Science Points to the Simulation: New Physics Reveals the Truth Behind Simulation Theory & Life After Death | Rizwan Virk PT 1

What if reality is not what it seems? In this mind-expanding episode of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu sits down with entrepreneur, MIT grad, investor, and bestselling author Rizwan Virk, known for his work on simulation theory and the intersection of technology, consciousness, and spirituality. Together, they explore profound questions about the nature of existence, consciousness, and whether our universe might be a sophisticated simulation. Virk shares insights from his personal experiences and research, referencing everything from quantum mechanics and near-death experiences to religious metaphors and the immersive power of video games. Tom and Rizwan navigate the philosophical and scientific landscape—debating the nature of the soul, the mysterious coherence of near-death accounts, and the possibility that ancient wisdom might have been trying to communicate truths later echoed by modern technology. SHOWNOTES 04:56 The Nature of the Soul: Debate or Dialogue? 13:49 Religious Metaphors: Book of Deeds, Karma, & the Golden Rule 22:58 Why Do We Forget Past Lessons? Immersion and the “River of Forgetfulness” 37:04 Psychedelics, Altered States, and Perception—Without the Trip 49:46 The Three-Body Problem, Sci-Fi as Philosophy, and the Concept of “Sophon” 55:19 Multiple Histories, Quantum Physics, and Branching Paths https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/774523/the-simulation-hypothesis-by-rizwan-virk/ FOLLOW RIZWAN VIRK: Website: https://zenentrepreneur.com Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/RizStanford Instagram: https://instagram.com/RizCambridge CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. ButcherBox: New users that sign up for ButcherBox will receive their choice between steak tips, salmon, or chicken breast in every box for a year + $20 off their first box at https://butcherbox.com/impact Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! CashApp: Download Cash App Today:https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod iRestore:Give yourself the gift of hair confidence this year. For a limited time only, our community is getting a HUGE discount on the iRestore Elite when you use code IMPACT at https://irestore.com iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Jerry: Stop needlessly overpaying for car insurance - download the Jerry app or head to https://jerry.ai/impact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we living in a simulation? And if we are, if this universe is simply a rendered environment, then there's no reason to believe that death is the end. Today's guest is MIT-trained computer scientist, author, and video game entrepreneur Rizwan Ferk. He's got some wild theories that tie together ancient mysticism with modern quantum physics and simulation theory. I'm not sure if he's right, but I know he is interesting. Buckle up because here's Rizwan Ferk.

• 2:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Starting at the foundation, what is the simulation hypothesis? And why do you think that it's actually a valid way to think of the universe?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  So I started off coming to this road through video games. And then, as I started to research quantum physics and looking at all the weirdness in quantum mechanics, I came to realize that a simulated universe made much more sense than a physical universe. Like if we lived in a static, physical universe, sort of a Newtonian world, if you will, where everything that's solid is solid and it always exists, as opposed to in the quantum world where everything gets rendered, or we say that there's a probability wave that collapses to one specific possibility. So that's called quantum indeterminacy. And then the third part was when I started looking at the world's religions,

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I found that they were saying something similar, they just didn't have the terminology to talk about it back then. So there's this strange phenomenon called the observer effect.

• 3:02Tom Bilyeu?

  This is so crazy.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, or quantum indeterminacy would be the more formal name for it. And most people can probably think of it in terms of Schrödinger's cat. Most people have heard of the cat. And so basically, the idea is that you have this box and inside the box is a cat and some poison. And without getting in details, there's a 50% chance that the poison gets released. And the cat is dead, which means there's a 50% chance poison does not get released and the cat is alive. Let's say after an hour. And so that is called a state of superposition, which means the cat is actually in two positions. Now, normally, we would say, common sense tells us, the cat is either alive or it's dead. Can't be both. It has to be one or the other. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  But the weirdness of quantum mechanics tells us that both of those are true, meaning the cat is both alive. And dead until somebody looks into the box. And then what happens is that this state of superposition of this probability wave, as it's defined, gets collapsed down to just one possibility. And that's the possibility that we see. So those are the two most popular interpretations. The big question is, why would the universe do that? And we can say, well, why do we do that in computer games? We do it in order to optimize because we have limited resources and, you know, limited memory, limited CPUs and all of this stuff.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  So it's an optimization technique that only renders that which needs to be rendered. Now, the objection that some physicists have, you know, between these two camps, they're like, that, you know, these guys don't like that interpretation and these guys don't like that interpretation.

• 4:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Why would the multiverse make sense?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  So what I'm saying is that the multiverse also makes more sense if it's a simulated multiverse. And I wrote a book called The Simulated Multiverse that goes through this idea. And so the objection to this idea that the universe is splitting off into multiple universes, every time we make, not just a, you know, major life decision, like, am I going to live in Los Angeles or New York? But at every single quantum decision event, which is happening like.

• 5:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, infinite.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, the numbers are incomprehensible. But one objection that people have to that is, well, that is not a parsimonious.

• 5:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it sounds like a memory leak that would like crash your computer.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Because each of those, like, when they split, then within that, there's essentially infinite quantum moments happening. And so those are like mushrooming, ah, like.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't see how.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Either, my instinct is either we are wrong, it's not a simulation, and so quantum works in some other way that doesn't require that kind of computation, or that one just rules itself out at the level of computation.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. And this is why I think it's interesting to look at simulation theory as a bridge between these two interpretations. And so the objection comes if.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  The universe is actually spinning off lots and lots of physical universes. Basically, you're saying that there's an infinite amount of resources and an infinite amount of universes. Now physicists love infinity. Computer scientists don't like infinity. We're always looking at, you know, what this algorithm is on this order of resources are required. And so we're always looking at ways to optimize. And nature has shown that in general, it finds the most efficient way to do something. And I think that's true across many of the different sciences. Now, in a simulated multiverse, you've redefined what it means to spin off a new universe.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  In fact, it's very easy to take a universe as it is now and then to create a copy of the data or information of that universe and spin off a new universe. And so that universe is only alive while the computation is running. So the idea is that this, these universes might only exist while they're needed for the computation. And so when we run simulations, what do we do? We run with a certain set of variables and then we rewind and we run it again with another set of variables. Right? So in essence, we try out the different possibilities and we see which of those is likely to lead us to,

• 7:34Speaker 01

  let's say, you know, what is the likely result? What is the most favorable outcome? So if those universes aren't necessarily alive forever, if those universes are alive only as they're needed in order to do whatever computation the universe is doing, it could be that the other, uh, the other universe is paused. It could mean that it's running again. So you get into this interesting notion of what does it mean for these other universes?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  To be physical universes, if our universe is not physical to begin with, then that starts to make more sense, I think.

• 8:13Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say then that starts to make more sense, what's that?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  That the universe must be simulated, our universe must be simulated. Doesn't mean there isn't a physical one outside of the simulation. Otherwise, this weird behavior that we get in quantum mechanics, I mean, there's almost no good explanation for for why that would occur. So let's go back to the Copenhagen interpretation. I said, there's a probability wave. And then that goes down to one collapses to one probability. What does that mean, actually? And so there was a physicist from Oregon, I think, University of Oregon, named Amit Goshwami. And he said something once that that really struck me. And he said, look, it's not really a probability wave. Because how would you know what the probability is

• 8:59Speaker 01

  of this happening versus that happening unless you had run something multiple times? Like, if you look at where probability comes from, the idea goes back to some French mathematician who was asked to help somebody who was betting money on the roll of the dice. And so he said, look, if you have a dice, a die, a single die, you can roll it, and there are six possible futures in a standard dice. And so the probability of each of those futures would be one out of six in this case. But how would you know that if you haven't actually run it multiple times? So probability by itself implies

• 9:42Speaker 01

  that there is some amount of repetition going on from which you can make the conclusion that this is a probability. That begins to look like a simulated multiverse. It ends up being a universe that runs again and again, and it tries out each possibility, you know?

• 9:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's take Schrodinger's cat. So for people that know it, you're gonna get this. There, there's a part of the story where there's like a radioactive isotope that has the 50% chance of decaying. And as it decays, then it triggers the poison that kills the cat 50% chance of not. Okay. If I'm programming that in a video game, I have to decide what the odds are so that when the box is opened, a calculation happens that goes this time alive or dead. Now, as a game developer, the reason that you do that is you want the game to feel dynamic. You don't want it to be on rails. So when you look at like procedural generation, you realize I can make this game a lot more interesting for the player if it's a rules based game.

• 10:40Tom Bilyeu?

  A lot of this mental model began developing for me when I played Minecraft. Minecraft is a deceptively brilliant game because it's just a set of rules. And so each biome has a different set of rules, which makes the biome react differently, which makes different things happen, different times of day, different amounts of light. And once you know those rules, then you can predict everything that's going to happen in the game. But if you make the rules sufficiently simple but complex, then what emerges is stable, learnable, but very diverse and capable of surprise. And so it's like, oh, as a game developer, that's, that's my goal.

• 11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, if I'm a, from our perspective, a god like game developer, then I'm going to be putting probabilities across as many things as I can. And as a game designer, you want a stable predictable game, but you want it to be based on rules enough that, take for instance, if I wanted right now, I could go absolutely crazy. I could smash my computer. I could break this table. And it has been programmed into the matrix, the way that pressure applied to these specific materials will break and shatter and move. And so the first thing you learn when you're developing a game is, oh my God, I have to tell every pixel how to act.

• 12:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if you have, like as a filmmaker, nature takes care of the physics engine. So clothes move the way You expect grass moves the way you expect wind happens the way you expect it's all there. In a game, you've got to tell the fabric how to move. You've got to tell wind what to do hair, how to react to wind hair, how to react to a hand. This is why you get crazy things like clipping. And so if I'm developing that game and my game is dope in the way that real life is, it's like everything has tailored probabilities that you apply pressure in this way and it's likely to break like that. And I had a physicist once explain to me, Tom, I can explain quantum physics

• 12:42Tom Bilyeu?

  to you in a single sentence. The universe you see is simply the most probable university universe. And I was like, oh, it's actually a really interesting way to see it. He said, there is, if there are infinite universes, there is a universe in which you go to sit down in your chair and you just fall right through it because all of your, the gaps in your space, because when you zoom in enough, we're all basically just empty space, line up perfectly with the gaps in the chair, because it's also at a microscopic level, just empty space. And so you fall through it. He's like, that's just not very probable. So it doesn't happen. So going back to game development, you've got this setup where everything has been pre-programmed so that no matter what might happen, it's already been accounted for. And so now the game isn't forced to be on rails.

• 13:25Tom Bilyeu?

  You get all of this surprise and but the rules ultimately are knowable. And that feels like what physicists are trying to do is I'm an NPC inside the game and I'm trying to figure out, how am I and the game that I'm inside of, how are they programmed? And once you understand the rules, then you can do things like nuclear energy, because you actually understand how this stuff is programmed, structured, however you want to think about it. But it, the more that you can go deeper into this probability set, deeper into the rules of a given biome.

• 14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  All of a sudden, you can do things.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  I want to just follow up on what you said. So if this universe has been fine tuned

• 14:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  with a set of probabilities that allow us to do certain things. So there's something called the anthropic principle. And what the anthropic principle says is that the numbers in this universe seem like they're fine tuned in such a way that we can have planets. We can have galaxies like the gravitational constant. And there's a whole bunch, there's a whole list. If you look up the anthropic principle, there's a list of constants that are found in physics such that if they were off by even like 1% that the planets would fall apart. They would fly apart. The galaxies wouldn't hold and that the universe would not be teemed for life.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  But yet our universe somehow seems like it's fine tuned. And so there really isn't a good explanation for that. And the, the only explanations that we can come up with are one, that it was intelligently designed this way. And there may be more that we haven't discovered yet. Or that there have been multiple universes and those universes couldn't support life. So perhaps there's no reason to have those universes continue. And the one that we're in out of this multiverse is the one that has been fine tuned for these types of things. So in computer science, you know, what we'll do, or just think of like an old chess game. Right?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And so when you're playing against a computer, what does the computer do? It would try to project forward each move, so many number of moves. And then it would say, okay, this is the best one to take. But it's already tried out these other moves. And then what's your possible response to that? So it's possible that the simulation can run multiple times until it finds a universe or a set of constants that actually would support this. So those are the two possible explanations for the anthropic principle.

• 16:14Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:57Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:28Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:34Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 18:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Is there a physical world somewhere? So I am writing a story that our video game is set inside of. So the game is called Project Kaizen. Inside the game, there's a character who basically goes crazy by asking a question, which is, where is the array? The array is our name for the server, basically, that we have to be running on.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Where is that server? Because that means that there's a world beyond the world that you're trapped inside of.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so whenever I hear people talk about this, you're always just pushing the miracle, essentially, of a first mover farther away.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 19:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Because then you're just gonna ask, well, how the hell does that universe exist? But so let's just say that instead of driving ourselves crazy with where this is, do you believe that there is a material world somewhere?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I believe there is an outside simulation. And I think because of the way that the physical world works. So getting back to what we talked about a little while ago, where you said, you know, this table is all 99% empty space. And if you were to go down, you would find that the molecules, mostly empty space, the atoms, you got the electrons, but it's mostly empty space. And if you keep going down, you know, John Wheeler, the physicist I mentioned at Princeton, got down and said, well, at the bottom level, all that's there is an answer to a series of yes/no questions. And those are basically bits, right? That's what a bit is. It's a zero or a one, a yes or a no. And so what he said was, he came up with this phrase, "it from bit",

• 20:09Speaker 01

  to suggest that anything that looks physical to us is actually just built of information. But somehow, that information has to get rendered in a way that it looks physical to us and that it feels physical to us. And so, you know, my interpretation of that is that that means that there is another layer to reality, where all of this information exists. But while we're inside, that's where the rendering occurs. And it turns out, most physicists will not argue with that first... Premise that the world is built of information. So I met a Nobel Prize winning physicist at the University of Cambridge last year. And he's like, okay, tell me about the simulation hypothesis.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And I said, well, it starts with the idea that the world is information. And he said, okay, that's not controversial anymore in physics. It used to be. I mean, go back 50 years and tell them the world is information. They'd say, you're nuts. The world is obviously physical. We know it's physical because, you know, going back to, uh, you know, the Bishop Berkeley was arguing with this guy, who was it? Dr. Johnson, I think. And Berkeley thought the whole universe existed in his mind. And what Dr. Johnson was kicked a rock and said, there, I just proved, you know, that it's real by kicking the rock. That said, if you're in a video game, you kick a rock. And if the physics engine is well done, then it, you know, your foot won't go through the rock. So simply saying that there's something physical there isn't enough to say that it's

• 21:34Speaker 01

  not built on information, because that's the particular arrangement of information. So this second part of how does that information get rendered to look like a physical world and feel like a physical world is where, you know, we don't have, physics doesn't have an answer for that. Neuroscience thinks they might have an answer for that, but I think the simulation hypothesis provides an interesting answer for that, which is that it gets rendered as part of the computation and we are able to see only snippets of that information. They get presented to us in certain ways. This is where I think the conversation gets more mystical at this point, because we don't have the answers necessarily. But you can look at all the various religious traditions and they always use the metaphor

• 22:17Speaker 01

  of the dream, that the world is like a dream world and that you wake up from this dream and you realize it wasn't a real world, but I thought that it was real. And, and so you get into this, this metaphysical type of conversation. In the Hindu traditions, for example, they have that the whole world is a dream of the god Vishnu. And then when he wakes up, the whole world gets destroyed. And when he goes back to sleep, the whole world gets conceived again. And then you have this idea that the world is Maya or an illusion within the Hindu scriptures. And you find the same terms being used within, say, the Islamic scriptures. Where they say the world is an enjoyable delusion. And they use a very specific term for that.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Which is el gururi matow in Arabic. And what that means is not just it's an illusion, but it's an enjoyable delusion. What does that remind me of? It reminds me of a video game or a type of game. Uh, and in fact, in the Western religious traditions, you have this idea of the here and the hereafter. And we're told there are these uh, angels that are recording everything we do. And then we have to like review all of that in the book of life or in Islam, it's called the scroll of deeds. So you can go to pretty much any mystical tradition. And you'll find that they're telling us that there's something more that can be perceived. And this is an ongoing debate in physics. I mean, you go back to Max Planck, who said consciousness is fundamental. The material is derivative. Today's material model is that.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  The physical world is real, consciousness is derived from the physical model. So the neurons are there. And the neurons result in consciousness as an emerging property. So it's it's sort of an ongoing debate. And it, we end up in metaphysical territory, I guess is what I'm saying when we go down that debate.

• 24:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Is the pursuit of answering this question meaningful in any way?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think it is, but again, it gets back to this issue of whether we're NPCs in a video game or we're not. So if you think back to Pascal's.

• 24:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Cause one is meaningful, one is not meaningful?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  One is more meaningful, I guess I would say.

• 24:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, what does Pascal tell us?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  So what Pascal said was.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  I can wager there is a God or there isn't a God. Meaning basically in the Western traditions, if you're good, you end up in going to heaven. If you're bad, you end up going to hell. And he said, if I act like there's, there's a God. And there is a God and I've acted well, well, then I'm golden because then I get to go to heaven. Said, on the other hand, if I act like there is a God, but there is no God, meaning there's no afterlife, then it doesn't really matter. Right? Either way. Whether at that point, it doesn't matter whether you acted good or bad, but if you acted good, then you know. Insurance policy. Let's say you're at zero. Yeah, it's like an insurance policy. On the other hand, if you act badly in the way that you could end up in in hell, if there is

• 25:06Speaker 01

  a God, you think of it as minus one million points. So I do this out like a video game, right? If you go to heaven, it's plus one million points. If you go to hell, it's minus a million points. And if you act badly and there's no God, then it doesn't then it doesn't matter, but it but it actually does matter. So he says it's better to just pretend like there is a God, whether there is or not, as an insurance policy. And so this one philosopher used this same argument to say, well, we should not try to find out if we're in a simulation. And he said, because if we do, then the simulators might shut us down, right? So if we try to find out if we're in a simulation, and we are actually in a simulation, the simulators might shut us down. And if we try to find out we're in simulation and we're not in

• 25:49Speaker 01

  simulation, then it may not matter. But on the other hand, if we don't try to find out if we're in a simulation and we're in a sim, then the sim keeps running, because that may be part of the reason for the simulation. And then, in the other case, it doesn't matter. So it's the same kind of four quadrants that you come up with, right? And and I don't necessarily agree with that, but we don't know what the purpose of the simulation is. Perhaps the purpose of the simulation is to see if we will get off the planet, if we will destroy the planet, if we will build intergalactic species, perhaps there are other people on other planets, to see if we are able to connect with each other, or but we might ruin the experiment in that version, if we happen to know we're in a simulation, or the purpose

• 26:31Speaker 01

  might be to see, you know, how long does it take us to finally figure it out? And how many times do they have to run this simulation? Like, what things need to happen for them to get to that point? And so now we get into this the metaphysical version, where if you look at the religious traditions, you have this idea of a soul. And then you have a body and the soul goes into the body. And in fact, they end up using such similar language or terminology or metaphors for how that very mysterious process works. They end up saying eh the soul clothes itself in the body, just like your body puts on clothes. So they're using a metaphor of putting on clothes, so you can kind of understand how that works.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Now, in the eastern traditions, they say you go in, you put on a certain character, you come out, you go back in and you play a different character along the way. In the western traditions or the Abrahamic religions, right? You might say that we just eh put, do it once and and then we're in heaven or hell afterwards. But but it's the same idea. Either way, we're saying that we have put ourselves into this game for a reason, into this false delusionary world eh that we are eh in. And how do, how do we determine, you know, what happens in a video game? Usually we give the characters an outline um for the game. So you choose a character, right? Like when I was young, we used to have Dungeons and Dragons and we used to have the character sheet,

• 27:57Speaker 01

  which almost all modern role playing games are based on that idea. And we would choose the race, we would choose the background, we would choose the likely profession or the profession of that character. We might roll some dice and we would get different attributes. Uh, so there's an element of randomness in that. Uh, but then you also have a storyline that you're trying to fulfill in say a campaign, for example. And then we have a bunch of quests or achievements along the way in modern video games, right?

• 28:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you leverage this like if you're going through a rough patch? And you just started thinking to yourself, okay, hold on, the right orienting mechanism here is to assume that I am playing an RPG. I have chosen this character, so let me make the most of my time.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. I think you're seeing exactly where I'm going with this is that in that case, when you have difficulties. In the game, I mean, in a video game, you don't necessarily give up when you have a difficulty. You go and you keep trying to to work that specific challenge again and again. And you might have a a tree of quests or achievements that you're trying to achieve. And some of them may not be unlocked until after you're able to, you know, achieve the the first few in the tree. And then that unlocks other parts of the tree. And some of them you do in conjunction with other people. You might say this is a multiplayer quest. And you might say, OK, we're going to meet at such and such a time in front of the castle. And we're going to go on this raid or, you know, whatever the case may be.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And so you have this kind of weird purposefulness to it. But the grandfather of the video game industry, well, since we're talking about video games a lot, was Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari. I actually got to meet him once, really interesting, really fun guy. I got to know his son, Brent Bushnell, who runs a kind of amusement park.

• 29:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, randomly, I've met them both, yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they're here in L A as well. And so, you know, there was a rule back at Atari, and they said, make the game easy to play, but difficult to master. And so it's important that there be some difficulty in the game to make it interesting. Because otherwise, what will happen? You'll stop playing the game and you'll play it once. It's it's easy to master. And then you'll say, OK, I'm done with that. I want to go on to the next one. On the other hand, if it's too difficult, you know, then you might abandon the game prematurely. And so you need to make it difficult enough for the player. So when we encounter difficulties in our lives, we can think of them as ramping up the difficulty levels for a particular challenge or a particular quest that we're on as part of our storyline.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And so again, now we're now we're in metaphysical territory.

• 30:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:11Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So what I'm hearing you say is, uh, life is challenging, but there's this really powerful metaphor that all through history, people use the modern technology to explain the human experience. I'm no different. That's just how I look at this thing is through that lens.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:58Tom Bilyeu?

  I come at it from a very different angle, which is I've had the very startling experience of thinking that it was just a metaphor to then building a video game and seeing all these parallels to then the Nobel Prize gets handed out for people. Who, and I'm going to butcher this, but I really want people to at least have the vague understanding that I have of, of the, um, the quantum entanglement that you were talking about that they won the Nobel Prize for.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Let me kind of explain that part. If we have light that's coming from, say, a quasar or some big object that's really far away, like a billion light years away. And then that is coming to earth, it's going to take how long? Billion years, right? It's a billion light years away. Uh, the light is going to take a billion years. And then there's something in the middle between the quasar and us, let's say a black hole or a galaxy or something that's a gravitationally large object. Then the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object before it comes here and we can measure the polarity of the light, let's say, and to figure out which way it went. So this is kind of like the equivalent of two slits. It just happens to be going around an object.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And suppose that object, that black hole is a million light years away from us. Okay. So when would the decision of whether to go left or right? Happen. Now, common sense, in a material universe where time is linear, that decision would have been made a million years ago. So before humans were really around on the planet, and certainly before we had any recorded history, maybe after the dinosaurs. But it was long enough ago that, you know, it's in the distant past. And so that decision about which way the light went is not made until the measurement occurs

• 33:49Speaker 01

  of the light today on Earth. So if we have these two telescopes that can figure out which way it went, left or right, it's when we do the measurement that choice is made. So that means today, we are somehow influencing the past. Because that decision should have been made a million years ago.

• 34:10Tom Bilyeu?

  The past isn't real. This is-

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so the past isn't real. And so I'm not saying that it's only a metaphor. I'm saying that that shows us that the past doesn't really exist in a single format, in the way we think it does.

• 34:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. So this is where-

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Rather it gets filled in, like in a video game, or like in a Philip K. Dick story, where they have false memories. So it gets-

• 34:30Tom Bilyeu?

  The false memory stuff is where you and I are gonna start disagreeing.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:33Tom Bilyeu?

  So let's first lay the track down, because if we can, like, people at home should be spitting their coffee out, being like, what, how is that possible? The reason that the more I develop video games, the more I become absolutely convinced that we are living in a simulation, is because that is exactly how you would have to develop a video game. There is no such thing as the past. What you say is there is a roll of the dice, a calculation that you are gonna run at the time that you have to render that thing. And you're gonna say, oh, now that light is going to hit here, but I need to understand like reflections and all that. So when the player looks at it, I'm gonna go, oh, what are the probabilities that it's gonna look like this? Okay, cool, it runs all these calculations. I decided the mathematics ahead of time, but I don't run the calculation until I need to look at it.

• 35:17Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yes, theoretically, there is this quasar way out there. And yes, because I know that that quasar is programmed, I know that there is a probability that I'm gonna see the light when I look at this thing, and it's gonna be- reflecting in this way, all that, but I'm not going to actually do the math until I need to for the player. So sure, by the programming, it left a million years ago, and I need to know that from the perspective of how I run the calculation, but I'm not actually going to run the calculation until I look at it. What got me thinking about that? So I'm playing Minecraft in my 40s and I'm like, oh my God, this game is unbelievably brilliant. But the thing that traumatizes me is that when I walk away from the game, the game stops.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And I was like, but what if you could take the server clock and have it keep ticking even when you're not there?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And I was like, what if I could set up a set of rules that instead of growing crops of wheat? That my civilization keeps advancing and that I could walk away from the computer for a year. And I could come back and whatever server tick I assign, let's say I assign every server tick is 15 minutes in the real world. But it accounts to a week or a year or whatever inside the game. And there's a certain set of rules, constant dice being rolled. Now I don't roll the dice until the player comes back to the game and says, I want to go to that place. And as you, the way that I was going to do it is as you get successively closer, I start running more and more of the mathematics. And so then as you like get fully to the thing, you realize, oh my God, there's like a space station here. This is crazy.

• 36:46Tom Bilyeu?

  When I left, there was just a bunch of monkeys, but I've got the rule set. I've got the mathematics. I've got the server ticks. And so we're just clocking, it's in a database. I say, last time you were here was this. There are this many server ticks between when you come back, you're this many blocks from seeing that. So I know to start running certain amounts of the math. So that you don't have like some drastic load time as you get there. And I was like, this is the actual universe. I was like, oh my God, if you just set up all these rules, you've got evolution, you've got time, which none of it's real.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:21Tom Bilyeu?

  In terms of a material way.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:23Tom Bilyeu?

  But because we have all of us NPCs, or whatever we are, constantly doing the measurements, we're constantly forcing it to run the mathematics.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And so you have this perception of a persistent world that until you start pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing in, it just seems it's all solid, it all works and everything. But the reason that I'm obsessed with it is I realize is if you become aware of how the simulation works, you essentially become a superhero. And that's why physicists have given us our entire modern world, more than people even realize, from GPS to nuclear power, is they understand, oh, you can actually go and split the atom. It's not easy, but you can do it because I understand the fundamental rules of, in my opinion, the simulation. And so it's like, yo, there are real consequences. There are real consequences. By understanding

• 38:18Tom Bilyeu?

  the, forget whether it's actually a simulation or not, by understanding the rules of this thing, which happened to seem to point to it's a simulation, you can do things.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, although often we understand the rules only a little bit, I think.

• 38:33Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Sometimes we don't take into account, you know, what might happen if we start manipulating, you know, these rules without knowing all of the rules of the simulation.

• 38:42Tom Bilyeu?

  So you're worried that we'll go off half-cocked because you said that this could be the simulation to find out if we destroy ourselves.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. That could be part of the simulation. But I think this, this idea that the past gets filled in as necessary, whenever there are players or whenever there are NPCs, depending on how you look at it, is quite fascinating. And I think the crops example is a good one, right? Because you might say there's a 50% chance that you have a locust, a storm, a swarm of locusts.

• 39:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Right? But when, it's not till you log in and you run the game again that you find out. So it literally hasn't happened. So there are two possible paths there. There's the past where your crops just continue to grow and now, you know, you're.

• 39:27Tom Bilyeu?

  And to your point, there's so many things that will. We'll get an answer to when we run the mathematics, when you log back into the system.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:35Tom Bilyeu?

  You start moving back towards that village or whatever, then it's going to be like, okay, well, there was this many years. Uh, storms happen at this rate, the likelihood of a flood is this, the likelihood of raiders coming by your village, the likelihood that your thatch roof catches on fire. Like you just have all ah, like all this stuff.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Crazy things. Now, it turns out in quantum mechanics, based upon what we were talking about earlier, the delayed choice experiment, that is true as well. That there are all these probabilities of things that happened, but it's not until somebody observes them. That all this entire history, including the dinosaurs being here and they left us fossils, all of these types of things now. At first I thought, okay, this can't really be the case. I mean, is that what really what quantum mechanics is telling us? Most physicists would tell you, there's no such thing as retro causality, meaning that we can't change the past.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  But that there is an exception to that, and that is this W A choice experiment. And so I started looking around at some of the original quantum mechanics pioneers and founders of the field. And Schrodinger himself had a very obscure quote all the way back in the 1940s. So even before the whole multiverse idea, yeah, they were still struggling with this Copenhagen interpretation. And he said, every time we make a choice or we observe or we collapse the probability wave, we are choosing from one of multiple simultaneous histories.

• 41:07Tom Bilyeu?

  That's a very weird choice of words. Why choosing?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  It's, it's a very weird choice because physicists would tell us we can't change the past. And that's what it seems like. Once we've chosen a past, right? It's, it's as if it's all been fixed. So they'll say, you're not changing.

• 41:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you agree with the use of the word choose?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  I, I do because I'm of the opinion that the observer effect requires an observer, right? That it's not just the NPCs.

• 41:32Tom Bilyeu?

  The observer simply says now run the mathematics. It doesn't say, uh, that, okay, go left instead of right around the galaxy or the black hole. It seems like an odd way to think through this problem. And this is going to matter as you and I begin debating whether there's life after death.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Right, but the observer does determine, say, what they do next, right? So if you think of it as a series of choices over a long.

• 41:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think we have free will?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  I believe we do, but you can't account for it inside the system in the same way.

• 42:05Tom Bilyeu?

  How could we have free will?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Because you, i- in order to have true free will, so physicists define free will simply as randomness, quantum randomness. So.

• 42:14Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not free will, that's randomness.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Right, that's there, that I'm saying, from a materialist point of view, that's the only approach where we can have free will, is if it's random, but it's not totally random.

• 42:24Tom Bilyeu?

  In my opinion.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Right, and I kind of agree with you there. But in order to have free will, you have to have a set of choices, and then you have to have someone outside the system who's free to make those choices.

• 42:37Tom Bilyeu?

  To have free will, you'd have to have choices that, I mean, quite frankly, you couldn't be bound by physics, because the second you're bound by physics, now I'm like, okay, I have a bounded option set, and then it becomes, well, what is helping me process whether I choose left or right? And then all of a sudden, you'll get down to, oh yeah, I'm running a program, my brain is made of certain material, even if it's made of certain material inside the simulation.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:01Tom Bilyeu?

  It still runs and processes data in a certain way, and if it processes data in a certain way, I don't have free will.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Right, but then the question becomes, how are those rules defined? And also, like a good example, I think it was David Deutsch who, or Seth Lloyd, these are like two pioneers in quantum computing, I'm forgetting which one had used this example, but it was a good one. They said that, you know, running physics rules can get you to know how materials interact with each other, and chemistry can combine, etc. But it doesn't tell you why there's a bunch of brass that's a statue of, you know, Admiral Nelson in the middle of London, right? So there's some, there's some ability, because if you're just running rules, why would you end up with that? Unless there is some set of goals, or some, you know, some set of.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  People, programs that are choosing that specific goal in and of itself. So, so.

• 44:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I think you can set up a pretty simple set of rules around uh evolution is gonna get you there. Because nature is deceptively simple from a survival standpoint that is just motivating you to have kids to have kids. But then you're trying to get this one animal has gone down a path of cooperation. And so then you realize there are going to be certain mechanisms in the brain that you have to plan for cooperation. We'll shorthand it to religion. So you have to create a sense of awe that there's something that people kneel before and because they're willing to kneel before it, they're willing to gather in large groups because we all kneel before the same thing. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, this is literally nature going, I only have two levers, pleasure and pain. And I've got to find ways to get these guys to have sex and protect. I mean, it's one of the options.

• 44:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Th- this is one where um we probably have to be careful to stay in base assumptions. My base assumption is that we operate on a finite set of rules.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And those rules run on a computational device of some kind. The computational device has a nature, meaning that there are, I'll say circuits, who knows what it actually does. But like electricity can only travel in so many paths on the circuit. And to your point, if this is bits of information, it's either on or off. So like, once you boil it down to its simplest, we're a very complex automata. But I don't see any way that we're not automata.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Right. But if you think of automata and how they work, let's look at AI today.

• 45:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  So for example, L L M's are based on essentially a very simple architecture at the, at the bottom level. Uh but they get incredibly complex when you start talking about layers of neural networks. But I mean, even back when I was studying computer science back in the day, they. You know, we had this idea of taking a neur- a neuron and a neural net type approach, even back in the nineties where they were using this approach where the neuron fires or doesn't fire. After a certain period of time. But if you look at AI, most of the AI in what I like to call wave one AI was a rules based AI. So it was more about expertise. Systems and defining rules and how to do things. And then they realized, oh, we have to use a bunch of different data.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Uh, and so today's AI is more based on uh, machine learning algorithms, deep learning, all of this stuff. And it's based more on neural networks. So it's more based on data.

• 46:20Tom Bilyeu?

  You don't think neural networks operate on rules?

• 46:22Speaker 01

  They do, but they operate on on very small rules, very simple rules.

• 46:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  But it's not always predictable at a high level. What, even today, we have hallucinations, right? Because of those rules.

• 46:34Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's, is it the level of complexity or the pre-programmed set of probabilities? Because to me, and maybe where we're disconnecting, I have the base assumption that uh, probability does not equal free will. Randomness does not equal free will.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  So then what does equal free will?

• 46:51Tom Bilyeu?

  There is no free will. So free will would be that you're not using a processing device that has a nature. And this is why, to me, do you know Phineas Gage?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 47:01Tom Bilyeu?

  To me, this story just literally shuts the argument down. People always push back. I find it crazy.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:06Tom Bilyeu?

  But uh, Phineas Gage, real person, he was working on a railroad, hit a tamping rod. And it misfired. It shot a three-foot metal rod that was about that big around. Up through his cheek and out the top of his head. He lost a teacups worth of brain matter. Never lost consciousness, but was never the same again. Now, the reason I would say he was never the same again is that even if we're in a simulation, the simulation has a set of rules. That go all the way down to the cellular level, how cells combine and we pull in mitochondria and all that. Through a process of evolution, it's like you you just set those rules and they go. So anyway, you get to the point where this NPC processes data through, again, it's all, it's all uh, synthetic in the sense that it's a simulation.

• 47:51Tom Bilyeu?

  But their cells are used in this incredibly complicated NPC in his brain. The brain has physics, so it responds to traumatic force and all that, has an inflammation response and all that. And so if in the game you cause that trauma, then it's going to alter the way that that NPC processes data. And so I'm just saying, whether I'm an avatar somewhere else. Like um Matrix style logging into this body. I'm still now processing data through this body. I have lost sight that there is anything else. My base assumption is that there is nothing else. Everything is a simulation on this level.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And there's just a set of rules and the set of rules gives birth to what we call biology. And if you disrupt that biology, there are consequences.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Right. And so, so you know, you lean towards the NPC version and that's.

• 48:40Tom Bilyeu?

  That means I'm locked inside my biology. That's my punchline. And if I'm locked inside my biology, I don't have free will.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  But if you're in a video game, you know, I have these rules of what will happen.

• 48:51Tom Bilyeu?

  But you have the rules.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  If I do X, right, because that the rules define the game. But as the player of the game, I still choose whether to do, it's like those old choose your own adventure games or in in a game.

• 49:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I still choose whether to take this quest or that quest. So if I don't take that quest.

• 49:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Think about computer programming for real.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Tom Bilyeu?

  If you want something to happen randomly, you have to assign a random number generator and it literally rolls the dice and says, okay, you do option thirty two. It's not, by my definition, I would not consider that free will. Do you consider that free will?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I don't consider it free will, but I consider it uh free will. The only way to have true free will is to step outside the system and have somebody make the choice whether to do that thing or not.

• 49:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But you'd have to step outside of any system that guides your behavior.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 49:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And biology guides your behavior.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. I mean, that hasn't been established yet.

• 49:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Hasn't it?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 49:42Tom Bilyeu?

  So I just told you the Phineas Gage story.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  It's still in, no, and I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is that there is still debate about whether consciousness survives, for example, death, right? Now we're back.

• 49:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, this is, this is exactly what I want to argue about. So first of all, I want to, I want to, I want to say my fundamental belief in life is nobody knows anything, least of all me. So while I'm going to present myself.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  You seem pretty sure.

• 50:05Tom Bilyeu?

  A hundred percent. And I think that's the only wise, I have strong convictions loosely held. So I know I'm wrong about something. We may not even be in a simulation. I could be wrong that foundationally. I am super open to that. I love this stuff so much. Uh, but I, I. I can't follow anyone's train of logic that is saying that we have free will. We can talk panpsychism where we're like an antenna, a radio with an antenna that receives consciousness. Like, we can talk about it however anybody wants, and I still don't see how we ever end up with anything other than we're, we're a processing plant that follows a set of rules. And that to me isn't free will. And I don't know that maybe the audience doesn't care and we don't bog down in free will.

• 50:48Tom Bilyeu?

  But to plant a flag so I can track your base assumptions.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:51Tom Bilyeu?

  You believe we have free will?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Well, the reason I wrote this book, interestingly enough, is because I think that the simulation hypothesis provides a common language between those who believe we have free will and those who believe we don't have free, free will. Because there is this spectrum, right? In the NPC version, I agree, we don't have free will because it's just a set of rules. In the video game version, the player has some amount of free will. So for example, I might choose as my player, you know, to go on this particular quest to, you know, go fight the Goblin King.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Now, if I as a player never decide to go down that path, then that specific set of circumstances never happens. So you still have this opportunity to choose. And that's where I think in the religious side, there's this idea that consciousness exists beyond the body. And in the materialist world, there's this idea that it is just physical. And that's all it's based off of is just simple biology. Right? And so what's interesting to me about simulation hypothesis is that it could actually accommodate both of those. If we're inside a simulation, you can have all of the rules of the game that are there. All of the quantum physics starts to make at least more sense, right? We're not a hundred percent there.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, I've talked, as you mentioned, about how we tend to use the latest technological metaphors. I believe we're in a simulation, but I don't believe we're in a simulation on a simple computer like the computers we have or like my iPhone computer, those processes. I believe it tends to be more like a quantum computer, which is a new type of computer that can accommodate things like superposition, etc. But I believe that the video game metaphor is a way for those who believe we have free will to think about a physical world and yet to try to ground that in some level of a techno-scientific basis, if you will.

• 52:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you believe that we have a soul?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I believe that our player is the soul. Yeah, I mean, I tend to believe that.

• 53:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So really fast and we'll come back to the simulation for a second. But does the player outside the game have a soul?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Player outside the game may be the soul. I don't take a strong position on that. Or the player outside the game may be just a soul. The player outside the game may be an alien. They may be future humans. So, once we start to think about what's beyond the simulation, now we're really speculating, because we're barely figuring out what's inside the simulation and we're still having an debate on whether it's a simulation or not. I mean, you and I aren't, but other people are having that debate. Sounds like you've come to a very similar conclusion to me.

• 53:37Tom Bilyeu?

  The thing, I really don't know. So, I'd like to step inside the frame of reference and go ham to see what's there. But the honest answer is, I don't know. But I'm gonna keep going as if I really am convinced it's more interesting for me to find the edges of my belief. But I really, the life after death thing is really, really interesting to me. So, I believe, simulation or not, that when the lights go out for your character, that's it. But I've heard you talk very eloquently that there might be a better way to see that.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I think some of the phenomena of quantum mechanics suggest that we don't live in a physical world or a pure materialist paradigm. And I think at the same time, there are other phenomena in other areas of human experience that also suggests something similar, that there is no physical world, but that there is possibly a consciousness that survives past death. And I think, you know, there are many researchers who have been working on these areas where there are just glitches. And one of the areas that I find most intriguing is near-death experiences. And so, these are situations where someone has died, someone has...

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Had no, not just their heart not function, but has had no brain activity for a period of time, who end up coming back to life. And they end up coming back and reporting similar things, many of them. And not a hundred percent, but there's enough commonality across what different people who have died, or have been in, had NDEs, as they're referred to, which is a term, you know, that was coined by Raymond Moody, all the way back in nineteen seventy-five. And one of them is that they're kind of floating above their body. Another is that they see a tunnel or a light. Another is that they encounter a light being. And they're very familiar with that being.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And then, the phenomenon that intrigues me the most about NDEs is this idea of a life review. So many of them report having had a life review. And what a life review is, is a replaying, right? So it's of every single experience in your life, up to that point. Now, I first learned about this from a guy named Daniel Brinkley. He was struck by lightning, again, back in the seventies or so. And he had like a pretty full account of an NDE. Eventually, he wrote a book called Saved by the Light about it. But he called it a holographic panoramic life review. And what he meant by that was he felt, not just that he was watching his life flash

• 56:23Speaker 01

  before his eyes, so that's the old terminology for this thing, right? But that he was embodied within that experience of replaying every single moment of his life. But he had to experience it from the other person's point of view. And so, he got to see what it was like, not just to be himself, but to be the other person. And he was a bit of a bully, you know, when he was, he was growing up.

• 56:50Tom Bilyeu?

  This guy that was in Vietnam?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, this is the guy that was in Vietnam. He used to beat up other kids, he was kind of a big, tough kid, and then he went to Vietnam, and he actually shot people while he was there. And he said he had to experience what it was like to have that bullet come at him, from, let's say, that, his character, but from the point of view of the other person. He also had to experience what it was like to be shot. But more interesting than that was...

• 57:18Speaker 01

  He often saw the ripple effects of that across that person's extended family. Or if that person had a wife and had kids, what was the effect that that person being dead had on them? And, you know, what people who've had a life review report is that they come back with a completely different sense of purpose in their lives, but they also report that where they were was so familiar to them, it was more real than this feels real. Like, once they come back, they say, this doesn't feel that real. And to me, that just reminds me so much of like, when you play, let's say, a professional football team plays a game, what do they do afterwards?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  They watch, you know, the replay and they say, oh, you shouldn't have done that, quarterback, you shouldn't have done that. And what he said was, he realized that his behavior was causing certain things to happen, bad things to other people, and he decided to change his behavior. And he's not the only one who's had this experience, but to me, I started to take it more seriously, and in fact, this, this whole idea of being in a virtual reality or a simulation, I started taking it more seriously when VR started to become a thing and I put on a virtual reality headset. And I've told this story many times online, but for those that haven't heard it, this was back in like 2016, so VR headsets were big and bulky. We didn't even have the Meta Quest yet.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  It was still, you know, wired headsets, basically. And so I was in this room, maybe about the size of this room, the wires were coming down from the headset, I put it on and I started to play this ping pong game. And after a while, it started to fool my body into thinking that this was a real game of table tennis, right? So much so, and it wasn't the graphics. I mean, if you look at the graphics that were used back then, they were terrible. So, but it was clearly something about it, it was the physics engine. It was the responsiveness of the game to my commands, so much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table and of course, the VR controller fell to the floor. And of course, I, I knew I wasn't, you know, playing a real game of table tennis, how could I not? We had what we called the

• 59:27Speaker 01

  On your face back then and even now, you know, whether it's the Apple Vision Pro or it's the other medicals, we're still dealing with big form factors. But it was then that I began to consider how long would it take us to build something with rules that are so realistic and that the world looks so realistic that we wouldn't be able to actually distinguish between a physical universe and a material universe. And then at the same time, there was a startup in Silicon Valley that was able to take a gameplay session of a game like, I think we had World of Warcraft, League of Legends was another one, a popular esports game, and particularly Counter-Strike Global Offensive. And so that's a first-person shooter, I mean,

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  set in like a, you know, place like Iraq or someplace, let's say. And in that, you know, you're shooting people. But we could go back and replay that entire game from any XYZ coordinate. And so literally, we could see what it was like to be shot by our character if we wanted to. But with the VR headset, it felt like you were on the, you know, the actual League of Legends playing field. You look around, you're not looking down on it like many games do. You could have that first-person point of view. And that started me thinking, you know, is that what's really going on here? So not only would we be able to create a world that's indistinguishable,

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  could we also step outside that world and replay what's happened and then use that to actually learn from our mistakes so that we might actually change our behavior? And that's when I started to dig into the world's religious texts and realized, oh, you know, they were all saying something very similar, but they were using different metaphors. I mean, what's the essence of the golden rule in Christianity? Do unto others as, you know, you'd like to have done unto you. Well, how would you understand what it feels like to be those others? If you're able to replay those, that gives you a sense. And in the Quran, which is, you know, a little more recent than, say, the Bible, the Old or the New Testament,

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  they get very explicit by saying that there are these angels that are writing down everything that you do, all your good deeds and your bad deeds. You've probably seen like, you know, little cartoons with the angel and the djinn, or the demon that's sitting on your left shoulder and your right shoulder. And so they use a metaphor of a book. And they say that the scroll of deeds contains all of your, everything that you've done, but also the impact of your actions. So it's not just what you did, but what happened because of that. And even though we simplify the religious traditions to say, okay, you know, you did a bunch of good things, did a bad things, you're gonna go to heaven or hell. When you really look at it, like even in the Quran, which is, you know, very much in that Abrahamic tradition,

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  it says, "Your own book will be open to you on the day of judgment, and you yourself are sufficient to be the reckoner." Meaning you judge yourself. And that's exactly what's reported by these near-death experiencers, that, you know, they said, "Oh, I shouldn't have done that." It wasn't like, okay, you're going to hell, you're going to heaven because of this. It was more, "Oh, I see now the pain that I caused." And the more people that I've met, like I remember recently, meeting somebody who had a life review and they said, they said something to their mother, they didn't think anything of it because, or their aunt, they were supposed to meet, meet her, but, and she, she had a garden and somehow as a, as a little girl, she just ran across the garden and then ruined it.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Or I forget the exact story, but it was a case where she stepped into being her mother or her aunt. And then she understood, "Oh, this is why I shouldn't have done that." And, and so to me, that's yet another indication that what we're living is some kind of non-physical reality, but one that can be replayed. And, and how would that work? If we weren't in the simulation, it also indicates to me, there's a part of the game when you step outside of the game, that you can learn lessons from it. And I believe that all the religious texts of old used metaphors, they used technical metaphors. I mentioned earlier, that, you know, the soul coming in the body, nobody knows how that works.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  If you're trying to dig down on it, right? But, we can think of it almost as, as a metaphor of putting on a virtual reality headset, and there's, they all agree that there's a level of forgetfulness. So while we're here, we go into NPC mode often. We're not, we forget. But when we die, we remember, oh yeah, this is what I was gonna do. I was gonna be an entrepreneur, I was gonna be a writer, and I myself have had this personal experience. You know, when I had my health crisis, which was, I had heart surgery. Now, you can come up with the logical reasons why I had heart surgery, you know, you could say, oh, cholesterol, genetics, heart disease, you know, my, my father had heart disease, my, my mother was

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  diabetic, therefore, I got a double dose. And of course, you know, what I ate, all of these types of things. But what was interesting to me was during that experience, I had this strong sense, that I had already laid out my storyline, and that I wasn't getting to the second part of the storyline. Like, I was spending all my time on the first part of the storyline, which was being in Silicon Valley, because at that point, I was actually

• 1:04:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is, are you sort of, I know at one point, you said you'd sort of dip in and out of consciousness, this wasn't a near death experience?

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  It wasn't a near death experience in that, technically, I wasn't dead, and I don't remember what happened during the operation itself. But so this started to happen to me while I was recovering.

• 1:05:06Tom Bilyeu?

  In an awake state, or a sleep state?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Half awake, half asleep. It's like that hypnagogic state. Because I would just, you know, be, if you've ever seen, you know, heart surgery, it's about as much violence to the body, you know, as you can do, and may often have unintended side effects. But as I was recovering, and, you know, it took a long time to recover. And during that time, I would kind of go in and out of consciousness. I knew I'd be falling asleep, really. But it was in that, in that middle state that I remembered the most because you don't always remember your dreams. But it was during that time that I actually got a very concrete message during those visions of these other beings that were there to take care of me and help me resuscitate me back to health.

• 1:05:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You could see them?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  I could, I could see them in my mind's eye. I mean, they weren't physical because...

• 1:06:00Tom Bilyeu?

  So you had a sense of, I know they're not physically here with me in the room.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Right, they're somewhere else, right?

• 1:06:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  I'm sort of dipping in and out, right? So imagine if you were in a VR headset, you took the headset partly off. You, you could see what's going on here and you could see what's going on there. And then you can get fully immersed here, or you can be, you know, fully out of the game. It was...

• 1:06:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, out of curiosity, as that is happening,

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Tom Bilyeu?

  why does your hypothesis become, uh, this is tied to sort of being half in, half out of the simulation, that there are beings that look over us versus your mind's making up a story that's somewhat dreamlike?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Uh, it, it certainly could be that. And, and I think that's the conventional explanation for even near-death experiences, right? That it has to do with chemicals and neurons firing. Except that what you get are very coherent instances of people. I mean, you can talk to nurses. That's interesting. If you talk to doctors who take a very materialist perspective, they'll say, "Oh yeah, you know, there's no such thing, you know, it's all material." But then you talk to nurses and they'll tell you stories all the time and they'll say, "Yeah, you know, this person, while they were under surgery remembers," you know, they describe a guy coming. Somebody told me this last week, you know, there was a guy who was only, who only came in for like, a second to check some, uh, measurement on some device and left, you know, while they were completely unconscious. And yet

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  they were able to not just tell me about them, they were able to describe the clothes they were wearing. Uh, in other cases, you have people who are describing things that were happening outside of the room with their relatives, uh, or that so-and-so, you know, was on a plane. There are all these coherent things that come out of it that can't be explained in a purely materialistic world. And so, that's where, you know, since I didn't have a near-death experience, I don't go that far, but I, I almost consider that I was having these, uh, subjective little simulations or dreams, if you will, in the sense that the beings that I saw weren't necessarily...

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Physical beings, but they kind of were guiding me and telling me, okay, do you remember now? Do you remember this was your storyline? These are the different paths that you could take. Almost like a chessboard was laid out and they said, here's the different choices you could have made in your life and this is what you're doing now. You were supposed to, you said you were gonna do this. Kind of as if I had planned with them to do this. Now, this is a subjective experience. I'm the first person to say that and that's my interpretation of that experience. But to me, it kind of indicated that there are, that there are quests, there are challenges. And sometimes we signed up for those.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  And so I've chosen to give a meaning to that that actually aligns well with simulation theory. And that's when I started to write this book because I found that it was one way that we could bring the materialist paradigm and the non-materialist paradigm closer together. When I feel like, you know, it's been kind of going further and further apart.

• 1:09:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Assuming all of that is accurate, have you hypothesized as to why? Like if we're in a simulation and there are lessons that we're supposed to learn and that at the end we go through a review, presumably you teach somebody something that they're about to use. Is it reincarnation? Is it moving to another simulation but with similar rule sets? Like, do you have a hypothesis about why that would be true?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my hypothesis is that we, there's not just a life review, there's also a life preview. When we're choosing our characters and we're choosing our particular challenges and difficulty levels that we're going to achieve and maybe some of the choices that we might have to make. We're still free to make those choices, but we choose that. So there's a life preview that's more like a character selection and then a life review. And I think the two are kind of tied together, right? And we're working on different aspects of ourselves. So in a sense, I think of it almost as a cosmic self-improvement program in a sense. That you go into a game and you try to learn the rules of the game, but...

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  You're measured based upon, you know, how you did after the game. And so, you know, one way to approach it is to say the game is totally random. Everything is random. Another way to approach it is to say it's grand theft auto. Or, you know, the game is I'm gonna get as much as I can, right? But what people who've had these experiences tell us, and the mystics of old, whether it's in the Western religions or the Eastern traditions, they tell us that the way we're measured is very much about how we treat other people. So I know it sounds really simple, but if that's the point of the life review, that's the point of the game at the end is, you know, one, how did you treat others and how did you affect them? And two, you were here to work on your arrogance. You were here to work on, you know.

• 1:11:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do you think we forget then? So if we've got these big lessons to learn, we do the review, all of that. Why make me learn the lesson and then wipe my memory before I go into the next round?

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  That's a good question, and I think that's one that has, you know, many, many scholars and mystics have weighed in on over the years. And the forgetfulness is something that's very common in different traditions. So it's not just in the religious traditions, even if you go back to the Greek, not just in the modern religious tradition, but if you go back to the Greeks, they have this river called Lethae. And when you cross it, you know, it's called the river of forgetfulness. And when you go back to incarnate, you go back almost to start fresh, to try to relive that life or to go in and do an incarnation. So it's almost if you knew everything that you were going to do, you didn't have to choose. So I view it more like, you know, the old saying,

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  tell me something and I'll forget. Show me something I might remember, but if I have to do it myself, then I really understand. So as a teacher and an instructor, you know, I know the value of making students actually do things, right? One of the things that we've talked about a lot in academia today is, you know, should students use ChatGPT all the time? It was a big issue when it first came out, because a lot of universities were. Like, okay, using ChatGPT is not really learning, right? You're just getting it to do it. We're getting to the point where now we have to adapt our strategies so that is having ChatGPT review,

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  you know, all the pros and cons of an argument and then you perhaps using that information to come up with a reasoning against those. The process of doing that is the process of learning. So I think we would learn better,

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  you know, when we've forgotten some of that stuff, especially if you play the game more than once. Okay, so in a reincarnational world now, if you're like stuck on all the bad things that happened last time, you're not really kind of embracing the game, right? So that it's not fully immersed. So it's a question of how immersive is the game? And and if you you remember that it's a game, then you're not fully immersed. You're not enjoying those quests in the same way that you might want to. That said, there are people who step outside the game and and, you know, there are many who who believe they remember, whether it's past lives or, you know, you've had documented instances from, say, the University of Virginia

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  in their Department of Perceptual Studies where in India, there was a woman that died in one village and then suddenly in another village,

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  a woman who was about that same age, but who was married and had kids, suddenly got all the memories of the woman that had died in the other village. And now she said she was this person or that person. And it was just a really weird coincidence that that would happen, but she had all the memories of that other person.

• 1:14:15Tom Bilyeu?

  The game allows for that kind of transfer, just not very often?

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think just not very often. And it may be because it's kind of like saying, here, take over my character, you know? Okay, why don't you take over my character? And then you have the memories of the other character that you may have been playing from before. So it's a big mystery, right?

• 1:14:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that the memories that we have influence who we are?

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  I think the tendency, yeah, the memory, the tendencies that we have tend to live across gameplay sessions. And so, for example, in this life, you know, I, as I said, I knew I was going to be, or at least I, I thought I was going to be a software entrepreneur and then a writer. There was another part of me that wanted to be like a scholar or a teacher, but I never really pursued it. And, and again, that was something very unique to me that wasn't there, say, with my siblings who had very similar genetics and very similar upbringing.

• 1:15:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And you think that comes before the body, before the upbringing? That's an innate thing from the method by way, I mean, I assume you're taking an RPG standpoint, so whatever the soul is, the person outside that's plugging into the body and wearing it like clothes, you're saying those things are inherent to that person?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Either they're inherent to that person, or they've been chosen by that player as characteristics of the storyline.

• 1:15:46Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, guys, that's it for part one. Make sure you're following Impact Theory and leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It really does help us grow. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done.

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