#2151 - Rizwan Virk

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Oh, cool, you know her?

Rizwan Virk (0:15)

Yeah, I know her pretty well, actually.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Boy, her theories are very, very, very interesting.

She's a strange person to talk to, because you start, like, you start really considering some of the things she's saying. It's just all the UFO stuff. I go back and forth on the UFO stuff from it being complete bullshit to, like, maybe there's something there.

Rizwan Virk (0:35)

Right.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

I fluctuate throughout the day.

Rizwan Virk (0:38)

Well, we can talk about that. You know, I'm peripherally involved with-

Joe Rogan (0:40)

Jamie, you're making noise over there.

Shake my golf. Yeah. You're peripherally involved with-

Rizwan Virk (0:47)

The Galileo Project at Harvard and the Soul Foundation at Stanford, which are, like, the two academic UFO research groups that are out there. You know, Avi Loeb is running the one at Harvard and Gary Nolan is running it. You had Gary on your show, right?

Joe Rogan (0:59)

I have not, but I've been in communication with him. Talked to him quite a bit.

Rizwan Virk (1:03)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

I'm very fascinated by his work.

Rizwan Virk (1:05)

I'm happy to talk about UFO stuff, where it overlaps with simulation theory.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

So how did you get involved in this whole theory in the first place? Explain to people your position, if you don't mind, on simulation theory. What do you think is going on?

Rizwan Virk (1:21)

Yeah, well, so first question, how did I get involved in this, right? So, you know, I was a video game developer in Silicon Valley, and then I became an investor in the video game industry, my background's in computer science. And what happened was after I sold my last video game company back in 2016, so we're talking like, you know, seven years ago now, eight years ago now, and I put on a virtual reality headset and started playing a VR ping pong game, right? Now, these headsets were even bigger than they are now, and they were wired. So there's no mistaking you're in virtual reality. But what happened was that the ping pong game was so realistic that for a moment, my brain forgot that this wasn't a real game of table tennis, so much so that I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table. But of course, there was no table, so the controller fell to the floor, and I almost fell over. I had to do one of these double takes, like, oh, wait, I'm just in VR. So I started to think about how long would it take us to build something like The Matrix, something that's so immersive that you would forget, right, that you were inside a video game. And so that led me to this idea of the simulation point, which is a kind of technological singularity. But then I started to research things like quantum physics and some of the mysteries around, you know, the observer effect and quantum mechanics.

And then I started to look at all the world's religions, and I realized that they're all kind of saying the same thing, which is that there is no physical universe.

And so, you know, that led me to the conclusion that we are most likely inside some kind of a computer simulation or a massively multiplayer video game, depending on how you look at it.

Joe Rogan (3:01)

But what, where did that computer game, where did that simulation come from if we are inside of it?

Rizwan Virk (3:10)

Well, that's the big question, right? And there's two versions of simulation theory.

And I teach a class on this at Arizona State University. It's probably the first college level class about simulation theory. And it kind of pulls in science fiction, religion, philosophy and technology. But one of the key distinctions I tell my students to make, cause it's not talked about a lot with simulation theory, is what I call the NPC versus the RPG versions of simulation theory. So NPC, as you probably know, means non-player characters within video games. So those are the AIs in the video game. The bartenders, the people you're beating up, the opponents, all of that stuff. But basically, they're just code and they're AI. Then there's the RPG version, which is that we are actually doing a role playing game, right? So you exist outside the game, and then you have a character or avatar inside the game. So it's just like what we would consider an MMORPG today, except with more sophisticated technology. And so in that case, you get a little bit of a different answer than if you talk about an NPC-only type of simulation, right? Because that's just running on a computer, and we're all AI in that case. Now, the two aren't mutually exclusive, right? In a video game like Fortnite or whatever, World of Warcraft, you have NPCs and you have PCs or player characters, right? So you've got both of those things going on. And so depending on how you look at it, you might come to different answers about who's outside the simulation.