The Jordan Harbinger Show
1239: Rizwan Virk | The Real Mysteries of the Simulation Hypothesis
13 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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crime and cults and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what if reality isn't real? I don't mean that in a stoner dorm room like, whoa, dude.
Literally, what if the universe, you, me, this podcast, were just running on someone else's hardware? Today, we're talking with Rizwan Virk, MIT-trained computer scientist, venture capitalist, and author of The Simulation Hypothesis, about why the idea that we're living inside a computer simulation might not actually be as crazy as it sounds.
If this all makes you think of The Matrix or Star Trek or something like that, you're not alone. Those are exactly the kinds of sci-fi ideas that first got me thinking about this, and other people I would assume as well. But hey, this isn't just movie fuel.
Everyone from Elon Musk to Neil deGrasse Tyson has taken this hypothesis seriously enough to say, yeah, the odds might not be in favor of base reality. So today we'll unpack what simulation really means, and it's not just we're living in a video game.
We'll explore what the evidence says from physics and computing, how close we are to building our own simulated worlds, and whether deja vu, UFOs, or that weird Mandela effect might actually just be hints that our code is showing.
Virk argues that some of the most fundamental limits in physics, like the speed of light, quantum indeterminacy, could be features of a computational universe, not bugs. We'll also look at what it would take to prove or disprove any of this, and why the implications might matter for ethics, spirituality, how we live our lives day to day.
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Chapter 2: What is the simulation hypothesis and why is it taken seriously?
Quantum, whatever.
Yeah. In that version, we'd be running on some much more advanced computational system, which could be some type of a quantum computing system. There have been a number of physicists who are looking at the world as information now. So there's a whole branch of physics called digital physics.
Instead of looking at things like conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, you're looking at conservation of information. Does information get created or get destroyed? And some have even said that the world itself is basically a quantum computer, if you think about it.
And so that would be in, you know, whatever computational substrate is being used to run the simulation would have to be a lot more advanced than what we think of as computers today. That said, to your earlier point, when you play a video game, your avatar doesn't have to look exactly like you.
In fact, when we play a video game, oftentimes we'll choose a race like an elf or a dwarf or a human, and then we'll choose a profession like a wizard. or a thief, etc. And so in The Matrix, they wanted to use the same actors, obviously, right? They want to use Keanu Reeves inside and outside the simulation. So their avatars were what I call identimorphic. They look just like the player.
But in reality, even if this were a multiplayer video game or an NPC simulation, it's hard to say what the world outside of the simulation might look like and what we might look like.
outside of simulation I guess and we'll get to this but like whoever's running this it seems most likely to me and look I am no expert obviously my expertise comes from having read your book three days ago so here we go but it seems like wouldn't we just be likely to be the ancestors or the primitive race of whatever's simulating us right like are we just like the monkey in a cage version of the advanced society civilization race whatever that's right and they're like wow this is wow humans these early humans
who aren't in the year 10 million, are just ridiculous. They just look at porn online and play stupid things on a screen and they walk around and they buy food and they get fat. It's so dumb, right?
Yep, and they share cat videos.
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Chapter 3: How do fundamental limits in physics relate to the simulation hypothesis?
But then he said, here, you got to try this. So I put on a virtual reality helmet and we started to play a virtual ping pong game. And the game itself wasn't very realistic. The graphics were pretty crappy. This was back in 2016 or so. And the VR headset had wires coming from the ceiling, so it wasn't even wireless at that point. So there was no mistaking that I was inside a virtual reality.
But what happened was that the physics engine was so good that it really felt like I was hitting the ball with a paddle and I had to move it just right.
Chapter 4: What evidence suggests we might be living in a simulation?
And so much so that it made me forget just for an instant everything. that I was in virtual reality and not playing a real game of table tennis. And I tried to put the paddle down on the table and I tried to lean against the table. Oh, wow. Just like I might do, right, at the end of a game. But of course, the controller fell to the floor. I almost fell over.
And then I started to think, well, how long would it take us to get to that point where we could create these types of simulations? And that's why I laid out these 10 stages simulation points.
Chapter 5: How close are we to creating our own realistic simulations?
So that's what got me to go down this rabbit hole. Now, what Bostrom's simulation argument was, was that if anybody ever gets to that point, and he was more concerned with creating AI characters in these simulations, then they would create lots of simulations, not just one. And so there would be, let's say, a billion simulated worlds, and there's only one physical world.
And he said those simulations could likely be ancestor simulations.
Chapter 6: What ethical implications arise from the simulation hypothesis?
So they would create simulations of their ancestors to see how civilization might have evolved, maybe even to see how it might have evolved differently than it actually has. And so his point was that if that's possible, then let's say there's 999 million simulated worlds in 999 and one physical world. So he said the odds that you are in a simulation is basically billions to one. Right, right.
That's what Elon Musk was quoting, the video clip of him online.
Yeah, right. Because if there's a billion worlds and 999 million of them are... Or virtual. Or virtual. What are the odds that this is the one that's real?
Right, exactly.
Pretty much zero.
Yeah, pretty much zero. Now, I say that it's at least 50% because at that point, you can't tell the difference, right?
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Chapter 7: How do personal experiences influence our understanding of reality?
I mean, there's still the chances that you are in the physical world, but you can't tell the difference. So it's somewhere between 50. Now, that is if... those worlds can be created. Now it's possible no civilization ever creates those worlds. Why? Because maybe it's not possible, right?
Although with the rapid progress of AI today and the rapid, if you've seen some of these latest videos, there's just this week or last week, there's a company called World Labs and you could take a picture and it would basically create this navigable video of space where like a video game, you can kind of wander around.
In the photo. Yeah.
In the photo. Wow. So it's basically extrapolating using AI to create the world.
And this exists in 2025. So what are the odds if you add a zero to the end of the year? We're at the year 20,250. So like, I mean, you're just, what are the odds that they can't do something slightly better than that? I mean, look, maybe it's not slight, but the other thing is I've done a lot of shows about the brain.
I've just done a lot, a lot, a lot of shows about the brain with guys like David Eagleman. And it doesn't make me a brain scientist, but one of the things that they...
put across pretty clearly is your brain is just making sense of information that's being put inside it right so your eyes aren't seeing anything they're just your brain is creating the picture from photons that go into your eyes if you got rid of the brain you just took the information from the optic nerve it would just be a bunch of white dots on a black background for example right there's nothing else going on it's just data right it's just data
So your brain can really create an image based on anything. And that's why blind people can get electric signals through, say, their tongue and their brain will create a basic picture of it. And if you were blind from birth and you used a really advanced device, there's a really good chance you'd be able to navigate the world pretty much just as well. as somebody else who was born sighted.
I mean, look, the world is built for the equipment that all 8 billion of us have. So you'd be at a slight disadvantage, of course, but it's not impossible. So the idea that your brain has to have, we don't have to have graphics that are as good as reality. Your brain would just simply adapt to it. And eventually you would forget what reality looks like.
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Chapter 8: What role do glitches and anomalies play in the simulation theory?
So that's like way more than any human game design team, right?
I don't even know how to, like, my brain doesn't know how to deal with that kind of number.
Yeah, that number is just so huge that it's effectively infinite, right? And why 18 quintillion? Well, it turns out it's two to the power of 64. So it's like a memory limit on the current. Yeah, just in terms of how many worlds they want to keep track of. But now, I mean, you could say, okay, we're going to use 128 bits, which suddenly gives you two, not double the number, but two to the 128.
And these numbers are eventually get to the point where there's more worlds than there are physical particles in our universe as these numbers grow exponentially. And so effectively you can create what seems to be an infinite world, but it's not because the whole world is not rendered. Now, this is one of the key points that I try to make in the book.
And the simulation hypothesis, the subtitle is, an MIT computer scientist shows why AI, quantum physics, and Eastern mystics agree we're in a video game. Now, the quantum physics part of it is the whole observer effect, which most people have heard of.
Tell us anyway, because I think there's a lot of people who are washing dishes right now and they're like, I'm not going to access that part of my brain to remember what this is. I'm looking for the soap.
The easiest way to understand it is, I mean, it came from the double slit experiment where if light is a particle, it would go through either one of the slits or the other slit. Can't go through both, right? If it's a particle, you can just go through one of those. Another way to think about it is Schrodinger's cat, which was the thought experiment.
The dead cat that's also alive, depending on whether or not you open the box. Is that what it is?
Yeah. So there's a box with some poison in it. And after an hour, there's a 50% chance the cat is alive and a 50% chance the cat is dead because the poison might be released or not. And so common sense tells us the cat is either alive... Or it's dead. We just don't know because we haven't looked in the box.
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