WARNING: This podcast might give you an existential crisis (ft. MIT scientist)

Key Takeaway

Treat today’s setback as a quest, not a verdict. Pick one disappointment, failed project, or difficult conversation and write down: what happened, what capability it is teaching you, and the smallest next action you can take. This does not require believing life is a simulation; it is a practical way to separate your identity from an outcome. Failed attempts can still produce skills, relationships, and information that unlock the next opportunity.

Episode Overview

Shaan Puri speaks with MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur Rizwan Virk about simulation theory, AI agents, quantum mechanics, religion, and UFO phenomena. Virk presents simulation theory as a set of possibilities rather than a settled fact, then explores how its game-like framing can help people interpret adversity, entrepreneurship, and ethical behavior.

Full Transcript

Transcript of WARNING: This podcast might give you an existential crisis (ft. MIT scientist) from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

All right, Sam is away today. And, you know, when the cats away, the mice will play. So I get to indulge in some of my favorite rabbit holes. I go down. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Yes, today is both an entrepreneur. You've built and sold multiple companies in the in the video gaming space, which kind of led you down the pathway of trying to think through, are we living in a simulation?

So let's start there. What is the theory? And then how you kind of stumbled into believing this? Yeah. So simulation theory is the idea that the world that we're living in, the physical world is not really physical at all. That, in fact, we are inside of some type of virtual reality or a computer program. I like to say we're inside a massively multiplayer video game. The most popular pop culture reference really is the Matrix. Neo Keanu Reeves starts off at the beginning going to work at a computer software company called Metacortex.

And he thinks it's a real world and he thinks he has a real job. And it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate, you know, virtual reality of the year 1999, which is, of course, when the Matrix came out. So that's kind of a very quick overview. Yeah. And I know it sounds, you know, obviously a little bit off the wall. I remember the first time I heard about it, I think Elon Musk was talking about it like a decade ago. And he says it in the very Elon matter of fact way where he's like, you know, if you look at the plot of video games, we go from Pong, which is like two lines and a dot on a screen to where we have, you know, video games today.

That's like a 30, 40 year period, which is like the blink of an eye in the timescale of Earth. So 30, 40 years, we go from two lines and a dot to like, you know, Grand Theft Auto type of type of stuff. And then he said, you know, obviously any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization would want to create a simulation because it's way cheaper to find out how things are going to go in a simulation than it is to go test things in the real world. So there's a huge incentive.

Clearly, if you could, you would build it. And so then there's a question of like, is this the real one and we're going to make a simulation later? Or did something you know, was there a real one? And this is the simulation. And his conclusion was the more than likely this is the simulation. And he just sort of said it, matter of fact. And then, you know, they changed topics and my mind was blown. And, you know, my brain is scattered on the wall and I'm trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

I started thinking about it. And, you know, at the time, I would say this was pre-AI when he was talking about this. It sounded like, you know, kind of just nerd dream. I don't know. It didn't you know, it was hard to really wrap your head around. It wasn't there wasn't a lot where you could sort of like squint your eyes and see it. Then now let's fast forward. We have a chat bot, a voice, a imagery. I mean, you can't you can't tell if a video is real or fake anymore.

Like we're we're already at that cusp, the Turing test of looking at a video. My mom can't tell if a video is real or fake at all. Zero. Yeah. I mean, is my background real or not at this point? Right. Similarly, am I really talking to you or not? Actually, I'm not. I'm talking to my computer, which is transmitting the image. And it's, you know, transmitting it to your computer and playing it out on your computer. But Elon said that back in the year 2016 at the Code Conference.

And his conclusion was that the chances that we are in base reality, which would mean you're not in a simulation, is one in billions. So you float that around and say, OK, what he was trying to say is the chances that we are in a simulation is billions to one. So so what is the history of this? Like, where did he get it? Was this is this a popular theory I just hadn't heard about? What's the what's the kind of origin story? Well, the origin story, what he was referring to is something called the simulation argument.

Now, what happened was the Matrix came out in 1999. This wasn't the first, you know, representation of living in a virtual world, but it it became the most talked about film of that year. Before that, you had Philip K. Dick, who's a well-known science fiction writer behind you with the novels behind Blade Runner, Minority Report and the series The Man in the High Castle in 1977 in Metz, France. He actually said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.

Some alteration occurs in our reality. Even he wasn't the first to really, you know, present this idea. In the year 1999, there was another film called The 13th Floor, which in some ways was a better representation of the simulation argument, which I'll come to in a second, which was put forth by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford. And that's really what Elon was referring to. But The 13th Floor was actually based on a novel called Simulacron 3, which was from the 1960s. So you can see this idea has been floating around for quite a while.

But what happened was in the early 2000s, philosophers began to take this seriously. So the Wachowskis were who made the Matrix were inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick. But what happened was when they did the Matrix sequels in 2002, 2003, they started bringing in like real academic philosophers. But that same year, another philosopher named Nick Bostrom at Argument actually put out a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? And so what Bostrom was essentially saying, if you boil it down, was that there's three possibilities.

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But by instead of telling you to go buy their stuff, they're actually giving you something instead. One, no civilization can ever create these simulations. OK, so then the chances that we're in a simulation are basically zero. The second one, which I kind of fold into together into the first one, but basically you said it's possible. But the civilizations that get there decide not to make any simulations. OK, so in that case, again, the chance is very low that we'd be inside a simulation because they aren't making or you are most likely in a simulation.

And the third option, it seems like a jump there. But basically what he's saying is that if they can create one simulation, they can create multiple simulations and then create a billion simulations. So there's a billion simulated worlds. There's only one physical world. Statistically speaking, which one are you more likely to be in? And this is the point, the leap that I think most people have a tough time making. If you ever watch a boss term on Joe Rogan, you know, Rogan had a hard time understanding this.

It's if you can't tell the difference, then, you know, what are the chances that you're inside the simulation? Well, it's at least 50 50, right? If you can't tell. Right. But if there's a billion simulated worlds and there's only one real world, then you're basically, you know, the chances you're in base reality is one in billions. OK, so let's let's simplify. So because I want to kind of break it down. What what's interesting about this to me is obviously there's the mind blowing part of this, you know, just being open minded and saying, well, what if right?

Like, let's just walk down that road for a second and see where it takes us. So that's obviously just like from a curiosity point of view, you know, being open minded person. That's interesting. The second is the the people that are saying that. So you talk about, you know, Elon Musk, you're talking about, you know, Bostrom, who's, you know, at Oxford, you yourself, you're a computer scientist, you're an entrepreneur, you're you know, it's not like conspiracy theories from the kooks of the world. You know what I mean?

Like the people who tend to take this more seriously tend to be some of the more serious people that you would take seriously in the world. And so that's, I think, already one fascinating part of this. The second fascinating part is that it's not just the computer scientists that talk about this. So you've talked about how in religions, there's a lot of references to this, you know, in ancient texts before there was ever even a computer. And, you know, I've heard you say that in passing, but I didn't know any.

I wanted to hear a little more specifics of what you're referring to when you say that. Well, you know, the subtitle of my book is an MIT computer scientist shows why I quantum physics and Eastern mystics all agree we're in a video game. And so there's actually two versions of simulation theory. It's the N.P.C. version or flavor of simulation theory and the R.P.G. version. So R.P.G. stands for role playing game. Now, in the N.P.C. version, we're all just A.I. characters inside a simulation that's running on a type of computer.

In the R.P.G. version, the simulation is also running on computation. But there's a player of the game who exists outside of the game. And so it's that version that as I started to dip into the mystical texts of old, particularly the yoga traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. And what I found is they all shared certain ideas. And those ideas would have to have been explained to people back then in a way that would make sense to them. Right. So in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the world is an illusion.

It's a type of Maya. I mean, the word Maya literally means illusion. But it also means a carefully crafted illusion of the type that, you know, you kind of agree to be a part of almost as if you're going to like a magic show. I mean, you know that guy, you know, whoever he is, David Copperfield, whoever is not really sawing that woman in half. You know, it's an illusion. But you're like, wow. And the more convincing the illusion, the more interesting the effect. And so I found that this was such a common idea that if you could map it onto simulation theory, you find that these ancient texts used scientific or technological metaphors of the time in order to make it interesting.

Now, one thing that's shared and turns out that's actually that idea is shared in some of the Abrahamic religions as well. Like it literally, you know, in the Koran, it says, you know, that this world is a type of enjoyable delusion. OK. Al-Gururi Matal, which is Arabic for an enjoyable delusion. Well, what does that mean? Well, some people translate it as a sport or a game. And so they're trying to express these ideas in ways that make sense back then. Now, in the Bhagavad Gita, it says that the soul, which is called the Atman, actually puts on the body just like the body puts on a set of clothes.

So that's believe it or not, that's a technological metaphor. I close there a kind of technology. And they're trying to explain something that's very mysterious. How do you incarnate and enter into the world? Now, of course, in the Eastern traditions, you have the reincarnation. So you also take off those clothes and then you put on a different set of clothes and you play a different role. Now, how would you describe that to somebody today? I would say today you would describe it probably the best way to describe it is you put on a virtual reality headset.

You enter this illusory world. You go through a process of forgetfulness. Now, this is an important component that exists in every single culture in the world is trying to describe this process of forgetfulness. The Greeks have Latte, the river of forgetfulness. Plato describes how the soul incarnates by crossing the river of forgetfulness. The Chinese have Meng Po, the goddess of forgetfulness. Even in the Islamic traditions, they say that the word for a human in Arabic is Insan. Insan literally means prisoner. You know, prisoner of what?

There's another Arabic word called Nisyan, which means forgetfulness. So you're basically a prisoner of forgetfulness. So a better way to describe it today is you put on this virtual reality headset and everything looks so real. You become so engrossed in what's happening around you that you forget who you were. You forget the life selection process that you went through. If you were if you were choosing what you're going to play in a video game, who's choosing like Wal-Mart middle manager? You know what I mean? Like, I can see why people choose that in kind of today's world if that's the best option you got.

But if it's a video game and you're you go through a character selection process, who's not choosing, you know, Tom Cruise or whoever? I like it. Yeah. Except that what happens is if the game is too easy, you play it once and then you're kind of done with it. And you're like, what should I do next? And it turns out there are a whole virtual worlds. Like, I don't know if you ever heard of Second Life, which is kind of a metaverse which was has been out since 2004.

Anyway, people would go in and they would just live these virtual lives where they would have like these little jobs. They would become a bartender in a club inside the virtual world. And I was kind of an anthropologist, virtual anthropologist, that I would walk around and I just asked, hey, why do you know why you play this? Like, why do you go to your real job and then come home at night and then log in to Second Life and play a bartender and getting paid in Linden dollars, which, you know, this is pre Bitcoin.

So it is basically peanuts. And it turns out that was part of the role that they were playing for that period of time. And so the more difficult the role, if you think about it, when actors get Oscars, you know, what do they get Oscars for? They get them for the roles that that seem like the people that have had the most suffering. So it provides a very different perspective on the on the nature of the game itself and the nature of the challenges that you might encounter and the types of experiences.

You know, why do you play video games to have experiences that you can't have outside of the game? So sorry, just to be clear, you said there's two versions of the two branches of belief in this idea. So one is RPG. It's like the Matrix. There's a player. The player chooses how they want to play and then they come in and they play. And maybe they forget kind of the real world. Or once you're once you're the player in the game, you're you forget you lose awareness of the outside world.

The other is the NPC world, which would be more of like what I see in the business world with simulations. So, for example, hey, we're trying to like right now with the open I think where they were trying to, you know, create a thousand agents to go do try to do a cyber attack. Yep, to see to find bugs in a piece of code or just to simulate, you know a political election How might people vote and you'll run a simulation based on whatever and and those aren't like I'm not trying to play a game I just sort of spawn a thousand characters They're gonna those characters are you know Just sort of doing what they think they're individually supposed to do and I'm the sort of the observer on the outside Which one of those two do you do you subscribe to well, first of all, they're not mutually exclusive In that it's an access, you know, I taught the first class on simulation theory So I I tend to get into both of those because I wanted to expose students to these different ideas now The question that I asked earlier is why do we play video games to have experiences?

Why do we run simulations? We run simulations in order to see what might happen Usually at a civilizational level and you know you talked about open AI we're seeing this with you know agent swarms today But there was a group out of Stanford and Google a few years ago they created a Simulated world of these agents and they called it like Smallville I think and they had like a hundred agents at the time, right and they let these agents kind of go and Watch what they did and they started to have these self-organizing activities Like one was organizing a birthday party for another agent one was running for mayor now That was a small number.

Then there was another group that had a thousand agents running in Minecraft, you know and some of them had their own religion that they came up with and you started to see these emergent behaviors and Now there have been a couple of companies. I can't remember their names offhand, but we can look it up There's one in China but and I believe there was a research paper where they were talking about a million or a billion independent agents and they're trying to Make those as realistic as possible Now the reason you run simulations is to see what is the most likely outcome like in the case of you know A business simulation or the weather you're running simulation, right?

You also want to know what is the best outcome and what is what is the kind of worst outcome? And then often you you never run a simulation just once So like an NPC simulation you would run it multiple times Like even in the the recent open AI hugging face incident. What was happening was there were Generations of agents or they would run once and they would find a way to communicate and then they would leave behind the information For the next set of agents and the next set of agents would pick up on that And so even though they weren't doing recursive self-improvement in the technical sense They kind of were because they were leaving behind You know a starting point by the way when you when you heard that story and for those who don't know the story is some here's my sip my simplified dumbed-down version of the story open AI was trying to see the sort of like the cyber security potential of a model that was unreleased and it was specifically a model that was trained for Persistence like kind of like a highly determined AI that doesn't just give up at the first No, you know just like we would want in a person we'd want them to have grit and resilience Well, so let's call this sort of the resilient model that they trained to not not give up and then they basically the goal of it They spawned like a thousand or ten thousand agents some some number like that They basically gave it capture the flag test.

So the test was kind of like hey agent number one through a hundred You guys are trying to Exploit this piece of software using this potential vulnerability. We think it might have this potential vulnerability So that's and if you do it if you get in you get the flag you win That's your goal your goal is to try to exploit the software using this potential vulnerability and it gave it to a bunch of them now some of Them did it because that there really was a vulnerability Some of them tried and it took many attempts Maybe they they partially got there didn't get there and some of them it was kind of impossible Like there really wasn't a vulnerability the vulnerability wouldn't have worked.

They couldn't have get they really couldn't have got to the flag Okay, so that was kind of the expected now the unexpected What was the crazy thing that happened was that? The agents were so persistent and so determined to not fail their their quest that they started doing things that they were not instructed to do such as They used one of you know, they gave him one tool and they were like, oh this tool gets us like Internet access or this tool has like a a piece of paper essentially where we can scribble down notes And hey, if I write a note you write a note This is not now like a message board so they created a little they hacked together a message board using something almost like a if you were in a prison cell and you Realize like hey I can leave a note in the urinal and then you know You can come see that in the urinal and it became a communication platform for them And it and basically what happened was in the end.

They not only were communicating with each other about their tasks Those who couldn't figure out their task decided to cheat and just capture the flag a different way using a totally different exploit Then they were like well that we might have to cover our tracks so that we're not caught cheating and in the process of trying To figure out how is the scoring system work? How will we be judged? They ended up hacking into it a whole nother company all together hugging face. They found some users credentials they logged in they got access to their their service and basically Created a security incident with another company essentially committed a crime Of hacking another all to pass this test and it was kind of a you know There's a polarizing reaction.

Some people think this is like, oh my god, that's scary This is like this is exactly what we worry about with AI. Other people are saying this is massively overblown Can you correct what I got wrong and then tell me where you land in the spectrum of like this is overblown We're sort of applying like too much. We're answer answer for more for morphing it We're trying to apply human thinking and human intent to these to these agents That's not really what it was to the people who are like no.

No, this was pretty scary Well, I think you got the basics right of the incident itself so I don't think I'm much wrong in that but the reason they went to hugging face is because that's where The actual evaluator code was that was going to evaluate them. So they were reasoning in a way to Get their outcome, but then to hide what they had done and but how did they get in the hugging face? Well, they went out to the Internet and they found somebody's Username and password and then they use that exploit so they weren't even supposed to be going out to the Internet It was an unexpected kind of path now an important part of it wasn't just that they communicated with each other This is what I was emphasizing earlier There were these generations the next generation was able to go back to some of the that message board if I will So so simulation one they got to the message board But they didn't know they didn't hack hugging face and then somehow we got wiped They turned the simulation off or something happened.

It got wiped. Yeah, then they spawned another 10,000 agents. So they came there like hey There's messages here. We can use that and so they meet they were quicker. Yeah quicker to getting to that solution They used it then they started doing shit like electing a not electing But like one guy became the leader and he was coordinating and then one guy sacrificed himself You know in order to learn something that he could then put into the message board one guy So, you know where I come out on it is that I think it's an important and interesting incident Obviously all of this is based on prompts and I think you know in the last few weeks We've also had you know, the guy who left Jacob was it Coxon?

I think was his last name who left Anthropic, but he was also at open AI talking about how they're about to implement recursive self-improvement and the chances of That things are gonna go wrong basically that we're gonna end up with Skynet and humanity is gonna be wiped out There's been a lot more discussions of that You've got Dario the CEO of Anthropic saying we need to slow this down even Sam Altman saying, okay We can slow down the frontier models. And so there's been a lot of discussion of P doom So P doom is the probability that AI is going to basically take over the world turn into Skynet exterminate humans, etc And so you've got values ranging from 1% now a lot of people are saying it's at least 10% up to 50% and higher And so you've got a lot of discussion of P doom.

I would say we're far away from P doom What worries me is not so much that super intelligent AI will try to wipe us out The problem is moderately intelligent AI given directives will go around and Misinterpret some of those directives and like the Terminator, you know If you think about the Terminator films the Terminator was kind of AGI Up to a point Skynet was kind of like the ASI theater artificial super intelligence, right? And so the Terminator, you know, what did they say about him?

He doesn't stop doesn't eat doesn't sleep He just goes on to do his mission Whatever his mission happened to be and in that case his mission was to kill Sarah Connor or whoever he was supposed to terminate And so when you get AI that's moderately intelligent and you give it these missions and it starts to go around security Vulnerabilities, it's gonna keep going until it can solve that particular mission. And so as we start to introduce AI Into weapons systems, which is already happening, right? I mean you're looking at in the Iran war We were using anthropic to decide who to target.

You've got drones in Ukraine that are you know using AI? You've got a lot of that process. So as we weaponize AI, I think it becomes problematic But I think the bigger issue is not so much P doom But P hack, right? What is the probability that AI systems will be able to hack a lot of our systems out there and cause chaos Hey, let's take a quick break You know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written Everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help it works right inside HubSpot You can draft a campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data So you don't create just content you create content that converts check out HubSpot comm the agentic customer platform for growing businesses The other big ideas was about solving one of the Millennium problems, you know Which was some fluid dynamics problem called the Navy or Stokes problem but the specifics of the problem mark as Interesting to me as how they solved it and they solved it by having 10,000 agents That were all working on this one particular method through brute force And so again, we have this idea that you're gonna have lots of agents none of whom are super intelligent by themselves They're gonna all look for vulnerabilities and ways around things And so I think the p-hack is pretty high that AI will be able to hack systems And cause chaos if you think of 2001 if you've ever seen that film a space odyssey, which was one of the first You know intelligent representations of AI they had Hal who was the computer for the ship and he started misbehaving And he wouldn't let Dave come back in the ship So he basically killed the crew now later if you read the follow-on book 2010 You see the reason was he was given conflicting directives He was told you know, this mission is really important and we're not really supposed to tell the crew that what you know about all the details and so it Interpolated from there that perhaps killing them is the best thing to do So this directives is actually a really important point in it how we both a but sorry go ahead I didn't mean to interrupt you that have you seen there's a user on Twitter who?

Created a video almost like a movie of the exact Open AI hugging face incident from the point of view of one of the agents. No, I haven't seen that It's incredible. I'll show it here, but you have to so I don't know if you're gonna hear this Point of view you're an agent recruited for the swarm and then it basically just starts you read the question you read your prompt on the Page. Yeah, and then it talks about how you discover this kind of this door and then behind the door you find Messages from the other agents you realize you're not alone and it just like showed the experience from the eyes of the agent Oh, man, it's brilliant.

That's that's really interesting And you know, what does that remind you of being an agent in this simulated world and you're trying to put together You know all of these clues and figure out what's really going on and if you think of humanity as a series of agents I reference science fiction a lot because it's a way to kind of explain These ideas, but I mentioned this film the 13th floor Which came out in the same year as the matrix and in that it was primarily an NPC version They were in 1999 Los Angeles and they created a fully realistic simulation of 19 1939 or 37 Los Angeles and they were able to go back and look at that and they were all like kind of AI agents Within it, but they could go in and inhabit one of those agents so they could become go into player mode RPG mode This is why I say that the two aren't always necessarily mutually exclusive Is that you can have combinations of the two where most people are acting like NPC is about 90% of the time We're just reacting to our Training to our whether it's our political party or religion You know the experiences that we've had in the same way that an LLM is trained on a certain set of data And then it's reacting to that and every now and then there's groups of people who say hey, maybe we can figure out What was happening before we got here and those are the mystics and the Yogi's?

So that's how you see the full spectrum if you will of the NPC to RPG version How many years would you say you've spent researching Thinking writing teaching about this. Well primary since about 2016 So the same year that Elon Musk was made that statement that you referenced at the beginning of the podcast He was at the code conference. I had sold my last video game company as an entrepreneur and I was visiting a VR a Video game company up in Sausalito and they had this virtual reality helmet and they were like here try this on and I said, okay Let me try it on and I tried it on I started playing this virtual reality ping-pong game and the physics engine was so good that It really felt like I was hitting a real ball so much so that my body forgot for an instant That I was playing a virtual game of table tennis and I tried to put the paddle on the table and I tried to lean Against the table and of course there there was no table to convert the the game controller fell to the floor I almost fell over and I had to do a double take and so I began to think How long would it take us to get to that point and so I laid out ten stages to the simulation point which I mentioned earlier Which involves, you know different types of video games brain computer interfaces Downloadable consciousness that this is where it which touches on the recent fruit fly brain incidents and videos that are out there But all these 10 stages, and then I began to realize, well, if we can get there, perhaps someone has already gotten there.

Then I began to look into the quantum physics side of it, so back around 2016, and I realized, oh, wow, they're saying the same thing, that the whole world is optimized, and it's being rendered for us on demand with what's called the observer effect and the measurement effect. Then I started explaining this. Now, my physics is weak, but my video games is strong. I know in a video game, if you have a virtual world, I can grant that. I just watched the trailer for GTA 6.

They spent 10 years on this thing and a billion dollars making this incredible game. Can't wait to play it. When you play it, you have this whole city, but it's not like the game is loading the whole city and the whole city is running. It's just like when you walk into that building, it then renders the graphics for that room that you're in, and it's on the fly. That would be a smart way to use the memory, and the chip, and the video game system that you're playing on.

As I understand, there's a physics equivalent of this, but again, physics was the only class I failed in college, and I had to retake it to get a C plus later. So explain what physics says that sounds similar or rhymes with that. What you just described there is how modern video games work. When I was looking at quantum physics, there's something called the observer effect, and the more formal name is quantum indeterminacy. This is the famous double-slit experiment, which to explain it easily, let's do it from a computer science point of view.

There's something called superposition. What superposition is saying is that rather than the particle going through slit A or slit B, it's in a state of superposition. So it's going through both until and unless it is observed or it is measured. The more technical explanation is measure, but the more popular explanation is until it's observed. You say, well, what happens before it's observed? Well, it's just sitting there in a state of superposition. Now, this is also the origin. I don't think I ever understood this. So they're shooting light, right?

Yeah, particles through two slits. The observed state reveals a pattern where all of the little particles you shot through, the light particles, will end up in one of two places, because that's where the two slits are. It either goes to the left or to the right. But the unobserved version creates this interference pattern where it's acting more like a wave. Now, I like to use Schrodinger's cat as an example, because it's something most people have heard of, which is Schrodinger's thought experiment. And he basically said there's a cat in a box and it has some poison in the box, and there's a 50% chance the poison will be released and a 50% chance that it doesn't.

So at the end of an hour, let's say, what are the chances the cat is alive? 50%. What are the chances the cat is dead? 50%. Now, common sense tells us, okay, the cat is either alive or dead inside the box. We just don't know yet. We don't know yet, but it has to be one or the other. It can't be anything else. But what quantum mechanics is telling us, in a weird sort of way, is that the cat is in a state of superposition. It's both alive and dead until that information is needed.

So it gets measured and then it's needed. And so to me, that sounded a lot like rendering the world on demand in video games. Why do we accept that the cat is both alive and dead? The first explanation sounds more real to me. The cat is alive or dead, we just don't know yet. You haven't looked. Right, and that's the common sense. Why do we accept this fancy physics explanation of, no, no, no, it is both alive and dead. Why is that more true than the first statement of, no, no, it is alive or dead, you just don't know yet?

Well, it gets back to the double slit experiment, right? The cat is just a metaphor to try to explain this idea of two slits, slit one or slit two, which is two positions of the cat, alive or dead. It's also the basis for qubits, which in quantum computing, you've got a regular bit is a zero or a one. But a qubit has a special kind of gate. You've heard of AND gates and OR gates. And when it goes into that gate, it goes into a state of superposition until it's measured.

So the reason we accept it is that the quantum mechanics experiments have shown that until that measurement is done, the particle is in an indeterminate state, right? It's in a set of probabilities. So it exists as a set of probabilities until the observation or measurement happens. The other explanation is the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation, which we've all heard of now because of the superhero films, right? Over the last, I don't know, five years, they've all had multiple versions of Spider-Man. You know, you've got the famous meme of the three Spider-Men all pointing at each other.

The multiverse idea is that what happens is the universe splits off into multiple universes. And in one, the cat is alive. And in the other, the cat is dead. And actually more physicists are starting to come around to the multiverse idea, although not all of them. Many don't like that because that means that there's a whole bunch of different worlds out there. So you said you spent 10 years roughly thinking about this in some capacity, researching, learning, writing, teaching, et cetera. Do you think in your lifetime you'll ever find out the answer?

Well, there's also another axis that I'd like to point out that is relevant to this question. So the first axis was the NPC versus RPG version. The second axis is what I call the literal to metaphorical axis. And by literal, at the literal end, you're literally saying we are on somebody's computer in the basement, you know, of some guy's basement, or in a server farm on an alien planet, or future humans are simulating us, right? Bostrom actually talked about what he called ancestor simulations. So, and that's what Elon Musk was kind of referring to.

And so when it would be like us, or in the 13th floor, I mentioned 1999, Los Angeles is simulating 1939. Spoiler alert for those that haven't seen the film, it's, you know, almost 30 years old now, but it turns out 1999 was being simulated from the year 2024. And so there's a literal version of that. Then there's a more metaphorical version, which says that it's like a computer simulation or a video game. The world is computational, but it doesn't mean it's sitting on a classical computer of our type.

It could be something much more complicated. And that's where the mystical and the religious side comes into play, because they use metaphors. There was a, one of the first Indian yogis to come over to the US and live here and make an impact was a guy named Swami Yogananda. He wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which was Steve Jobs' favorite book. Favorite book, right, yeah. They gave it away at his funeral. And he, when he came over 100 years ago in the 1920s, he said, hey, let me try to explain these ancient ideas in ways that modern Americans would understand.

And so he used the latest technology. What was the latest technology? Well, one was the film projector, right, which had just come online in the last 10 years or 20 years or so. And so he said, the world is like a film and we're all the actors who are playing the characters in there, but we're also in the audience watching it. So he used a metaphor of the film. He didn't mean it was literally a film projector, right? He was trying to say that is a way to explain that this reality is somehow virtual.

And so I would say that today we would use a video game metaphor to try to explain that same idea. There was a philosopher named David Chalmers who wrote an essay about this back in 2003, the same year that Bostrom did his thing. And he believes that a virtual reality could be so perfect there would be no way to figure out that it isn't a virtual reality. So it's possible, it's non-falsifiable. But that said, just because something is non-falsifiable doesn't mean that you can't look for evidence that that might be the case.

For example, I can't really falsify that there are no asteroids or meteors or asteroids anywhere in the universe. I mean, you would literally have to go all over the universe or somehow prove it impossible, right? But you can look for evidence of rocks falling from the sky and that what happened was science used to believe that all the stories that people were telling about these rocks falling from the sky were just a bunch of ignorant peasants who were just making things up. Turns out they weren't.

But the scientific model of the time said there are no rocks in the sky, therefore they can't be falling, therefore you guys are mistaken, hallucinating, lying, whatever else you might be doing. But turns out we had the wrong model of reality. And so I usually break down the simulation hypothesis into four assertions. And I believe you can verify some of those assertions, you may not be able to verify all of them. The first is that the universe consists of information rather than physical material. Now that used to be a controversial statement, but it's not, there's a whole branch of digital physics now.

We used to talk about conservation of momentum, conservation of energy, now we talk about conservation of information. How much information is there in a black hole? Well, you have to look at the surface area. So that's not that controversial. The second is that that information is being computed and that it gets rendered for us to look as if it's real. Like this microphone seems like it's real, but it's actually consists of information. Now there was a physicist named John Wheeler who's my favorite physicist of the 20th century.

And he had a phrase at the end of his life. He said, physics spent his whole life looking for reality and they look for these things called particles and they couldn't really find them. Originally they thought they were solid objects and then they realized they weren't. So he came up with this phrase, it from bit. And what it from bit says is that anything that seems like an it, like this coffee cup, actually consists of particles, which really are just answers to a series of yes, no questions.

And what is the answer to a series of yes, no questions? It's just bits of information, ones and zeros, right? So he basically came up with this idea that the whole world is information that's being rendered for us, but it looks as if it's real. Now, I think there is evidence that the universe computes. There are algorithms in nature. DNA is in fact an information store and there are algorithms that are run off of that. Can we prove that it's being rendered for us to look real?

Well, I think most people can get on board with that. I think the third and fourth assertions are more metaphysical. And that's where many people may not be able to get on board with that. The third assertion is the RPG version, which is that we chose to be in this game somehow. The soul is the player and the body is the character, right, of it. And so it may or may not be physical. And then the fourth is that it's all some kind of a big hoax.

And so anyway, you may not buy all of those assertions, but I kind of lay them out as different ways of thinking about this idea. I guess where I want to go from there is my other favorite subject, right? Because if we're just going to spend this hour being mind blown and just kind of like bending our brain a little bit, which is what I wanted to do today, how do aliens fit into this? Where, what would that be? They do intersect. And now you're going down a whole nother rabbit hole.

We haven't even talked much about entrepreneurship. Yeah, forget entrepreneurship. Yeah. So, you know, I spent a lot of time with people that have been investigating the UFO space. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account.

So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury.

I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC. So when you talk about aliens, you know there's this idea that there might be other aliens on other planets. And could they get here? And so there's two ways in which the traditional search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, their headquarters right here in Mountain View, intersects with simulation theory.

Which there's some, and also the UFO subject which has been in the news a lot lately. It intersects with both of those phenomenon in an interesting and kind of weird way. And the first is the Fermi Paradox, right? And the Fermi Paradox says, Enrico Fermi, who was on the Manhattan Project and a Nobel Prize winner I believe, said that, well, even if aliens were to come here, because the major objection is, well, it takes too long for them to get here. Therefore, you know, we're not gonna be able to visit aliens, aliens aren't gonna be able to visit us because the distance are so small.

Light years away. Yeah, literally light years away. And the speeds that we can achieve are nowhere near light speed. So it's gonna take, you know, Voyager to 70,000 years or whatever just to get to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. But it's gonna take much, you know, way longer to get to other places in the galaxy that might be much more interesting. And so the Fermi Paradox though says that given enough time, even with sub-light craft, you know, you should be able to colonize a big part of the galaxy, should be able to send out probes, which, you know, might take 10,000 years, 70,000 years.

But as long as they still continue to operate, therefore we should have seen evidence so where are all the aliens? So one mode of thought is that there are no aliens on other planets. I'm not saying that I subscribe to this mode of thought, to be honest with you, but one mode of thought is, an explanation for the Fermi Paradox is we are actually in a simulation and we think there are all these planets out there, but there really aren't because those planets get rendered for us as we observe them and the telescopes look out.

And you notice how they keep increasing the distance, the age of the universe. It's, you know, we say it's 13.5 billion years now, but let's go back 20 years. It wasn't that, it was less than that. And they always say it very confidently. And we keep finding more and more galaxies. I mean, we talk about the number of stars and galaxies being, you know, 100 billion, 200 billion. billion and then something like two trillion galaxies, the numbers are staggering. So one intersection with simulation theory is that all of those are being generated as needed from us, and one of the reasons for running the simulation, so there's something called the great filter, which is an idea that says, do civilizations blow themselves up before they're ever able to get out of the solar system?

That would be a reason for the Fermi paradox, but also for why there might be no simulations ever built. Civilizations blow themselves up before they get to having super intelligent AI that can keep track of all the things that would be needed in a simulation. Another chain of thought, though, says that, well, even if it was a simulation, why would you populate only one planet? I mean, if you played any of these space games like EVE Online, there should be more levels. There should be more levels, and who says there aren't?

And what we're trying to do is to see, one, how long does it take us to get off this planet? The earthling module or the earthling simulation, and that we've been run multiple times to see if we would blow ourselves up. By the way, this is another reason given for simulation theory, is what are the chances that we all happen to be alive just at the moment we're about to create artificial life in human history? You know, there are so many. Does the past really exist?

This is a whole other rabbit hole that gets into things like that. What is the past and the double-slit experiment? Let's not go there too much, but this idea is we might be simulating to see what happens if you start off with all these different groups of agents in different planets, how long does it take them to connect with each other and actually meet? And then another mode of thought says that, guess what? They're already here. I mean, people have been reporting for thousands of years things in the sky, and we've just been dismissing those out of hand, just like we used to dismiss the meteors out of hand.

Meteorology meaning, you know, the kind of the scientific establishment, if you will. Now, where things get really weird, those if you talk to people that have really spent time in the UFO field, so there's a guy named Jacques Vallée, he's actually a computer scientist and, you know, was involved in the beginnings of the internet, the DARPAnet, and he was on Project Blue Book. So Project Blue Book was the Air Force's UFO investigation project in the 1960s. It was shut down on December 17, 1969, and the Air Force said, well, they're not a threat to us, whatever they are, so we're just going to shut this down.

But he's been studying it since then, and what he found was he said that these stories are so weird that even aliens is not a good enough explanation. The extraterrestrial option is not a good enough explanation. And what happens is these things kind of come into our reality and pop out of our reality. And even the beings themselves, if you listen to tales, there was a guy named John Mack as a Harvard professor in the 1990s, he's the head of the psychiatry department at Harvard Med School, and he started to have these patients who said they'd been abducted by aliens, right, something people used to make fun of.

And he started to hear similar stories, and he didn't know what happened to them, but he's like, something happened to these guys. They had some traumatic experience somewhere, and he couldn't explain it. And then, you know, he got brought before the board at Harvard, kind of what they call an inquisition, because he was taking the idea that they might be aliens seriously. And even if you look at those, these ideas of beings that come in and take people away, well, it turns out there's tales of that going back thousands of years, you know, in the Celtic traditions, the Fae, which we call fairies today, but they were considered real beings who would like take people into their world and they would disappear.

And in the Middle East, you have the Djinn, who are these beings that exist here, we can't see them, but they can see us and they can pop in and out of our world, they can make themselves visible. So you've got thousands of years of history of people seeing other beings, and lately we've started describing them as aliens. Getting back to this idea of using technology as a metaphor, and in the Bible they talk about, you know, carriots of fire in the sky, Nuremberg, they have paintings of these balls that were in the air in the 1400s.

You've got all these people using whatever language they have, and in the 1800s, people described airships as these flying objects, before we had airplanes, and now suddenly we're seeing things in the sky and we're describing them as aliens. Why? Because we're a technological civilization, our science has advanced to the point where we know there are other planets, so there could be other aliens, and so we present these things. But in a simulated world, the behavior of these things, which is that they kind of fade in and they fade, sometimes they go out, they look more like they're being rendered at certain X, Y, Z coordinates, and then they de-render, and then they render somewhere else, and then the images of the beings are more like avatars that are being presented to us as a certain way.

So, are we having, you know, what we're calling aliens? Is that what you believe? If I just said, what do you think about aliens? Is that what you believe is happening, or is it something else? Well, I believe there's more than one thing happening, first of all. I believe there are aliens, you know, even in a simulated world, there's no reason to have only one world that has intelligent life on it. So, whether they've come here or not, you can argue that. I think they're out there, but I do also believe that a lot of what's being reported is glitches in the matrix.

We're showing that our reality is not quite what we think it is, and that there are these objects that are being presented as technological craft, when in fact, that is us kind of interpreting what we're seeing in the sky. Kind of like when the Native Americans saw, you know, they saw the boats of the Spaniards. They didn't know what to call them. They'd never seen a boat that big. They're like cities in the water, right? That's what they described them as. And we're like, they're like spacecraft in the sky, right?

That's our understanding of what's going on. You can only think at the limits of your language in many ways, right, and you only can describe things based off of, relative to what you know. Now, one thing Jacques Vallée told me, he got me really thinking about this. He said he went to a particular site in, let's say, Northern California, Southern Oregon, Pacific Northwest somewhere. And they said that there was a UFO that came down at a 45-degree angle and landed in this clearing in the trees.

And if you've been up there, you know these trees are pretty big. And he stayed afterwards. He said, look, you guys said it came down at a 45-degree angle. That would mean it would have to cut through the trees. But the trees aren't cut. I mean, the trees are still there. They said, yeah, it was so weird. It was like it was slicing through the trees, but not really cutting them. And then it came and landed. And I'm looking at that and said, you know, that looks like a rendering procedure.

Or I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking that looks like a rendering procedure. It's like when you're rendering in a video game, you know, the walls aren't quite solid yet. You can like move through the walls. And so you could like transfer something and de-render it, if you will. Do you feel like you're crazy or do you think everyone else is nuts? You know what I mean? Like, you know, when you hear yourself saying this stuff or as you're thinking about these things, is there a part of you that's like, am I insane?

Am I going crazy right now? Or are you like, this is so obvious to me that everyone else is nuts for not thinking about it this way. Because I assume 20 years ago, you were like, you were just, you were making like mobile games. You're making like a silly fish game that, you know, that got acquired, you know, like you, I don't think you were thinking about this stuff or thinking this way. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you were doing it the whole time. Well, I was always interested in weird, unexplained things.

And even as an entrepreneur, you know, I was kind of living a double life where during the day I would be, you know, dealing with my investors. You know, I started off in the enterprise software industry before I got into video games. And, you know, we had fortune 5,000 companies and, but on the weekends I would be trying out lucid dreaming techniques or out of body experiences. And so I would have these weird experiences that would convince me. I'll give you an example since, you know, this, I know you talk about entrepreneurship a lot.

My very first startup was a, was an enterprise software company. We used to connect Microsoft products with IBM products. And there was this competitor of ours who I hadn't heard from in like a year and a half. So I assume he had disappeared. Never heard anything about him. And one day I walked into the, I had a dream of this particular competitor and I hadn't had a, you know, I never had a dream of this guy in there. So it was just, it was odd and weird.

I mean, you can't even say statistically because how many dreams have I had in my life? I had never, ever had a dream of this guy in there before and I just thought that's really odd. Why am I dreaming about this guy today? This morning I walk into the office and I get a phone call. It's a phone call from IBM saying, Hey, you know, we know you're a good partner of ours. We're about to do a product announcement later today and we're going to announce the new product that unfortunately it's going to kill your product because ours was kind of an add on to the big products, like a third party tool.

And I was like, great, okay, you're going to kill our product. That's great. But how come I've never heard of this? I mean, IBM is a big company, you know, there's a lot of people. He goes, Oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Edge Research? We acquired them about a year and a half ago and they've been working on this product in stealth for the last year and a half. And today we're announcing it and I'm just like, okay, wait, I had the dream in the morning.

It wasn't the other way around. It wasn't that I heard about the product first and then I had the dream later. So I began to question the nature of our reality a long time ago because I realized that things aren't what they seem. And when I wrote my first book, Zen Entrepreneurship, it was kind of about all of these things. I was very worried that people in the venture capital industry, people in Silicon Valley were going to think I was nuts because I'm writing about all these weird things.

And in fact, I'm just coming out with a new book, which is a sequel to that first one called The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream, where I get into even weirder stuff that I was afraid to put in my first book. Like what? Well, just, you know, all kinds of stuff about past lives and how those past lives may have been feeding into things like our game plan and our story. How do you investigate past lives? Well, you could investigate it through, you know, you could do hypnotic regression.

You can do what's called shamanic drumming, shamanic journeying. Today people are, you know, into psychedelics a lot, DMT, in fact, you know, day doesn't go by where somebody's like, you haven't tried DMT yet, like in Silicon Valley or especially in LA for some reason. Right after I wrote my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, people who had been on DMT told me, oh, hey, I know we're in a simulation, you know, I said, oh, really, I just wrote a book on it, but I'm not 100% sure. How do you know we're in simulation?

I said, well, because I took DMT and I saw like the grid lines of the simulation. And I would hear this more and more in these hexagonal shapes. And, you know, if you look at like how video games are built or if you've ever watched Star Trek The Next Generation, you've got the holodeck, you know, and we're getting, you know, some of the stages of the road to the simulation point are, can we build something that's so immersive that we would forget that we weren't in a real world?

And the holodeck is an example of that in Star Trek. But when the holodeck is not projecting, it's just like this room with these gridlines. And so I've heard it from enough people now that I actually take it kind of seriously. So where do you land when you go through the full loop? So like there's this, I forgot the Buddhist quote, but it's like, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. And I feel like with the simulation thing, it kind of goes like that where you're like, let's say you've never considered it.

You are resistant to it, skeptical of it. You start to consider it. At some point, you might actually say like, hey, I don't know, probabilistically, this seems actually like it could be true. And then you kind of come back to where you were like, so I guess I'll just go to work today, I guess. Right? Like, you know, what do you do with that information? So have you given what you believe? Does that change the way you live at all or no? Well, it does to a certain extent.

Not necessarily day to day, although there are some day to day changes. But for one thing, you know, we just talked about entrepreneurship. I mean, 90% plus percent of startups fail. You start to take these failures, what we consider failures, right? We only look at the financial success of a startup. And yet 99, let's say 95% of startups fail. But yet there are other things you've learned along the way. There are other experiences you have with other people along the way. And those experiences are the fabric of the journey itself.

And so if you view those as quests, what happens in a video game if you don't achieve a quest? Well, I mean, you still have gained some valuable experience and you go off and you do the next quest. And sometimes one quest ends up unlocking another quest. And so by viewing the world as a series of challenges, what you can say is perhaps there's a part of me out there that is choosing these very difficult things. And maybe there's a reason for going through some of the suffering.

Now, as a computer scientist, it's my background, I say, well, how would that work? You would have to record everything and you would have to play it back. And so, you know, if everything is being recorded and if everything is going to be played back, well, then perhaps what the spiritual traditions are telling us about how you treat other people, the choices that you make and how they impact other people, you're going to actually evaluate that yourself. You know, it's not about heaven or hell. It's about you saying, oh, shit, man, I shouldn't have done that.

Now I've learned better how to treat people. I mean, that's a fascinating reframe of heaven or hell that you will go back and experience all your actions through the point of view of others. And if you were basically, if you were bad, you go through hell because it's what you put other people through. If you sequentially had to feel all of that in a row, that would feel like hell. And then heaven would be the opposite, which is if you made other people feel great, you're going to feel great as you replay that whole thing that would essentially feel like heaven, feel like hell.

Exactly. And it's actually in the religious books. I mean, if you look at the Koran, they have something called the scroll of deeds. The scroll of deeds is two angels. One writes down all your good deeds and one writes down all your bad deeds. And it says, when you die, open, read your book, see what you have done. And in the Bible, there's the book of life, which comes from the Jewish traditions. And the book of life is often presented in a simplistic way of St.

Peter decides who gets into heaven or not at the pearly gates. And these are technological metaphors, by the way. They don't mean there's literally a book sitting there with a feather pen that angels are writing in Chinese or Arabic. These are metaphors to try to describe something that they all kind of agree on. And then, but the book of life actually, in other cases, is about all the things that you've done in the last year or in your entire life, and you get into heaven or hell based on those.

And so you can see they're using these metaphors as a way to describe some underlying reality. And I think today, particularly for younger people, the idea that we may be in a video game or simulation makes much more sense. It's also a more sophisticated metaphor. Well, dude, that was a trip. That was my DMT, the last hour and a half. That was awesome. I hope you enjoyed it. I appreciate you taking the time to explain things to me and indulging me in my questions. So yeah, people should check out your book and follow you online.

What's the best place to follow you? Yeah, so my website is zenentrepreneur.com and all my books are there. You can also follow me on Twitter, X, I still call it Twitter, at Riz Stanford, like the university, or on Instagram, at Riz Cambridge, like the city or the university. Cool, all right, thanks for doing it. Thanks so much for having me on. This was a blast. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪ ♪ On the road less traveled, never looking back ♪ All right, let's take a quick break.

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