Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2151 - Rizwan Virk
Uploaded: 2024-05-16T17:00:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2151 - Rizwan Virk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-05-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2151 - Rizwan Virk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-05-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2151 - Rizwan Virk

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
By the way, Diana Pasoka says hi.
Oh, cool. You know her?
Yeah, I know her pretty well, actually.
Boy, her theories are very, very, very interesting.
Yeah.
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.
Right.
I fluctuate throughout the day.
Yeah.
Well, we can talk about that.
You know, I'm peripherally involved with it.
Jamie, you're making noise over there.
Show your mic off.
Yeah.
You're peripherally involved with it?
With 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 the
one.
You had Gary on your show, right?
I have not, but I've been in communication with him.
Okay.
I've talked to him quite a bit.
Yeah.
I'm very fascinated by his work.
I'm happy to talk about UFO stuff, where it overlaps with simulation theory.
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?
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.
All 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, right?
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.
But what, where did that computer game, where did that simulation come from if
we were inside of it?
Well, that's the big question, right?
And there's two versions of simulation theory.
And, you know, 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, because it's not
talked about a lot with simulation theory,
is what I call the NPC versus the RPG versions of simulation theory.
Okay.
Right?
So NPC, as you probably know, means, you know, non-player characters within
video games.
So those are the AIs in the video game, you know, 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, right?
Except with more sophisticated technology.
And so in that case, you know, 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, you know,
different answers about who's outside the simulation, which would answer the
question of who made the simulation, right?
Yeah.
So in the first case, you basically say that if we can get to the point where
we can build these simulations, what I call the simulation point.
So I call that a kind of technological singularity.
Now, we've heard the term singularity mostly because of, like, AI and super
intelligent AI, right?
And, you know, AI is going to take over the world.
But the guy who defined the term was actually a computer scientist who became a
science fiction writer named Werner Vingy.
In fact, he just passed away like a month ago or something.
He was a real pioneer in, like, science fiction and the cyberpunk kind of subgenre
or so.
And so he said the singularity happens when technology increases exponentially
to the point where everything will be different for humans after that point.
Now, he gave, like, four different ways we could reach the singularity.
Most of us talk about only one, which is AI starts to become super intelligent
and it grows exponentially and everything will be different.
But I think this idea of the simulation point where we can create simulations
that are indistinguishable from reality.
And I lay out, like, ten stages in my book of all the technology we would need,
including brain-computer interfaces, like in the Matrix, right?
Or Neuralink.
Or Neuralink, right.
We're getting there, right?
Yeah, we're very close.
We're at the beginning of that whole thing.
And so that's stage eight, stage seven and stage eight on the way to the
simulation point.
And, you know, being able to read but also then being able to write memories as
well.
And have, so the definition of the simulation point is being able to create a
virtual reality that is indistinguishable from physical reality with AI
characters that are indistinguishable from biological characters.
So, you know, you wouldn't be able to tell you're talking to an NPC, basically.
Right.
We're getting closer to that already, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, there's, like, companies out there doing smart NPCs now inside
video games.
Right, but what would be the difference between looking at what is possible in
the future and making either a hypothesis or suggesting that that has already
taken place?
Right.
So that's kind of the leap, right, that you need to make.
Right.
Which is to say that if we can do it, now let's imagine a civilization that was
a million years ahead of us, a thousand years ahead of us.
Yeah.
Even 200 years ahead of us.
Right.
Right.
But certainly a thousand years ahead of us.
So where will computers be in a thousand years?
They would already have created these types of simulations.
Right.
Right.
Because if we can do it, now, 50 years ago, we didn't know if we could do it.
We didn't know if computers could get to that point.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Today, we're pretty sure we can get there.
In fact, I'd say that I'm 70% sure that we will get to the simulation point,
which means I think there's a 70% chance we're living inside a simulation.
And so the point is, if they already got there, they created a whole bunch of
simulations.
Okay.
And you can't tell the difference whether you're in the real world or a
simulated world.
Right.
So there's 99 of these.
There's one of these.
But you can't tell the difference.
So which one are you more likely in?
Just statistically speaking now, we're not even, you know, projecting the
technology forward.
We're just saying it's more likely you're in one of the 99 than the one because
there's so many more of these, right?
Sort of.
If you can't tell the difference.
If you can't tell the difference.
But there's so many things you have to think about, right?
There's so many things you have to take into consideration.
One of them is we don't have a straight linear line from the moment that we're
born to the moment that we exist in currently.
The reason being is that we go to sleep every night.
Right.
It's a weird thing.
We shut off every night and we wake up intermittently and you go back to bed.
Maybe you have to pee.
Maybe you're thirsty.
You go back to bed and then you wake up again.
But when you wake up, you are just waking up.
Like when I woke up this morning, I don't know if this is the life I've always
lived.
Right.
I'm assuming it is because I have all these detailed memories of the past.
I see my dog, he reacts the exact same way he always does.
You know, I see my wife, I see my kids, I see my house.
It's the same house that I remember.
But I'm not sure.
I just woke up.
Right.
I'm a little foggy already.
It just exists in your memory.
It just exists in your memory.
This might be the first day of my life.
Right.
If, suppose that you can implant false memories, right?
Right.
So this was a popular topic for Philip K. Dick, right?
Yes.
Movies like Total Recall, even in Blade Runner.
You know, I interviewed his wife while I was researching, you know, my book.
He was a wild boy.
He was an interesting guy, right?
Yeah.
And he said some interesting things.
In fact, all the way back in 1977 in Metz, France at a sci-fi convention, he
said, and there's
a pretty famous quote.
He said, we are living in a computer programmed reality.
And the only clue we have to it is if some variable is changed, some alteration
occurs in our reality.
Right.
And that's become kind of a famous quote in the simulation world.
But if you listen to the rest of the quote, he says, well, we would basically
rerun the
same events and we would change some variables, right?
And we would have a sense of deja vu.
Like, maybe we've already done this, right?
Maybe I've, you know, talked to you before.
Right.
In a different run of the simulation, right?
And this idea, like after I wrote my first book on this topic, simulation
hypothesis, this
idea wouldn't leave me that, well, if you can run one simulation, you can
certainly run it
multiple times.
In fact, that's what we would do, right?
If we were running a simulation of the weather, we wouldn't just run it once.
We would run it multiple times.
And if we were doing a simulation of whatever, right?
Pandemic, anything, name it.
We would change the variables and we would go forward.
And so, you know, when I interviewed Tessa, you know, Phil K. Dick's last wife,
she said
that he came to believe this was really happening, right?
That someone was altering with our reality and they would change a few
variables and rerun
the simulation forward.
So now we're getting pretty deep in the rabbit hole.
So this is the topic of my second book, which is called The Simulated Multiverse.
This idea that each of these timelines could be like a different run of the
simulation itself.
So that gets a little weird at that point, right?
Because now we're saying that time isn't the same thing, right, that we think
it is.
So with the simulation hypothesis, we're saying that space doesn't really exist.
It basically gets rendered for us like a video game.
And then with this second idea, we're saying that time doesn't really exist
because what you remember could have been either implanted memories or it could
be a specific run 