March 19, 2025 • 53 mins
Rizwan Virk is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, and is a successful entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, computer scientist and bestselling author of The Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse. He is the founder of Play Labs at MIT, a video game accelerator at MIT, and is also an advisor to the Galileo Project at Harvard.
You can grab a copy of Rizwan's books here.....https://www.amazon.com/Simulated-Multiverse-Scientist-Simulation-Hypothesis/dp/1954872003
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You can grab a copy of Rizwan's books here.....https://www.amazon.com/Simulated-Multiverse-Scientist-Simulation-Hypothesis/dp/1954872003
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
So welcome to Mysterious Circumstances. I am justin and for
the listeners, this man right here, dude, I was just
telling him, I said, once I got the email for
this interview, I had to take it. He's the author
of more than two books, but the two I'm gonna
mention right now is the Simulation Hypothesis and the Simulated Multiverse.
Your background is incredibly interesting. I mean, Mit Stanford, I
(00:56):
know you're on a couple boards as well with each
of those universities, if not, I know Harvard too, But
you're also incorporate like UFOs, and I don't even know
what they call them now UAPs, I think so they
keep changing the name and it's like, yeah, it's the
same thing. We all know what it is, but yeah,
(01:17):
it's the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
In fact, the term UFO was adopted by the government
because the old term lying Saucer had you know, too
much science fiction baggage. It looks like they did the
same thing again with UFO. Were they named it up?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I love it so much, man, So tell us a
little bit about your background and how you got into
these topics and how how it interested you.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Sure, so you know, my background is as a computer scientist.
And you know, I study computer science. Back in at
my t I was a programmer, you know, writing code. Uh.
And then I became an entrepreneur in the video game
industry in Silicon Valley, where I ended up going to
business school. And it was really from my work in
the video game industry that I started to think more
(02:04):
about virtual reality and where it might take us. And
one day I had actually sold my last video game company,
and I had become an investor at an venture capitalist
at that point, and I was visiting a startup in
Marin County, which, if you know, is just north of
San Francisco. It looks out over the Bay, and they
had made a virtual reality ping pong game, and you know,
(02:26):
I was trying on this headset. The headset was coming
from the ceiling with wires. This was a few years ago. Now.
I was twenty sixteen, so I guess it was, you know,
eight years ago now, So the technology wasn't as advanced
as it is today. It was a heavy headset. You
couldn't really mistake the fact that you were in a
VR headset. But what happened was that the physics engine
(02:47):
of this game was so realistic that at the end
of the game, my body was fulled just for a
few seconds into thinking I was playing a real game
of ping pong, because it really felt that way with
the motion, and so much so that I tried to
put the paddle down on the table and I tried
to lean against the table, and of course there was
no table. It's just this big headset on my head.
(03:07):
So the controller fell to the floor and as I
tried to lean on the table, I almost fell over,
and I did a double take. I was like, wait
a minute, Oh yeah, of course. And then, you know,
that made me realize that as our video game technology
gets better, we'll be able to create simulated worlds and
video games that are basically indistinguishable from physical reality, something
(03:30):
like the Matrix. And so I really started to think
about what are the stages of technology between now and
then that will take us to that point? And then
what does that mean if we ever get to that point?
And that's kind of, you know, the initial interest in
this topic. And then I found that there was a
guy at Oxford named Nick Bostrom. So this is back
(03:50):
when the Matrix sequels were coming out about you know,
you are you living in a computer simulation, and he
basically came up with a logic that said that if
any civilization anywhere ever makes these types of simulations, they'll
make a whole bunch of simulated worlds, and because of that,
you're more likely to be in a simulated world than
(04:11):
a physical world. And this was the logic that that
same year in twenty sixteen, when I was playing a
ping pong game, Elon Musk was at the CODE conference
in somewhere in France, i think, and he basically made
a statement that the chance that we are not in
a simulation, the chances that we are in base reality
is one in billions, which of course means the chances
(04:31):
that we are in a simulation is billions to one.
Now those numbers aren't exact, obviously, but he was just
trying to say, there's you know, it's very very likely
that we live inside a simulated world. So anyway, that's
what kind of got me into it. And then I
started looking in the quantum physics, which is telling us
really weird things about the world that doesn't fit a
purely physical, materialistic reality. And then I started to look
(04:55):
at the religions of the world. Give me the mystics
of the religions, the Eastern mystics at first, but really
across all the world's major religions, and I realized they're
all telling us the same thing, that the world is
not real. What we think is physical is just a
temporary illusion of a sort. And so I realized that,
you know, all of these three areas, the computer science,
which was my background, the physics, and the mystics are
(05:19):
all telling us that we basically live inside a fake world,
which is kind of like a multiplayer video game. So
and that's how I really got drawn into the subject
and ended up writing the first book, The Simulation Hypothesis
about it.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
So, speaking on that book, what conclusion or not even conclusion,
But where did you go with who's who actually created
the simulation?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
If that is the case, Well, that's, you know, obviously
a tough question, and you get different answers depending upon
which angle you take. Now, there's something that I call
that's kind of important in the distinction between the simulation
hypothesis and various flavors of it. I call this the
R versus NPC distinction. Okay, And so NPC is a
(06:05):
term that's gotten popular now beyond video games, but it
came out of the video game industry, and it stands
for a non player character, and usually it means an
AI within the game that you know, it's not one
of the main characters. It's just somebody that's there, like
a bartender or a bank teller or even an opponent, right,
or somebody to help you in your quest in the
video game. Right. But it's it's not it's not a
(06:28):
playable character. Actually, the original term came out of Dungeons
and Dragons and tabletop games even before there were video games,
but the video game industry is where it's known for.
Of course, now it's made its way into popular usage
as someone who doesn't think for themselves. It takes the
programming of the media, and that's you know, we call
them an NPC sometimes, but the actually, yeah, so that's
(06:50):
pretty popular, right, But the actual term means it's an
AI that doesn't have a player. And so the other
version is the RPG version, as I like to call it,
which is role playing game where there's a player and
the player has a character inside the game, which is
called an avatar inside video games, which incidentally is an
old Hindu term you know, which means divinity coming down
(07:12):
into a body, right, and so it was it was
actually these guys at Lucasfilm, you know, George Lucas who
made Star Wars. His company had a gaming division and
they created a game called Habitat back in nineteen eighty
six to eighty nine. This ran on a Commodore sixty four,
you know, and with dial up modems, you know, with
that old salad. But they had these little characters on
(07:34):
the screen. It's considered pretty much the first, you know,
really well done MMORPG, even though they were just like
these tiny two D characters, and they were trying to
come up with a term for what do we call
your character that's moving around? They said, it feels like,
you know, we're big people and we have to basically
take ourselves and shrink ourselves into the phone line and
go down into this little sprite character on the screen.
(07:56):
And so they used this Hindu terms from Sanskrit, which
also meant, you know, big divine entity coming down into
a small little body. So that's where the trunk. But
so so those two flavors, they're really flavors, but they're
more like an axis because if you think of when
most academics talk about simulation. They think everybody's AI in
(08:17):
the simulation, and so somebody might have created the simulation
and they might be watching the simulation. On the other hand,
if we think of it as an RPG version, this
is closer to the matrix because in the Matrix, Neo
and Morpheus and Trinity, they all existed as players, if
you will, outside of the game, and then they had
their avatars which looked just like them inside the game, right,
(08:39):
So they were players with characters and avatars, and so
depending on which flavor you look at, and by the way,
these are not mutually exclusive. In a video game. You
can have your player characters, you can have other people's characters,
and then you can have NPCs as well, so you
come out with different answers. And I found that the
religious side was closer to the RPG version because they're saying,
(09:01):
we have a player which is like a soul that
exists outside the physical reality, right, and we basically watch
ourselves playing this game. And in the Eastern traditions, you know,
we talk about how in Hinduism and Buddhism they talk
about how once you've completed a life, you go back,
(09:21):
you kind of look at the game, and then you
go into the next character, and you play again and again,
and you have multiple lives. But when most academics talk
about simulation, they're saying, well, it's just a bunch of
AI NPCs. And Nick Boston, who I mentioned earlier, who
wrote that original paper, you know, he calls it an
ancestor simulation, And so an ancestor simulation is if we
(09:42):
were to make a simulation of say ancient Rome or
ancient Greece. Right, we're making a simulation of our ancestors.
And in a sense, I've talked about the Matrix a lot,
but there was a there was another movie that came
out in nineteen ninety nine that was simulation theme. I
don't know if you've seen it. It's called The Thirteenth Floor.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
No haven't. I'm intrigued now though.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, you should watch it if you're to this topic,
which you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Are, definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
It was based on an old book from from nineteen
sixties called Similar chron three, which is a science fiction novel.
But in it they're in nineteen ninety nine, and you know,
so the same year as the Matrix in factor came
out just a couple months later, of course it got
dwarfed because the matrix was talked about the movie of
that year. But I actually think this is one of
the better representations of this locasion, I thought SYS and
(10:27):
so in nineteen ninety nine they made a simulation of
nineteen thirty seven Los Angeles, and inside that simulation, everybody
was an NPC who were living their lives, and you
could also the main character. He could also go in
and inhabit one of those characters. So it's like taking
over like an NPC. But these people thought they were
(10:48):
real and they're living in it, and so in that case,
you know, it would be more like people who are
simulating something to see what would happen, Right in the
same way that we simulate the weather, Like why do
we run a simulation of the weather. We want to
see what might happen, or you know, a pandemic spread,
or traffic you know, or bag teller you know, bike
traffic or whatever you know, or winds and losses in
(11:10):
a casino. Whatever we might simulate, we do it to
figure out what is the most likely outcome and also
what might be the most favorable outcome, so we can
tweak the parameters and go back awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
So in your community, when you wrote the simulation I
bought to this what what was the feedback? Did a
lot of academics just kind of why did you write that? Man? Like,
what the hell are you doing? You know?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Well, so, you know, I was a part of a
few different communities, and I still am in a way.
There's the Silicon Valley community, which is more technology centric, right,
and then there's the academic community, which is a little
more science and philosophy centric, but also tends to have
a certain view of the world. And then you know,
I also spend a lot of time, as you alluded
(11:57):
to in you know, in the introduction, a lot of
you know, spiritual types, conspiracy types, people in new a
faux world, you know, all kinds of other stuff that
you know, you don't always get a lot of mixture
between these different these different worlds. And so in the
Silicon Valley community, the response was very positive because it's
all about technology and how it developed. So this is
a really popular topic. I even, in fact, I spoke
(12:20):
at Google right while I was you know, when I
had first released the book, and the talk went over
quite well, particularly you know, the the ideas about AI.
But also about religions and stuff, although at the end
I showed them a picture of a spoon bending party
that had just happened at the Institute Ions the Institute
(12:41):
for Noetic Sciences conference in Santa Clara, which is literally
around the corner from Google, and at the end they
were like, no, that's all fakes, you know, spoon bending
is all fake, but everything else we love. In the
academic world, I got a lot of good response from
certain groups, you know, people who were like the philosophy
(13:01):
of science, philosophers, religious studies, and other scholars. But the
physicists didn't necessarily like it, but the computer scientist did.
So it depended which community you know or subcommunity you're
talking about.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
That's that's great though. I think it's great. How what
did your what did your family think? Were they all
on board? Like, hey, get it on paper, man, you know,
we're we're interested to get more in depth to it
because I know, if I have a significant a significant other, yeah,
sometimes I'll just go on those rants, you know, and
they'll have no idea what I'm even talking about. But
I just got to get it out, and you know,
(13:37):
they're supportive, you know, but they have no idea what
I'm talking about half the time.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But yeah, well in my case, you know, my partner,
she was very supportive the book and the ideas. I mean,
she's not necessarily into the computer science part or the
physics part, but she's into the spiritual part. So she
was very supportive, you know, of the whole idea. Yeah,
and my extended family is you know, pretty mu pretty
much into it as well. So awesome where it worked out,
(14:03):
all right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
That always helps a little bit. So how does how
does the extraterrestrial factor? What what does that play in
the simulation theory or hypothesis?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Well, at first, you know, my interest in these topics
was you know, almost completely separate, right, It was like
two different threads of interest that I had. But what
happened was that the more I started to look into it,
the more I started to see, you know, areas of overlap.
And you know, in terms of background, I got involved
in the UFO topic because I was involved. I was
(14:38):
an independent filmmaker for a little while, which was more
of a hobby of mine than anything. And so because
in Silicon Valley I was an investor and i'd help
startups basically, you know, entrepreneurs take their ideas and turn
them into the companies. And then I got involved in
some early stage filmmakers who were basically doing the same thing, right.
They were trying to take their ideas and turn them
(15:00):
into a real film, and they had to raise money
and they had to do all this other stuff. And
so there was a film called Thrive What on Earth
Will It Take? And this came out in twenty eleven,
So this is right around to Occupy Wall Street time,
and you know, it was more of I guess you'd
call it a conspiracy movie more than anything. But there
was a there was a segment in that movie that
was about UFOs and free energy technology, and so I
(15:23):
started to kind of investigate the topic a bid and
that's when I started to meet more people the simulation.
I met Jacques Valet.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Oh, I don't know if that would be awesome. I would,
yeah to talk to that guy.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, you know, he's been you know, for I'm sure
your audience may know of him, but if not, you know,
he's been involved in the UFO topic since Project Blue Book. Yeah,
he had just gotten his PhD. And he worked with
Dye Allen Heinech and even by database of French cases
that he was comparing to the Project Blue Book cases.
And so we had lunch in Silicon Valley, which is
(15:57):
actually where I am right now, just down the road,
and this was actually, I think, before I had written
the book, and he started to describe to me some
cases that were just a bit odd, which basically made
me think, Okay, there's more going on here than just
the extraterrestrial hypothesis, because what would happen, was said, was,
sometimes these UFOs would come in and out of physical reality, right,
(16:21):
almost as if they were projected a hologram, you know,
of some type, and you know, he would say that
there would be cases where one person would see the
UFO and the other person and that got me really thinking, well,
what could it mean if one person is seeing it
or not. Well, inside a video game, the way that
things work is even though you and I our avatars
(16:43):
might be in the same room or the same field,
they're actually being rendered on different devices, right just like now,
I mean literally, I'm not talking to you right now,
I'm talking to my computer, and your image is being
rendered on my computer, and my image is being rendered
on your computer and voice as well. And so if
you were to take a rendering model where each person
(17:04):
has their own let's say, quote unquote computer, although that's
not necessarily what it is, and it only seems like
we're in the same physical world, we're actually rendering it differently. Well,
in a video game, we do that all the time.
We might say, you know that you're level thirty and
my character is only level two, and turns out that
level thirty characters can have an ability to see, you know,
(17:26):
the dragon or the UFO, and level two characters can't, right,
And so to me, I'll say, obviously there's nothing there
because I'm looking right at it, and you'll say, obviously
it's right there. Can't you see it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
That's honestly interesting though.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It really is, because it starts to get into what
is this shared consensus of reality. And then he told
me about another case which was really interesting as well.
He said he went to investigate this case in northern
California or southern Oregon. I don't know if you've been
up there, but you know they have the big the
big redwood trees up there.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. So it's you know different. I grew up in
the Midwest, you know, not too far from where you are. Yeah,
so it's very different landscape when you go north in California.
And he said that there was a case where where
these guys claimed there was a UFO that came down
and landed and left, you know, some some marks on
the ground, and he said, you know, you have to
move on. And all these other guys came to investigate it,
(18:18):
and then they left. But Jacques what he likes to
do is he likes to stay and investigate and get
to know the people more. And afterwards he said to
them he was in the clearing with these big trees,
you know, all around, and he said, well, you know,
you said that the UFO came down at a forty
five degree angle when it landed. He said, yeah, that's right,
and he goes, well, if you look at these big trees,
(18:41):
if it came down at a forty five degree angle
and landed here, it would have had to have gone
through the trees, literally right cut through the trees. And
they said, yeah, that's exactly what happened. But we didn't
want to say that because it sounds crazy, right that
it does not match our materialistic idea of the universe.
So in a sense, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the simplest explanation,
(19:05):
but it also matches our current worldview. Right if you
were to go back five hundred years and say, oh,
these guys you know are from another planet or another
solar system, that would just look at you like, what
are you weird? What are you talking about? Right, that
wasn't a worldview that was really shared. And then you know,
Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler came around, and Kepler was
(19:26):
actually one of the first science fiction writers. Not many
people know this, when he calculated the laws of planetary motion.
He also wrote a science fiction novel about characters from
other planets, Nice to you know. That's sort of the
idea of taking science and then turning it into fiction
to communicate it. And so, I think in a sense,
even though most academics today are very much against this
(19:48):
idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial, in a sense, that's actually
a pretty okay explanation that fits within their worldview, because
we know there are other planets and there are other
solar systems, et cetera. But we don't know about these
other dimensions and things that go in and out of
physical reality. But UFO is maybe weirder. So to me,
(20:09):
that almost seemed like in a video game where if
you've played video games, you can render a character, but
while it's rendering, like when the whole scene is rendering,
the first time you can go through walls, you know,
you're kind of transparent, and then when you get solid,
like when the rendering is done, then the physics engine
stops you from going into the wall. Like I can't
put my hand through this table right now, but while
(20:32):
it's being rendered, I can still do that, right And
so it almost seemed like that there was something here
that had this ability to be like a holograph. And
I'm not saying that they aren't physical, because many people
have seen physical craft. I'm saying that these physical craft
materialize and de materialize, and what does that mean In
our material world, we don't know what ms, But in
(20:53):
a simulated world that's rendered with pixels, there is a
meaning for that, and that's something that we can at
least understand that perspective.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Damn, dude, I'm gonna end up going down a whole
another rabbit hole after this interview. That's gonna be great.
So going on that though, So talking about the spiritual
aspect of simulation. Are you. Are you familiar with shadow
people and the happened person known as the hat man
in the paranormal community.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I've heard of them, but I haven't gone deep into
into them.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So I've interviewed a neuroscientist at one point who was
pretty into the paranormal and we had a whole long
discussion about you know, brain activity, how that works and everything.
I was just curious if you did have an opinion,
because a lot of people think that they are interdimensional.
That's one of the theories. Nobody really really knows too
(21:46):
much about it. It's just a lot of theories stuff like that.
But yeah, I was I was curious.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, well, I mean I do have a bit of
an opinion on what that could be, because, you know,
part of my research took me down this the rabbit
hole of different religions, and particularly in the Islamic religions,
and you know, as I was looking at near death
experiences and let's talk about the life review in a minute,
because it relates. But within the Islamic traditions, they have
(22:14):
this this whole idea of another set of beings that
lives on Earth with us. But that we can't normally see.
And those beings are called the gin or a genie,
like the genie in Aladdin, you know that is the
single gin. But so they're you know, considered real beings
in that tradition, and they come in and out of
our face and time differently as well. And if we
(22:36):
don't want to talk about the Mendela fact, I can
tell you an interesting story about of course, and that
was you know, in my second book and the Simulated Multiverse.
I get a lot into this idea of multiple timelines.
But the idea is that these gin can materialize and
de materialize. So I was recently at a conference with
Whitley Strieber, who you may know, you know he will Communion,
(22:58):
which had the picture of the gray alien that's become
kind of the standard way that. Yeah, and you know,
in fact, I was at Rice University last year at
the Archives of the Impossible conference and they have Whitley's
letters that his wife Anne had like collected and organized
over like twenty thirty years. And it's amazing when you
(23:20):
look at these letters that people wrote back in the eighties.
I mean they wrote like twelve page letters type letters
where they would draw images of what they saw. But
he told a story recently on one of his podcasts
and asked them about it about a young man who
met this young woman, and you know, he thought she
was just a regular young woman. He thought he was
falling in love with her. They had sex. She called
(23:41):
him to her apartment one day and said, I have
to tell you I'm pregnant. But then she said, I
also have to tell you that I'm actually like a
gray alien. That was the terminology, and she transformed right
in front of him into a different kind of being.
And then she transformed back and she said, and I'm
leaving and you'll never see me again. Okay, now this
sounds like a bizarre right. If we take a purely
(24:04):
materialistic view of the universe, you know that can't happen, right,
Either the person is a human or they're an alien,
and that's it. But if we take an avatar based view, right,
you can change your avatar in a video game. But
what were editions from the Middle Ages and earlier to
be fairly common where they would say there was this man,
he married this gin woman. They had these gin children,
(24:26):
and one day she said, I'm taking the children into
the gin world and you'll never see me again. And
then she, you know, just disappeared. And it's like these
stories that have been around for thousands of years, you
start to wonder, well, what if they weren't crazy, what
if they were telling you know, actual things that happened.
Today we interpret these as like aliens or you know,
(24:47):
the shadow man or the guys with a hat, because
those are images that we might understand in the modern sense.
And even so, you know, I'm currently at Arizona State
University and I teach a class classes on the simulation.
I bought this this on virtual reality, but my research
is actually on science fiction and how it influences technological
(25:09):
innovation and technology impacts society and society impacts technology. And
so for example, like time zones, we use time zones
and we look at the clock very you know, like
almost religiously in the US. And turns out that happened
partly because of the railroads, right, because the technology of railroads,
(25:32):
they needed the technology of accurate time zones and timekeeping
so they could say when they're going to arrive. Because
before that it was just like yeah, you know, sunsets
and people did have clocks, but they weren't always synchronized
across different areas of the world, and so technology has
this weird impact on society. And so I think that
our understanding of the world is making us think everything
(25:55):
is aliens, when in fact it may be. Not saying
that it's not alien some of it may be, but
some of them may actually be other types of beings
that have existed all along, that go in and out
of reality, and that with you know, these shadow beings
often appear at night, right m hm, And so you
know what happens at night, Well, we're kind of half
the sleep, half awake. It's like in a lot of traditions,
(26:18):
like the shamanic traditions, you know, they do shamanic journey
where you go into these different worlds, you go in
the underworlds. I'm not necessarily with DMT, just you know,
using drumming and breathing, although of course there's a whole
ayahuasca tradition and now now people are experimenting with DMT
and talking about the different types of beings that they encounter.
But as possible, these beings are there all along, and
(26:40):
we just have to get into an altered state to
be able to perceive them, So that's kind of part
of it. It's not a real full theory of what
these things are, but I think there's some correlation. Uh.
And I was influenced, you know. I mentioned jacquesvale or
there are influenced by his work and if you see
his book Passport to Magonia, it has a really cool
picture on the cover, one of the where you see
(27:01):
the gray alien but with different masks that look like
a fay or fairy from the Celtic traditions are different. Yeah,
it's like they put on different masks. One of those
masks could be you know, these hat men as it were,
these dark figures that show up.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
The part that got me about the shadow the shadow
people thing is obviously, I mean they've been written about forever,
all across the world. I mean, before communication or good communication,
I should say, it was the same stories. And it's like,
how are all these people from around the world who
can't communicate with each other telling the same story. But
(27:38):
then you have the factor of a sleep deprivation. Sleep
deprivations going to you know, make you see things loosinate.
You know, if some guy who's been up for you know,
four days on drugs is like man, I see these
people in the bushes, I'm gonna be you know, I'm
gonna be like, dude, just you know, you need to
sleep a little bit. But the interesting thing is that
they did a simulation, and I think it was on
(28:00):
accident they were doing. There was a girl, I believe
it was in Switzerland or that section of Europe, and
you can get the whole pdf on the study, and
they simulated a shadow person. You know, they just triggered
some specific part of her brain that that simulated it.
And I don't know, I thought that was really interesting,
(28:21):
you know, you just never know.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
I guess, yeah, no, that is interesting, you know. But
of course they didn't necessarily have that kind of technology,
you know, absolutely, So how do you explain you know,
all of these things. But yeah, I do believe. So
it's part of my book, the simulation. I thought as
I mentioned these ten stages of technology, and one of
the stages is brain computer interfaces, and it's this idea
(28:42):
of you know, we have Elon Musk with NERO link
out there now where they implanted in the first human
patient and it was working great. For a while. He
was able to like play video games just using his mind,
because he was paralyzed and then later they kind of dissolved.
So the technology is not quite there yet, but you
know that idea of being able to read the signals
in the brain and then to send signals to the
(29:05):
brain is something that is in our future. And so
there is this element of sending electrical signals to try
to stimulate different parts of the brain and you might
see different things, but the question is what are those
stimulants and how do they happen a person. I have spent
a lot of time looking at different types of dreaming
techniques from different traditions, and it's one of the oldest
(29:26):
topics out there because people have been dreaming right since forever.
And whether you're talking about the Aborigines in Australia, you
talk about the Iroquois, you know, or the Chippewa near
where I grew up, and or the Maricopa within the
Arizona Phoenix area, which is where I'm based. Most of
the school is at the school year this time. You know,
(29:49):
they all have these stories about beings that come in
the dreams and that these are some of these are
real beings. And even in the Tibetan traditions, they have
a whole called dream Yoga, where you learn to do
lucid dreaming within dreams so you can recognize that what
you're seeing is not real, it's a dream. But then
(30:09):
you use that to actually wake up in real life
and realize that all of this is a kind of
dream as well, that it's also a kind of illusion.
But even with all these traditions, they still have this
idea that you can go places, like you can have
actual experiences when you're dreaming. They're they're not just sort
of personal like some of them are just symbolic dreams,
like you ate ate too much and you know it
(30:32):
dreams into a weird dreaming, yeah, yeah, Or you're trying
to give a talk and your naked, or you're taking
a test, right, So kind.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Of those along the lines of astral projection.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Yeah, kind of like the lines of astral projection. I
mean it, I kind of like to translate these different
traditions into big dreams and little dreams. You know, little
dreams are like our personal stuff that we're working on.
The Tibetans call them karmic trace dreams. They're just based
on stuff. You know, you probably had a dream where
you saw something on TV or in a movie that
(31:03):
made an impression on you, and then later it shows
up in your dream. Right. That's they call that a
karmic trace. It's an impression and it gets resolved in
the dream. So that impression was not enough karma to
actually create a situation in your real life. But it's
sort of like what we do in computer science. There's
a process, like people who don't like program don't know
(31:24):
about this necessarily, but there's a process called garbage collection,
and we go through the code and we clean up
stuff that's not really needed anymore. Right, It's like old
memory values and memory that aren't needed anymore. Otherwise they're
just using up space. And that's kind of like these
karmic traces. There are things that made an impression in
your mind that are not needed. But then you get
to dreams of clarity or what are called big dreams,
(31:46):
which tend to be more like astral projection, where you're
actually going somewhere and what you're seeing is has more
truth to it or more objective reality. So there's like
a subjective astral and an objective astral is the way
that I like, it's pretty cool, and that's where you know,
we can interact with each other. That's where we can meet,
you know, spirits of people that have that have died
(32:08):
or as I like to say, they they've left the simulation,
but they come back in with these kind of ghost
avatars sometimes to see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
That's interesting. So going on, you know your your your
feedback from your first book, How did that propel you
to do the simulated multiverse? And in what are you
getting in deeper or more in depth on or just
different topics?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, well there were two. Well, first of all, when
I wrote the simulation Hypothesis, I thought, okay, great, I'm
done with this topic. Like I've gotten it out, I've
researched it, I've been thinking about it for years because
it brought together these different threads of my life, you know,
the computer science, the science, the religion, the mystics, the
crazy stuff. Right, it kind of brought it all together
(32:55):
into one, and I thought, okay, great, I'm done. I
can go back to Silicon Valley and back in the industry.
But what happened was that there were two There were
two meetings, if you will, that's stuck in my mind.
And one of them was the wife of the science
fiction author Philip K. Dick, and so I interviewed Tessa B. Dick.
She's his I think fourth wife or so, and you
(33:17):
know she's older now. Philip K. Dick died in I
think nineteen eighty two, is just before Blade Runner came out,
so you know, he just started to see because all
his life he was like kind of a marginal writer
who never made any money. He was trying to always
keep writing to have enough money for his family, right,
but near the end he got paid a million dollars
(33:40):
for the screenplay for Blade Runner, which was based on
his book to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep. But anyway,
she told me about a speech he gave and Metz France,
and in that speech I had heard one famous line.
So in nineteen seventy seven in France, he said, we
are living in a computer programmed reality. And many people
use that a quote because he's like one of the
(34:02):
first guys to talk about this seriously, even though he's
a science search and writer. He wasn't talking about this
in terms of a sci fi story. He was saying,
I think this is what's really going on. But then
the second part of that statement was one that most
people don't really look at He said, We're living in
a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have
to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration
(34:24):
occurs in our reality. And she encouraged me to go
and listen to that whole speech, and so I did.
I listened to it, and I found a transcript of it,
and it was called, you know, if you think this
world is bad, you should see some of the other worlds.
And what happened was she also told me that he
came to believe that this process where somebody changes a
(34:45):
variable and reruns the simulation, he said, we would be
living the same events, we would be hearing the same things,
we would be having a sense of deja vu, and
that would be the clue that this is happening. Again
that that inspired some of his work, and in fact
he came to believe that the Man in the High Castle,
which I don't know if you've seen that at Amazon
(35:06):
TV series.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So this is an alternate history book. This was actually
before Blade Runner. This was really his famous, his most
famous book. He won like all the prestigious science fiction
awards for it, and he rout it way back in
nineteen sixteen. It's an alternate history where Japan and Germany
won World War two and then they split America between them. Right,
the east coast was ruled by the Nazis, the West
(35:29):
coast was ruled by the Empire of Japan, because you know,
those were the but the middle, like Colorado, was kind
of this free area. But anyway, he came to believe
that that was a real timeline that had happened, and
he said that I had these fragmentary memories of America
being a police date. And later he said, all the
(35:50):
memories came flooding back into him when he had some
experience that he called nm nesis or a loss of forgetfulness.
But the important part here is he came to believe
that this really happened, and it was a timeline that
the simulators decided they wanted to run another timeline, and
that our timeline where you know, we won World or two,
(36:10):
was an alternate timeline, but one that led to a
better outcome of some time. So this idea was live
in my mind that if we could run one simulation,
why wouldn't we run it multiple times? Right, because that's
when you run a simulation of the weather, or you
run a simulation of any process, what do you do?
You go back and you change the variables and you
rerun it. And you know, there's a movie called The
(36:33):
Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, which was
also based on one of Philip K. Dick's stories, which
is called The Adjustment Team was the original story. You know,
these guys come in, they freeze everything, and then they'd
make a few changes and then they let it run again.
And what you saw in this movie they dramatized it.
I mean they changed it a bit, but they dramatized
it where there's these guys monitoring what's going on in
(36:55):
their little books and they can see, oh, no, we
got to change something, otherwise it's going to go in
the wrong direction. Said, this is not going to go
where we wanted to. But this idea that there might
be multiple timelines and there might be people fiddling with
these timelines was something that really came out of this
speech that he gave about these timelines. So that was
sticking in my mind. And then I had I had
(37:16):
coffee with a friend of mine from MIT who normally
you know, other MIT graduates in computer science don't talk
about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
And he had gotten a job at Google. A guy
named Bruce, and he was visiting Mountain View and so
we we have coffee and he said, yeah, you know,
I read about your book. Have you looked at the
Mendela effects? And I said, yeah, I've heard of it,
but I had just dismissed it as faulty memory. He goes, well,
you know the simulation. I thought this is one of
the best explanations for that. And so that sent me
down a whole nother route, which was that if we
(37:49):
can have multiple runs at the simulation, could we be
remembering like slightly different versions of individual things. And and
there's a whole you know, there's a whole science mathematics
around chaos theory. And the whole idea of chaos theory
is if you make little changes in initial conditions, they
can have huge impacts down the road. And there's also
(38:11):
a term that a computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram who
wrote the software called Mathematica that's used by a lot
of engineers and a lot of academics. Anyway, he was
a brilliant physicist who dropped out of Oxford because he
felt like everything was too boring, and he went and
studied account tech into other things. But he came up
with this term called computationally irreducible, and he said that
(38:33):
certain processes, in order to know what's going to happen,
even if their rules are deterministic, you have to run
the process to figure out what's going to happen at
step two million. You can't just assume what's going to
happen or do in a little equation. You have to
actually run it. And so, you know, I came to think,
what if this reality is a computationally irreducible process. The
(38:57):
only way to know what's going to happen is if
we run the simulation and we let ourselves make choices,
and we let ourselves change variables, and we see where
it leads to. And then we may be remembering other
runs of the simulation when we have instances of deja
vu or clues, or we may even be remembering future
events like oh, yeah, we ran the simulation and it
(39:18):
went to this point in the future. And so so
all of these ideas kind of came together with quantum computing,
and that's what made me write about the multiverse ideas.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Is there any Mandela effect that trips you up that
you're just like, man, I know what I remember, and
this one's just not right?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well, yeah, I mean, you know there's a few, like
the famous ones, like the Bernstein Bears. Yeah, is one
that I you know, that definitely gets me. One that
I didn't experience personally, but I feel is kind of
an important one is the Tianeman Square. Do you remember
the guy in front of the tank? They called him
(40:00):
a tank boy, and so what what happened would that?
Would that guy in the tank? Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Actually?
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Wow, because I remember it, I think I remember. What's
the consensus for you, which is that you know, the
tank stopped and it.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Didn't run him over, but I thought it ran him over.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Right, So there's a group of people that think the
tank ran him over, and more than that, they remember
very clearly that you know, this bloody scene of this
tank running him over and said it was the worst
thing they'd seen on TV at that point. Right, this
was back in eighty nine, I think, so he was
really pretty primarily had the networks you had, you had
CNN two I think. But but but so that's an
(40:37):
interesting one because it's such a vivid memory. You know,
of course I'm a movie fan, so you know, the
Empire strikes back.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, you tinker bells one for me? Did they say that? Yeah,
because I I just saw that one like one or
two weeks ago, and I'm like, I know, damn well
she went around and dotted that I with her wand
you know, on the Disney logo, and They're like, Nope,
never happened. And I'm like, I specifically remember it happening. Well,
(41:05):
that Curious George was a good one too.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Curious George is another one, but the one that really
what really got me to take this even more seriously
was the scriptural changes. I don't know if you're familiar
with that, but with the Bible, there are certain verses
that people say that have changed. And one of the
most famous is in Isaiah, which is about the lion
and the lamb. Right, and I don't remember the exact verse,
(41:28):
but it had something to do to lion in the lamb. Well,
it turns out if you look at the King James
Bible today, it says the wolf in the lamb. It
doesn't say the lion in the Latin and pretty.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Sure a lion was a big part of that, you.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Know, yeah, exactly. And more than that, there are physical artifacts,
you know, people have like clocks and things that talk
about the lion and the lamb, and it's just such
a common thing we all remember.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
The reason I think this one is more interesting is
because people take their scriptures seriously. And that's just one.
There are many other scriptural changes and and so so
I began to wonder, Okay, are there other scriptures that
might have changed other than the Bible, Because again, at
first I thought FAULTI memory, But then you know with scripture,
that's a little less likely since people memorize these things
(42:13):
word for word. And then I thought, oh, it must
be different translations. And people are like, no, no, I've
had this King James Bible since I was a kid, right,
it's the physical Bible that's different. And then so I
began to look around to see if the Koran, you know,
the Islamic Holy book which came in a revelation to
the prophet Mohammad, had changed at all. And I couldn't
(42:35):
find much out there except there was this one Sufi
Imam and he was talking about this and if you know,
in the Islamic traditions. They don't just memorize passages. They
memorized the whole Quran, like the whole damn thing, word
for word. In fact, there's a term called it hafs.
It's like an achievement on the way to becoming a priest,
which means that you can recite the entire Quran word
(42:57):
for word and get it exactly right. I remember wondering
about this, because you know, I was born in Pakistan
and grew up in the Muslim tradition. It's like, why
do we memorize it? I mean, it's there, we got
the butt. Why don't we memorize the Arabic word for word?
I mean, not all Muslims even speak Arabic, you know.
But turns out this guy said, well, there's a reason
why we memorize it word for word. And he said,
(43:19):
because there are certain beings that are allowed to go
back in time and change physical objects in the room,
but they're not allowed to change your memory. And so
for that reason, they could change a physical book like
the Kurn, but they can't change your memory. So you know,
for me, and those are called the gin basically, so
(43:42):
this ties back to our idea because gin don't exist
in the same uh you know kind of space and
time as we do. And so for me, I was like, oh,
that's really interesting because now you've got beings that can
muck around with the timeline, right, they can go to
the path. I mean, we've heard stories of gin Mucket.
So you know, when I grew up, there was always
stories of gin. This watch out the ghost. You know,
(44:02):
the Gin is going to be there and get you
at night. It was like something you used to scare kids.
But there's actual stories, like in the Bible and the Quran,
there's references to the Queen of Sheba and the Queen
of Sheba and Solomon. I don't know if you know
this particular story where you know, she's coming from Africa
and what happens is he gets her throne and he
(44:24):
brings it. Solomon brings it, you know, before she gets there.
It's like, how did he do that? And supposedly he
did that through the magic of the Gin who were
able to go and get it and bring it to him.
And so I started to look around to say, are
there you know more modern stories where people could get
gin to manipulate objects and turns out. You know, they're
in Autobiography of the Yogi, which is a book by
(44:46):
part of Hansea Yogananda, who was one of the first
Indian Yogis to come over and live in the US,
all the way back in the nineteen twenties. In fact,
I wrote another book called Wisdom of a Yogi, which
just came out last year, which is about kind of
lessons from this book Autobiography of Yogi, which was like
the favorite book of Steve Jobs. You know, he had it.
I was the only book on his iPad. At his
(45:06):
memorial service, everybody got a little brown box and inside
the box was a copy of Autobiography of Yogi. And
in that book, there's a story of a guy who
learned to control an entity named Hasrat, and he would
tell him to just take any object, and Hazrat would
make the object disappear and appear somewhere else. And he
went around and abused this power. He used to use
(45:27):
go to jewelry shops and touch these objects, and then
he'd leave, and later the jewelry would disappear and nobody
could pin it on him because it didn't happen while
he was there. And I was like, is this you know,
a real story or is this just you know, something
he made up to teach us things right? And I
started to look around and there were you know, there
are stories of these types of things where objects get
(45:49):
manipulated and moved around. So anyway, this is you know,
tying some of the weird stuff back to the multiverse idea,
which is was a key part of why why I
wrote this book was I wanted to explore this idea
that the be multiple timelines and we may have tried
out different things.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
That's interesting. That makes me think, I'm not sure how
how in depth with the paranormal you are. I'm one
of those people. I got to go to the most
haunted places ever. I want to see it, I want
to experience it. I'm into it. But I'm also a
very huge skeptic. Now that being said, there was what
you were just saying brought up a point that I
(46:24):
had heard one time that some people consider so there's
different types of hauntings, like there's intelligent older guy's residual.
Some people believe that it's overlapping timelines. And one of
the reasons is because in the Conjuring House, the original
you know, all the movies are based on the warrens
and everything like that. So the parent family told a
(46:46):
story once where they saw like these old time people
in the same room and they were ghosts, but the
ghosts were looking at them confused, like what the hell
is going going on? What are you guys doing here?
And that I don't know why that story stuck out
with me specifically, because it's like it's I don't know,
(47:08):
it's just weird. It kind of makes me kind of
adds validity. I guess to the theory that it's like
at some point, maybe it's timelines kind of crossing over
and there's that thin veil and each one sees each
other or whatever. But I didn't know if you had
ever gotten into any of that before.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Well, I had heard about these things, and there was
a computer scientist at University of North Carolina a few
years ago, and he said he thought ghosts could be
artifacts of the simulation running again the same scene. So
when you think of like these different types of hauntings,
as you said, like the Poultergeist versus. But some of
them are just the same scene being repeated, it's like
(47:48):
the same.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, it's those are what they refer to as residual
because it's just residual energy and they're repeating the same
actions to us over and over again. They're going through
their daily lives. But then you have the intelligent ones
that also somehow you know, interact with you or whatever.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Well, so the residual ones, you know, makes a
lot of sense from a simulation point of view, because
it's like I mentioned garbage collection. Yes, there's like data
that the engine just runs whatever's in memory, and until
that memory has been cleaned out, it's just going to
rerun that scene again and again. Then you see it again.
Now when you get into the more intelligent ones, that's
(48:27):
where I think it becomes interesting again from a simulation
point of view, because it's like there are two different
sets of avatars right that are running at the same time.
And I remember reading a book from Leslie Kane Surviving Death.
Have you read that one?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
No, but I've heard of it actually.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah, And in that there's a chapter it's actually by
another gentleman I forget his name now, but there's a
chapter where he was investigating a particular haunting in Oakland, California,
and there was an old woman and that the boy
would see and you see this a lot right where
the kids can see them and the parents it's not
like they don't see him at all, but they see
(49:07):
him a little bit. Whereas the kid was carrying out
like a full conversation and saying, oh, yeah, her name
is whatever it was, Lydia, I forget the exact name,
you know, and she lived here and she died before.
And then then their son is telling them that and
they're like, really weird. They looked into it, and yeah,
there was a woman named Lydia who had lived there
pretty much since she'd been born until she died in
like the eighties. And then later the ghost tells the
(49:30):
boy that she can, you know, she can decide who
sees her, like really, yeah, so she decided or that
the sun maybe because he's more open, she's going to
talk to him more, whereas with the parents, like, they
weren't as open, and so they caught glimpses of her.
But but she either she decided not to interact with
(49:50):
them or they couldn't see it. But there's some intelligence
there that gives them this ability. And again, in a
video game like environment, you can have settings easily that
say okay, yes, see me and these people don't. And again,
you're gonna have one person next to you that sees
it and the other person doesn't.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
It's like the younger you are, like the algorithm's not
set yet, you know. It's like you're still open to everything.
And as you get older, like the algorithm gets you
and it's like, oh, yeah, he's not gonna see nothing.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yep, yep, that's right. So I think there's some overlap
here with some of these. I mean, I personally tend
to stay away from places that are funted, not not
not because I'm skeptical, but because I believe there are
other other beings and instant I do too, and I
don't want them to come home with me, so try
to avoid.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
It's a very good point. It's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
I I love going to places and doing that kind
of stuff, and.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
They might come home with you something.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Oh you never know. I got I got some stuff
from some places. I don't know. I get to endo
the spiritual aspect, so I try to do what I
can to, you know, protection wise and stuff like that.
But some people laugh at me. I don't care. It's
like I'm into that stuff. It's like it is what
it is.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
Well, people have been seeing this stuff for thousands of
years exactly. It's like it's a thing, maybe even tens
of thousands, right, we just don't we don't have recorded history.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah, absolutely, So what is Do you have anything in
the future going on, like speaking events, any books that
you're working on for the future.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah, so you know, I'm speaking in Huntsville, Alabama in
end of September at a conference called Doorway to the Future,
which is put on by a gentleman named Tom Campbell,
who wrote a book called My Big Toe, My Big
Theory of Everything, And he's been talking about this idea
that we live in a video virtual reality for some time.
He was involved with the Monroe Institute way back when
(51:40):
when they were first getting set up. And so I'm
going to be speaking there, and I have an online class.
I have a class that I teach at ASU or
the Simulation Hypothsis, and I'll probably offer that online in
either the fall or the spring as well. And I'm
working on a second edition of The Simulation Hypothesis, but
that won't be out till next till next year or
sometime awesome.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, when it comes out, you're more and welcome to
come back on again. I would love to have you.
This is a great conversation.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yeah, I'd be happy to get come back on definitely.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And for the listeners, I will provide links to all
of his stuff in the in the description show notes
everything like that. But again, man, I cannot thank you
enough for coming on and doing this interview. Is one
of the better conversations I've had in a while.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
So well, thanks for inviting me in your show. Yeah,
I appreciate that as well. Really enjoyed.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
All right. Well, I hope you have a good rest
of your afternoon and hope hopefully it gets relaxation. You
don't go down any rabbit holes tonight or anything.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
But yeah, a little bit of writing to do, but other.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Than that, all right, that's good. Well, thank you so
much and I will talk to you later. S S
Speaker 2 (53:11):
S S.
So welcome to Mysterious Circumstances. I am justin and for
the listeners, this man right here, dude, I was just
telling him, I said, once I got the email for
this interview, I had to take it. He's the author
of more than two books, but the two I'm gonna
mention right now is the Simulation Hypothesis and the Simulated Multiverse.
Your background is incredibly interesting. I mean, Mit Stanford, I
(00:56):
know you're on a couple boards as well with each
of those universities, if not, I know Harvard too, But
you're also incorporate like UFOs, and I don't even know
what they call them now UAPs, I think so they
keep changing the name and it's like, yeah, it's the
same thing. We all know what it is, but yeah,
(01:17):
it's the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
In fact, the term UFO was adopted by the government
because the old term lying Saucer had you know, too
much science fiction baggage. It looks like they did the
same thing again with UFO. Were they named it up?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I love it so much, man, So tell us a
little bit about your background and how you got into
these topics and how how it interested you.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Sure, so you know, my background is as a computer scientist.
And you know, I study computer science. Back in at
my t I was a programmer, you know, writing code. Uh.
And then I became an entrepreneur in the video game
industry in Silicon Valley, where I ended up going to
business school. And it was really from my work in
the video game industry that I started to think more
(02:04):
about virtual reality and where it might take us. And
one day I had actually sold my last video game company,
and I had become an investor at an venture capitalist
at that point, and I was visiting a startup in
Marin County, which, if you know, is just north of
San Francisco. It looks out over the Bay, and they
had made a virtual reality ping pong game, and you know,
(02:26):
I was trying on this headset. The headset was coming
from the ceiling with wires. This was a few years ago. Now.
I was twenty sixteen, so I guess it was, you know,
eight years ago now, So the technology wasn't as advanced
as it is today. It was a heavy headset. You
couldn't really mistake the fact that you were in a
VR headset. But what happened was that the physics engine
(02:47):
of this game was so realistic that at the end
of the game, my body was fulled just for a
few seconds into thinking I was playing a real game
of ping pong, because it really felt that way with
the motion, and so much so that I tried to
put the paddle down on the table and I tried
to lean against the table, and of course there was
no table. It's just this big headset on my head.
(03:07):
So the controller fell to the floor and as I
tried to lean on the table, I almost fell over,
and I did a double take. I was like, wait
a minute, Oh yeah, of course. And then, you know,
that made me realize that as our video game technology
gets better, we'll be able to create simulated worlds and
video games that are basically indistinguishable from physical reality, something
(03:30):
like the Matrix. And so I really started to think
about what are the stages of technology between now and
then that will take us to that point? And then
what does that mean if we ever get to that point?
And that's kind of, you know, the initial interest in
this topic. And then I found that there was a
guy at Oxford named Nick Bostrom. So this is back
(03:50):
when the Matrix sequels were coming out about you know,
you are you living in a computer simulation, and he
basically came up with a logic that said that if
any civilization anywhere ever makes these types of simulations, they'll
make a whole bunch of simulated worlds, and because of that,
you're more likely to be in a simulated world than
(04:11):
a physical world. And this was the logic that that
same year in twenty sixteen, when I was playing a
ping pong game, Elon Musk was at the CODE conference
in somewhere in France, i think, and he basically made
a statement that the chance that we are not in
a simulation, the chances that we are in base reality
is one in billions, which of course means the chances
(04:31):
that we are in a simulation is billions to one.
Now those numbers aren't exact, obviously, but he was just
trying to say, there's you know, it's very very likely
that we live inside a simulated world. So anyway, that's
what kind of got me into it. And then I
started looking in the quantum physics, which is telling us
really weird things about the world that doesn't fit a
purely physical, materialistic reality. And then I started to look
(04:55):
at the religions of the world. Give me the mystics
of the religions, the Eastern mystics at first, but really
across all the world's major religions, and I realized they're
all telling us the same thing, that the world is
not real. What we think is physical is just a
temporary illusion of a sort. And so I realized that,
you know, all of these three areas, the computer science,
which was my background, the physics, and the mystics are
(05:19):
all telling us that we basically live inside a fake world,
which is kind of like a multiplayer video game. So
and that's how I really got drawn into the subject
and ended up writing the first book, The Simulation Hypothesis
about it.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
So, speaking on that book, what conclusion or not even conclusion,
But where did you go with who's who actually created
the simulation?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
If that is the case, Well, that's, you know, obviously
a tough question, and you get different answers depending upon
which angle you take. Now, there's something that I call
that's kind of important in the distinction between the simulation
hypothesis and various flavors of it. I call this the
R versus NPC distinction. Okay, And so NPC is a
(06:05):
term that's gotten popular now beyond video games, but it
came out of the video game industry, and it stands
for a non player character, and usually it means an
AI within the game that you know, it's not one
of the main characters. It's just somebody that's there, like
a bartender or a bank teller or even an opponent, right,
or somebody to help you in your quest in the
video game. Right. But it's it's not it's not a
(06:28):
playable character. Actually, the original term came out of Dungeons
and Dragons and tabletop games even before there were video games,
but the video game industry is where it's known for.
Of course, now it's made its way into popular usage
as someone who doesn't think for themselves. It takes the
programming of the media, and that's you know, we call
them an NPC sometimes, but the actually, yeah, so that's
(06:50):
pretty popular, right, But the actual term means it's an
AI that doesn't have a player. And so the other
version is the RPG version, as I like to call it,
which is role playing game where there's a player and
the player has a character inside the game, which is
called an avatar inside video games, which incidentally is an
old Hindu term you know, which means divinity coming down
(07:12):
into a body, right, and so it was it was
actually these guys at Lucasfilm, you know, George Lucas who
made Star Wars. His company had a gaming division and
they created a game called Habitat back in nineteen eighty
six to eighty nine. This ran on a Commodore sixty four,
you know, and with dial up modems, you know, with
that old salad. But they had these little characters on
(07:34):
the screen. It's considered pretty much the first, you know,
really well done MMORPG, even though they were just like
these tiny two D characters, and they were trying to
come up with a term for what do we call
your character that's moving around? They said, it feels like,
you know, we're big people and we have to basically
take ourselves and shrink ourselves into the phone line and
go down into this little sprite character on the screen.
(07:56):
And so they used this Hindu terms from Sanskrit, which
also meant, you know, big divine entity coming down into
a small little body. So that's where the trunk. But
so so those two flavors, they're really flavors, but they're
more like an axis because if you think of when
most academics talk about simulation. They think everybody's AI in
(08:17):
the simulation, and so somebody might have created the simulation
and they might be watching the simulation. On the other hand,
if we think of it as an RPG version, this
is closer to the matrix because in the Matrix, Neo
and Morpheus and Trinity, they all existed as players, if
you will, outside of the game, and then they had
their avatars which looked just like them inside the game, right,
(08:39):
So they were players with characters and avatars, and so
depending on which flavor you look at, and by the way,
these are not mutually exclusive. In a video game. You
can have your player characters, you can have other people's characters,
and then you can have NPCs as well, so you
come out with different answers. And I found that the
religious side was closer to the RPG version because they're saying,
(09:01):
we have a player which is like a soul that
exists outside the physical reality, right, and we basically watch
ourselves playing this game. And in the Eastern traditions, you know,
we talk about how in Hinduism and Buddhism they talk
about how once you've completed a life, you go back,
(09:21):
you kind of look at the game, and then you
go into the next character, and you play again and again,
and you have multiple lives. But when most academics talk
about simulation, they're saying, well, it's just a bunch of
AI NPCs. And Nick Boston, who I mentioned earlier, who
wrote that original paper, you know, he calls it an
ancestor simulation, And so an ancestor simulation is if we
(09:42):
were to make a simulation of say ancient Rome or
ancient Greece. Right, we're making a simulation of our ancestors.
And in a sense, I've talked about the Matrix a lot,
but there was a there was another movie that came
out in nineteen ninety nine that was simulation theme. I
don't know if you've seen it. It's called The Thirteenth Floor.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
No haven't. I'm intrigued now though.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, you should watch it if you're to this topic,
which you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Are, definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
It was based on an old book from from nineteen
sixties called Similar chron three, which is a science fiction novel.
But in it they're in nineteen ninety nine, and you know,
so the same year as the Matrix in factor came
out just a couple months later, of course it got
dwarfed because the matrix was talked about the movie of
that year. But I actually think this is one of
the better representations of this locasion, I thought SYS and
(10:27):
so in nineteen ninety nine they made a simulation of
nineteen thirty seven Los Angeles, and inside that simulation, everybody
was an NPC who were living their lives, and you
could also the main character. He could also go in
and inhabit one of those characters. So it's like taking
over like an NPC. But these people thought they were
(10:48):
real and they're living in it, and so in that case,
you know, it would be more like people who are
simulating something to see what would happen, Right in the
same way that we simulate the weather, Like why do
we run a simulation of the weather. We want to
see what might happen, or you know, a pandemic spread,
or traffic you know, or bag teller you know, bike
traffic or whatever you know, or winds and losses in
(11:10):
a casino. Whatever we might simulate, we do it to
figure out what is the most likely outcome and also
what might be the most favorable outcome, so we can
tweak the parameters and go back awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
So in your community, when you wrote the simulation I
bought to this what what was the feedback? Did a
lot of academics just kind of why did you write that? Man? Like,
what the hell are you doing? You know?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Well, so, you know, I was a part of a
few different communities, and I still am in a way.
There's the Silicon Valley community, which is more technology centric, right,
and then there's the academic community, which is a little
more science and philosophy centric, but also tends to have
a certain view of the world. And then you know,
I also spend a lot of time, as you alluded
(11:57):
to in you know, in the introduction, a lot of
you know, spiritual types, conspiracy types, people in new a
faux world, you know, all kinds of other stuff that
you know, you don't always get a lot of mixture
between these different these different worlds. And so in the
Silicon Valley community, the response was very positive because it's
all about technology and how it developed. So this is
a really popular topic. I even, in fact, I spoke
(12:20):
at Google right while I was you know, when I
had first released the book, and the talk went over
quite well, particularly you know, the the ideas about AI.
But also about religions and stuff, although at the end
I showed them a picture of a spoon bending party
that had just happened at the Institute Ions the Institute
(12:41):
for Noetic Sciences conference in Santa Clara, which is literally
around the corner from Google, and at the end they
were like, no, that's all fakes, you know, spoon bending
is all fake, but everything else we love. In the
academic world, I got a lot of good response from
certain groups, you know, people who were like the philosophy
(13:01):
of science, philosophers, religious studies, and other scholars. But the
physicists didn't necessarily like it, but the computer scientist did.
So it depended which community you know or subcommunity you're
talking about.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
That's that's great though. I think it's great. How what
did your what did your family think? Were they all
on board? Like, hey, get it on paper, man, you know,
we're we're interested to get more in depth to it
because I know, if I have a significant a significant other, yeah,
sometimes I'll just go on those rants, you know, and
they'll have no idea what I'm even talking about. But
I just got to get it out, and you know,
(13:37):
they're supportive, you know, but they have no idea what
I'm talking about half the time.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But yeah, well in my case, you know, my partner,
she was very supportive the book and the ideas. I mean,
she's not necessarily into the computer science part or the
physics part, but she's into the spiritual part. So she
was very supportive, you know, of the whole idea. Yeah,
and my extended family is you know, pretty mu pretty
much into it as well. So awesome where it worked out,
(14:03):
all right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
That always helps a little bit. So how does how
does the extraterrestrial factor? What what does that play in
the simulation theory or hypothesis?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Well, at first, you know, my interest in these topics
was you know, almost completely separate, right, It was like
two different threads of interest that I had. But what
happened was that the more I started to look into it,
the more I started to see, you know, areas of overlap.
And you know, in terms of background, I got involved
in the UFO topic because I was involved. I was
(14:38):
an independent filmmaker for a little while, which was more
of a hobby of mine than anything. And so because
in Silicon Valley I was an investor and i'd help
startups basically, you know, entrepreneurs take their ideas and turn
them into the companies. And then I got involved in
some early stage filmmakers who were basically doing the same thing, right.
They were trying to take their ideas and turn them
(15:00):
into a real film, and they had to raise money
and they had to do all this other stuff. And
so there was a film called Thrive What on Earth
Will It Take? And this came out in twenty eleven,
So this is right around to Occupy Wall Street time,
and you know, it was more of I guess you'd
call it a conspiracy movie more than anything. But there
was a there was a segment in that movie that
was about UFOs and free energy technology, and so I
(15:23):
started to kind of investigate the topic a bid and
that's when I started to meet more people the simulation.
I met Jacques Valet.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Oh, I don't know if that would be awesome. I would,
yeah to talk to that guy.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, you know, he's been you know, for I'm sure
your audience may know of him, but if not, you know,
he's been involved in the UFO topic since Project Blue Book. Yeah,
he had just gotten his PhD. And he worked with
Dye Allen Heinech and even by database of French cases
that he was comparing to the Project Blue Book cases.
And so we had lunch in Silicon Valley, which is
(15:57):
actually where I am right now, just down the road,
and this was actually, I think, before I had written
the book, and he started to describe to me some
cases that were just a bit odd, which basically made
me think, Okay, there's more going on here than just
the extraterrestrial hypothesis, because what would happen, was said, was,
sometimes these UFOs would come in and out of physical reality, right,
(16:21):
almost as if they were projected a hologram, you know,
of some type, and you know, he would say that
there would be cases where one person would see the
UFO and the other person and that got me really thinking, well,
what could it mean if one person is seeing it
or not. Well, inside a video game, the way that
things work is even though you and I our avatars
(16:43):
might be in the same room or the same field,
they're actually being rendered on different devices, right just like now,
I mean literally, I'm not talking to you right now,
I'm talking to my computer, and your image is being
rendered on my computer, and my image is being rendered
on your computer and voice as well. And so if
you were to take a rendering model where each person
(17:04):
has their own let's say, quote unquote computer, although that's
not necessarily what it is, and it only seems like
we're in the same physical world, we're actually rendering it differently. Well,
in a video game, we do that all the time.
We might say, you know that you're level thirty and
my character is only level two, and turns out that
level thirty characters can have an ability to see, you know,
(17:26):
the dragon or the UFO, and level two characters can't, right,
And so to me, I'll say, obviously there's nothing there
because I'm looking right at it, and you'll say, obviously
it's right there. Can't you see it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
That's honestly interesting though.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It really is, because it starts to get into what
is this shared consensus of reality. And then he told
me about another case which was really interesting as well.
He said he went to investigate this case in northern
California or southern Oregon. I don't know if you've been
up there, but you know they have the big the
big redwood trees up there.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. So it's you know different. I grew up in
the Midwest, you know, not too far from where you are. Yeah,
so it's very different landscape when you go north in California.
And he said that there was a case where where
these guys claimed there was a UFO that came down
and landed and left, you know, some some marks on
the ground, and he said, you know, you have to
move on. And all these other guys came to investigate it,
(18:18):
and then they left. But Jacques what he likes to
do is he likes to stay and investigate and get
to know the people more. And afterwards he said to
them he was in the clearing with these big trees,
you know, all around, and he said, well, you know,
you said that the UFO came down at a forty
five degree angle when it landed. He said, yeah, that's right,
and he goes, well, if you look at these big trees,
(18:41):
if it came down at a forty five degree angle
and landed here, it would have had to have gone
through the trees, literally right cut through the trees. And
they said, yeah, that's exactly what happened. But we didn't
want to say that because it sounds crazy, right that
it does not match our materialistic idea of the universe.
So in a sense, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the simplest explanation,
(19:05):
but it also matches our current worldview. Right if you
were to go back five hundred years and say, oh,
these guys you know are from another planet or another
solar system, that would just look at you like, what
are you weird? What are you talking about? Right, that
wasn't a worldview that was really shared. And then you know,
Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler came around, and Kepler was
(19:26):
actually one of the first science fiction writers. Not many
people know this, when he calculated the laws of planetary motion.
He also wrote a science fiction novel about characters from
other planets, Nice to you know. That's sort of the
idea of taking science and then turning it into fiction
to communicate it. And so, I think in a sense,
even though most academics today are very much against this
(19:48):
idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial, in a sense, that's actually
a pretty okay explanation that fits within their worldview, because
we know there are other planets and there are other
solar systems, et cetera. But we don't know about these
other dimensions and things that go in and out of
physical reality. But UFO is maybe weirder. So to me,
(20:09):
that almost seemed like in a video game where if
you've played video games, you can render a character, but
while it's rendering, like when the whole scene is rendering,
the first time you can go through walls, you know,
you're kind of transparent, and then when you get solid,
like when the rendering is done, then the physics engine
stops you from going into the wall. Like I can't
put my hand through this table right now, but while
(20:32):
it's being rendered, I can still do that, right And
so it almost seemed like that there was something here
that had this ability to be like a holograph. And
I'm not saying that they aren't physical, because many people
have seen physical craft. I'm saying that these physical craft
materialize and de materialize, and what does that mean In
our material world, we don't know what ms, But in
(20:53):
a simulated world that's rendered with pixels, there is a
meaning for that, and that's something that we can at
least understand that perspective.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Damn, dude, I'm gonna end up going down a whole
another rabbit hole after this interview. That's gonna be great.
So going on that though, So talking about the spiritual
aspect of simulation. Are you. Are you familiar with shadow
people and the happened person known as the hat man
in the paranormal community.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
I've heard of them, but I haven't gone deep into
into them.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So I've interviewed a neuroscientist at one point who was
pretty into the paranormal and we had a whole long
discussion about you know, brain activity, how that works and everything.
I was just curious if you did have an opinion,
because a lot of people think that they are interdimensional.
That's one of the theories. Nobody really really knows too
(21:46):
much about it. It's just a lot of theories stuff like that.
But yeah, I was I was curious.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, well, I mean I do have a bit of
an opinion on what that could be, because, you know,
part of my research took me down this the rabbit
hole of different religions, and particularly in the Islamic religions,
and you know, as I was looking at near death
experiences and let's talk about the life review in a minute,
because it relates. But within the Islamic traditions, they have
(22:14):
this this whole idea of another set of beings that
lives on Earth with us. But that we can't normally see.
And those beings are called the gin or a genie,
like the genie in Aladdin, you know that is the
single gin. But so they're you know, considered real beings
in that tradition, and they come in and out of
our face and time differently as well. And if we
(22:36):
don't want to talk about the Mendela fact, I can
tell you an interesting story about of course, and that
was you know, in my second book and the Simulated Multiverse.
I get a lot into this idea of multiple timelines.
But the idea is that these gin can materialize and
de materialize. So I was recently at a conference with
Whitley Strieber, who you may know, you know he will Communion,
(22:58):
which had the picture of the gray alien that's become
kind of the standard way that. Yeah, and you know,
in fact, I was at Rice University last year at
the Archives of the Impossible conference and they have Whitley's
letters that his wife Anne had like collected and organized
over like twenty thirty years. And it's amazing when you
(23:20):
look at these letters that people wrote back in the eighties.
I mean they wrote like twelve page letters type letters
where they would draw images of what they saw. But
he told a story recently on one of his podcasts
and asked them about it about a young man who
met this young woman, and you know, he thought she
was just a regular young woman. He thought he was
falling in love with her. They had sex. She called
(23:41):
him to her apartment one day and said, I have
to tell you I'm pregnant. But then she said, I
also have to tell you that I'm actually like a
gray alien. That was the terminology, and she transformed right
in front of him into a different kind of being.
And then she transformed back and she said, and I'm
leaving and you'll never see me again. Okay, now this
sounds like a bizarre right. If we take a purely
(24:04):
materialistic view of the universe, you know that can't happen, right,
Either the person is a human or they're an alien,
and that's it. But if we take an avatar based view, right,
you can change your avatar in a video game. But
what were editions from the Middle Ages and earlier to
be fairly common where they would say there was this man,
he married this gin woman. They had these gin children,
(24:26):
and one day she said, I'm taking the children into
the gin world and you'll never see me again. And
then she, you know, just disappeared. And it's like these
stories that have been around for thousands of years, you
start to wonder, well, what if they weren't crazy, what
if they were telling you know, actual things that happened.
Today we interpret these as like aliens or you know,
(24:47):
the shadow man or the guys with a hat, because
those are images that we might understand in the modern sense.
And even so, you know, I'm currently at Arizona State
University and I teach a class classes on the simulation.
I bought this this on virtual reality, but my research
is actually on science fiction and how it influences technological
(25:09):
innovation and technology impacts society and society impacts technology. And
so for example, like time zones, we use time zones
and we look at the clock very you know, like
almost religiously in the US. And turns out that happened
partly because of the railroads, right, because the technology of railroads,
(25:32):
they needed the technology of accurate time zones and timekeeping
so they could say when they're going to arrive. Because
before that it was just like yeah, you know, sunsets
and people did have clocks, but they weren't always synchronized
across different areas of the world, and so technology has
this weird impact on society. And so I think that
our understanding of the world is making us think everything
(25:55):
is aliens, when in fact it may be. Not saying
that it's not alien some of it may be, but
some of them may actually be other types of beings
that have existed all along, that go in and out
of reality, and that with you know, these shadow beings
often appear at night, right m hm, And so you
know what happens at night, Well, we're kind of half
the sleep, half awake. It's like in a lot of traditions,
(26:18):
like the shamanic traditions, you know, they do shamanic journey
where you go into these different worlds, you go in
the underworlds. I'm not necessarily with DMT, just you know,
using drumming and breathing, although of course there's a whole
ayahuasca tradition and now now people are experimenting with DMT
and talking about the different types of beings that they encounter.
But as possible, these beings are there all along, and
(26:40):
we just have to get into an altered state to
be able to perceive them, So that's kind of part
of it. It's not a real full theory of what
these things are, but I think there's some correlation. Uh.
And I was influenced, you know. I mentioned jacquesvale or
there are influenced by his work and if you see
his book Passport to Magonia, it has a really cool
picture on the cover, one of the where you see
(27:01):
the gray alien but with different masks that look like
a fay or fairy from the Celtic traditions are different. Yeah,
it's like they put on different masks. One of those
masks could be you know, these hat men as it were,
these dark figures that show up.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
The part that got me about the shadow the shadow
people thing is obviously, I mean they've been written about forever,
all across the world. I mean, before communication or good communication,
I should say, it was the same stories. And it's like,
how are all these people from around the world who
can't communicate with each other telling the same story. But
(27:38):
then you have the factor of a sleep deprivation. Sleep
deprivations going to you know, make you see things loosinate.
You know, if some guy who's been up for you know,
four days on drugs is like man, I see these
people in the bushes, I'm gonna be you know, I'm
gonna be like, dude, just you know, you need to
sleep a little bit. But the interesting thing is that
they did a simulation, and I think it was on
(28:00):
accident they were doing. There was a girl, I believe
it was in Switzerland or that section of Europe, and
you can get the whole pdf on the study, and
they simulated a shadow person. You know, they just triggered
some specific part of her brain that that simulated it.
And I don't know, I thought that was really interesting,
(28:21):
you know, you just never know.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
I guess, yeah, no, that is interesting, you know. But
of course they didn't necessarily have that kind of technology,
you know, absolutely, So how do you explain you know,
all of these things. But yeah, I do believe. So
it's part of my book, the simulation. I thought as
I mentioned these ten stages of technology, and one of
the stages is brain computer interfaces, and it's this idea
(28:42):
of you know, we have Elon Musk with NERO link
out there now where they implanted in the first human
patient and it was working great. For a while. He
was able to like play video games just using his mind,
because he was paralyzed and then later they kind of dissolved.
So the technology is not quite there yet, but you
know that idea of being able to read the signals
in the brain and then to send signals to the
(29:05):
brain is something that is in our future. And so
there is this element of sending electrical signals to try
to stimulate different parts of the brain and you might
see different things, but the question is what are those
stimulants and how do they happen a person. I have spent
a lot of time looking at different types of dreaming
techniques from different traditions, and it's one of the oldest
(29:26):
topics out there because people have been dreaming right since forever.
And whether you're talking about the Aborigines in Australia, you
talk about the Iroquois, you know, or the Chippewa near
where I grew up, and or the Maricopa within the
Arizona Phoenix area, which is where I'm based. Most of
the school is at the school year this time. You know,
(29:49):
they all have these stories about beings that come in
the dreams and that these are some of these are
real beings. And even in the Tibetan traditions, they have
a whole called dream Yoga, where you learn to do
lucid dreaming within dreams so you can recognize that what
you're seeing is not real, it's a dream. But then
(30:09):
you use that to actually wake up in real life
and realize that all of this is a kind of
dream as well, that it's also a kind of illusion.
But even with all these traditions, they still have this
idea that you can go places, like you can have
actual experiences when you're dreaming. They're they're not just sort
of personal like some of them are just symbolic dreams,
like you ate ate too much and you know it
(30:32):
dreams into a weird dreaming, yeah, yeah, Or you're trying
to give a talk and your naked, or you're taking
a test, right, So kind.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Of those along the lines of astral projection.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Yeah, kind of like the lines of astral projection. I
mean it, I kind of like to translate these different
traditions into big dreams and little dreams. You know, little
dreams are like our personal stuff that we're working on.
The Tibetans call them karmic trace dreams. They're just based
on stuff. You know, you probably had a dream where
you saw something on TV or in a movie that
(31:03):
made an impression on you, and then later it shows
up in your dream. Right. That's they call that a
karmic trace. It's an impression and it gets resolved in
the dream. So that impression was not enough karma to
actually create a situation in your real life. But it's
sort of like what we do in computer science. There's
a process, like people who don't like program don't know
(31:24):
about this necessarily, but there's a process called garbage collection,
and we go through the code and we clean up
stuff that's not really needed anymore. Right, It's like old
memory values and memory that aren't needed anymore. Otherwise they're
just using up space. And that's kind of like these
karmic traces. There are things that made an impression in
your mind that are not needed. But then you get
to dreams of clarity or what are called big dreams,
(31:46):
which tend to be more like astral projection, where you're
actually going somewhere and what you're seeing is has more
truth to it or more objective reality. So there's like
a subjective astral and an objective astral is the way
that I like, it's pretty cool, and that's where you know,
we can interact with each other. That's where we can meet,
you know, spirits of people that have that have died
(32:08):
or as I like to say, they they've left the simulation,
but they come back in with these kind of ghost
avatars sometimes to see what's going on.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
That's interesting. So going on, you know your your your
feedback from your first book, How did that propel you
to do the simulated multiverse? And in what are you
getting in deeper or more in depth on or just
different topics?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, well there were two. Well, first of all, when
I wrote the simulation Hypothesis, I thought, okay, great, I'm
done with this topic. Like I've gotten it out, I've
researched it, I've been thinking about it for years because
it brought together these different threads of my life, you know,
the computer science, the science, the religion, the mystics, the
crazy stuff. Right, it kind of brought it all together
(32:55):
into one, and I thought, okay, great, I'm done. I
can go back to Silicon Valley and back in the industry.
But what happened was that there were two There were
two meetings, if you will, that's stuck in my mind.
And one of them was the wife of the science
fiction author Philip K. Dick, and so I interviewed Tessa B. Dick.
She's his I think fourth wife or so, and you
(33:17):
know she's older now. Philip K. Dick died in I
think nineteen eighty two, is just before Blade Runner came out,
so you know, he just started to see because all
his life he was like kind of a marginal writer
who never made any money. He was trying to always
keep writing to have enough money for his family, right,
but near the end he got paid a million dollars
(33:40):
for the screenplay for Blade Runner, which was based on
his book to Android's Dream of Electric Sheep. But anyway,
she told me about a speech he gave and Metz France,
and in that speech I had heard one famous line.
So in nineteen seventy seven in France, he said, we
are living in a computer programmed reality. And many people
use that a quote because he's like one of the
(34:02):
first guys to talk about this seriously, even though he's
a science search and writer. He wasn't talking about this
in terms of a sci fi story. He was saying,
I think this is what's really going on. But then
the second part of that statement was one that most
people don't really look at He said, We're living in
a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have
to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration
(34:24):
occurs in our reality. And she encouraged me to go
and listen to that whole speech, and so I did.
I listened to it, and I found a transcript of it,
and it was called, you know, if you think this
world is bad, you should see some of the other worlds.
And what happened was she also told me that he
came to believe that this process where somebody changes a
(34:45):
variable and reruns the simulation, he said, we would be
living the same events, we would be hearing the same things,
we would be having a sense of deja vu, and
that would be the clue that this is happening. Again
that that inspired some of his work, and in fact
he came to believe that the Man in the High Castle,
which I don't know if you've seen that at Amazon
(35:06):
TV series.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So this is an alternate history book. This was actually
before Blade Runner. This was really his famous, his most
famous book. He won like all the prestigious science fiction
awards for it, and he rout it way back in
nineteen sixteen. It's an alternate history where Japan and Germany
won World War two and then they split America between them. Right,
the east coast was ruled by the Nazis, the West
(35:29):
coast was ruled by the Empire of Japan, because you know,
those were the but the middle, like Colorado, was kind
of this free area. But anyway, he came to believe
that that was a real timeline that had happened, and
he said that I had these fragmentary memories of America
being a police date. And later he said, all the
(35:50):
memories came flooding back into him when he had some
experience that he called nm nesis or a loss of forgetfulness.
But the important part here is he came to believe
that this really happened, and it was a timeline that
the simulators decided they wanted to run another timeline, and
that our timeline where you know, we won World or two,
(36:10):
was an alternate timeline, but one that led to a
better outcome of some time. So this idea was live
in my mind that if we could run one simulation,
why wouldn't we run it multiple times? Right, because that's
when you run a simulation of the weather, or you
run a simulation of any process, what do you do?
You go back and you change the variables and you
rerun it. And you know, there's a movie called The
(36:33):
Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, which was
also based on one of Philip K. Dick's stories, which
is called The Adjustment Team was the original story. You know,
these guys come in, they freeze everything, and then they'd
make a few changes and then they let it run again.
And what you saw in this movie they dramatized it.
I mean they changed it a bit, but they dramatized
it where there's these guys monitoring what's going on in
(36:55):
their little books and they can see, oh, no, we
got to change something, otherwise it's going to go in
the wrong direction. Said, this is not going to go
where we wanted to. But this idea that there might
be multiple timelines and there might be people fiddling with
these timelines was something that really came out of this
speech that he gave about these timelines. So that was
sticking in my mind. And then I had I had
(37:16):
coffee with a friend of mine from MIT who normally
you know, other MIT graduates in computer science don't talk
about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
And he had gotten a job at Google. A guy
named Bruce, and he was visiting Mountain View and so
we we have coffee and he said, yeah, you know,
I read about your book. Have you looked at the
Mendela effects? And I said, yeah, I've heard of it,
but I had just dismissed it as faulty memory. He goes, well,
you know the simulation. I thought this is one of
the best explanations for that. And so that sent me
down a whole nother route, which was that if we
(37:49):
can have multiple runs at the simulation, could we be
remembering like slightly different versions of individual things. And and
there's a whole you know, there's a whole science mathematics
around chaos theory. And the whole idea of chaos theory
is if you make little changes in initial conditions, they
can have huge impacts down the road. And there's also
(38:11):
a term that a computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram who
wrote the software called Mathematica that's used by a lot
of engineers and a lot of academics. Anyway, he was
a brilliant physicist who dropped out of Oxford because he
felt like everything was too boring, and he went and
studied account tech into other things. But he came up
with this term called computationally irreducible, and he said that
(38:33):
certain processes, in order to know what's going to happen,
even if their rules are deterministic, you have to run
the process to figure out what's going to happen at
step two million. You can't just assume what's going to
happen or do in a little equation. You have to
actually run it. And so, you know, I came to think,
what if this reality is a computationally irreducible process. The
(38:57):
only way to know what's going to happen is if
we run the simulation and we let ourselves make choices,
and we let ourselves change variables, and we see where
it leads to. And then we may be remembering other
runs of the simulation when we have instances of deja
vu or clues, or we may even be remembering future
events like oh, yeah, we ran the simulation and it
(39:18):
went to this point in the future. And so so
all of these ideas kind of came together with quantum computing,
and that's what made me write about the multiverse ideas.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Is there any Mandela effect that trips you up that
you're just like, man, I know what I remember, and
this one's just not right?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well, yeah, I mean, you know there's a few, like
the famous ones, like the Bernstein Bears. Yeah, is one
that I you know, that definitely gets me. One that
I didn't experience personally, but I feel is kind of
an important one is the Tianeman Square. Do you remember
the guy in front of the tank? They called him
(40:00):
a tank boy, and so what what happened would that?
Would that guy in the tank? Do you remember?
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Actually?
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Wow, because I remember it, I think I remember. What's
the consensus for you, which is that you know, the
tank stopped and it.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Didn't run him over, but I thought it ran him over.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Right, So there's a group of people that think the
tank ran him over, and more than that, they remember
very clearly that you know, this bloody scene of this
tank running him over and said it was the worst
thing they'd seen on TV at that point. Right, this
was back in eighty nine, I think, so he was
really pretty primarily had the networks you had, you had
CNN two I think. But but but so that's an
(40:37):
interesting one because it's such a vivid memory. You know,
of course I'm a movie fan, so you know, the
Empire strikes back.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
Yeah, you tinker bells one for me? Did they say that? Yeah,
because I I just saw that one like one or
two weeks ago, and I'm like, I know, damn well
she went around and dotted that I with her wand
you know, on the Disney logo, and They're like, Nope,
never happened. And I'm like, I specifically remember it happening. Well,
(41:05):
that Curious George was a good one too.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Curious George is another one, but the one that really
what really got me to take this even more seriously
was the scriptural changes. I don't know if you're familiar
with that, but with the Bible, there are certain verses
that people say that have changed. And one of the
most famous is in Isaiah, which is about the lion
and the lamb. Right, and I don't remember the exact verse,
(41:28):
but it had something to do to lion in the lamb. Well,
it turns out if you look at the King James
Bible today, it says the wolf in the lamb. It
doesn't say the lion in the Latin and pretty.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Sure a lion was a big part of that, you.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Know, yeah, exactly. And more than that, there are physical artifacts,
you know, people have like clocks and things that talk
about the lion and the lamb, and it's just such
a common thing we all remember.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Now.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
The reason I think this one is more interesting is
because people take their scriptures seriously. And that's just one.
There are many other scriptural changes and and so so
I began to wonder, Okay, are there other scriptures that
might have changed other than the Bible, Because again, at
first I thought FAULTI memory, But then you know with scripture,
that's a little less likely since people memorize these things
(42:13):
word for word. And then I thought, oh, it must
be different translations. And people are like, no, no, I've
had this King James Bible since I was a kid, right,
it's the physical Bible that's different. And then so I
began to look around to see if the Koran, you know,
the Islamic Holy book which came in a revelation to
the prophet Mohammad, had changed at all. And I couldn't
(42:35):
find much out there except there was this one Sufi
Imam and he was talking about this and if you know,
in the Islamic traditions. They don't just memorize passages. They
memorized the whole Quran, like the whole damn thing, word
for word. In fact, there's a term called it hafs.
It's like an achievement on the way to becoming a priest,
which means that you can recite the entire Quran word
(42:57):
for word and get it exactly right. I remember wondering
about this, because you know, I was born in Pakistan
and grew up in the Muslim tradition. It's like, why
do we memorize it? I mean, it's there, we got
the butt. Why don't we memorize the Arabic word for word?
I mean, not all Muslims even speak Arabic, you know.
But turns out this guy said, well, there's a reason
why we memorize it word for word. And he said,
(43:19):
because there are certain beings that are allowed to go
back in time and change physical objects in the room,
but they're not allowed to change your memory. And so
for that reason, they could change a physical book like
the Kurn, but they can't change your memory. So you know,
for me, and those are called the gin basically, so
(43:42):
this ties back to our idea because gin don't exist
in the same uh you know kind of space and
time as we do. And so for me, I was like, oh,
that's really interesting because now you've got beings that can
muck around with the timeline, right, they can go to
the path. I mean, we've heard stories of gin Mucket.
So you know, when I grew up, there was always
stories of gin. This watch out the ghost. You know,
(44:02):
the Gin is going to be there and get you
at night. It was like something you used to scare kids.
But there's actual stories, like in the Bible and the Quran,
there's references to the Queen of Sheba and the Queen
of Sheba and Solomon. I don't know if you know
this particular story where you know, she's coming from Africa
and what happens is he gets her throne and he
(44:24):
brings it. Solomon brings it, you know, before she gets there.
It's like, how did he do that? And supposedly he
did that through the magic of the Gin who were
able to go and get it and bring it to him.
And so I started to look around to say, are
there you know more modern stories where people could get
gin to manipulate objects and turns out. You know, they're
in Autobiography of the Yogi, which is a book by
(44:46):
part of Hansea Yogananda, who was one of the first
Indian Yogis to come over and live in the US,
all the way back in the nineteen twenties. In fact,
I wrote another book called Wisdom of a Yogi, which
just came out last year, which is about kind of
lessons from this book Autobiography of Yogi, which was like
the favorite book of Steve Jobs. You know, he had it.
I was the only book on his iPad. At his
(45:06):
memorial service, everybody got a little brown box and inside
the box was a copy of Autobiography of Yogi. And
in that book, there's a story of a guy who
learned to control an entity named Hasrat, and he would
tell him to just take any object, and Hazrat would
make the object disappear and appear somewhere else. And he
went around and abused this power. He used to use
(45:27):
go to jewelry shops and touch these objects, and then
he'd leave, and later the jewelry would disappear and nobody
could pin it on him because it didn't happen while
he was there. And I was like, is this you know,
a real story or is this just you know, something
he made up to teach us things right? And I
started to look around and there were you know, there
are stories of these types of things where objects get
(45:49):
manipulated and moved around. So anyway, this is you know,
tying some of the weird stuff back to the multiverse idea,
which is was a key part of why why I
wrote this book was I wanted to explore this idea
that the be multiple timelines and we may have tried
out different things.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
That's interesting. That makes me think, I'm not sure how
how in depth with the paranormal you are. I'm one
of those people. I got to go to the most
haunted places ever. I want to see it, I want
to experience it. I'm into it. But I'm also a
very huge skeptic. Now that being said, there was what
you were just saying brought up a point that I
(46:24):
had heard one time that some people consider so there's
different types of hauntings, like there's intelligent older guy's residual.
Some people believe that it's overlapping timelines. And one of
the reasons is because in the Conjuring House, the original
you know, all the movies are based on the warrens
and everything like that. So the parent family told a
(46:46):
story once where they saw like these old time people
in the same room and they were ghosts, but the
ghosts were looking at them confused, like what the hell
is going going on? What are you guys doing here?
And that I don't know why that story stuck out
with me specifically, because it's like it's I don't know,
(47:08):
it's just weird. It kind of makes me kind of
adds validity. I guess to the theory that it's like
at some point, maybe it's timelines kind of crossing over
and there's that thin veil and each one sees each
other or whatever. But I didn't know if you had
ever gotten into any of that before.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Well, I had heard about these things, and there was
a computer scientist at University of North Carolina a few
years ago, and he said he thought ghosts could be
artifacts of the simulation running again the same scene. So
when you think of like these different types of hauntings,
as you said, like the Poultergeist versus. But some of
them are just the same scene being repeated, it's like
(47:48):
the same.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, it's those are what they refer to as residual
because it's just residual energy and they're repeating the same
actions to us over and over again. They're going through
their daily lives. But then you have the intelligent ones
that also somehow you know, interact with you or whatever.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Well, so the residual ones, you know, makes a
lot of sense from a simulation point of view, because
it's like I mentioned garbage collection. Yes, there's like data
that the engine just runs whatever's in memory, and until
that memory has been cleaned out, it's just going to
rerun that scene again and again. Then you see it again.
Now when you get into the more intelligent ones, that's
(48:27):
where I think it becomes interesting again from a simulation
point of view, because it's like there are two different
sets of avatars right that are running at the same time.
And I remember reading a book from Leslie Kane Surviving Death.
Have you read that one?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
No, but I've heard of it actually.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Yeah, And in that there's a chapter it's actually by
another gentleman I forget his name now, but there's a
chapter where he was investigating a particular haunting in Oakland, California,
and there was an old woman and that the boy
would see and you see this a lot right where
the kids can see them and the parents it's not
like they don't see him at all, but they see
(49:07):
him a little bit. Whereas the kid was carrying out
like a full conversation and saying, oh, yeah, her name
is whatever it was, Lydia, I forget the exact name,
you know, and she lived here and she died before.
And then then their son is telling them that and
they're like, really weird. They looked into it, and yeah,
there was a woman named Lydia who had lived there
pretty much since she'd been born until she died in
like the eighties. And then later the ghost tells the
(49:30):
boy that she can, you know, she can decide who
sees her, like really, yeah, so she decided or that
the sun maybe because he's more open, she's going to
talk to him more, whereas with the parents, like, they
weren't as open, and so they caught glimpses of her.
But but she either she decided not to interact with
(49:50):
them or they couldn't see it. But there's some intelligence
there that gives them this ability. And again, in a
video game like environment, you can have settings easily that
say okay, yes, see me and these people don't. And again,
you're gonna have one person next to you that sees
it and the other person doesn't.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
It's like the younger you are, like the algorithm's not
set yet, you know. It's like you're still open to everything.
And as you get older, like the algorithm gets you
and it's like, oh, yeah, he's not gonna see nothing.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yep, yep, that's right. So I think there's some overlap
here with some of these. I mean, I personally tend
to stay away from places that are funted, not not
not because I'm skeptical, but because I believe there are
other other beings and instant I do too, and I
don't want them to come home with me, so try
to avoid.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
It's a very good point. It's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
I I love going to places and doing that kind
of stuff, and.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
They might come home with you something.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Oh you never know. I got I got some stuff
from some places. I don't know. I get to endo
the spiritual aspect, so I try to do what I
can to, you know, protection wise and stuff like that.
But some people laugh at me. I don't care. It's
like I'm into that stuff. It's like it is what
it is.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
Well, people have been seeing this stuff for thousands of
years exactly. It's like it's a thing, maybe even tens
of thousands, right, we just don't we don't have recorded history.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Yeah, absolutely, So what is Do you have anything in
the future going on, like speaking events, any books that
you're working on for the future.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah, so you know, I'm speaking in Huntsville, Alabama in
end of September at a conference called Doorway to the Future,
which is put on by a gentleman named Tom Campbell,
who wrote a book called My Big Toe, My Big
Theory of Everything, And he's been talking about this idea
that we live in a video virtual reality for some time.
He was involved with the Monroe Institute way back when
(51:40):
when they were first getting set up. And so I'm
going to be speaking there, and I have an online class.
I have a class that I teach at ASU or
the Simulation Hypothsis, and I'll probably offer that online in
either the fall or the spring as well. And I'm
working on a second edition of The Simulation Hypothesis, but
that won't be out till next till next year or
sometime awesome.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Well, when it comes out, you're more and welcome to
come back on again. I would love to have you.
This is a great conversation.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
Yeah, I'd be happy to get come back on definitely.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And for the listeners, I will provide links to all
of his stuff in the in the description show notes
everything like that. But again, man, I cannot thank you
enough for coming on and doing this interview. Is one
of the better conversations I've had in a while.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
So well, thanks for inviting me in your show. Yeah,
I appreciate that as well. Really enjoyed.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
All right. Well, I hope you have a good rest
of your afternoon and hope hopefully it gets relaxation. You
don't go down any rabbit holes tonight or anything.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
But yeah, a little bit of writing to do, but other.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
Than that, all right, that's good. Well, thank you so
much and I will talk to you later. S S
Speaker 2 (53:11):
S S.
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Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.