The Basement: w/ Rizwan Virk – Reality Is a Video Game (Transcript)

And very few people actually had laptops in their dorm rooms. In fact, one of my best friends had a Mac, one of the very early Macs. I forget which one, but with the little floppy drive. The 3.5-inch floppy drives. But mostly we would spend all our time doing our assignments and writing games in the computer lab.

AJ GENTILE: On, so, like using Solaris?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it was using Solaris and it used something called X Windows.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, of course. X is still— you can’t get rid of X.

RIZWAN VIRK: You really can’t. Yeah. It’s like really solid infrastructure that it was built on. So I actually learned to use X Windows on Unix before I actually used a Windows PC, believe it or not. I mean, obviously I’d seen a Mac, and we would send each other messages. It was called Project Athena at MIT. It was one of the first networked computer labs. Because my brother went to University of Michigan, and you go to the computer lab, and each computer was kind of— they’re connected to the printer, but they were kind of doing their own thing. Whereas with Project Athena, they were investigating or experimenting with writing software where you would communicate with each other. And we would just sit there and send trashy instant messages to each other.

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

RIZWAN VIRK: Before IM was available on PCs and stuff. So in fact, one of my friends started the company that became MSN Messenger. They were bought by Microsoft. And so a lot of the instant messaging stuff that we’ve seen over the years had its origins in these old MIT things that people had just built as part of this program.

AJ GENTILE: Built on Solaris and X?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, built on Solaris and X. Programmed in C. In C, right. C units, basically, right?

AJ GENTILE: I love it. Yeah, my first love is SGI IRIX. I go back, I still have an SGI box. I just love that. Oh yeah, the big blue box. I used to love it. Is that how you got started? Is that how you got interested in video games?

The Racing Game That Started It All

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, well, I got interested in video games around the same time that I was learning to program because we had an Atari, the 2600. Yeah, the 2600, like the original Atari system. And we had games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders and an obscure one called Yars’ Revenge that I always thought was cool. And there was a racing game. I think it was Pole Position.

And it was while I was playing the racing game, I would look at the guys in the bleachers, which were just like these little squares. It was like 8-bit graphics we’re talking. And then there’d be like a mountain and it would look like there’s something out there. I always started to wonder, well, what would happen if I drove the car past the bleachers and past the mountain? Of course, you weren’t able to, but I always wondered, like, is there a little world in here with all these kind of straight lines? So that’s when I really started to wonder about the intersection of video games and virtual reality.

AJ GENTILE: That is an interesting game to choose because I think Pole Position is one of the first games back then in 8-bit to actually use background parallax. Where things started to move at different— I think it was a 3 or 4 level parallax, but it looked kind of real.

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I have this slide that I show sometimes which shows Pole Position as an 8-bit racing game, and then it shows like a 16-bit racing game for the Nintendo, and then it shows like a 32-bit for the PC, and then it shows like the modern games. And you can just see how much more realistic it got just by adding a few bits.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

RIZWAN VIRK: Right? And it’s gotten to the point where you look at these racing games and even though you can tell the characters are graphical virtual characters designed by game designers, the city looks so realistic that you literally could not tell if that was a real city or not. In fact, I don’t know if you saw the recent Matrix movie, the fourth Matrix movie.

AJ GENTILE: I did.

RIZWAN VIRK: Wasn’t that great of a movie, but—

AJ GENTILE: No, but the tech was good.

RIZWAN VIRK: The tech was good, but just when they came out with that, they came out with a demo on the Unreal Engine.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

RIZWAN VIRK: Which I know you know about.

AJ GENTILE: I’m an Unreal guy, so yeah, I have it.

RIZWAN VIRK: Absolutely. And so they used the Unreal Engine, and they came out with this demo called The Matrix Awakens. And it wasn’t like a full game. It was like a minigame. But it started with a guy that looked like Neo kind of getting the message on his computer, 1999 computer, “Wake up, Neo.” And of course, this was ’21, so we’re talking 5 years ago now. So the graphics were not nearly as good as they are today. But he would get up and go with Trinity, and there were scenes where you almost thought it was really Keanu Reeves or Carrie-Anne Moss. But the city they were driving around— I think they filmed that one in San Francisco and Berlin, and it looked like a combination of those two cities. And it had just gotten ultra-realistic.

AJ GENTILE: The car chases looked real. Like, as soon as you pulled away from the kind of the uncanny valley, those cinematic shots of like the car tearing around the corner and flipping over, that looked pretty good.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it did look pretty good. And the key is you stay away from the humans, and everything looks realistic. I mean, there’s a reason why— so Toy Story was built or made by Pixar, which actually came out of Lucasfilm, so George Lucas’s special effects company and his film company. And there’s a reason why the first fully computer-generated film was actually about toys. It was Toy Story, because it’s much easier to make those look realistic than it is to get humans.

There was a film based on one of the Final Fantasy games, Spirits Within, and they spent— they had like a $200 million budget, and they spent like $50 million of it on the hair.

AJ GENTILE: On the hair.

RIZWAN VIRK: Just trying to get the hair right. And so this is all before AI. Right now, we’re seeing a world where AI is making the generation of realistic characters very easy to do.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

RIZWAN VIRK: But that’s kind of how I’ve seen the technology evolve, just in my lifetime.

AJ GENTILE: Sure. Well, take us back to how your first game— I mean, you couldn’t program a game for 2600, right? Because it was cartridge.

RIZWAN VIRK: No, you couldn’t. Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: So, but on the C64 you could.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. And so again, I would make these little graphical games like tic-tac-toe and other little games that kind of tried to imitate some of the cool arcade games that I had seen. And then we got an Apple II and then I started to look at more from a game design perspective. There were these adventure games, like have you ever played King’s Quest?

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

RIZWAN VIRK: Which was super popular, but there was a whole series of these types of adventure games and they were on the big floppy disks. Not even the small floppy disks, which are pretty old now.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, they are.

RIZWAN VIRK: Kids today have no idea what—

Early Gaming, Compression, and the Road to Silicon Valley

AJ GENTILE: Kids today, they were 5¼-inch, they were huge.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, they were huge, exactly. What would happen is you’d put in one of the disks and it would bring up a picture of, I don’t know, a city, let’s say, and then you’d move the character around. They were kind of like the text adventure games like Zork, but with some graphical pictures. And then you would go to the next one and the next one.

AJ GENTILE: Kind of like a graphic novel choose-your-own-adventure almost.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, almost, right? And the innovation that King’s Quest made was they actually added a character that you could actually go to the left or to the right.

AJ GENTILE: It was bananas.

RIZWAN VIRK: And it looked like it was real.

AJ GENTILE: Bananas.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, and Sierra On-Line, the company that made that was really considered one of the pioneers in graphics. In fact, they were the first to make a game, a graphical game for the Apple II that was called Mystery House. And it was just line graphics. And it was a husband and wife team, and she was the artist and he was the programmer. And they figured out how to get 74 of these, or 78, some number in the ’70s, of these line graphics onto a single floppy disk.

AJ GENTILE: That’s crazy.

RIZWAN VIRK: That was considered a huge innovation back then. Because every other game you had to keep taking out the discs and put in the next one. And I remember thinking, well, how is it that they can compress these images, which are really big, and get so many of them? And it turns out it’s because they use a compression technique where they actually use just vector graphics, which are commands that tell it, so you don’t actually store all the pixels.

AJ GENTILE: Right, you store the directions.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so if anybody’s ever done this, I mean, they have a picture of a JPEG. If you uncompress — let’s say it’s 300 kilobytes or something, or 500K, so it’s less than a megabyte. And if you uncompress that, I mean, we’re getting kind of geeky now, so I don’t know how far we want to go down this road.

AJ GENTILE: This is a geeky audience.

RIZWAN VIRK: Okay, so if you uncompress it and save it as a TIFF, an uncompressed TIFF, it’ll be something like 100 megabytes for that one picture, right? And if you think of a film or a TV show like Game of Thrones, I mean, the reason I can stream it on my phone is because it’s not sending 100+ megabytes per frame. It’s compressing it down.

And so I began to think about compression really early as an optimization technique for games. And there was this one program, I think it was called like, was it called the Graphics Magician? And it was like $100 and I couldn’t afford it. And I went to my parents’ home because you could take like images and compress them down and you could create a little adventure game. And I think I entered a programming contest where you could go to different planets and you could — in fact, this is funny, it wasn’t even that graphical because it was mostly text, but I called it the Simulation Machine.

AJ GENTILE: No way. In high school.

RIZWAN VIRK: I’ve completely forgotten about this. And the reason I did it was so you could — it was like a little bit of text you could change and then the user has to figure out where they are. And maybe you could add a graphic or two as well. But I actually used to call it the Simulation Machine.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, synchronicities are happening all over your life.

RIZWAN VIRK: I haven’t thought about that in years, actually. We went to the University of Michigan where they had a big programming competition there.

AJ GENTILE: You still have that, all that stuff?

RIZWAN VIRK: No. When my dad died recently, we ended up moving, cleaning up things in that house and selling it because my mom stays with my siblings now. But we did still have the Apple IIc sitting there. So who knows, maybe there were some old floppy disks still sitting around. It’s possible.

AJ GENTILE: I love it that you were thinking about compression that young. That’s amazing. I can remember writing programs on the C64 before we could afford a hard drive and just printing them out, just printing out pages, lines of code before.

RIZWAN VIRK: And then did you reenter them?

AJ GENTILE: Then you reenter them until the 1541 drive came out and then the world changed. Like, we’ll never be able to fill this up. So where do you go from there? How old were you when you started, when you entered that contest?

RIZWAN VIRK: That was in high school, so it was probably like 16, 17, somewhere.

AJ GENTILE: Were you thinking, this is what I want to do?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I was thinking that computer science is definitely what I want to do. In fact, and this ties to a larger theme we can talk about later, but if you had asked me kind of later in high school when I was old enough to kind of know something about the world, or even early college, “What is it you’re going to do with your life?” I would’ve told you, “I’m going to be a software entrepreneur. And then I’m going to be a writer.”

AJ GENTILE: And then, you mean later on?

RIZWAN VIRK: Later on when I was really old, like 28. Because back then, I thought I was in high school. I thought 28-year-old is really old. I’ll make my millions and then I’ll go be a writer.

And it’s odd when you think about it because I believe we all may have these scripts for our lives that we’re unaware of at a conscious level, but somehow unconsciously they seep through sometimes and they come out. But I definitely wanted to program computers because I was good at it, right?

And I think then I got to MIT and I found, MIT had some really smart people. There were guys that were really good at physics, and there were guys that were really good at chemistry, and there were guys that were really good at aero-astro. And I think it was a wake-up call for most people who went there because they were either valedictorians or they were top of their class, and you’re around these people, and every now and then you have somebody who’s really good at X or Y.

And so people say, “Is MIT hard?” And I say, “Well, it depends. If you’re the guy that’s really good at physics, then MIT is not that hard. But if you’re everybody else, then physics is really hard at MIT.” And I was the guy for whom computer science was just really easy.

AJ GENTILE: Well then why, what book did you want to write?

RIZWAN VIRK: I wasn’t sure at that point. I just knew that I liked to write stories and I wanted to write something someday. It was just a sense that I had that I would be a writer, going back to the 4th grade when I wrote a little story about a dwarf that lived in some magical kingdom or something like that.

AJ GENTILE: Well, you were writing story-based games. You weren’t really writing shooters. You were writing story games.

From MIT to Silicon Valley: The Mobile Gaming Revolution

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, well, I finally got into the video game industry much later. So after MIT, I did enterprise software for a while. So I kind of went in this other direction, and it wasn’t until I moved to Silicon Valley that I got back into games and into the game industry. And that was when the iPhone was relatively new, right? So it was like, wow, we have a gaming platform.

Now Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple, they didn’t realize when they were designing the iPhone, they built this thing called the App Store, which everybody knows what it is now, but back then it was a big innovation. You could just write your program and upload it into the store, and people can just download it on their phone. Because before that, the games on mobile phones were like these little line games, and you had to go through a big giant publisher, and Verizon had to approve your game. There were very few games you could play on the old phones. And with the iPhone, anybody could upload an app. So what Apple didn’t anticipate was that games would become so popular.

AJ GENTILE: They didn’t see that coming.

RIZWAN VIRK: They were actually surprised by it. And for the first 10 years of the App Store, let’s say 2008 to 2018, the number one top grossing apps were all games. Of course, even now, if you look at it, probably some of the top 10 are probably still games. And so it took off as a gaming platform. So then with each new hardware release, they ended up increasing the capabilities of the hardware to be able to play more and more games.

And at that time, a lot of the big guys dismissed the iPhone games as no big deal. “These are just little games you sell for $0.99. Our real games are these big AAA games.” But it turns out today the mobile part of the gaming industry basically dwarfs the console and the PC games. So it’s the biggest segment of the entire video game industry.

AJ GENTILE: And it’s bigger than movies and sports combined.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, and record music.

AJ GENTILE: And music combined.

RIZWAN VIRK: All of those combined, video games is a bigger industry. So I really saw that evolve from zero to a pretty major industry. Because back then, a couple guys could just write a mobile game.

And then we ended up building games that were called simulation games, but not in the sense that we’re talking about the simulation hypothesis. It was like, if you’ve ever played FarmVille, there were games on Facebook where you simulated having a farm or you simulated running a cafe. And we had a game called Tap Fish, which I guess with your hucklefish might be appropriate. But you basically had your own fish tank and you would raise little baby fish and breed them and you’d have different species. And that ended up being the number one grossing game in the App Store for a while. And then we sold it to a big Japanese company.

The Daily Show Sandbagging

AJ GENTILE: Now since you brought it up, we gotta get into what was the Daily Show beef with Tap Fish? Because you handled it so well. Didn’t they sandbagg you?

RIZWAN VIRK: They totally sandbagged.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. That’s when I learned you have to be a little bit careful with people who are Hollywood types in general, because until then I was kind of naive. And they basically came in and kind of sandbagged me and kind of edited this piece.

AJ GENTILE: What did they say? They want to interview you about this popular game?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, about the popular game in the industry.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, that’s not what they did.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, no, no. So they ended up basically — we were one of the games that were the first free-to-play games out there. And what happened was Apple made it so that if somebody had a password you could just buy stuff in the game. And what would happen is some kids ended up spending — not just in our game, I mean, you name it, these games. And this is when the industry was actually pretty small. Today you have Fortnite, which is doing, I don’t know, a million dollars a day probably, if not more than that. So we’re talking very small numbers.

But what would happen is you’d have people whose kids would end up spending like $1,000 on FarmVille or something. And so they sandbagged me by having a parent of a kid actually call me and have a call with us. And then they edited out the part where the parent thanked me for what I said and tried to explain to him how it works. Turns out he had given his kids his password and they had used the password, and they made it seem like we were the villains.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, they did.

RIZWAN VIRK: And they edited out the part. They even had a part where, if you want to buy, you have to enter the password. They edited that part out and made it seem like, “Oh, you don’t even need passwords.” And so they made me look like the bad guy. So that was my introduction to, well, what the media tells us in general may not be exactly true out there. We have to keep our guard up.

AJ GENTILE: But you — I think it might have been the next day, didn’t you post a rebuttal on your blog, which I think is still there, about here’s what really happened?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I think, but nobody read the rebuttal.

AJ GENTILE: Well, yeah.

RIZWAN VIRK: A small number of people read the rebuttal, but many people saw the episode, and so that’s when I started to really think about what I call the hard simulation hypothesis, which is that the physical world is a kind of simulation. But there’s also the soft simulation hypothesis, which is more like the narrative matrix, which is what we’ve been told. Perhaps not everything that we’ve been told is as we’ve been told on TV, whether it’s the wars, whether it’s who to make fun of.

In 1984, they had the two-minute hate, which was, “Who are we going to hate today? We’ll get everybody together in a room, and we’ll put them up there, and we’ll make everybody hate them.” And of course, we go through that now in the media all the time.

AJ GENTILE: Sure.

RIZWAN VIRK: But it was kind of a rude introduction, which is why I like doing podcasts, because in podcasts, they’re not going to edit. I mean, they may edit some things in, but it’s really a conversation. And people are able to see our whole conversation. They won’t just see a little part made to look like somebody said something that they didn’t say.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. That annoyed me when I read that story, but it didn’t surprise me. Eventually we’re going to get to Sausalito and your VR experience, but can you tell us what’s happening — like leading up to that? Were you working on games?

From Game Developer to Investor

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so what happened was, I was working on different games. We did a game company where we built games for TV shows. There was a TV show called Penny Dreadful and a show called Grimm. You remember that show?

AJ GENTILE: Sure. I love Grimm.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, Grimm was great. And so I designed — not many people know this because it was a small game — but I designed probably one of the first, if not the first, card battle game on a phone, because the phones were much smaller back then and people didn’t know how you were going to do a whole card battle game there. And I did one called Titans versus Olympians. So we had the Greek Titans and then the Greek Olympians like Zeus, and you would play this game for so many turns.

And then eventually we ended up creating a card battle engine which we could use. This was now a different company. We sold off our game company to a big Japanese company. And then we did some games for TV shows and I became more of an investor and advisor to different companies.

AJ GENTILE: Didn’t you do Game of Thrones?

RIZWAN VIRK: One of the companies that I was an investor in did a Game of Thrones game.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, my mom has spent a fortune on that game.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I was an investor in Telltale Games as well, which had The Walking Dead game that was huge.

AJ GENTILE: It was, and it was great.

RIZWAN VIRK: And Telltale was story-based games.

AJ GENTILE: It’s really back to the same thing. It’s like a graphic novel that you play.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, exactly. Now Telltale eventually imploded. This happens a lot with game industry companies where you have a big hit and then you try to do too much and then the whole thing implodes. So that wasn’t good for me as an investor, but it was good for the industry because Telltale then broke up and all these people went out and started new game companies. So there’s all kinds of interesting games out there now that were from people who used to work at Telltale.

AJ GENTILE: So at that point, we’re talking maybe 2010, 2011?

Investing in Discord Before It Was Discord

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. I also invested in a small company that’s now called Discord.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, I’m aware of that.

RIZWAN VIRK: Which was a game company initially. They started as a MOBA game, kind of like League of Legends, but on an iPhone. And I knew Jason Citron who had founded Discord because he was in the mobile game industry. So we all kind of knew each other back then in San Francisco, Silicon Valley. A lot of the big AAA games were in LA, but a lot of the mobile games came out of the San Francisco Bay Area.

And so when he started this company, he was like, “Okay, I’m going to do either a 3D printing company or another game company.” So he ended up doing another game company and I ended up investing in his first round. But then what happened was that the game wasn’t that successful and these guys hated Skype. So they wanted to build something other than Skype for talking to each other while they’re playing their mobile battle arena game. And then eventually they ended up releasing that as a separate app, Discord.

And I remember we had lunch and he said, “Oh, the game’s not doing so well, but this app is doing well.” I was like, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, we have like 100,000 downloads.” “That’s pretty good. Like per month?” He’s like, “No, per week.” And I said, “Wow, how many marketing dollars are you spending to get these downloads?” Because there was an advertising industry that mobile developers often used to get people to download their apps. And he was like, “Zero. People are just dragging their friends into it.”

And of course now Discord is huge. It’s used all over the place now. But it started off just for gamers, and then it eventually expanded.

AJ GENTILE: How did you get into investing in these companies?

RIZWAN VIRK: Well, if you’re just part of that ecosystem, you kind of know a lot of different entrepreneurs. And when you sell your company, you’re like, “Okay, how do I help along the next generation of entrepreneurs?” And then I went to MIT and ran a startup program there for a couple of years, which was based not all on games, but it was at the MIT Game Lab, which is within the Media Lab complex there. And that was a lot of fun. So I did that for a little while as well.

AJ GENTILE: Were you still writing code during this time?

RIZWAN VIRK: No, by then I had kind of stepped back from writing code.

AJ GENTILE: I think you miss it a little bit, don’t you?

AI, Game Development, and the Evolution of Tools

RIZWAN VIRK: I do miss it, but I don’t have the time for it. Which is why now with AI, it’s gotten pretty good. A couple years ago — I think this was maybe a year and a half ago — I said, “Okay, let me see if ChatGPT can write a simple Pac-Man game.” And it got something up and running pretty quickly. But it wasn’t quite right. The Pac-Man wasn’t pointing in the right direction. And I found I had to do so much live coding and extra prompts. Eventually I just went into the code and started fixing it myself — the direction of the Pac-Man, for example. But now I hear that it’s gotten so good that you don’t have to go into the code yourself anymore. So I may get back into it. We’ll see.

AJ GENTILE: Even though you had to go in and tweak that code back then, I still bet you got it working faster than Williams did in 1981.

RIZWAN VIRK: Oh, way faster. In fact, that was the benefit — you get something up and running quickly with AI. Now, if you added the total amount of time it took me to get it right, it would probably have been similar, but I wouldn’t have had anything you could really see till like, let’s say 50% of the process. Here I had it at like 10% of the process — the initial getting the game up and running — and then the rest of it was tweaking. So people who are building games today are dealing with a much better set of tools.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, they are.

RIZWAN VIRK: Than we had, or certainly than the guys who did these original arcade games, where they had not even 64K. Think of the Atari memory on those. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wrote a game called — I think it was called Breakout — for the Atari cartridge. Steve Jobs got paid for it, but he actually had Wozniak come in and write it for him.

AJ GENTILE: That was the one where you hit the bricks?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I think it was that one. Don’t quote me on that, but it was definitely something like that. It was a very early one of those cartridges.

AJ GENTILE: It was, but it was a groundbreaking game because of the physics, which were really cool.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. Here’s an aside on Atari. Having been in the game industry, there’s a great book called 8-Bit Apocalypse. And if you’ve ever played the game Missile Command — which we’ve all played, because that was a really popular game — by today’s graphics, it looks very primitive. I doubt I could get my nephews interested. But the guy who wrote it was researching ICBMs and nuclear war. He started to have dreams and nightmares about a nuclear war. And so this book, 8-Bit Apocalypse, is all about his kind of moral dilemma in writing this game and what he went through. Because back in the ’70s and ’80s, that was a real thing, as you remember.

AJ GENTILE: Of course, every day we thought that there was going to be nuclear war. We lived with that every single day. Yeah, absolutely.

The Sausalito VR Experience

AJ GENTILE: All right, so Sausalito, 2016. Tell me what was going on that day before you threw on the VR headset. Was VR a thing? Did someone invite you over and say, “We got this idea”?

RIZWAN VIRK: So what happens is virtual reality has gone through a bunch of different waves over time. Even back when I was in college, back in ’92, ’93, there was a novel called Snow Crash, and there was a wave of VR. In fact, that term itself was coined in, I think, 1987 or 1988 by a guy named Jaron Lanier. And the movie Lawnmower Man was very loosely based on him, as I understand it. But that wave kind of went away. They had a glove even — if you think of Ready Player One — they had a glove way back in the late ’80s and ’90s, and then it kind of went away.

And what happened was in 2012, there was a new wave of VR. Oculus was one of the first startups with consumer headsets, because until then they were unaffordable for consumers. And so there was a whole series of headsets like the HTC Vive, et cetera.

I had sold my last video game company, and one of the companies that actually took over some of the games was in Sausalito, a company called Free Range Games. And they were working with HTC to create sports games there. And so we went over to their office just to kind of meet the people and find out more. And it was a beautiful day in Sausalito. If you’ve been there, people who’ve been there will know that on a beautiful day you can see the San Francisco skyline. And I think it’s one of the prettiest views that we have in any of our major cities out there. And so they were literally right on the Bay, so from their offices, we could see the skyline. And they said, “Hey, you’ve got to come upstairs and try out this new VR headset thing.”

And so it was going through one of these waves. Some of my academic research that I’ve done is about how innovation goes through waves. A bunch of venture capitalists jump in, and a bunch of entrepreneurs jump in. And that’s what happened in the mobile game industry — it was a new wave. A bunch of entrepreneurs started to build games and then a bunch of investors started to invest in those games.

AJ GENTILE: Tell me a few more of those waves. That’s interesting.

The History of AI Waves

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. So these waves happen over time. We’re obviously in a major wave now — the AI wave. But this isn’t the first AI wave. The first AI wave happened in the ’80s, and it was with this thing called expert systems. These were rule-based systems. So they tried to take an expert who’s really good at, let’s say, machine debugging or diagnosis of problems in an industrial setting, and they tried to codify those rule sets into a big knowledge system. The idea was you could just ask the knowledge system what’s wrong, and it would guide you through the whole thing.

Now, that turned out to be not manageable. It was too many rules — just like having a lot of code that you have to manage. Because they were coding these rules, often by hand, and that took too long. There was a company called Symbolics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT was a big hub for this AI wave. So that AI wave kind of went away.

Then we had another AI wave back in the 2000s, which was starting to be based on deep learning and big data — this idea of neural nets, where you can have multiple layers of neural nets and then they make the decision for you. Neural nets have been around for a while.

AJ GENTILE: Sure, machine learning. We know about Big Blue in chess and all of that.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, although most of that was still rules. Still rule-based. Believe it or not. So the guys who won the Turing Prize — a guy named Geoff Hinton, who was at University of Waterloo in Toronto, Canada — they kept it alive because people weren’t using neural nets for much. Even when I was a student at MIT, they showed us how a neural net worked and how we could use it to train it — like if people wrote the number 2 or the number 3, we would feed it examples. These were really simple neural nets. They didn’t have many layers, but they worked. But nobody was using them for anything. And it wasn’t until they scaled them massively — that was the difference. That’s where big data and machine learning comes from. You just run it on huge sets of data.

AJ GENTILE: Is that when Geoff Hinton started to panic? Because he doesn’t like where things are going.

RIZWAN VIRK: He doesn’t like where things are going now, right? Not then, but eventually he did, because people took up his ideas. You had Google DeepMind. Playing games like chess is an interesting example because DeepMind had the ability to play the game Go. They had the AlphaGo platform, which was one of the first platforms that could actually beat a human champion of the game Go. And it’s much harder than chess.

But they had coded some rules, and then they used the machine playing a human, and then eventually they had the machine just play itself a million times. And so it learns the patterns. You don’t actually have to code the patterns.

There’s a guy named Claude Shannon — and we’re kind of geeking out on the information side of this now. Claude Shannon was considered the father of information science. He was at Bell Labs and he became an MIT professor. Part of the reason we can ship information across the wire is because of his work. He wrote a paper about computers and game playing, way back in the 1940s and ’50s. He said there are different stages it could go through, one of which is you can tell it the rules and it’ll play the game. There’s a little picture of him and his wife sitting with a big box that has a chessboard on top. It was one of the first chess-playing computers — a physical machine that would light up where—

AJ GENTILE: I know the machine.

Claude Shannon and the Evolution of Machine Learning

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, and somebody had to physically move the pawn or the horse to that place. But he said eventually machines will be able to learn the rules of the game. And that’s what happened. There was AlphaGo, and then there was another version where they didn’t even teach it how to play Go. They just said, “Play, and we’ll just tell you if you won or not.” And eventually it learned the rules.

AJ GENTILE: So that’s machine learning. We got a hint of that in, I think it was 1985 with WarGames, right? Where it’s just playing tic-tac-toe over and over. It was learning.

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s right. Yeah, that was a great fictional representation. That was, I think, an era-defining movie for many of us.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, for me it was.

RIZWAN VIRK: I mean, you saw AI, where it might end up, and how it can learn from itself. And I think that’s an important lesson. I wish they would have re-released the movie today, especially with autonomous weapons and the race for using AI within the military. I’m less of a believer that AI will take over the world necessarily, but more that AI can be used for nefarious ends — whether it’s censorship, whether it’s automated autonomous drones that are basically killing people on behalf of other humans.

AJ GENTILE: That’s true. We’ll get to that. That’s in here for sure.

A First Encounter with Virtual Reality

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so back to the story. They had built a whole VR sports suite — in fact, I think it was just called VR Sports. And they said, “Try this on.” And this was not like today’s headsets, which are still big and uncomfortable, but back then they were really big.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, they were worse.

RIZWAN VIRK: They were worse. Literally there were wires coming from the ceiling onto the headset, because there weren’t even that many wireless headsets. In fact, I don’t know if there were any. Oculus itself was something you had to hook up to a PC. This was the HTC Vive. We used to joke that it was called a toaster on your face. It was like having a toaster on your face.

AJ GENTILE: Because it also got pretty hot.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it got pretty hot, and it was just so big and kind of heavy. This is a random aside, but one of the first VR headsets ever built was by a guy named Ivan Sutherland back in 1968, somewhere in Massachusetts — I think at Harvard. It was this big giant thing that you put on your head that was connected, not just with wires, but physically connected. And they called it the Sword of Damocles, which is like this old Greek myth — the sword’s always above your head — because it felt like it was going to snap your neck. It was so heavy.

AJ GENTILE: I never heard of that. That’s wild.

RIZWAN VIRK: That was one of the first ever real computer-controlled virtual reality type of things. And so in this case, it was pretty uncomfortable. And I started to play this table tennis game.

AJ GENTILE: Now hold on, before tennis — you put it on. Do you look around first and get a sense?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, you look around.

AJ GENTILE: So what are you thinking? Like, this is pretty good?

The Moment VR Fooled His Body

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. So first of all, the room was empty — it was actually about the size of this room. And I look over and there’s a ping pong table, graphically generated. You can tell it was graphically generated. In fact, I have a screenshot of it in my book, The Simulation Hypothesis. And then there was an opponent on the other side. Now, the opponent didn’t look very realistic — it was just like a bunch of circles and triangles and squares and stuff. But they said, “Here, put the controller in your hand and you can start to play.”

So the ball would come across and I would start to hit the ball. And the best thing about that game was the responsiveness of it. The physics engine was so good that if I moved my hand fast versus if I moved my hand slow, the ball would go faster or not shoot across.

AJ GENTILE: And you weren’t feeling latency?

RIZWAN VIRK: That was the best part. There was latency in the overall graphics — that’s why they had a very simple opponent. They didn’t have a photorealistic opponent.

AJ GENTILE: The physics was dialed in. The physics engine was really good.

RIZWAN VIRK: And that’s key for a sports game. Even for a shooter game, it’s key. You want to be able to figure out who shot first. But it was so realistic that for a few moments it fooled my body into thinking that I was playing a real game of table tennis.

So much so that I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table, just like I might do at the end of a game of table tennis. Now, of course, there was no table. It was an empty room, and the VR table was about this size. So what happened was the controller fell to the floor and I almost fell over, and I did a double take. I was like, “Whoa, wait, what just happened? Oh, of course, there’s no table.”

AJ GENTILE: Did you hear cheers around you? Who was in the room?

RIZWAN VIRK: It was just like one or two other guys, so it wasn’t like a crowd — but they gave you the smile like, “Yeah, you get it now, you get it now.” And it’s the kind of thing, even back then, you had to really just try on a headset in order to understand what’s possible. The headsets are still too big these days, so we’re not quite at the point of mass consumer adoption. But we’re getting there.

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Simulation Hypothesis

RIZWAN VIRK: That got me thinking, and that’s really what got me down this rabbit hole — that’s one of several strands of thinking. I started to wonder, how long would it take us to build a game or a virtual reality that was so realistic that we would forget? Not just for a couple of moments, which is what happened to me — obviously I knew it was a game — but you would forget for an hour, and then you would forget for a day. And then could you forget like The Matrix, basically, where Neo had lived in this virtual reality his whole life and he didn’t really know that he was in a virtual reality?

So I got down in the rabbit hole by looking at how technology might evolve over the next few decades. I called it The Simulation Point. But then I stepped back and I started looking at the quantum physics side of things.

AJ GENTILE: Well, we’re going to get to that later.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, but I just want to summarize to say it turns out that quantum physics was telling us that the world isn’t really as real as we think it is. Then I did another thread, which was looking at the various religious and mystical traditions. I realized, “Oh, they are also telling us that the world is not really real, at least not the way we think it is.”

I realized that there was a universal idea here that tied together Silicon Valley technology with physics and science — but looking at it from the point of view of an information-based world or video game designer — and mystical experiences, which are the basis for the world’s religions. And so that’s really what got me down this rabbit hole in a big way, and writing the book as well.

AJ GENTILE: This is a perfect segue to my next question. You were sort of living a double life because you were going to the Monroe Institute, you were learning meditation, drum circle — all this kind of stuff.

Meditation, Consciousness, and the Double Life

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. So what happened was when I was an entrepreneur back in the ’90s is when I did my first startup, pretty much as soon as I graduated, like within a year. So most of my career has been as an entrepreneur. So during the day I would deal with things like code reviews, builds, engineers, managing engineers, hiring salespeople, which really sucks if you’re like a technical guy, and investors and customers. And a lot of our customers were big Fortune 5,000 companies.

This was in Boston, so it was actually much more conservative in the financial industry than, say, in Silicon Valley where the guys were sitting around smoking weed as part of their startups. That wasn’t happening in enterprise software startups in Boston. But at the same time, I started to learn about different types of meditation techniques and I started to explore different aspects of consciousness.

What drew you to that? I’ve always had a bit of an interest in it, but I will say that initially, I just thought, “Hey, if I can learn to meditate, I can be a better computer programmer because then I can concentrate.” Of course. I can be a better entrepreneur because I can visualize what I’m trying to build. But then the more you got into it, the more you realize that it’s not so much about that stuff. It’s not about the selfish thing.

And what I eventually got to realize— and I wrote my first book, it was called Zen Entrepreneurship, about this time when I was living this double life. Every chapter, one chapter is about a problem we had with our startup and the customer canceling on us. The next is about me jetting off to the Monroe Institute for a week to try to do out-of-body experiences. I started doing lucid dreaming. There was a guy named Carlos Castaneda who wrote about this way back in the ’70s. A lot of young people today have no idea who he is.

AJ GENTILE: They should learn. They should learn.

RIZWAN VIRK: And he was on the cover of Time Magazine, which, okay, Time Magazine would be like— I don’t know, what would it be?

AJ GENTILE: It’d be like— We don’t have those anymore.

RIZWAN VIRK: We don’t have those anymore, right? It’d be like being Joe Rogan’s top guest for the year or something like that this year. I don’t know what you would put in today’s terms. But basically, he was called the grandfather of the New Age movement. And he talked a lot about, initially, about psychedelics. But eventually he was talking about dreaming and different states of consciousness.

And some people— there’s some controversy about, did he really find a Mexican shaman that taught him this, or is he borrowing other people’s ideas? But the interesting part of his teachings for me were about his dream experiences, which it almost didn’t matter if he was imagining this while he was on psychedelics or while he was dreaming, because that’s what it was all about. But it was realizing there’s something different about our reality.

A Precognitive Dream About a Competitor

This really got me into thinking about alternate models because, okay, I’ll give you a startup example because I know you’ve been in the computer startup world. One day I had a dream about this competitor of ours, and I was like, that’s odd. I’ve never dreamed of this guy before. One, never. Two, I hadn’t even heard from him or his company. Is this Mark?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, this is a guy named Mark. Okay, I like this story.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. Okay. So it was a guy named Mark. He had a company called Edge Research, and I had a dream where I was in a business conference and I started chatting with him about it. And I woke up, I thought, that’s weird. Like, why am I dreaming about this guy? We haven’t heard from his company for a year.

We had software that was connecting IBM products to Microsoft and Oracle products. So we were like a big partner of IBM back in those days using a product called Lotus Notes. Probably too much information for the audience there. But basically I went in the office that day and I get a call right in the morning from a product manager at IBM. And he says, “Oh, hey, we’re going to do a big announcement today. And I just want to tell you, let you know, because you’ve been a good partner to us, but this new product we’re going to release is probably going to kill your product.”

I was like, “Great. Okay. Thanks.” Because we had a product that worked on top of their product. And I said, “Well, how come I’ve never heard of this product before?” Because IBM’s a big company. I’m sure it would have leaked somehow. He’s like, “Oh, do you remember that competitor of yours, Mark, who had this company called Edge Research? We bought them like a year and a half ago and they’ve been working on it in secret up in New Hampshire, and now we’re going to do the big announcement today.”

And I thought, okay, that’s weird. I had the dream in the morning, the phone call came after, right? Some people think, “Oh, it’s not a big deal because it happened the other way around.” No, the dream came first out of nowhere. It was almost like a precognitive sense that this guy was going to show up again today in some significant way. I believe it was.

AJ GENTILE: What was the dream?

RIZWAN VIRK: The dream was just— it was more like I was at a conference like I used to go to, and he was at one of the booths, and I was asking him, “Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while. What have you been working on?” We were just having that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody who’s in your industry. But he was cagey about something in the dream.

He was? But he was always cagey. As I recall, this is 30 years ago now. So we’re getting into details I may not even get right. But I do remember being a little cagey. And it was sort of par for the course because when we had built our product, our first product, and announced it, he had called me and he was being a little bit cagey. He was asking me about it and didn’t tell us he was going to have a competitive product.

But that to me was one of many wake-up calls that I had around dreams. And the nature of reality, that in fact we may be getting clues about things that haven’t happened yet. And our idea of time as being linear may not be correct. And only getting information from a materialistic point of view may not be correct either. There may be other ways to get information.

Lucid Dreaming and Glimpses of the Future

So that was one example. Once I ended up lucid dreaming and said, “Hey, let me go visit my girlfriend” — at the time, still my partner now — in Cambridge. I was like, “Let me fly over to her apartment.” And I looked over there in the living room and there was this weird light on the couch. And I thought, that’s weird because it’s the middle of the night. She’d probably be sleeping in the bedroom. But there was this weird light on the couch.

And I didn’t really think much of it because then the lucid dream goes away. So if you’ve ever tried lucid dreaming, it’s hard to stay in it. It’s hard to stay lucid. It just goes away. And then I told her about it the next day, and she said, “Oh yeah, I was sleeping on the couch last night.”

Whoa. And I would have these little confirmations like that. Like, I would be flying around Cambridge, and they had all these ultra-realistic glass, high skyscraper-type buildings, but we didn’t have that many back then. I remember thinking, okay, what’s going on here? And then recently I went on a trip back to Cambridge because I still have a place there. And if you go to Kendall Square now, which is just outside of MIT, they’ve got all these tall skyscrapers that are like these glass buildings and stuff.

AJ GENTILE: So you’ve seen the future? I might have.

RIZWAN VIRK: Like, it’s hard to say because I don’t remember exactly what the buildings look like, but it was definitely the tenor of the future.

Out-of-Body Experiences at the Monroe Institute

AJ GENTILE: Well, at Monroe, were you able to get out of body? So I tried it.

RIZWAN VIRK: So the Monroe Institute, they did Hemi-Sync. Hemi-Sync, what it does is it puts in different rhythm beats and it gets your brain into a certain rhythm. I found that it wasn’t quite working for me to get out of my body. But I did have an actual experience where I was— what today I would call a shamanic journey. So later I learned how to do this with just drumming and just breathing. You can get into an altered state and you can have— you can do what shamans do, which is they have almost like a visualization, but you’re aware you’re doing something in another reality, but you’re also aware of your physical body.

So this is the experience that I had at the Monroe Institute where I saw this guy, kind of looked a little bit like me, brown guy, but he had a beard and he was a sadhu sitting against a tree. Who knows, maybe it was in India somewhere, like years ago. I thought, “Hey, this is interesting.” And I felt somehow connected to this guy. And so this is like a vision I’m having while I’m in, with a Hemi-Sync.

AJ GENTILE: How present are you in the real world?

RIZWAN VIRK: Are you like, “Oh my God, this is happening?” I was present where I was still aware of my body. You were. But it was enough, and for me, this is very close to what happens with shamanic journey. You are aware that there is some other reality, really something happening there. You are still aware of your body, but it is almost like you are not paying attention to your body. Is this like samadhi?

AJ GENTILE: No, it is not quite samadhi.

RIZWAN VIRK: This is more like you are leaving, your consciousness is leaving your body and going somewhere else, but it is not like a full out-of-body experience. It is like just a part of you is going out to this other place. This other place could be a real place, it could be an imaginary place, it could be a place where multiple people can validate things. I’ll tell you about that in a second.

We used to have those kind of experiences too. But in this case, the guy was sitting against the tree, kind of like I am now, but maybe leaning back a little bit more. And he’s like, “You’re doing it all wrong.”

“What do you mean I’m doing it all wrong?”

He goes, “Look, if you want to get out of your body, don’t you remember you learned this in a past life or something?” He goes, “This is what you do.” You do not lay down, you sit against— because if you lay down, you go to sleep. You sit back against the tree. That is what he was doing. I do not know how many years ago this was, if it was even real. He goes, “You go up to your third eye.” At that point, I felt like I was him for a second. You would leave your third eye, and you would go out. Then you would come back. When you left, I could see him sitting, his body sitting there. He is like, “That is how you are supposed to do it.”

AJ GENTILE: You saw that?

RIZWAN VIRK: I saw that in my vision. Wow. I was like, “That is wild.” There was a time after that when I got back home where I was sitting at a desk coding or something. It was the middle of the afternoon. You get tired in the afternoon. I started to doze off and I remembered this. I went up and I basically went out of my body and I saw my physical body and then I came back.

For me, what happened in these dreams is I would just wake up somewhere else, like in a lucid dream that became an out-of-body experience. Rarely have I had the kind of experience where somebody actually just sees themselves sleeping in the bed.

AJ GENTILE: And you brought up that you had out-of-body experiences with other people.

Shamanic Journeying and Shared Dreamscapes

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so what happened was after that, I found an easier way for me to do that was using shamanic drumming. So I studied with a guy named Robert Moss who wrote a book called Conscious Dreaming. A really interesting guy, Australian guy, who somehow has gotten tied into all these Aboriginal and Iroquois and Native American dream practices. And he kind of pulled it together.

So we would get into a group and somebody would do drumming. It’s a certain beat of the drumming. And anybody can look it up, look up shamanic journeying, you’ll see what the beat is. It’s like a da-da-da-da-da-da. And what it does, it’s very similar to the binaural beats. It puts your mind and your breathing and your— it’s frequency related, yeah. So it puts you into kind of this altered state, and then you basically have an intention that says, “Hey, let’s all go to— Riz had this weird dream last night at a business conference. Let’s all see what we can do.”

And we would all go into there and try to— we’d all look around, and then we’d come back and say, “Hey, what did you see?” And every now and then, there would be a lot of correlation. And I have a skeptical engineer side, as well as this kind of intuitive side where I’m intrigued by all of these things. Kind of like you, I’m sure, right?

AJ GENTILE: Absolutely. And so by the time I studied Monroe, I knew lucid dreaming, I do all that stuff.

RIZWAN VIRK: Oh yeah, that’s great.

AJ GENTILE: Could you see each other or no? Sometimes, not necessarily.

RIZWAN VIRK: Some people could, but some people were better at it than others, of course. But for me, one of the most interesting ones— and again, you might go to what Robert used to call a stable place in the dream world, meaning it’s like, my dreams are subjective, your dreams are subjective. 90% of our dreams are. And I write more about this in my book Zen Entrepreneurship, and my book Treasure Hunt, which is about dreams in the business world. Not so much in the simulation books, but it’s a fun topic anyway.

And so one day he said, “We’re going to journey to Sirius.” And I was like, “What does that mean, journey to Sirius? What are we talking about?” “Let’s just do it.” So he started the drumming, set the intention. And then you say what you saw. And I remember going to this weird planet that maybe was orbiting Sirius. Again, this was a vision I was having, so hard to say how realistic it was.

I saw these giant buildings, but they were on stilts. It was just bizarre to see these giants, and it was like ruins of an ancient civilization, but there was an even more ancient civilization that had ruins at the bottom. And so that’s why these big buildings were on— wow. And then I went off to the side and it looked like Superman. Did you ever see, in the original movie, do you remember the Fortress of Solitude?

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

RIZWAN VIRK: So there were like all these little points— white crystals and stuff.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, white crystals.

RIZWAN VIRK: And then there was this group of people that were looking out over like different planets, but like living beings. There were some living beings there too, but they weren’t there physically. It was a little bizarre. Let’s leave that part off for now because I might have then transitioned to something else.

AJ GENTILE: I just love this story.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so I went and described all these details to Robert and some of the other people who went on the journey with us. And there were something like 17 points that many of us saw, including right down to the Superman crystalline structures and buildings on stilts. They saw that?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. There’s no way.

RIZWAN VIRK: Several of them saw that. Not 100% of the people, don’t always see it. But that’s why you do it in a group and you say, “Okay, what are the correlations we can make?” Now, is that a shared dreamscape in an imaginary world? Could it be like an actual planet on Sirius? Could it be something else? My skeptical mind kicks in and says, well, I don’t know. But there certainly was something going on here— whether it’s an archetypal thing— but the fact that there were so many instances where this would happen—

AJ GENTILE: The stilts is very— that’s a very strange detail. It’s very specific because anyone could say futuristic buildings or something, but the stilts is very specific.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it was stilts on top of like ancient ruins, almost like an older civilization. And that’s why they built on stilts, so that when they built a new building, you wouldn’t ruin the old buildings. And that was the reason why. And then eventually, I think the second part of it was they had moved off the planet and they were somewhere monitoring what was going on in different parts of their local quadrant of the galaxy. So now it gets into a little more Star Trek. So that’s just me, my sci-fi self coming out at that point.

The Matrix Synchronicity at Esalen

AJ GENTILE: But whatever it was, there’s something there. And we’ll talk about that more with simulation. Before we go to break, can we talk about the synchronicity and how weird that was? Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Morpheus. Oh yes, yes. So the Matrix synchronicity.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yes, at the Esalen Institute. So those who don’t know, Esalen is like this kind of a hippie commune set up in Big Sur north of LA, and they have conferences there. And so Jeffrey Kripal is a professor at Rice University. He’s one of the few academics that’s been looking into UFOs and mysterious subjects.

In fact, I just wrote a paper that I put a preprint of online. I wanted to call it Aliens Over Harvard. It’s actually called Aliens Over Harvard and Stanford, but it’s actually called UFOs in Academia: A Case Study in Stigma, Boundary Work, and the Edges of Legitimate Science. So I interviewed a whole bunch of professors who had studied the UFO subject openly about why there is a stigma about studying this seriously in some way.

AJ GENTILE: That’s a great idea for a paper. Is that out yet?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, the paper preprint is available online. If people search for it, they can find it, or they can look at my Twitter account, which is @rizstanford. I guess it’s called X now. I keep calling it Twitter still.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, me too.

RIZWAN VIRK: But so I interviewed people, and it turns out, going back a little bit, I graduated from MIT in June of 1992. And there was one other major interesting thing that happened at MIT in June of 1992— there was an alien abduction conference at MIT in June of 1992. And I heard about it.

AJ GENTILE: What a strange place to have that conference.

RIZWAN VIRK: It was an invite-only conference. And John Mack, who—

AJ GENTILE: Sure, from Harvard.

RIZWAN VIRK: —many people will know from Harvard, was one of the co-chairs, along with a physics professor from MIT. And I remember thinking, “This is weird. Why are we having an abduction conference here?” I didn’t go to the conference because it was invite-only. Bud Hopkins was there.

AJ GENTILE: Wow, the big names.

RIZWAN VIRK: And that was like the last serious abduction conference in that phase, because John Mack got in trouble for the subject. But so I went back and I interviewed people like David Pritchard, who’s the MIT professor who hosted it. John Mack has passed away, but Ralph Blumenthal, who is his biographer, wrote a book on him. And Jeff Kripal actually kept these alive with these secret conferences that were invite only. And so they used to happen at Esalen.

And so at Esalen, I came out with the book The Simulation Hypothesis on March 31st, 2019, which was the 20th anniversary of the release of The Matrix.

AJ GENTILE: Intentionally or no?

RIZWAN VIRK: Intentionally.

AJ GENTILE: Okay, nice.

RIZWAN VIRK: And that’s why I ended up self-publishing the first version, because there’s no way a publisher could have got it out on time, because I only finished it in December. And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to get this out.” The second edition was Penguin Random House, so they did all the usual publishing timeline things.

So I had met Jacques Vallée, who I’m sure your audience knows him.

AJ GENTILE: Very well, but what is he like as a person?

RIZWAN VIRK: He’s a super nice guy, and he’s really— what’s the word I want to use? Thoughtful, I think. And that’s what I like about him, is he’ll present what he’s heard, what people have told him, but he won’t necessarily present his conclusions. So I think he’s one of the few people in the entire UFO world.

And for those who don’t know him, he was part of the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he’s been involved since Project Blue Book, but he’s a computer scientist at heart, which is how we connected. Really nice guy. He even wrote a foreword for the French edition of The Simulation Hypothesis in French.

AJ GENTILE: He did? What an honor.

RIZWAN VIRK: It really was an honor. And again, it was just in that French edition. But it was really awesome that he did that.

AJ GENTILE: He’s a very important person.

RIZWAN VIRK: I think so, yeah. And he’s getting up there now. Hynek passed away many years ago, so I never got to meet him. But Jacques has lots of stories. He started telling me about some of the overlap between— well, he started telling me about UFO cases that led me to start thinking about the overlap between the UFO phenomenon and simulation theory.

But so there was a really interesting synchronicity that happened right when my book came out, and Jacques had given me a little blurb for the English version of the book. And I heard about this afterwards, so I actually wasn’t there, but it was a synchronicity involving me. He said Jacques gave a presentation at Esalen at one of these conferences that they have there, and it was just before lunch. And his last slide had a picture of my book, and he was talking about Rizwan Virk and The Matrix, and it probably had a picture of The Matrix. And so they left it as the last slide and they all said, “Oh, that’s interesting,” because the book had literally just come out.

And so then they left the classroom and they walked over to the cafeteria. If you’ve ever been to Esalen, they’re not that far. It’s right on Big Sur, beautiful. They walk into the cafeteria and who’s there but Morpheus. I mean, they literally see Laurence Fishburne sitting there in the cafeteria while they had just been talking about The Matrix and my name.

And so I heard this from multiple people, including Jeff Kripal and other people who were there. They’re like, “Hey, you had this big synchronicity about you and Morpheus in the book.” And I was like, “Oh damn, I wasn’t there.” But it was an interesting synchronicity.

AJ GENTILE: I mean, the simulation is always listening. All right, let’s take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll talk simulation theory.

Technology, Physics, and Religion Converge on Simulation Theory

AJ GENTILE: We’re back. So you’ve had this VR experience, precognitive dream, a weird synchronicity. And then I think you start to realize that simulation theory is not just a thought experiment, that technology, physics, and religion are all starting to point in the same direction?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, that was the realization that I came to, was that there’s no way in just a pure materialist model for some of these weird things to be happening. Not just the things that have happened to me, but things that others have reported.

And so I really first wrote an article about simulation theory. I was actually visiting Sri Lanka, and in Sri Lanka there was a famous science fiction writer who lived there, Arthur C. Clarke, whom anybody who’s into sci-fi knows. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his office is still well preserved there.

AJ GENTILE: Really?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. It’s technically not a tourist attraction, but a buddy of mine was there. He’s like, “No, you can go. You just slip the guy a few rupees.”

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that. Awesome.

The Simulation Point and Virtual Worlds

RIZWAN VIRK: So a buddy of mine from MIT had started a company in Sri Lanka and I had invested in his company and I was helping him out. So I went out to visit him and I really want to see Arthur C. Clarke’s office. So I went there and his desk is preserved and it’s got all these books behind him and it’s got 2001, 2010, but it’s got different versions. Wow.

And so I see this and sometimes I think we have a recognition of something. It reminded me of something. And I was like, yeah, that’s right, I was supposed to be a writer. Like, you kind of have this vision and it flashes in your mind and you don’t know all the details, right? It’s like you remember the storyline. And somehow it dawned on me that I needed to do more writing.

But at that point, I had gotten this idea that the video game was a good way to explain this idea of the physical world being virtual. And I had also spent a lot of time in a game called Second Life, which was from a decade before that.

AJ GENTILE: Sure, I remember.

RIZWAN VIRK: But it was a virtual world. So the difference between a virtual world and a game is in a game you’re trying to score points and you’re trying to win, but in a virtual life you’re just kind of living there. And people would have jobs inside Second Life. They would come home from their real job and then they would log in to be a bartender at a club.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

RIZWAN VIRK: In Second Life. And so I’d ask them, “Why are you doing this?” Well, because it’s fun. Because they got paid in Linden dollars. This is pre-Bitcoin, which were worth peanuts. So they weren’t doing it for the pay, even though technically they were being paid. It was like that was part of their virtual life, their character’s life. And people would have relationships and get married. And that made an impression on me as well.

But I decided to write an article, a long article about why I think we might be living inside a video game. In some of the elements that I’d been thinking about. So that article allowed me to pull together these different ideas, and I wrote it, I believe it was like end of 2017, beginning of 2018, partly because of the Arthur C. Clarke experience. And it was just a flashpoint that said, “Oh, I’m going to have a bunch of books that are going to be translated in a bunch of languages.” At that moment?

AJ GENTILE: At that moment.

RIZWAN VIRK: But I got to get busy doing more writing. And so I wrote the article and I said, ah, that’s enough for now. I was running this program at MIT. I’m doing other stuff. But that got me into talking about the technology side of it initially more because when I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like the Matrix, I came up with this idea of the simulation point, which is, I define it as a type of technological singularity. Now, most people know that term because they think of Skynet, super intelligent AI, going to kill us all and take over the world.

The Technological Singularity

AJ GENTILE: So the AI singularity is what, when AI exponentially grows to the point where it—

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it’s become super intelligent, or beyond us, beyond us. That’s one example, right? The guy who coined the term the technological singularity was actually a guy named Vernor Vinge, who was a science fiction writer and a computer science professor. And he defined it in many different ways. So it wasn’t just AI. He said it could be computers networking with each other to become intelligent, or us merging with computers, which is what Ray Kurzweil talks about. The merger of biology and silicon.

But Vinge was relying on an earlier famous guy named — well, you’ll know him — John von Neumann.

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

RIZWAN VIRK: Who’s a famous Hungarian mathematician. He basically defined the von Neumann architecture that all of these computers still pretty much use, the von Neumann architecture. The guy really was a genius. And he borrowed the term singularity from physics because in physics, singularity is when you’re approaching that line at the center of a black hole. And he said it’s the point at which technology grows exponentially such that everything is different for the human race.

AJ GENTILE: And you can’t come back from a singularity. Yeah, that’s it.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, at that point everything is different. Yes. And so Vinge wrote the paper and then Kurzweil wrote a book about it. So a technological singularity is when technology gets to the point where you can’t come back. And so I started to think, well, if we were to build a virtual world that was indistinguishable from physical reality, then we would have reached what I call the simulation point. And if there are AI characters inside there that you can’t tell if they’re AI characters or not, then we’re basically able to create a full virtual world.

The Turing Test and Its Evolution

And there’s something called the Turing test, which most people have heard of. It’s again, going back to 1950, back in the time of Claude Shannon, it was actually Alan Turing. He wrote a paper called “The Imitation Game.” Yep. Actually, that’s what he called it. And for people who don’t know, most people have heard of it by now. But there’s a computer behind curtain A and a person behind curtain B, and you’re passing messages back and forth. Now, how did they pass messages back in those days? They didn’t have cell phones. It was teletype machines. Sure. That was how he decided to do it.

And he said, if you can’t tell the difference between the AI — now again, back then they thought AI was physical computer — so if you can’t tell the difference between a computer and the human, then the computer has passed the Turing test. And of course today many people think with ChatGPT and Claude and Google and Grok that we’ve pretty much passed the Turing test for text because it’s all a text-based interface.

There used to be a prize called the Loebner Prize, which was set up in the ’90s. And it was for the chatbot that actually came closest to passing the Turing test. And there was a chatbot named Alice that was one of the winners of it. It was the first chatbot that actually took on like a personality of a young woman.

AJ GENTILE: I don’t remember Alice, I remember Eliza.

RIZWAN VIRK: Eliza was even before that. So Eliza was like in the 1960s. So this was like ’90s or so, like mid-’90s. And there was a guy, a Hollywood guy, who saw this chatbot like back in the 2000s. He’s like, “Huh, a chatbot that has the personality of a young woman?” And his name was Spike Jonze. And he decided to write a script called “Her,” which became the film, you know, with who is it?

AJ GENTILE: Was it Joaquin Phoenix?

RIZWAN VIRK: Joaquin and Scarlett Johansson played the voice. And so you see what’s called the science fiction feedback loop at work where science fiction inspires technology and then technology inspires science fiction. And then when Sam Altman and these guys came out with, I think it was ChatGPT-3 or 3.5, one of the versions they came out with, they started referencing “Her” and there was a big blowup because the voice of the woman who sounded like the guy’s girlfriend in the video sounded like Scarlett Johansson.

AJ GENTILE: It was just someone who sounded like her. He promised it wasn’t her.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it was just someone kind of like her. Was it Samantha, I think, in the film was her character? Yeah. And he literally referenced the movie “Her,” so you start to see the science fiction feedback loop over time.

The Virtual Turing Test

But coming back to what I was talking about was in my book, the second edition of The Simulation Hypothesis, I define something called the virtual Turing test or the metaverse Turing test. And we’re not quite there yet. And that is, if you’re inside a multiplayer game or a virtual world like a Second Life or a World of Warcraft or Fortnite — I’m sure there’s a lot more recent examples now — and your avatar is controlled by you, and there’s two other avatars, one of which is controlled by a human player and one of which is controlled by an AI, and if you can’t tell the difference between those two, and you can do anything you want in the virtual world — you can drive cars, you can fly on dragons, you can go skiing, you can talk to each other, you can flirt, you can have virtual sex, whatever you want.

And if after, say, an hour you can’t tell which of those avatars — and you’re talking too, so there’s a voice element, which of course today, if you’ve seen any of the latest AIs, they can have a voice. In fact, I got a call from an AI not that long ago.

AJ GENTILE: Could you tell it was AI?

RIZWAN VIRK: They made it so that they told you it was AI.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, okay.

RIZWAN VIRK: It was called Bordy. It was an AI venture capitalist who basically was like, well, as an AI venture capitalist, I can talk to every single founder on Earth, right? Because it’s just making calls and it’s automated. But it was actually pretty good. In taking what I said, it’s an example of where they’re putting in the LLM behind the scenes, but it’s basically the brain that’s driving the character.

And in fact, we were talking about The Matrix Awakens, and that was a virtual city. And there was a guy, he put a smart NPC engine into it, which basically has an LLM behind it so that all the NPCs in that city — they were kind of dumb NPCs in most games, but now we have smart NPCs. And so he walked around this virtual world and he started telling people, “You’re in a video game.”

AJ GENTILE: I remember this. “You’re an NPC.” And some got upset, didn’t they? Yeah.

RIZWAN VIRK: Some were like, “That’s ridiculous.” Or some were like, “I got to go to work. I don’t have time for this crap.” Others were like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more.” And this was back in like ’22. So looking at how fast AI technology evolves, we’re already many generations beyond that. But they reacted kind of like real people might.

And so we’re not quite at passing the virtual or metaverse Turing test yet, but I think we will be eventually. And that’s one of the stages of these 10 stages to get to the simulation point, to build a Matrix. And another would be like BCIs, putting in brain-computer interfaces.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, like in The Matrix. So before we go too far down, one thing I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else do is your NPCverse RPG inside the simulation. But before we get there, take us back to your paper and what was your argument for this could be a simulation? The actual technology. Yeah, so the technology—

The Technological Argument for Simulation

RIZWAN VIRK: The technological argument was that video games can get to be so good that we will reach the simulation point. At some point, and it could be soon, it could be 100 years, could be 1,000 years. It really doesn’t matter that much as long as we get to that point. And so if we will eventually be able to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds that we can’t distinguish if we’re having the real experience or not — and one of the stages also included like false memories, like Philip K. Dick. We can talk more about him.

AJ GENTILE: I hope so. Yeah, because he’s one of my favorite authors.

RIZWAN VIRK: In Blade Runner, for example, you had the android that had Rachel, who remembered being a little girl growing up. She didn’t think she was AI, but she had those memories implanted in her. But if we can have those experiences and you can’t tell the difference, then how do we know for sure that we’re not inside a virtual world right now? That was the crux of the argument, but it was built on the idea that technology is developing, and people like to have virtual lives. And then the quantum physics was part of the argument as well. So I don’t know if we want to get into that in just a second, because I want to dispel something.

AJ GENTILE: And this was in my episode about simulation theory. Physicists will argue this can’t be a simulation because to simulate all this material, all consciousness down to the quantum level, you would need a simulation bigger than the universe itself. And my response was, “That’s not how simulations work.”

RIZWAN VIRK: Right, exactly.

Simulating Reality: Rendering, Quantum Physics, and the Observer Effect

RIZWAN VIRK: I mean, the way that simulations work is you simulate the parts that you need. And physicists love the law of big numbers, right? They love to say infinity. Oh yeah, it’s infinite, or there’s an infinite number of particles. But computer scientists, we hate infinity because we are always dealing with limited resources. So it’s all about optimization.

And I tell people, so in the book there’s a, we mentioned King’s Quest, so I’ll bring it up again. If you look at King’s Quest, you’ll see that each of the screens, when that guy is walking, it almost looks continuous, but it’s really not. All the pixels of all the screens are laid out, which means they’re called raster images or bitmap images. But they’re basically rendered, like the pixels are sitting there on disk and it’s just a matter of loading it.

Now, back in the ’80s, and you know this because you were around, if you tried to build something like World of Warcraft, or a Fortnite or a CS:GO, which is a first-person shooter, you wouldn’t be able to do it because there’s too many pixels to keep track of. And they didn’t know how to compress that down in such a way that you could render it on the fly. The hardware wasn’t that good either, but the thing that I learned as a computer scientist is that it’s, yes, the hardware gets better, but it’s the algorithmic improvements that really make the order of magnitude difference. Like hardware might go from 1 to 2, but if you want to go from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, you need to change the way that you’re doing things.

And so the reason we can render a World of Warcraft today is we don’t need all the pixels for all the castles to be on your computer. What we do is we generate it through 3D models based upon where you’re looking. And the first game that got really popular that did this was Doom. Of course. Back in the ’90s. I mean, they had Castle Wolfenstein and before that as well, but the game that really got popular simulated a first-person perspective. And so it basically just showed you what your character could see. And the rule of thumb was only render that which is observed.

AJ GENTILE: And by the way, that sounds familiar.

RIZWAN VIRK: It sounds familiar, right? And that’s what we do with Zoom too. Like, if you and I— I mean, we happen to be in the same room, although how would the audience know that we’re not in the same room? But if we’re on Zoom and I’m in Phoenix, and you’re in Los Angeles, then my computer doesn’t have to render all of Los Angeles. It just renders your background. And similarly, your computer doesn’t have to render all of Phoenix. It just needs to show the part that is visible from the camera.

AJ GENTILE: So that castle that’s way out in the distance is really just a few pixels. That’s all we’re rendering until you get there, and then we give you more and more information. Yeah, and it’s rendering it on demand.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yes. And this is a key feature of how 3D, particularly 3D video games are built. And the information for that castle is still out there. And sometimes it’s even that is generated on the fly. There was a game in 2016 called No Man’s Sky.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, procedural, yes.

RIZWAN VIRK: Procedural, right? And it had 18 quintillion planets, okay?

AJ GENTILE: That’s an interesting number, actually.

RIZWAN VIRK: It is, right? You probably know why.

AJ GENTILE: I do, but you have to explain it. But that’s an interesting number.

Procedural Generation and the Algorithmic Nature of Reality

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. But first of all, it’s a really big number. So it pretty much seemed infinite at that point. And the way video games used to be designed is you would have to have your design team design every one of those planets. Now, there’s no way that anyone could design 18 quintillion worlds. It’s just too much. So what they did was they used procedural generation.

AJ GENTILE: Which is what?

RIZWAN VIRK: Which is basically code that runs and generates the scenery for you. As needed. So when you get to the planet, it would generate like the trees, the forests, the landscapes, the mountains, using a whole bunch of algorithms. And there’s a whole bunch of algorithms, there’s algorithms that can simulate water. There’s fractal algorithms. If you’ve ever looked at how you can have trees being generated, in fact, in my second simulation book, The Simulated Multiverse, there’s a whole chapter on these types of algorithms and how it looks like nature is algorithmic. Nature is algorithmic in nature, no pun intended.

AJ GENTILE: Because you look at the seashells and things. Right, the Fibonacci numbers and things.

RIZWAN VIRK: Fibonacci numbers, but you see all these similar sequences of things or algorithmic generation or fractals, right? Which are, fractals are when you have self-similarity at different levels. No matter where you are, how close or far away, it looks the same. It’s very similar, right? Because it uses a similar algorithm, right? There might be some randomness in the algorithm.

And fractals came from a guy, I think, what was his name, Mandelbrot. It was a guy in the ’70s who said, how long is a coastline? So if you were to measure a coastline, how long would it be? Like, say, in England? Well, it depends on the scale, because if you’re measuring it from satellite, you’ll see kind of like almost like a straight line. But if you go into the bays and nooks and crannies, it’ll be longer because now you’re going like this. Well, if you got really small, you would start to see even within one rock, you would see all of these little variations, right? And so it depends on what scale you’re at, but there’s some self-similarity at larger scales.

And so all of these algorithms— so that’s what this game was known for. It’s still out there now, but it was considered a boring game when it first came out, but now they’ve added— supposedly, I haven’t played it in a long time.

AJ GENTILE: Me neither.

RIZWAN VIRK: But supposedly it’s gotten better. But it was known for this large number of worlds, and almost infinite, generated on demand. Like, that’s the key phrase that we need there. And so why 18 quintillion? Well, it’s because it’s 2 to the power of 64. Right, that’s why it’s that very specific number.

AJ GENTILE: So this is 64 bits.

The Chess Story and Exponential Growth

RIZWAN VIRK: You had 64 bits. Kept track of, you know, how many worlds do you want to keep track of? Now, there’s no reason that’s the limit. I mean, they could also have used 128 bits. But it was very convenient to use like 64 bits because that’s a commonly used size of what’s called a word, which is like multiple bytes within coding. And so you see this very interesting number. It’s also, by the way, a big number related to the chess story from ancient India.

AJ GENTILE: Yes, it is. Now you have to tell that story. It’s a great one.

RIZWAN VIRK: I’ll tell that story, and then later we’ll tie it to exponential problems and quantum computing. But for now, I’ll just tell the story because we’re talking about that number.

So there was a king in India who loved to play chess, and he beat everybody. And there was this wise man or sage, and he’s like, I want to play chess with you. And the sage goes, nah, I don’t really want to play. King goes, really? I’ll give you anything you want if you’ll just play chess with me. “Anything?” Anything. And the wise man goes, “Okay, if I win,” meaning if the king loses, “you’ll give me 1 grain of rice for the first square in the chessboard, and then you’ll give me 2 grains of rice for the second square, and then double it to 4, and double it to 8, double it to 16, for all the squares of the chessboard.”

The king will look, “Okay, that’s not a very big price to pay.” It’s only 64 squares. Yeah, and I told you I’d give you anything. This is all you want? Well, of course, the wise man wins the game of chess. And then the king realizes when you go 2 to the power of 64, you double it 64 times, it was more grains of rice than would fit in all of India. That’s right. And that’s an example of a big exponential problem. And how it grows.

And so what we do as computer scientists is we optimize and figure out how much of that do we really need at any given time, and we cache it. So that, I think, ties together this idea of how video games only render that which is observed.

AJ GENTILE: So tell us about caching and lazy loading as well.

The Observer Effect and Quantum Indeterminacy

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, should we draw the analogy first to the quantum physics?

AJ GENTILE: However you want to do it.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so in quantum physics, there’s this thing called the observer effect, which I think everybody has heard of, and it’s based on the double slit experiment where the light goes through two slits. And if it’s a particle— if a particle is solid, you can really only go through one of those slits. You can’t go through both. But if it acts as a wave, it basically spreads out with this weird interference pattern. It’s like it’s going through both.

And what quantum physics is telling us is that it’s not until it’s observed or measured that the particle decides which slit it’s going to go through, or even which slit it just went through. Now that’s a weird kind of thing, because if it’s a particle, it could only have gone through one. But quantum mechanics has a thing called superposition. And the superposition says it’s in multiple states.

AJ GENTILE: Or in all states.

RIZWAN VIRK: In all states. At the same time. It’s a superset of all the possible positions, if you will. That’s where the term comes from. It’s also used a lot in quantum computing, which we can talk about later if we have time. But it’s in a state of superposition, and then when it gets observed, it gets rendered. Now this is usually where I bring up Schrödinger’s cat.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, we can if you want to. People have heard it. People have heard it, and Schrödinger was trolling because he didn’t like this. Yes. But we can use it.

RIZWAN VIRK: Schrödinger thought it was bizarre, right, and didn’t like it. And he said, look, it’s ridiculous to say that a cat is in superposition. It’s either alive or dead. We won’t get into details. But it’s in the superposition until you open the box. Now common sense says, no, no, no, hold on, it’s either alive or dead already. We just haven’t looked in the box, so we don’t know if it’s alive or dead. But no, that’s not what quantum indeterminacy is actually saying, right? It’s saying it’s in both of those states.

AJ GENTILE: That’s why he was wrong, right?

RIZWAN VIRK: He was wrong. Yeah, he ended up being wrong. And there’s an aside to this if we get around to talking about multiple timelines with Schrödinger that we’ll get—

AJ GENTILE: We have to.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. But I looked at that as a guy doing video games and a guy who’s been optimizing code all my life, and I realized, oh, the rule of thumb there is only render that which is observed. Until then, it stays as a set of information and a set of probabilities. And I thought, that’s just like how we build video games. We render the part of the world that gets observed.

Now in the old Newtonian model, the world just exists. All the particles are there and we move through it. It’s kind of like King’s Quest where you can move the guy around, but all the pixels are there. But in quantum mechanics, it’s like the pixels are generated dynamically. And so that was a big insight for me that, oh, quantum indeterminacy is so bizarre. Why would it possibly exist? And I said, well, because it’s an optimization technique. That’s right. If you have limited resources, you only need to render that which is observed.

Now that brings up all kinds of questions about what happens if there’s multiple observers, are different people seeing different things? But there’s also something called caching in computer science. And what we do is, if I have just been to this world and it gets generated, or this room, let’s say, and then you bring your avatar into the room, well, your computer is going to render it faster because the data is already there. But more than that, the next room is cached, and so is the next room over there.

AJ GENTILE: Because there’s a probability that you might go into one of these places, so you can sort of preload the algorithm.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yes, it’s preloading. Right, right.

AJ GENTILE: It’s like, oh, he didn’t go in there, that’s— so that’s fine, we have this one preloaded, so render that.

Quantum Mechanics, Game Engines, and the Nature of Reality

RIZWAN VIRK: Right, exactly. So you render it quickly. So it’s all about performance because there are operations which are slower or more expensive and operations which are quick. And in a multiplayer game, the most expensive operation is to go from your computer to the server on the internet. That’s the slowest part of the whole process, right? And then bring information back. Now imagine there’s a million players all doing this. Well, you have to kind of optimize in such a way that assets can be loaded.

It was funny, a few years ago, these filmmakers called me up. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to them and they said, “Hey, we’re trying to develop this show for Netflix and it’s called—” these guys are living in a little small town and they look up and they see this dialog box that says “sky not found,” which is like an asset. What happens in video games when it can’t find your asset. But so caching is basically a way to save what’s needed. And so in this model of using the observer effect like a video game, as long as there’s at least one observer, then you still have that rendering there.

AJ GENTILE: And then you also have multiple levels of what game designers would call LODs, just in case, right? Yes, right. So that LOD is a level of detail. So we’ll show it to you, but just as much as you need to, right?

RIZWAN VIRK: Especially like we’re talking about things right off in the distance, right? And then you can go in and the assets can become higher and higher resolution. Kind of like, I don’t know if people remember this, but when JPEGs used to load on old web browsers. You know, that was an expensive operation. Today we think, “Oh, it’s no big deal, I’m going to download a whole video like on wireless.” But back then it was a big deal. So the text would load first and then slowly it would fill in the actual images over time. And that’s an optimization technique.

AJ GENTILE: And now that’s called lazy loading online.

RIZWAN VIRK: And so lazy loading is a good way to think about it. And in fact, there’s an underlying concept called lazy evaluation, which goes down to the code level. So it basically says, don’t execute any code unless you absolutely need to.

AJ GENTILE: So what is it holding on to?

RIZWAN VIRK: So what it does is it looks for references. So it’s actually a timing issue more than— Right. So before we’re talking about optimizing the number of bits you send, we’re talking about optimizing your GPU, your graphics processing unit for drawing things. But this is optimizing the CPU. And what it says is if you had like a really long equation, x equals 1 plus 2 to the power of this, plus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you never use that variable x later in the program, it’s not needed. Now maybe it’s used a couple days later, the program’s running and now it needs x. It says, “Okay, I’m going to go back and calculate that big long equation because that’s an expensive operation.” And so lazy evaluation’s actually built into a lot of programming languages and compilers and virtual machines like Java, et cetera, which says basically only run the code that you really need to run.

It’s like having comments, like when you have comments in code. Coding is becoming a lost skill now because of AI, but the comments aren’t part of the actual program. They’re not really needed. So when it gets compiled, it doesn’t compile the comments, it just gets rid of them, and it’s just compiling the code parts.

Now, when you’re running it, I remember I was back at MIT and we did a— I had a professor who was studying parallel processing at the time. I think later he became CTO of Sun Microsystems and a bunch of other things as well. But he was trying to come up with a way when you have multiple processors, and like with AI today, GPUs are the constraining factor. You see video games in most technology advances. AI uses GPUs. Cryptocurrency mining uses GPUs. And GPUs were developed for graphics and video games.

Game Engines, Quantum Mechanics, and the Copenhagen Interpretation

AJ GENTILE: Is this why most games are built on engines? Because a lot of that math has already been handled.

RIZWAN VIRK: Engines make it much easier to build a game because what would happen is in the old days everyone had to write everything from scratch, including the physics engine. The loading engine, like the things we just talked about. You’d have to write how do you take a 3D model and put the rendering or the textures, which is like putting the clothes and the skin on top of the person.

AJ GENTILE: Particle systems.

RIZWAN VIRK: Particle systems. All that stuff has been built over many years. And in the old days, every team had to write all that themselves, which would just take way too long. Now there’s Unreal and there’s Unity. Unity became big partly because of the mobile game industry, because it was a way of doing a game on iOS and on Android. Once write the code, because before that people used to write their games directly in C or Objective-C or Java for the other one. But so the whole engine makes it easier to build new worlds on top of it. And then some companies like Unreal, they made their engine available to other people as a product so they can build games on. I think it was the Unreal Tournament initially. Is what it was built as, right? And then it became a pretty solid engine. It’s probably one of the best ones out there right now.

AJ GENTILE: My favorite. Oh yeah, you guys use it here, right?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yep. And so where were we going with this? The parallels between quantum mechanics and the way that we write code. Because the big question is not just does this happen, because I think quantum mechanics has been validated. This stuff happens. We don’t know why it happens and we don’t know how to think about it or interpret it.

Now there’s another— so the first most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation, right, which basically says that all these probabilities exist and then the probability wave collapses down when an observation or a measurement has been made, right?

AJ GENTILE: That’s the wave function collapse, the wave function collapse.

RIZWAN VIRK: And that to me reminded me of what I’ve just been talking about, which is the optimization and the lazy evaluation and the caching. And the rendering and the first-person point of view.

AJ GENTILE: You didn’t need to know the position yet, right?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, we didn’t really need to know. No, it was there. What’s going on, right? And you can calculate it. You can calculate what might have happened before then as well. This will get more interesting if we talk about multiple timelines, so I’ll come back to that.

And so the other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with physicists is— now, they didn’t like this idea that you needed an observer. No, they didn’t. Especially a conscious observer. And so they’re like, “Okay, can we find an alternative?” So one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler.

AJ GENTILE: Mine too. Yeah, he was a great— Delayed choice, yes.

John Wheeler, Hugh Everett, and the Many Worlds Interpretation

RIZWAN VIRK: Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, but he was also the supervisor, PhD supervisor for Richard Feynman, who was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Caltech. Many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was it the Challenger or Columbia? Challenger, in 1986, when he took the little O-rings and put them in ice water and said, “Look at what happens to these.” Yeah, and this was much later in his career. He also wrote the paper, this is an interesting story here, about how quantum computers came about, but we’ll come to that later if we have time.

And so Wheeler was the supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett, who was looking for an alternative. And he basically said that all these wave functions get separated, and that would kind of mean that there’s multiple worlds where each of these things happened. So that became known as the multiverse, or the many worlds interpretation, right, is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn’t like it. No, no. And Bohr, Niels Bohr, who was the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn’t like it either. And so Wheeler said, “Take out this stuff about there being multiple physical worlds, just stick to the math.” And so Hugh Everett needed a job, and he’s like, “Okay, fine, I’m just going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry.” But that became the basis for a lot of great science fiction today.

AJ GENTILE: Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn’t like— I know that they didn’t really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it. Why didn’t they like many-worlds interpretation? Because you can still have your block universe theory just in a different universe.

RIZWAN VIRK: I think Einstein just didn’t want to go there for the implications, because he had his— “God does not play dice with the universe.” That’s right, that’s true. And that became— it wasn’t so much that he didn’t like, it wasn’t that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation.

AJ GENTILE: He tried to disprove it, he couldn’t.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, he couldn’t, and then he didn’t want to get into the interpretation element of it. And then Bohr didn’t like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it’s called the Copenhagen interpretation because Bohr, Niels Bohr, was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him.

AJ GENTILE: And a bit of ego.

RIZWAN VIRK: And a bit of ego. Of course, yeah. That happens a lot in science.

The Problem with Wave Function Collapse and the Video Game Mechanism

And so that’s the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics. Where do you land? So this is what’s interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, “Okay, what are the problems?” The first one, they don’t like that they need a conscious observer. There’s no way to define what this collapse is. That’s the real mathematical problem is it goes from all these possibilities to this one and nobody really knows how it works. It’s like magic.

There’s this old cartoon comic where it’s got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations, step 1, and then over here, step 2, and then step 3’s got the answer. And his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, “Can you tell me more about step 2?” And step 2 says, “Then a miracle occurs.” That’s what happens, right?

But if it’s a video game, well, then we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they’re seeing. And so that’s where it ties to the video game.

Now the big problem— I mean, there’s great superhero movies. You’ve probably seen the Spider-Man meme where you’ve got like the three Spider-Mans: Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who’s the third one?

AJ GENTILE: Tobey. Tobey Maguire.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, they’re all pointing at each other. Well, they’re coming from a different branch of the multiverse, right? That’s what we’re told. That’s how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a science point of view is they say it’s not parsimonious. And what that means is it requires too much— you’re creating a new world, okay? Not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point, at each choice.

AJ GENTILE: Which would be at the Planck scale.

RIZWAN VIRK: At the Planck scale and maybe even at the Planck time.

AJ GENTILE: At the Planck time.

The Planck Scale, Pixels, and a Simulated Universe

RIZWAN VIRK: Which, by the way, the Planck scale is another reason why I think physics is showing us that we have pixels in the universe. It’s the smallest measurable distance.

AJ GENTILE: And Planck time sounds like frame rate.

RIZWAN VIRK: Exactly, a clock speed or frame rate. Which is— and now we do know that the universe is probably quantized. Scientists don’t agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought a MacBook that’s like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don’t know what that means. What it means is hertz is instructions per second or cycles per second. And so you can only do so many, and you can’t really do anything in between that minimum time, right? And that’s what the Planck time is, is the amount of time it takes the speed of light to get through the Planck length, basically.

And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those, and it’s more likely we live in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program.

AJ GENTILE: That’s a lot of universes.

The Simulation, Multiverse, and Mandela Effect

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s a lot of universes. So it’s not parsimonious, and you have to create all these universes. But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami. He wrote, what did he write? It was The Conscious Universe. I forget his book, but he wrote a few really— he’s a physicist who writes about consciousness as well.

I was listening to one of his talks, and somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don’t think about it until later. He said, “Look, those probabilities aren’t really probabilities in the sense that we think of them.” He goes, “It’s what would happen if you did it again, if you kept doing it a bunch of times, right? Then it’s a probability.”

So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don’t know if it was Pascal, it was one of these French mathematicians that began with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice and he asked him, hey, can you quantify how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea. He said, if you have one die, a single die, a single dice, a die has 6 possibilities. He called them 6 possible futures. He literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it’s evenly weighted— you know, we’re in Vegas, so it’s a gambling analogy— if it’s properly weighted, is 1 out of 6. But you can’t really have a probability until you’ve tried something multiple times. You could try the coin flip once, but you’re not going to get real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times, right?

And so, a lot of times you need to get up to a certain number, right? And then it got me thinking, well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run it as many times as you wanted. You also didn’t have to infinitely run every single possibility. Why? Because you would basically, if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding— this is the problem with it being infinite— you could prune large parts of the tree.

Like, the universe has something called fine-tuning, which is if a certain number of constants, like the gravitational constant or these other constants, were slightly off by like 1%, the planets would fly apart, right? The galaxies wouldn’t stay together. And there’s so many of these— those people can look them up. There’s at least 12, and there’s probably more than that. But it looks like the universe is fine-tuned. And well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times and then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don’t have life. So there’s no need to go down that tree.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

RIZWAN VIRK: Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you’re not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You’re like, that’s not interesting to the simulation. So let’s just focus on this subset of possibilities.

AJ GENTILE: Right. So you tune Avogadro’s number until it’s just about right. Yeah. Or mole’s constant or the speed of light. Yeah. It’s like, this is what works.

RIZWAN VIRK: Right. Throw that stuff out. Right, exactly. And you tune that stuff. And that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book because I have the second edition. And also I interviewed Philip K. Dick’s wife, Tessa Dick.

AJ GENTILE: Wow. What was that like?

Philip K. Dick, The Matrix, and Alternate Timelines

RIZWAN VIRK: It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone. But she had so many stories. And she’s still around. And she would tell me these stories. I interviewed her because the Wachowskis, who made The Matrix, were inspired by Philip K. Dick. In fact, she told me— I asked her, what would Philip think of The Matrix? And she said, well, first he would like it. The first reaction would be, this is awesome, because it’s very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he’d call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money. For using his ideas.

AJ GENTILE: I think their déjà vu explanation came from his talk at METS in ’77. Yeah.

RIZWAN VIRK: And so she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk, and there’s a written version. Everyone should. It’s amazing. And there’s a famous line from it where he says, “We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, some alteration occurs in our reality.”

And so when I— originally I was just interested in the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer-programmed reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone’s like, “What?” I love it.

AJ GENTILE: They think they’re going to see a sci-fi author talk and they’re getting this philosophical— it’s so important, that talk.

RIZWAN VIRK: It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who’s like, “Huh?” Turns out her name is Joan Simpson. She was his friend. She went with him to the conference and even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, the rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay. So he must have added it in his notes while he was flying over there.

But if you read the rest of the speech, the next line is: we would have a sense of reliving the same moments, of déjà vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past a variable was changed and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate path.

And his most famous book while he was alive was actually The Man in the High Castle. It won all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don’t know, some of you may have seen the Amazon series, which is a really good series, by the way. I talked to his wife. She said he would have loved that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War II, and they end up splitting America between them, and you have kind of a police state on both sides.

And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened, where the Axis powers won the war. And now we’re on a different timeline. And he said at some point all the memories came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book too, by the way. Was he? That’s what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn’t want to go there because there were such bleak memories in that time.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, he said he saw it. He said this happened, but somewhere the variable was changed. Who changed it? Exactly.

RIZWAN VIRK: He called it the programmer and counterprogrammer. He used this idea of orthogonal time, which he compared to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit, you can try on the other suit.

But what he also said— so Tessa encouraged me to read his speech, and I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation and changing variables each time. He also said we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate timeline. And of course, back then, it was hard to do that, but now we have this thing called the Mandela Effect. And whether you believe in the Mandela Effect or not, it’s a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible histories.

The Mandela Effect

AJ GENTILE: Well, let’s talk about that, because people love it. The Mandela Effect never worked on me until— there is one that got me. Otherwise, the Berenstain Bears, all that, Froot Loops, the— well, you tell the story. What’s the Mandela Effect?

RIZWAN VIRK: So the Mandela Effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past. And it’s named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the ’80s. And of course he didn’t in our timeline. He actually was released from prison, he became President of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and died, I think, in like 2013 or something.

AJ GENTILE: They remember his funeral on TV. Yeah, they remember details.

RIZWAN VIRK: Winnie, his wife, taking over the ANC. They remember all of these. And then Fiona Broome was the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Comic-Con convention in Atlanta. It was called like Dragon Con, and it was a Star Trek panel, and the panelists were actors from the original Star Trek series. If you know your Trekkies, they know their stuff.

AJ GENTILE: They know their stuff.

RIZWAN VIRK: They know their episodes. And people in the audience were like, “Don’t you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this, Mr. Spock did that, and maybe Mr. Sulu did that?” They’re like, “No, we never shot such an episode.” And multiple people in the audience remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore it. She used to find all these different Mandela effects.

Now, someone came to me— and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way. Same. If you asked me what it was, I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. But a friend of mine from MIT, who typically— a lot of my MIT friends don’t get into this stuff, they’re very kind of left-brained about these things— he said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way in which this could actually happen.

And so, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it, and him talking about it, I couldn’t get this out of my mind that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines, some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines.

And so I categorize these into different categories. Things like letter changes is one. Then there’s things like movies is another category. The events—

AJ GENTILE: The Moonraker one is the one that got me. Oh yeah, so yeah, the Moonraker one— that she doesn’t have braces, but I remember the braces, right?

RIZWAN VIRK: It was Jaws who had the steel teeth, right? He meets— was her name Dolly?

AJ GENTILE: Dolly meets Dolly.

RIZWAN VIRK: And I remember that too. You remember the braces? I remember the braces too. I mean, that was the whole point. That’s what got me. Yeah. And so there’s a few like that that really got me. And most people know the Berenstain Bears one.

And what I like to say is if someone has proximity or significance to an event and they remember it differently, that’s more interesting to me than just some random guy remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online— I’m forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the Simulated Multiverse book— where she was a journalism student and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela, and he was too sick to be interviewed. So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated, probably back in the ’80s now, and was working for NPR. So again, she was in the news industry, and she heard that Nelson Mandela had died.

And now you’re not going to get that wrong if you went there to meet the guy. No, you’re not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Stephen Vico, which is the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. If there’s more significance, and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance.

One of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. You remember that? Of course. The tank boy? Yep. The tank went— What do you remember?

AJ GENTILE: I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him.

The Mandela Effect and Quantum Reality

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s how I remember it as well. I started asking people about this, and there’s always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy, and they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw on the news. They were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it’s like 10 to 20% in a group.

I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Hynick and a few other people were on it with me. Two of the people were like, “What? I absolutely remember him being run over.” So I asked at a recent conference, I always do, I said, “Does anyone remember Tank Boy being run over?” Nobody raised their hand, so I thought, “Okay, this audience doesn’t have it.”

This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards, and she said she lived in Beijing at the time, and she remembers him being run over there, but she didn’t raise her hand and didn’t want to say it. That was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one.

Similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, “Why are the Bernstein bears, why are they Jewish bears?” to their parents. Now, they’re not going to get that wrong. The rest of us might get it wrong. And then there’s the Bible verses. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that?

AJ GENTILE: Yes, I know the verse.

RIZWAN VIRK: So there’s a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, that’s not the verse.

RIZWAN VIRK: It’s not the verse, but that’s how a lot of people remember that.

AJ GENTILE: The lion lays with the kid, the leopard lays with the kid.

RIZWAN VIRK: The wolf lays with the kid.

AJ GENTILE: The wolf with the lion, the leopard with the kid. Yeah. So that’s a Mandela effect?

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s a Mandela effect because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even people with wall calendars that show a lion and a lamb and say Isaiah 111. That’s not it. And again, it’s one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture, right? Because they remember— and I thought, okay, well, maybe they’re looking at two different translations of the Bible, one that happened to translate it differently. But people are telling me, no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with the lamb, and the physical object has changed.

So recently I met someone who’s actually another blogger and podcaster named Alexis Brooks, and she said she went to her Catholic priest and she said, “Do you remember the lion, the verse with the lion?” He goes, “Yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb.” And she’s like, “Okay, now go look it up.” And he looked it up and he’s like, “What?” So you have a Catholic priest, again, somebody who’s closer to it.

The Thinker and Other Mandela Effects

RIZWAN VIRK: There’s another interesting scriptural element which we’ll come to in a second, but the other one that really got me was The Thinker. The statue? Yeah, the statue. So if you look at it today, and there’s a cast of it at Stanford, so I was happening to be in Silicon Valley, so I went to look at it. Where’s his hand? Do you remember where his hand was?

AJ GENTILE: On his chin.

RIZWAN VIRK: On his chin. And was it clenched or was it kind of like this?

AJ GENTILE: I don’t remember that. I thought it was kind of fisty. Yeah.

RIZWAN VIRK: If you look at it, it’s kind of not really clenched too hard. But there are all these people who took pictures standing next to the Thinker like this with their hand on their forehead. That’s weird. And there are people who remember it that way. But if you look at the pictures, it’s not there. And so again, I thought, okay, maybe they’re pranking us. What’s going on? Why are these random people putting these pictures? Because usually when you take a picture next to a statue and you get the pose, you’re trying to do the actual pose.

And then turns out there’s a picture, an actual picture of George Bernard Shaw. So G.B. Shaw was a well-known guy in England. He also modeled for Rodin and for other people. They were doing the London release of The Thinker, and they were unveiling it in London. I forget what year, like 1900-something, 1901, maybe it was 1910. They took a picture of him, this one photographer, and it says, the title of the picture, you can find it online, is “G.B. Shaw in the pose of The Thinker.” And guess where his hand is? It’s up on his forehead. Wow. And that picture is still there in museums, and people can find it online.

And so is it possible that some variables are being changed in a way? And so I began to think, well, which one’s got you? So that one got me, The Thinker. Not because I didn’t remember it. I mean, I remembered it. I wasn’t that close to it, so I didn’t think too much about it. But seeing the physical evidence of this picture really got me. That’s one that got me.

There— the Jaws one was another one that I remember. Jiffy peanut butter wasn’t that big of a deal to me. There’s a famous one about in Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke, “I am your father.” Again, I think that could be just faulty memory. Collective faulty memory. There’s so many now that I’ve come across. And Chick-fil-A is another one that doesn’t have a K in the Chick-fil-A.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right. That’s right. That would probably get me. And I read an interesting theory about Jaws that made me feel a little better is sometimes when you’re remembering, especially if it’s a long time ago, your brain fills in what would be most logical because that joke works better if she has braces, right? Yeah. So that made me feel better. But that was one that blew my mind because I was like, I remember all this stuff perfectly. No, I don’t.

The Quran, the Jinn, and Simulation Theory

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many of these. So I was looking around at explanations. I began to wonder, the scripture stuff really got me too. Not because I remembered the scripture. I mean, I remembered the lion will lay with the lamb too, but I’m not that religious. I began to wonder if there’s other scriptures that have changed.

And in Islam, the Quran, right? Islam is the second biggest religion after Christianity. The Quran is memorized word for word, and you can think of the reason why, and the exoteric or normal reason why is probably just not a lot of people could read back then, so they literally recited it word for word. And there’s even a designation of a guy who knows all of that.

I looked around to say, “Hey, has anyone claimed that this has changed at all?” There’s one Sufi Imam, and again, the exoteric reason is because not everybody has a physical book. The esoteric reason he gave, he said that there are beings that are allowed to go back in time and change objects. Oh. But they are not allowed to change your memory.

AJ GENTILE: I know these beings. Tell us about these beings.

RIZWAN VIRK: These are called the jinn. The jinn, yes. In Middle Eastern lore. And you go to the Middle East and people take these beings very seriously. Oh, yeah. I mean, people get possessed by these beings. I was born in Pakistan. It was kind of like the boogeyman. Like, there’s a jinn over there. Don’t pee on that tree.

But then it turns out they’re actual people who pour scalding— Jacques Vallée told me a story of a guy in Saudi Arabia, or a kid who poured scalding water, and then he got possessed. And supposedly there was a jinn, and a priest had to come in and do kind of like an exorcism, but he had to talk the jinn out of it, saying, “He’s just a young kid. He didn’t know what he was doing.” And the jinn was like, “Okay,” and then released him. Wow. There’s so many interesting stories. That’s a huge different rabbit hole to go down. But I got interested—

AJ GENTILE: It’s so in tune, I think, though.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it’s so in tune. And I got interested in it because it became a way to think about simulation theory as if you have run this more than once, you could have changed things along the way. Now, it’s very easy for us to think of multiple possible futures, like, okay, I go to New York, I go to London, I go to live in LA. Those are three different possible futures. But we’re not used to thinking of multiple possible paths. I mean, that sounds weird to say there could be more than one past. Well, it turns out there’s something called the delayed choice experiment.

AJ GENTILE: I was hoping this was going to come back to John Wheeler.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so we’re going to come back to John Wheeler. Actually, can we take a quick break?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, take a quick break and we’ll talk about how the past is not really the past. Yeah, be right back. Take some photons, shoot them at two slits, you get two lines. Observe it, you get an interference pattern. Got it. John Wheeler said, wait a second, what happens next?

The Delayed Choice Experiment and the Nature of the Past

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so he came up with what’s called the delayed choice double slit experiment. And what it’s telling us is that time is not what we think it is. That the present and the past and the future are different from the way we think about it. I mean, we think of the past as being linear. We know what happened, right? It’s just one timeline. This is what’s happened along the way. And the delayed choice experiment opened up an opportunity that the past could also be in superposition.

Now, the best way to understand this actually is not so much the slits, but it’s what Wheeler called the cosmic delayed choice experiment. And he said suppose there’s something like a quasar which puts out a lot of light and it’s really far away from us, like a billion light years. And so that would be outside the galaxy, beyond the Andromeda Galaxy. And how long would it take for the light to reach Earth? Let’s say Earth is here. It’s going to take a billion years, right?

But suppose right in the middle there’s a big black hole or some other big gravitational object, and the light has to make a decision about whether to go to the left or to the right. Ah, okay. And that’s kind of like two slits. Yeah. And we can have telescopes here on Earth that will measure through what’s called polarization of light whether it went this way or that way, right? So the measurement happens now, but it has to go one way or the other. Like, let’s say it’s halfway. So how long ago would the decision have to have been made? It would have been half a billion years ago, right? So we’re back in the age of the dinosaurs now at this point, right? Or even before. Yeah, before the dinosaurs.

It’s kind of like saying, if you’re going to go to San Francisco from New York, are you going to go up towards Chicago or are you going to go down through Tennessee, Arkansas? You have to make that decision well before you get to San Francisco. Now what the delayed choice experiment is telling us is that it’s when the measurement of the light is done today on Earth that the decision gets made on whether the light went to the left or to the right of that black hole. That’s weird because now we’re saying that the past isn’t fixed, that the past is in superposition, and it’s only when the measurement is done here— it’s like an observer effect, but for time, not just for space.

AJ GENTILE: Those photons went back in time to make the decision about today’s observation.

RIZWAN VIRK: Well, that’s one interpretation of it.

AJ GENTILE: Okay.

The Mandela Effect and Multiple Histories

RIZWAN VIRK: The other interpretation is that both of those existed as possibilities, and they didn’t get fixed until today. So again, did Germany or Japan win World War II? Did the Allies win World War II? What if that decision isn’t made until somebody observes the result, and then that result is cached now so that everybody is on that timeline for some period of time?

This to me was an interesting revelation because it reveals that there could be a simulated multiverse of multiple timelines. Because what if what we’re really thinking about is we ran the simulation one way and we also ran it the other way, and we are basically pulling the past in on demand? Now you’ll appreciate this because not only do we optimize resources with lazy evaluation, but we also say, don’t run something until it’s needed.

And so in a computer game, let’s say like FarmVille or Minecraft — kids still play Minecraft today — they have crops that grow. And what happens is you log in and you see that the crops have grown since you logged in yesterday or 4 hours ago or whatever the case is. Now, what happens during the time that you’re not logged in? The answer is nothing.

AJ GENTILE: Nothing.

RIZWAN VIRK: Because it would take too many resources to sit there and calculate every single growth of every single blade of grass or of wheat for that time. What the computer does is, when you log in, it basically renders what might have happened over the last X period of time. Let’s say 24 hours. And it uses a database of probabilities. What’s the probability that your crops were destroyed by locusts? What’s the probability that your neighbor came in and stole some of your crops, or that the fox got in and ruined a few crops? And you see it as, “This is what’s happened. Now my crops are all grown. I can now sell my crops.”

But what just happened there was that the past was generated on demand. So it’s not so much that you’re changing the past, because physicists don’t like that. Physicists don’t like when you say retrocausation. It’s that you are filling in the past based upon the observations as it’s made, and there could have been multiple possible versions of that.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, I like this.

RIZWAN VIRK: So that’s a different way to think about time. Now, is it possible that some of us are remembering one version of the Mandela effect? We talked about ones that got you, like the Jaws one. There’s another famous one about Sinbad being in a movie.

AJ GENTILE: Oh yeah, that’s right. Shazam!

RIZWAN VIRK: And it turns out it was Shaq and Kazam. But so many people would swear they had a VHS tape, and the story was like this, and the kids are asking the genie about his dad. Sinbad actually recorded in like 2017 a little clip from this movie that never existed, as kind of a joke to say, “Okay, here’s the scene you guys all saw but never existed.” But people remembered it. So many different versions and Mandela effects. Gino has one for you that I can’t reveal to you. He’s going to tell you later.

But is it possible that we are all remembering a different version? Now, I thought, okay, that’s the delayed choice experiment. Wheeler proposed it as a thought experiment. He couldn’t do it at the time. It required a pretty complex setup. And so is it just a thought experiment? Well, it turns out no. People have actually run this experiment.

The Delayed Choice Experiment

RIZWAN VIRK: They obviously haven’t run it for the cosmic version, but what they’ve done is they’ve gone through two slits and they’ve sent a particle up to a satellite 1,000 miles away. And so the question is, when they measure the particle — or say the light, using our example — from the satellite, it was 1,000 kilometers from the slits themselves. And the question is, is the decision made about which slit to go through here, when it first starts out in the slits, or is it made after the light travels 1,000 miles?

And 1,000 miles is not that far in the scope of things, but when you’re talking about nanoseconds, you can measure it.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, you can measure it.

RIZWAN VIRK: It’s very measurable by today’s instruments, is the point. And they did this experiment, and they found, in fact, that it was in superposition until it was measured by the satellite.

Okay, so then I said, well, how come more physicists don’t talk about this? And so I went back and I found an obscure speech by our favorite quantum founder, Schrödinger. This was an obscure speech he made in the 1940s. I think it was at Caltech, and nobody talks about this for some reason. People talk about the multiverse, which was late ’50s, early ’60s. People talk about the Copenhagen interpretation. He said that in effect, once the observation was made, we would not just be deciding the state, the superposition, but we would be choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories.

So literally, Schrödinger is telling us there are multiple simultaneous histories. And it’s like when you choose to look at the cat, you’re not just choosing whether it’s dead or alive. Sorry for bringing the cat back.

AJ GENTILE: That’s okay.

RIZWAN VIRK: But what did the cat do before it jumped in the box? Did it come from the living room or did it come from the dining room? Before that, was it in the backyard or was it in the front yard? It’s like you’re choosing this history, and that is the one that is now being part of our simulation, is what I would say.

AJ GENTILE: I’ve got to read that speech.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it’s very obscure.

The Simulated Multiverse and Dark Matter

RIZWAN VIRK: And I have a reference to it in The Simulated Multiverse. But I’ve never heard anyone else talk about it. I found it when I was looking around online for the earliest references to the multiverse. And again, we think of the multiverse as branching out this way.

There’s a series on Apple TV called Dark Matter. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

AJ GENTILE: I did. I did.

RIZWAN VIRK: It’s based on a book by Blake Crouch. And when I was researching the multiverse, I had read that book along with many others. Basically, this guy has multiple versions of his life. What happens is he gets kidnapped by somebody and he gets taken away and he wakes up in a whole other university than he was working at. He finds out who it was that kidnapped him. It was himself from another version of the multiverse who had made different choices. That guy, although he was almost like a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he didn’t have a family and kids.

AJ GENTILE: And so that guy is taking over his family.

RIZWAN VIRK: That is right. I will not tell the rest of the book, but that is pretty much described. Even if you just look at the series, you will know that is what it is about.

The multiverse, I think, brings up this idea that we could run multiple processes. Maybe they are running to try to see what the outcomes are. Maybe the outcomes that are less than ideal, just like I talked about with pruning, maybe we prune — we meaning whoever runs the simulation — these different things, because you never run a simulation just once, do you?

AJ GENTILE: No.

RIZWAN VIRK: Simulation of the weather, simulation of a virus, simulation of a financial model, or whether an asteroid is going to hit us. There’s something called the three-body problem. I’m sure you’ve heard of that.

AJ GENTILE: Yep.

RIZWAN VIRK: It’s when we have three bodies that are kind of circling each other. The question is, will they stay in a stable orbit, or will one day one of them fly off? And it turns out we don’t know the answer to that, because there’s no shortcut. You have to just keep running it to see.

Computational Irreducibility and the Game of Life

RIZWAN VIRK: And there’s a term that came from a physicist turned computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram called computational irreducibility. And Wolfram was a pioneer in many things. He wrote the Mathematica software, but he also was a pioneer in cellular automata, which, for those who don’t know, are like simple rule sets. It’s like you could have one row of squares, and the squares would light up or not depending on if the next square is lit up or not, and it’ll go dark following these rules. So these are very simple rules, a very deterministic version of reality.

And then there’s what’s called the Game of Life.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

RIZWAN VIRK: Which is a 2-dimensional grid. And if you watch it — nowadays we run it on computers, but when Conway came up with it, he literally had a grid sitting at the University of Cambridge, and his mathematical students would erase squares and fill in squares. But what would happen is you get these very complex arrangements. Every now and then you’d get a stable arrangement, which means you know it’s going to stay this way, or it flips back and forth. But they have what they call complex or chaotic results or processes, and those you don’t know what’s going to happen. This is kind of the basis of complexity theory.

AJ GENTILE: And the Game of Life is, just quickly, the rules are —

RIZWAN VIRK: If the next square is lit up and the one next to it is lit up, then you light up. And if maybe the one on top of it — I’m making up these rules, but these are the types of rules — and the one below it is lit up, then it’ll go dark. And so at each step, every square follows these rules. So it’s a very simple computer program.

Now, for complex and chaotic processes, you would think we could predict what’s going to happen, but it depends on the initial conditions. And this is what led to the whole science of chaos theory.

AJ GENTILE: Sure, Lorenz and all of that.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, Lorenz, and also people remember Jurassic Park, with Ian Malcolm, who’s a chaotician.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

RIZWAN VIRK: The point was with the butterfly effect, where they say the butterfly flaps its wings in, let’s say, Hong Kong, and the stock market crashes in London. There’s a whole chain of events that has to happen along the way. And so what computational irreducibility means is you don’t know what’s going to happen at step 1 million until step 999,999,999. And then you don’t know what’s going to happen at that step until you go to 998 and to 997 and all the way back. So you have to run the computer program.

And so even for a deterministic process that has no free will, you don’t know what’s going to happen for chaotic and complex processes. And I believe our simulation would qualify as a complex or chaotic process.

Philip K. Dick and the Altered Timelines

RIZWAN VIRK: And so Philip K. Dick believed that the timelines were altered. I asked his wife, “Well, did he tell you any other examples of this?” She said, “Yeah.” She goes, “They told him.” I said, “Well, what do you mean, ‘they’? Did you see them?” She goes, “It looked like he was talking to somebody, but it looked like a little blur to me or something.” Like the ‘they’ that runs this simulation?

AJ GENTILE: That runs the simulation. People outside.

RIZWAN VIRK: I said, “Did they look like gray aliens? Did they look like…” She said, “I could not really tell because only Phil could see them.” She could tell there was something weird that he was talking to, like an entity. And she said they told him that they prevented the assassination of JFK in Dallas, but then he was assassinated in Orlando. And then they prevented it in Orlando, and then he was assassinated somewhere else. And every time they changed it, it resulted in a worse outcome, like a nuclear war. It just ended up dying somewhere else.

AJ GENTILE: So he had to be assassinated.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, it’s kind of like if you’ve ever read that book by Stephen King, or the miniseries, 11/22/63, where he goes back in time and tries to prevent the assassination. I won’t give it away, but you have to read it to see how the past doesn’t necessarily want to be changed.

But for me, it’s very similar to what we would do if we were running a simulation. We would run it and we’d get to a point and say, “Okay, that’s enough on this timeline. Now let’s run the next one. Now let’s run the next one.” And so it provides — simulation theory provides — a bridge between the Copenhagen interpretation, the collapse of the probability wave because there’s an observer who’s playing the game, and the multiverse idea, because it doesn’t require an infinite multiverse. So it’s like, people often ask me, what’s the purpose of the simulation?

AJ GENTILE: Well, sure, who’s running it and why?

The Purpose of the Simulation

RIZWAN VIRK: Who’s running it and why? And in the new edition of “The Simulation Hypothesis,” I have, there’s about 100 new pages for those who read the old version. Oh, wow. It’s a pretty big update because all of the AI stuff happened. That’s right. All the brain-computer interface stuff happened. Is the technology side. And then I went deeper on the religion. But there’s about 20 pages of FAQs, which are the most commonly asked questions over since the 20th anniversary. I was— I ended up writing this on the 25th anniversary of The Matrix. And one of those questions were, what’s the purpose of the simulation? Who’s running the simulation?

And I say, look, let me ask you a couple questions back. One, why do we run simulations? And two, why do we play video games? And I believe the answer to those two questions gives us an answer for why we might be in a video game, in a video game type simulation, a personal purpose and a bigger societal purpose. And the reason we run simulations is to see what is the likely outcome under this set of variables, and then we would change the variables. And we also want to know what is the most favorable outcome, right? We’re like, hey, if we do this to the asteroid, what will happen? Will it miss Earth or will it hit the moon? And that’s just as bad, right, as it hitting Earth, because if the moon gets really smashed, then we’ll be screwed, or whatever the simulation is. So it’s to find the most likely outcome, the most favorable, and maybe to avoid the least favorable outcome. And you have to do that, you have to run it multiple times. But at the personal level, why do we play video games?

AJ GENTILE: Entertainment.

RIZWAN VIRK: Entertainment. We want to have fun, so we want to experience certain things. As much as I used to read Lord of the Rings when I was a teenager. Still, now I just watch the movies, but I used to read it every so often. I can’t jump on a dragon and shoot arrows at orcs in this particular reality, but I can do it inside a virtual world. And it’s a safe, a safe, quote unquote, way to do it and to have bad experiences too. I don’t believe the purpose of the simulation is Grand Theft Auto. Probably not. So anyway, that ties to some of these bigger questions around why would there be a simulated universe in the first place, and why would there be a multiverse.

Suffering in the Simulation

AJ GENTILE: But that’s projecting our sense of morality and intent onto some greater consciousness. So what do you think their endgame is? Are they looking out for us? Because there’s a lot of suffering.

RIZWAN VIRK: There’s a lot of suffering in this world. Yeah, I often say people say to me, “Well, I can’t be in a simulation because if I was, I would be a billionaire and I would be an actor.”

AJ GENTILE: My kid wouldn’t have got cancer.

RIZWAN VIRK: Holocaust, all these things. But it depends on the nature of the game and what we’re trying to experience. When we run a simulation, the better they get, we’re going to run very bad scenarios through the simulation. What happens if the virus spreads to everybody? Right, right. And we want it to be as realistic as possible eventually.

Now this gets back to the NPC versus RPG version. Yes. Which we started talking about. Yes. And I think it ties to this bigger question because in an NPC version, of course they’re going to have suffering on us because that’s why you build simulations and that’s why you run NPCs. Like, that doesn’t imply that we couldn’t be in a simulation just because there’s— now in the RPG version it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Because there people are choosing roles that might have bad experiences, bad quote unquote, or suffering, if you will.

Now, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons, and same, right back before— now it’s popular again because of Stranger Things, right? But back in the day when we used to play back in the ’80s, we do it with pencil and paper, and you would choose your character. Yeah, you would choose the race. You would say it’s an elf, dwarf, or human, let’s say. And then you would choose the general profession— thief, cleric, right, warrior, paladin.

AJ GENTILE: Paladin. Oh yeah, that’s right.

RIZWAN VIRK: And it’s not that the wizard couldn’t also be a good fighter. It’s just that that’s not their skill set. So you’re choosing almost like aptitudes, right, in a sense. And you’re choosing a storyline or a profession. And then you choose the campaign that you’re going to be on.

AJ GENTILE: But you also choose the morality, whether evil, good, chaotic evil, all that stuff.

RIZWAN VIRK: That’s right. Yeah, there’s all of this stuff that you’re choosing, and some of those roles are not good roles. No. Yeah, but that to me gets back to this idea whether you can— you can treat the simulation theory in one of two ways. And again, it’s an axis, just like NPC and RPG is an axis, because you can have both NPCs and RPGs in the same game. It doesn’t have to be 100% of one or 100% of the other. In fact, most games have both.

And I’m assuming the audience might be familiar with that term, but if they’re not, NPC stands for non-player character or non-playable character. And it actually comes from Dungeons & Dragons. Sure. The tabletop game. Yep. Because you had to interact with a bartender at the inn. You had to interact with the guy at the armory who’s selling you the +5 crossbow or one of these other items. And there’s going to be enemies there that you have to fight as well.

Are We NPCs or RPGs?

AJ GENTILE: Which are we? Were we the NPCs?

RIZWAN VIRK: Are we the RPGs? Well, that’s an interesting question. And I like to say that we may be both because there’s something in between, which is that we choose roles and we are playing the roles, but we also go into NPC mode for other people. In that we are playing certain roles. Like, there are people who may have had a role in your life that’s a relatively small role or a major role, but— and one woman came to me once and said, I think my husband is an NPC. Oh no. I said, that’s not a healthy way to think about it. No. In fact, it’s better to think about everyone as a source player with their own storyline, their own difficulties, and their own quests, but they’re going to play roles for us. Which could be they’re going into NPC mode because that is a role that we have agreed to, kind of like in a film.

Now I like to say that the other way to think about the simulation hypothesis is a metaphor for reality. So one way is it’s literally code running on a machine, and if we really get into it, I think it’s closer to a quantum computing device than a regular digital computing device. But the other way is to say the video game is a metaphor for this idea that we are coming into this fake or hoaxed reality and that we are playing a role and we have agreed to forget that we’re playing that role.

AJ GENTILE: So there’s a consciousness out there that we’re not even aware of that’s driving this reality?

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, so it could be that we’re a player. Wow. And so AJ, Riz, Joe, all these guys, we are the avatars of our consciousness, which is sitting outside of the simulation and playing the game. Now, in The Matrix, Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity existed outside of the Matrix. And of course, they look the same because if you’re going to hire Keanu Reeves in a movie, you want him to be the same character. But in a game, when you choose your avatar, you don’t have to look like that. It doesn’t have to be— you would choose the role that the character has. And outside, you could be something else entirely.

AJ GENTILE: This feels like reincarnation a little bit.

RIZWAN VIRK: It does. You respawn. You respawn as a new character, but you may have some of the skills that you learned. There’s evidence of that. Right. There’s the work of Ian Stevenson in particular with the children who have marks where they claim they were killed violently. For sure. There’s people who remember languages.

AJ GENTILE: Zita Glossy, Life Between Lives by Michael Newton talks about this.

Life Between Lives and Soul Agreements

RIZWAN VIRK: I spent a lot of time looking at Life Between Lives. When he talks about the in-between time, what he did was he hypnotized people. Also Dolores Cannon did the same thing. I was about to say Dolores Claiborne, but I think I mentioned Stephen King earlier. That’s probably why. There’s a period just before you go into the life which first there’s life selection. And they lay out, here’s the possible trajectories that you might take in your life. And here’s the major decision points you might make. Now you’re still free to choose to go this way, you go live in California or you live there. But if you go there, how are you going to meet this other character player who’s going to be your wife or your husband? And there are different challenges, and these are the quests or challenges that you’re going to deal with in this life.

AJ GENTILE: Quests, that’s very interesting.

RIZWAN VIRK: So if you think of games and how they work today, you have difficulty levels of quests. We have like a quest tree typically where you start off with simple quests and then you unlock the more difficult quests.

AJ GENTILE: That’s very interesting because Michael Newton talks about, and many researchers, about soul groups that always sort of reincarnate together. And that makes me think it’s just a bunch of nerds around a table saying, all right, let’s play again. Reset the table. I’m going to do this, you do that, and we’ll start rolling dice.

RIZWAN VIRK: Exactly. Or like, hey, we’re all going to meet on Tuesday, right, at this castle, right, to have a raid, right? And Michael Newton even talks about these little clues that you’re going to— I call them clues, you know, he called— I forget what he called them exactly, but they were like signs that, oh, when you meet this person, you’re going to recognize them because she’s going to be on a red bike, or she is going to have an earring, and you just cannot stop looking away from that earring. Have you ever had that experience? Of course. Déjà vu, or where does it come from? Is it because we made an agreement to meet that person at this point in time?

Ancient Traditions and the Simulation Metaphor

Now, that helps us to reframe the idea of suffering as well. Because another metaphor that was used in spiritual traditions— in the Hindu traditions, they talk about the Lila, the grand play of the gods, and Maya, which is an illusion. The world is an illusion. It’s a hoax. The Buddha talks about the world as a dream. Buddha literally means wake up, woken up, like I have awoken. A woman said, “What are you?” He said, “I am Buddh.” What did that mean? It meant he was awake, which meant the rest of us were asleep and dreaming. Shakespeare had his metaphor of the world as a stage.

Swami Yogananda, who was one of the first Hindu swamis to come and live in the US, he wrote Autobiography of a Yogi. Which was passed around during the hippie generation. And it was Steve Jobs’ favorite book. So much so that at the end, after his death, at his memorial service at Stanford, everyone got a little brown box and they opened it up and there was a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi in there. So it really introduced a lot of Westerners to these Eastern ideas.

Now, Yogananda had a challenge. It was the 1920s. This is a brown guy with long hair. He’s here and he’s trying to teach about yoga and karma and Maya. And he needed to translate it into newer technological metaphors. So he used the metaphor of the video game, of the, sorry, the film projector, because that was new technology. Right. So right back in 1920, films were relatively new to the world. And he said that we are like actors in this film and there is suffering happening to those characters, but the actors aren’t dying. But they choose the role with suffering. But there is a part of us that is outside, and you have to look away from the screen to see the light. It is just a projection of all of that onto the screen. He would use that metaphor.

I believe if he were alive today— and I actually wrote a book called “Wisdom of a Yogi” about his teachings. They asked me to write it. HarperCollins India emailed me one day and said, “Will you write this book about Yogananda?” Why do you want me to write the book about Yogananda for Indians, like young Indians, professionals?

AJ GENTILE: A Pakistani American with an Islamic background who grew up in Michigan, admit from Michigan.

The Vision at Encinitas

RIZWAN VIRK: I was like, are you serious? They’re like, yeah, we want you to write it. I was like, why is that? They said, because, you know, and I do reference Yogananda, I reference other mystics, like they’re in the subtitle, there’s quantum physics and Eastern mystics. But they said, because you use these technology analogies that younger people, meaning like young professionals will understand.

And I thought about it, and I thought, if Yogananda were alive today, he would say we’re like in a film, but we’re the actors and we’re the characters. We all have our scripts and these roles we’re supposed to play, but we can change those scripts. We have free will. We’re also the audience that’s sitting there watching us. Or you could say like a game where you’re sitting on tables deciding what to do. And what does that sound like? It sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

AJ GENTILE: It does. Yeah. Speaking of Yogananda, can you tell us about the experience you had in Encinitas?

RIZWAN VIRK: Oh yeah, so I was asked to write this book and I said, okay, I’ll write this book. And I started writing it, and this was during COVID and I was hitting a little bit of a writer’s block because it’s like this big responsibility. You’re writing about this well-known and loved spiritual figure.

For those who haven’t read Autobiography of a Yogi, it’s chock full of stories of saints that are like levitating in the air, bilocation, you know, this guy’s over here sitting and meditating and somebody sees them in the park. You’ve got the Perfume Saint who can make any perfume odor appear on his hand. You’ve got this mysterious guy in the mountains who supposedly has been living there for 800 years. You’ve got this fat 300-pound Swami that was 180 years old when he died, supposedly, who’s really well-known.

So you got all these stories, and I kind of like these stories. You’ve got a guy with a jinn who’s controlling what I confirm, what I think is a jinn. He’s a Muslim fakir who’s controlling an invisible entity that’s making this cup appear and disappear. I was like, “This is all great, but I got to be serious and write some serious lessons.”

I wanted to go visit the place where Yogananda wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, and that was in Encinitas. He has a hermitage there. And you read Autobiography of a Yogi and you think, wow, man, everything goes well for this guy. He just says, divine mother, give me this, and it all happens. And if you read about his life, you realize he had many, many challenges. And at one point, his entire organization fell apart. And he’s like, oh man, I just want to go to India and meditate in a cave. The message he got was, no, you need to stay in the West. You’re here in America for a reason. And so then he decided to go to Encinitas and write this book. It took him about 10 years or so to write the book.

And so I wanted to go to the Hermitage, which is beautiful if anyone’s ever been there. It’s like overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There’s a beach he used to walk. Now it’s literally called Swami’s Beach. That’s the formal name for it. And so I wanted to go there and check it out, but it was during COVID and it was closed to the public.

And so through another series of coincidences, I got to meet some of the people at SRF, told them I was writing this book, and they said, okay, for you, we’ll open it up. And so literally I went down there and they had some of the monks or monastics who live there, gave me a little private tour. We sat around and talked, and I got to go to Yogananda’s office where he wrote the book. Just by myself. And they’re like, here, just relax, do whatever you want. And I decided to meditate.

And then suddenly I got a vision of Yogananda. Now again, it’s one of these visions where you’re kind of present and you’re still sensing this vision.

AJ GENTILE: Is it like the man by the tree?

RIZWAN VIRK: No, it sort of looks similar to that, but this is a vision of Yogananda. Similar. And he’s sitting there with a stack of papers, which is how they wrote books back then. It was typed out. And he’s kind of looking at me, but with this mischievous grin. And I always thought of him as a very serious kind of guy, but if you read some of his, other people wrote about him, he was very mischievous. He would play practical jokes on his students and stuff. And he’s like, kind of glint in his eye.

And I was like, yeah, wow, that’s him writing Autobiography of a Yogi. I’m having a vision of it here. And he kind of smiled at me and he took those papers and he opened the French doors or whatever that go out to the ocean, and he tossed them all out there and they flew everywhere. And I was like, no, stop, what are you doing? Like, back then, once you lost the papers, that’s it, you don’t have to go rewrite the book. And he smiled and he laughed.

And I was like, okay, what is he trying to tell me? He goes, watch the papers. And each of them turned into these little white doves and they floated off to carry his words to different parts of the world. Somehow that totally got me out of my writer’s block because he was also saying, “Have fun with it. Don’t treat it so seriously. It’s our words that we leave behind, but say what you want to say and just have fun.”

I just started writing about all these yogis with these superpowers. The book just flowed from there and it went on and it did quite well. In India as well.

Free Will in a Simulation

AJ GENTILE: Let’s say everything that you’ve talked about is right and we really are in a simulation. What does that mean for us as regarding free will?

RIZWAN VIRK: Does anything matter? Yeah, well, sometimes people say if I’m in a simulation, nothing matters. And I say, well, that depends on the nature of the simulation. If we are here to learn lessons and have certain quests and achievements, then if you do not make the quest, what do you do? You are going to have to do it again. It is not like you just give up. You may have more difficult quests afterwards.

When we have difficult situations in our lives, whether it is financial, health-related, relationship-related, war, suffering, we can view it as a more difficult quest that is part of our storyline. Perhaps we can give meaning to these problems to say, “Okay, this is a terrible thing that’s happened, but if I view it as a higher difficulty quest…” In fact, maybe the people whose lives are easy are the early players and the ones who are having the more difficult lives, maybe they’re the advanced players.

I believe that. Along with, I mean, you’ve probably heard of the Telepathy Tapes? Of course. With Dr. Diane Hennessy. And she was working with these autistic kids who were telepathic. So she called me up a few years before the Telepathy Tapes came out, and she said, this is my work. I’ve been working with these autistic savant children, like Rain Man type, where they can calculate these numbers. And she goes, I don’t think they’re calculating. I think they’re looking it up in a database, and I think this is an information-based reality, and so one of the best explanations she could come up with at the time was that this is some kind of a simulation. And so she actually sponsored a conference on autistic savants and simulation theory.

Autistic Savants and the Source Code

And now these autistic kids are showing us abilities that the rest of us don’t have, but maybe — and we view them as having a physical handicap because they’re nonverbal, meaning most of them can’t speak, but they can point to things. They also don’t have fine motor controls, right? They have gross — they can move their arm, they can put their finger here, but many of them don’t have the fine motor controls to be able to write by hand.

And so I began to think about that in this context and realized, well, what if the rest of us are in the full body suit of the video game, or like Ready Player One, and we have the headset on, and all we see is this first-person perspective? But because, like, with a glove, I’ve got full control. I can do every little thing that I want. But if I was half in or half out, or if I was sitting there with a mouse, I could move my character around, I could point at things, but it’s going to be really hard, right? But I can see stuff from a third-person point of view that you can’t see.

AJ GENTILE: That’s right.

RIZWAN VIRK: I can put the virtual camera over here. I can message my friends. I can use private messaging. Then one of the autistic children, her name is Lidu, she’s been at some of these conferences with her mother, Dalia, who’s also demonstrating a lot of amazing capabilities like mindsight and stuff. Dalia came up to me and she said, “Lidu wants to tell you something.” I said, “Oh, what does Lidu want to tell me?” She goes, “When she’s communicating with her friends, it’s like they’re in a video game, and they can help her and she can see what they’re doing and she can help them.” It’s like they’re all in a video game together. And so for me, this was a different way to think about many of these things.

AJ GENTILE: Like they are closer to the source code than we are.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, they are closer to the source code and they have control of the virtual camera. They are not locked in. And there are some disadvantages to that, but they are actually perhaps the more advanced players who are trying to get the rest of us to wake up that there is more to this reality than we know.

Questions That Could Prove or Disprove the Simulation

AJ GENTILE: That is right. I can get behind that. Last thing for you. Questions or answers do you need to be sure this is a simulation or be sure it’s not? What are those things?

RIZWAN VIRK: Well, it’s a good question, and again, I think it depends on where you are on this axis, right? So I mentioned the axis from the NPC to RPG version. That’s one axis that’s important. The other axis is, do you view this as a literal computer simulation or do you view it as a metaphor for something very advanced.

And I like to say that it’s really 4 propositions that I’m proposing or asserting in these set of books. The first is that the world consists of information and not physical matter. Now, I met just the last year or the year before, in fact, when I was writing the second edition, I spent a semester over at the University of Cambridge in one of their AI groups. In fact, the guy that I work with, Henry Shevlin, he was just hired as a philosopher for Google DeepMind, and the story went viral that Google DeepMind is looking at consciousness by hiring a philosopher that specializes. It’s very interesting. But while I was there, I met a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the ’70s, and I was telling him these propositions.

AJ GENTILE: You can’t name him? Oh yeah, Brian Josephson.

The Simulation Hypothesis and UFOs

RIZWAN VIRK: Oh, okay. He’s actually fairly well known. Something to do with quantum tunneling. I forget what he won the Nobel Prize for back then. But he’s also very into different models of consciousness. He also says that his colleagues didn’t want to talk about this stuff, and he had a lot of stigma from his colleagues just for investigating it.

But when I told him that first proposition, he goes, “You know what, that’s not controversial anymore, that the world consists of information.” It’s not. 30 years ago, physicists would have said, yeah, that’s controversial, because there’s a whole branch of digital physics. Instead of just talking about conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, we’re talking about conservation of information. Does information get lost? Does it get destroyed? Sure, some people might disagree, but for the most part, the idea that we live in an information-based reality.

Now, John Wheeler, his other favorite phrase was, “It from bit.” That’s when he became my favorite physicist from the 20th century. What he was saying was he was looking for this thing called a particle. We think of a particle as hard. It is a physical object. But he could not find it. It is like those Russian dolls. I think they are called the Matryoshka dolls. Yeah, yeah. Or the Babushka dolls, if they are male or female. There are different versions.

But he kept opening up this thing and looking for this thing at the bottom, and it was just empty at the bottom level. He said the conclusion he came to at the end of his life was that the only thing that distinguishes one particle from another is an answer to a series of yes/no questions. And what is that? That’s a bit. I mean, the basis of information theory is a 1 or a 0. And so he came up with this phrase that said anything that’s physical, like this coffee cup or mug, actually consists of bits of information. And so I think that’s a perspective that’s gaining traction. Let’s put it that way. You can argue with it, but I think it’s not that hard.

But then that information is getting computed over time. We see evidence of algorithms in nature for it. The second proposition is kind of obvious but really hard to prove, and it is that the world seems physical, so it gets rendered for us. The bits are rendered in a way that looks real and feels real. When we think we’re touching the wall, we’re not really touching the wall. There’s electrical signals, the basis of the universe is electromagnetic.

AJ GENTILE: Right, it’s mostly empty. Right, exactly.

RIZWAN VIRK: It’s 99.9% empty space. You get on the molecules, it’s 99.9% empty. You look at the atoms, it’s 99.9% empty space. You go down to the subatomic particles, and in the end, what you have is a set of information, and that is just like a video game. Now there I’m making argument by analogy. Necessarily a formal argument, but it’s an informal one, just like the Copenhagen interpretation. Nobody knows how the Copenhagen interpretation works. Nobody knows how the collapse works. And I’m saying that basically, like a video game, there’s no castle there, there’s no dragon. Those are just bits of information, right, coming to your machine and they’re rendering it for you.

The third gets into the metaphysical side, which is that this universe is a big hoax, a big purposeful hoax. Maya. Like Maya, an illusion. This is what gets into the religious and the Maya. I was reading about Roger Ebert, the film critic? He died not that long ago, unfortunately, from throat cancer, but his wife was with him when he died, naturally. She talked about his death, and she said the last thing he said just before he died was, “Oh my God, it’s all a big hoax.”

She said that meant that the physical universe that we think is real is all a big hoax. And other people that get close to that boundary, you start to hear similar things. You do. You start to talk to people so that the physical world is not just information. It is like a big hoax. Maya means illusion, but it also means an illusion that you agree to walk into and to fool yourself.

We are here in Vegas. There are the magic shows with, I do not know who the latest, David Copperfield, Criss Angel, whoever the latest magician is. That is the best analogy I have heard from Maya. They said, “You go to a magic show and you know that guy is not really sawing the woman in half, but that is what makes it exciting is it is like magic.” You do not know how it is done, but it is an illusion. It is a sleight of hand.

The Buddha eventually came to this conclusion where he talked about everything is like a reflection in a very clear mirror devoid of inherent existence. You can buy that or not buy that proposition, but certainly the spiritual traditions buy that.

Then the fourth one, which is similar, is that you agreed to be here and play a character, which is the video game proposition. Pure materialists don’t like that at all because they’ll say, “Well, there’s nothing beyond this physical world anyway.”

To me, if you take all of those together, that encompasses why I wrote this book, was so that I can talk to physicists at MIT about — now, they may not agree with that it’s a simulation or a computer simulation, but they’re willing to talk to me about these ideas. I can’t go in there and say, I want to talk to you about guys leaving their body, floating around and seeing apparitions, and haunted tours or UFOs, right? They’d be like, we’re just going to dismiss this out of hand. But they’re willing to talk about the world being a simulated reality, and if it is, well, then maybe there are entities that exist outside of our visibility that exist outside the simulation that would seem supernatural to us. Like UFOs.

UFOs, Consciousness, and the Simulation

AJ GENTILE: Like UFOs or angels. Or angels. Could UFOs that we’re seeing be part of the simulation somehow?

RIZWAN VIRK: I think so. So there’s two different ways. So one way is even if they’re extraterrestrial, which I think many of us who have studied it realize that there’s much more going on in order to explain the data. Like, if you want to really be scientific about it, you want your observations and data to match your explanation.

But on the one hand, when you have a multiplayer game, you’re not just going to have one planet, you’re probably going to have multiple planets. So in fact, part of the purpose of the simulation could be, do you get off the planet? Do you destroy yourself? What’s called a great filter. Or maybe we’re all trying to get to the point where these civilizations meet.

But then it gets weirder, right? And on your show, I’m sure you’ve covered some of these weird phenomena. But when I met with Jacques Vallée, he started telling me about these cases where one person would see the UFO, the other person would, all the time. I began to think about that and I thought, huh, that’s interesting.

And he said there was another case where this UFO came down at a 45-degree angle and it landed in a clearing and supposedly left some marks. So everybody went, MUFON went, and they’re looking at the clearing, and he said, “Well, wait a minute. If it came down at a 45-degree angle, and this was in like Pacific Northwest where they have these big trees, it would have had to have cut through the trees, but the trees aren’t cut.” They said, “Yeah, it did. It went right through the trees, but we don’t want to say that because we sound crazy.” So they’re censoring their observations.

I thought about that too. And then you see these observations where these things move around, like from here to here. It’s almost like they’re projected into our reality like a light or a holographic projection. And so when you rez inside a game, you can kind of move through walls because everything’s not fully rendered yet. But once it’s rendered, they’re physical.

And so is it possible that UFOs represent a projection into our reality in a way that makes sense to us, in that we are a technological civilization? Aliens make at least some sense to us, right? More than the djinn, the nuts and bolts aspect.

So in this paper that I mentioned at the very beginning of the show about stigma in academia, the stigma is getting less because of the government and the New York Times article. It’s still there, but it’s getting less, but only for part of the UFO phenomenon, and that is the nuts and bolts part of the phenomenon, not the consciousness, not even the alien abductions. No, because that would require acknowledging beings that are more powerful than us, and it gets into all of that, and there’s this kind of boundary there.

But we can at least accept that, okay, maybe there could be aliens because we know now there are other planets around other solar systems. And so maybe they’re presenting themselves to us as aliens because that is a technology that would make sense to us at this point in time. Whereas in the ’50s, all these contactees are like, “They told us they’re from Venus,” right? Okay, we know they’re probably not from Venus. Okay, assuming they exist, first of all, we know they’re probably not from Venus, they’re probably not from Mars, but that was what they told them. Why? They were lying to them. Why? Because they could wrap their minds around it. Imagine if you had said, “We’re from Zeta Reticuli.” 1,000 years ago, I would be like, what are you talking about? Couldn’t understand it. They couldn’t understand it.

AJ GENTILE: And angels, they could understand. Yes, for thousands of years they could.

RIZWAN VIRK: Djinn, they could understand. Yes, they could. The fae, they could understand. And is it possible that — so there’s what’s called the avatar theory of UFOs, or the avatar hypothesis. There’s two different versions of it. Gary Nolan talks about one version, I talk about the other version.

The Avatar Hypothesis

AJ GENTILE: This is a good time to say that you’re on the board of the Galileo Project with Avi.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I’m on the advisory board, yeah.

AJ GENTILE: And you work with Gary Nolan as well.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, I work with the Soul Foundation. I wrote a white paper on venture capital investment in UFOs. So I’m deep in the topic.

AJ GENTILE: So you’re in the topic.

RIZWAN VIRK: In fact, in the academic world, because I went back to get my PhD after, I have about 15 years between my bachelor’s and my master’s and another 15 years between that and the PhD. And they’re like, “You know, I wouldn’t talk about this UFO stuff too much if I were you.” I’m like, I already wrote a book saying the world isn’t even real.

AJ GENTILE: Like, yeah, you’re fine.

RIZWAN VIRK: UFOs, it’s not even that weird to me. Like, at least the alien explanation is not that weird. The other stuff may be. But so one of the avatar interpretations, I think, is Gary talked about it, and it had to do with the film Avatar. In the film, he was controlling his avatar, the alien, but he was controlling it. And so are these beings controlling the ships and even the beings that we see remotely?

My interpretation of the avatar, of course, is an avatar inside a video game is your character in the game, and you can change that character’s characteristics if you want, but you are projecting into a physical reality, into a virtual reality from outside. So it’s not just from another planet, it’s being projected into.

And supposedly, people have been seeing these different beings for thousands of years, like the djinn. Is it that they were just presenting themselves a certain way because that would make sense to the people at the time? Today aliens is an interpretation that would make sense to us. And so is it like in a video game you render the avatar, and in some games you can change your avatar? Is it possible that they have unlocked that feature where they can change —

AJ GENTILE: — how it appears to us? Or could you take DMT and see kind of behind the curtain a little bit? Right, yeah.

RIZWAN VIRK: And people who’ve taken DMT start to talk about things like a waiting room, right? Or they talk about different types of beings, like the different — I’m not a DMT person, right?

AJ GENTILE: The machine elves or machine elves.

UFOs, Simulation Theory, and Other Dimensions

RIZWAN VIRK: You’ve got the insectoids. You’ve got all these different versions of beings that are there. And there’s the work of Danny Goler, who was a guy who projected laser on the wall. And he saw the code, or what looked like code, kind of like Matrix code, but he said it’s not exactly that. And other people took it, and many other people can see it as well.

I started hearing about this right after I wrote the first edition of the book in 2019. People are like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen the grid lines of the simulation on DMT.” And so it’s very interesting to me how that kind of lines up, because perhaps it’s suppressing whatever mechanisms we have in our brain to be able to perceive this other reality.

So there’s a lot of relationships there. But my favorite explanation for the simulation, for UFOs, is that they’re being projected into this world in some way to get us. This came from my conversations with Jacques Vallée, where he talks about how maybe they’re not extraterrestrial at all. Him and John Keel, I think, were among the first saying, “They’ve been here all along.”

The materialist version of they’ve been here all along is lost civilization in the bottom of the Earth. But a non-materialist explanation would be like, they’re still here, but they’re projecting in. They can see us, but we can’t see them. And that sounds a lot like these stories that we’ve been hearing for thousands of years about the fae and the Celtic traditions. They can take you into their world.

In the Middle East, there’s even stories of hybrids, human-jinn hybrids, a man marrying a jinn woman and then having children, and then that child gets taken.

AJ GENTILE: The Bible has the same stories, or Uriel taking someone up above the clouds and seeing the whole thing.

RIZWAN VIRK: And so I think with that, some of that could be going on with the UFO phenomenon. Personally, I believe there’s something there, as opposed to many of my academic colleagues who are like, “Yeah, that’s all flat earth stuff,” right? They kind of put it all together: Bigfoot, flat earth, UFOs. It’s not the same thing.

And especially — in fact, I wrote an article for NBC News years ago saying the government is taking UFOs seriously. Why isn’t Silicon Valley and academia? And academia still isn’t, although more are. That’s why I wrote that specific article about stigma and what it means.

Closing Remarks

AJ GENTILE: Very important work. Riz, thanks so much for coming in. This has been so much fun. I can keep you here another couple of hours, but I know you got to get out of here. I appreciate it.

RIZWAN VIRK: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a fun conversation. You’re right, we could go on for a few more hours, I’m sure.

Final Thoughts from AJ

AJ GENTILE: Bye, everybody. So that was Rizwan Virk, Dr. Rizwan. Simulation theory, quantum physics, the Mandela effect, UFOs as avatars, whether we picked our character before we logged into this life. Let’s try to untangle some of this.

Well, first, Philip K. Dick’s 1977 speech in Metz, France. That’s documented. You can find it online. I talk about it all the time. He stood in front of a room of science fiction fans and said, “We are living in a computer-programmed reality.” He said a lot of great stuff during that speech. Definitely watch it.

John Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment — that’s real physics. In 2017, a team took it to space. A satellite about 1,000 kilometers from the slits, peer-reviewed journal, the whole thing, and the result held up. The particle was in superposition until it was measured. So that means at the quantum scale, the past genuinely doesn’t appear to be fixed until somebody observes it. Think about that for a second. At the quantum scale, there is no time.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the idea that only rendering what’s observed isn’t just a video game trick. It might be the underlying logic of physics itself. Quantum mechanics already works exactly the way a game engine does.

What Riz is actually doing isn’t selling simulation theory as a certainty. It’s something quieter. It’s more interesting. He’s showing that quantum mechanics, ancient mysticism, and video game design all point at the same strange logic: that reality might be rendered, not built. And you don’t have to buy the conclusion. But it’s a fact that three completely unrelated fields approached by serious people keep landing in the same uncomfortable neighborhood.

His book is The Simulation Hypothesis, Second Edition, on Amazon. He’s also written The Simulated Multiverse if you want to go deeper on the multiple timeline stuff. Also find him on X @rizstanford, R-I-Z-S-T-A-N-F-O-R-D. And I covered simulation theory in episode 186. Links down below. Until next time, be safe. Be kind and know that you are appreciated.

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