would do if we were running a simulation. We would run it and we'd get to a point and say, okay, that's. That's enough on this time. Now let's run the next one. Now let's run the next one. And so it provides. Simulation theory provides a bridge between the Copenhagen interpretation, the collapse of the probability wave, because there's an observer who's playing the game, and the multiverse idea, because it doesn't require an infinite multiverse. So it's like people often ask me, what's the purpose of the simulation?

[Podcast Host]

Well, sure. Who's running it and why?

[Rizwan Virk]

Who's running it and why? And in the new edition of the simulation hypothesis I have, there's about 100 new pages for those who read the old version.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's a pretty big update because all the AI stuff.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

Happened. All the brain computer interfaces to the technology side. And then I went deeper on the religion, but there's about 20 pages of FAQs which are the most commonly asked questions over since the 20th anniversary. I ended up writing this on the 25th anniversary of the Matrix. And one of those questions were, what's the purpose of the simulation? Who's running the simulation? And I say, look, let me ask you a couple of questions back. One, why do we run simulations? And two, why do we play video games? And I believe the answer to those two questions gives us an answer for why we might be in a video game? In a video game type simulation, a personal purpose and a bigger societal purpose. And the reason we run simulations is to see what is the likely outcome under this set of variables. And then we would change the variables. And we also want to know what is the most favorable outcome, right? We're like, hey, if we do this to the asteroid, what will happen? Will it miss Earth or will it hit the moon? And that's just as bad, right, as it hitting Earth, because if the Moon gets really smashed, then, you know, we'll be screwed, or whatever the simulation is. So it's to find the most likely outcome, the most favorable, and maybe to avoid the least favorable outcome. And you had to do that. You have to run it multiple times. But at the personal level, why do we play video games?

[Podcast Host]

Entertainment.

[Rizwan Virk]

Entertainment. We want to have fun, so we want to experience certain things. Like, I can't as much as, you know, I used to read Lord of the Rings, you know, when I was a teenager still now I just watch the movies, but I used to read it every so often. And I can't jump on a dragon and shoot, you know, arrows at orcs in this particular reality. But I can do it inside a virtual world. And it's a safe, A safe, quote, unquote way to do it. And to have bad experiences, too. Like, I don't believe the purpose of the simulation is Grand Theft Auto. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Probably not.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So, so anyway, that, that ties to, to, to, you know, some of these, these bigger questions around, why would there be a simulated universe in the first place? And why would there be a multiverse?

[Podcast Host]

But that's projecting our sense of morality and intent onto some greater consciousness. So what do you, what do you think their end game is? Are they looking out for us? Because there's a lot of suffering.

[Rizwan Virk]

There's a lot of suffering in this world. And I often say, people say to me, well, I can't be in a simulation because if I was, I would be a billionaire and I would be an actor.

[Podcast Host]

My kid wouldn't have got cancer.

[Rizwan Virk]

My kid wouldn't have got Cancer, holocaust, all these things. But it depends on the nature of the game and what we're trying to experience. When we run a simulation, the better they get. We're going to run very bad scenarios through the simulation. What happens if the virus spreads to everybody? Right, right. And we want it to be as realistic as possible eventually. Now this gets back to the NPC versus RPG versions. Yes. Which, which we started talking about. And I think it ties to this bigger question, because in an NPC version, of course they're going to have suffering on us, because that's why you build simulations and that's why you run NPCs. Like, like that doesn't imply that we couldn't be in a simulation just because there's. Now, in the RPG version, it gets even more interesting, in my opinion, because there people are choosing roles that might have bad experiences, bad quote, unquote, or suffering, if you will. Now, you know, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons.

[Podcast Host]

Same.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right. Back before. Now it's popular again because of Stranger Things.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

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

[Podcast Host]

also choose the morality, whether evil, good, chaotic evil, all that stuff.

[Rizwan Virk]

That's right. Yeah. There's all of this stuff that you're choosing. And some of those roles are not good roles. No, but that to me gets back to this idea whether you can treat the simulation theory in one of two ways. And again, it's an axis, just like NPC and RPG is an axis, because you can have both NPCs and RPGs in the same game. It doesn't have to be 100% of one or 100% of the other. In fact, most games have both. And I'm assuming the audience might be familiar with that term, but if they're not, NPC stands for non player character or non Playable character. And it actually comes from Dungeons and Dragons.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

The tabletop game. Because you had to interact with a bartender at the inn, you had to interact with the guy at the armory who's selling you the plus five crossbow or one of these other items. And there's going to be enemies there that you have to fight as well.

[Podcast Host]

Which are we, we're the NPCs or we the RPGs?

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, that's. That's an interesting question. And I like to say that we're. We may be both, because there's something in between. Okay. Which is that we choose roles and we are playing the roles, but we also go into NPC mode for other people in that we are playing certain role. Like there are people who may have had a role in your life. That's a relatively small role or a major role. And one woman came to me once and said, I think my husband is an npc. Oh, no. I said, that's not a healthy way to think about. No, in fact, it's better to think about everyone as a source player with their own storyline, their own difficulties and their own quests. But they're going to play roles for us, which could be they're going into NPC mode because that is a role that we have agreed to, kind of like in a film. Now, I like to say that the other way to think about the simulation hypothesis is a metaphor for reality. So one way is it's literally code running on a machine. And if we really get into it, I think it's closer to a quantum computing device than a regular digital computing device. But the other way is to say the video game is a metaphor for this idea that we are coming into this fake or hoaxed reality and that we are playing a role, and we have agreed to forget that we're playing that role.

[Podcast Host]

So there's a consciousness out there that we're not even aware of that's driving this reality.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah. So it could be that we're a player and we. So aj, Riz, Dino, Joe, all these guys, we are the avatars of our consciousness which is sitting outside of the simulation and playing the game. Now, in the Matrix, you know, Neo, Morpheus and Trinity existed outside of the Matrix. And of course they look the same, because if you're going to hire Keanu Reeves in a movie, you want them to be the same character. But in game, when you choose your avatar, you don't have to look like that. It doesn't have to be. You would choose the role that the character has. And Outside, you could be something else entirely.

[Podcast Host]

This feels like reincarnation a little bit.

[Rizwan Virk]

It does.

[Podcast Host]

You respawn.

[Rizwan Virk]

You respawn as a new character. But you may have some of the skills that you learned.

[Podcast Host]

There's evidence of that.

[Rizwan Virk]

I'm playing, right? There's like the work of Ian Stevenson, in particular with the children who have marks where they claim they were killed, for sure. There's people who remember languages.

[Podcast Host]

Xena Glossy Life Between Lives by Michael Newton talks about it.

[Rizwan Virk]

So I spent a lot of time looking at life between lives and when he talks about the in between time. So what he did was he hypnotized people. And also Dolores Cannon did the same thing. I was about to say Dolores Claymore. I mentioned Stephen King earlier. That's probably why. But there's a period just before you go into the life, which. First, there's life selection. And they lay out. Here's the possible trajectories that you might take in your life, and here's the major decision points you might make. Now, you're still free to choose to go this way. You go live in California or you live there. But if you go there, how are you going to meet this other character player who's going to be your wife or your husband? But there's different challenges. And these are the quests or challenges that you're going to deal with in this life.

[Podcast Host]

That's very interesting.

[Rizwan Virk]

So if you think of games and how they work today you have difficulty levels of quests. We have like a quest tree, typically, where you start off with simple quests and then you unlock the more difficult quests.

[Podcast Host]

That's very interesting because Michael Newton talks about, and many researchers about soul groups that always sort of reincarnate together. And that makes me think it's just a bunch of nerds around a table saying, all right, play again. Reset the table. I'm gonna do this, you do that, and we'll start rolling dice.

[Rizwan Virk]

Exactly. Or like, hey, we're all gonna meet on Tuesday at this castle to have a raid. Right. And Michael Newton even talks about these little clues that you're gonna. I mean, I call them clues. I forget what he called them exactly. But they were like signs that, oh, when you meet this person, you're gonna recognize them because she's gonna be on a red bike or she's going to have an earring. And you just can't stop looking away from that earring. Right. Have you ever had that experience?

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Rizwan Virk]

Deja vu or, you know, where does it come from? Is it because we made an agreement to meet that person at this point in time. Now, that helps us to reframe the idea of suffering as well, because another metaphor that was used by spiritual. In spiritual traditions. So in the Hindu traditions, they talk about the Leela, the grand play of the gods, and Maya, which is an illusion. The world is an illusion, right? It's a hoax. And the Buddha talks about the world is a dream. I mean, Buddha literally means wake up, woken up, like I have awoken, like a woman said, what are you? And he said, I am both. And what did that mean? It meant he was awake, which meant the rest of us were asleep and dreaming. And, you know, Shakespeare had his metaphor of the world's a stage, right? So Swami Yogananda, who was one of the first Hindu swamis to come and live in the US he wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, which was passed around during the hippie generation. And it was Steve Jobs favorite book. So much so that at the end, after his death, at his memorial service at Stanford, everyone got a little brown box and they opened it up and there was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi in there. So it really introduced a lot of Westerners to these Eastern ideas. Now, Yogananda had a challenge. It was 1920s, this Brown guy with long hair, he's here, and he's trying to teach about yoga and karma and Maya. And he needed to translate it into newer technological metaphors. So he used the metaphor of the video game. Sorry, the film projector, because that was new technology, right? So right back in 1920, films were relatively new to the audience, to the world. And he said that we are like actors in this film, and there is suffering happening to those characters, but the actors aren't dying, but they choose the role with suffering. But there's a part of us that's outside, and you have to look away from the screen to see the light. It's just a projection of all of that onto the screen. And so he would use that metaphor. And I believe if he were alive today and actually wrote a book called Wisdom of a Yogi about his teachings, they asked me to write it. Harper Collins India emailed me one day and said, will you write this book about Yogananda? Why do you want me to write the book about Yogananda? For Indians. Like, young Indians, professionals.

[Podcast Host]

A Pakistani American with an Islamic background

[Rizwan Virk]

who grew up in Michigan, from Michigan. I was like, are you serious? They're like, yeah, we want you to write it. Like, why is that? They said, because, you know, and I do reference you know, Yogananda, I reference other mystics, like in the subtitle, there's quantum physics and Eastern mystics. But they said, because, you know, you use these technology analogies that younger people, meaning like young professionals will understand. And I thought about it and I thought if Yogananda were alive today, he would say, we're like in a film, but we're the actors and we're the characters. We all have our scripts and these roles we're supposed to play, but we can change those scripts. We have free will. We're also the audience that's sitting there watching us. Or you could say like a game where you're sitting on tables deciding what to do. And what does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role playing game.

[Podcast Host]

It does, yeah. Speaking of Yogananda, can you tell us about the experience you had in Encinitas?

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh, yeah. So I was asked to write this book and I said, okay, I'll write this book. And I started writing it. And this was during COVID and I was hitting a little bit of a writer's block because, you know, it's like this big responsibility. You're writing about this well known and loved spiritual figure. And you know, I just. For those who haven't read Autobiography of Yoga, it's chock full of stories of like saints that are like levitating in the air, bilocation, you know, this guy's over here sitting and meditating and somebody sees them in the park. You've got like, you know, the perfume saint who can make any perfume odor appear on his hand. You've got this mysterious guy in the mountains who supposedly has been living there for 800 years. You've got this fat 300 pound swami that was 180 years old when he died, supposedly who's really well known. So you got all these stories, and I kind of like these stories. You've got a guy with a jinn who's controlling what I confirm what I think is a jinn. He's a Muslim fakir who's controlling an invisible entity that's making this cup appear and disappear. And so I was like, this is all great, but I gotta be serious and write some serious lessons. And I wanted to go visit the place where Yogananda wrote Autobiography of Yogi and that was in Encinitas. He has a hermitage there and he actually had some. You read Autobiography of Yogi and you think, wow, man, everything goes well for this guy. He just says, divine mother, give me this. And it all happens. And if you read about his life, you realize he had many, many challenges. And at one point, his entire. His entire organization fell apart. And he's like, oh, man, I just want to go to India and meditate in a cave. The message he got was, no, you need to stay in the West. You're here in America for a reason. And so then he decided to go to Encinitas and write this book. For about 10. 10 years or so it took him to write the book. And so I wanted to go to the hermitage, which is beautiful if anyone's ever been there. It's, like, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There's a beach he used to walk. Now it's literally called Swami's Beach. That's the formal name for it. And so I wanted to go there and check it out, but it was during COVID and it was, you know, closed to the public. And so, through another series of coincidences, I got to meet some of the people at srf, told them I was writing this book, and they said, okay, for you, we'll open it up. And so, literally, I went down there, and they had, you know, some of the monks or monastics who live there, gave me a little private tour. We sat around and talked. And I got to go to Yogananda's office where he wrote the book.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

Just by myself. And they're like, here, just relax. Do whatever you want. And I decided to meditate. And I'm like, okay, I need a. This is inspiring me. And it was. And then suddenly, I got a vision of Yogananda. Now, again, it's one of these visions where you're kind of present and you still. You're still sensing this vision.

[Podcast Host]

This is like the man by the tree.

[Rizwan Virk]

No, it sort of lives similar to that, but this is a vision of Yogananda. Wow. Similar. And he's sitting there with a stack of papers, which is how they wrote books back then, you know, it was typed out. And he's kind of looking at me, but with this mischievous grin. And, you know, I always thought of him as a very serious kind of guy. But if you talk, you know, you read some of his other people wrote about him. He was very mischievous. He would play practical jokes on his students and stuff. And he's like kind of glint in his eye. And I was like, yeah, wow, that's. That's him writing yogi. I'm having a vision of it here. And he kind of smiled at me, and he took those papers, and he opened the French doors or whatever that go out to the ocean. And he tossed them all out there and they flew everywhere. And I was like, stop. What are you doing? Like, back then, once you lost the papers, that's it, you don't have to go rewrite the book. And he smiled and he laughed and I was like, okay, what is he trying to tell me? He goes, watch the papers. And each of the papers turned into these little white doves and they floated off to carried his words to different parts of the world. And somehow that totally got me out of my writer's block because he was also saying, have fun with it, don't treat it so seriously. And it's our words that we leave behind, but say what you want to say and just have fun. And so I just started writing about all these yogis with these superpowers and the book just flowed from there. And it went on and it did quite well in India as well.

[Podcast Host]

Let's say everything that you've talked about is right and we really are in a simulation. What does that mean for us regarding free will? Does anything matter?

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, well, sometimes people say, if I'm in a simulation, nothing matters. And I'm say, well, that depends on the nature of the simulation. If we are here to learn lessons and have certain quests and achievements, then if you don't make the quest, what do you do? You're going to have to do it again.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's not like you just give up and then you may have more difficult quests afterwards. And so when we have difficult situations in our lives, whether it's financial health related, relationship related, war suffering, we can view it as a more difficult quest that is part of our storyline and perhaps we can give meaning to these problems to say, okay, this is a terrible thing that's happened, but if I view it as a higher difficulty quest, and in fact, maybe the people whose lives are easy are the early players and the ones who are having the more difficult lives, maybe they're the advanced players. I believe that along with, I mean, you've probably heard of the telepathy tapes, of course, with Dr. Diane Hennessy. And, you know, she was working with these autistic kids who were telepathic. So she called me up a few years before the telepathy tapes came out, and she said, oh, you know, this is my work. I've been working with these autistic savants children and, you know, like Rain man type, where they can, you know, calculate these numbers. And she goes, I don't think they're calculating. I think they're looking it up in a database. And I think this is an information based reality. And so one of the best explanations she could come up with at the time was that this is some kind of a simulation. And so she actually sponsored a conference on autistic savants and simulation theory. And now these autistic kids are showing us abilities that the rest of us don't have. But maybe we view them as having a physical handicap because they're non verbal one, meaning most of them can't speak, but they can point to things. They also don't have fine motor controls. Right. They have gross. They can move their arm, they can put their finger here. But many of them, you know, don't have the fine motor controls to be able to write, like by hand. Of course, today you don't have to as much but. And so I began to think about that in this context and realized, well, what if the rest of us are in the full body suit of the video game or like Ready Player one and we have the headset on and all we see is this first person perspective. But because like with a go with a glove, I've got like full control. I can, you know, do every little thing that I want. But if I was half in or half out or if I was sitting there with a mouse, okay, I can move my character around, I could point at things, but it's going to be really hard.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But I can see stuff from a third person point of view that you can't see.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Rizwan Virk]

I can put the virtual camera over here. I can message my friends. I can use, you know, private messaging. And then one of the autistic children, her name is Lidu, she's been at some of these conferences with her mother Dalia, who's also demonstrating a lot of amazing capabilities like mindsight and stuff. But Dalia came up to me and she said, leetu wants to tell you something. Oh, well, what does Leetoo want to tell me? She goes, when she's communicating with her friends, it's like they're in a video game is what she said. And they can help her and she can see what they're doing and she can help them. Wow. So it's like they're all in a video game together. And so for me, this was a different way to think about many of these things.

[Podcast Host]

Like they're closer to the source code than we are.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, they're closer to the source code and they have control of the virtual camera.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

Which they're not locked in. And there's Some disadvantages to that, but they're actually perhaps the more advanced players who are trying to get the rest of us to wake up that there's more to this reality than we know.

[Podcast Host]

That's right. I can get behind that last thing for you. What questions or answers do you need to be sure this is a simulation or be sure it's not? What are those things?

[Rizwan Virk]

Well, it's a good question and again, I think it depends on where you are on this access. So I mentioned the access from the NPC to RPG version. That's one access that's important. The other axis is do you view this as a literal computer simulation or do you view it as a metaphor for something very advanced? And I like to say that it's really four propositions that I'm proposing or asserting in these set of books. The first is that the world consists of information and not physical matter. Now I met just last year or the year before in fact, when I was writing the second edition. I spent a semester over at the University of Cambridge in one of their AI groups. In fact, the guy that I work with, Henry Shevlin, was just, he was just hired as a philosopher for Google DeepMind and the story went viral that Google DeepMind is looking at consciousness by hiring a philosopher that specializes.

[Podcast Host]

Very interesting in that.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's really interesting. But while I was there I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist from the 70s and I was telling him these propositions.

[Podcast Host]

You can't name him.

[Rizwan Virk]

Oh yeah, Brian Josephson.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, okay.

[Rizwan Virk]

He's actually fairly well known. Something to do with quantum telling. I forget what he won the Nobel Prize for back then. But he's also very into different models of consciousness. He also says that, you know, his colleagues didn't want to talk about this stuff and he had a lot of stigma from his colleagues just, just for investigating it. But when I told him that first proposition, he goes, you know what, that's not controversial anymore. The that the world consists of information.

[Podcast Host]

It's not.

[Rizwan Virk]

Thirty years ago physicists would have said, yeah, that's controversial because there's a whole branch of digital physics. There's a mount. Instead of just talking about conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, we're talking about conservation of information. Like does information get lost? Does it get destroyed? So I mean, sure, some people might disagree, but for the most part the idea that, that we live in an information based reality. Now, John Wheeler, his other favorite phrase was it from Bit.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

And that's why, that's when he became my favorite physicist from the 20th century. And what he was saying was he was looking for this thing called a particle. And we think of a particle as hard, right? It's a physical object, but he couldn't find it. It's like those Russian dolls, you know, I think they're called the matryoshka dolls.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Or the babushka dolls. If they're male or female. There's different versions. But he kept opening up this thing and looking for this thing at the bottom, and it was just empty at the bottom level. And so he said what he. The conclusion he came to at the end of his life was that the only thing that distinguishes one particle from another is an answer to a series of yes, no questions. And what is that? That's a bit. I mean, the basis of information theory is a one or a zero.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Rizwan Virk]

And so he came up with this phrase that said anything that's physical, like this coffee cup or mug, actually consists of bits of information. And so I think that's a perspective that's gaining traction, let's put it that way. You can argue with it. But, you know, I think it's not, you know, that. That hard. But then that information is getting computed over time. We see evidence of algorithms in nature for it. The second proposition is kind of obvious but really hard to prove, and it is that the world seems physical, so it gets rendered for us. The bits are rendered in a way that looks real and feels real. Right. When we think we're touching the wall, we're not really touching the wall. Like, there's, like, electrical signals. Like the basis of the universe is electromagnetic.

[Podcast Host]

Right. It's Mostly empty.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's 99.9% empty space. You got on the molecules, it's 99.9% empty. You look at the atoms, it's 99.9 percent empty space. You look at, you know, you go down to subatomic particles, and in the end, what you have is a set of information. And that is just like a video game.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

Now there I'm making argument by analogy. That's not necessarily a formal argument, but it's an informal one, just like the Copenhagen interpretation. Nobody knows how the Copenhagen interpretation works. Nobody knows how the collapse works. And I'm saying that basically like a video game, there's no castle there. There's no dragon. Those are just bits of information coming to your machine, and they're rendering it for you. The third gets into the metaphysical side, you know, which is that this universe is a big hoax, a purposeful hoax.

[Podcast Host]

Maya.

[Rizwan Virk]

Like, Maya, an illusion. So this is what gets into the religious and the Maya. I was reading about Roger Ebert, you know, the film credit.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Rizwan Virk]

So he died not that long ago, unfortunately, from throat cancer. But his wife was with him when he died naturally, and she talked about his death, and she said the last thing he said just before he died was, oh, my God, it's all a big hoax.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Rizwan Virk]

She said that meant that the physical universe that we think is real is all a big hoax. And other people that get close to that boundary, you start to hear similar things. You do talk to people so that the physical world is not just information. It's like a big hoax. Maya means illusion, but it also means kind of an illusion that you agree to walk into and to fool yourself. Right. We're here in Vegas. There's, like, the magic shows with, I don't know who the latest. David Copperfield, Criss angel, whoever the latest musician is. You go to a. And that's the best analogy I've heard from Maya. They said, you go to a magic show, and, you know, that guy's not really sawing the woman in half. But that's what makes it exciting, is it's like magic, right? You don't know how it's done, but it's an illusion. It's a sleight of hand, you know. And the Buddha, you know, eventually came to this conclusion, you know, where he talked about, everything is like a reflection in a very clear mirror devoid of. Of inherent existence. So you can buy that or not buy that proposition, but certainly the spiritual traditions buy that. And then the fourth one, which is similar, is that you agreed to be here and play a character, which is the video game proposition, you know, pure materialists don't like that at all because they'll say, well, there's nothing beyond this physical world anyway.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Rizwan Virk]

But to me, if you take all of those together, that encompasses why I wrote this book was so that I can talk to physicists at MIT about. Now, they may not agree with that. It's a simulation or a computer simulation, but they're willing to talk to me about these ideas. I can't go in there and say, I want to talk to you about, you know, guys leaving their body floating around and seeing apparitions and haunted tours or UFOs. Right. They're just like, ah, we're just going to dismiss this out of hand, but they're willing to talk about the world being a simulated reality, or. And if it is, well, then maybe they're entities that exist outside of our visibility, that exist outside of the simulation that would seem supernatural to us.

[Podcast Host]

Like UFOs, like UFOs or angels, you know, angels. Could UFOs that we are seeing be part of the simulation somehow?

[Rizwan Virk]

I think so. So there's two different ways. So one way is even if they're extraterrestrial, which I think many, many of those of us who have studied it realize that there's much more going on in order to explain the data. Like, if you want to really be scientific about it, you want your observations and data to match your explanation. Yes. But on the one hand, when you have a multiplayer game, you're not just going to have one planet, you're probably going to have multiple planets. So in fact, part of the purpose of the simulation could be, do you get off the planet, do you destroy yourself, what's called a great filter? Or when maybe we're all trying to get to the point where these civilizations meet. But then it gets weirder. And on your show, I'm sure you've covered some of these weird phenomena. But when I met with Jacques Vallee, he started telling me about these cases where, like, one person would see the UFO and the other person wouldn't all the time. I began to think about that and I thought, huh, that's interesting. And he said there was another case where this UFO came down at a 45 degree angle and it landed in a clearing and supposedly it left some mark. So everybody went, MUFON went, and they're looking at the clearing. And he said, well, wait a minute. If it came down at a 45 degree angle and this was in like Pacific Northwest where they had these big trees, it would have had to have cut through the trees. But the trees aren't cut. I mean, they're still there. They said, yeah, I did. It went right through the trees. But we don't want to say that because we sound crazy. Right. So they're censoring their observations. I thought about that too. And then you see these observations where these things move around, like from here to here. It's almost like they're projected into our reality like a light or a holographic projection. And so when you rez inside a game or, you know, you're resin, you can kind of move through walls because everything's not fully rendered yet, but once it's rendered, they're physical. And so is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us in that we are a technological civilization, aliens make at least some sense to us? Right. More than the gin, like the nuts and bolts aspect. So in this paper that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show about stigma and academia, the stigma is getting less because of the government and the New York Times article. It's still there, but it's getting less. But only for part of the UFO phenomenon. And that is the nuts and bolts part of the.

[Podcast Host]

The phenomena, not the consciousness.

[Rizwan Virk]

Not the consciousness. Not even the alien abduction. No, because that would require acknowledging beings and beings that are more powerful than us. And it gets into all of that and, you know, there's this kind of boundary there, but we can. At least we can accept that, okay, maybe there could be aliens because we know now there are other planets around other solar systems, and so maybe they're presenting themselves to us as. As aliens, because that is a technology that would make sense to us at this point in time. Whereas in the 50s, all these contactees are like, they told us they're from Venus. Right, Right. Okay, we know they're probably not from Venus. Okay. Assuming they exist. First of all, we know they're probably not from Venus. They're probably not from Mars. But that was what they told them. Why they were lying to them. Why? Because they could wrap their minds around it. Imagine if you had said, we're from Zeta Reticuli a thousand years ago. I would be like, what are you talking about?

[Podcast Host]

Couldn't understand it.

[Rizwan Virk]

They couldn't understand it. And angels, they could understand.

[Podcast Host]

Yes. For thousands of years. They could.

[Rizwan Virk]

Jinn. They could understand.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they could.

[Rizwan Virk]

The Fae, they could understand. And is it possible that. So there's what's called the avatar theory of UFOs or the avatar Hypothesis. There's two different versions of it. Gary Nolan talks about one version. I talk about the other version.

[Podcast Host]

This is a good time to say that you're on the board of the Galileo Project with avi.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I'm on the advisory board, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And. And you work with Gary Nolan.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, I work with the Soul Foundation. I wrote a white paper on venture capital investment in ufo. So I'm deep in the topic.

[Podcast Host]

So you're in the topic, in fact,

[Rizwan Virk]

in the academic world, because I went back to get my Ph.D. after, you know, I have about 15 years between my bachelor's and my master's and another 15 years between that and the Ph.D. and they're like, you know, I don't. Wouldn't talk about this UFO stuff too much if I were you. I'm like, I already wrote a book saying the world isn't even real.

[Podcast Host]

You're fine, you know, UFOs, you know,

[Rizwan Virk]

not even that weird. To me at least the alien explanation is not that weird. The other stuff may be, but. So one of the Avatar interpretation, I think is Gary talked about it and had to do with the film Avatar. In the film, he was controlling his avatar, the alien, but he was controlling it. And so are these beings controlling the ships and even the beings that we see remotely? My interpretation of the Avatar of Hutz is an avatar inside a video game. Is your character in. In the game, and you can change that character's characteristics if you want, but you are projecting into a physical real, into a virtual reality from outside. So it's not just from another planet or it's being projected into. And supposedly, you know, people have been seeing these. These different beings for thousands of years. Like the jinn aren't. Is it. They were just presented themselves a certain way because that would make sense to the people at the time. Today, Aliens is an interpretation that would make sense to us. And so that is it. Like in a video game, you render the avatar and in some games you can change your avatar.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Rizwan Virk]

Is it possible that they have unlocked that feature where they can change how it appears to us?

[Podcast Host]

Or could you take DMT and see kind of behind the curtain a little bit?

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, yeah. And people who've taken DMT start to talk about things like a waiting room. Right. Or they talk about different types of beings. Like the different. I'm not a DMT person.

[Podcast Host]

The machine elves or machine elves.

[Rizwan Virk]

You've got like the Insectoids.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Rizwan Virk]

You've got like all these different versions of beings that are there, you know, and there's the work of Danny Goler, who was the guy who projected the laser on the wall at jmt and he saw the code, what looked like code, kind of like matrix code, but he said it's not exactly that. And other people took it and many other people can see it as well. I started hearing about this right after I wrote the first edition of the book in 2019. People are like, oh, yeah, I've seen the grid lines of the simulation on dmt. And so it's very interesting to me how that kind of lines up, because perhaps it's suppressing whatever mechanisms we have in our brain to be able to perceive this other reality. So, yeah, so there's. There's a lot of relationships there. But, you know, my favorite explanation for the simulated for UFOs is that they're being projected into this world in some way to get us. And this came from my conversations with Jacques Vallee where he talks about how maybe they're not extraterrestrial at all. Him and John Keel, I think, were among the first saying they've been here all along. And then the materialist version of they've been here all along is lost civilization in the bottom of the earth. But a non materialist explanation would be like they're still here, but they're projecting in. They can see us, but we can't see them. And that sounds a lot like these stories that we've been hearing for thousands of years about the fae and the Celtic traditions. They can take you into their world. In the Middle east, there's even stories of hybrids, human jinn hybrids. A man marrying a jinn woman and then having children and then that child gets taken.

[Podcast Host]

The Bible has the same stories. Or Uriel taking someone up above the clouds and seeing. Seeing the whole thing.

[Rizwan Virk]

Right, right. And so I think that some of that could be going on with the UFO phenomenon. Personally, I believe there's something there, as opposed to many of my academic colleagues who are like, eh, that's all, you know, it's all flat earth stuff. Right. And they kind of put it all together. Bigfoot, flat earth, UFOs.

[Podcast Host]

It's not the same thing.

[Rizwan Virk]

It's not the same thing. Yeah, especially. In fact, I wrote an article for NBC News years ago saying, you know, the government is taking UFOs seriously. Why aren't. Isn't Silicon Valley in academia and academia still isn't, although more are. That's why I wrote that specific article about stigma and what it means.

[Podcast Host]

Very important work, Riz. Thanks so much for coming in. This has been so much fun. I can keep you here another couple of hours, but I know you got to get out of here. I appreciate it.

[Rizwan Virk]

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a fun conversation. You're right. We could go on for a few more hours.

[Podcast Host]

I'm sure we could. Bye, everybody. So that was Rizwan Virk. Dr. Rizwan. Simulation theory, quantum physics, the Mandela effect. UFOs as avatars. Whether we picked our character before we logged into this life. Let's try to untangle some of this. Well, first, Philip K. Dick's 1977 speech in Metz, France. That's documented. You can find it online. I talk about it all the time. He stood in front of a room of science fiction fans and said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. He said a lot of great stuff during that speech. Definitely watch it. John Wheeler's delayed choice Experiment, that's real physics. In 2017, a team took it to space. A satellite about 1000 km from the slits. Peer reviewed journal the whole thing, and the result held up. The particle was in superposition until it was measured. So that means at the quantum scale, the past genuinely doesn't appear to be fixed until somebody observes it. Think about that for a second. At the quantum scale, there is no time. But here's what I keep coming back to. The idea that only rendering what's observed isn't just a video game trick. It might be the underlying logic of physics itself. Quantum the mechanics already works exactly the way a game engine does. What Riis is actually doing isn't selling simulation theory as a certainty. It's something quieter. It's more interesting. He's showing that quantum mechanics, ancient mysticism and video game design all point at the same strange logic that reality might be rendered not built. And you don't have to buy the conclusion, but it's a fact that 3D completely unrelated fields approached by serious people keep landing in the same uncomfortable neighborhood. His book is the Simulation Hypothesis, second edition on Amazon. He's also written the Simulated Multiverse. If you want to go deeper on the multiple timeline stuff, also find him on X at Rizz Stanford. R I Z S T A N F O R D and I covered simulation theory in episode 186. Links down below. Until next time. Time be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated.

[Rizwan Virk]

I play Poly scenario 51 a secret code inside the the Bible said I would I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never ends. I feel the crab cat and got stuck inside mel's home with MK Outra being only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Head of fish on Thursday night swims AJ2 and the weapons rapid all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth so the weapons all through the night. The madman sirens and the solar storms still come to a Gotha the secret city underground mysterious number stations planet circle to project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. Me so I can't believe I'm still. Me up to the. Truth. Loves to dance yeah K loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel. And camels love to dance. When the feeling is right. Always in time, Sa.