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

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

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Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, investigative journalist, tech luminary, or hostage negotiator.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what if reality isn't real? I don't mean that in a stoner dorm room. Like, whoa, dude. [00:01:00] Literally. What if the universe, you, me, this podcast, we're just running on someone else's hardware. Today we're talking with Rizwan Virk, MIT, trained computer scientist, venture capitalist, and author of the Simulation Hypothesis about why the idea that we're living inside a computer simulation might not actually be as crazy as it sounds.

If this all makes you think of The Matrix or Star Trek or something like that, you're not alone. Those are exactly the kinds of sci-fi ideas that first got me thinking about this, and other people I would assume as well. But hey, this isn't just movie fuel. Everyone from Elon Musk to Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken this hypothesis seriously enough to say, yeah, the odds might not be in favor of base reality.

So today we'll unpack what simulation really means. And it's not just we are living in a video game. We'll explore what the evidence says from physics and computing, how close we are to building our own simulated worlds, and whether deja vu UFOs, or that weird Mandela effect might actually just be hints that our code is showing.

Virk argues that some of the most fundamental [00:02:00] limits in physics, like the speed of light quantum indeterminacy, could be features of a computational universe, not bugs. We'll also look at what it would take to prove or disprove any of this and why the implications might matter for ethics spirituality, how we live our lives day to day.

Because if it is a simulation, what does that say about free will, meaning, morality? And if it's not, why does this idea feel so intuitive somehow? So grab your controller or your prayer beads or whatever, and let's boot up reality with Rizwan Virk right here on The Jordan Harbinger Show. So the simulation theory stuff is always, it started off in my mind a little bit like crackpot maybe, but it turns out to not be a crackpot theory.

Why don't we back up a little bit. Can you define what simulation hypothesis even is for the layman? Because I think a lot of people have never even thought about this.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, sure. So the simulation hypothesis is basically the idea that what we think of as the physical world, you know, like this table, this chair, that all the [00:03:00] physical reality is actually part of a virtual world, a computer generated world.

And probably the most popular expression of that in the media has been the film, The Matrix. 'cause you know, Neo thought he was in a real physical world, but turns out he was actually in a virtual world. Now there's a lot of different flavors of simulation theory when you kind of delve deep into it. So, for example, in the case of Neo, uh, and, uh, Morpheus in The Matrix, they existed as players outside of The Matrix, and then they had an avatar or character inside The Matrix.

And I call that the RPG version, or the role playing game version of the simulation hypothesis. And then there's another flavor, which I call the NPC version, which NPC stands for. Non-player characters. Anyone who's played video games knows that terminology. And in that scenario, everybody in the game is ai.

So it's just code that's controlled by, you know, computer programs. And of course, those two are not completely exclusive, mutually exclusive [00:04:00] because you can have player characters or avatars and you can have NPCs within a virtual environment. So I think of it more like an axis. You know, I used the metaphor of video games that the world is the type of massively multiplayer online video game.

'cause that's sort of my background was in building video games in Silicon Valley, uh, before I, I came to write this book. Uh, but when some academics and scientists refer to simulation theory, they're talking more about the NPC version, where we're all running on a computer and you don't exist as a player.

You are just one of the beings being simulated.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Right. Okay. So to, to clarify this, the first version, the Neo and The Matrix version is there's a real version of us somewhere else, but we're just not necessarily, we're not the person that I am right now. I'd be, by the way, be pretty pissed if this is my avatar.

Like I could have been anything and they gave me this, uh, this is bullshit wan, but, but the, so it must be the other one. Otherwise, they're just too cruel. The other version is we're just, we're all running on [00:05:00] essentially silicon or, or something like that, quantum, whatever.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, in that version we'd be running on some much more advanced computational system, which could be some type of a computer, uh, quantum computing system.

There have been a number of physicists who aren't looking at the world as information now, and so there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics. Uh, and instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed?

And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it. And so that would be in, you know, whatever computational substrate is being used around the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. That said, to your earlier point, when you play a video game, your avatar doesn't have to look exactly like you.

In fact, when we play a video game, oftentimes, you know, we, we'll choose like a, a race, like an elf or a, a dwarf or a human, and then we'll choose a [00:06:00] profession like a wizard, uh, or a thief, et cetera. And so, uh, in The Matrix, they wanted to use the same actors, obviously, right? They wanna use Canner Reeves inside and outside the simulation.

So their avatars were what I call a endomorphic. They looked just like the player. But in reality, even if this were a multiplayer video game or an NPC simulation, it's hard to say what the world outside of the simulation might look like and what we might look like outside of simulation,

Jordan Harbinger: I guess, and we will get to this, but like whoever's running this, it seems most likely to me, and look, I am no expert.

Obviously my expertise comes from having read your book three days ago. So here we go. But it seems like, wouldn't we just be. Likely to be the ancestors or the primitive race of whatever's simulating us, right? Like are we just like the monkey in a cage version of the advanced society, civilization, race, whatever that's running, and they're like, wow, this is wow.

Humans. These early humans who aren't in the year 10 million are just ridiculous. They just look at porn [00:07:00] online and play stupid things on a screen, and they walk around and they buy food and they get fat. It's so dumb, right?

Rizwan Virk: Yep. And they share cat videos, right? They share

Jordan Harbinger: cat videos on their stupid primitive internet.

It's just unbelievable the stupidity these people get up to. And they're just watching us in real time or watching, you know, the Truman Show version, and they're like, look at these. Why do we even bother running this stupid simulation? Look at these, these like. Inbred, you know, monkeys essentially, like I, and, and I don't mean that, that sounds insulting to monkeys, essentially, but I would imagine looking back at early humans, we would also be like, so you just picked your butt and, and ate food with it.

Gross. You are, you're revolting. That's kind of what we probably look like to them.

Rizwan Virk: It's very possible. And so, you know, the term, you mentioned an ancestor, simulation is an important one within the simulation world. And it was defined by a Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom. And what he basically said was that if a civilization got much more advanced than we are today.

And he [00:08:00] wrote this paper back in like 2003, so it was a couple years after The Matrix, but really before today's AI chat, JPT, LLMs, all this stuff. But he basically said that if a civilization ever gets to the point where they, they are posthuman or what I call the simulation point. Where they can create a fully immersive virtual reality with AI characters that are indistinguishable from physical characters, that if they reach that point, they would create what he called ancestor simulations or simulations of their ancestors.

And like you said, that could be like us creating a simulation of caveman or of ancient Rome or ancient Greece, for example. This is like Westworld kind of, right? Yeah. Similar to Westworld in a way. Right? If you think about it, Westworld is a simulation of our past, right from the 18 hundreds. In that case though, there's the physical robots that we can get into in the simulation theory.

It's more like a virtual world where you would put on a virtual reality helmet if you wanted to go in there. But yeah, the AI characters in there are very similar to the ones that you might [00:09:00] see in Westworld.

Jordan Harbinger: So the simulation point is essentially where I put on my VR helmet. I don't even remember that it's on because you look just as real to me at the simulation point as I, if I took my helmet off and you were sitting in front of me, like it's basically, like you said, indistinguishable.

So I might remember that I have my helmet on or I might, there might be some clue eventually that I could do, I don't, what was it in inception where the thing keeps spinning and that's how they know they're in the dream,

Rizwan Virk: right? Yep. Right. They call it their totem. Right. And have the totem a little top in that

Jordan Harbinger: case.

So you might have something along the lines of that. Or maybe there's a, maybe there's a way to get a status bar to appear in the top of the screen, you know, or whatever. Right. Pause. Um, but uh, but everything else is just, you're in there. So you're saying if the technology evolves to that point, and that's the simulation point.

Well, okay, now I'm, I'm talking myself in circles, which is gonna happen a lot in this episode 'cause it's a lot to wrap your mind around. But it seems like if a civilization has the technology to get to the point where they can create a simulation that's indistinguishable from their reality, doesn't the [00:10:00] probability approach a hundred percent that we are in a simulation?

Rizwan Virk: Yep. That's, does this make sense? That's exactly right. Okay. So, so the way that I started to think about this was because I was building video games here in Silicon Valley, and after I'd sold my last video game company, I ended up at a, a video game firm that was located in Marin County. And, you know, they had an office in Sausalito and they were looking out over San Francisco Bay.

Nice, beautiful landscape. Nice. Yeah. I think it's one of the most beautiful cities on a nice day. But then, you know, he said, here, you gotta try this. So I put on a virtual reality helmet and we, we started to play a virtual ping pong game. And, uh, the game itself wasn't very realistic. Like the graphics were pretty crappy.

This was back in 2016 or so, and the VR headset had wires coming from the ceiling, so it wasn't even wireless at that point. Uh, so there was no mistaking that I was inside a virtual reality. But what happened was that the physics engine was so good that it really felt like, you know, I was hitting the ball with a paddle and I had to move it just right.

And so much so that it made me forget just for an instant that I was in virtual [00:11:00] reality and not playing a real game of table tennis. And I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table, just Oh wow. Just like I might do right at the end of a game. But of course, the controller fell to the floor.

I almost fell over. And then I started to think, well, how long would it take us to get to that point where we could create these types of simulations? And that's why I laid out these 10 stages simulation points. So that's what got me to go down this rabbit hole. Now what Bostrom's simulation argument was, was that if anybody ever gets to that point and he was more concerned with creating AI characters in these simulations, then they would create lots of simulations, not just one.

And so there would be, let's say a billion simulated worlds and there's only one physical world. And he said those simulations could likely be ancestor simulations. So they would create simulations of their ancestors to see how civilization might have evolved, maybe even to see how it might have evolved differently than it actually has.

Uh, and so his point was that if that's possible. Then let's say there's [00:12:00] 999 million simulated worlds and you know, 9 99 and one physical world. So he said, the odds that you are in a simulation is basically billions to one. Right, right. That's what Elon Musk was quoting. I see this video clip of him online.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Right. 'cause if there's a billion worlds in 900, 99 million of them are Are virtual. Are are virtual. What are the odds that this is the one that's real.

Rizwan Virk: Right, exactly. Yeah. And pretty much

Jordan Harbinger: zero.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, pretty much zero. Now I say that it's at least 50% because at that point you can't tell the difference.

Right? I mean, there's still the chances that you are in the physical world, but you can't tell the difference. So it's somewhere between 50 now that is, if those worlds can be created now, it's possible. No civilization ever creates those worlds. Why? Because maybe it's not possible. Right? Although with the rapid progress of AI today, uh, and the rapid, if you've seen some of these latest videos, there's a, just this week or last week, there's a company called World Labs and you could take a picture and it would basically create this navigable video of space where, like a video [00:13:00] game you can kind of wander around in

Jordan Harbinger: the photo.

Rizwan Virk: In the photo. Wow. So it's basically extrapolating using AI to create the world.

Jordan Harbinger: And this exists in 2025. So what are the odds if you add a zero to the end of the year where at the year 20,250. So like, like, I mean, you're just, what are the odds that they can't do something slightly better than that? I mean, look, maybe it's not slight, but the thing, the other thing is I've done a lot of shows about the brain.

I've just done a lot, a lot, a lot of shows about the brain with guys like David Eagleman and doesn't make me a brain scientist. But one of the things that they put across pretty clearly is. Your brain is just making sense of information that's being put inside it. Right? So your eyes aren't seeing anything.

They're just, your brain is creating the picture from photons that go into your eyes. If you got rid of the brain and you just took the information from the optic nerve, it would just be a bunch of white dots on a black background, for example. Right? There's nothing else going on. It's just

Rizwan Virk: data. Right?

Right. It's just

Jordan Harbinger: data. So your brain can really create an image based on anything, and that's why blind people can get electric signals through, say their tongue and their brain will create a [00:14:00] basic picture of it. And if you were blind from birth and you used a really advanced device, there's a really good chance you'd be able to navigate the world, eh, pretty much just as well as somebody else who was born sighted.

I mean, look, the world is built for the equipment that all 8 billion of us have, so you'd be at a slight disadvantage, of course, but it's not impossible. So the idea that. Your brain has to have, we don't have to have graphics that are as good as reality. Your brain would just simply adapt to it. And eventually you would forget what reality looks like.

And if you were born into it, never seeing the physical world, you would never have any idea that you were in a simulated one.

Rizwan Virk: Right. Exactly. And there's an old philosophical thought experiment called the brain in a vat, and the basic idea is that you put the brain in the vat and you have all the, the signals coming into it that are the same signals that we are getting from our eyes, like you were saying, from our ears, from our senses.

And the brain would never know the difference, theoretically. Now we don't know how to do that yet. But again, that's another kind of earlier flavor of simulation theory. [00:15:00] Now there's a new flavor of simulation theory that came out just within the last few months called prompt theory. This, it shows you how fast AI is moving.

I mean, I mentioned World Labs and Google also has something called Genie three, which lets you type a prompt and it'll create the world that you can kind of move around it. And if you change the world, like if you spray paint something on the wall, it'll still be there when you go back. So it's really creating this virtual world based on prompt.

But, so there's this, uh, some videos online, if anyone just searches for Prompt Theory where they basically prompted these characters using Google. VO three was one of the, the first video engines that did a really good job with not just video, but with sound, uh, with, uh, virtual actors that looked like real people.

In fact, I showed a, a clip of this and at a conference and I told people, these are AI generated characters. And afterward they came up to me and they said, was that really AI generated? Because you, you, it's getting to the point where you can't tell the difference. But the basic idea is prompt of, prompt theory is you create these videos and you tell these characters in the, in the movie, in the videos, and.

To basically talk about [00:16:00] whether they're based on prompts, and of course they're saying things like, I'm not a prompt. Clearly this is real. I mean, look how beautiful the world is. This can't be ones and zeros or, you know, a, a woman saying, if a guy starts talking about the prompt theory, uh, forget, you know, you know that date's not going anywhere.

Yeah, yeah. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: It's

Rizwan Virk: funny, it's pretty funny to see how they, these characters react and how realistic they look. Yeah. So, I, I think we'll get there and, and I think, you know, yeah, most people in, in the technology world would agree that we could get to the point where we can simulate an entire

Jordan Harbinger: world. I'm definitely curious how far away we are, but I, I'll get to that in a minute.

I guess for now, where people I think might be getting hung up is they're like, well, I play Grand Theft Auto, and there's a limit. You know, eventually you go so far west, you hit a river, you go so far east, you hit, uh, I don't know, a mountain range or whatever it is, right? They limit the map, but that's because it's designed by the designers of the game.

I don't play a lot of video games, but I, I think, aren't there video games aren't things like Minecraft kind of infinite because they're being generated by users or even they're just generated as [00:17:00] you walk in that direction?

Rizwan Virk: Right? So there's something called procedural generation, and what that does is it creates the landscape for you.

If you think of like really old video games, like I used to play when I was a kid, like, you know, PAC Man. There was a limited screen. Yeah. Well you go to the right and you come out of the left and that's if you're lucky, right? Exactly. Yeah. If you're lucky, right? If the ghosts don't get you right. But then you think of the side scroller games, like they've got various Mario games that are like side scrollers.

They just kind of keep going. Right? And eventually what happened was video game designers learn to use procedural generation to create worlds that might seem realistic. So there was a game called No Man Sky. Which came out in like 2016, so again, almost 10 years ago now. And it had 18 quintillion worlds.

Right. So that's like way more than any human, uh, game design team. Right? Yeah. I don't even

Jordan Harbinger: know how to, like, my brain doesn't know how to deal with that kind of number. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: That number is just so huge that it's effectively infinite. Right. And why 18 quintillion? Well, it turns out it's two to the power of [00:18:00] 64.

So it's like a memory limit on

Jordan Harbinger: the current,

Rizwan Virk: yeah. Just in terms of how many worlds they wanna keep track of. But now, I mean, you could have say, okay, we're gonna keep use 128 bits, which suddenly gives you, uh, two, not double the number, but two to the 1 28. And these numbers are eventually get to the point where there's more worlds than there are physical particles in our universe, as these numbers grow exponentially.

And so effectively you can create what seems to be an infinite world, but it's not because the whole world is not rendered. Now, this is one of the key points that I try to make in the book and the simulation hypothesis. The subtitle is an MIT Computer Scientist shows why ai, quantum physics and Eastern mystics agree.

We're in a video game. Now, the quantum physics part of it is the whole observer effect, which you know, most people have heard of,

Jordan Harbinger: which tell us anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are washing dishes right now and they're like, I, I'm not gonna access that part of my brain to remember what this is.

Yeah, I'm looking for the soap.

Rizwan Virk: So the easiest way to understand it is, I mean, it came from the double slit experiment where if light is a particle, it would go through [00:19:00] either one of the slits or the other slit can't go through both, right? If it's a particle, you can just go through one of those. Another way to think about it is Schrodinger's.

Which was the thought experiment,

Jordan Harbinger: right? The dead cat that's also alive depending on whether or not you open the box. Is that what it is?

Rizwan Virk: Yeah. Yeah. So there's a box that's in poison in it, and after an hour, there's a 50% chance the cat is alive and a 50% chance the cat is dead because of, you know, the, the poison might be released or not.

And so common sense tells us the cat is either alive or it's dead. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box. Now, what's weird about quantum mechanics is that it's telling us that the cat is in a state of super position, meaning it's in both of those states, it's both alive and dead until somebody observes it or somebody measures it.

That doesn't make any sense from a

Jordan Harbinger: no,

Rizwan Virk: you know, comment. I mean like, okay, this, you know, my little water bottle here is here. My P

Jordan Harbinger: brain is not able to do anything with that particular theory

Rizwan Virk: right now. Right? But yet it's one of these fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, and this is why Neil's Boer, who's one of the [00:20:00] forefathers of quantum mechanics, said, if you are not shocked by the quantum theory, then you haven't understood it.

Because what it's saying is really strange. It's saying that the observation itself. Actually is when the outcome is decided.

Jordan Harbinger: But in a video game, that makes perfect sense, right? It's like if you're walking around grand theft auto, the only thing that the computer is doing, well, one of the only things the computer is doing, correct me if I'm wrong, is rendering, drawing the things that I can see on my screen that my character can use or interact with or, or view the stuff on.

The other side of the map is just, it doesn't exist at that point.

Rizwan Virk: The other 18 quintillion minus one worlds, right, don't have to be rendered on your computer.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Rizwan Virk: So some people use kind of what I call the brute force method of estimating. And they say, well, there's too many particles. Our, you know, my, our, our best supercomputer today couldn't keep track of all those particles.

But the fact is that it doesn't have to render all of those particles. It only needs to render those parts which are being observed by one person. And then when [00:21:00] they're observed by the next person, there's something we call caching, which is that we store it on the server. So now that's available to multiple people.

So as long as people are there, then that gets rendered. But only the parts that are necessary. So only that which is observed by your avatar is what needs to be rendered. And to me, looking at this weirdness of quantum mechanics and looking at what we do and how we build video games, right? If you tried to build Fortnite, a World of Warcraft or No Man Sky back in the eighties when I was a kid, you wouldn't be able to, it's just too many particles.

But then they came up with this idea of 3D modeling and rendering and you know, you've got things like what's obfuscated don't bother, or even if it's like behind this curtain, we don't need to necessarily render. So computer science is often about optimization, and there's something called lazy evaluation in programming.

And lazy evaluation means you don't evaluate, you don't actually run the code unless you need to. So if you say X equals two to the 1 million power, but then you never use that variable X, [00:22:00] that computation might take a long time to do. I mean, it's not that hard for computer to do, but you can think of a more complex computation, but if it's never used, it'll just wait around until somebody needs X and then it'll go and it'll compute it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So theoretically there's no coffee machine behind this curtain, but when I open it and it's there, it was created the second that my eye,

Rizwan Virk: yes, it could be. Now, in this case, because you've been living here, it's probably cached. It's so it's already there. Yeah. Right. Okay. So, because that's the thing you might look at next, whereas you're not gonna go to Mogadishu, you know, immediately you'd have to get on a plane.

That's right. You'd have to go

Jordan Harbinger: all the way over. There's a lot of time for it to render in my brain. Yeah. Or wherever it's being done. Now that actually makes a, a lot of sense when you think about it from a video game standpoint, but it, it says a lot about space. Right. I remember I had Michi o Kako on this show a long time ago, and I asked if we were in a simulation and he said, no, because weather is too hard to simulate, which I didn't find super compelling.

I mean, no shade. He's obviously smarter than me, but I didn't find that completely [00:23:00] compelling one. Sure. Our computers today would have a hard time with weather. We're talking about a civilization that's maybe a million years advance. Yeah, they could probably run the weather on their iPhone, right? Or whatever.

Rizwan Virk: Exactly. I mean, it's like saying, can you run chat GPT on a 2 86 sort Pentium processor? No. No. You need the GPUs from Nvidia. Right. But more than that, you need the LLM. Training and the algorithms, which couldn't have been done.

Jordan Harbinger: The other thing is you don't really need to worry about the, if we're talking about weather rendering and caching, you don't need to run the weather for the whole earth unless something is perceiving that weather.

Right? So it doesn't really have to be done. All the storms that are 3000 miles in the middle of Antarctica, they don't need to render. They just, we just need to theoretically know that they're there. Yeah. If nobody's there to observe these, then it doesn't matter,

Rizwan Virk: and that's where it gets even a little bit stranger.

Okay. So I talked about not needing to render it until it's observed. That makes sense when we talk about, okay, you're gonna go to Antarctica. What about space

Jordan Harbinger: though? It's so far no one. Nothing's there. Well,

Rizwan Virk: we don't know. Well, we don't know. But if you look at it, it looks almost infinite, right? [00:24:00] Yeah. And yet, how do we know that's not being procedurally generated beyond a certain point

Jordan Harbinger: for it?

Yeah. I guess we don't, as we

Rizwan Virk: 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, you know, people on different planets. And maybe the purpose of the game is to wait to see when these guys are gonna interact with each other.

Uh, 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. And 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 [00:25:00] 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 a histor one of these historical paths. Okay, now this is like even more confusing and I talk about this in this book I talk about a little more in my book, the Simulated Multiverse.

Jordan Harbinger: You ever see Donny Darko? You know that movie Long time ago. So it's been like 25 years, so gimme a break here. But I think J Gill Andal, 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 his him screwing with that kind of quantum idea of time. So its sounds like that's what you're saying, right? So this. At the time the cat is rendered, the history is rendered Before that it didn't exist, right? Is that what you're saying? Okay. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: Basically, and a good way to think about it is what's called the, the Cosmic Delay Choice Experiment.

And that is when, let's suppose we have [00:26:00] light from a quasar that's a billion light years away. So it's pretty far away. It's gonna take the light a long time to get here. A billion years, 'cause that's how far it's, but suppose in the middle there's a black hole or a galaxy, something that's a, 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. And 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 it would've, the decision would've had to have been made a 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 [00:27:00] 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 Now. It's made now when we measure it now, that's just really bizarre because that's saying there's more than one possible pass.

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, 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. The 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 the, this kind of detail when I'm talking about simulation theory? Well, if you've ever played a game like Farmville, which was popular, you know, 10, 15 years ago when I got in the video game industry with Facebook wasn't my thing, but [00:28:00] yeah.

Yeah. I know what what it is. But it was like extremely popular. Right? And, and today Minecraft is extremely popular. That's

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Rizwan Virk: And so they have crops that grow in Minecraft

Jordan Harbinger: while you're not there. Yeah. While you're

Rizwan Virk: not there. Now the question is, are they actually growing when you're not there? What happens is when you log in, the computer figures out.

What happened while you were gone? Right?

Jordan Harbinger: You were gone for two days, so it now it's gonna be 48 hours now. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah. Not only are they, you know, have they matured, but some locusts came by. Mm-hmm. 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, 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 Yeah.

And, and do things more efficiently like today. Sam Altman just announced Open AI is getting a hundred billion dollars from xi. I saw that. Why? Because they don't have enough compute and they just wanna, again, use the [00:29:00] dumb brute force method, which is they just wanna add more hardware. But in computer science, the way you should really do it is look for better algorithms so that they use less

Jordan Harbinger: compute.

They're probably doing that too, right? Yeah, they're probably doing that too. It takes time. Yeah, it takes

Rizwan Virk: time. There's a short term. Yeah. Short term. The only thing they can do at let's

Jordan Harbinger: throw money at this for now and then later on worry about the efficiency. Right.

Rizwan Virk: Right, 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 five, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. It's crazy to think that in theory, this is old tech, right. That we're, uh, using because it, it is quite amazing what it can do. I mean, yes, it's fancy auto complete, but also it saves me a shit load of time, so I'm not complaining.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, it's very fancy. Auto complete.

Jordan Harbinger: So a hundred billion dollars from now. I mean, I'm stoked. I wanna see it. After 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 [00:30:00] sponsored in part by Quiltmind.

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Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage 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 Six Minute Networking dot com.

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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 Six Minute Networking dot com. Now back to Rizwan Virk. At what point do the end game characters think that they're real?

Maybe it's less important whether I actually think I'm in Grand Theft Auto six. It's probably more important that the characters in Grand Theft [00:33:00] Auto Six think they're in Grand Theft Auto six and they don't, they can't tell the difference. Right. Is this, is this a decent question or am I Yeah, no, no.

That's a great

Rizwan Virk: question. Okay. And so, you know, in the past we had, uh, what were called, uh, dumb NPCs. 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 their owns 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, the creators of the game have laid out, you know, all the paths.

Kinda like the old choose your own adventure. I

Jordan Harbinger: remember those. I also, yes, Skyrim had something I've seen where it's like a meme, right? Where someone gets blown up or whatever and it's the NPC goes, huh? Must have been the wind. Right? It's just like they don't have this advanced Yeah,

Rizwan Virk: they're not very advanced.

No. So, but today we're starting to get smart NPCs. So, uh, what's happened with the Turing [00:34:00] 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. 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 is thinking a physical computer, and one of those is a human, and you can just pass messages back and forth.

Now, back then he was thinking of teletype machines, but you know, we could think of it as text messages or just the chat bot 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 if you, you know, 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.

A

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:00] human would never put up with me for as long asche GPT exactly to put up with me. That's how I know it's a robot.

Rizwan Virk: 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 nineties called the Loebner Prize, uh, for which chatbot is closest to passing the Turing test.

And it went on for many years. In fact, there was a chat bot called Alice back in the early, late nineties, early two thousands that had, 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 and it went all the way through 2019 and it became defunct.

And now they're doing, running these experiments where, you know, they have a thousand people talking to chat GPT. And so the most scholars think we're pretty close or we've already passed the training tech. But in my book simulation Hypothesis, I talk about the Metaverse Touring 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, [00:36:00] there's you, your character, there's uh, an NPC, and then there's an avatar controlled by a human. And you can go do whatever you do in the inside the video game, like inside Second Life, you can go have a swimming pool, you can go to Starship Enterprise, you can do whatever you would do.

Uh, you can go dancing, you can have virtual sex, whatever. And then if you can't figure out whether, which one is the NVC and which one is controlled by the human, then it would pass the, what I call the metaverse or the virtual touring test. Now, we, 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 chat, GPT, to an avatar. And they're bringing the two together. I dunno if you ever saw the, the film her.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Great film, right? Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, I think, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And

Rizwan Virk: so, turns out the guy who wrote the film, uh, and directed it Spike Jones, he had seen the Alice Chatbot like back in the two thousands.

And he came out with this film in 2013. And then when, uh, OpenAI released one of their recent versions of Chat g pt, you know, they tried to hire Scarlet [00:37:00] Johansen 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, there are companies that specialize in like virtual girlfriends, boyfriends.

I

Jordan Harbinger: mean, I'm not against people using it if it makes 'em feel better. It'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 outta the dating game to talk to a computer.

I don't know. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah. Well, it does seem sad in its way. Yeah. 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, 20 15, 16. And of course, people are now using Chat, GPT and variations of it, and there's character ai. There were a whole bunch of these companies that were just specializing, you know, 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 [00:38:00] 2021.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't think I saw it. I pulled the plug on, uh, at some point. Yeah,

Rizwan Virk: it, it wasn't that great, according to most Matrix fans.

Uh, it, it was sort of deep if you think about it, but it, 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 like very realistic landscapes today. They came out with a demo called The Matrix Awakens, and it was basically a 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 kinda 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 in PCs, but then what one guy did, there's a video of this online, he hooked up an LLM engine into the NPCs and he made them smart NPCs. And then he had his character walk around [00:39:00] 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. 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 today. I mean, if

Jordan Harbinger: you walk around New York, there's a good chance somebody would run up to you and say, you are in a simulation or you are in a video game. And 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, 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 is going, if we had to plug that into the simulation theory, what's, how does, does that fit in at [00:40:00] all?

Rizwan Virk: It does because in any simulation, you end up with glitches, but you also end up with, uh, an information substrate that you can't see normally. But it's driving what happens. And so this could be driving glitches, like whether it's a deja vu or where you feel like you've actually experienced this before.

In fact, I quoted Philip Keck, the science fiction writer who wrote, uh, the books behind, uh, 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 Mets France, uh, 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. In fact, the Wachowskis who made The Matrix were inspired by Philip k Dick. Uh, 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 [00:41:00] have the sense of reliving the same events, of saying the same words.

We would have a sense of deja vu as 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, some people had precognitive dreams, for example. It's a real phenomenon, and it's weird because you can't really explain it

Jordan Harbinger: 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 in my dream. Yeah. Like a week or two later. Right. And she's like, whatever, you're a kid and you don't know what you're talking about.

Right. But I remember very clearly being like, no, I told you that this was a thing and it's happening right now. And she, you know, she didn't believe me and [00:42:00] rightfully so. Because it sounds insane. It sounds insane. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: I, I didn't believe it until I had it happen to me in the business world. It was really weird.

I had, uh, we had a startup back in Boston. We, we worked with IBM as one of our key partners, and we had a competitor. Who this guy named Mark, uh, in his company was called Edge Research. And they disappeared like a year ago. And 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 and he's like, Hey, how are things going? And I just woke up and I thought, that's bizarre. Why am I dreaming at this guy now of all days? I haven't heard from 'em in a year, never ever had a dream about 'em. And then I walked in the office and I got a call from IBM and they're like, Hey, we're calling you.

'cause before we do this announcement today, 'cause you're one of our partners, but we're introducing this new product. Unfortunately it's gonna compete with your product, it's gonna probably crush your product, but you're a good partner. So we thought we'd let you know beforehand. I was like, great, thanks.

But 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've heard of it. He goes, oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, [00:43:00] 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 it happened before I got the phone call. So, 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 peak cognitive. Most of course things are just, you know, spicy pizza.

As one of my mentors used to say, yeah, I don't think I'm

Jordan Harbinger: gonna be flying around with Bruce Lee over the Manhattan skyline anytime soon. Right? Yeah,

Rizwan Virk: yeah. But there is an element of dreams. There's, uh, lucid dreaming where you recognize that you're actually, this happens to me

Jordan Harbinger: all the time. It does. When was a kid, this happens to me constantly.

It was basically every night. Yeah. Oh, interesting. All the way through maybe high school. Yeah. Yeah. And then I started getting like really stressed out about, I remember once school got kind real and really stressful, it basically stopped happening.

Rizwan Virk: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Now, how did you know you were in a dream?

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:44:00] 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 Mazda and then I would be like, well, I'm not just gonna 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 that I had never been to before. And then the next night, or a few nights later, I would have another dream and I'd go, oh my God, I can't run.

'cause my feet are, ah, wait, no, no, no, no. I've been here this. So it 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.

Rizwan Virk: Okay. So you had like little clues and getting back to inception, he had the little spinning thing.

Yeah. That was his, to figure out if it was a dream or not. So the

Jordan Harbinger: totem thing, so this is, I wasn't gonna share this, but I [00:45:00] might as well. 'cause it's a apropo. 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.

Rizwan Virk: I mean, when you're a teenager, right? Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And they, 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, that was my dis It's like the

Rizwan Virk: best holodeck from Star Trek. Yeah, you could ask, but it

Jordan Harbinger: would be like, wow.

Oh man, that girl from my class is, wait a minute, I can make her get into a swimsuit. Oh wow. So

Rizwan Virk: you had that much control. Oh yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And I, I remember being able to like, choose the color of the swimsuit, everything. It was just like I could control every element of the stream. It was awesome.

Rizwan Virk: 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, like the Tibetan monks called dream yoga.

And in dream yoga, what would happen is they would train the monks through meditation during day, but then they, while they're falling asleep, to try to keep, because you know, we have a waking consciousness and we have a [00:46:00] dreaming consciousness and you kind of, there's a wall in the middle and 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 recognize 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.

I'm not gonna try to fly. That would be stupid. And then I floated up off my chair. It turns out it actually was a dream. Uh, 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, the, uh, 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 uses 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 [00:47:00] that's outside the dream. It's what the Hindus call the ottman, 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, but that's another type of glitch if we think of the world as the type of dream.

Another is synchronicity. I'm sure if you've heard the term, uh, some people are skeptical about it. Uh, Jung coined the term synchronicity. Yeah. 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. Uh, but there's also a new way of thinking about synchronicity.

So 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. This happens quite a bit. It, 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 by 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 [00:48:00] thinking about me is probably a hundred to one. But it does happen so often that I'll send someone a text and they'll go, I'm having lunch right now talking about you with someone else.

And it's, it'll be like, again, not a family member, not a friend, not a close friend. Yeah. 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. They're 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.

Rizwan Virk: Right. It happens often enough. Yeah. I was in the UK in Cambridge last year, uh, doing some research on AI at their AI center. And 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, uh, 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 'cause she didn't even live in the UK anymore.

And so this [00:49:00] kind of thing happens a lot. But from a simulation hypothesis perspective, you can think of it as there's an information substrate. And so there's a term called a technological synchronicity, which is a term that a guy named Jacques Valet 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, uh, he was the inspiration maybe 20 years ago. Yeah. He was the inspiration for the French scientist. So Jacques was a French scientist who came to the us, 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. And I like to describe it by using, uh, uh, an example, uh, from online shopping. 'cause 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, I was about to buy it and I said, ah, let me hold off on buying it.

And then I'm on my phone, you know, outside [00:50:00] on Facebook or something and I see an ad for that exact

Jordan Harbinger: backpack. Yeah. Probably not magic.

Rizwan Virk: It's probably not magic. Right. But if I didn't know anything about

Jordan Harbinger: databases, oh, I was gonna say cookies. Don't tell me you think that this is internet now I got you. No,

Rizwan Virk: 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. Yeah. When you put the thing in the shopping cart. Yeah. And you abandon it. That we put that in a database. Yes. 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,

Jordan Harbinger: right,

Rizwan Virk: you would say, oh, either it's magic. It's a sign I, it's a sign. I'm

Jordan Harbinger: meant to buy this background.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah. Or you would say, it's just a coincidence. That's the scientific point of it. Sure. That's bullshit. 'cause we, we can't see, and it's cookies, come on, you're making this stuff up.

It lives in some database in a cloud. Yeah. You gotta be kidding. That's a good

Jordan Harbinger: point. It's a really good analogy. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah. So if there's an information substrate and our thoughts are somehow getting things from the database and putting things in database, it's [00:51:00] 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, you know? And so that's kind of, it's become a kind of religion in many ways, I think, in our society.

Yeah. 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 is become kind of a religion that says that, that doesn't fit my worldview.

Therefore it's not possible.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I'm definitely the skeptic when it comes to all this stuff. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: It's okay if you're a skeptic. Yeah. I'm just saying that at the same time, there are things that happen that we can't explain, that's for sure. True. And so there may be a scientific explanation.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 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 [00:52:00] like I'm just trying to get a clip for stoners on YouTube, what about the UFOs? Like what, how does that fit into simulation theory, or how does simulation theory make UFOs make more sense as opposed to

Rizwan Virk: Well, it's interesting and, and I have spent a little bit of time, um, investigating the UFO phenomenon.

There's a guy. At Harvard named Avi Loeb, who started the Galileo project, and I'm an advisor of the project. And then there's a guy from Stanford named Gary Nolan, who started the Soul 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've thought of AI 50 years ago.

Right? It's something that almost seems like Arthur C. Clark said, any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, you know? 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, like in close encounters of third kind.

It was a spacecraft, it came from an [00:53:00] 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. 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 them didn't see it.

So again, that doesn't make any sense from our standard material point of view is 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. And 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, 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 were 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 [00:54:00] resing 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 VR chat. We might think we're sitting together, but we're not.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Rizwan Virk: I'm rendering you on my computer and you're rendering me on your computer. Ah, right,

Jordan Harbinger: right,

Rizwan Virk: right. We happen to be sitting across from each other, although, you know we could fake it.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I'm still rendering you on my brain, right?

Rizwan Virk: Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's right. You have another level on the computer.

Rizwan Virk: 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 a coffee machine. It's still cashed. Still cash. Yeah. But. That would explain how you could have a phenomenon that seems both physical and non-physical and, and changes shape and appear differently. Yeah. Because in a video game, you could be at level 30 and I could be at level two and you could have the [00:55:00] C Dragon spell, and I couldn't, we could be standing in the exact same field and look up, you're like, look at the dragon.

I'm like, mm-hmm. There's no dragon there. What are you talking about?

Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's just a different, yeah. So it could be these

Rizwan Virk: 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, uh, Jacque told me where there was this group that said this UFO came down at a 45 degree Ingle and landed in a clearing in Northern California, Southern Oregon, if 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, and Jock said, well. If it came down a 45 degree angle and it landed here in the clearing, it would've 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 wanna 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, and then it becomes physical. Just like when you read something in a video game, you can kind of walk [00:56:00] through walls and things that when they're not fully res, but then when they're fully res, you have the laws of physics in the world.

So is it possible that UFOs are in fact, not extraterrestrial, but are somehow extra dimensional and they're being projected in 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 fast and speed of light over like a hundred thousand 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 'em 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, a hundred billion stars and [00:57:00] you know, how many, was it 2 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. Oh, you mean the, the stars and planets are just being generated as we observe them, like you said before.

Rizwan Virk: 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 we, 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. Mm-hmm. 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. Interesting. They're hiding something now. 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, or I'm gonna go with that, but Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's like, I think what where most people would go. But then I talk to people who've been at Lockheed and who've 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 [00:58:00] engineering, make a piece of metal, could have been a civilization on Earth a million years ago.

That's completely like all traces of an advantage now. But there's still stuff that they find and they're like, Hey, let's figure out how this thing works.

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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 [01:02:00] should it?

Rizwan Virk: 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 wanna be in a simulation because if I'm just an NPC, then I don't really matter.

That doesn't mean things aren't real to you as they're happening. I mean, there's still, 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 what 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 and 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 [01:03:00] saying, uh, have the girls all in bikinis at my Hugh Hefner, uh, palace. Right? Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean that 12-year-old me was super into that, but I think, yeah, yeah.

12-year-old would, 45-year-old me could take it or leave it. Yeah. Yeah,

Rizwan Virk: exactly. It's like

Jordan Harbinger: a dog chasing in a car. What are you gonna do when you catch the car?

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, exactly. And so it's possible as we go through life, we all face real significant challenges. And 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 if first I don't succeed, I'm going to keep trying.

It helps maybe to put perspective into very difficult situations. It doesn't, 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. You know, if you've ever seen that movie, uh, free guy. It came out a couple years ago, uh, was a ring, it was like an NPC and it was it Ryan Reynolds, I think, uh, one of the Ryans, Ryan Hosley.

Ryan Reynolds, I think it was Ryan Reynolds, uh, who was an NPC in a video game. And it was a video game, kind of like grant theft auto. [01:04:00] 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 the game were actually characters of avatars of real people. But they abused people, you know, when they came in the game. 'cause 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?

It's like, well, what do we

Jordan Harbinger: do

Rizwan Virk: when

Jordan Harbinger: we create

Rizwan Virk: video

Jordan Harbinger: games? Right? Yeah. They make grand theft auto, which is worse than real life. Right. Theoretical, which is

Rizwan Virk: worse. Yeah. They actually make it worse in order to have suffering or that you wanna simulate what's going to happen in a nuclear blast, if there's a World War iii, like you would literally make the people suffer, right?

Sure. 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?

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Rizwan Virk: And I say, well, let me ask you two questions. Why do we play video games? And then why do we run simulations? Now? The second question is kind of that nuclear war scenario.

We run [01:05:00] 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. With Tom Hanks in, was it Philadelphia? The movie? Oh yeah. Where he played, I mean, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think he was a gay man with AIDS and this was like an eighties movie, so it's, yeah, it was like controversial. He was very

Rizwan Virk: controversial, but pointing out the difficulties that they went through, or Braveheart with Mel Gibson, 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 [01:06:00] through it. It's a more difficult challenge maybe than that guy's having. You know, I wrote this book when I had a, a very challenging part, the 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 and if you had asked me in high school, I would've said, yeah, you know, I'm gonna be an entrepreneur and then I'll be a writer. Like, it was sort of this, knowing that that was part of the story. 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 kinda 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 gonna go out and [01:07:00] help start another video game company.

Once 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 for the hospital, but when I was recovering, no, not from the hospital, man, they wouldn't let me go.

Yeah, they let you do that. Yeah. No, no. I was in the ICU and it was when I got home Serious. Yeah. I mean, I'm talking about months where I was still recovering it. You know, modern medicine is great at very specific things, but they're not always great at predicting side effects. And so it took a long, 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, 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. Uh, maybe not. [01:08:00] If I had to consciously choose, I would not choose that as a way to go. You know, probably 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. We, using a virtual reality metaphor, it actually becomes understandable and it can help us in how we, 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.

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, you know, they're floating above their body. They see a light, there's a bing of light.

But one of the things that they report really caught my attention, and it's called a life review. And there was this guy named Danny Brinkley. He was struck by lightning back in the seventies, and uh, he had a near-death experience. He wrote a book called Save by the Light. Interesting guy. But he used to be in the military and he used to shoot people.

And he said, I, I had a life review, which was like a [01:09:00] holographic, panoramic replaying of everything in my life, but from the point of view of other people. And he used to like beat up kids when he was in school. He had to experience 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 we used in the military. And it gave him a different perspective and 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 X, Y, Z coordinate. And so there's a game called cs Go Counterstrike Global Offensive, which is a first person shooter. It takes place in, I don't know, the desert Iraq somewhere. And I was involved with the startup right here, actually not, not far from here, Cupertino, where you would put on a virtual reality helmet and you would replay the Cs Go session, the game that had been played.

But you would see it from any X, Y, Z coordinate. So you could wander around, you could [01:10:00] 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 called a virtual camera to any X, Y, Z coordinate.

And any XYZT coordinate and you can replay it. And you know, kids today watch video game replays on YouTube all the time. That's

Jordan Harbinger: true.

Rizwan Virk: I mean, my nephew, he was only like three years old and he would say to my, his father, my brother, he would say, dad, I wanna watch Star Wars. He goes, oh, you wanna watch Star Wars movie?

He goes, no, no. I wanna 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. We might treat people differently if we know that we're gonna review what happened afterwards. Isn't

Jordan Harbinger: that, that's 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?

Yeah, it's a scroll of deeds. Scroll of deeds. Yeah.

Rizwan Virk: So I was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in the uk, um, you know, with these scholars from Cairo, they're like Islamic scholars. And I'm like, you sure you want me to speak there? You know, I write about, you know, virtual [01:11:00] reality and business and video games.

And there was an ayatollah there, which just means like a cardinal. Oh, okay. He wasn't like the guy, he guy, not the guy from Iran. It wasn't like he was from Iran. Oh, okay. But he wasn't like the guy like Ayatollah Khomeini or Khomeini Supreme leader. It was like, think of one of a bunch of bishops. Right?

And so here I was telling them, well, the Quran describes this thing called the scroll of deeds. It, it says you have these angels who sit there and write down all your good deeds and your bad deeds and even gives 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, and we don't think of books as technology, but it is. Mm-hmm. Sure. I don't think they meant, which is why many of us in the techno scientific world don't take religion seriously. They didn't mean that. They were like literally angels sitting there with feather bands writing things down.

But 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 2000 years ago is, oh, it's a book. It's a record keeping [01:12:00] 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 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.

They say the book, your books will be opened and each of you'll be judged according to your teeth. 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, 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 Chiro Gupta, and they say, well, who's Chiro Gupta? He is a minor God. Well, it turns out he's called the record keeper and he sits next to Yama, the God of death.

Why? So that Yama doesn't make a mistake in terms of where he sends you. And this guy writes down all, everything that you do and it's your, and again, I, that's a metaphor. It's just an accounting [01:13:00] metaphor that we use to try to, uh, 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 wanna get in trouble with anybody's religion. I'm not saying the arc 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. Like, yeah, because I generally, I think, so it turns out, you know, they have been trying to use metaphors to try to describe something that is outside of this world and how do you describe something outside of this world?

You can't, you have to use metaphors. You know, if you ever watched Battlestar Galactica?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I have not. No.

Rizwan Virk: Yeah, it was, uh, science fiction series kind of post Iraq days was the, the version I'm thinking of. And they had these AI robots who oddly enough were kind, 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. That actually is true of the [01:14:00] simulation hypothesis as well, but with the simulation hypothesis, we have a technoscientific metaphor and a way to describe how that can happen.

Like 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 same modern type of point of view.

You're like, yeah, okay. Either we dismissed it or we say it's some kind of metaphor for something. 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, make it. And now with AI and prompting, we can create entire virtual worlds just by saying, okay, now create the water.

There was a demo of, uh, mark Zuckerberg a few years ago. This is even before chat. JPT was released with, uh, product called Builder Bott. He was like, builder, make an ocean, and it made an ocean. And he's, he was standing there with his avatar. Okay, now have a little island on it. Okay, now put some trees up, now add some [01:15:00] 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. In the Eastern traditions, you almost don't even need to use metaphors. I mean, they, 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.

I mean, it's basically like a video game. I mean, I mean those guys, and that's why I say Eastern mystics, but e 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, uh, for the Big Bang Theory. She was a, she's Jewish and she's telling me, oh, we have the same thing. We have this angel. So May Bialek. Yeah, it was May Bialek. Yep. Uh, when she puts, she goes, we have this angel who, uh, you know, Layla I think, who puts her hand on your upper lip here, and [01:16:00] 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 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. 'cause you know, here we're in Silicon Valley, people tend to be either, either they're religious or they're kinda materialists and atheists. Sure. But maybe there's something in between,

Jordan Harbinger: maybe. I know we're running outta 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 what, how many years away? Well,

Rizwan Virk: 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 [01:17:00] we'll get to that point much more quickly, and certainly within the next 50 years. A hundred 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, you know, we're starting with, but we don't, we haven't mastered yet.

So that one's pretty, but AI has moved so fast. It was actually stage nine out of 10 stages when I first started thinking about this. It'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 I, that stuff is gonna take a while. Uh, but so I don't think it's like next year. Yeah. Uh, 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 1 million years technology [01:18:00] advance to build something like this.

It's a hundred years, 50 years. We'll definitely be there.

Jordan Harbinger: 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?

Rizwan Virk: Possibly, yes. Okay.

So when Bostrom laid out a simulation argument, he had three possibilities. Let's just reduce 'em to two. There are no simulations or there's a billion simulations. Right. If you get to that point, you're gonna make a lot of simulations. If you never get to that point, fine you. 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. So 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, you know, at about 70 now because we're at about 70% of the way to get to that point as well. So I'm, I'm sort of [01:19:00] reducing, you know, the probability, like once that gets to a hundred percent that we can get there, then it's pretty close to a hundred 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 gonna go back and rerun it again. And those people would have deja vu and say, Hey, didn't we have this podcast before already? Dan, you and I spoken already.

Yeah, I just remember the host was much better looking last time.

Jordan Harbinger: Ruwan Burke, thank you so much. Thanks so much

Rizwan Virk: for having me. This has

Jordan Harbinger: 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 Vevo, 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.

JHS Clip: 71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that 75% is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary. Deep ocean in the middle of Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there and it's hard to go [01:20:00] 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 gonna spend money, I'm not gonna spend it on a $10 million birthday party. I'm gonna spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology.

It was kind of like Oceans 11, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management? Who 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 a 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 wanna 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.

[01:21:00] Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank and things did go wrong. Eventually, you can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware and you need to mitigate those risks.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 based reality or somebody else's grand experiment. The lesson is kind of the same. Curiosity 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 [01:22:00] notes@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals, please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter every Wednesday wee bit wiser. 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. It's a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at Six Minute Networking dot com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. It's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, 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 [01:23:00] 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.