Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. This is your
last chance after this, there is no turning back. You take the blue
pill. The story ends, You wake up in your bed and believe whatever
you want to believe. You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland,
and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. I remember,
all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more. That's the beginning of the
movie Matrix, and the character Neo is getting a choice to stay in the
Matrix, a artificial world created by machines, or understand where he has coming
from, how he was born, and understand that he has a choice to
be in the machine world or be out of it observing what is going on.
We're talking about artificial worlds today, featuring a book called The Simulation Hypothesis
by author Ritz wine Urk, and I've been wanting to have on the program
for a while simply because he is of the belief that we are living in
an artificial created world, that we are living karmically, we are living through
different multi universes, and I've been wanting to him on the I've been wanting
to get him on the program for about eight months and today we will be
speaking to him on his theory, on his discoveries of our artificial world.
Now, if you follow the Eastern philosophies, and we talk a lot about
the yugas, we talk about meditative practices, we talk about yoga, they
have always contended that we are living in an artificial environment, that we incarnate
on a huge platform. We incarnate in the body. The soul activates the
body when we're born, and we live out our life according to a script,
and the script is karma. The script is an agreement prior to incarnating
that you must fulfill and it is people that you meet, the work you
do, the relationships you have, the career you have, and so on.
And if you can step outside the creation that you have incarnated in through
meditation, through yoga practice. In some cases this includes ayahuasca or psychotropic drugs,
where you can actually step out and see and look back into what you're
up to. This is important and the various stages, including present day yogis,
are all about developing what they call self realization, where you know you're
in the matrix, you know you're in an artificial environment, and you can
begin to manipulate it so that you're having more positive reactions, you're having more
positive lifestyle, you're more successful, and you begin to burn karma. And
that's a big one. And I've never really understood how you accumulate karma,
but you know, the obvious ones are you hurt people, you kill people,
you traumatize others and animals, And I think most likely the environment.
If you're a big polluter, if you're the CEO of a big company and
you're polluting, I think you're creating karma there. And then you come back
through different lifetimes and you try to burn through that karma, and it's a
huge, huge cycle. Now today we're going to learn that we actually live
in a mo multiverse, which is multiple realities, concurrent lifetimes where you could
be living a thousand different lives and experiencing karma and creating karma, all in
an environment that you can consider a matrix or a school. We're learning we
are applying our karma, our scripts, and we are discovering ourselves. We're
discovering why we came to the reality that we're experiencing, and so forth and
so on, and it becomes fascinating and becomes a little confusing. I have
been meditating for over thirty years, and occasionally, not every time, but
occasionally, when I go very, very deep, I will kind of link
up with what I can only consider is my higher self, and I feel
this extreme peace. That's the only way I can describe it. But the
other thing is when I'm hooking up with the higher self, that is,
in a way, the Godhead or the Nirvana is what the Hindus call that
space. And when I'm in that space, just for a few seconds,
I have tremendous relief, tremendous peace, and I guess you could call it
profound awareness. It's very very strange. It's hard to explain. But again,
it doesn't happen every time. It happens infrequently, and I would say
the majority of my meditations are just deeply relaxed, and in the evening I
do twice a day, I do morning meditation. I do one right after
I kind of finish the day, I'll do a meditation and I use that
to reset my day, my evening, I should say, and by doing
that, I can stay fresh, I can stay focused into the early evenings
and then I'll retire for the day. But I have found great benefits with
meditation, and a lot of people have, and today we're going to talk
about the one of the great benefits of meditation, one of the effects of
meditating on your reality, on your wellness and holistic outlook. So one of
the fascinating aspects of this book we're going to discuss today is the fact that
Riz the author is a video game developer and had his aha moment that we
are living in an artificial environment during an experience with video games and actually virtual
reality, which is a huge step up from simple video gears. You're actually
wearing the headgear and you're interacting in an artificial environment, and they're getting so
good now that you can actually lose a sense of where you are. And
it's important that you have people around here because you could walk out and get
all kinds of trouble because you're actually living and experiencing a virtual reality or an
artificial environment. So this is a fascinating program today. It's mystical virtual reality,
it's sci fi, it's video all combined into one fun interview. Today's
program is the Simulation Hypothesis, and my guest is rit swan Verk. Don't
look down, so it is the matrix real? We saw the movie with
Neo, and we see other bits and pieces of reality creation in movies and
books. But are we living in a artificial environment? My guest today has
written a book called The Simulation Hypothesis where he not only looks at it from
a computer scientist, and we're gonna learn a little bit more about his background,
but he also uses spiritual wisdom, some of the church editions of Eastern
philosophy to kind of explain what he believes is an artificial reality. My guest
today is riswan Vik and he is a computer scientist. He's a graduate of
MIT. Very impressive. He had a successful video game career. It's also
a film producer of Venture Capitalist and a best selling author. So we're going
to learn more about this shortly. Riz, Welcome to Destiny. Great to
see you. Great to see it as well. Thanks for having me on.
All right, I have to ask you this, and I've watched a
couple of YouTube channels. As a computer scientist, you were playing with developing
videos, successful videos. When did it come to you that we were perhaps
involved in a for lack of a better word, a matrix, perhaps not
our own design, perhaps there's an overlord situation here we're going to talk about
in a second. But where did this focus come in your mind? Sure?
Well, so you know, as you mentioned, I had a successful
video game company. We created the number one game in the app store back
when the iPhone was relatively new and the app store was relatively new, and
I had sold that company, and I was visiting a startup. I became
an investor, So I was investing in a lot of different startups in Silicon
Valley and back in twenty sixteen, which I guess six years ago now,
I you know, I ended up going to visit a company that had a
virtual reality software that they had built for playing different types of sports, virtual
sports. In one of those games was a ping pong or table tennis game,
and so I put on this headset and it was a kind of a
bulky headset that were bigger than they are today. There were wires coming from
the ceiling they had blocked off the room, and so you know, it
was no mistaking that I was in a virtual reality headset. So I started
playing this virtual ping pong game, and what happened was that the physics engine
of the game was so responsive that it felt like I was really playing a
real game of table tennis against a real opponent. Now this was six years
ago and the graphics weren't even that great, but somehow the responsiveness fooled my
brain into thinking that this was real, so much so that at the end
of the game, very instinctively, without thinking, I tried to put the
paddle down on the table, and I tried to lean against the table,
but of course there was no table right, so the controller fell to the
floor. I almost fell over. And that's when I started to realize that
we were building technology, you know, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, that
would basically make something like the matrix possible. We would be able to create
a video game that was so realistic that we would not be able to tell
if we were inside a game or we were inside physical or what's called base
reality. And so I started to think about this theoretical point in the future,
which I call the simulation point. So it's a type of technological singularity.
When people hear the term singularity, they think AI characters and superintelligence and
robots taking over the world. But this is another kind of singularity, which
basically means that technology advances exponentially at past the point of no return, and
so as I started to think about how long it would take us to get
there. The more I started to investigate this idea, I found that there
was a whole lot of arguments out there already, including one by an Oxford
philosopher named Nick Bostrom that said, if somebody can make these types of simulations,
then it's pretty likely that we're already inside a simulation ourselves. And so
I found these arguments and I started to think more deeply about it. And
then I started investigating quantum physics and realized that quantum physics was telling us that
there is no physical reality. And then when I looked at the world's religions,
particularly the mystical side, I had spent a lot of time with different
techniques of consciousness, yoga, meditation, auto body experiences, lucid dreamings.
I'd been kind of living a double life while I had been an entrepreneur in
Silicon Valley. I'd go investigate this stuff on the weekends, like I'd fly
out to them in the Roe Institute, et cetera. And the more I
looked into the different religious traditions, whether it's Islam, it's Yoga, Buddhism.
I found that they all agreed that the world is a kind of delusion
and it's not real. And I found out they were saying pretty much the
same thing. So really, when I started drawing those connections, that's when
I decided to focus in and write the first book about simulation theory, which
is called the Simulation Hypothesis because it turns out all three of these areas,
the technology, which was kind of my day job, the philosophy, the
quantum physics, and the mystics, we're all kind of saying the same kind
of thing that we're in some kind of an artificial construct or some type of
simulation. Okay, we're going to talk about some of the key triggers that
you have uncovered that would identify a matrix like setting. But was there and
I should mention to our listeners that you are a meditator. I don't know
what practice you use or what systems you use, but you do meditate on
a regular basis. Correct, Yes, that's correct. Is this transcendental meditation
or is it another form of yoga meditation that you describe in the book.
It's another form of yoga meditation, and I've over the years, I've learned
different techniques from different people. But it's basically a chakra technique where you focus
in on certain energy centers within the body and you use that to focus the
mind. And other times I might use the mantra. So I kind of
jump between different techniques that I've learned. Other times I may do more of
a pranayama technique, which you will definitely get you into the state where it's
easier to meditate. And so I've kind of combined two or three techniques that
I learned from different groups at organizations over the years. Okay, so if
we are in a matrix, who do you hypothesize is the creator? Who
is the one who is sitting up the fields the environments that we call our
reality. Well, you know that's the big, you know, sixty four
thousand or million dollar question, I guess you would say. And it's one
of the ones I get asked a lot. And if you look at it,
you know, look into it, there's several different options for what that
might be right, And so why don't we just run through a couple of
those options. Sure we can see, you know, where we might end
up. So the guy I mentioned earlier, the Oxford philosopher Naed Nick Bostrom,
who put out this simulation argument, you know, he thought it was
a future version of ourselves, right, so a kind of what he called
an ancestor simulation. So that would be as if today we were making a
video game of ancient Rome that was really realistic, right, it would be
a simulation of our ancestors, and so it could be a future versions of
us. Other people think it's an alien civilization that's not really human, but
they want to investigate what it would be like, you know, to have
humans in this simulation. Some people think that it's God and it ties to
the religious idea of a creator, which you know, I think has some
merit because anyone who created the simulation from our perspective, would seem like the
creator, or rather a set of creators is more likely. My favorite answer
is that it's us right, that we help design the simulation, and that
we are basically players of the game. And so there's actually two flavors to
the simulation hypothesis, and they're not mutually exclusive. But it's worth getting into
it because I think most people haven't thought through the differences if the simulation is
this way or that way, and most likely it's both. But there's what's
called the NPC version of the simulation hypothesis, and what that NPC stands for
is non playable character. So you know, inside a video game, you
have your character, which is typically called like an avatar, which is a
term borrowed from ancient sanscript by the way, which was a term for you
know, divinity to descend into a body, into a small body. And
the guys out at Lucasfilm right there in the Bay Area where you are up
in Marin County. You know, at the time, they were creating a
video game called Habitat on the Commodore sixty four way back in like nineteen eighty
nine. You know, we dial up lines and they had a little too
d spriked character on the screen and they're like, what should we call this
thing? And they said that it felt like they were taking a big self
and they were stuffing it into this little guy. And so they used the
term avatar for like a divine presence that stuffs itself into a little human body.
And so there's your avatar. But then there's all the other characters that
are AI within the video game, and so NPC are all those other characters,
the bartender, you know, the opponents or whatever is controlled by the
computer. So in an NPC version, everyone is AI within the simulation and
you don't really exist outside the simulation. You only exist when the simulation is
running. In the RPG version, which stands for role playing game, you
are a player and you're plugged in, like in the matrix, right in
the matrix with Neo and you know, Morpheus, they all existed outside the
matrix, and they had what we today call a brain computer interface, right,
it was right in the back of the head, and you plug yourself
in, and then they chose the cartridge that they wanted, right, They
were using kind of a console model of video games. Constructs, I think
they call them, that's right. They call them different constructs, right,
including the what the dojo was a construct where he was, you know,
learning. And so in this version you have a character or an avatar that
is your body. You exist outside of the simulation as the player. And
meanwhile, when you're plugged in, you forget that you are outside. And
so that's the RPG version, and so these are not mutually exclusive. In
a multi massively multiplayer online video game like World of Warcraft or Fortnite. Right,
you have your character, your avatar, and then there are other people's
avatars, and then there are NPCs as well, so you have all of
these. But so if we are living more in an RPG simulation, right,
then it's more likely us that had some say in the simulation, and
we are here because we chose to. If you will put on the headset,
right, that's a it's a metaphor for getting plugged in and crossing what
the Greeks called, let they the river of forgetfulness. Right, when you
incarnate here, you forget about your life. And this summer I was asked
to speak at a conference in the UK that was at an Islamic scholarly institute,
and I gave a talk about Islam and the simulation hypothesis. And they
were all talking about what is insulment, When does the soul connect to the
body, right, debating all these ideas, and I said, I'd like
to give you a different, different definition of what insulment means. It is
the moment you put on the headset and you forget about the life before.
That is when the soul gets connected with the body now, you know.
So in that version, I think it's it's a version of ourselves. And
I think the question you asked is you know, it's it's a deep question
when you say who's outside the simulation, because it touches into this other question,
which is what is the purpose of the simulation? Right? Yeah?
And and I say, well, let's think of it in two ways.
Think of two questions. Why do we run computer simulations ourselves? Why why
do we run simulations? Well, we run like simulations of the weather.
We'll run simulations of you know, economies, we run simulations of you know,
number of people in a in a particular area, traffic simulations. We
run them to see what are the likely outcomes? Uh, and what is
the most optimal outcome? So and we change the variables of the simulation.
And so that's why we would run an NP simulation. We would run it
in order to see what would happen. You know, does this this sim
city or sim Earth if you will, that we're in. Do they blow
themselves up? Do they destroy the planet, do they get off the planet?
You know, are they able to get to that point? Do they
become conscious that they're in a simulation. So that's the first question, and
then the second question is why do we play video games. We play video
games to have experiences that we can't have outside of the game. Right,
So I can't fly on a dragon and fight you know, goblins and orcs
right in physical reality, or fly out of spaceship and shoot at you know,
tie fighters in an X Wing Fighter, but I can do it inside
a video game. So we use it to have experiences that we can't have
outside the game, and we may also use it to learn things, you
know, train ourselves. You know, if you've ever seen the VR fitness
games now where you like Beat Saber and these others where you know you're doing
like you're doing physical fitness, but you're doing it with a VR headset.
I'm kind of like the ping pong game I was playing years ago. And
so so that would be a reason for us to actually co create the simulation
and then choose our roles and then jump in and play a specific role.
This is fairly theoretical at this point in your dialogue of this and your explanation
of it, but I want to dig a little deeper, and you may
not be able to do this, where you had an AHA moment where you
got to blip in the in the matrix and you were like doing something and
you're like, wait a minute, Like like at the very beginning of the
matrix, they have the cat, the black Cat, and then it repeats
itself because there's a little blip in the in the in the programming. Have
you had an AHA or did you have an AHA moment where you were like,
wait a minute, this is weird, this is artificial. I think
I'm proving my hypothesis is correct and this is real. This is a matrix.
Yeah. Well, you know I've had many of those, and oddly
enough, you know, I had them kind of even before I actually hunkered
down to write the book about the simulation, right, and I called them,
you know, glitches in the matrix or clues right on a treasure.
In fact, I wrote a book called Treasure Hunt a couple of years ago
that was published by Watkins in London that was about this idea that synchronicity a
deja vu, and sometimes we would I would see something in a dream that
would show up the next day and it would be a certain kind of synchronicity,
right, And that was really one that made me think, Hmmm,
something is off here, right, something is not like what they've been telling
us. Reality is like right. And the first time this happened, it
was a long time ago, back in the nineties where I was running a
startup and we were building some software related to you know, IBM and Microsoft
products at the time. Uh, And we were partners with IBM. It's
called Lotus at the time. That was bought by IBM, and you know,
we work with them pretty closely, and so our products were like these
these add ons and they bridge the gap. Then all these companies, Fidelity,
General Motors, they all used our products to kind of interface with IBM's
products. And then that night, that that morning, I had a dream
of a competitor of ours, and it was a competitor that I hadn't seen
in over a year. I didn't know what happened to the competitor. I
figured, maybe we're out of business, maybe somebody bought them, but it's
not wasn't somebody I thought about in a while. And I had this dream
and I'm like, it's weird, what are you doing here. I haven't
thought about you, I haven't talked to you in a year. And so
I get up and I just thought that was strange. And I go into
the office and that competitor was a company called Edge Research in New Hampshire.
Uh, and that guy was named Mark something at the time. And so
I go into the office and the first thing that happens at like nine AM
is I get up the phone range. You know, this is back in
the days of you know, of landlines. And I pick up the phone
and it's a guy from IBM. It's a product manager. He's saying,
Hey, I just wanted to let you know, because we're you're a partner
of ours, that we're going to be announcing a product that's gonna unfortunately it
might crush your product, but you know, we just wanted to give your
heads up that we're announcing it today. That was like great, great,
But then I said, heck, come, I I haven't heard of this
product before. I mean, you got IBMS, big company, there's a
lot of people. It's odd that you would keep it secret this long.
And he goes, oh, that's because we bought that competitor of yours called
Edge Research, last year and they're releasing the product today. And it was
that same morning that I had the dream, and I remember thinking, Okay,
something really odd is going on here, right. The dream happened at
the first and then I got the call about edge research, and so that
led me to believe that there's there's another mechanism, right, We're tapping into
different timelines or something. And that kind of made me pay attention to synchronicities
and when things go a certain way when we weren't expecting them. I mean,
even around twenty sixteen, when I was doing the virtual reality Ping Pong
game, I had sold my last company and I was thinking what should I
do next, And I had this idea, Hey, maybe I can go
back to MIT. Maybe I can go to the Media Lab, which is
where I did my undergraduate degree. But it was like twenty years earlier,
and I hadn't really done anything with MIT since then, and I was like,
well, okay, but what would I do there? And I looked
online and I couldn't find anything that looked interesting, so that maybe it was
just a random thought. Within a week, I did an email from a
MIT professor whose office is in the Media Lab saying, Hey, I'm coming
out to the Bay area and I'd like to talk to you. And then
he came out and talked to me and gave me an invitation to come and
talk at their classes. And then because of that, I ended up running
a whole startup program called play Labs at MIT, which was at the Media
Lab. And so it was this weird case where I wasn't necessarily trying to
manifest it right, but the thought came in my mind that hey, maybe
this would be an interesting idea. And so again I've had enough of these
experiences to realize that sometimes there's a strange synchronicity going on and that might relate
very much to this idea that we're in an information based reality. Okay,
those are those are pretty good examples. I want to get to the Eastern
philosophy side of this book, which makes it really hit home for me because
I'm very much involved and focused on Eastern philosophy Eastern techniques when it comes to
reincarnation and karma, which are a big part of Buddhist theory, Hindu theory,
and other ancient traditions. It looks like we reincarnate the situation, where
as I understand it. You can tell me if this doesn't work for you,
but we have a script before each lifetime. We are given a script
and you're gonna follow it, and you're gonna this is gonna be your pro
I'm gonna call it programming. So you incarnate into a body, you have
this script that you kind of follow, and within this script there's karma,
things that you needed to relearn, things that you perhaps in the previous life
didn't do well, or perhaps you were rude and you were a mass murder
or something, and you're coming back to perhaps cleanse out or pay homage to
people that may have followed in the same foot print or footpath or whatever you
want to call it. So my question is talk about reincarnation as a program
in the matrix and how you can actually dial in and out of that to
create success. That's a little bit. That's a lot. So that's a
lot. Well, why did I start with the Eastern side? Okay?
And you know karma and reincarnation and so you know what's fascinating to me is
that you know in the ancient traditions that they used certain metaph force to try
to describe this idea of reincarnation and to describe the insulment right and one of
in the baghav Ghita for example, it uses a phrase that actually recurs in
other religion religions, which is that it's the soul or the atman in this
case, which is the kind of personal element of the overall Brahma or soul.
It puts on a pair of clothes, right, And that's what the
body is like you put It's like you're putting on a pair of clothes,
uh, And then you're living that particular life. Uh. And I found
that, you know, pretty fascinating. There. There's an old story,
uh, in the in the Hindu traditions, of a warrior named Narada who
goes to the god Vishnu and says, I want to learn about maya.
And so maya means illusion in Sanskrit, and it's a key term within Buddhism,
right and within Hinduism. And but the interesting thing idea about it is
that it's not just illusion. If you look more carefully at the meaning,
it means something like a carefully crafted illusion, meaning that we deceive ourselves in
order to enjoy disillusion enjoy in quotes there, but meaning to immerse ourselves.
It's like you go to a magic show. You know that the guy on
the stage is not really sawing that woman in half, right, but you
kind of suspend your disbelief because you ought to be like, wow, that's
amazing. How the heck did he do that? Right? And so that's
what Maya is. And so Narada, this famous warrior, goes to the
god Vishnu and says, I want to learn about Maya, and Vishnu says,
well, you can't learn about it. I'll just show you what Maya
is, and he goes, Okay, so he says, step into this
pool of water. Narada steps into this pool of water, and suddenly he's
a young baby girl named Sushila, and he goes through and he forgets completely
about the Narata and he goes through the life of Sushila, who's the princess
of a king and she marries another prince and then the prince her husband fights
with her father and all the males and her family get killed, and she's
really disfunded, and she goes and steps into this pool of water and suddenly
she's back as Narrata with Vishnu and he goes, now, do you understand
what Maya is? That was Maya, right, wow? And it was
that entire life where you know, he forgot about it, and so,
you know, the metaphor of the dream is used a lot Yoga Nanda,
who wrote autobiography of the Yogi, which is a topic of my most recent
book called Wisdom of a Yogi. You know, he used to say that
life and death are but doors through which we go from one dream world to
the next dream world, right, and so this and the butdh of course
used the dream as a metaphor for life. In fact, but Buddha means
awake right. Somebody said to him, what are you and he used a
term that was based on the ancient Sanskrit in his native language of Poli.
He said, I'm but right, which means awake right. And if he's
awake, that means the rest of us are dreaming. And we can talk
more about the dream metaphor later if we on. But so those were interesting
metaphors what it's like to incarnate. And I believe today that we have a
better metaphor, and that is of an interactive video game. Right, so
when you choose a particular character, you know you're going to play Grand Theft
Auto, right, or you're going to play you know, Eve Online,
or you know Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. You're choosing a role, and in
some games you actually it actually shows you here's the different avatars you can have.
Choose which one you want, right, And so you choose that role,
and you have a basic storyline and you have what are called quests.
And so for me, you don't have to make an analogy that much for
this idea of playing a video game and having a life, and then you
finish that game and you can go back and review that and then you can
play again. Right. In fact, the term multiple lives is used in
video games right that back in the seventies when Atari was the main video game
company, they came up with that Termoh you're playing multiple lives? What were
they you know, they weren't thinking about the Eastern traditions. But it's funny
how it relates so well to that idea is that you take on this world
of the character. So I view karma as almost like a questing algorithm.
And so the way video games work today is you have a series of quests,
right, You don't just to go play and you see the list of
quests and only some of them are open because they're right for the level of
the character that you're at, and you choose to unlock these quests. And
after you do the quests, sometimes you can't achieve it. You have to
go back, you die, something happens, you have to go back,
and you have to redo the quest, right. And then at other times,
at the end of a quest, it unlocks multiple other quests. And
so in Silicon Valley, we like to say this stuff is stored in the
cloud, and that's where karma is stored. Right. So in a video
game, you have the rendered world, which is what you see around you,
and then you have all the information that drives the game. That information
like what's in your inventory, what's your level, and sending messages to your
friends. All of that is information that's not in the rendered world, but
you can kind of see it you're playing a video game, but if you're
in the eyes of the character, it's not really there. And and so
Karma is like a questing algorithm, uh, and it puts these new quests.
So every time we create karma. And so if you look at the
ancient definition of yoga from Patan Jolly, and you know, I did kind
of a new translation of this phrase from the yoga south thras where you know,
it'says yoga jit ritty naroda, and what that means in sounds great is
yoga is the cessation, which is naroda of the ritzis and one of the
rittis. The frittis are like it literally means world pools, world pools,
and chitta means mind stuff. So it's like saying it's whirlpools of mind stuff.
Well that that doesn't translate so well into English, but basically I said,
you know, if you're retranslated, it's yoga is the cessation of the
whirlpools of thought and feeling. Right, because when we translate a lot of
the Indian stuff, particularly the Buddhist traditions, we talk about stopping thoughts,
but really it's the attachment, which usually means there's an emotion involved. So
it's not just thought, it's thoughts and the emotion that go with those thoughts.
Together, what they do is they create these little whirlpools that get stuck
in our energy fields, and then once they're stuck, they become some scars.
And then the some scars lead to what are called masanas or tendencies,
which then become karma, which become part of our script for the next life.
And so yoga, even though we think of it as being more about
you know, physical saunas today, right, if you read Automography and Yoga,
there's very little about the asanas in that book. And that was one
of the first books that was really made yoga popular in the West back in
the sixties. All the all the you know, the counterculture folks in the
sixties and seventies past around copies of that book. And so yoga is about
stopping those which means stop creating new karma, right, And if you stop
creating new karma, means your database isn't growing, it's actually really shrinking,
right, And that's you know, the Buddha said, if you stop doing
this, then that will stop too. What is that? That is sansara
and the wheel and so in the simulation setting, it's like, stop putting
stuff in your database for yourself to do in the future. And if you
do that, you can then start to see, oh, look, this
is all just a game, and this is how this is all. We're
going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves and
we will be right back with my guest today risbon Verk, discussing his new
book The Simulation Hypothesis, will be right back. I guess today is video
game designer riswold Vik, who has written a new book called The Simulation Hypothesis,
where he believes that we are living in an artificial environment and we're discussing
the means by which we get around this unusual world. I think what you're
saying is, and I'm going to use this term right now. Yoga Nana
talked about this, But I have Maharishi mesh Yogi who handed down the easiest
system of meditation in the world. I don't know how many millions of people
adopted it and continue to adopted it adopt his form of meditation. I think,
in the most succinct language, becoming self realized is understanding the karmic system
and understanding that you are reincarnating. But I'd like to hear from you if
being completely self realized in the matrix means that you're consciously playing the game,
and that you're consciously able to manifest what you want when you want it,
and at some point you can get off the playing field and say I want
to transition this physicality and go and do something else. Yeah, well I
think there's two. There's two ways to think about it, right, And
I'm glad you asked the question that way because I think you know it's worth
considering both. Both kind of trast towards self realization in a sense. Right.
In one way, it'sly immersing yourself in the game and playing the character
that you're supposed to be playing, right, That is why you're there in
the first place, right, so completely experiencing it. Right. It's like
back when I was at MIT, I had a there was a physics instructor.
He was a pig farmer from Ireland who became a physics instructor at MIT,
A very interesting guy named Bill Kennedy. I fund you. I think
he's past now, but it's been many years, but you know, he
used to run these workshops and we used to talk about what happens to your
mind when you meditate. And I remember one of those, either him or
one of the guys there, who was saying, there's two different things you
can see. One is where the meditator his brain waves are exactly in sync
with what's happening. So if somebody makes a loud noise like Yeah, you
can see it jump up and then the next second it goes right back to
where it was. So it's completely in the moment, whether it's excited or
not excited, it's completely experiencing the moment. The other approach is where the
meditators brain waves are just completely stable, right, they're not affected at all
by the loud sound or anything like that. And those are two different ways
of thinking about meditation. But it's also two different ways of approaching this question.
So the first way is to completely enjoy the game as it is,
uh And but I think self realization is partly in understanding that you are in
fact playing a game and remembering, right, remembering that there's a part of
you that actually chose to be in this game. And when you do that,
and that is you know, like within autobiography the Yogi, for example,
there's a ton of miracles that happen, right, all these stories of
these saints lemitating saints bylocating saints. You know, you got a guy materializing
a palace in the himalayas U and you know, I know the Beatles.
You know who visited Rishikesh for the Mahrishi. You know George Harrison used to
give away copies of autobiography the Yogi just to get people thinking about you.
Called it regrooving right themselves right. But you know what Yogananda says is because
if you realize the whole thing is a dream or a game, you can
then manifest things like creating a palace in the Himalayas, et cetera. But
at the same time, I think once you realize it's a game, it's
also okay to not try to manifest all these things because you realize that it's
just the desires themselves are what creates more karma for creating what. So,
for example, I mentioned materializing a palace in the Himalayas, and this was
a start. I'll just tell the story briefly from Automak for you because it
ties to the simulation and the desires and the karma. And so Yogananda's Guru's
guru was a guy named Lahiri who when he was thirty years old, was
called to go to by his office to the mountains and he had nothing to
do. He was called to go to some office in the middle of nowhere,
so he decided to hike the mountains and he ran across this guy Babajie,
who supposedly lived hundreds or maybe even thousands of years, depending on who
you believe. And he goes, look, here you have come. And
he goes, I don't know who you are. Who are you? He
goes, don't you remember? You know you meditated with me in this cave.
You became enlightened in this previous life. And here he didn't remember anything,
but then he gave him some techniques and he started to remember, and
he said, We've prepared an initiation for you, and I've created this giant
palace. And it's like this golden palace in the middle of the mountains,
right, it's like something right out of the Arabian Nights, right out of
a lad In fact, many people accused Yogananda of basically, you know,
creating stories that sound like they were from the Arabian Nights with the genies and
stuff like that. But anyway, so he created this palace and here he's
amazed, like where did this palace come from? And he goes, why,
how did you do this? Why did you do this? And he
goes, well, because in a previous life, you had expressed this strong
desire to live in a palace as a prince. By creating this, now
we are resolving your karma, right, so you no longer have to worry
about that. And as soon as he was initiated the palace disappeared. He
didn't have to go and live an entire life to satisfy that desire. So
karma is also about the thoughts that we have and the desires that we have,
and so it's I think an interesting lesson so that when you remember who
you are, you also don't I think, have to worry so much about
creating you know, these different things that you might desire, because you realize
the desires themselves are are sort of immaterial, and that there is a script
that you still need to work through some of that script, right, That's
why you're here. You still have some things to do here. And so
I think I think becoming self realized becomes, you know, being aware of
it, kind of like if you've ever had a lucid dream. We're in
the middle of the dream, you realize that it's a dream and you remember,
oh, yeah, there's a part of me that's asleep over there in
the bedroom, but it's not here, and it's something that you know,
the Tibetans with dream yoga, you know, really perfected this technique. But
the idea is once you learn that, then there are many different things you
can do. You can enjoy the dream, you can change the dream,
you can other things. But you try to bring that same awareness into the
physical life to remember that, hey, this is a game that I chose.
You know that I'm actually the warrior Narata. I'm not the princess Sushila,
if you will, right. And so I think that's a part of
being self realized. I think for a lot of people listening though, it's
like that sounds really great and and self realization is, uh, you know,
something I should be thinking of attaining. But in the long run,
it's it's a lot to be self realized. I mean it's it's it's so
unique. And we read about the yoga. Nanda is someone I would consider
self realized, and perhaps his teacher Shu Kuwar scripture War, I mean he
actually changed the Yugas. Uh. The guy did a sacred small book on
sacred science which was very, very unique, and we talked about the Yugas
quite a bit, simply because it talks about epics or epochs of mankind uh
coming and going. I want to bring up another aspect that you don't talk
about in the book, but I have had people speak on and this is
using psychotropics like d m t lsd ayahuasca, where a person is broken out
of current reality and they in some cases, especially with doctor strass Strassman's analytics
of it, they pass into another reality where they are told that their current
reality is a matrix or it's not what they appear to be. And this
is what this is what I thought you might have done it. You might
have said, Hey, Cliff, my AHA moment was when I took ayahuasca
on my trip to Peru and the shop and said, I'm gonna be with
you. I'm going to follow you kind of as a guiding hand. And
this is another reality that you should touch base with. Does that help or
hinder your hypothesis? Well, so I will say that I personally haven't done
ayahuasca or d mt UH, and I have had many people tell me about
the effects and how they relate to this idea of bas so. I think
one of the first guys to tell me this was Sean Stone, who's Oliver
Stone's son. And you know, I think it was when I first wrote
the book. We were having lunch with a group of friends in La and
he said, oh, yeah, well, you know, if you take
DMT, you'll see the lines, the grid lines of the matrix, so
you can you know, you, you know you you won't be in doubt.
And I've had many other people tell me this, although not necessarily just
from d MT or ayahuasca, you know. So for example, I learned
shamanic journey with a gentleman named Robert Moss who wrote a book called Conscious Streaming.
And it's where you use the drumming, that you used a certain rhythmic
drumming to put yourself in an altered state, and you take a journey.
And we used to do it in groups, right, so we would all
try to journey to the same place. And then you come back and you
have what are you know, travel reports And it's when when they start saying
when many of you start having you know, very similar experiences and you describe
similar things, then you realize, oh, we actually went somewhere. Where
did we go? That we were all seeing something quite similar, right,
as opposed to you know, especially when you talk about specific details and not
that it worked for everyone, but it worked for enough people to realize that
there are some similarities there. And I've had other people you know, who
reach out to me now and say, you know, they've had experiences where
they felt pulled out of their body and they saw the grid lines of the
matrix itself, and so so you know, that happens a lot where people
tell me that they've seen something that to them proves to them that they're in
the simulation. I think for us, for many of us who you know,
who meditate, we can often get into altered states of consciousness without necessarily
meaning psychotropic drugs, you know. I mean, I've had a lot of
different visions that kind of convince me that, Okay, these visions are like
mini simulations, if you will, like they really exist in the same way
that what we think we're doing here in the physical world, you know,
really exists to a certain extent as well. And so I think there are
experiences that we can have, but I think the easiest one is synchronicity because
it doesn't require us to really change our our physical mind per se to notice
that hey, that's really odd, right, And it's when you start to
notice those things like A good good friend of mine is Diana Walsh Pasoka,
who wrote American Cosmic UFOs, Religion and Technology, is a professor of religion
and Catholicism and Universal and she spent some time with Jacques Bela and they wrote
about this idea of a technological singularity. And I think the best way to
describe that is, you know, if, for example, I was on
a website and I was looking for a backpack the other day. Okay,
I was on the internet, and then I went on my phone and I
was on Facebook or some social media app and there was an ad for that
same backpack. Now I was like, that's really odd. I was just
on the website and here's an ad for that backpack. Okay. If I
wasn't a computer scientist and I didn't know, well, there's a thing called
a cookie that stores this information in the database, and they can easily match
where I was to where I am. Now, if I didn't know about
that, it would look like magic, right, it would look like a
glitch in the matrix. Right. But because there's information that's stored, and
that's how I like to think about, you know, the physical reality is
it's based on information, right, That's where a lot of my computer science
background and physics led me to. Any investigating the physics is that we are
in a physical world that is really just information that gets rendered. And I
think, so these altered states of mind, let us kind of peek behind
that and see what other things might be there. But that there are linkages
of this information. And that's why syncreticity it seems so weird, but when
in fact it was there in the database all along. It was just that
we couldn't see that that that that cookie to see that as we create.
I like to think of the world as karma as an engine of creation,
which is really if you go back to it, right, maya is not
just an illusion, it's an engine of creation. It creates things. Right,
So how do the lords of Carmon which is a metaphoric term create the
situations in our lives? Right? How do they manifest these things? And
I believe they do it by looking at all this information that's been stored and
then you look at what is being created by the people around you, and
you try to match the two. And in my book, I get into
some details of how karma is a questing algorithm, but it chooses based on
the people that you are physically around and that you're interacting with and what their
database says and what your database says. So I went off on a little
bit of a tangent here from the you know, the mind altering substances.
But yeah, I have heard from many people that you know that that that
that they see different types of things. But sometimes people have bad trips too,
so you know, it's you have to be a little bit careful.
I think sometimes I like, and you write this in your book, Karma
is is the programming is how you phrase it, and we come in the
karma is the script with a few variations. We incarnate into the physical body
and then we live that karma and then die and then go back to heaven
or whatever you want to call it. And this is near death experience.
And by the way, you mentioned Daniel Brinkley, who is a close friend
of mine. Yeah, and he describes the other side is another form of
schooling or university where you evaluate the lifetime and then you perhaps modify the karma
for the next life and you would guard it again. Is fascinating. Yeah,
well, I mean, if I could just say something on that life
review the life review which Daniel and he's a good friend of mine as well,
you know, he describes as the holographic, panoramic, three dimensional review
of his life where he's reliving every moment. He's not just reliving it though,
he's reliving it from the perspective of the other people now a few years
ago. And this actually led me to include this as a key part of
the book. Was I was working at a virtual reality startup. A friend
of mine had started it, and what we would do is we would take
a video game that you have already played, like League of Legends, which
is a popular, very popular esports game, or counter Strike Global Offensive,
which is a first person shooters as a very popular game. You would shoot
people, and we would take that game play session. He would replay it
virtual reality, so you would put on a virtual reality hell of it,
even though it wasn't a VR game, it was just two D grade,
and then you would replay it from any X, Y Z coordinate you want
it. So basically you could replay the game and see what it was like
to be in the middle of the battlefield and to be shot by yourself,
which is exactly what Daniel described, right. He said that he had to
see what it was like to be the guys when he was in the military
that he shot right in Vietnam or whatever it was, that sharpshooter, right,
he actually killed people, but he had to not just see them,
he had to see the effect what's called the ripple effect of the emotions,
of the emotions, and then on the wife or the kids of the people.
And so you know, as I got into the simulation theory, and
you know, as a computer scientist, if the life review happens, which
many people have told us that it does, and actually it turns out there's
actually pretty strong evidence for in various scriptures around the world. It's just you
they use different metaphors and different names for the same thing. There's a scroll
of deeds in Islam where you have two angels, one right down all your
good deeds and write down, right down all your bad deeds. That's a
metaphor, I tell people. Doesn't mean there's a feather pen with an angel
is sitting on your hop sholder. That's writing in Arabic or Chinese, every
little head and he went to the bathroom, right. No, what it
means is it's recording everything and so as a computer scientist, my question is
how you have to record it, and that's what we do in video game
sessions, and then we replay those sessions. Like on YouTube, the most
popular content on YouTube, like number one or number two is rewatching a video
game session, and that is like the simulation you step out of and then
you replay, right. Some people describe a life review as a big giant
screen, others describe it as more like a theater, a theatrical production.
Dany And I think describes it with this holographic panoramic where you're stepping back into
the roles, and I think that's very powerful and that that's another thing that
led me to this idea that the universe is a simulated universe and that we
delve in. Then there's the life preview, which gets in to the whole
idea of the karmic reaction, of karmaic plan like what happens if you do
this, what happens if you do that? Because I still believe we have
choices to make in our lives. So we may have scripts, but the
scripts are more like, you know, a set of possibilities and key points
that we know we're going to get to and you can choose not to.
So, for example, I became an entrepreneur in this life after college,
and I could have just as easily gone on to become an academic and kind
of VHD. Well, now I at the age of fifty, I've decided
to go back and get a PhD. And now I'm teaching classes on simulation
theory, among other things, which is kind of fun. But it's like
a piece of the script that you still have the choice of whether to invoke,
you know, this path or that path at different points in your life.
I believe. Well, you're finishing this answer with my next question,
which is, and you don't address this in your book, kind of you
really don't. Is how do we consciously create our reality? How do we
not necessarily sidestep the karma script that we incarnate with, but how do we
ensure that we are not suffering and getting the most we can out of the
reality. Well, you know, for me, people often ask me,
how has this affected your life? Right, this idea, that word of
simulation. And one of the ways this affected my life is to realize that
if you play game right, you're going to have challenges in the game.
That's what makes the game interesting. If you remember in the Matrix movies,
in like the sequel, they mentioned there was a first version of the Matrix
that was just this idyllic matrix and you just had every everything you wanted.
Everything was nice, and it said the human mind refused to accept that as
reality, right, right, and so they had to create, you know,
kind of the droll version of the Matrix that Neo and you know,
all these guys were in that we saw and and this is true of video
games as well. There's a rule of video games. And it was the
rule I think that was best articulated by Nolan Bushnell, who was the founder
of ATARII and pretty much the grandfather of the entire video game industry. And
he said, make the game easy to play, but difficult to master,
right, And that's the key to a fun game. And that's often what
life is. Easy to play. You're here, right, you got both
you were born. It's easy to be here, but it's not so easy
to master. And so if you consider the fact that some of the challenges
that you're going through might be challenges that are part of your quest, right,
then maybe you take it a little less seriously, or you remember that
if you turn up the difficulty level right in a game, like once you've
mastered something, you can play it again, but you turn up the difficulty
level. Right. This happens in video games all the time. So if
somebody is born with the disability, or if you have financial problems, consider
that you've just ramped up your difficulty level. Right. That it's the guys
who have the easy lives where everything's coming easy to them. Maybe they're not
the self realized ones. They're the early players at the lower levels, right,
the baby souls who haven't been Yeah, okay, you've signed up for
the higher Now that said, I believe that, you know, we can
manifest certain things in our lives. What we're really doing is we're choosing from
this grid of possibilities. So what you're really doing, and in quantum mechanics,
there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics and the observer effect that talks about this
that when we talk about different possibilities, that they're actual possible futures that are
calling to us, right, So they're sending information from the future to the
current, and each of those futures is a possibility. But when we tune
into a specific one of those futures we're kind of like resetting. It's like
those train tracks, right, you know, you have the train tracks,
and then you have that little switch that puts you back on this. And
so, you know, one question that I've pondered in my life, and
even more so after you know, writing about simulation theory, is why is
it so easy to manifest certain things at certain times in your life? And
it's really difficult at other times? Right, to manifest something, you can
sit there and visualize it all you want and it doesn't happen, and other
times, like like I mentioned this example earlier where I said, well,
maybe I can go back to the media lab and do something there. Right
the next week, something happened, and then I visited them and the whole
thing just unfolded so easily. And it wasn't even my pushing on it,
right, I wasn't visualizing it, but I did have an impression. And
so it's a matter of I think, rather than simply visualizing anything, it's
tuned in to one of these realities that's already played out for you, and
you tune into that, and you tune in and you move forward along that
path and that's when creating the things that you want in your life becomes much
easier when they are part of your possible storyline, but you actually orient yourself,
so it's more of like a navigating rather than a simple creating. I
think that's that's a good analogy and a good explanation. But I would like
you to address one topic which has come to the forefront in the last decade,
which is using intention. And I consider intention kind of a step or
a key to open the possibility. So if I intend to get a good
job that covers my bills and has me meet new people and expands my experience,
that is kind of a key to opening a new reality that can And
I'm interested your take on that, because the terminology intention may be in another
form an Eastern philosophy or a terminology that means access to multi dimensional realities.
I don't know. Well, for me, I would say that that is
just the law of karma, right, not just meaning it's not important.
But so people think of karma as being actions, right, like, oh,
you killed somebody in your previous life and now they're going to kill you,
right, But it's not just about that's kind of the course version right.
The more subtle version is that in his thoughts, actions, and deeds
right, that and that creates karma. And so in a sense, you
know, when you are visualizing something and you're setting the intention, you are
putting that into the database, you are asking the engine of creation, which
is karma in the Eastern traditions, to create that situation for you. And
so I believe that when we manifest, that's kind of what we're doing.
By setting that intent, right, you are focusing your mind and then that
is going into the set of possibilities. And then if there are situations in
your life physically around you that allow that to happen, right, then it
comes to you. So sometimes it does work, right, It does work
to set an attention, and it does open up, you know, certain
ideas because you the more energy you put into it, the more I believe
you're kind of you know, setting that karma in motion to have it create
those circumstances for you in this life. Now, we always think of karma
as being for a future life, but sometimes the karma happens here in this
life as well. And so you know, there's nothing that says karma has
to happen ten lives down the road, right, it could happen ten days
down as well, And so I believe it's all part of that that same
process, and that's why our thoughts are important. Right. So in yoga
they talk I talked about quieting the mind, right, and of course anybody
who's meditated knows about this. Or even if you do a good physical that
yoga session, at the end, what do you do. You have the
shivasan oppose, which is you know, translates to the corps pose or like
the translation that an austral Australian yoga teacher did better peaceful post. But it
feels like something has settled down at the end, right, It's like stuff
that was at the storm of whatever it was, it's kind of settled down,
right. And so that's you know, one aspect of yoga. But
when you do that, you get a clarity of mind. So now when
you visualize something, it's not one of these millions of ritti's that are floating
around, right, it becomes a more powerful ritti, if you will,
a more powerful world whool of thought and desired intention which then gets floated out
into the engine of creation. In my opinion, the books called the stimulation
hypothesis. My guest today has been Rezverk who should read this book? Who
did you write this book for? If you were to, if you were
to, I mean, and by the way, this book came out in
twenty nineteen, so it's been a few years. But if you were to
to look back and think about well or even today, who should be reading
this book? Well, you know, I wrote this book because it really
bridged the gap right between people that I spend time with in Silicon Valley who
are like more like technologists who may be interested in meditation for mindfulness purposes,
with academics who are more scientists right who are thinking about the nature reality.
With people that I spend time with in you know, whether it's Buddhist monks
or people that are out exploring different levels of consciousness, or people in different
spiritual traditions. And I felt like this book was a way to bridge the
gap between all three of these, in the fourth world being science fiction enthusiasts
who like the matrix in these different science fiction scenarios, and it really bridges
the gap between those. And that's why this book has actually been reasonably successful.
You know, it's my best selling book, and it's been translated into
Portuguese. It hit the nonfiction bestseller list like their version of the New York
Times bestseller line in Brazil, for example. It was censored in China.
Oh, I'm not surprised at all because of all the Buddhist content. Probably,
I mean, they wouldn't tell me why, although you know, and
it's been translated into other languages Japanese, it's done quite well. But I
wrote it really to bridge the gap between these different folks who are either left
brain or right brain. Fantastic, Give us your website and let us know
how people can contact you or learn more about your work. Sure. So
my website is zen entrepreneur dot com and that's based on the title of my
very first book, which was called The Zen Entrepreneurship, which was about me
living this double life being an entrepreneur by day and exploring consciousness stuff at night
and in the weekends. And then they can follow me on Twitter or at
RIZ Stanford like the University riz STA and f RD. And you don't have
a YouTube channel. I would think that you would, but maybe not,
you know, I don't at the moment. I had a podcast that was
called the simulated universe. But I haven't done any episodes in a while,
but if people really want to get deep into the subject, I interviewed you
know a number of philosophers and other people who computer scientists and others, and
I may revive that at some point. And this week, you know,
all of my books are the ebooks are on sale for two ninety nine for
the holidays, and they have to go to the website to download that get
that deal, or I then go to Amazon. So you're kidding me.
Wow? Yeah, so all the ebooks are in sale this week on Amazon
and on other ebook websites. Yeah, amazing. Okay, you guys listening.
That's there. You go. Your your holidays are set. Riz.
Thank you very much. I enjoyed speaking with you and definitely going to have
to have you come back. Yeah, I'd love to come back. Thanks
so much for having me on. This has been a great, great discussion,
a lot of fun. I was listening to that interview and kind of
going back through the book the simulation hypothesis. It's kind of scary in some
ways when you think that, hey, we don't have control of our reality.
But yes we do, but we're not consciously aware that we manifest and
consciously create our reality. So it's kind of a two way street where you're
not conscious of manifesting. But we've always been told, at least I've been
told that everything you do you do on your own, and people interact with
you. But you know there is a God, but you are also godlike
and are able to manifest and create your own reality. So but what Riz
is talking about is this matrix that and I heard him say that, you
know, we perhaps are the ones who manifested ourselves. We didn't get into
another good that we didn't have enough time. But I think we had help,
and I think we had help from overseers or ancient beings of some kind.
I'm not saying ets. I'm saying, you know, perhaps ancient ancient,
ancient ancestors. It's a head trip. It's a total head trip.
And when you read this book of how he you know, uncovered and began
to be suspicious of his reality, it's kind of fun, but it's also
kind of nerve wracking because it's like, wait a minute, this matrix.
I'm in, this artificial, self generated world, what does that mean?
There's so much within the Eastern philosophies that we really need to begin looking at
it more closely. Some of us, I'm included, naturally gravitate towards Eastern
philosophies like yoga, like meditation. And I'll tell you why the more I
think about it. But these are practices from the earliest epochs, tens of
thousands of years ago, perhaps one hundred thousand plus years ago, when we
were so syncd up with the Earth and the other realities and the heavens,
that we regularly interacted with these other dimensions and these other realities. And we've
lost the ability to do that. And I think when we find books like
this, the Stimulation Hypothesis and people talking about manifesting reality, it kind of
for some of us a light bulb goes on. You're kind of like,
yeah, I kind of do get it. So what a fun consideration.
We're gonna have to have him back next year to talk about another book called
the Multiverse, which is multiple realities and how we work in and out of
that. So, hey, if you're enjoying Earth Ancients, please consider becoming
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Forward slash Earth Ancients. Hey, I want to remind you also Christmas is
here and you can give yourself a wonderful gift this holiday season and join us
in Egypt April twenty eighth through May ninth. This is two weeks of amazing
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us. This tour is almost full. It is half the cost of typical
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All right. That's it for this program. I want to think my
guest today, Rizwan Verk his book The Simulation Hypothesis. As always, the
team of Ruth Thomas, Mark Foster and everyone who makes this thing happen.
You guys rock, you really do all right, take care of you will
and we will talk to you next. Timetic sci