EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,075 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- RVRizwan Virk
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- RVRizwan Virk
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music) By the way, Diana Pysoka says hi.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, cool. You know her?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah, I know her pretty well, actually.
- JRJoe Rogan
Boy, her theories are very, very, very interesting.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
She's a strange person to talk to, 'cause you start like, you start really considering some of the things she's saying. It's just the, all the UFO stuff. I go back and forth on the UFO stuff from it being complete bullshit to like maybe there's something there.
- RVRizwan Virk
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I fluctuate throughout the day. (laughs)
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah. Well, we can talk about that. You know, I'm, I'm peripherally involved with-
- JRJoe Rogan
Jim, you're making noise over there.
- RVRizwan Virk
Huh? Uh...
- JRJoe Rogan
Shut your mic off.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, you're peripherally involved with-
- RVRizwan Virk
With, uh, the Galileo Project at Harvard and the SOLO Foundation at Stanford, which are like the two academic UFO research groups that, uh, are out there. You know, Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
And Gary Nolan is running... You, you had Gary on your show, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
I have not, but I-
- RVRizwan Virk
You haven't. Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
... I'm in communication with him.
- RVRizwan Virk
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
I talk to him quite a bit.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah. So I'm ma-
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm very fascinated by his work.
- RVRizwan Virk
I'm happy to talk about UFO stuff where it overlaps with simulation theory, and where it doesn't...
- JRJoe Rogan
So how did you get involved in this whole theory in the first place? Simula-... Explain to people your position, if you m- if you don't mind, on, on simulation theory. What do you think is going on?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah, well, so first question, how did I get involved in this, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- 15:00 – 30:00
I'm not sure I…
- RVRizwan Virk
it turns out that decision is in the past as we think of it, but what the delayed choice experiment tells us is that that decision is made now when we measure that light, when the little telescope... Suppose we have two telescopes, one picks up on the left, one picks up on the right. And it's when we do the measurement, and until we do that measurement, both of those possibilities still exist. So we have these two possible pasts. A million years ago, right, the light went to the left or to the right. But which one happened isn't decided until the measurement is done today. So this is like Schrödinger's cat on steroids, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm not sure I totally understand this.
- RVRizwan Virk
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why, why is the decision made when you measure it?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, that's what the experiment, you know, kind of showed with quantum mechanics. Just like, okay, let's start with Schrödinger's cat-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- RVRizwan Virk
... because it's a simpler, simpler version. So Schrödinger's cat is this experiment where there's a, there's a cat in a box, theoretical experiment, nobody's killing any cats. And there's, uh, some poison in there and there's some radioactive material that has a 50% chance of setting off the poison and a 50% chance that it won't, let's say after an hour or so. And so, uh, after an hour, the chances that the cat is dead or alive is 50%, right? Because there's a 50% chance. But what the observer effect and what quantum mechanics is telling us is that both of those possibilities exist. The cat is both alive and dead until somebody looks at that box, right? The observer, in this case. Uh, and so until then, the cat is in the state of superposition, okay? And this is what makes quantum mechanics so weird, right? This is why, you know, Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner said, "Nobody understands-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
"... quantum mechanics." And Niels Bohr said, "If you're not shocked by this, then you haven't understood it." Okay, because to us, the cat has to be alive or it has to be dead.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we don't know until we see.
- RVRizwan Virk
We don't know until we see, but it's only one... And common sense tells us-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
... it's one of those, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
But quantum mechanics a- uh, through the double-slit experiment and the observer effect says both of those possibilities exist in the present until the time when someone looks and, and someone measures that result. So then we say the superposition, which is two states, comes down to one state. So the cat is both alive and dead, and then when somebody measures it, it's either alive or dead and we're in one of those states, right? Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
I, I kind of understand what you're saying, but isn't it really just that we don't know until we open the box and it's not that the cat is both alive and dead, the cat is either alive or dead? We just haven't figured it out yet until we open the box.
- RVRizwan Virk
That's what it would seem like, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
That would be like common sense-
- JRJoe Rogan
Logical.
- RVRizwan Virk
... point of view, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
But what all the physicists have been telling us now for, uh, almost 100 years, right? Going back to the 1920s when quantum mechanics first started to get formalized, is that that's not actually the case. That what happens is you have this probability wave and that there are different probabilities of the cat being alive or dead. Now, of course, they weren't talking about cats. That was-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. The cat is maybe too simplistic.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's like a pl- placeholder.
- RVRizwan Virk
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Y- you know what I'm saying? Like, it's-
- 30:00 – 45:00
Right. …
- RVRizwan Virk
it make sense." Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
Because the cat should be alive or dead. How can it be both, right? And so when you think of information, uh, and you think of the simulation idea, the core of it is that the world is not physical. Okay? This table seems pretty physical, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
But if you go and you look inside, it's mostly empty space, uh, something like 90 some percent, maybe 99%. And then you go to the atoms and you look inside those and it's mostly empty space, right? I mean, there's these electron clouds and stuff, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
... except for the, the, the nucleus, it's mostly empty space. And the problem is like these Russian dolls, if you keep looking inside, they keep looking for this thing called physical matter.... and they can't find it. Like, it's not really there. It's like, you go to the, the very smallest of the Russian dolls and the only thing they can find is information, right? And so, John Wheeler, who I talked about earlier, you know, he plays a, an outsized role in, in, in at least my explorations of simulation theory, he came up with a phrase. And his phrase was, "It from bit." So if there's something that's an it, physical object like this cup or this table, that if you just keep, keep looking down, you have a microscope that just keeps going down, he goes, "In the end, the only thing you find are particles." But what the heck are particles? He said, "Well, the only thing that particles really are is a series of answers to yes-no questions." So it's like, does the particle spin up, does it spin down? Uh, it's got, like, you know, various different polarities and, and things. But so he said, "In the end, the only thing you have are bits of information," because that's a bit, right? Every single decision is a bit, yes or no, one or zero. Uh, that's like the fundamental unit of computation, and that's how we, you know, like I said, stream video, everything else. Uh, and so he, he said, "Everything that's an it is actually from bits of information." Um, and there's a whole new, uh, there's a whole new kind of, uh, field within physics which is called digital physics, right? So in the past, you know, physics was about physical objects moving around. And so digital physics is about information, like what happens to information in the universe. Does it get destroyed in a black hole? Does it get created? So you have... Instead of conservation of momentum and, you know, conservation of energy, you have conversation of information. So it's like a different way of looking at the physical world. Uh, you look at it as a computation rather than looking at it as physical objects moving around like in classical physics.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
The problem is, like, we do live in a physical world as far as we can tell. But then if you measure the actual things in the physical world, then you get to this weirdness.
- RVRizwan Virk
Right, exactly. You get to this weirdness down at the bottom level.
- JRJoe Rogan
The very core of it all, like what is, what is going on as far as we can measure? So...
- RVRizwan Virk
Right. And there's a limit. Like, we can only measure up to the smallest unit-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
... which is called, like, the planck.
- JRJoe Rogan
But as we go deeper, we get less answers and it gets more weird.
- RVRizwan Virk
It gets more weird and it starts to look less like the physical world exists and more like it's a bunch of information that gets rendered as we observe the world or as groups of people observe the world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever taken this back as far as you can and, like, tried to figure out, like, what created this?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or what possibilities could have created this, or was there ever a physical world?
- RVRizwan Virk
W- Well, that's a good question. So where I ended up with this was looking at how the world gets rendered as you observe it. Like for me, my background is, as I said, a computer scientist and a video game designer and developer. Um, is that that's pretty much how we render video games, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
So if you and I are in the s- our avatars are in the same field, uh, or the same room about to shoot each other in a video game, we're not really in the same room, are we?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
You're rendering it on your screen and I'm rendering it on my screen.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
Right? And so there's information that's coming from the server and then what happens is we render only the part that we can see, right? Only that, that view around your avatar. You could be first person point of view or you could be kind of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
... hovering over your character, or like many video games do that these days, uh, like a kind of third person or second-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Fun. …
- RVRizwan Virk
these experiences, right? Sometimes people say, "Well, what's the purpose of the simulation?" And I say, "Well, why do you play video games?" Right? Now, why do you play video games?
- JRJoe Rogan
Fun.
- RVRizwan Virk
Fun is one. Two is to try to have experiences that you probably can't have-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
... outside of the game. Like, even Grand Theft Auto, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- RVRizwan Virk
You're not gonna go out there and do all that crazy stuff in the real world. Well, some people might, but, right? Most people wouldn't. And you're not gonna, I can't fly on a dragon and kill orcs. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
As much as I might want to.
- JRJoe Rogan
Especially with no real world consequences.
- RVRizwan Virk
Right, right. With no real world, exactly. So, that's one of the reasons why, but there are consequences within the game, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
Uh, and for the characters in the game, right? For the NPCs that you're killing, right? Those are all real consequences within the game, but f- when you look at it from outside the game. And so, like, the Eastern mystics have been telling us this, and turns out in the Judeo-Christian Islamic traditions, right? The Abrahamic religions, they've also been telling us this. Uh, that the world is Maya, and they use metaphors back then, right? So, you know, all these religions came about a couple of thousand years ago, and so they had to use metaphors that were understood by the people back then, right? And so they, they used whatever met- the metaphor of the dream was, was a key metaphor. That the world is like a dream or that the soul puts on the body like a set of clothes, and that when you die, you take off these clothes, and then you're back to the soul, whatever that happens to be. They don't really define- (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
... what that is. In fact, they used the exact same metaphor, like in the Bhagavad Gita, they used this clothing metaphor. And then Rumi, who's become popular in the West, and was a, a, was an Islamic Sufi, um, y- you know, a poet, but also a mystic. He used the exact same phrase, right? He said, "You put on the body, you put like a, like a series of clothes." And so they used that metaphor to try to describe something which is the second part of the idea of the simulation hypothesis. The first idea was the world is information that gets rendered, and the second part is the world is some kind of a hoax that we are a part of, uh, for whatever reason. And so, uh, in, in the, in the traditions, over time, they've tried to update these metaphors. Um, and they've tried to use new technology to describe the metaphors, because that's how we can, as modern people, we can understand it. So, about 100 years ago, there was a guy named Swami Yogananda. He came over from India. He was, like, one of the first Indian yogi swamis to really live in the US, and he wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. I don't know if you ever read it, but you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes, I read it. Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
Oh, you read it. Oh, great.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah. In the '60s, it was, like, the book, one of those books that everybody passed around.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
Uh, and Steve Jobs, you know, it was his favorite book. At his funeral, he gave everybody... Or his memorial service, he gave everybody a little brown box. They went home and opened the box, and they found a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi in there. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
Um, but so, Yogananda came over about 100 years ago, and he tried to update this old metaphor. And what was new technology back in the 1920s? It was movies, movie projectors, where... He said, "The world is like a movie projector." Right? You're playing these parts, the actors are playing the parts on the screen, and things are happening to them. But really, the actors aren't necessarily dying, it's the characters that are suffering, you know, within the game, within the movie itself. And so he used that metaphor as a way to try to explain this, this ancient religious idea that's at the core of every single religion, which is that the world, as we see it, is not really real, and there's a real or "real world" beyond this world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
And so he updated the metaphor to use movie projectors. Uh, a- and, you know, if you've ever been... And we've all been in movie theaters, if you look away from the, the screen, you know, you can kind of see the flickering of the light, (laughs) right? Uh, and you can kind of see everybody so engrossed in it that they're not looking around, they don't know what's going on other than-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
... you know, maybe, uh, having some popcorn or something.And so, today, I think we need to update those metaphors, right? Particularly for a younger generation who spent, like, as much of their time in, you know, things like Fortnite or Roblox when they were younger a- as avatars. If we use the, the metaphor of a massively multiplayer online game, and I think Yogananda, if he were alive today... In fact, my, my latest book, which I wrote after the simulation books, uh, because it was the 75th anniversary of, uh, Autobiography of a Yogi a couple years ago, and, uh, Harper Collins India asked me to write this book about, you know, what can you learn from Autobiography of a Yogi, and there's all these weird stories in there of, like, you know, some guy materializing a palace in the Himalayas out of nowhere, right? You've got levitating saints. You've got guys bilocating, disappearing, all kinds of crazy shit going on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
Right? A- and I said, "Well, you sure you want me to write this book? You know, I'm an entrepreneur and (laughs) and a computer scientist." They said, "Yeah, because we want you to use your technology metaphors like the simulation hypothesis to explain this stuff." And so, if Yogananda were alive today, and I wrote this in my, my new book called Wisdom of a Yogi, I would... What he would say is, "It's like a movie, but we're the actors and we're also the audience. And we have a script, and we're kind of playing the script, but we can change the script if we want." Uh, what does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Uh-huh. …
- RVRizwan Virk
about what that is. They call it The Scroll of Deeds. Okay, now of course remember, 2,000 years ago they had to call it something people would understand.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh.
- RVRizwan Virk
The Scroll of Deeds, there's two angels. And you've probably seen like, you know, in the movies, in the animated movies they'll have like a, the angel and the devil.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
That comes out of the Islamic traditions (laughs) , right? And so there's these two angels, uh, uh, they're called the Kiraman Kitabin and they're sitting down and writing down... One's writing down all your good deeds, and one's writing down all your bad deeds. And what- what it says in the tradition... And- and, you know, when I delve into these different traditions it's not so much to say, "Okay, this- this religion is right and that one isn't," but to say, "What's in common across all these religions?" Because that- that part is probably right (laughs) , if these guys are coming to that independently. All the other stuff, maybe. You know, I- I won't st- you know, I- I won't criticize for you believing the other stuff, that's up to you. But that stuff is probably at the core of this thing called life and what happens after life. And so what- what it says in the Islamic traditions is your book will be laid open for you after you die, and you will be the reckoner, right? So we think of Judgment Day and we think of all this stuff-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
... but what it's actually saying... Now they're- that's a metaphor, it doesn't mean there's like angels with a feather pen writing down (laughs) -
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
... in Chinese, you know, "This is what happened this day," or in Arabic.The only thing that makes sense is you would basically just record the entire 3D scene and you would play it back for yourself, which is exactly what near-death experiencers describe when they talk about the life review. It's like this, they're sitting there, there's a screen, and then suddenly they get pulled into the screen and they replay all of this stuff. And there's usually an angel or they might call him God, or they might say it's Jesus, or they might say it's a being of light. You know, different experiencers say different things, but they say, "That guy doesn't judge you." You're looking at it saying, "Oh, crap," you know, "I, I was gonna try to be better person to my wife this time around and I wasn't," you know, and I did this or I did that, or my kids, or, you know. Uh, and they tell us that the moments that matter are the small moments in how you treat other people. Like, that's the thing you're most proud of or, or you're like, "Damn, I, I-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
"... treated that person in, in grade school, you know, we all made fun of her and I should've-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
"... like, been her friend." Like, those are the things that really matter.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- RVRizwan Virk
So if that's the game, right, uh, you always think, what's the objective of the game, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
Uh, and then I think it gives us a very different perspective, uh, and a way to think about life. So, so that's one, you know, kind of big answer for me. The other is, we go through lots of difficulties in life, right? We go through financial difficulties, go through health difficulties, right? Uh, and these can seem, uh, you know, pretty tough, but if we just think of them as a quest with a difficulty level, right, that's higher that we might have to get through, there might be some purpose to that. And that ties to the idea of karma, particularly within the Eastern traditions, right? Where if you think of karma as a s- most people think of karma as, "Hey, you shot me. I'm gonna shoot you in this life," right? That's a very simplistic view of karma. What karma is actually about is about your thoughts, your desires, and your actions which then create situations in the future, um, whether in this life or a future life. So of course, in the Eastern traditions you have the reincarnation idea, which you don't necessarily have in the, uh, in the Western traditions. Um, but that karma is about basically a list of information that follows you around from life to life, right? So you might have a different body in the next life, but that information is still there. Where does it live? You know, I'm from Silicon Valley, I like to say, "It's in the cloud," right?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- RVRizwan Virk
That, that's where we store all our information.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
It's in a database in the cloud.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is also a bizarre thought-
- RVRizwan Virk
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... because it's not a cloud.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah, it's not really a cloud.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why are we even saying that?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why is that so ubiquitous, that term?
- RVRizwan Virk
I know.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's such a stupid term.
- 1:15:00 – 1:16:31
Mm-hmm. …
- RVRizwan Virk
words.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
And so you... They can't really tell you what's out there, but they use these metaphors to try to describe it. And so I think whether you view simulation theory as a, you know, hardcore physics thing, or you view it as a metaphor for what this world is all about and how we go through our lives, I think there's value in looking at both of those, uh, both of those angles. And, and the metaphor side is what I think... Actually, for me personally, that was your question, "How does this change the way that I, that I view the world?" It actually has changed the way that I view the world so that when I go through difficult situations, I kind of step back. They don't bother me as much. I mean, they still bother me physically, but they don't bother me as m- much in other ways.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you view them as challenges in this thing that you're doing.
- RVRizwan Virk
E-
- JRJoe Rogan
So instead of, "Woe is me. Oh my God, how is this happening to me?" Which is the way a lot of people interface with problems, you go, "Okay, this is the challenge that I'm presented with. How do I overcome this challenge, and what feels like the thing to do?"
- RVRizwan Virk
Right, and, and why this challenge now, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Why this challenge now?
- RVRizwan Virk
I- if, if there's a part of me that's, like, outside watching this, right? Like, maybe when I go to sleep or wherever, whenever, why would it choose this particular challenge-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
... at this point in my life? Wh- wh- what is it that, you know, it's meant to, to impact, and what is it that I need to learn? But, yeah, I, I view it as a challenge rather than, you know, this is just a, a bad thing that's happening to me.
Episode duration: 2:38:11
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