Do we live in a simulation? Today's guest claims there's powerful evidence that we live in a simulation. But why?

I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally, you know, with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this world. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries of what could be seen.

But is there really evidence that we.

Live in a simulation? Our reality is not actually physical like this table. It's actually a virtual reality.

Today's guest, Dr. Rizwan Ver, explains exactly why he thinks it's more likely than not that our whole existence is a mere manifestation of a master simulation taking place in the universe. Let's go. Thank you so much for coming on.

Absolutely great to be here.

We'll go through the book and take. Take everybody on a journey. First of all, I want to present you with the Keating Medal for impossible Imagination. There it goes, with a picture of Arthur C. Clarke. And he plays a role in this book. Minor role, but. But a role nonetheless.

And, of course, you've been to his house, unlike me. What was that experience like when you went there Were there monoliths, like this little over there.

There were a lot of pictures of monoliths. And there were, you know, pictures of him with David Prowse from Darth, who played Darth Vader. Pictures of Arthur C. Clarke with, you know, the moon landing astronauts. It was really interesting because they preserved his office. And generally speaking, it's not supposed to be open to the public, but any foreigner who goes there and slips a few rupees to the security guard will take you up. And, you know, he's got all of his books there. And, you know, plays a minor role in my book because it was during that visit when I was looking at.

Behind his desk, I saw many of my favorite books from when I was growing up, like 2001 A Space Odyssey 2010, Odyssey 2. And I saw all these different translations. And I had one of those moments that we sometimes have when we get inspired. And I had wanted to be a writer for a while, and I just had this intuition that it was time for me to get busy on the writing side, because I had been spending all my time in Silicon Valley, first as an entrepreneur, then later as an investor. And it was during that time that I wrote the article about why I think we live inside a video game. That led to this book.

Eventually I noticed in this book, reading it, that there was this connection between something that happened in my childhood, which might have had an impact on my career. And it was the video game adventure which featured a virtual world. But more than that, it featured the very first real Easter egg, as far as I understand it. So Easter egg being a hidden message, encoded, encrypted, which if you took this magic zero dimensional pixel and you transported it, left, left, right, right, up, down, side, side, back, back, signal, and up, you'd come to a secret chamber. And then if you move the joystick to just the right position, you would drop the pixel and you would enter this, this room where there'd be some flashing lights. I mean a room, it was a square with a dot. And the zero dimensional pixel unlocked this, this message which came from the designer, Warren Robinette. And it said, created by Warren Robinette.

That's basically it for 1981 or whatever I was. It was amazing that I had unleashed and unlocked the evidence. Proof positive that living in a simulation. Tell me why you think that we are of greater odds than not that we live in a simulation.

Well, if you think of the simulation hypothesis, and I think we share a history there in terms of having played video games on the Atari computer, which is where adventure was. But before that there were text adventure games. And I became intrigued by this idea that there was a whole world inside the computer. And originally with the text adventures, we were visualizing it in our heads. But then with graphic adventures, we were suddenly able to see this. But I always wondered what was beyond the boundaries of what could be seen. So, for example, there was a racing game called Pole Position. And I used to wonder, well, what's beyond the racetrack? You'd see a mountain that looks like Mount Fuji, or you'd see some bleachers with some fake people.

I mean, they weren't really people, they were like a few pixels, right? But I'd always wonder what was beyond the mountain, what happens to those people when I'm not logged in, et cetera. And so that kind of inspired me later, when I became a video game designer, to really start thinking about this. So the simulation hypothesis, if you were to define it, I like to say it's the idea that our reality is not actually physical, like this table. It's actually a virtual reality like that depicted in the film the Matrix. But I also like to think of it as a series of propositions. And you can agree with some of those propositions, but I think they kind of follow logically, one to the other. So the first is that the world is not actually physical, but that it consists of information or bits of information. The second is that that information is getting computed all the time.