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

24:47So I talked about not needing to render it until it's observed. That makes sense when we talk about, okay, you're going to go to Antarctica. What about space, though? It's so far. Nothing's there. Well, we don't know. But if you look at it, it looks almost infinite, right? Yeah. And yet, how do we know that's not being procedurally generated beyond a certain point? Yeah, I guess we don't. As we get better and better at looking at it. Now, that doesn't rule out the fact that there could be other civilizations in a simulation. I mean, in many multiplayer strategy games, you have people on different planets.

25:16And maybe the purpose of the game is to wait to see when these guys are going to interact with each other. But there's something even weirder, and that is with time. Now, we're used to thinking, okay, the future, I can think of multiple possible paths in the future, right? I moved to San Francisco. I moved to New York. Those are two different paths along the way. But in the past, I'm used to thinking of I have only one past, which is that I moved to the Bay Area. I was a video game developer, et cetera. But in quantum mechanics, there's something called the delayed choice double slit experiment.

25:49And that's even weirder because what it's saying is not only are you deciding whether the cat is alive or dead, but when you render it, you are also deciding the history of the cat. Like, did it come in from the backyard or the front yard? Before it came from the front yard, you know, was it across the street or was it in the backyard? So you're basically choosing from one of these historical paths. Okay, now this is even more confusing. And I talk about this in this book. I talk about it a little more in my book, The Simulated Multiverse. You ever see Donnie Darko? You know that movie? Long time ago.

26:24So it's been like 25 years. So give me a break here. But I think Jay Gyllenhaal, he sees this weird guy in a rabbit suit or something like that. It's got this mercury or liquid thing flowing through it. And eventually you kind of figure out, I think that that's time. and it goes forward and backwards, the whole thing is like him screwing with that kind of quantum idea of time. So it sounds like that's what you're saying, right? So at the time the cat is rendered, the history is rendered before that it didn't exist. Right. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, basically. And a good way to think about it is what's called the cosmic delay choice experiment.

26:58And that is when, let's suppose we have light from a quasar that's a billion light years away. So it's pretty far away. It's going to take the light a long time to get here, a billion years, because that's how far it is. But suppose in the middle, there's a black hole or a galaxy, something that's a gravitationally large object. And so the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object to get here. And we have telescopes here on Earth that can measure whether it went left or right. So this is a thought experiment that was proposed by my favorite physicist of the 20th century, a guy named John Wheeler.

27:28And so he said, well, when would the decision have to be made about whether the light goes to the left or to the right? And suppose it's halfway between us and the quasar. So suppose that's a half a billion light years away. So the decision would have had to have been made half a billion years ago, so 500 million years ago. We're talking about the past, but the deep past. We're talking about dinosaur age, right? Maybe even before the dinosaurs. But what this experiment shows us is it's not until the light is measured here on Earth and we measure what's called its polarization, which is the same as saying whether it went left or right, that the decision about whether it goes left or right is made.

28:09Now, it's made now when we measure it. Now, that's just really bizarre because that's saying there's more than one possible past. And so I wasn't sure I was interpreting this right. And I went back and I found an obscure quote from Schrodinger, who, again, one of the forefathers of quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger wave equation. And he said, in an obscure speech, he said, effectively, when we're collapsing the probability wave, which is one of the interpretations of what happens for the observer effect is that you have all these probabilities and then you come down to just one. That's the one you observe.

28:39The cat is alive. That's it. But Schrodinger said we're also choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories, which just gets really bizarre. Now, why do I go into this kind of detail when I'm talking about simulation theory? Well, if you've ever played a game like Farmville, which was popular 10, 15 years ago when I got in the video game industry with Facebook. It wasn't my thing, but yeah. Yeah, but it was like extremely popular. And today Minecraft is extremely popular. That's right. And so they have crops that grow in Minecraft. While you're not there, yeah. While you're not there. Now the question is, are they actually growing when you're not there?

29:12What happens is when you log in, the computer figures out what happened while you were gone. Right, you were gone for two days, so it's going to be 48 hours. Yeah, not only have they matured, but some locusts came by because there was a percentage of possibility that that might happen. And they destroyed half your crops. Now that's the past, right? But it's figured out when you render the game. So is it possible that we are choosing from multiple simultaneous histories? That doesn't mean we're choosing like all the time, but it could in fact be that's a more efficient way to simulate things. So in computer science, we're always looking at ways to optimize and do things more efficiently.

29:51Like today, Sam Altman just announced OpenAI is getting$100 billion from NVIDIA. I saw that. Why? Because they don't have enough compute. And they just want to, again, use the dumb brute force method, which is they just want to add more hardware. But in computer science, the way you should really do it is look for better algorithms so that they use less compute. They're probably doing that too, right? Yeah, they're probably doing that too. It takes time. It takes time. There's a short term. Yeah. Short term, the only thing they can do. Let's throw money at this for now and then later on worry about the efficiency, right?

30:19Right, right. But then you've got other guys trying to figure out these. Because remember, their current models are based on research that was done 5, 10 years ago. I mean, a lot of this was in Google Research Labs. You know, back in the day, they just hadn't implemented it fully. Wow. It's crazy to think that, in theory, this is old tech, right, that we're using. Because it is quite amazing what it can do. I mean, yes, it's fancy autocomplete, but also it saves me a shitload of time, so I'm not complaining. Yeah, it's very fancy autocomplete. So$100 billion from now, I mean, I'm stoked. I want to see it.

30:49After bending your mind for a little bit here, let's take a breath and ground ourselves in something simple and real. Consumerism. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Quilt Mind. Most people lurk on LinkedIn. Hardly anyone posts. I didn't for years either, which is why the folks who do, well, they pop. They get the lowest effort visibility win out there. Anytime I share something, even a quick thought, I get a wave of DMs and ads and stuff like that on old colleagues. They crawl out of the woodwork. Dude, that story landed. And that's the magic. You stay top of mind. So when opportunities show up, podcasts, partnerships, interviews, you're the first call.

31:25It's not luck. It's visibility. Enter Quilt Mind. They make posting effortless. They take your ideas and they turn them into tight, scannable posts that actually get engagement written in your voice so you show up consistently without burning hours. It's not just a bunch of AI slop. It's not vanity. It's relevance. We pay for the gym to look good, in part. So why not invest in your professional presence as well? If you've ever thought, hey, I should post more, but you never follow through Quilt Mind is the bridge between intention and action, and the upside could be bigger than you expect. Curious what I'm sharing?

31:54Go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn. If you want to start making quality posts like me, message me or email jordanaudience at quiltmind.com. That's jordanaudience at q-u-i-l-t-m-i-n-d.com. This episode is also sponsored by Uncommon Goods. All right, the holiday shopping countdown is on. If you don't know where to start, check out Uncommon Goods. This is a goldmine of unique, high-quality gifts you won't find anywhere else, something the recipient will say, oh my gosh, where did you find this? I love it. For example, and I hope he's not listening to this, my brother-in-law who is impossible to shop for is obsessed with pickleball and I got him a Christmas ornament of a pickle playing pickleball.

32:29His girlfriend is getting pickleball paddle earrings. It's the perfect mix of thoughtful and oh wow, where did you find this? Let me put it that way. They've got something for everyone, your foodie friend, your dad who's impossible to shop for, your kid who's already got every toy known to man, and every purchase supports small creators, which is cool. Plus, they donate a dollar from every order to a non-profit that you choose. They've already given over 3 million, which is pretty amazing. So don't wait, cross those names off your list before the rush, and Jen's going to tell you how to get a discount.

32:55To get 15 % off your next gift, go to UncommonGoods.com slash Jordan. That's UncommonGoods.com slash Jordan for 15 % off. Uncommon Goods, we're all out of the ordinary. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust, teaching you how to build the same thing for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. This is about improving your relationship building skills. It is not cringy. It is not awkward. It is very down to earth. It's not going to make you look like a jerk or worse.

33:26It'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in whatever reality you're living in. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, the course is all free without any shenanigans over at 6minutenetworking.com. Now, back to Rizwan Virk. At what point do the in-game characters think that they're real? Maybe it's less important whether I actually think I'm in Grand Theft Auto 6. It's probably more important that the characters in Grand Theft Auto 6 think they're in Grand Theft Auto 6.

34:02And they can't tell the difference, right? Is this a decent question or am I... Yeah, no, no, that's a great question. And so, you know, in the past, we had what were called dumb NPCs. right they were just basic npcs that you could interact with if you've ever played like an old video game from i was an investor in a company called telltale games years ago and they used to create like a game of thrones and a walking dead game and when you wanted to talk to the character the character would basically you know tell you what they said and then there would be these choices and you'd have to choose one of them so it's basically a dialogue tree so those were like simple dumb npcs where the the creators of the game have laid out you know all the paths It's kind of like the old choose your own adventure.

34:42I remember this. I also, yeah, Skyrim had something I've seen where it's like a meme, right? Where someone gets blown up or whatever and it's like the NPC goes, huh, must have been the wind, right? It's just like they don't have this advanced. Yeah, they're not very advanced. But today we're starting to get smart NPCs. So what's happened with the Turing test, which was this test that Alan Turing proposed way back in 1950, actually. And he was talking about AI as a computer, right? Today we think of AI as software. But he was basically saying, look, if you are passing messages behind two curtains, curtain A and curtain B, and one of those has a computer, again, he's thinking of a physical computer, and one of those is a human, and you can just pass messages back and forth.

35:22Now, back then, he was thinking of teletype machines. But, you know, we could think of it as text messages or just a chatbot today. Then if you can't tell the difference, then that computer has passed. The Turing test, he actually called it the imitation game in his paper, which was the name of a movie about him, which was not about the Turing test at all. It was about his other work, his code-breaking work. But so most people believe today that we've passed the Turing test in that many of these chat GPT-like LLM engines, it's very difficult to tell if a human is behind it or not. That said, I mean, you can kind of tell when something's AI generated more because of the length of what they're doing and the patterns that are there.

36:00A human would never put up with me for as long as chat GPT has had to put up with me. That's how I know it's a robot. Yeah. So you can tell from the, you know, more or less still, but there have been experiments done now. There was a prize that was set up by a guy named Loebner back in the 90s called the Loebner Prize for which chatbot is closest to passing the Turing test. And it went on for many years. In fact, there was a chatbot called Alice back in the early, late 90s, early 2000s that was supposed to have the personality of a young woman. And it was getting pretty good. I think it was the winner of the Loebner Prize, but no one won the grand prize.

36:35And it went all the way through 2019 and it became defunct. And now they're running these experiments where they have a thousand people talking to chat GPT. And so most scholars think we're pretty close or we've already passed the Turing test. But in my book, Simulation Hypothesis, I talk about the metaverse Turing test. And it gets back to the point that you just made about no human would put up with me for that long. But the idea is if you're inside a video game, there's you, your character, there's an NPC, and then there's an avatar controlled by a human and you can go do whatever you do inside the video game, like inside Second Life.

37:09You can go have a swimming pool. You can go to Starship Enterprise. You can do whatever you would do. You can go dancing. You can have virtual sex, whatever. And then if you can't figure out whether which one is the NPC and which one is controlled by the human, then it would pass what I call the metaverse or the virtual Turing test. Now, we haven't passed that yet, but we do have smart NPCs now. So what people are doing is they're hooking up like an LLM engine, like ChatGPT, to an avatar, and they're bringing the two together. I don't know if you ever saw the film Her. Yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah, great film, right?

37:41Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, I think. Yeah, that's right. And so it turns out the guy who wrote the film and directed it, Spike Jonze, he had seen the Alice chatbot back in the 2000s, and he came out with this film in 2013. And then when OpenAI released one of their recent versions of ChatGPT, they tried to hire Scarlett Johansson to get her voice, but they used the movie Her as kind of a way to think about how you could have a virtual girlfriend or boyfriend. And now there are companies that specialize in like virtual girlfriends, boyfriends. I mean, I'm not against people using it if it makes them feel better.

38:15It's just sad to me that they need to do that. But it wouldn't surprise me. Look, it depends on the use case, I suppose, right? If you're elderly and you don't have companionship, it's a little bit less pathetic than a 20-something-year-old guy who's just opted out of the dating game to talk to a computer. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it does seem sad in its way, but they've been around for a while now. There's a company called Replica, for example, that has been around since, I don't know, 2015, 16. And of course, people are now using ChatGPT and variations of it. And there's character.ai.

38:44There were a whole bunch of these companies that were just specializing in this. But getting back to your question, which was, would the AI, the NPC not know that it's an NPC? And so we're getting closer. So there was a, if you remember, there was a fourth Matrix movie that came out in 2021. I don't think I saw it. I pulled the plug at some point. Yeah. It wasn't that great according to most Matrix fans. It was sort of deep if you think about it, but it just didn't have the same tenor of the earlier films, I think. But when that came out, the Unreal Engine, which is one of the big gaming engines that's used for building very realistic landscapes today, they came out with a demo called The Matrix Awakens.

39:24And it was basically kind of a mini game, if you will. and it was a city and they had a neo that looked like keanu reeves and they had his voice in there and they had trinity with carrie ann moss and the city that you moved around looked real it was kind of like a mixture of san francisco where they shot part of the film in berlin but it was all virtual and so the landscapes were so good that you couldn't tell the difference now that city was filled with npcs initially they were dumb npcs but then what one guy did there's a video this online, he hooked up an LLM engine into the NPCs and he made them smart NPCs.

39:58And then he had his character walk around in this virtual city and say to them, hey, you're in a video game. Hey, you're an NPC. And they reacted the way that people might react. Some of them were like, I don't have time for this. I got a job to get to. Others were like, really? Tell me more. And so it was interesting to see. And that was in late 21 or early 22, probably. So just around the time the chat GPT came out. So today there are smart NPCs and I think they will get to the point where they may not know. Now that's not the case. I mean, if you walk around New York, there's a good chance somebody will run up to you and say, you are in a simulation or you're in a video game.

40:32And now the question is, are they crazy? Are they crazy? Or is this my moment? Right. To take the red pill. I don't know. Yep. Okay. So anomalies are something that I remember from the matrix a little bit anyway. And I would love to talk about anomalies in the real world, deja vu, other kinds of glitches, or even UFOs, right? Might be one that's apropos lately. What do you think's going, if we had to plug that into the simulation theory, what's, how does, does that fit in at all? It does, because in any simulation, you end up with glitches, but you also end up with an information substrate that you can't see normally, but it's driving what happens.

41:13And so this could be driving glitches, like whether it's deja vu or where you feel like you've actually experienced this before. In fact, I quoted Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer who wrote the books behind Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle. I interviewed his wife while I was writing the first edition of this book a few years back. And he had a speech in Metz, France in 1977 where he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality. and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality. Now, that's become a very famous quote.

41:49In fact, the Wachowskis who made The Matrix were inspired by Philip K. Dick. But he went on, and that's the famous line, but if you read the rest of his speech, what he said next was, we would have the sense of reliving the same events, of saying the same words. We would have a sense of deja vu. Such an impression is a clue that some variable had been changed in the past. And so one way that it fits in with deja vu is it's very possible that we have done this before, because if you run a simulation, you might run it multiple times to see what is the best outcome, the worst outcome. Perhaps you are running it yourself in dreams, for example.

42:26Some people had precognitive dreams, for example. It's a real phenomenon, and it's weird because you can't really explain it from a normal point of view. I'm not much of a believer in any of this, but I will say that this stuff has happened to me too, of course. Well, one, deja vu happens to everybody pretty much. But two, I've definitely, I mean, I remember very clearly having dreams and telling my mom about it. And then I'd be like, this is the thing that happened to my dream like a week or two later. And she's like, whatever, you're a kid and you don't know what you're talking about. But I remember very clearly being like, no, I told you that this was a thing and it's happening right now.

42:58And she, you know, she didn't believe me. And rightfully so, because it sounds insane. It sounds insane. I didn't believe it until I had it happen to me in the business world. It was really weird. We had a startup back in Boston. We worked with IBM as one of our key partners. And we had a competitor, this guy named Mark, and his company was called Edge Research. And they disappeared like a year ago. We weren't sure what happened to them. And I just hadn't thought of this guy in a year. Never had a dream about him. one morning I had a dream and there's my competitor Mark, you know, from edge research.

43:29And he's like, Hey, how are things going? And I just woke up and I thought, that's bizarre. Why am I dreaming of this guy now of all days? Haven't heard from him in a year. Never, ever had a dream about him. And then I walked in the office and I got a call from IBM and they're like, Hey, we're calling you. Because before we do this announcement today, because you're one of our partners, but we're introducing this new product. Unfortunately, it's going to compete with your product. It's going to probably crush your product, but you're a good partner. So we thought we'd let you know beforehand. I was like, great, thanks.

43:53But then I was like, wait, how come I hadn't heard of this product before? IBM's a big company. I mean, I'm sure I would have heard of it. He goes, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, from Edge Research? We bought his company about a year ago, and they've been working in secret in New Hampshire, and it's just coming out now. And it was like, of all the times for me to have that dream, it was just so, and it happened before I got the phone call. So this kind of thing would start to happen. So that's another kind of glitch in the matrix. That doesn't mean all dreams are precognitive.

44:19Most dreams are just, you know, spicy pizza, as one of my mentors used to say. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be flying around with Bruce Lee over the Manhattan skyline anytime soon. Right. Yeah, yeah. But there is an element of dreams. There's lucid dreaming, where you recognize that you're actually... This happens to me all the time. It does? When I was a kid, this happens to me constantly. It was basically every night. Oh, interesting. All the way through maybe high school. Yeah. Yeah, and then I started getting, like, really stressed out. I remember once school got kind of real and really stressful, it basically stopped happening.

44:48Oh, interesting. Now, how did you know you were in a dream? Oh, so this is interesting. I would love to do a full episode about this at some point, but I knew I was in a dream because I, one, they were almost always recurring dreams. So it would be like, oh, I'm swimming with my neighbor, Michael, again, like I have for the last 20 nights in a row. And then I would go, all right, this is a dream. Or I would do something where I would be dreaming and I would do, maybe it was a nightmare and something was chasing me. And I would go, huh, wait a minute. I've had this dream before, I think. also this doesn't make sense that i can't run why would my feet be stuck to the ground this must be a dream well if it's a dream then i don't have to be stuck to the ground in fact i can fly so i would jump over the monster and then i would be like well i'm not just going to jump over this dumb monster forget about that i want to explore i'm flying so then i would go fly over the neighborhood over cities i had never been to before and then the next night or a few nights later i would have another dream and i go oh my god i can't run because my feet are oh wait no no I've been here.

45:43So usually it was a recurring thing and it was always like, I've had this dream so many times that whenever I feel this way, it's just a dream. Okay. So you had like little clues and getting back to inception, he had the little spinning thing that was his to figure out if it was a dream or not. So the totem thing. So this is, I wasn't going to share this, but I might as well, because it's apropos. There would be, when I was starting to become a little bit more of a young man, I would go, if this is a dream, I could probably make these women that are in the dream disrobe. when you were a teenager right yeah yeah and then i would be like wow they're all wearing bikinis now i'm definitely in a dream this is amazing well what else can i do that's that that was my yeah it's like the best holodeck from star trek yeah but it would be like wow oh man that girl from my classes wait a minute i can make her get into a swimsuit oh wow so you had that much control oh yeah yeah and i remember being able to like choose the color of the swimsuit everything it was just like i could control every element of this dream it's awesome it's interesting so what we call lucid dreaming, which is what you were doing there in modern times, it's a deviation of what the Tibetan monks called dream yoga.

46:49And in dream yoga, what would happen is they would train the monks through meditation during the day, but then while they're falling asleep to try to keep... Because we have a waking consciousness and we have a dreaming consciousness and there's a wall in the middle. That's why it's hard to remember. You can remember a dream when you first wake up, but then over time, you don't remember it. But they train the monks to recognized that they're in a dream. And I used to do a lot of lucid dreaming too. And flying was one of my clues that, okay, this might be a dream if I can fly. I can't tell you the number of times where I was sitting with somebody in a restaurant or something and I thought, well, this is obviously not a dream.

47:24I'm not going to try to fly. That would be stupid. And then I floated up off my chair and turns out it actually was a dream. But so they would train them. But the reason they would train them is because then the monks would remember their waking life and they would remember that this is a false world. And in Buddhism, that's basically one of the main tenets of, you know, not just the spiritual practice, but of the cosmology is that the world is Maya or an illusion, which is the term that Eastern mystics use from Sanskrit. And basically they said, look, if you can wake up in the dream, you should be able to wake up here and remember there's a part of you that's outside the dream.

48:01It's what the Hindus call the Atman, or what we would call in the West, the soul, or what I would call the player. And the player could be one-to-one matching or it could be somebody who's running the simulation. But that's another type of glitch if we think of the world as a type of dream. Another is synchronicity. I'm sure if you've heard the term, some people are skeptical about it. Jung coined the term synchronicity. And he said it's basically when an inner thought and some outer event coincide. So in a sense, the dream that I talked about was kind of a synchronicity. But there's also a new way of thinking about synchronicity.

48:35So what happens is when that happens, you think of somebody, somebody calls you, the more scientifically minded of us say, well, that's just coincidence. No big deal. Yeah, this happens quite a bit. It's like what you said about the dream and your competitor, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm always surprised by this because it happens so often. And look, some of remembering that is selection bias or survivor bias, whatever it is. Confirmation bias, actually. That's the most common one, right? So the amount of times I think about somebody and they aren't thinking about me is probably 100 to 1. but it does happen so often i'll send someone a text and they'll go i'm having lunch right now talking about you with someone else and it'll be like again not a family member not a friend not a close friend someone you don't even from four years ago i'm like hey do you still run that company that does bottle manufacturing and they're like who is this and i'm like jordan harbinger like dude my friend is telling me about your podcast at a meal right now and i haven't talked to this guy since a conference in 2016 right it happens often enough i was in the uk in cambridge last year doing some research on AI at their AI center.

49:35And I was meeting a friend and I was telling her, oh, you know, there's this guy who's got this, he's talking about religion and AI and his name is this, and I've never met him. And she goes, wait a minute. And she wasn't from the University of Cambridge. She just happened to be in London and visited so we could have coffee. And she goes, wait a minute, his sister was my best friend. And it was just like a weird, you know, like 20 years ago. It wasn't even like recently because she didn't even live in the UK anymore. And so this kind of thing happens a lot. But from simulation hypothesis perspective, you can think of it as there's an information substrate.

50:07And so there's a term called a technological synchronicity, which is a term that a guy named Jacques Vallée, who, speaking of UFOs, he was involved in UFO research back at Project Blue Book. And if you've ever watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was the inspiration. Maybe 20 years ago. Yeah. He was the inspiration for the French scientists. So Jacques was a French scientist who came to the U.S., got his PhD in computer science and then got into this UFO world at the time. But anyway, he defined this term. But the idea is that there's an information substrate that organizes things so that what seems like a coincidence is just how we organize information.

50:42And I like to describe it by using an example from online shopping, because I used to be in the online advertising business. And so the other day, I was shopping for a backpack online on my laptop on my desk. And then it was a specific backpack. And I was about to buy it and I said, let me hold off on buying it. And then I'm on my phone, you know, outside on Facebook or something. And I see an ad for that exact backpack. Probably not magic. It's probably not magic, right? But if I didn't know anything about databases, cookies, internet. Oh, I was going to say, don't tell me you think that this is, okay, now I got you.

51:13No, no, I'm saying, I know exactly what it is. I see where you're going. So in fact, we even call it registering your intent in the advertising industry. When you put the thing in the shopping cart and you abandon it, that we put that in a database. and so we keep track of it behind the scenes and so there's an ad generator that is like ooh, you're the guy that had the intent to do this and we put it to you. But my point is if you didn't know anything about the internet you would say, oh, either it's magic It's a sign. It's a sign. I meant to buy this back. Yeah, or you would say it's just a coincidence.

51:44That's the scientific point of view. That's bullshit because we can't see it. Cookies, come on, you're making this stuff up. It lives in some database in a cloud. You've got to be kidding. That's a good point. This is a really good analogy. Yeah. Yeah. So if there's an information substrate and our thoughts are somehow getting things from the database and putting things in the database, it's very possible that we're getting hints about that. That's why it might come up in a dream. Or if we're thinking of someone, it's very possible that that could remind them and then they do it to us. As long as we don't think of the world as a material, physical world.

52:13you know and so that's kind of it's become a kind of religion in many ways i think in our society and people get as offended when you tell materialists that something else could be going on that they can't see as people who like you tell them oh jesus didn't really resurrect they'll be like you know christians could be pissed at you and so it's a it's become kind of a religion that says that that doesn't fit my worldview therefore it's not possible i mean i'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to all this stuff yeah it's okay to be a skeptic i'm just saying that at the same Sometimes there are things that happen that we can't explain.

52:44That's for sure true. So there may be a scientific explanation as opposed to a divine one. That would be great, actually. Yeah, I would actually rather find out that we're all living in a simulation than some of the other stuff is real. I'd rather that be. So what about, and again, at the risk of sounding like I'm just trying to get a clip for stoners on YouTube. What about the UFOs? How does that fit into simulation theory? Or how does simulation theory make UFOs make more sense as opposed to? Well, it's interesting. And I have spent a little bit of time investigating the UFO phenomenon. There's a guy at Harvard named Avi Loeb who started the Galileo Project.

53:20And I'm an advisor to the project. And then there's a guy from Stanford named Gary Nolan who started the Sol Foundation. And I wrote a white paper for them on venture capital investment in UAP technology, which would be potentially technology that can move a lot faster, kind of far future technology, the way we would have thought of AI 50 years ago. It's something that almost seems like Arthur C. Clarke said, any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But when you think of UFO sightings and how they might fit in, this is where it gets a little weird. So science fiction has kind of influenced the way we think about UFOs.

53:56Like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was a spacecraft. It came from an alien planet, presumably. And that's pretty much the narrative that you see in science fiction. But what happens is with UFO sightings, they get weirder and weirder. And things seem to plop in and out of existence. They change shape. So I was with Jacques once, and he told me about this case where one person saw the UFO and the next person standing next to him didn't see it. So again, that doesn't make any sense from our standard material point of view. It's either there or it's not there. But if one person is seeing it and the other person isn't, that's really weird.

54:33And then I heard of another case. There were two people sitting next to each other in the car, and one saw like a large cylinder, and one saw like a donut. Like, it was weird, different enough, and they were sitting right next to each other in the car, that it was just strange that they could do that. And then there are reports of UFOs popping in and out of existence. I mean, I've had people tell me, they're like, it was a clear blue sky. There was nothing there. And suddenly it slowly materialized. And to me, that sounds a lot like brezzing or rendering within video games. What happens is you and I, like if we were doing this on Zoom or we were both sitting inside a virtual reality room like in Second Life or Meta's Horizon Worlds or whatever or VRChat, we might think we're sitting together.

55:18but we're not, right? I'm rendering you on my computer and you're rendering me on your computer. Right. We happen to be sitting across from each other, although we could fake it. Well, I'm still rendering you on my brain, right? Yeah, that's right. You have another level on the computer. So basically at some level, we are both rendering this scene, like I'm rendering the scene of the studio and so are you on your computer. I put that in quotes because it doesn't have to be. It's a coffee machine. It's still cashed. Is it still cashed? Yeah. But that would explain how you could have a phenomenon that seems both physical and non-physical and changes shape and appears differently.

55:54Because in a video game, you could be at level 30 and I could be at level 2. And you could have the sea dragon spell and I couldn't. We could be standing in the exact same field and looking up and you're like, look at the dragon. There's no dragon there. What are you talking about? Right. It's just a different. So it could be these objects are being rendered into our reality. Now, why are they being rendered into our reality? That gets, you know, much more complicated. There was also a case where Jacques told me where there was this group that said this UFO came down at a 45 degree angle and landed in a clearing in northern California, southern Oregon.

56:27If you've been up there, you know, there's a lot of redwood trees and big, you know, evergreen trees. And they said it landed here. And so people went to investigate and they were trying to find physical evidence. And Jacques said, well, if it came down at a 45 degree angle and it landed here in the clearing. It would have had to go through those trees, like literally cut through the trees. And they were like, yeah, that's what happened. But we didn't want to tell anybody that because then we sound like we're crazy. Right. So again, you have this weird thing that almost looks like it's a holographic projection into our reality.

56:56And then it becomes physical. Just like when you read something in a video game, you can kind of walk through walls and things that when they're not fully rezzed, but then when they're fully rezzed, you have the laws of physics in the world. So is it possible that UFOs are, in fact, not extraterrestrial, but are somehow extradimensional, and they're being projected into this reality? That's not to say some of them couldn't also be hoaxes. Some of them could be extraterrestrial. I mean, there's the Fermi paradox in scientific circles, where they say Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and I think he was a Nobel Prize winner too, but he said, look, if there was life in the universe, and even if they didn't have warp speed, so they couldn't travel faster than the speed of light.

57:35Over like 100 ,000 years, they could colonize most of the galaxy, certainly over a million years. And the universe is billions of years old. So where are all the aliens, right? Now, UFO, people in that world would say they're here. We've seen them. We see them all the time. Navy pilots have seen them. But if we take that perspective, then it would be weird to have this entire galaxy of whatever, 100 billion stars and, you know, how many was it? Two trillion galaxies or something like that without other life, unless they're all being generated for us to make it look like we live in this infinite world.

58:11Interesting. Oh, you mean the stars and planets are just being generated as we observe them, like you said before? Yeah. And there might be some where there are aliens on there, and that world is also being rendered for that specific group of players. And where the whole point of simulation could be, wait till we meet each other openly. Whereas in the UFO world, there's this idea of a concealed contact. Like contact has happened already, just it's not been admitted by the government. And I've talked to people in some of these top secret programs. There's something weird there. They're hiding something.

58:40Now, we don't know what they're hiding, whether it's extraterrestrials, it's time travelers, it's top secret technology that Lockheed Martin built in Skunk Works. I'm going to go with that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, I think where most people would go. But then I talked to people who've been at Lockheed and have been in these programs and they're like, well, we're reverse engineering something. Now, I don't know where they got it from, what they're reverse engineering, make a piece of metal. Could have been a civilization on Earth a million years ago that's completely like all traces of it have vanished now.

59:07But there's still stuff that they find and they're like, hey, let's figure out how this thing works. Hey, if we're all NPCs, I'm at least trying to be the kind that makes good recommendations. Here are a few you should actually click on. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Sleep Me. I've gotten pretty serious about optimizing my sleep lately because it affects everything. Focus, mood, energy, really how patient I am with my kids. I wish it wasn't the case, but it sure is. And one thing that's made a huge difference for me is the ChiliPad from SleepMe. It's a water-based cooling system.

59:39If it's right on top of your existing mattress, it lets you control your exact bed temperature. I set mine cool. Jen sets hers warmer. We both get our ideal sleep temps. We're both cozy and comfy. And I'm not exaggerating when I say this. It's one of the most valuable things that I own. I sleep deeper. I wake up feeling more rested and when I travel without it, I miss it every single time. If you're serious about feeling better and performing better, start with your sleep and the Chili Pad by Sleep Me is worth every penny. Visit sleep.me slash Jordan to get your Chili Pad and save 20 % with code Jordan.

1:00:10This special offer is available for listeners of the Jordan Harbinger Show, but only for limited time. Plus, it ships free and you can try it risk free for 30 days with flexible payment and financing options. And if you don't like it, return it at no cost. That's sleep.me.jordan because when you optimize your sleep, you optimize your performance. This ad is brought to you by VIV Healthcare, the makers of Apritude, Cabotegravir. You never skip your SPF and you carry hand sanitizer like an accessory. But what are you doing for HIV prevention? One way to help protect yourself from HIV is Apritude, a prescription medicine used to reduce the risk of getting HIV in adults and adolescents weighing at least 77 pounds.

1:00:49You must be HIV negative to receive APRITUDE and get tested before each injection. If you think you are exposed to HIV or have flu-like symptoms, tell your doctor right away. More HIV testing may be needed. APRITUDE does not prevent other sexually transmitted infections. Practice safer sex to reduce your risk. Get APRITUDE as scheduled. Missing doses increases your HIV risk. Don't take APRITUDE if allergic to it or taking certain medicines that may interact. Tell your doctor about your medical conditions, liver problems, and mental health. Serious side effects include allergic reactions or rash, liver problems, and depression.

1:01:21If these occur, get medical help right away. The most common side effect is injection site reaction. Bring your A-game and talk to your doctor. Learn more at Apertude.com or call 1-888-240-0340. I've got homes.com as a sponsor for this episode. Homes.com knows when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or the condo. It's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location. It's the neighborhood. If you've got kids, it's also schools, nearby parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home.

1:01:57It's so hard not to say home every single time. And when I say in-depth information, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood complete with a video guide. They also have details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student-teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place, homes.com. We've done your homework. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible.

1:02:32All of the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, go ahead and email us jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Rizwan Virk. Okay, so a lot of people are wondering, why do I care if I'm simulated? It doesn't change my behavior or should it? It depends on if we're in the NPC version or the RPG version. That actually does make a difference, I think, because some people are like, well, I don't want to be in a simulation because if I'm just an NPC, then I don't really matter.

1:03:13But that doesn't mean things aren't real to you as they're happening. I mean, there's a philosopher at NYU named David Chalmers, and he said, look, what happens in the virtual world is real while you're in the virtual world. It's like if you learn a skill, if you learn a language online, have you really learned it just because it was virtual? Yeah, you still learned it. In the RPG version, you're a player in the game. And how do we build video games? We build video games with increasing quests, increasing difficulty of quests and challenges. And you choose sort of the next challenge. And some people choose to have lives that are, you know, with a lot more difficulty level.

1:03:48And others choose to have very easy games or when you first start playing. Like people often say to me, look, if I was in a simulation, I would choose to be a billionaire and a movie star and have all these, you know, Like you were saying, have the girls all in bikinis at my Hugh Hefner palace. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that 12-year-old me was super into that. Yeah, 12-year-olds wouldn't. 45-year-old me could take it and leave it. Yeah, exactly. It's like a dog chasing a car. What are you going to do when you catch the car? Yeah, exactly. And so it's possible as we go through life, we all face real significant challenges.

1:04:22And if we think of ourselves as players in a video game, then what it does is it gives us this ability to say, okay, if even at first I don't succeed, I'm going to keep trying. It helps maybe to put perspective into very difficult situations. That doesn't mean there isn't real suffering in the world. There absolutely is. If you take the NPC version, you could say, well, it doesn't matter. If you've ever seen that movie, Free Guy, it came out a couple of years ago. It was like an NPC. It was at Ryan Reynolds, I think. One of the Ryans. Ryan Reynolds. I think it was Ryan Reynolds, who was an NPC in a video game and it was a video game kind of like grand theft auto so the players had like abilities that the npcs didn't have he was just a guy who worked at a bank or something and he realized these guys had these glasses and when he put on the glasses he started to see all this extra information in the world around him and then he started to realize he was an npc and some of the people in the game were actually characters of avatars of real people but they abused people you know when they came in the game because why not some people say well we can't be in a simulation there can't be any creators because then why would they create so much suffering in the world?

1:05:29It's like, well, what do we do when we create video games? Right. Yeah. They make Grand Theft Auto, which is worse than real life, right? Which is worse. Yeah. They actually make it worse in order to have suffering or that you want to simulate what's going to happen in a nuclear blast if there's a World War III. You would literally make the people suffer in order to see what would happen. So that's at a civilizational level because people always say to me, well, what's the purpose of the game? And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do we play video games? And then why do we run simulations?

1:05:56Now, the second question is kind of that nuclear war scenario. We run simulations to see what would happen, what's the most likely outcome, what's the worst outcome, what's the most favorable outcome, and then you tweak the variables and you run them again and again. The reason we play video games is maybe to have experiences that we can't have outside of the physical world. And so it's very possible that we are choosing to be in a video game with a character, like when do actors win Oscars? It's when they play roles that are like extremely difficult. Right. Yeah. Tom Hanks and was it Philadelphia, the movie?

1:06:29Oh yeah. Where he played. And that was when he won his first Oscar is because that was a very challenging life that he played. He had, it was AIDS, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was a gay man with AIDS and this is like an eighties movie. So it was like late eighties. It was very controversial, but pointing out the difficulties that they went through or Braveheart with Mel Gibson or that's what makes the story interesting. Those are the choice roles. And so it's when we have some difficulties in our lives, if we think of it from the perspective of, okay, this is a challenge that either was chosen for me or that I chose, but I need to get through it.

1:07:01It's a more difficult challenge maybe than that guy's having. And, you know, I wrote this book when I had a very challenging episode in my life, which was I ended up having heart surgery back in like 2018. And I was at the height of my entrepreneurial career. And it was during that time that I had gotten some intuitions while I was recovering. I mean, I didn't have a traditional near-death experience, but I had some intuitions that I had a plan and a storyline for my life, which was I was supposed to be an entrepreneur, make a lot of money, and then go be a writer. But instead of doing that, I went on.

1:07:32And if you had asked me in high school, I would have said, yeah, you know, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and then I'll be a writer. Like it was sort of this knowing that that was part of the story. And I think the things that we are naturally attracted to again and again, and I had written a little bit, but I was still doing entrepreneurial stuff. I was still investing. I was still kind of worried about venture capital and making money. And then after that, what happened was I literally couldn't do anything in the business world for nine months. And every time I would like jump back in, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go out and help start another video game company.

1:08:02Once I'd recovered, I would end up back in the hospital and it would happen again and again. But when I did have enough energy to go and write for a couple of hours, I would take a Uber to Starbucks. Oh, wow. And it gave me energy. From the hospital? Not from the hospital, but when I was recovering. No, not from the hospital. They wouldn't let me go. Yeah, they'd let you do that? No, no, I was in the ICU, and it was when I got home. I'm talking about months where I was still recovering. You know, modern medicine is great at very specific things, but they're not always great at predicting side effects.

1:08:30And so it took a way longer recovery than they had told me. But during that time, I found that I was being steered and motivated to do this other part of my story. and I wrote two books in nine months during that time while I was recovering. One is an academic book about startups for Columbia Business School, and one was the first edition of this book. The second edition just came out. But by thinking of that as a different kind of challenge, it was almost like the difficulty level was increased and it got me on one of these different choose your own adventure paths. Maybe not if I had to consciously choose, I would not choose that as a way to go.

1:09:05Probably not, but we can think of ourselves that way. And then finally, there's what I call the life review. Now, as a skeptic, you may or may not believe this idea, but it's interesting using a virtual reality metaphor. It actually becomes understandable and it can help us in how we go through the game. So I don't think we're in Grand Theft Auto. I mean, some people may think that's the game we're in, but you can evaluate a game based upon how you're measured afterwards. And what people who've had near-death experiences report, I mean, they report many things in common over, you know, many decades now, thousands and thousands of reports.

1:09:38You know, they're floating above their body. They see a light. There's a being of light. But one of the things that they report really caught my attention and it's called a life review. And it was this guy named Daniel Brinkley. He was struck by lightning back in the seventies. And, uh, he had a near death experience. He wrote a book called saved by the light. Interesting guy, but he used to be in the military and used to shoot people. And he said, I, I had a life review, which was like a holographic panoramic replaying of everything in my life, but from the point of view of other people. And he used to beat up kids when he was in school.

1:10:10He had experienced what it was like to be beat up by himself. He's like, oh, that's what it felt like. Man, I shouldn't have done that. And then he had to experience what it was like to be shot by himself. And then he had to see the ripple effects on that guy's family, the guys he shot in, say, in Vietnam or someplace, when he was in the military. And it gave him a different perspective in how he treats people. And so I looked at that And I said, you know, that is something we do in video games. We can replay the entire video game. And we can replay it from any XYZ coordinate. And so there's a game called CSGO Counter-Strike Global Offensive, which is a first-person shooter.

1:10:42It takes place in, I don't know, the desert Iraq somewhere. And I was involved with a startup right here, actually not far from here, Cupertino, where you would put on a virtual reality helmet and you would replay the CSGO session, the game that had been played. But you would see it from any XYZ coordinate. so you can wander around. You could literally see what it was like to shoot yourself. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. That's kind of like what these people have been describing. So if we are in a virtual reality, there's no reason you can't move what we call the virtual camera to any XYZ coordinate and any XYZT coordinate, and you can replay it.

1:11:18And kids today watch video game replays on YouTube all the time. That's true. I mean, my nephew, he was only like three years old, and he would say to his father, my brother, He would say, Dad, I want to watch Star Wars. He goes, Oh, you want to watch a Star Wars movie? He goes, No, no, I want to watch the man and the woman play the Star Wars game. And so if we think of it as that type of game, as a multiplayer game, you know, we might treat people differently if we know that we're going to review what happened afterwards. Isn't that a tenet of most major religions, though, right? I think it's Islam that has, like, you get a review of the Book of Deeds or something.

1:11:48Yeah, it's called the Scroll of Deeds. Scroll of Deeds, yeah. And so I was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in the UK with these scholars from Cairo. They're like Islamic scholars. And I'm like, are you sure you want me to speak there? You know, I write about, you know, virtual reality and business and video games. And there's an Ayatollah there, which just means like a cardinal. It wasn't like the guy. Not the guy from Iran. It wasn't like he was from Iran. Oh, OK. But he wasn't like the guy, like Ayatollah Khomeini or Khomeini's supreme leader. It was like, think of one of a bunch of bishops, right?

1:12:17And so here I was telling them, well, the Quran describes this thing called the scroll of deeds. It says you have these angels who sit there and write down all your good deeds and your bad deeds. It doesn't even give them names. And then it says, at the end, your book will be open. Read it. You yourself are sufficient as a reckoner by reading your own book. And I said, okay, those are technological metaphors. We don't think of books as technology, but it is. I don't think they meant, which is why many of us in the technoscientific world don't take religion seriously. They didn't mean that they were like literally angels sitting there with feather pens writing things down.

1:12:49But maybe what the essence of what they're trying to tell us is that everything is being recorded and we are going to replay it. And the only way they could describe it to people 2 ,000 years ago is, oh, it's a book. It's a record-keeping device. And so angels are actually AI. These angels are not angels. They're just processes that are running, that are recording everything. And then it gets replayed, not as a book, but as a holographic panoramic point of view. And then it turns out they have that same idea in the Bible. There's the book of life where they write down who gets into heaven and who gets into hell.

1:13:19And they say, your books will be opened and each of you will be judged according to your deeds. Well, again, I don't think that if we take it seriously for a moment, if we just say, suppose they're telling some truth, we don't know what truth it is, then probably that would not be a physical book with billions of people. And then turns out in the Hindu traditions, I just learned this recently. I don't even know if this made it into this edition of the book. There's a guy named Chitra Gupta. And they say, who's Chitra Gupta? He's a minor god. Well, it turns out he's called the record keeper and he sits next to Yama, the god of death.

1:13:50Why? so that Yama doesn't make a mistake in terms of where he sends you. And this guy writes down everything that you do. And again, that's a metaphor. It's just an accounting metaphor that we use to try to, what these guys could actually be in a simulated world is just processes. All the minor gods and all the minor angels. Now, I'm not trying to, I don't want to get in trouble with anybody's religion. I'm not saying the art angels, art individuals. It's my inbox that I'm worried about, not yours. That's right. But actually, I find religious people very open to this. Yeah. Because it turns out, you know, they've been trying to use metaphors to try to describe something that is outside of this world.

1:14:31And how do you describe something outside of this world? You can't. You have to use metaphors, you know. Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica? I have not, no. It was a science fiction series in kind of post-Iraq days was the version I'm thinking of. And they had these AI robots who, oddly enough, became religious fanatics. I don't know why. as opposed to the rest of the people. But one of the guys has a line and he goes, what is the most basic article of faith? She goes, what? He goes, that this is not all there is. And that actually is true of the simulation hypothesis as well. But with the simulation hypothesis, we have a techno-scientific metaphor and a way to describe how that can happen.

1:15:08Like, for example, Genesis seems ridiculous if we try to take it at face value. God spoke, there was light. And then he said, create the water. He said, create the land. Okay, now create the forests and the trees and the fruit. Okay, now create the animals. Now create the people in six days. Again, from a modern type of point of view, you're like, yeah, okay. Either we dismiss it or we say it's some kind of metaphor for something. But it turns out we can do that now. If you look at the holodeck in Star Trek, the way they programmed it was they basically told it, create a street in Paris. And now with AI and prompting, we can create entire virtual worlds just by saying, okay, now create the water.

1:15:45There was a demo of Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago. This is even before ChatGPT was released with a product called BuilderBot. He was like, BuilderBot, make an ocean. And it made an ocean. And he was standing there with his avatar. Okay, now have a little island on it. Okay, now put some trees up. Now add some clouds. Now do this. Right? AI could generate an entire world for us. So it could be that all the major religions of the world, and in the Eastern traditions, you almost don't even need to do metaphors. I mean, in the reincarnation, they say, you take on this character, you play the character, you die, you go back, you come in, you play another character.

1:16:20I mean, it's basically like a video game. I mean, those guys, and that's why I say Eastern mystics in the subtitle, but even Western mystics. In Islam, there's this idea of forgetfulness. There's like the 70 ,000 veils when you incarnate and you forget about them. And in the Greek traditions, there's the river of forgetfulness. You have to cross it when you incarnate. and I was on a podcast recently, the woman who was running it was for the Big Bang Theory. She was Jewish and she's telling me, oh, we have the same thing. We have this angel. It's a Mayim Bialik? Yeah, it was a Mayim Bialik, yep.

1:16:52When she puts, she goes, we have this angel who, you know, Leila, I think, who puts her hand on your upper lip here and that's why we have a cleft. But the reason she does it is you know everything and then you forget everything when they presses it. So again, that's a metaphor. I don't think that was meant to say there's a real angel that actually is sitting there. So I think many of the things in the religious traditions can be reinterpreted from a simulation point of view. And that at least gives us a way, a new way to think about it, that maybe we shouldn't just dismiss them because here we are in Silicon Valley, people tend to be, either they're religious or they're kind of materialists and atheists.

1:17:29But maybe there's something in between. Maybe. I know we're running out of time. I do want to leave with this though. Well, how far away are we, do you think, from creating these realistic enough simulations where we can't tell the difference? Like how many years away? Well, you know, when I thought about this originally, like when I started writing back in 2019, I thought we were maybe, you know, 50 % of the way there. We're just getting basic virtual reality, augmented reality. And AI was kind of in the future. It was in the labs, but it hadn't really come out. But now AI is moving so fast that I think we'll get to that point much more quickly.

1:18:04And certainly within the next 50 years, 100 years at the max. But I think we're actually almost 70 % of the way there in terms of all of the stages that I lay out. Now, you don't need all of those stages, but I lay them out so that you can build the matrix fully, like including brain-computer interfaces where you can go in and you would be embedded within it and you would completely forget. So that's one of the ones that we're starting with, but we haven't mastered yet. So that one's pretty fun. But AI has moved so fast. It was actually stage nine out of 10 stages when I first started thinking about this.

1:18:36it's actually one of the ones that's moved faster than stage seven and eight, which are all about not just reading thoughts, but implanting memories like in science fiction films. So that stuff is going to take a while. So I don't think it's like next year. But I do think within a few decades, certainly within a hundred years, we'll be there. But I think probably even within 50 years. Wow. So we don't need a one million years technology advance to build something like this. It's a hundred years, 50 years, will definitely be there. Incredible. So, okay, so if we get there and we build a simulation, then doesn't that dramatically increase the odds, one, that we're in a simulation, but two, that we're in a simulation that's in a simulation that built a simulation?

1:19:16Possibly, yes. So when Bostrom laid out a simulation argument, he had three possibilities. Let's just reduce them to two. There are no simulations or there's a billion simulations, right? If you get to that point, you're going to make a lot of simulations. If you never get to that point, fine, you don't build any simulations at all. But basically, so you might think the odds are 50%. There's two options. But if we show that it's possible to get there ourselves, then it's very likely in a physical world that is older than ours, a million years older than ours, that someone has already gotten there.

1:19:46So it increases the chances dramatically to like 99%. I think that we're inside some kind of a simulation. It's at least 50. I put it at about 70 now because we're at about 70 % of the way to get to that point as well. So I'm sort of reducing the probability. Once that gets to 100 % that we can get there, then it's pretty close to 100 % that we're already inside a simulation. Could be from the future, like you said. And perhaps there's more than one timeline. I mean, perhaps this is being run to see if we destroy ourselves, and then we're going to go back and rerun it again. And those people would have deja vu and say, hey, didn't we have this podcast before already?

1:20:23Dan, you and I spoken already? Yeah, I just remember the host was much better looking last time. Rizwan Virk, Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. This has been great fun. The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75 % still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans, built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen. 71 % of the Earth is ocean, and of that, 75 % is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary. Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown.

1:20:59We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a$10 million birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Ocean's Eleven, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management?

1:21:34Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it. That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. But I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people. I want to be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together? Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15 ,000 meters. That thing was a tank. And things did go wrong, eventually.

1:22:10You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware. And you need to mitigate those risks. What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 1089 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. So, are we living in a simulation? I'm not saying go unplug your toaster and start looking for a glitch in the sky, but as Rizwan reminds us, even asking that question forces us to think differently about reality, meaning, and what it means to be human in a world that might just be running on code. Whether this is base reality or somebody else's grand experiment, the lesson is kind of the same.

1:22:47Curiosity still matters. Humility still matters. And how we treat each other in this game definitely matters. Maybe the real test isn't finding the code. It's how we play within it. All things Rizwan Virk will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter every Wednesday, Weebitwiser. It's very specific. It's very practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. It is a short, under two-minute read, and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

1:23:21It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about If you know somebody who's interested in simulation theory, video games, computer programming They might be interested in this one Definitely share this episode with them In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show So you can live what you learn And we'll see you next time