New Physics Reveals the Truth Behind Simulation Theory & Life After Death | Rizwan Virk PT 2

Picking up where we left off, Part 2 of this fascinating episode with Rizwan Virk and Tom Bilyeu dives even deeper into the boundaries between science fiction and scientific reality. The discussion moves beyond simulation as a hypothesis and into the territories of time travel, alien intelligence, and the recurring patterns that mystics and religious traditions have long wrestled with. Rizwan opens up about the research behind his updated Simulation Hypothesis book, laying out how modern AI, quantum computing, and ancient spiritual wisdom might all be converging to update humanity’s operating system. Tom challenges Rizwan on the reliability of self-reported mystical experiences and probes the intersection where memory, psychological illusion, and technological overlap might reveal a deeper structure to reality. Together, they dissect why we may be “meant” to learn certain lessons, what meaning and purpose look like if we’re avatars with storylines, and how intuition and dreams might be signals from outside the “game.” SHOWNOTES 55:59 Simulation Saves, Replays, and Alternate Histories 01:10:56 Can We Access the Rules? Acting on Patterns, Glitches, and Branches 01:13:13 Ethical Frameworks: Commandments, Karma, and Replay of Deeds 01:14:34 Mystical Practice, Yogic Breathing, and Altered States 01:15:48 Enjoying (and Suffering) Through the Rules of the Game 01:16:28 How To Play The Game Well: Purpose, Challenges, and Self-Discovery Pre-order Rizwan's Upcoming Book, "The Simulation Hypothesis":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 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 https://butcherbox.com/impact Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at ⁠https://monarchmoney.com⁠ https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! CashApp: Download Cash App Today:⁠ https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl⁠ 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 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 https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Jerry: Stop needlessly overpaying for car insurance - download the Jerry app or head to ⁠https://jerry.ai/impact⁠ 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?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. I'm Tom Bilyeu, and this is Impact Theory. Listen up, because what we're talking about today is going to change everything. This is part two of my incredible conversation. If you're just tuning in now, go back and listen to part one. I highly recommend that you start there and then join us here. So without further ado, let's get right back into the action. One thing I want to try to map is, okay, so we're both speculating like mad.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure, for sure, I don't know that the things that I'm saying are true. I assume you have a same sense of like, well, I'm mapping it like this. But do you have a, what is the, what is the thing that you see that you're trying to connect the dots of? So like by saying, like, have you seen in your own life, like, I really feel like an old soul. I feel like I had to have been here before. I hear all these people with near-death experiences and like, they're clearly referencing another realm. And I'm trying to bring all these together in a modern technological context. And like, here's what I've come up with? Or is there something else that you're mapping?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, so what I'm mapping is.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Experiences that people have had with near-death experiences in the modern world and other weird phenomenon like whether it's reincarnation or it's transfer of consciousness or memories of other lives with also what the ancient mystics have been telling us that that this world is Maya or illusion. And so, again, they had to come up with metaphors for what does this mean? And there was a yogi from India named Swami Yogananda who came over to the US back in the 1920s and he became one of the first Indian yogis to really spend time here in the US. He wrote a book called Autobiography of the Yogi, which was like Steve Jobs' favorite book. And, you know, he gave it out at his funeral.

• 2:58Tom Bilyeu?

  What was his big insight?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  He was given a message that the world is like a movie or a film projector. And so, he was reinterpreting the ancient ideas of Maya and illusion. And his insight was that the characters are dying, but the actors are still there outside of the game and that the world itself is made of light and shadow, that it's not substantial and that-

• 3:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Sounds very much like Plato's cave.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  It is very much like Plato's cave. So if you think of the different metaphors, whether it's Plato's cave, whether it's the world is a dream as in Buddhism, I mean, literally the word Buddha means to awaken. What is it you're awakening from? The concept of Maya or lila in the Hindu traditions, the concept of the illusion in, say, the Islamic traditions or the here and the hereafter within, say, the Judeo-Christian traditions. Each of them are using different metaphors, right? And Shakespeare used the metaphor of all the world's a stage and the men and women are merely players in it. That idea of play is one that has persisted over time. And so, Yogananda used the latest technology,

• 4:11Speaker 01

  which was the film projector. In the 1920s, that was new, right? That was a new way to understand. Now, he didn't literally mean there's a big projector that's projecting onto a- Screen, but he said it's like that. And I think that's where we are today. When we say video game, we're talking about what we know of as video games. So we're using that as a way to describe something that is very complex. And it's difficult for us to get our heads around that idea. And in the same way that before there was a massively multiplayer, there were massively multiplayer online role playing games. You know, we would use other metaphors at the time. So there may be new metaphors that come up in the future.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  But this is where I'm trying to tie the idea that the world is made of information with this idea that the world is some kind of a hoax or illusion where players are kind of choosing to get in. And when they get in, then they forget, they experience it, and then they come out, and then they review the game. There's an old story in the Hindu traditions of Sushila and Narada. I don't know if you've ever heard this story. And so let's say Narada is this proud warrior. And he goes to the god Vishnu. Remember, in that tradition, the world is the dream of Vishnu. But he says to the god Vishnu, I want to understand what illusion is, what Maya is.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And he says, well, I can't tell you what it is, but I'll show you. Sounds a lot like The Matrix, doesn't it? In fact, Morpheus is the Greek god of dreams. And so he says, here, step into this pool of water. So let's say this proud warrior steps into the pool of water. And suddenly, he's a little baby girl named Sushila. And he grows as a princess in this kingdom in ancient India. She grows up, you know, she ends up marrying a prince from a nearby kingdom. And then later, the two kingdoms go to war. Her husband goes to war with her father and her brother's kingdoms. They all die, and now she's really sad, obviously. Her whole family's been killed. Then she goes outside the village, and she sees a pool of water, and she steps in it.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  And then suddenly, she's back. She's no longer Sushila, she's the proud warrior Narada. And then the god Vishnu says, That is Maya, right? It was an element of forgetting, of immersing yourself in this character. And now you can step on. Now, that's just a metaphor. But I think our metaphors today have the ability to bridge this idea that information science is eating all the other sciences. And I think you and I would probably agree on that in that the physical sciences, in the end, they're coming down to how is information being processed? With this idea that there may be a consciousness or a part of ourselves that exists outside the physical world, and we don't necessarily agree on that part of it.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  But that, this idea of how does the information get rendered into something that appears real, that provides us with a way, a framework to think about that, I think.

• 7:21Tom Bilyeu?

  So if we're in a simulation, then I imagine there's a server and the server processes data in a certain way, and the software's been written in a certain way. And so if I'm an NPC, I run on AI logic, that AI logic follows a set of rules, even if probability is part of it. Do you want it to remain a mystery? Or do you feel like this is a knowable thing?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I feel like there are elements of it that are knowable. And they're knowable because of glitches that happen and things that don't seem to be able to be explained, you know, in a purely physical model of the universe. Even little things like, okay, have you heard the term synchronicity? Which was coined by Carl Jung, and he called it an a-causal connection between, you know, an internal thought and something that happens in the external world. And of course, in a modern techno-scientific world, we would dismiss that there's any connection between you thinking a thing and something happening in the real world. But the other day, I was just explaining this idea of a technological synchronicity.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  I was browsing the web, looking for a backpack, and there was a specific brand that somebody told me to look at. So I was looking at their website, and then I forgot that. And then later, I was on my iPhone, and suppose I was in Facebook or, I don't know, some social media, and there's an ad for that exact same backpack. And I said, oh, that's weird. I was thinking about this backpack. I had an intent for this backpack. And now I'm seeing an ad for that. Now, if you didn't know that about how technology works, if you didn't know there's a server that tracks your intents, that there's something called a cookie that whenever you have an intent.

• 8:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I was so nervous you were gonna be like, oh, my God, can you believe? And I was like, yes, very much so. As an advertiser, I can believe.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I was in the advertising business, so I know all about this for a while, where we advertise mobile games. And so the closer you can register somebody's intent, the more likely you are to make the sale. That's why Google has done so well as a company, because, you know, before that you were showed ads to everybody. And now, if you know somebody's searching for X, you can show them an ad for X. But if I didn't know that, it would look like it's just weird, mysterious, and it would be dismissed as that's just coincidence. There's no way. But in a technological universe, or rather, an information-based universe, suddenly, things that seem disconnected and are often attributed to pure chance might actually have some explanation or some intentionality behind it, which could be technological in nature.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  But if we don't acknowledge that the world is technological in nature, or that that information is stored somewhere, somewhere outside of the physical world, then they just become mysteries, or they just become dismissed.

• 9:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Why don't you take psychedelics?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Well, so it's funny, I was on a panel at a conference the other day. It was from psychedelics to synchronicity. And I said, why am I on this panel?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  You know, I've never taken psychedelics. That said, I have spent a lot of time with people that have taken psychedelics.

• 10:17Tom Bilyeu?

  But why haven't you?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't just because, one, they put you in an altered state of consciousness, which is okay, that part I don't mind. I've explored lots of altered states of consciousness, but usually through yogic breathing, you can do it through drumming, shamanic drumming.

• 10:34Tom Bilyeu?

  So you find the altered state useful? You just don't want to do it through drugs?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, just because all drugs have side effects. And I think this is something in a technologically deterministic world, we think all of our technologies. So I study science fiction. academically, so how does science fiction influence the world? And I think it influences in such a way that we're we're used to thinking of medicine and pharmacological approaches to everything as being infallible, right? So in Star Trek, when Dr. McCoy, or if I don't know if you're a Star Trek fan.

• 11:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Not really, but I know.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  In the original Star Trek, or Dr. Crusher in The Next Generation, you know, when they figure out how to how to how to cure something, you know, nobody ever has a side effect, right? That's not how it works.

• 11:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, if only.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  If only, right? But it's a science fiction version of medicine. And so there are bad trips, there are side effects. There are also reasons why medicines interact with each other in ways that we don't know about, right? Even now, we're having to use AI to try to figure out, because there are so many different pharmacological substances that could affect us. And, you know, psychedelics wasn't really a big thing when I was exploring these altered states of consciousness, sort of in between, let's say, the 60s and 70s. And now, where psychedelics are becoming more respectable. And there are a number of people, like this gentleman Danny Gohler, I don't know if you've heard of him.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  So what what he did was he was taking DMT, and he's taken it before, and he said he was shining a laser on the wall, like a laser, like a scanner from your grocery market. And he said he started to see what looked like little numbers and figures and script. In fact, he said it looked kind of like katakana, right? Which is what you have on your, you know, on your t-shirt there. But but it wasn't katakana, because that's Japanese. But he started to see, like, it was moving so fast, these little figures. And it was part of the structure of the physical world. And then he ran a hundred people through that.

• 12:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Always on DMT?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Always on specific versions of DMT. And I'm not familiar enough to know, you know, the different versions.

• 12:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think they would have seen that in 1998? Before The Matrix comes out?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  I don't think they would have seen it exactly that way, but they might have seen something because I've had people tell me on DMT. In fact, first time somebody told me this was after I had originally written about the simulation hypothesis. I was here in LA and I had Sean Stone, who was the son of Oliver Stone. And he said, oh yeah, I know it's a simulation. I said, okay, well, how do you know it's simulation? Like I've written a book on it. I think it's likely we're in a simulation, but I don't know 100%. And he said, well, because when you take DMT, you see the grid lines of the simulation. And it just looks as if you're kind of perceiving more. And I thought that that was pretty interesting as well. And so I started to take the idea seriously that perhaps we can open our perception and we can see more. That said, you know, I, for

• 13:32Speaker 01

  me, it's more an issue of pharmacological side effects, unpredictability, you know, I've had some health issues, so I've been on various medicines. I don't want to take any chances. Yeah.

• 13:43Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:24Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:09Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:51Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:04Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 16:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I think you and I have a different base assumption about self reporting. So I don't trust it in the least. I think humans are so fallible, most aggressively me. And so I walk away from that going, ah, it feels like there's a pretty easy explanation from just the aberrations of the human mind. Given the human mind is so similar from person to person, that of course, whenever a thing starts to go awry, it's going to have a similar reaction. It's not like when one person has hypoxia, they're going to feel like they're being shoved in a meat grinder. And then another person has hypoxia and they feel like they're floating on a cloud. Like the odds of it being that different seem low. So of course you would get patterns, at least that's my take.

• 16:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So when you look at self reporting, what is it that makes you go, oh, there's probably something here?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Well, for me, I think it's the similarity of the stories.

• 17:00Tom Bilyeu?

  You don't think that can be explained by our common biology?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Not necessarily. Like, I'm not saying it 100% can't be, right? But I don't think you necessarily would get, you know, such similarities. And, and there are times when, you know, people have stories from near-death experiences that go way back. Before, there was a term called near-death experience, right? And then later, it takes people to collect those stories. And so, I, I think, yes, it's possible that it's just random neurons firing that leads to random weird things. But again, that's not a really good explanation. That's still relying on weird, random things, right? Uh, or, as you start to see these patterns, I think they become,

• 17:46Speaker 01

  they become more interesting, uh, when it's across different populations and different cultures. Uh, so, you know, you can, you can look at near-death experiences in different places around the world, and you get similar. Now, you do get differences, right? It's like with DMT. You get enough similarity, but you also have differences. And which leads me to believe that they're also interpreting it, what they're seeing, which gets back to this idea that there's still an element of putting things together. It's just with near-death experiences, what is the, the interpretation? When is it occurring? It's occurring when they're dead, potentially. Uh, which leads me to believe that there is a part of, uh, of reality.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  There, there's a way to view things outside. I mean, you know, there's, there's cases of remote viewing, for example, which again, make no sense in a materialistic point of view. I've met Hal Poudoff, who ran Stanford Research Institute's Remote Viewing Program back in the seventies from the CIA. I mean, they had many, many instances where a remote viewer who knew nothing about what was going on, including an instance where, uh, there was, uh, uh, an airplane that had went down somewhere in Africa, and this guy, uh, I think it was Pat Price, one of the remote viewers who was really good at it. I think there's a spectrum. He was able to pinpoint within the continent of Africa. Now, if you look at the size of Africa... It's bigger than it is in a Mercator map, right?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  We think, oh, it's just as big as, you know, this part of Europe or whatever, but it's huge. He was able to pinpoint, you know, exactly where it was. And Jimmy Cargor said, that's, you know, would admit later, that's how they found this crashed plane out there. Uh, now you could say, well, that's just random coincidence. Well, yes, except certain people tend to get random coincidence more. Now, that can't be explained in the materialist model. So I think you have to look at the glitches, the outliers, the things that don't work. And say, well, what if there's a better model? Just like I was saying with the backpack example. What if there is something that ties this together? What would that look like? And then we can start to speculate about what that might be. Well, in games, we have a virtual camera.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And in remote viewing, they give them coordinates oftentimes, latitude, longitude coordinates. And you can just put the virtual camera anywhere. And if you're in the right state, if you're not locked into your avatar, you know, you can like pan around and see what's going on in this other part of the world as long as you have the coordinates. Uh, so I feel like we, we need to explore those and figure out if there is a, a techno scientific basis for it. But because we say, well, you can't do it a hundred percent of the time, therefore it's not real. Uh, then that's, I think, the materialistic paradigm that says, well, we have no mechanism for that. Therefore it's not real. And we take it the other way and say, well, you know, exceptions are how science gets expanded. Uh, you know, whether it's anomalies like Mercury's orbit, nobody could explain it until,

• 20:33Speaker 01

  uh, until they had to have a different model. Einstein's theory of general relativity was able to explain it. Or these crazy people would report rocks falling from the sky. And as scientists, we know that's ridiculous because there are no rocks in the sky. Turns out, science is incomplete. Guess what? Science is still pretty incomplete today. Uh, but when they looked at it with a different kind of lens and they said, okay, what if, you know, the earth is one planet and what if there's like, you know, these asteroids and meteorites and things? Then now we have a mechanism for how rocks could be falling from the sky. Whereas before we dismissed it because we didn't have the mechanism. And I'm saying we should look for the mechanism.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And the simulation hypothesis is a good way to frame how some of these things might happen. In my personal opinion, that's really why I wrote this book was to try to bring some of these weird things into all the findings. And the, my, the fact that my background, like, like yours now is in video games, uh, and in information science.

• 21:35Tom Bilyeu?

  If this is a simulation, do you think that it's just meant to simulate Earth? Or do you think that there are other planets with life? What do you think about the great big universe?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I think it would make sense that there are other planets with life as well. That said, you know, there's a game called No Man's Sky.

• 21:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, it's a great game.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people like it, some people say it's boring.

• 21:55Tom Bilyeu?

  When it came out, people slashed it for pretty just reasons. But over the whatever five or six years that it's been out. It's pretty impressive. They've done a nice job of like continuing to push and develop and all of that. But it's whatever two to the sixty-four power number of planets or something, just an ungodly number.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  It was an eighteen quintillion worlds, right? And now, if you didn't know, you know, two to the sixty-four is eighteen quintillion. That number wouldn't necessarily make any sense, but they, they obviously didn't design all those worlds. Right? They fill them in as needed.

• 22:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, rules based.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Rules based.

• 22:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Procedurally generated.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Procedural generation while, while you're there. But when those worlds are needed, they get rendered and then the player can go to those worlds. So at that point, you know, they're doing exactly what we talked about in the first part of this.

• 22:48Tom Bilyeu?

  But in that example, the player is the only observer. Do you think that there are other planets with observers on it? Or would we?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  There certainly could be, there's no reason why there shouldn't be more than one planet.

• 23:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it possible that we are being observed and that's the only reason that we're running?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  That's very possible.

• 23:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Like if we're in an NPC universe, are we the ant colony that the aliens are, happen to be coming by to check out right now? And so we're, we've got the processing power.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  There are people that believe that, right?

• 23:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you read The Three Body Problem?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I have read The Three Body Problem.

• 23:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Ah, man, such an interesting concept that you could have these like really tiny particles that we'd never see that could fly through our bodies because they're so small. Uh, but that can actually watch and record and listen.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, what was the term, what was the term they used for that?

• 23:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, man, I forget, yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Starts with a P, the, the particle.

• 23:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I'm gonna look it up.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  A single particle, yeah, if you have your laptop there.

• 23:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's see, let's see.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Now, you know, that, that's an interesting novel in many ways because it, it gets us into this question of alien life, also technological progress, right? The aliens wanted to stop our physics from developing so they could come and invade. So far, that's what it was. Not P starts the nest. So far was the single particle in another dimension that they're able to to send out. They also have the dark forest theory.

• 24:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  In the second novel.

• 24:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah. Don't make a peep.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Because if somebody knows you're there.

• 24:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  They're gonna shoot. Now, now you're into interstellar game theory, which is a fun area to think about.

• 24:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But do you think aliens are a thing or?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I don't see why they wouldn't be, right?

• 24:35Tom Bilyeu?

  But no evidence.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Well, I've talked to enough people in the government, and I don't know if we want to go down this rabbit hole.

• 24:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Whatever you've got, let's hear it. I mean, we're so deep and we live inside a video game that I think we can handle aliens.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Because now I'm in academia, and in academia, you know, people are looking at me and, you know, I'm getting my PhD at a later age. So I care a little less about, you know, the stigma associated with topics. They're like, you might not want to talk about UFOs and aliens so much. And I said, I just wrote a book that says the world isn't real.

• 25:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, A. And do they know what era we're in? Like?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Plus, I mean, aliens is not even, it's not even out of our current scientific understanding. We know there are planets. Like, if you go back, all the aliens are from Mars or Venus, right? If you go back to the 50s and 40s, because that was the general knowledge of the population. They didn't know anything beyond that. Now we happen to know there are other solar systems, and now we know for sure there are other planets. So there's no reason why there wouldn't be aliens in different parts of the galaxy. And in fact, if you were designing a massively multiplayer game, you know, you might have, you know, like different servers. And then you would see, you know, how these different empires might evolve over time and how they might interact with each other.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  That said, there is a phenomenon, the UFO phenomenon, that's been around since the 1930s and 40s. And you have reliable witnesses saying they saw metallic craft.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Engaging in uh or performing with performance characteristics in ways that we can't understand and that we can't duplicate. Now, I think that's almost a given if you investigate this. I I know for the general public, that's not a given, but actually for the general public, it probably is. But within say the techno scientific community, it's not a given. I think in the general public, people will generally admit that they've all seen weird things. I had a professor at a major university tell me, he talked about this subject. Nobody, you know, no, nobody said anything personal. And then afterwards, people would come up to him, other professors and say, oh, you know, I saw this weird metallic object. Moving silently across the screen or not the screen. Now we're back in the simulation, right? Across the screen.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I've talked to people who've been in these government programs and they're telling us our pilots are seeing things that we can't explain and they're not China and they're not Russia. And you could say, well, is it a Lockheed Martin skunk works? You know, secret thing. And then you talk to people who worked in these aerospace companies and say, and they'll tell you that they had samples of stuff that came from somewhere else and they didn't know where. And they're trying to reproduce it. And so it's very possible we could reproduce some of this behavior today. Uh, there's a guy named Lou Elizondo, who used to be in charge of the Pentagon's uh UFO program that Harry Reid, Senator Harry Reid actually got twenty two million dollars for back in the day.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  And they came up with what they called the five observables. It's like, uh, let's see if I can get this right. Instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, uh, no visible means of propulsion, transmedia, right? All these characteristics that we don't know how to do with our aerospace technology. So somebody, whether it's uh, you know, a secret government lab, it's maybe a breakaway human civilization. It's maybe a civilization that's been on earth that is hidden. There's something called the Silurian hypothesis. Have you ever heard of that word? So science fiction fans might know that term. It comes from Doctor Who. And in in Doctor Who, there's this reptilian race that's been like underground for millions of years, for example.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Uh, so the bottom line is there's a phenomenon and we don't know what it is. Now, this gets back to how science fiction influences how we think about things. Uh, when you say UFOs, people conflate that with aliens.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Could be aliens, could be something else.

• 28:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say, what do you mean? What else could it be?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Could be time travelers, right? There's a, there's a guy.

• 28:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go. So now we're into time travel. So, you think time travel is possible? Or it's just skipping around the simulation essentially?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think in the simulation, you can make it possible. If you're inside a simulation, I think in a physical material universe where time goes one way, it's impossible, right? But I, I think, I mean, there are closed time like curves and that, that are allowed uh, within uh, Einsteinian physics that might allow you to be able to repeat certain things. There's obviously time dilation.

• 29:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I never thought about time travel in the simulation.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  In the simulation, time travel would be a sense of going back and being able to rerun a portion, but to inject other avatars or NPCs into that, that part. I mean, you can, you can stop a simulation. You can save it. You can run it forward. Uh, so now we're totally in, in, in science fiction territory at this point. Uh, one of the first guys to talk about this idea that we're in a simulation in modern times, I mean, obviously the idea's been around in various forms forever was Philip K. Dick, you know, who wrote the, the books behind Blade Runner, Minority Report, uh, you know, Man in the High Castle. And he said all the way back in nineteen seventy seven, in a speech at a science fiction convention

• 29:58Speaker 01

  uh, in Metz, France. We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in our reality. And so, you know, he, he kind of believed that you could go back and change things and rerun parts of the simulation, which in an NPC simulation, you could do that, right? And when you run a simulation, you never run it once, just once. You always run it more than once. Why? Because you want to see what would happen. And so this gets back to this broader idea uh, that perhaps we are on a branch of a simulation that's running to see where we will end up.

• 30:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:48Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. When you talk about an RPG one, I think immediately, I'm at like a theme park or the void or whatever. And this is a game and I'm logging in to do the thing. And in that case, it's not experimental. So I'm not looking for a given outcome. I've just set up a game and this we're like the Sims.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  And I want to just play the game.

• 32:11Tom Bilyeu?

  If it's an NPC universe, then I get that you could just be running it to see what happens. Like you said before, is this the world where they blow themselves up? Or the world where they reach interstellar travel? Can't wait to find out.

• 32:24Tom Bilyeu?

  But yeah, it seems like that the rerunning assumes that we're in an NPC version.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  I think that, yeah, the rerunning tends to lean towards this idea. But now if you combine this with this idea in quantum physics that we talked about earlier, that was just so weird, the delayed choice experiment. And Schrodinger saying there is one of multiple simultaneous histories. Perhaps while we're playing, we're able to perceive, you know, a particular history. But that doesn't mean there wasn't another history that might have been run in another run of that simulation. And so it may be that we play the game multiple times. It may be that we can choose different paths to bring it in.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So there is an area where it overlaps, but yes, I agree with you in that that tends to lean more towards an NPCC type of simulation. And the video game, a single video game at a time. But you can save the state, you can change the variables and you can rerun the state. And that could be the past, getting back to the Crofts example, right? Both of these things could have happened and maybe it actually explored what would have happened if this happens. And it might have explored what would have happened if that happened. Just like in the chess board, if I make a move, I can explore. You know, I can, I can simulate what might happen, but then I come back to the present and I play the game forward. Maybe I can do the same thing with the past.

• 33:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you working on a new book?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Uh, well, so, uh, you know, the simulation hypothesis is coming out, the new, the second edition. Yeah, it's a, tell the new version because we didn't have a lot of AI. It was mostly speculation about AI when I wrote it originally. Uh, and so, you know, in July of this year, 2025, the simulation hypothesis V2, uh, being a software guy, think of it that way. Um, comes out with a lot more about virtual reality developments, uh, about Boston simulation hypothesis, which, you know, we haven't talked that much about his argument. Uh, but, but it's out there and then I'm also looking at perhaps doing another book in the future, which will combine a little more of the religious and mystical element with the simulation hypothesis.

• 34:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And what, what do you think is going on there? Is it religions are people grappling with the simulation and they just don't have the metaphorical language? Or are they actually in touch with whatever is creating the simulation? How do you see that?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I think that whether it's religious mystics, and so religions get formed in a couple of ways primarily. I have a friend who calls it, you know, observation or insight. And there's something called a theophany. And a theophany is when something intervenes in the physical world. And somebody sees-

• 35:17Tom Bilyeu?

  God grabs you.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  God grabs you, or in the case of Islam, the angel Gabriel grabbed, you know, the Prophet Muhammad when he was asleep in the cave and said, "Here, listen to this." Or something happens, right? The other way is you have mystics and yogis who are out trying to find insights. Whether it's the Buddha, you know, meditating under the Bodhi tree, or you've got Milarepa, Tibet's most famous yogi, you know, they're going through and trying to perceive what's, what's out there. And if there's a part of them that maybe is outside the physical world, in either case, somehow there's an awareness that something from outside the physical world that we can't normally see or perceive is able to be acknowledged or understood.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And now they have to explain that to people. So this Plato's cave again, so if you, if you read the full allegory of the cave, not only does the guy break his chains, he leaves the cave. Everybody else is still in the cave, looking at the shadows on the wall. What's the first thing that happens to him? He's blinded by light, because there's, there's the sun out there. So the first thing that happens is he can't really figure out what's going on. Second thing is he eventually, you know, gets used to the light, explores the world outside and comes back in and tries to tell people, "Hey, there's a whole world out there." And you know what they do, the people in the cave? They say, "No, that's ridiculous, you know, there's no world out there."

• 36:39Tom Bilyeu?

  That is for sure what would happen.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Exactly, and that is pretty much what happens often at the beginning of most religions, right? Whatever religious paradigm came before is the orthodoxy that, you know, tends to prevail for a while while the new one catches on, but-

• 36:57Speaker 01

  So they use technological metaphors, you know, the Buddha's wheel, which is the wheel of samsara or wandering where you go through multiple lives. Now, they couldn't say back then, "Oh, it's like a video game and you're playing a character and then that character's life ends and then you choose another character, but you're at a higher skill level or a higher difficulty level." They didn't have that terminology. Uh, or they couldn't talk about quantum mechanics. So that, you know, they say things like,

• 37:24Speaker 01

  "All that we are, we create with our thoughts."

• 37:28Speaker 01

  And that's a description, but it's not a real description. I think today, as science and technology advances, we can come up with better descriptions that might describe what's actually going on there. They couldn't say it's a, uh, you know, it's a quantum computer and superposition. They can just say, "All possible paths have been explored." And so they use metaphors. And so my goal is, can we take the metaphors of old? And using simulation theory, some people say simulation theory is a religion for atheists, right?

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Because it provides them an out to say, "Okay, this world isn't, isn't the whole thing, that there's something else beyond this world," which is the basic principle of most religions.

• 38:10Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. So I, I don't believe in God, but I never refer to myself as an atheist. Um, and in no way does thinking of the simulation give me a religious experience. That's interesting. It just feels like you move the miracle somewhere else.

• 38:28Tom Bilyeu?

  My relationship to that is there's clearly something that I don't understand. There is clearly, whatever a first mover would be, whatever forever is, like, I can't conceive of there was nothing and then instantly there is something. So, I mean, I am at a loss when I try to like terminate at what, what created this? Why does anything exist? You can go to, "Oh, bro, it's just a simulation." But then you're like, "Yeah, but where's the array? Where, where is the server sitting? Is it in a rack somewhere?"

• 39:02Speaker 01

  It's in the cloud, we like to say.

• 39:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So if it's in the cloud, if it's on a rack somewhere, like, then what's that world? So you're always gonna find yourself left with, and what's the thing?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Bigger questions.

• 39:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So, I don't know. I stand in awe before the natural world or the simulation, however you want to think about it. And that sort of provides the reverence, I guess, but,

• 39:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I wouldn't say that it it does a stand in. The simulation doesn't do a stand in for religion for me. The unknown, the sense of awe of wow, there's a thing I can't comprehend. Uh, but it doesn't have doctrine, it doesn't have ritual. And so those things can be very, very helpful. But honestly, I think because I grew up in a Judeo-Christian ethic. Like, I feel like, okay, I have grounded morals. Um, I can articulate them. I just can't say that I believe them because God told me to.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Right, and and that that makes sense. I I think there's different ways to look at it. And again, it gets back to the NPC versus RPG versions. Uh, this is why I think I'm one of the few people that really try to delve into what it would mean if it was this kind of a simulation. What would it mean if it was that kind of a simulation? And, you know, religion.

• 40:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Which do you hope it is?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  I I hope that it's more of the RPG.

• 40:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So you want to have a soul or a body or something that exists in the other plane just because it's more interesting? Or what does that give you?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  You know, I'd say it gives me a sense of meaning and purpose. Like, we all want a sense of meaning and purpose. And that is also the point.

• 40:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you wanna do the hard things here, learn, and then take it back out.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Right, and also do the things that I felt I was meant to do. And what does that mean?

• 40:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting, that's a strong one for you.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I feel that I was meant to do certain things while I was here. Uh, now, that meant to do.

• 41:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Why, why meant?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Because it it's difficult to explain because it it's more that I feel that there was a reason why I stumbled into, say, simulation theory, which was part of my plan, which was how do you bridge the gap between? People that are in a totally materialist point of view and people that are in, you know, a religious point of view. And I've spent time with people that are in all kinds of, into all kinds of weird things. And, and I realize at the beginning, there it's a, it's a common metaphor that we can use to try to describe reality. But it also has, you know, this ability to delve down into the rules and really get into the scientific side of things, if you will. But why do I feel

• 41:47Speaker 01

  that I was meant to? I mean, I think that's just the intuition. I mean, I'm a big believer in intuition, and I feel like different people in the same circumstances.

• 41:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we born with intuition?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I think intuition could be thought of as another interpretation of quantum mechanics. So there are, there are interpretations-

• 42:08Tom Bilyeu?

  As in, we're picking up on what the rules are?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  No, but there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that say that, um, uh, there are multiple possible futures, and they're sending us back information about what would happen if we did this, what would happen if we did that.

• 42:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And the way that that calculation comes back is as bodily intuition?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Bodily intuition, hunches, uh, sense of certainty, or sometimes it's just a visualization, uh, precognitive dreams. Okay, here's an area that, that science says, eh, that's just random shit, right? So this actually happened to me as an entrepreneur. So one day, uh, I'm working on my software startup, and one, one morning, I have this weird dream about this competitor of ours that I hadn't thought about in a long time. And he used to compete with our product. This is way back. Uh, and I was like, that's odd. I mean, I've never had a dream with this guy in there. It's not like, you know, one of a member of my family, somebody I'm in a relationship with. It was just, it, it's

• 43:13Speaker 01

  been over a year since I've even heard anything about this guy. And I've had zero dreams where this guy has appeared. I walk into the office.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And I get a call from IBM, which was our business partner at the time. Just like today, if you, you know, had an app in the App Store, you would have to be partnering with Apple or with Google or with Epic to be in their, their, their App Stores. And he says, oh, we're making a competitive product to your product. I just wanted to let you know, because we're a partner of yours before it happens. And I said, well, IBM is a huge company. How come I've never heard of this product before? And he goes, oh, do you remember that guy that used to be your competitor in the past? We bought his company about a year ago. And we're just going to announce the product they've been working on today. And I'm like, wait, I had the dream before I had the call, not after. So it wasn't a regurgitation of something that happened that day. Now, most dreams are not precognitive.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Most dreams are not in any way that meaningful, depending on who you talk to. But the fact that this happened before shows me there's something weird going on with time here. That I got the message about this guy before I got the call. And again, getting back to the backpack example, if you didn't know there was something else going on, you would just assume that's weird, it's magic. But if you know that there is some information somewhere that you can access, then that wouldn't be such a weird thing to believe at that point. But also in what they call the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. The future is sending us information and, and we're like, by observing,

• 44:47Speaker 01

  we're choosing not just the present, but we're also somehow pulling these in. And I believe this is, you know, people talk about manifestation, visualizing yourself successful, doing all these things. I believe the basis of that is visualizing these different futures. And maybe there are certain futures that are easier for us to visualize. Because we were, you know, we were meant to learn lesson X or learn to have lesson Y. But it may just be that we run the simulation forward and that that's just us remembering that we ran the simulation forward in the, in the present moment. So it's like a pre-visualization, if you will. You might visualize something just to see what might happen and then you actually go and you live it.

• 45:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So the simulation feels very purposeful to you. It's not like rules got set and then hey, let's just see what happens in the simulation. There's more of a, there's meaning behind it. It's, I mean, if I were to sort of visualize what I imagine you're imagining. There's a soul that needs lessons, could be more like a person or could be a true soul. They log into this experience, inhabit a body. There are things that they're meant to learn and discover and explore. And it's on a quantum computer of some kind. So we can run forward. You talked about time travels and maybe we can run them back. I'm not sure what advantage it would be to that, but

• 46:11Tom Bilyeu?

  that there's such a profound lesson to be learned and there's such a meaningful point to being in the simulation that we're able to do what most people who are not awake would assume to be magic.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, I have a strong preference for that version of simulation theory personally. At the same time, I acknowledge there could be an NPC version of the simulation running, but I don't view the two necessarily as mutually exclusive. And in fact, I think we all play roles in each other's stories. And so we may be running, we basically enter sort of NPC mode because we've sort of forgotten the specifics, but we remember kind of basic highlights of things. And these weird experiences happen along the way that are common human experiences. We just don't have a mechanism for them, so we dismiss them. And I believe that the simulation provides us with these things as clues

• 47:10Speaker 01

  to what the game might be like, you know? And that's what the glitches can often be. They can often get us to go in a certain direction or to try to achieve a certain thing or to try to not go a certain path. Because maybe we ran that path forward and said, what would happen if I did X? What would happen if I did Y? And they're very different, you know, different. Sort of outcomes of the game, kind of like in the choose your own adventure books from long ago. Where, you know, it says, turn to page fifty-eight if you do this, turn to page one hundred and seventy-two if you do that. There are still lines, you know, kind of like, I know behind you and behind me, there's this sort of geometrical shapes, if you think of each of those as

• 47:56Speaker 01

  a particular point of the universe in time, and all the matter in the universe is arranged a certain way. And then each of the times, you know, the lines go like this, it's like two branches. And you can explore the branches a little bit, and then as you play the game, you're actually defining your real path through the simulation.

• 48:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Which religion

• 48:21Tom Bilyeu?

  is most in tune with

• 48:26Tom Bilyeu?

  making the lessons of running the simulation accessible?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, this is sort of why I like to look at the religious side of this as well. Is I, I don't believe that any one religion by itself has the entire truth. It's like the old story of the, you know, the blind man and the elephant, right? Each of them are touching different parts of the elephant, one of says it's like a snake, you know, they're touching the trunk. One says it's like a house, they're touching the body. One says it's like, you know, a slender thing like the tail, one says it's like a tree, they're touching the legs. And I feel like each of the mystical doctrines that are behind the religions, right? Because the religions are a formalization for that culture in that point of time.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  And so they're going to speak not just in the language, but also in the culture of the time. And of course, each religion wants to say, okay, that, you know, we have to freeze it at this point in time, and that's it. Nobody can have those insights today. I mean, today, people are taking D M T. They're coming up with their own insights, they're doing the same kinds of things that people did back then. So I don't think any one religion has, has a monopoly on it, but I believe that If you look at the commonalities behind religions, that's where simulation theory, I think, is effective. It becomes a connective thread for some of the principles behind each of these religions. So if you think of the principle of the here and the hereafter, that is the basis of most

• 49:56Speaker 01

  religious thought, which is the physical world is not all there is. Then there's the ethical side, whether it's the Ten Commandments, whether it's the Golden Rule, whether it's karma in the eastern traditions, or whether it's the Scroll of Deeds, where you have to look at your deeds in Judgment Day within the Islamic world, or going to heaven or hell within the Christian traditions. All of those, maybe, are talking about some aspect of being inside a game and there being something outside of the game, but I don't believe any of them gets it right, because they have to put it in language and terminology for the people of the time.

• 50:36Tom Bilyeu?

  You don't think, though, something like yogic breathing, which you were talking about before, which can create very altered states of consciousness, meditative practices in general, whether yogic or not, you don't think that that does anything extra to make this stuff accessible, whether it's the intuition you were talking about?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't say that it doesn't do anything. I think that that does make it more accessible if your goal is to try to understand the nature of reality, right? Most of religion, most people who follow religion are just trying to go through their daily lives, and so the religion might find some guidelines for how to live those lives. So you have the physical rules of the simulation, there might be, you know, behavioral rules, which are not physical, like I said, grand theft auto and how you treat, or the movie Free Guy, if you've ever seen that movie.

• 51:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  With Ryan Reynolds where, you know, they were going running around the the city and they were just abusing the NPCs and then some of the NPCs realized, you know, by putting on the glasses, they could see the heads up display, they could see the additional information that the people who have players could see that they can't see. So yeah, I believe those things help. I mean, there are shamanic traditions that do that as well, that are not yogic per se, whether they do it through drugs, pharmacological substances, or through drumming. There are Sufi mystics who do dancing, rituals to get into an altered state. There's the whirling dervishes, for example. So I think you have the mystical tradition in across different

• 52:16Speaker 01

  religions tends to try to understand more than just how to behave. They try to understand what's really going on behind the scenes. But I think most people are just playing the game the way they were meant to, enjoying, and I put that in quotes because, you know, clearly, the world has a lot of suffering in it, right? There's a lot of challenging parts to the game, otherwise the game would not be any fun.

• 52:38Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So if religions are like the ultimate self-help book, and this is potentially a video game, be prescriptive for a second. What does playing the game well look like?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Let's assume for a second that the life review is real, okay? So if you know that you're gonna have to live what it's like to be the person that you are, you know, interacting with, are you gonna do something bad to that person? You might like steal their stuff, right? Or, you know, shoot them, whatever the case may be, or cheat them in a business deal. Let's use, you know, more modern example. Let's say you cheat somebody out of stock in a company. They had the idea with you, you were gonna do it together, you decided to do it yourself, you don't give them any stock. Okay. Now, if you knew you would have

• 53:33Speaker 01

  to experience what it was like to be the person that was cheated, would you cheat them as much? This is very common in the entertainment industry. This is why you have so many lawsuits against each other, right? Back and forth. I think there's a, on the one hand, it would change your behavior. On the, the, the second point, I think, is when bad things happen, rather than, you know, there's a old, uh, character from the seventies named Carlos Castaneda, who supposedly went to, uh, Mexico and learned a lot about peyote and a lot of drugs, and he wrote all these books that were, it was called The Godfather of the New Age Movement back in the seventies. And whether he was just on a lot of drugs, or he really did that, we don't know. Most people think he didn't, but there was a character in the

• 54:16Speaker 01

  book who says, "The ordinary person views everything as a blessing or a curse." You can view it as a challenge instead. And I think that, that, that is the way to think about it. When you have some difficulty, view that as a challenge. And perhaps your difficulty level has been raised, and it's trying to set you on a, on a different path. And then, three, think about the things that have always attracted you. Like, why do you want to be a game, game developer? I mean, is anybody else in your family building games or doing a podcast?

• 54:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Nope.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  What is it that makes you you? Think of that as part of your storyline. And I think when you think of it that way, uh, it, you live a more meaningful and purposeful life, rather than just a bunch of random interactions. And then you feel that you can influence things as well. We can argue whether you can or you can't, but at least you feel that way.

• 55:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Riz, this has been amazing. I find this topic so fascinating. Where can people follow along with you?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  So, they can go to my website, which is zenentrepreneur.com, which was the title of my very first book, uh, called Zen Entrepreneurship. Uh, they can follow me on Twitter at RizStanford, or X, I should say, uh, like the university, or on Instagram at RizCambridge, like the city where, where I was living when I set up the account. Uh, and they can get the books pretty much anywhere, but I would suggest people go to their local bookstores to, to get the books.

• 55:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go. Support the locals.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 55:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Well, thank you, man, for coming on. I really appreciate it. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 55:49Tom Bilyeu?

  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. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make.

• 56:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.