Rizwan Virk

I'm forgetting her name now.

She was a journalism student in Chicago and she said she went to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela in prison and was told that he was too ill.

So she literally came back and then she started working for NPR.

And then she says, well, I remember him dying shortly after.

Now, if you just went to South Africa.

To interview Nelson Mandela and then you remember him dying, that's proximity and significance.

You're less likely to get it wrong than just some random guy who just thought Mandela died.

Or if you're a heavy-duty Christian and you're more likely to memorize certain passages from the Bible.

So, again, I dismissed it.

And then what happened was after I had written the simulation hypothesis about this idea that the whole world is computation, a friend of mine from MIT who was working at Google came to me and said, you know, hey, have you heard of the Mandela effect?

I was like, yeah, I heard about it.

But, you know, a bunch of people remembering, you know, different stuff.

Right.

No big deal.

He goes, well, the simulation hypothesis is one of the best explanations for this.

that the world is a simulation.

Now, I was surprised for two reasons.

One, most guys who work at MIT or Google, they tend to be very left-brained, right?

So the Mandela effect is not something that they generally pay attention to, or UFOs or any of this kind of weird stuff.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you're running a simulation...