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Aug. 11, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
54:04
Edition 564 - Rizwan Virk

Computer scientist and video game developer Rizwan Virk thinks we might be living in a "simulation"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is definitely Howard Hughes, and this is certainly the unexplained.
Well, the British summer rolls on, they keep telling us that the weather is going to improve.
I know I'm kind of fixated on the weather now.
Loads and loads of rain, but they're telling us we're going to get some sunshine.
By the time you hear this, we might even have some.
Fingers crossed.
It's been a bit of a trying few weeks for me, one way and another.
I don't know.
Do you have those weeks when nothing seems to be very functional?
It's all dysfunctional.
And I've had a couple of weeks like that, but hopefully, you know, it hasn't told in the output of things that I'm doing.
But it's been kind of difficult to keep myself on track.
Thank you for all of your emails.
If you want to communicate with me, you can send an email through the website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
And I'll get to see that.
If your email requires a response, then I will get back to you.
And if I haven't yet, please give me a kick and remind me.
Thank you very much indeed.
And I had one email.
I haven't got the email in front of me here from a guy who said he was a bit worried about me that I seemed, with some of the guests that I have on here, to be gullible in some ways.
Now, I've never really thought of myself as being gullible.
You know, having been brought up in a news tradition and worked on news desks, real hard news desks with people who smoked and drank and swore when I was a young guy.
I didn't know where to look or listen half the time.
You know, I don't think I'm a pushover, but I think what you have to be able to do is to let people tell their stories.
And if it's something that needs to be challenged or interrupted, okay, do it.
But the judgment on any of the guests that you hear, I think, has got to be with you.
So if what you're hearing from a guest you feel is implausible, then, you know, that's how we form our opinions.
And sometimes by hearing something that we think is implausible, it actually strengthens us in the solidity of our opinions.
I listen to all kinds of people.
I've interviewed all kinds of people.
Believe me, not all of them, I think, are totally believable or have it right.
You know, some people, I think, maybe have the wrong interpretation.
Some people are absolutely on the money and leave me spellbound.
But that's how it is.
That's the smorgasbord of what we do here.
So there you go.
That's my little bit of philosophy.
Don't forget to check out my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
On this edition, something that was on my radio show within the last week.
Rizwan Verk.
Now, he's an entrepreneur.
He's a tech guy.
He's a computer scientist.
He has the idea and a lot of evidence to back it up, a lot of theory and thought to back it up.
This guy does lectures and writes all over the world.
That we are living in some kind of simulation.
That it's one big video game, perhaps.
And given the number of coincidences that happen in life and strange things that occur that you think, how could that have happened?
Maybe that's so.
Who am I to say that it's not?
So the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is Rizwan Virk.
And we'll talk about the world not being a great big onion, Tammy Terrell, but being a video game.
So we'll get to that.
Remember, please stay in touch with me.
Let me know your thoughts about the show and just check in with me.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv, send me an email from there, and I love to hear from you.
And thank you to Haley for her involvement in the online show.
Adam, of course, for the website and getting the shows out to you for all of these years.
All right, from my radio show, here now is my conversation with Rizwan Virk.
Technically, and in terms of the modern world and social media and media in general, I'm a pretty connected guy.
I started using computers way back in the 90s.
I know there are people who used them way before that.
But I'm self-taught in everything, which means there are big gaps in what I know.
But I don't think I could do anything that I do these days without technology.
Technology is like my third arm these days.
You know, just imagine trying to do podcasts, for example.
In the days when I started broadcasting, the only way to disseminate a show, if you didn't put it on the radio, if you weren't working for a radio station, would be to duplicate it on cassettes, send it out in the mail, or hand it out on street corners.
I'm serious.
These days, if I want to, if you want to, you can create your own content and reach people wherever in the world they are.
I find that massively exciting.
But technology has many aspects to it, and there are plenty of downsides.
We see those all the time.
You know, the internet is not as safe as it was when I started using it back in the 90s.
It's getting less safe all the time.
What are we doing about that?
And then we come to the whole idea that technology may be much more than just an adjunct to our lives.
We may be connected to it in ways that perhaps we don't even know.
What I'm saying here is maybe all of this is a simulation.
Maybe all of this is a creation, is artificial, and maybe we fit into it in ways that we cannot fully comprehend.
A man who's well qualified to talk about not only technology, but particularly the simulation hypothesis, is Rizwan Verk, Riz Verk, a graduate of MIT and Stanford universities.
So he's at the top of that tree.
He's a computer scientist, entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, and best-selling author of the book, The Simulation Hypothesis.
An MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics agree we are in a video game.
Riz Verk, nice to have you on.
Thank you very much for making time to do this.
I know you're a busy guy.
That's a hell of a book title.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me on.
And yeah, the book really is pulling together a lot of different threads in my life and my career.
And so, you know, I decided to put them all in the subtitle of the book.
Okay, now, an awful lot of people I know, and I know some great people in technology, in particular, my own webmaster, Adam, who's an incredibly bright guy when it comes to all this.
He's a digital entrepreneur.
But a lot of the people I know in technology look at the technology for its own sake.
They don't see outside it.
They Don't hypothesize about it, if that's the right word.
You do right.
Well, that's very true.
I mean, I think, you know, in our day-to-day jobs, many of us don't really get the opportunity to step back and think about the big picture.
But I was involved in making video games for quite a few years when mobile games were relatively new, when Apple had just come out with the iPhone and they opened up a thing called the App Store and people were starting to download apps.
And so I lived in that world for a little while.
And what happens with technology is it changes every few years.
And so as I got older, I started to see these different waves of technology advancement.
You know, I started playing video games when I was a kid with the Atari system, you know, way back in the early 1980s.
And after I sold my last game company, I was visiting a virtual reality company and they had built a ping pong game in VR.
So you put on the virtual reality headset, the VR headset, and I was holding the controller and it felt like I was playing a real game of table tennis.
The physics engine was just right.
And so much so that I forgot that I was in virtual reality.
And at the end of the game, I tried to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table.
But of course, there was no table.
So I almost fell over.
And that's when I started to really think about how far we had come in building interactivity and how far we had to go before we could build something like the Matrix, where we would completely forget that we were in virtual reality 24-7.
And so that's really what led to my writing of this book was thinking about how video game technology will evolve over the next decade or two or three to get to what I call the simulation point, the point at which the virtual reality is indistinguishable from the physical reality.
I think it's fascinating.
I think there's a lot of truth in what you say.
And we're going to get into it in some depth in a little while.
I want to talk about some tech topics with you before we do that.
But just quickly, though, before we move on, just to talk initially about some general tech topics, what's the difference between what you described, where you were playing a video game and you found yourself becoming immersed in it, and me as a little kid going to the cinema locally with my dad, the brutal Odeon cinema, and watching a James Bond film and coming out and thinking that I'm James Bond?
Well, it's similar, but there's a level of interactivity that is greater and greater, right?
So when you think of watching a movie, you're watching a predefined script.
You're not necessarily participating in the script and you can't change the script.
So you can certainly imagine yourself in the movie.
And, you know, one of the themes that I explore in the book is that different religions, religious traditions and philosophers have used different analogies over the years for what reality is like.
And so, you know, the metaphors range from a stage play, if you think of the Vedas going back 5,000 years, to the Leela or the grand play.
Within the Buddhist traditions, they talk about the world being like a dream very often.
And Yogananda, who was one of the first Indian gurus to come to the US back in 1920, used the metaphor of a film.
And he said, you know, we are, it's like we're in a film with the script that we're watching.
And I'd like to think that if all of those guys were alive today, they would say, well, it's an interactive film where you can change the script.
And now, what does that sound like?
It sounds like a video game or an interactive video game.
So I think this is the newest metaphor in a very long line of metaphors, I think.
Okay, like I say, definitely fascinating.
And I want to get stuck into it in some detail.
But I think for the rest of this segment, I just want to ask you, since I've got you on here and since you are connected in ways that I will never be to the world of tech, just a few questions about where we're at at the moment.
First of all, what do you think, and this is just a general question, about the growing issue that just a few very wealthy and powerful tech giants essentially control very large parts of our lives?
This seems to have crept up on us within the last decade, 15 years or so.
And I'm not sure whether that's a good thing.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, this has happened within the last decade or two, really, particularly with Google, Facebook, you know, a few of these other guys like Amazon.
But, you know, in some ways, there's a parallel to what happened 100 years ago, at least in the U.S., where you had the industrialists who were creating these very large companies and consolidating large segments of industry, whether it was the railroads or the oil industry with Standard Oil.
And so you had J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, people like that.
And so, you know, that led to a bit of a backlash because there was almost too much wealth and power in the hands of a few people.
And it led to the whole trust busting part of the Teddy Roosevelt administration back then.
And so, you know, after that, there was a lot of breakup of these giants.
And so you're seeing rumblings of that, you know, particularly here in Silicon Valley and in the U.S. government of trying to break up some of these tech giants so that they don't have so much control over so many different aspects of our lives.
Right.
And America has done that at various points of history.
For example, in telecommunications, I know that you had the Bell giant split into two, wasn't it?
That's, I think, in the 60s or 70s.
So, you know, there is scope for this kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to be happening perhaps on the scale that it should.
I don't know whether you have any just views about that.
Well, yeah.
You know, I wrote a little bit about this, wrote an article for a site called Venture Beat about, you know, ways in which I think the tech giants could be broken up.
And, you know, there are kind of natural ways and then there are other regulatory issues that come up.
I mean, part of the problem with market economies is that you tend to consolidate market share within either a few different players or, as seems to often be the case, you know, within tech, search, you know, Google, social networking, Facebook.
And then Facebook got so big that they bought Instagram And they bought WhatsApp.
But there's also another element here, which is that there's continually more innovation coming up.
So, you know, Facebook and Google a decade ago, I remember thinking, okay, these guys are kind of old because they were PC-based companies.
And at that point, all the exciting stuff, you know, going on was in mobile, which was the new computing platform.
But what happened was these guys had made so much money in the PC world that they then went and bought, you know, a lot of the mobile giants or people that became players in the mobile world.
And so now, you know, there's that technology wave.
But now TikTok, you know, is starting to become more popular in some ways in terms of usage than Facebook.
And so, you know, there is a natural cycle of innovation that happens that will disrupt some of these guys.
But I tend to agree that they do have too much knowledge and too much power right now.
And, you know, we get to a stage where sometimes we say, we have concerns about privacy.
We have concerns about this, that, or the other.
And because they have so much power, they are able to just wave their finger and say, no, no, no, that's not true.
And by and large, things may well change.
And as you say, there is a natural tendency for new players to come in.
But by and large, if they say no, no, no, that's roughly the way that it goes.
Right.
Well, that's where you have government regulation, right?
You know, within the EU, there was the whole, you know, privacy, web privacy controls.
And then within the US, there have been a couple of committees in Congress, and they actually put out a report about the tech giants and how to break up the tech giant.
Now, it hasn't happened yet, but there is a process.
You know, if you remember back in the 90s, there was the Microsoft antitrust violation and it didn't really go anywhere.
But my sense is that innovation will take care of it and that Microsoft is no longer considered the evil empire that it was back in the 90s.
And that's because there was innovation with the internet and then there was innovation with mobile.
So you have these different ways.
But I mean, I do agree that we are quite connected right now to these tech giants.
And part of the problem is that they end up just buying the new companies, right?
For me, that's a bigger problem than just the power they have now, because over time, they will be disrupted, but they've accumulated so much cash that they're going to try and acquire.
It's like Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp.
And if you look at the number of users of these different social apps, I mentioned TikTok is the highest usage, but it's followed by Facebook, followed by Instagram, followed by WhatsApp.
So the next three are owned by Facebook.
Stole in the family.
Right, exactly.
So there's not really competition going on there, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Something that's concerned me for a long time.
I just want to get your thoughts about this.
The future viability of the internet.
That sounds like a crazy thing to say because we are all totally, especially during this COVID period, we've learned to become even more greatly connected to it.
But we're so dependent on the internet and this technology.
But it's becoming less safe.
There are more bad actors in there.
There are more people hacking and messing around.
And the good guys seem to be sometimes half a step or one step behind them.
Do you think we will ever reach the point where this particular version of the internet will simply not be a viable thing for us to use?
I think that point is far off because, you know, I tend to be a believer that innovation will creep up and there'll be new solutions that are built on top of existing platforms.
I mean, I don't think that the internet itself is going to be abandoned at this point.
There's just too many, you know, there's just too many actors and players and we're all tied into it.
But if you think about it, the internet is not necessarily what we think it is.
It's not the web.
The web is one protocol called HTML or HTTP on top of the internet.
Email is actually a different protocol that is used to send information.
And then it turns out, you know, with mobile apps, you know, we've already started to use the internet differently, right?
So like how much of your day is spent in front of a computer and how much is spent in front of a mobile phone?
Well, in the US, in 2012, the number of requests over the internet from mobile phones was actually greater than from desktops.
And that was what, eight, nine years ago, which means that we've already seen a shift in how people are using it.
So there will probably be other shifts, but that still uses the underlying internet protocols.
So I think the internet protocols will continue to be there, but it's the application level sites, whether it's particular sites like Facebook or the way that we use the web, those things may change.
And we don't know what's next beyond apps, but that was one way in which it changed.
And then if you think of before the web, there was America Online and CompuServe.
And I don't know what the equivalent would have been in the UK or in Europe, but they had these different applications you ran on your computer and it did a dial-up and that was the way everything was accessed.
Then the web came along as a better protocol.
Now apps have come along as another way to do it.
And so you'll get these kind of higher level ways of accessing things that will, there's this, there's something called DApps now, which is distributed apps built on top of blockchain.
That's actually a very different way of doing things than what we're used to.
It's new.
It still takes learning about Bitcoin and Ethereum and private keys.
So it's still kind of cumbersome now, but that's how the web was back in the day.
So eventually that might become a way that we use it.
So I do think the way we use the internet will evolve, but I don't think that the internet protocols that underlie the whole system are going away anytime soon.
I spoke to a researcher a few weeks ago about cryptocurrencies, a guy who's very into these things.
I think he's made some money through cryptocurrencies.
So he's a big fan of them.
He says that we're all going to be using them in the end, and it is the way of the future.
Do you think so?
Yeah, I think so.
You know, I've been following the cryptocurrency space for some time.
I started buying some Bitcoin back in 2013.
And back then, I would literally, you know, I would find somebody who wanted to sell a Bitcoin.
I would meet them downtown.
I took out 100 bucks from my bank, gave them $100 in cash, and they would give me one Bitcoin into my wallet, which was on my phone.
And so it was a manual.
And today, the cryptocurrency market has grown.
Bitcoin is almost at a trillion dollar valuation, and there are many sites, Coinbase, Gemini, many others that you can use.
So, already we've seen cryptocurrency start to take up a bigger percentage of the global financial system.
It's not really used for transactions yet.
It's used more for store of value.
So, if you think of money, right, money is used for two things.
One is store of value.
How much money do I have in the bank?
Or two, for transactions, right?
And so, right now, cryptocurrency still is kind of cumbersome to use to buy anything specifically.
But for sending money to somebody in another country, it's actually the most efficient way to do it right now.
You don't have to go through any of the old banking systems, right?
And so there are new ways of, for example, banks don't pay very much in terms of interest for putting your money in the bank.
Well, there's something called DeFi or decentralized finance, where you take your Ethereum, which is one form of cryptocurrency, you put it in a particular location and you earn interest on it that's higher than the interest you can earn at the bank.
Now, today, only a small percentage of the population are doing that, but within the crypto world, you're seeing a lot of innovation in many of these spaces.
So I do think over time, I mean, China just announced they're going to have their own digital cryptocurrency and other central banks are thinking about it, but you're still going to need a way to transfer from one to the other.
And that's where, you know, Bitcoin has become kind of the de facto way to move things around in the cryptocurrency space.
And, you know, one thing they learned way back, probably before the days of railroads in the United States, you cannot stand in the way of progress.
You might think that you can, but it's coming down the track literally and metaphorically, whether you like it or not.
That's exactly right.
You know, things will happen if they can happen, right?
Now, the timing, we don't know about the timing of things, but I think with this wave of cryptocurrency, the same thing happens every few years.
It goes up to a new high, then there's a perceived crash.
It hangs out for a while, then it goes up to a new high, and there's a perceived crash.
And right now, we're in a little bit of a downturn from the earlier part of this year when we were in a boom cycle.
But that's actually the best time to get in, to really get in while it's stable before the next boom happens.
And so I think with each of these waves, if you think of them as waves of adoption, eventually cryptocurrency will be the future.
It'll take some time to get there, I think.
Well, they're going to have to do a tremendous publicity job on it because I think an awful lot of people just don't understand it.
Well, it's hard to use right now.
But as I said, if you tried to use the internet back in the early 90s, when I was in college, there was something called the Usenet, right?
The web hadn't really come along.
And so it's very hard to use the internet.
And even when Netscape came out and you would go buy this little package at the Best Buy and you would like hook up your modem and wait to see if I type www.
It took a while, right?
But then eventually there was mass adoption.
And so as things become easier, as infrastructure gets laid, that will become easier as well.
And there are sites like Coinbase now that make it as easy as just remember your username and password to use crypto, which was not the case a few years ago.
Talking with Riz Wynne Virk, Riz Virk in the United States here, computer scientist and expert on simulation theory.
First off, Riz, what is simulation theory?
Is it, as most of us, well, many of us who read the newspapers think, is it the idea that everything that we can see and feel and touch and that we think is real isn't?
Is it as simple as that?
Yeah, at a very high level, it's as simple as that, that the physical world around us is not the real world.
But there's some details, which is that in simulation theory, it's a kind of ultra-realistic video game or simulation built on some type of a computational platform.
And so, you know, when you think of this idea, many people think of the movie The Matrix, which came out 20-some years ago.
And in fact, The Matrix 4 is coming out this year.
So this year, I actually like to say that 1999 was the first big year for simulation movies because you had The Matrix and you had the 13th floor and you had existence.
So you had like three major motion pictures about this idea that we live in a video game-like reality.
Well, this year there's actually four.
There's one coming out called Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds this summer, which is about an NPC.
I'll talk about NPCs in a minute.
And then there's the Matrix 4, and there were a couple that came out earlier this year.
But yeah, that's the basic idea is that we live in a computationally rendered reality.
And it seems like we're going back a long way here.
But in the first Matrix, Keanu Reeves was basically told, you're in a dream world, but we can't tell you any more than that.
You've got to work it all out for yourself.
Right.
There was the famous scene where he said, you know, you can take the red pill or the blue pill, which, you know, were actually like Dayquil and Nyquil, I think, if you look closely at the colors of the pills.
But, you know, he could choose to wake up.
And when he woke up, in that case, if you remember, he was in a pod, but he had a wire connected to the back of his head, right?
So that was the technological basis for beaming signals in and out.
Now, there's actually two different ways that I like to think about simulation theory or versions of simulation.
And those are the NPC version and the RPG version.
And so NPC stands for non-playable character within a video game.
So it's, you know, you're in a video game as the bartender.
He's not a real character or he's not an avatar of a player.
He's just an AI in the game.
And so there's plenty of NPCs in almost any video game.
If you go into World of Warcraft or any of these games, there are these characters in there who are just AI.
In the other version, the RPG version, we actually exist outside of the video game.
So it's just as if you and I were in a game like Fortnite, where our avatars, our characters within the game, were in the same room with each other.
And so, And that's the role-playing game version of it.
Now, those two aren't mutually exclusive, right?
If you play a game like World of Warcraft, you'll have player characters and you have non-player characters within the same virtual environment.
And so, when people talk about simulation theory, I think they confuse these two sometimes.
And that's an important distinction to make, is that you draw different conclusions depending on if you think if we are just AI and have no consciousness outside the simulation, or if we actually exist outside the simulation and are playing a character.
I'm playing Riz, you're playing Howard.
These are avatars that we're playing for some period of time.
Now, you know, I'm sitting here in my little home studio with a cup of nice fresh coffee here, one of these one-cup coffee filters, which I'm just removing from the top of the cup here because it's filtered through and it's very nice.
This particular filter is made of recyclable paper.
They used to be plastic.
I am removing it from the cup and I'm going to put a tissue underneath it in case it marks my nice work surface here.
And now I have the coffee and I can feel that the cup is warm.
In what way might that not be real?
Because to me, it is 1000% real.
Well, of course, it seems real.
And, you know, to use the analogy of a dream, going back to the Matrix and to some of the Buddhist worlds, when you're inside a dream, the dream seems real, right?
Everything within the dream.
I mean, haven't you had a situation where you woke up and you're like, wow, I thought that was real.
I'm so glad that was just a dream.
But while you're in it, everything seems real within that world because it's rendered to be physical and you have to follow pretty much the rules of physics, you know, from within that game.
But the question is, is there something outside of that physical reality so that if somebody was watching it, so for example, you and I are having a conversation, but we're really not having a conversation, right?
I am talking to my computer.
It's translating it into virtual bits.
Your computer is replaying those virtual bits.
And then you are talking and your computer is recording that.
So already we are in a virtual space and many of our interactions are happening virtually, but they feel real time.
And the same would be true of our avatars within a video game.
They would think, you know, if they try to walk through the wall of the room that they're in, they won't be able to.
And, you know, unless there's what we call a glitch in the matrix, we can talk about those separately.
But under normal conditions, everything about it would seem real because that is the makeup of the physical world.
So the essence of me, my consciousness, if you want to call it that, may in one analysis of simulation be almost like a puppet master connecting to the game that is being played that I am observing, but also participating in.
Have I got that kind of right?
That's right.
So, you know, in one version of simulation theory, you are a player and you have a character, right?
And so the player exists outside of the game and the character exists inside the game.
And so there's a connection, right?
Now, how would that connection work?
Well, that's where, you know, you have to decide if you want to talk technologically.
If you remember in the matrix, I mentioned the wire that went into the back of Cana Reeves' head.
That is what we call a brain-computer interface.
And we are actually, you know, there are companies now that are starting to build brain-computer interfaces to read what's happening inside your brain.
And eventually they'll be able to beam signals in and out so that it becomes indistinguishable.
So that again, inside the game, you'd say, well, this table is real, right?
Because it would feel real.
Everything about it would feel real to you.
But it's actually a series of electrical signals that's going into your brain.
Now, if you want to take the different approach and say, well, if you look at it from a spiritual or a religious perspective, well, it turns out it's pretty much what all the religions have been telling us all along, right?
That we have something called a soul.
It incarnates and it exists after the physical body dies.
And, you know, we can get into some of that esoteric stuff as well.
But there's a lot of analogies that work pretty well from that perspective also.
But it's a great concept, isn't it?
It's a great series of concepts because what it does is unify all of the stuff that up to now we haven't been able to unify.
In other words, all of that stuff that religion says, like you've just indicated, and we will talk about that more.
You know, all of the things that we think about, we hypothesize about, and all this world of technology and reality as we think it is.
It would be, if it was so, it would be a theory of everything.
Right.
It would be at least a framework of everything and how this stuff can all work together, because there are lots of things that science can't explain and they tend to dismiss and put, you know, put under the rug, which are some of the unexplained things that I'm sure that you've explored in your show, whether it's UFOs or telepathy or OBEs, out-of-body experiences, etc.
And so, you know, for me, I've spent a lot of time in the worlds of technology and with scientists, but also I've spent a lot of time with people of different religious traditions and exploring different mystical paths and consciousness.
And part of the reason why I wrote the book was this was a framework that I can use to talk to either side about, you know, what's really happening.
And there are a number of people who have in the scientific world who have said, well, you know, I was a staunch atheist, but when I think about the simulation hypothesis, I start to think that, well, yeah, there would be, if there were people outside of the physical reality to us, they would seem like supernatural beings or gods or angels, right?
And so, you know, perhaps atheism isn't the most logical approach.
Perhaps it's better to be agnostic.
And so I find that it's an interesting bridge for these different views of the world.
We'll talk about UFOs in a second.
I want to for a whole bunch of reasons.
But if it's all a simulation and we have, you know, some kind of detached control over it, how come this world is not better than it Is?
Why is there a pandemic?
Why do people get murdered?
Why do people die of cancer?
Right.
And that's, you know, one of the big questions would be: what is the purpose of the simulation?
Right.
And so when people ask me that, I say, well, think about what is the purpose of video games and what is the purpose of films, right?
To go back to the analogy that you used, I mentioned Yogananda, who was a spiritual teacher of the 1920s, and he was asked the same question.
Why is there so much suffering?
And he said, well, you know, if you're watching a movie about World War I where people have to die, I mean, it isn't a very interesting movie if there's no challenges and there's nothing in there to experience.
So going back to the idea of why do we build video games, we build them to have experiences we can't have outside of the virtual world.
And so it's possible that this experience of suffering is something that we don't have outside of the virtual world.
So why do people create games like Grand Theft Auto, where they're stealing things and killing people or Counter-Strike Global Offensive, which actually has been used by places like the Israeli army as a training ground.
It's a first-person shooter game to train people to, you know, be able to, you know, to do, to shoot rifles, et cetera.
But so by itself, if you remember in The Matrix, there was actually in one of the sequels, they mentioned the first version of the Matrix was this kind of blissful world, but the human mind didn't accept that as a real world.
And so they had to introduce some of the drollness and some of the challenges that we saw when Kennedy Reeves was there in his droll, dull office building at the beginning.
And so they had to create a version that the human mind would accept in that case.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily exactly the same, but it provides us at least a way to think about the nature of this game.
Is it a simulation where the simulators would want to see what happens?
Like, do we destroy our civilization?
Do we ever get off the earth?
Or is it more where you've got thousands or millions or billions of individual players who all want to have certain experiences?
And so now we're getting into very big philosophical and religious issues that people have been debating for thousands of years.
And, you know, the simulation doesn't necessarily get us away from that, but it gives us a different way to think about it.
But one of those standpoints would indicate that there is a game controller who wants to see whether we destroy the planet as part of, I won't say an experiment, but some kind of scenario, hypothesis, whatever it might be.
That's when you start getting into ideas of that there is something that would equate on a technological level to God.
Right.
And I wrote an article, you know, after my book came out of, you know, is God an AI?
And I wasn't necessarily saying God is an AI per se, but if you think in the religious traditions, there's this idea of these angels, right?
And they're sitting there recording everything we do in different religious traditions.
And in the Islamic tradition, they even have names.
And in the Western religions, they're recording angels who write in the book of life.
And in the Islamic traditions, it's the scroll of deeds.
And so they're sitting there writing down all these things.
And the idea is you have to review that at the end of your life.
And so if you're really going to implement that, you know, you don't need like billions of conscious entities.
You just need AI that's going to record everything for you.
But it does raise the idea that there are people outside the simulation.
And, you know, when I was writing my book, I interviewed Tessa Dick, who was the wife of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.
And, you know, she told me some very interesting things about his perspective.
And, you know, he had a very famous speech in France, in Metz, France, in 1977, where he said, we are living in a computer programmed reality.
And the only clue we have is when some variable is changed or some alteration is made in our reality.
And so she said he believed this was happening all the time.
And, you know, he used the terms the programmer and the counter programmer changing things.
But this became the basis for some of his movies and books.
And he came to believe that The Man in the High Castle, which was about a timeline where Germany and Japan won World War II, that he was actually writing that from what he called fragmentary memories.
And then he claimed eventually to have gotten full memories of that timeline.
And he felt that that was a timeline that ran.
And then they went back and changed some variables and re-ran it to get to our timeline.
And so, you know, there's a concept in computer science which was coined by a gentleman named Stephen Wolfram called computational irreducibility.
And what that means is you can't just take a shortcut and figure out what's going to happen at step 2 million.
You have to actually run those 2 million steps on the computer or the simulation to see what's going to happen.
And so it's very possible that our simulation is the same way where someone or somebody or something is watching the timeline and they're seeing what happens and then they're trying different alternatives and changing it.
And that's actually the subject of my next book, which is called The Simulated Multiverse, where someone is able to change the timelines and rerun the same simulation over and over again, which might lead to other types of glitches in the matrix, like deja vu, for example.
Fascinating and chilling thought.
And that would tie into the whole idea that's very popular at the moment of the Mandela effect, which is that people have memories of things that actually didn't, or apparently didn't transpire.
Like a lot of people believe that Nelson Mandela died on Robin Island, that awful prison off Cape Town.
And there are people in America, if you believe this, who have vivid memories of a children's television program that appears not to have existed.
That's right.
And there are many of these Mandela effects.
And so part of my next book is trying to explain the Mandela effect from the point of view of quantum mechanics and computer science and to show that, you know, what quantum physics tells us is something really strange about matter and the material world.
You know, that it's kind of like those Russian dolls, the nested dolls, where every time they look for this thing called matter, they can't find it, right?
And you mentioned earlier, well, this is a real coffee cup.
Well, if you look at that coffee cup and you zoom in, you're going to see that it's mostly empty space.
And if you kept zooming in, they couldn't find it.
So there was a physicist named John Wheeler who worked with Einstein and Bohr and many of the giants from the last century.
And he passed away not that long ago, but he came to the conclusion that everything was actually, when you got right down to it, it was just information.
And so he called it it from bit.
Anything that's an it is actually based on bits of information.
And so there was no matter.
There was just information that gets rendered in a certain way, which sounds a lot like a video game.
Wow.
I think there's so much in this.
Hold that thought.
Riz Verk is here.
We're talking about simulation.
We've got about another 12 or 13 minutes to go.
The Unexplained brings you a discussion of simulation hypothesis or hypotheses with Riz Van Verk, who is a computer scientist at the very highest level in the US and has clearly given an awful lot of thought about this.
We got into the utterly involving and fascinating and immersive topic of the Mandela effect and possible false memories.
It's worth discussing that a little bit more.
How could that be?
Yeah, you know, it's quite interesting.
And I just mentioned in the last segment that quantum mechanics is telling us that space or matter is not what we think it is.
Well, it's also telling us something else that's really odd.
It's telling us that time is not what we think it is, right?
And so there's an experiment called the delayed choice experiment.
And probably the easiest way to think about it is to what they call the cosmic delayed choice experiment, which if you think about light coming from, say, a quasar that's a billion light years away from us, well, how long would it take for that light to reach us?
It would take a billion years, theoretically, right, at the speed of light.
That's how we define light years.
But what if there was a black hole that was a million light years away?
So it means it was pretty close to us compared to the quasar, but it's still pretty far away.
And it turns out that you can measure whether the light went to the left or to the right of that black hole.
So we could tell, you know, that this particular photon went to the right or to the left.
Now, the choice of whether to go to the right or the left of that black hole, it would have had to have been made a million years ago, right?
Back when there was nothing on this earth, depending on what you believe in terms of ancient civilizations, et cetera.
But it was a long time ago.
So a decision that was made a long time ago would have resulted in the light being in one place or the other today.
But what quantum mechanics is telling us is it's not until we measure that light particle that the decision of whether it went to the left or the right of the black hole actually occurs.
And so this is really puzzling because it's showing us that the past is not what we think it is.
The past is one of several different alternatives which get chosen when somebody makes an observation.
And so, you know, even scientists have been scratching their heads on this one.
And one of the theories that they came up with was the idea of parallel universes, what's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
And the idea is that there's one timeline or world where the light went to the left and one timeline that went to the right.
Now, if you look at that theory, it actually says that every decision we make is resulting in splitting off of different worlds.
Well, from a computer science perspective, that sounds, I mean, it sounds crazy even from a common sense perspective, because it means we're spawning off all these different worlds all the time.
But from a computer science perspective, we think of information and we think of rendering the information like in a video game.
And so it's not so crazy if you say these are different possibilities that exist as information.
And it's only when we go and we read that information and we show it on our computer screen that it gets rendered.
And so, you know, within a video game, the reason you can have World of Warcraft or 3D Sims or Fortnite on your phone is because we render only what you can see, right?
We don't render all of the pixels of the entire World of Warcraft on your screen.
It wouldn't work.
In fact, back in the 80s when I started playing video games, if you asked someone, could you make a full 3D multiplayer online world?
They'd say, no, computers can't handle that many pixels.
Well, the trick was optimization.
And so, of course, computers got faster, but even more importantly, rendering techniques got faster.
And so there's a school of thought that says that quantum mechanics is really an optimization method to render only what you see.
And it turns out that's true, not just of physical things, but of the past as well.
And so now we see how the Mandela effect could actually come to be, where different people are viewing slightly different pasts.
And so I get into this in a lot of detail in my new book, which is coming out in the fall called The Simulated Multiverse.
But the idea is that there is a node of states of the world, and we can draw a path through those nodes.
And that is what's called a timeline.
But there's different ways to get there within that graph.
Sorry to jump in here.
This is a really, this may be a really flippant question, but it just occurred to my silly mind.
Could that explain why psychics and those who claim to be really good psychics sometimes get it vastly wrong?
Maybe they're looking, I mean, this is giving them an out here, isn't it?
But, you know, maybe they're looking at the wrong version of the past.
Right, I suppose so.
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it.
Or, you know, the future, right?
Perhaps, you know, whether it's Edgar Casey's predictions or other predictions, perhaps they actually did see a future, but it's not the one that we happen to collectively be observing.
And, you know, Philip K. Dick got into this a lot.
You know, I mentioned that quote.
And, you know, he went on To describe this process where you rerun the same events again and again, and you have feelings of deja vu that this has happened before.
And so, you know, if you think about quantum computers and how they work, there are physicists who are building quantum computers now, and they tell us, well, they use quantum parallelism, which is that they run every possible scenario, which would take a normal computer way to, it would take a thousand years for a computer to run through, excuse me, every single scenario, but a quantum computer does it in parallel somehow.
And it does it using something called superposition, which is best explained from Schrödinger's cat, which you may have heard of and your listeners may have heard of, which is that you think the cat is either dead or alive with a 50% chance, but quantum mechanics is telling us the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until somebody opens up the box and looks.
And then one of those two realities comes into being.
I would say gets rendered into being at that point in time.
And so those are each of those could be different parallel timelines.
And that's what they're sensing.
So does this indicate that all of those people at the moment, there is a movement, I know about this because people email me about it, to try to improve the world in which we live.
You know, there are a lot of people meditating and concentrating on making this a better world.
Does this in some scenario indicate that if we all wanted a better version of this reality, that we could actually pick it if we worked out how to?
I personally believe that's the case, that if we all wanted to act in a certain way, I mean, there's meditating, but then there's action that we'd have to take in the world, that that would impact the course of certain events in the world.
Now, that said, you know, we have got a billion, seven billion different actors, right?
And it's possible that each of us has our own quests and achievements.
So that's how we build video games today.
You know, you don't just play the game.
You say, here's the quest that I want to achieve.
I want to get the gold and the goblin lair or whatever the case may.
We're in The Sims.
You know, my character is a female.
She's going to have a boyfriend and she's going to have a job in this industry.
It's going to stay up late and you can watch the AI.
And so, you know, I believe each of us has our own storylines that we have preselected in the same way that we preselect which character we're going to play in the game.
Now, that doesn't mean we don't have free will.
We can still change what our character does in the game, but we have certain things that call out to us.
Like I always knew I wanted to be a writer, even though I spent most of my career as a computer scientist and as a video game and software entrepreneur.
And so, because I feel like that was part of my path.
And so I feel like each of us has these storylines that are part of our path.
But yeah, I do believe that if we work individually, if we work collectively, we could make an impact on the overall storyline, if you will.
So those people who tell me, and they do, and other people, be careful what you think, because if you're not thinking positive thoughts, those negative thoughts that you are having are going to manifest in some way.
And I've often thought that those people have, including my own sister who keeps telling me this and has for many, many years, I've often thought that they have a point.
By the sound of what you're saying, they might well.
That's right.
It depends a little bit on the mechanism of those thoughts and how does it get translated in.
I think if we are in the RPG version of the simulation, then yes, each of us can influence the overall scheme.
If we're in an NPC version, maybe it's a little more difficult, but it's pretty much what the mystics have been telling us for thousands of years.
So it's not necessarily a new idea, but that our thoughts create reality.
I mean, that's what in Buddhism they say all the time.
The very first words in the Dhammapada are, we are what we think, basically.
With our thoughts, we create the world.
What does that mean exactly?
In the Eastern traditions, they say the world is Maya.
It's a carefully crafted illusion.
Well, who is crafting that illusion?
Well, if it's us, right, if we're the players, then we can definitely influence it.
I said I'd get into UFOs and just at the back end of this because it ties very neatly into all of this.
There are people who say things like the Tic-Tac UFOs that that current interim U.S. government report has tried to give us a little bit of a handle on.
There'll be more investigation in this.
I've spoken to people who personally observed that phenomenon.
This would explain why some people say that actually what we're watching with the Tic-Tac UFOs and other UFO-style phenomena like that is some kind of artificial visual display.
You know, it seems to me that everything that you've been saying kind of lends some credence to that thought.
Well, yeah, it does.
And, you know, I've spoken to some of the people as well that have seen the Tic Tac and other incidents.
But what we find in the UFO world is that there is the same tension between the material and the non-physical, right?
And so I spent some time talking with Jacques Vallet when I was writing my book.
And, you know, he has been studying UFO since Project Blue Book.
And he was the inspiration for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And he told me there are instances where two people are standing next to each other and one of them sees the UFO and one of them doesn't.
And there are other instances where, like one case, he said he was investigating a UFO and there was actually some physical marks on the ground where it had landed.
But when he got, he asked them, well, how did it get there?
This was in Northern California where there's these huge, tall redwood trees.
They said, oh, it came in at a 45 degree angle.
And so, you know, nobody thought to ask them that before.
And he just scratched his chin and said, well, that means it went through the trees.
Right.
And they said, yeah, but we don't want to say that because we sound crazy.
So now you get into the same tension between physical and non-physical.
But in that case, it was both.
It was a physical thing that actually left a mark on the ground.
And it was also a non-physical thing that went through the trees.
So, was it a hologram or was it a physical?
Well, I would argue that there may not be as much distinction between those two as we think.
You know, when you are rendering inside a video game, like Second Life, for example, if you're in your house and it's still rendering, you can actually go through the walls.
But then as soon as the rendering is complete, you can no longer go through the walls, right?
And so there is this idea of information being rendered in the physical world.
And so that might provide us at least an explanation for part of the UFO phenomenon.
And also, why do some people see it and not others?
Which is very regularly reported by a lot of people.
And I discussed exactly that with Jacques Valley himself about six weeks ago.
Riz, we're out of time.
Thank you so much.
We could probably talk for several hours here.
I think this is a good introduction to you and your work.
So thank you for giving me your time.
If people want to check you out online, where would they go?
Well, they can go to my website, which is zenentrepreneur.com.
And from there, there's links to my books on Amazon.
You can contact me from there as well.
And on Twitter, I'm at Riz Stanford.
Riz Stanford on Twitter.
Rizwan, thank you so much for being part of my show and have a good day.
Thanks for having me, yeah.
Rizwan Virk.
And as I've always thought through this strange life that I've lived, maybe everything you see and experience is not quite what you think it is.
Now, maybe that's because it's all a simulation.
Maybe it's for another reason.
But we've got to keep thinking.
Please keep your emails coming.
Theunexplained.tv is the website.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
If your email requires a response from me, then it will get one.
And if you haven't had one, then please remind me.
Life gets a little silly from time to time.
So, until next, we meet and hoping that the sun shines the next time I record one of these.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
My name is Howard Hughes, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all else, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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