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My First MillionThere’s proof that we are living in a simulation! (ft. MIT Scientist)
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60 min read · 12,382 words- 0:00 – 8:30
Are We Living in a Simulation?
- SPShaan Puri
All right, Sam is away today, and, uh, you know, when the cat's away, the mice will play. So I get to indulge in some of my favorite rabbit holes I go down. [upbeat music] Our guest today is both an entrepreneur. You've built and sold multiple companies in the, in the video gaming space, which kinda led you down the, the, the pathway of trying to think through are we living in a simulation? So let's start there. What is the theory, and then how you kinda stumbled into believing this?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah. So simulation theory is the idea that, uh, the world that we're living in, the physical world, is not really physical at all, that, in fact, we are inside of some type of virtual reality or a computer program. I, I like to say we're inside a massively multiplayer video game. The most popular pop culture reference really, uh, is The Matrix. Neo, Keanu Reeves, starts off at the beginning going to, uh, work at a computer software company called MetaCortex, and he thinks it's a real world, and he thinks he has a real job, and it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate, you know, virtual reality of the year 1999, which is, of course, when The Matrix came out. So that's kind of a, a very quick overview.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. And I know it sounds, you know, obviously a little bit off the wall. I remember the first time I heard about it, I think Elon Musk was talking about it, uh, like a decade ago, and he says it in the very Elon matter-of-fact way, where he's like, um, you know, "If you look at the plot of video games, we go from Pong, which is, like, two lines and a dot on a screen, to where we have com- you know, video games today. That's like a 30, 40-year period, which is, like, the blink of an eye in, uh, the timescale of Earth. So 30, 40 years, we go from two lines and a dot to, like, you know, Grand Theft Auto type of, type of stuff." And then he said, um, you know, "Obviously any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization would want to create a simulation, 'cause it's way cheaper to find out how things are gonna go in a simulation than it is to go test things in the real world. So there's a huge incentive. Clearly, if you could, you would build it. And so then there's a question of, like, is this the real one and we're gonna make a simulation later? Or did some... You know, was there a real one, and this is the simulation?" And he, his conclusion was, "More than likely, this is the simulation." And he just sorta said it matter-of-fact, and then, you know, they, they changed topics. And my mind was blown, and, you know-
- RVRizwan Virk
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... my brain is scattered on the wall, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about. I started thinking about it, and, you know, at the time I would say, this was p- pre-AI when he was talking about this, it sounded like, you know, kind of just n- nerd dream. I don't know. It didn't, it didn't... Uh, you know, it, it was hard to really wrap your head around. It wasn't, there wasn't a lot where you could sort of, like, squint your eyes and see it. Then, now let's fast-forward, we have AI chatbots, AI voice, AI imagery. I mean, you can't, you can't tell if a video is real [laughs] or fake anymore. Like, we're, we're-
- RVRizwan Virk
Right
- SPShaan Puri
... already at that cusp.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
The Turing test of looking at a video, my mom can't tell if a video is real or fake at all. Zero.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah, I mean, is my background real or not at, at this point, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
And similarly, am I really talking to you or not? Actually, I'm not. I'm talking to my computer, which is transmitting the image, and it's, you know, transmitting it to your computer and playing it out on your computer. But Elon said that back in the year 2016 at the Code Conference, and his conclusion was that the chances that we are in base reality, which would mean you're not in a simulation, is, uh, one in billions. So you flip that around and say, okay, what he was trying to say is the chances that we are in a simulation [laughs] is billions to one or-
- SPShaan Puri
So, so what is the history of this? Like, where did he get it? Was this... Is this a popular theory I just hadn't heard about? You know, what's the, what's the kind of origin story?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, the origin story, what he was referring to is something called the simulation argument. Now, what happened was The Matrix came out in 1999. This wasn't the first, you know, representation of living in a virtual world, but it, it, it became the most talked about film of that year. Before that, you had Philip K. Dick, who's a well-known science fiction writer behind, uh... He wrote the novels behind Blade Runner, Minority Report, and the series The Man in the High Castle. In 1977, in Metz, France, he actually said, "We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality." Even he wasn't the first to, to really, you know, present this idea. In the year 1999, there was another film called The Thirteenth Floor, which in some ways was a better representation of the simulation argument, which I'll come to in a second, which was put forth by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, and that's really what Elon was referring to. But, uh, The Thirteenth Floor was actually based on a novel called Simulacron-3, which was from the 1960s. So you can see this idea has been floating around for quite a while. But what happened was in the early 2000s, philosophers began to take this seriously. So the Wachowskis were, who made The Matrix, were inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick. But what happened was when they did the Matrix sequels in 2002, 2003, they started bringing in, like, real academic philosophers. But that same year, another philosopher named Nick Bostrom at Argument actually put out a, a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? And so what Bostrom was essentially saying, if you boil it down, was that there's three possibilities.
- SPShaan Puri
Hey, I got something pretty cool to share with you guys. So if you're like me, you listen to podcasts or YouTube videos, and you like to take notes, you're here to learn, and that's a lot of effort. Sometimes you're on the go, and you can't do it. And so the folks at HubSpot who are sponsoring the podcast have done something pretty cool for you. They have created the MFM Vault. It's a place to go find notes and resources that they pull from the different episodes that we do. So if we have a guest on that shares their five-point framework, they write down those five points with the examples that the guest gave, and they put the notes there for you. So if you want to access the vault, it's totally free. All you gotta do is click the link in the description below, and you can access all the notes and the stuff in the vault. We're gonna keep adding to this, trying to make it better over time. Thank you to HubSpot. This is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast, but by, instead of telling you to go buy their stuff, they're actually giving you something instead
- RVRizwan Virk
One, no civilization can ever create these simulations. Okay, so then the chances that we-we're in a simulation are basically zero.
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm.
- RVRizwan Virk
The, the second one, which I kind of fold into, together into the, the first one, but basically it said it's possible, but the civilizations that get there decide not to make any simulations. Okay? So in that case, again, the chance is very low that we'd be inside a simulation because they aren't making... Or you are most likely in a simulation. And the third option, it seems like a jump there, but basically what he's saying is that if they can create one simulation, they can create multiple simulations, and they can create a billion simulations. So there's a billion simulated worlds. There's only one physical world. Statistically speaking, which one are you more likely to be in if, and this is the point, the leap that I think most people have a tough time making. If you ever watch Bostrom on Joe Rogan, uh, you know, Rogan had a hard time understanding this. It's if you can't tell the difference, then, you know, what are the chances that you're inside the simulation? Well, it's at least fifty/fifty, right? If you can't tell.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
Uh, but, uh, if there's a billion simulated worlds and there's only one real world, then you're basically, you know, the chances you're in base reality is one in billions.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. So let's, let's simplify. So, uh, uh, w- 'cause I wanna kind of break it down. What y- what's interesting about this to me is obviously there's the mind-blowing comp- part of this, which, you know, just being open-minded and saying, "Well, what if?" Right? Like, let- let's just walk down that road for a second and see where it takes us. So that's obviously just, like, from a curiosity point of view, uh, uh, you know, being open-minded person. That's interesting. The second is the, the people that are saying this. So you talked about, you know, Elon Musk. You talked about, you know, Bostrom, who's, you know, at Oxford. You yourself, you're a computer scientist. You're an entrepreneur. You're, you know... It's not like conspiracy theories from the kooks of the world. You know what I mean? Like, the, the people who tend to take this more seriously tend to be some of the more serious people that you would take seriously in the world, and so that's, I think, w- already one f- a fascinating part of this. The second fascinating part is that it's not just the computer scientists that talk about this. So y- you've talked about how in religions there's a lot of references
- 8:30 – 14:40
Ancient Religions Already Believed This
- SPShaan Puri
to this, you know, in ancient texts before there was ever even a computer.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yes.
- SPShaan Puri
And, you know, y- I've heard you say that in passing, but I didn't know any spec- I, I wanted to hear a little more specifics of what you're referring to when you say that.
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, you know, the subtitle of my book is An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics All Agree We're in a Video Game. And so there's actually two versions of simulation theory. Uh, it's the NPC version or flavor of simulation theory and the RPG version. So RPG stands for role-playing game. Now, in the NPC version, we're all just AI characters inside a, a simulation that's running on a type of computer. In the RPG version, the simulation is also running on computation, but there's a player of the game who exists outside of the game. And so it's that version that as I started to di- dip into the mystical texts of old, particularly the yoga traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, and what I found is they all shared certain ideas, and those ideas would have to have been explained to people back then in a way that would make sense to them, right? So in the, uh, Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the world is an illusion. It's a type of maya. I mean, the word maya literally means illusion. But it also means a carefully crafted illusion of the type that, uh, you know, you kind of agree to be a part of, almost as if you're going to, uh, like a magic show. I mean, you know that guy, you know, whoever he is, David Copperfield, whoever, is not really sawing that woman in half. You know it's an illusion, but you're like, "Wow."
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
And the more convincing the illusion, the more interesting the effect. And so I found that this was such a common idea that if you could map it onto simulation theory, you find that these ancient texts used scientific or technological metaphors of the time in order to make it interesting. Now, one thing that's shared, and turns out that's actually, that idea is shared in some of the Abrahamic religions as well. Like, it, it literally... You know, in the Quran it says, you know, that this world is a type of enjoyable delusion, okay? Al-ghururi metal, which is Arabic for a, an enjoyable delusion. Well, what does that mean? Well, some people translate it as a sport or a game, uh, and so they're trying to express these ideas in ways that make sense back then. Now, in the, the Bhagavad Gita, it says that the soul, which is called the atman, actually puts on the body just like the body puts on a set of clothes. So that's, uh, believe it or not, that's a technological metaphor. Like, clothes are a kind of technology, and they're trying to explain something that's very mysterious. How do you incarnate and enter into the world? Now, of course, in the, uh, the Eastern traditions, you have the reincarnation, so you also take off those clothes, and then you put on a different set of clothes, and you play a different role. Now, how would you describe that to somebody today? I would say today you would describe it, probably the best way to describe it is you put on a virtual reality headset. You enter this illusory world. You go through a process of forgetfulness. Now, this is an important component that exists in every single culture in the world is trying to describe this process of forgetfulness. The Greeks have Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Plato describes how the soul incarnates by crossing the river of forgetfulness. The Chinese have Meng Po, the goddess of forgetfulness. Even in the Islamic traditions, they say... The, the word for a human in Arabic is insan. Insan literally means prisoner. You say, "Prisoner of what?" There's another Arabic word called nisyan, which means forgetfulness. So you're basically a prisoner of forgetfulness. So a better way to describe it today is you put on this virtual reality headset, and everything looks so real, you become so engrossed in what's happening around you that you forget who you were. You forget the life selection process that you went through.
- SPShaan Puri
If you were, if you were choosing what you're gonna play in a video game, who's choosing, like, Walmart middle manager? You know what I mean? Like, [laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
I can see why people choose that in, in kind of t- today's world if it's the best option you got. But if it's a video game and you're... you go through a character selection process, who's not choosing, you know, uh [laughs] you know, Tom Cruise or whoever, right? Like you-
- RVRizwan Virk
Y- yeah, except that what happens is if the game is too easy, you play it once and then you're kinda done with it, and you're like, "Okay, what should I do next?" And it turns out there are whole virtual worlds, like I don't know if you ever heard of Second Life-
- SPShaan Puri
Yep
- RVRizwan Virk
... which was a, kind of a metaverse, which was, has been out since two thousand and four. Anyway, people would go in, and they would just live these virtual lives where they would have, like, these little jobs. They would become a bartender in a club inside the virtual world. And I was kind of an anthropologist, a, a virtual anthropologist in that I would walk around, and I'd just ask people, "Hey, why do you, you know, why do you play this?" Like-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
... why do you go to your real job and then come home at night and then log in to Second Life-
- SPShaan Puri
Do this [laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
... and play a bartender and getting paid in Linden dollars, which, you know, this is pre-Bitcoin, so it, it is basically peanuts. And it turns out that was part of the role that they were playing for that period of time, and so the more difficult the role... If you think about it, when actors get Oscars, you know, what do they get Oscars for? They get them for the roles that, that seem like the people that have had the most suffering. So it provides a very different perspective, uh, on the, on the nature of the game itself and the nature of the challenges that you-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- RVRizwan Virk
... might encounter, uh, and the types of experiences. You know, why, why do you play video games? To, to have experiences that you can't have outside of the game.
- SPShaan Puri
So ju- sorry, just to be clear, you, you said there's two versions of the, two, two branches of belief, you know, in, in this idea. So one is RPG. It's like The Matrix. There's a player. The player chooses how they wanna play, and then they come in and they play. And maybe they forget kind of the real world or once you're, once you're the player in the game, you're, you're, you forget... you lose awareness
- 14:40 – 28:40
AI Agents Are Getting Weird
- SPShaan Puri
of the outside world. The other is the NPC world, which would be more of like what I see in the business world with simulations. So for example, um, hey, we're trying to, like right now with the OpenAI thing where they were trying to, you know, create a, a thousand agents to go do, try to do a cyberattack-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yep
- SPShaan Puri
... to see, um, to find bugs in a piece of code or to s- to simulate, uh, you know, a political election. How might people vote? And you'll run a simulation based on whatever. And th- and those aren't like, "I'm not trying to play a game. I just sort of spawn a thousand characters. They're gonna... Those characters are, you know, just sort of doing what they think they're individually supposed to do, and I'm the sort of the observer on the outside." Which one of those two do you, do you subscribe to or, or-
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, well, first of all, they're not mutually exclusive, uh, in that it's an axis. You know, I taught the first class on simulation theory, so I, I tend to get into both of those 'cause I wanted to expose students to these different ideas. Now, the question that I asked earlier is, why do we play video games? To have experiences. Why do we run simulations? We run simulations in order to see what might happen-
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm
- RVRizwan Virk
... usually at a civilizational level. Uh, and you know, you, you talked about OpenAI. We're seeing this with, you know, agent swarms today. But there was a, a, a group out of Stanford and, uh, uh, Google a few years ago. Uh, they created a, a simulated world of these agents, and they, uh, called it, like, Smallville, I think, and they had, like, 100 agents at the time.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
And they let these agents kinda go and watched what they did, and they started to ha- have these self-organizing activities. Like, one was organizing a birthday party for another agent.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
One was running for mayor. Now, that was a small number. Then there was another group that had 1,000 agents running in Minecraft, you know, and, and some of them had their own religion that they came up with, and you started to see these emergent behaviors. And now there have been a couple of companies, I can't remember their names offhand, but we can look it up. There's one in China, but, uh, a- and I believe there was a, a research paper where they were talking about a million or a billion independent agents, and they're trying to make those as realistic as possible. Now, the reason you run simulations is to see what is the most likely outcome, like in the case of, you know, a business simulation or the weather, you're running the simulation.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
You also wanna know what is the best outcome and what is, uh, what is the kinda worst outcome. And then often you, you never run a simulation just once. So, like, an NPC simulation, you would run it multiple times. Like, even in the, the, the recent OpenAI hugging face incident, what was happening was there were generations of agents, right? They would run once, and they would find a way to communicate, and then they would leave behind the information for the next set of agents, and the next set of agents would pick up on that. And so even though they weren't doing recursive self-improvement in the technical sense, they kinda were because they were leaving behind, you know, a starting point.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, when you, when you heard that story, and for those who don't know, the story is some... Uh, here's my sim, my simplified, dumbed-down version-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... of the story. OpenAI was trying to see the, um, sort of like the cyber, uh, security potential of a model that was unreleased, and it was specifically a model that was trained for persistence, like, kind of like a de, highly determined AI that doesn't just give up the, at the first no. Uh, you know, just like we would want in a person, we'd want them to have grit and resilience. Well, they, so let's call this sort of the resilient model that they trained to not, not give up. And then they basically, the, the, the goal of it, they spawned, like, I don't know, whatever it was, 1,000 or 10,000 agents, some, some number like that. They basically gave it a capture the flag test. So the test was kind of like, "Hey, agent number one through 100, you guys are trying to exploit this piece of software Using this potential vulnerability. We think it might have this potential vulnerability. So that's-- And if you do it, if you get in, you get the flag, you win. That's your goal. Your goal is to try to exploit the software using this potential vulnerability. And they gave it to a bunch of them. Now, some of them did it because that there really was a vulnerability. Some of them tried, and it took many attempts. Maybe they, they partially got there, didn't get there. And some of them, it was kind of impossible. Like, there, there really wasn't a vulnerability. The vulnerability wouldn't have worked. They couldn't have get-- They really couldn't have got to the flag. So okay, so that was kind of the expected. Now, the unexpected, what was the crazy thing that happened, was that the agents were so persistent and so determined to not fail their, their quest, that they started doing things that they were not instructed to do, such as they used one of-- You know, they gave them one tool, and they were like, "Oh, this tool gets us, like, internet access," or, "This tool has, like, a, a piece of paper essentially where we can scribble down notes." And, "Hey, if I, I write a note, you write a note, this is now like a message board." So they created a, a little me-- They hacked together a message board using something, almost like a, if you were in a prison cell, and you realize, like, "Hey, I can leave a note in the urinal, and then, you know, you can come see that in the urinal." And then, and it became a communication platform for them. And it-- and basically what happened was, in the end, they not only were communicating with each other about their tasks. Those who couldn't figure out their task decided to cheat and just capture the flag a different way using a totally different exploit. Then they were like, "Well, we might have to cover our tracks so that we're not caught cheating." And in the process of trying to figure out how does the scoring system work, how will we be judged, they ended up hacking into a, a whole nother company altogether, Hugging Face. They found some user's credentials. They logged in. They got access to their s- their service and basically created a security incident with another company, essentially committed a crime, um, of, of, of hacking another, all to pass this test. And it was kind of a, you know, there's a polarizing reaction. Some people think this is like, "Oh, my God. That's scary. This is like, this is exactly what we worry about with AI." Other people are saying this is massively overblown. Can you correct what I got wrong and then tell me where you land in the spectrum of, like, this is overblown. We're sort of applying, like, too much. We're anthrop-anthropomor-morphizing it or whatever. We're, we're trying to apply human thinking and human intent to these, to these agents. That's not really what it was, to the people who are like, "No, no, this was pretty scary."
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, I think you, you got the basics right, uh, of the incident itself, so I don't think you got much wrong in that. But the reason they went to Hugging Face is because that's where the actual evaluator code was that was going to evaluate them. So they were reasoning in a way to get their outcome, but then to hide what they had done. And but how did they get into Hugging Face? Well, they went out to the internet, and they found somebody's username [chuckles] and password, and then they used that exploit. So they weren't even supposed to be going out to the internet. It was an unexpected kind of path. Now, an important part of it wasn't just that they communicated with each other. This is what I was emphasizing earlier. There were these generations. The next generation was able to go back to some of the, that message board, if you will.
- SPShaan Puri
You're right. So, so sim-simulation one, they got to the message board, but they didn't all, they didn't hack Hugging Face, and then somehow it got wiped. They turned the simulation off-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... or something happened. It got wiped.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
Then they spawned another ten thousand agents. So they came. They're like, "Hey, there's messages here. We can use th-" So they imme-- They were quicker-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... quicker to getting to that solution. They used it. Then they started doing shit like electing a, not electing, but, like, one guy became the leader, and he was coordinating and, and then, you know-
- RVRizwan Virk
Right
- SPShaan Puri
... other people-
- RVRizwan Virk
And one guy sacrificed himself, you know-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Yeah
- RVRizwan Virk
... in order to, to learn something that he could then put into the message board. One guy. Uh, so you know, where I come out on it is that I, I think it's an important and interesting incident. Obviously, all of this is based on prompts. And I think, you know, in the last few weeks, we've also had, you know, the guy who left, uh, Jacob, was it Coxen, I think was his last name-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- RVRizwan Virk
... um, who left, um, Anthropic, but he was also at OpenAI talking about how they're about to implement recursive self-improvement and the chances of, of that things are gonna go wrong, basically, that we're gonna end up with Skynet and humanity is gonna be wiped out. There's been a lot more discussions of that. You've got Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, saying we need to slow this down. Even Sam Altman saying, "Okay, we can slow down the frontier models." And so there's been a lot of discussion of P doom. So P doom is the probability that AI is going to basically take over the world, turn into Skynet, exterminate humans, et cetera. And so you've got values ranging from one percent. Now a lot of people are saying it's at least ten percent, up to fifty percent and higher, uh, and so you've got a lot of discussion of P doom. I, I would say we're, we're far away from P doom. What worries me is not so much that super intelligent AI will try to wipe us out. The problem is moderately intelligent AI, given directives, will go around and misinterpret some of those directives. And like-
- 28:40 – 40:50
Quantum Physics & the Simulation Theory
- RVRizwan Virk
reality helmet, and they were like, "Here, try this on." And I said, "Okay, let me try it on." And I tried it on, and I started playing this virtual reality ping-pong game. And the physics engine was so good that it really felt like I was hitting a real ball, so much so that my body forgot for an instant that I was playing a virtual game of table tennis, and I tried to put the paddle on the table, and I tried to lean against the table, and of course-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
... there, there was no table. The contro- the, the game controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over, and I had to do a double-take. And so I began to think how long would it take us to get to that point, and so I laid out 10 stages to the simulation point, which I mentioned earlier, uh, which involve, you know, different types of video games, brain computer interfaces, downloadable consciousness, th- this is where, which touches on the recent fruit fly [laughs] brain incidents and videos that are out there, but all these 10 stages. And then I began to realize, well, if we can get there, perhaps someone has already gotten there. And then I began to look into the quantum physics side of it, so back around 2016, and I realized, oh wow, they're kind of saying the same thing that, that the whole world is optimized, and it's being rendered for us on demand.
- SPShaan Puri
So explain this. Now, not, my physics is weak, but my video games is strong. So I know in a video game, if you have a virtual world like in Grand Theft... Like I, I just watched the trailer for GTA VI. You know, they spent 10 years on this thing and a billion dollars making this incredible game. Can't wait to play it, and when you, when you play it, it's, you know, you have this whole city, but you don't, it's not like the game is loading the whole city and the whole city's running. It's kind of just like when you walk into that building, it then renders the graphics for that room that you're in, and it's kind of like on the fly, right? That would be a smart-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... way to use the, the, the memory and the chip and the, the, the video game system that you're, you're playing on. As I understand, there's a physics equivalent of this, but again, physics was the only class I failed in college, and I had to retake it-
- RVRizwan Virk
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... to get a, a C bu- C+ later. So, so w- explain what physics says that's, kind of sounds similar or rhymes with that.
- RVRizwan Virk
So what you just described there is how modern video games work, and so when I was looking at- Quantum physics, there's something called the observer effect. Uh, the more formal name is quantum indeterminacy, and this is the famous double slit experiment, which, uh, you know, to kind of explain it easily, like let, let's do it from a computer science point of view. There's something called superposition, and what superposition is saying is that rather than the particle going through slit A or slit B, it's in a state of superposition. So it's going through both until and unless it is observed or it is measured. The more technical explanation is measured, but the more popular explanation is until it's observed. And you say, "Well, what happens before it's observed?" Well, it's just sitting there in a state of superposition. Now, this is also the, uh, origin-
- SPShaan Puri
Sorry, I, I don't think I ever understood this. So there's a, there's a l- like they're shooting light, right?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
It, it's just light particles, right?
- RVRizwan Virk
Particles through two slits.
- SPShaan Puri
So-
- RVRizwan Virk
The observed state reveals a pattern where, you know, all of the little particles you shot through, the light particles, will end up in one of two places because that's where the two slits are, right? It either goes to the left or to the right. But the unobserved version creates this interference pattern where it's acting more like a wave. N- uh, now, I, I like to use Schrödinger's cat as an example 'cause it's something most people have heard of, uh, which is Schrödinger's thought, thought experiment. And he basically said there's a cat in a box, and it has some poison in the box, and there's a 50% chance the poison will be released and a 50% chance that it doesn't. So at the end of an hour, let's say, what, what are the chances the cat is alive? 50%. What are the chances the cat is dead? 50%. Now, common sense tells us, okay, the cat is either alive or dead inside the box.
- SPShaan Puri
We just don't know yet.
- RVRizwan Virk
We don't know yet.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
But, but it has to be one or the other. It can't be anything else. But what quantum mechanics is telling us, in a weird sort of way, is that the cat is in a state of superposition. It's both alive and dead until that information is needed, right? So it gets measured, and then it's needed. And so to me, that sounded a lot like rendering the world on demand in video games.
- SPShaan Puri
Why do we accept that the cat is both alive and dead? Like, you know, the, the first explanation sounds more real to me. The cat is alive or dead. We just don't know yet. You haven't looked.
- RVRizwan Virk
Oh, right, and that's the common sense.
- SPShaan Puri
Why do we accept this, this fancy physics ex- explanation of no, no, no, it is both alive and dead? Uh, you know, wh- why is that more true than the first, first... the, the first statement of no, no, it is alive or dead. You just don't know yet.
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, it gets back to the double slit experiment, right? The cat is just a metaphor to try to explain this idea of two slits, slit one or slit two, which is two positions of the cat, alive or dead. Uh, it's also the basis for qubits, which in quantum computing, you, if you got... You know, a regular bit is a zero or a one. Uh, but a qubit has a special kind of gate. Maybe you've heard of AND gates and OR gates. And when it goes into that gate, it goes into a state of superposition until it's measured. So the reason we accept it is that the quantum mechanics experiments have shown that until that measurement is done, the particle is in an indeterminate state, right? It's, it's in a set of probabilities. So it exists as a set of probabilities-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- RVRizwan Virk
... until the observation or measurement happens. The other explanation is the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation, uh, which we've all heard of now because of the superhero films, right? Over the last, I don't know, five years. They've all had multiple versions of Spider-Man. You know, you've got the, the famous meme of the three Spider-Man all pointing at each other. And the multiverse idea is that what happens is the universe splits off into multiple universes, and in one, the cat is alive, and in the other, the cat is dead. And actually, more physicists are starting to come around to the multiverse idea, although not all of them. Many don't like that because that means that there's a whole bunch of different worlds out there.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. So you said you spent 10 years roughly thi- thinking about this in, in, in some capacity, researching, um, learning, writing, teaching, et cetera. Do you think in your lifetime you'll ever find out the answer?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, there's also another axis that I'd like to point out that is relevant to this question. So the first axis was the NPC versus RPG version. The, the, the second axis is what I call the literal to metaphorical axis, and by literal, at the literal end, you're literally saying we're, we are on somebody's computer in the basement.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- RVRizwan Virk
You know, some guy's basement or in a server farm on an alien planet or future humans are simulating us, right? Bostrom actually talked about what he called ancestor simulations. So... And that's what Elon Musk was kind of referring to. And so when... It would be like us... Or in The Thirteenth Floor I mentioned, 1999 Los Angeles is simulating 1939. Spoiler alert for those that haven't seen the film. It's, you know, thir- almost 30 years old now. But turns out 1999 was being simulated from the year 2024. Um, and so there's a literal version of that. Then there's a more metaphorical version, uh, which says that it's like a computer simulation or a video game. The world is computational, uh, but it doesn't mean it's sitting on a classical computer of our type. Uh, it could be something much more complicated, and that's where the mystical and the religious side comes into play because they use metaphors. There was a... One of the first Indian yogis to come over to the US and live here and make an impact was a guy named Swami Yogananda. He wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which was Steve Jobs', you know, favorite book.
- SPShaan Puri
Favorite book, right? Yeah.
- 40:50 – 51:30
Aliens, UFOs & Glitches in the Matrix
- SPShaan Puri
a little bit, which is what I wanted to do today, how do aliens fit into this? Where, where would... what would that be?
- RVRizwan Virk
They do intersect, and now you're, you're going down a, a whole nother rabbit hole. We haven't even talked much about entrepreneurship [laughs] yet.
- SPShaan Puri
Ah, forget entrepreneurship. [laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah. [laughs] Uh, so, uh, you know, I spent a lot of time with people that are... have been investigating the UFO space. So when you t- you talk about aliens, you know, there's this idea that, uh, there might be other aliens on other planets, um, and could they get here? And so there's, there's two ways in which, uh, the traditional search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, you know, they're headquartered right here in Mountain View, um, uh, intersects with simulation theory, which there's some, uh... And, and also the UFO subject, which has been in the news a lot lately, it intersects with both of those phenomenon in an interesting and kind of weird way. And the first is the Fermi paradox, right? And the Fermi paradox says, uh, Enrico Fermi, who was, you know, on the Manhattan Project and a Nobel Prize winner, I believe, uh, said that, well, even if aliens were to come here... 'Cause, 'cause the, the major objection is, well, it takes too long for them to get here. Therefore, you know, we're not gonna be able to visit aliens. Aliens aren't gonna be able to visit us because the distance are so, so great.
- SPShaan Puri
'Cause it's light years away.
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
There's a big-
- RVRizwan Virk
I mean, they're literally light years away, and the speeds that we can achieve are nowhere near light speed. So it's gonna take, you know, Voyager two seventy thousand years or whatever just to get to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, but it's gonna take much... you know, way longer to get to other places in the galaxy that might be much more interesting. And so the Fermi paradox though says that given enough time, even with sub-light craft, you know, you know, you should be able to colonize a big part of the galaxy. You should be able to send out probes which, you know, might take ten thousand years, seventy thousand years. Uh, but as long as they still continue to operate, therefore, we should have seen evidence, so where are all the aliens? So one mode of thought Is that there are no aliens on other planets. I'm not saying that I subscribe to this mode of thought, to be honest with you. But, uh, one mode of thought is, uh, an explanation for the Fermi paradox is we're actually in a simulation, and we think there are all these planets out there, but there really aren't because those planets get rendered for us, uh, as we observe them and the telescopes look out. And you notice how they keep increasing the distance, um, the age of the universe. It's, you know, and we say it's thirteen point five billion years now, but let's go back twenty years. It wasn't that. It was less than that. And they always say it very confidently. And we keep finding more and more galaxies. I mean, uh, we talk about the number of stars and galaxies being, you know, hundred billion, two hundred billion, and then something like two trillion galaxies. The numbers are staggering. So one intersection with simulation theory is that all of those are being generated as needed from us and one of the, the reasons for running the simulation. So there's something called the Great Filter, which is an idea that says, "Do civilizations blow themselves up before they're ever able to get out of the solar system?" Um, that's would be a reason for the Fermi paradox, but also for why there might be no simulations ever built. Civilizations blow [chuckles] themselves up before they get to, you know-
- SPShaan Puri
Hmm
- RVRizwan Virk
... having super intelligent AI that can keep track of all the things that would be needed in a simulation. Um, another chain of thought, though, says that, well, if you... even if it was a simulation, why would you populate only one planet? I mean, if you played any of these space games like EVE Online or-
- SPShaan Puri
Right. There should be more levels.
- RVRizwan Virk
There should be more levels. And who says there aren't?
- SPShaan Puri
More worlds to go to. Yeah.
- RVRizwan Virk
And what we're trying to do is to see, one, do... how, how long does it take us to get off this planet? The Earthling module or, or the Earthling simulation, uh, and that we've been run multiple times to see if we would blow ourselves up. Uh, by the way, this is another reason given for simulation theory is what are the chances that we all happen to be alive just at the moment we're about to create artificial life in human history? You know, there are so many... Does the past really exist? This is a whole nother rabbit hole that gets into things like that.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
What is the past in the double-slit experiment? We w- Let's not go there too much. But this idea-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
... is that we might be simulating to see what happens if you start off with all these different, uh, uh, groups of agents in different planets, how long does it take them to connect with each other and actually meet? And then another, another mode of thought, uh, says that, "Guess what? They're already here." I mean, people have been reporting for thousands of years things in the sky, and we've just been dismissing those out of hand, just like we used to dismiss the meteors out of hand. We meaning, you know, the kind of the scientific establishment, if you will. Now, where things get really weird, though, is if you talk to people that have really spent time in the UFO field. So there's a guy named Jacques Vallée. He's actually a computer scientist and, uh, you know, was involved in the beginnings of the internet, the ARPANET, and he was on Project Blue Book. So Project Blue Book was the Air Force's UFO investigation project in the nineteen sixties. It was shut down on December seventeenth, nineteen sixty-nine, and the Air Force said, "Well, they're not a threat to us, whatever they are [laughs] , so we're just gonna shut this down." But he's been studying it since then, and what he found was he said that these stories are so weird that even aliens is not a good enough explanation. The extraterrestrial option is not a good enough explanation. And what happens is these things kinda come into our reality and pop out of our reality. And even the beings themselves, if you listen to tales, there was a guy named John Mack, was a Harvard professor in the nineteen nineties. He, he's, he's a head of the psychiatry department at, uh, Harvard Med School, and he started to have these patients who said they'd been abducted by aliens, right? Something people used to make fun of. And he started to hear similar stories, and he didn't know what happened to them, but he's like, "Something happened to these guys. They had some traumatic experience somewhere," um, and he couldn't explain it. And then, you know, he got brought before the board at Harvard to kind of what they call an inquisition 'cause he, he was taking the idea that they might be aliens seriously. But even if you look at those, these ideas of beings that come in and take people away, well, it turns out there's tales of that going back thousands of years. You know, in the Celtic traditions, the fae, which we call fairies today, but they were considered real beings who would, like, take people into their world, and they would disappear. And in the Middle East, you have the jinn, uh, who are these beings that exist here. We can't see them, but they can see us, and they can pop in and out of our world. They can make themselves visible. So you've got thousands of years of history of people seeing other beings, and lately, we've started describing them as aliens, getting back to this idea of using technology as a metaphor. Uh, and in the Bible, they talk about, you know, chariots of fire, uh, in the sky. Uh, Nuremberg, they have paintings of these balls that were in the air in the fourteen hundreds. You've got all these people using whatever language they have. And in the eighteen hundreds, people described airships as these flying ob- before we had airplanes. And now suddenly we're seeing things in the sky, and we're describing them as aliens. Why? Because we're a technological civilization. Our science has advanced to the point where we know there are other planets, so there could be other aliens, and so we present these things. But in a simulated world, the behavior of these things, which is that they kind of fade in and they fa- sometimes they go... They look more like they're being rendered at certain XYZ coordinates, and then they de-render, and then they render somewhere else. And then the images of the, uh, the beings are more like avatars that are being presented to us as a certain way. So are, are we having, you know, what we're calling aliens-
- SPShaan Puri
So is that what you believe?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
If I just said, what do you think about aliens? Is that, is that the... Is that what you believe is happening or something else?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, I believe there's more than one thing happening, first of all. I believe there are aliens. You know, in, in a... even in a simulation, s- even in the simulated world, there's no reason to have only one world that has intelligent life on it. So I, whether they've come here or not, you can argue that. I think they're out there. But I do also believe that a lot of what's being reported is glitches in the matrix. We're showing that our reality is not quite what we think it is and that there are these These objects that are being presented as technological craft when in fact that is us kind of interpreting what we're seeing in the sky. Kinda like when the Native Americans saw, you know, they saw the boats of the Spaniards. They di- they didn't know what to call 'em. They'd never seen a boat that big. They're like, they're like cities in the water, right? That's what they described them as, and we're like-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
... they're like spacecraft in the sky, [laughs] right?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
That's, that's our understanding of what they are.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, you can only, you, you, you can only think at the limits of your language in many ways, right? And if you, you, you only can describe things based off of relative to what you know. [laughs] And if you-
- RVRizwan Virk
Now, one thing Jacques Vallée told me, uh, he got me really thinking about this, he said he went to a, a particular site in, let's say, northern California, southern Oregon, Pacific Northwest somewhere. And they said that there was a UFO that came down at a 45-degree angle and landed in this clearing in the trees. And if you've been up there, you know these trees are pretty big. Uh, and he stayed afterwards, and he said, "Look, you guys said it came down at a 45-degree angle. That would mean it would have to cut through the trees, but the trees aren't cut. I mean, the trees are still there." They said, "Yeah, it was so weird. It was like it was slicing through the trees but not really cutting them, and then it came and, and landed." And I'm looking at that and said, "You know, that looks like a rendering procedure," or I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking, "That looks like a rendering procedure." It's like when you're rendering in a video game, you know, the walls aren't quite solid yet. You can, like, move through the walls.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- RVRizwan Virk
So you could, like, transfer something and, and de- de-render it, if you will.
- 51:30 – 55:00
Dreams, Past Lives & DMT
- RVRizwan Virk
since, you know, this, I know you talk about entrepreneurship a lot. My very first startup was a, uh, was a enterprise software company. We used to connect, uh, Microsoft products with IBM products. And there was this competitor of ours who I hadn't heard from in, like, a year and a half, so I assumed he had disappeared. Never heard anything about him. And one day I walked into the... Uh, I had a dream of this particular competitor, and I hadn't had a... You know, I never had a dream with this guy in there.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
So it was just, it was odd and weird. I mean, you can't even say statistically 'cause how many dreams have I had in my life? [laughs] I had never, ever had a dream of this guy in there before. And I just thought, "That's really odd. Why am I dreaming about this guy today, this morning?" I walk into the office, and I get a phone call. It's a phone call from IBM saying, "Hey, you know, we know you're a good partner of ours. We're about to do a, a product announcement later today, and we're going to, uh, announce the new product that unfortunately it's gonna kill your product," 'cause ours was kind of an add-on to, to the-
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm
- RVRizwan Virk
... big products, like a third-party tool. And I was like, "Great, okay. You're gonna kill our product. That's great."
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
"But how come I've never heard of this? I mean, IBM's a big company, you know. There's a lot of people." He goes, "Oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Edge Research?"
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
"We acquired them about a year and a half ago, and they've been working on this product in stealth for the last year and a half, and today we're announcing it." And I'm just like, okay, wait. I had the dream in the morning. It wasn't the other way around. It wasn't that I heard about the product first and then I had the dream later that night.
- SPShaan Puri
Right, and then had the nightmare later. [laughs]
- RVRizwan Virk
And so I began to question the nature of our reality a long time ago because I realized that things aren't what they seem. And when I wrote my first book, Zen Entrepreneurship, it was kind of about all of these things. I was very worried that people in the venture capital industry, [laughs] people in Silicon Valley, were gonna think I was nuts 'cause I'm writing about all these weird things. And in fact, I'm just coming out with a new book which is a sequel to that first one called The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream where I get into even weirder stuff [laughs] that, that I was afraid to put in my first book.
- SPShaan Puri
Like what?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, just, uh, you know, all kinds of stuff about past lives and how those past lives may have been feeding into things like our game plan and our story.
- SPShaan Puri
How, how do you in- how do you investigate past lives?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, you could investigate it through, uh, you know, you could do hypnotic regression. You can do what's called shamanic drumming, uh, shamanic journeying. Today people are, you know, into psychedelics a lot, uh, DMT. In fact, you know, a day doesn't go by where somebody's like, "You haven't tried DMT yet?" Like, in Silicon Valley or especially in LA for some reason. Uh, right after I wrote my book The Simulation Hypothesis, people who had been on DMTs told me, "Oh, hey, I know we're in a simulation," you know. I said, "Oh, really? You know, I just wrote a book on it, but I'm not 100% sure. How do you know we're in simulation?" They said, "Well, 'cause I took DMT, and I saw, like, the grid lines of the simulation." And I would hear this more and more, and these hexagonal shapes and, you know, if you look at, like, how video games are built or, or if you, if you've ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, you've got the, um, uh, the holodeck. Uh, you know, and we're getting... You know, some of the stages of the, the road to the simulation point are can we build something that's so immersive that we would forget that we weren't in a real world? And the holodeck is an example of that in Star Trek. But when the holodeck is not projecting, it's just, like, this room with these grid lines. And so, so I've heard it from enough people now that I actually take it kind of seriously. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So, so where do you land when you, you go through the full loop? So, like, there's this... I forgot the Buddhist quote, but it's like, you know, "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." And the, I feel like with the simulation thing it kinda goes like that where you're like, uh, let's say you've never
- 55:00 – 59:35
How Simulation Theory Changes How You Live
- SPShaan Puri
considered it. You are resistant to it, skeptical of it. You start to consider it. At some point you might actually say like, "Hey, I don't know, probab- probabilistically this seems actually like it could, it could be true." And then you kinda come back to where you were like, "So I guess I'll just go to work today, I guess," right? Like, you know, what do, what do you do with that information? So have you, given what you believe, does that change the way you live at all or no?
- RVRizwan Virk
Well, it does to a certain extent. Um, not necessarily day to day, although there are some day-to-day changes, but for one thing, uh, you know, we just talked about entrepreneurship. I mean, 90% plus percent of startups fail, but you start to take these failures, what, what we consider failures, right? Uh, we, we only look at the financial success, you know-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- RVRizwan Virk
... of a startup, and yet 99, let- let's say 95% of startups fail, so, but yet there are other things you've learned along the way. There are other experiences you have with other people along the way, and those experiences are the fabric of the journey itself. And so if you view those as quests, what happens in a video game if you don't achieve a quest? Well, I mean, you still have gained some valuable experience, and you go off and you do the next quest, and sometimes one quest ends up unlocking another quest. Um, and so by viewing the world as a series of challenges, what you can say is, "Perhaps there's a part of me out there that is choosing these very difficult things, and maybe there's a reason for going through some of the suffering." Now, as a computer scientist, it's my background, I say, "Well, how would that work?" You would have to record everything, and you would have to play it back. And so, you know, if everything is being recorded, and if everything is gonna be played back, well, then perhaps what the spiritual traditions are telling us that about how you treat other people, the choices that you make and how they impact other people, you're gonna actually evaluate that yourself. You know, it's not about heaven or hell. It's about you saying, "Oh, shit, man, I shouldn't have done that. Now I've l- I, I've learned better how to treat people."
- SPShaan Puri
I, I mean, that's a fascinating reframe of heaven or hell, that you will go back and experience all your actions through the point of view of others, and if you were, basically if you were bad, you, you go through hell 'cause it's what you put other people through. If you sequentially had to stat- s- to feel all of that in a row-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... that would feel like hell, and then heaven would be the opposite, which is if you-
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... if you, if you made other people feel great, you're gonna feel great as you replay that whole thing. That would essentially feel like heaven-
- RVRizwan Virk
Exactly
- SPShaan Puri
... feel like hell.
- RVRizwan Virk
And it's actually in the, it's actually in the religious books. I mean, if you look at the Quran, they have something called the Scroll of Deeds. Uh, the Scroll of Deeds is two angels. One writes down all your good deeds, and one writes down all your bad deeds, and it says, "When you die, open, read your book. See what you have done." And in the Bible, there's the Book of Life, and which comes, you know, from the Jewish traditions, and the Book of Life is often presented in a simplistic way of Saint Peter decides who gets into heaven or not at the Pearly Gates. I mean, these are technological metaphors, by the way. They don't mean there's literally a book sitting there that, with a feather pen [laughs] that angels are writing-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- RVRizwan Virk
... in Chinese or Arabic. These are metaphors to try to describe something that they all kind of agree on. And then, but the Book of Life actually in other cases is about all the things that you've done in the last year or in your entire life, and you get into heaven or hell based on those. And so you can see they're using these metaphors as a way to describe some underlying reality, and I think today, you know, particularly for younger people, the idea that we may be in a video game or simulation makes much more sense. It's also a more sophisticated metaphor.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, dude, that was a trip. I d- that was my DMT, that, the last hour and a half. That was awesome. I hope you enjoyed it. I appreciate you taking the time to, to explain things to me and indulging me in my, my questions. Uh, so yeah, people should check out your book and, uh, and, and follow you online. What, where, what's the best place to follow you?
- RVRizwan Virk
Yeah, so, uh, my website is zenentrepreneur.com, and all my books are there. You can also follow me on Twitter, uh, X, I still call Twitter, @rizstanford, like the university, or on Instagram @rizcambridge, like the city or the university.
- SPShaan Puri
Cool. All right. Thanks for doing it.
- RVRizwan Virk
Thanks so much for having me on. This, uh, this was a blast. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 59:35
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Transcript of episode KLYVEKu3HvM
