MIT scientist: Elon Musk was right, we are almost certainly in a simulation

Shaan Puri (0:00)

All right, Sam is away today, and when the cat's away, the mice will play. So I get to indulge in some of my favorite rabbit holes I go down.

Our guest today is both an entrepreneur, you've built and sold multiple companies in the video gaming space, which kind of led you down the pathway of trying to think through, are we living in a simulation? So let's start there. What is the theory? And then how you kind of stumbled into believing this?

Rizwan Virk (0:32)

Yeah. So simulation theory is the idea that the world that we're living in, the physical world is not really physical at all. That in fact, we are inside of some type of virtual reality or a computer program. I like to say we're inside a massively multiplayer video game.

The most popular pop culture reference really is the Matrix. Neo Keanu Reeves starts off at the beginning going to work at a computer software company called Metacortex and he thinks it's a real world, and he thinks he has a real job, and it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate virtual reality of the year 1999, which is of course when the Matrix came out. So that's a very quick overview. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (1:20)

I know it sounds obviously a little bit off the wall. I remember the first time I heard about it, Elon Musk was talking about it like a decade ago. And he says it in the very Elon matter of fact way, where he's like, if you look at the plot of video games, we go from Pong, which is like two lines and a dot on a screen, to where we have video games today. That's like a 30, 40 year period, which is like the blink of an eye in the time scale of Earth. So 30, 40 years, we go from two lines and a dot to like, Grand Theft Auto type of stuff.

And then he said, you know, obviously, any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization would want to create a simulation because it's way cheaper to find out how things are going to go in a simulation than it is to go test things in the real world. So there's a huge incentive. Clearly, if you could, you would build it. And so then there's a question of like, is this the real one and we're going to make a simulation later or did someone, you know, was there a real one and this is the simulation? And he, his conclusion was more than likely, this is the simulation and he just sort of said it, matter of fact, and then, you know, they changed topics and my mind was blown and you know, my brain is scattered on the wall and I'm trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about. I started thinking about it and you know, at the time, I would say this was pre-AI when he was talking about this, it sounded like, you know, kind of just nerd dream. I don't know, it didn't, you know, it was hard to really wrap your head around.

There wasn't a lot where you could sort of like squint your eyes and see it. Then, now let's fast forward, we have AI chatbots, AI voice, AI imagery. I mean, you can't tell if a video is real or fake anymore. Like we're already at that cusp, the Turing test of looking at a video, my mom can't tell if a video is real or fake at all, zero.

Rizwan Virk (3:07)

Yeah, I mean, is my background real or not at this point, right? Similarly, am I really talking to you or not? Actually, I'm not, I'm talking to my computer, which is transmitting the image and it's, you know, transmitting it to your computer and playing it out on your computer. But Elon said that back in the year 2016 at the Code Conference, and his conclusion was that the chances that we are in base reality, which would mean you're not in a simulation, is one in billions. So you flip that around and say, okay, what he was trying to say is the chances that we are in a simulation is billions to one.

Shaan Puri (3:43)

So what is the history of this? Like, where did he get it? Was this, is this a popular theory I just hadn't heard about? What's the kind of origin story?

Rizwan Virk (3:49)

Well, the origin story, what he was referring to is something called the simulation argument. Now, what happened was The Matrix came out in 1999

This wasn't the first representation of living in a virtual world, but it became the most talked about film of that year. Before that, you had Philip K. Dick, who's a well-known science fiction writer, he wrote the novels behind Blade Runner, Minority Report and the series The Man in the High Castle. In 1977 in Metz, France, he actually said, 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. Even he wasn't the first to really present this idea. In the year 1999, there was another film called The 13th Floor, which in some ways was a better representation of the simulation argument. Which I will come to in a second, which was put forth by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford. And that's really what Elon was referring to.