Is it Possible that We are Living in a Simulation? Part 2 With Rizwan Virk
Interview with Rizwan Virk
In the second instalment of the ‘Smart Dust Investigates’ podcast series, we interview MIT Games Lab founder and author of the new book “The Simulated Multiverse” (and “The Simulation Hypothesis”), Rizwan Virk.
Want to explore the possibilities for XR to create an immersive virtual world? Tune into part 2.
Transcript
Douglas Nicol:
Hello, I’m Douglas Nicol.
Nick Abrahams:
And I’m Nick Abrahams.
Douglas Nicol:
And welcome to episode two in a new three-part special series from Smart Dust called Smart Dust Tech Mysteries, in which we investigate one of the most discussed and mind-bending topics amongst the tech industry, which is the simulation hypothesis that sets forward the proposition that our current existence that we know could in fact be an artificial simulation, such as a computer simulation. In essence, are we living in a sim? It’s a big topic, Nick, isn’t it?
Nick Abrahams:
It’s a massive topic. I got to say, Douglas, the response to episode one was really terrific and it got people really thinking. I must say, this whole Smart Dust Tech Mysteries format seems to have really hit its straps, so I’m delighted that that people are enjoying it and thank you very much for joining us on episode two, as we try to unpack the story as to whether or not we are living in some form of simulation. It’s massively challenging, the concept that we are trying to unpack is, is it possible of all that science and technology is actually delivering to us a convincing all-immersive simulated human experience.
Nick Abrahams:
In this episode, we meet Riz Virk, founder of MIT Play Labs and author of the sensational new book, The Simulated Multiverse. I think there’s very few people in the world who’ve looked in detail at this issue, as to whether we are living in a simulation, as Riz has. What we’re going to find out from Riz is really understand how close technology is, notably AR, VR and also XR, to creating this convincing simulated environment. As I think you’ll find, technology is taking us to this convincing environment sooner than you may think.
Douglas Nicol:
Rizwan, you are very welcome.
Rizwan Virk:
Thanks for having me on, great to be here with you guys.
Nick Abrahams:
Thanks, Riz, for joining us, and to the extent that this is actually Riz who we are speaking to and we’ll drop into the detail of that later on. But you’ve got an incredible career, computer scientist and video game designer, author, but a bunch of other things as well. Could you give us a little bit of a background as to how you ended up where you are, with wearing so many different hats?
Rizwan Virk:
Sure. Many years ago, I studied computer science at MIT and really was a programmer and started a few enterprise software companies, sold the last one to a division of EMC Documentum back in 2007 and ended up moving out to Silicon Valley. I decided that I wanted to do something more fun than big IT software inside very big organizations, and so I got involved in the video game industry. I became an investor and a founder of a few different video game companies, including the game Tap Fish, which was the number one grossing game in the Apple App Store when they first came out with in-app purchases. Of course today it’s a very big business, but back then it was pretty small.
Rizwan Virk:
We were in the process of raising venture capital financing for that company when a big Japanese public game company decided we’ll just buy you and we said, “Okay.” We sold the company and then I became an investor and an advisor to a lot of the different software technology startups, many in video games, including some that your audience might have heard of, like Discord, which even if your audience hasn’t heard of it, their kids probably have. It’s a very popular chat app that’s used in gaming and other applications. Telltale Games, which made games based on Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.
Rizwan Virk:
Then I went back to MIT and ran a startup accelerator at the MIT Game Lab for a couple of years, which was a lot of fun. Then during that time, I’ve been going back and forth between Silicon Valley and MIT. At that time, virtual reality and augmented reality were becoming a thing. One of the startups that I was an investor in was creating a virtual reality ping pong game. I went to their office, it was right across from San Francisco Bay. I put this big toaster-sized thing on my head, which was the virtual reality headset, and I started to play ping pong. By the end of the game, I was so engrossed in the game that I forgot I was in virtual reality and there was no ping pong table. I tried to put the paddle on table and leaned against it, and of course the controller that was in my hand fell to the floor and I almost fell over.
Rizwan Virk:
That’s when it hit me that, oh, our technology is becoming good enough that at some point in the future we will be unable to distinguish between what is physical reality and what is virtual reality. That was really the genesis of this book, was to do a thought experiment to say what do we need to do to get there from a technology point of view, how long will it take, and of course that led to much bigger philosophical issues of whether we are actually in a virtual reality already.
Douglas Nicol:
I wonder, one of the things you talk about is the simulation point, the moment at which we could realistically build a sort of matrix-like simulation, how far away are we from actually being able to deliver that?
Rizwan Virk:
Well, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer. In the book, I identify 10 stages of technology development, starting with simple text adventure games, like Zork, going way back. Those were the first games there was an actual world inside the computer. Now, it wasn’t rendered graphically, you had to issue little text commands, but you go to stage three, which is where we are with video games, which are massively multiplayer online, 3D online role playing games like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or many of these others that your audience may have played, or again, seen their kids play. We’re in stage four or five, which is virtual reality and augmented reality.
Rizwan Virk:
We still don’t have really good photo realistic virtual reality. Even that ping pong game that I was talking about, this was in 2016, so this was that actually five years ago, already VR has gotten much better, but the opponent was not a fully photorealistic opponent. It was more that the physics engine felt so real, so that it was the responsiveness. That’s really the key to fooling the brain into thinking that you are in a real environment, is how responsive is it to your commands.
Rizwan Virk:
We’re about out halfway there. The next few stages include being able to project augmented objects without needing glasses, first the glasses will get smaller. Pretty soon, some of you may have seen Westworld, where if you remember in season three, they had these glasses that were just the size of normal glasses, sunglasses, AR glasses, and you would put them on and you could talk to the other person as if they were actually there. We’re actually getting close to that, there are startups that are working on that.
Rizwan Virk:
But probably the big area that we don’t have yet is BCIs, or brain-computer interfaces. If you remember in The Matrix, when Keaunu Reeve’s character, Neo, actually woke up from the Matrix, he had this wire tapped into the back of his head. It was doing two things, it was sending information into the brain and it was reading his responses out of the brain. That’s what’s called a BCI today. Actually, there are quite a few startups, including one by Elon Musk, who features in this simulation discussion in many different ways, called Neuralink, where they put a chip into a pig and read his brain waves and then into a monkey and they were able to teach the monkey to play Pong, the old Pong, which was the two lines and the dot, which was the first widely available video game, using a joystick and a reward system. Then they disconnected joystick. The monkey still thought he was moving it with a joystick and they were actually able to get the monkey to play Pong in this case.
Rizwan Virk:
We’re getting closer to being able to read signals from the brain. Sending signals in is a tougher task, but once you can do that, we get into some very disturbing areas like false memories, which is an area that was explored by the science fiction writer, Philip K Dick, a lot in movies like Total Recall and Blade Runner. And so we’re probably, I think, at least a decade away from that. And then eventually, you get to downloadable consciousness, which is taking entire, what they call, the connect home of the brain, and then being able to download that into what some people call a digital afterlife. So once you reach all of those, including AI in there, you’re finally at the simulation point. So my guess is we’re probably 50 to 100 years away. Some people think we’re closer. I think the AI will actually be the hardest part of that as we move forward and try to create realistic virtual characters.
Douglas Nicol:
I just wonder. You mentioned false memories. Could we talk a bit about the Mandela Effect, what it is, and why it exists?
Rizwan Virk:
Sure. So my next book is called The Simulated Multiverse, and it’s about this idea that not only are there multiple possible futures, which I think is an idea that everyone understands, but the implications of quantum physics and the idea of being in a simulation, the intersection of those two, and we can talk more about that if you want, but that gets into a lot of details, but they imply that there might also be multiple pasts. I came across this idea when I was interviewing the wife of Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, and she said that he actually believed there were multiple past timelines. So he wrote his book, The Man in the High Castle, off of which the recent Amazon series, which was quite successful, was based on where the Germans and the Japanese won World War II. And he said he had fragmentary memories of this other timeline, and that timeline was reset and then it was moved forward again.
Rizwan Virk:
And at the time, I didn’t think too much of this. I thought, “Okay, science fiction writer, he comes up with crazy ideas all the time.: And then I was meeting with a friend of mine at Google, just down the road here, another MIT grad, and he said, “Oh, you should really look at the Mandela Effect, because your simulation theory actually explains it pretty well.” And so I started to look into it. And so the Mandela Effect is that some people remember a different past. So they remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, whereas most of us, and if you look it up online, you’ll see that he actually got out of prison, became president of South Africa in the 1990s and died, I think, in 2013 or so.
Rizwan Virk:
And so that’s the commonly accepted timeline. Well, it turns out there’s a whole bunch of these mis-memories where some subset of people remember it a certain way. And so this is usually explained by, well, it’s just a faulty memory, which is different than false memories, which is what I was talking about earlier. So most scientists like to dismiss it and say, “Well, maybe they just remember something differently. That happens all the time.” The weird thing is that, for example, journalists who went to interview Nelson Mandela in the ’80s and were told that he was sick and then when they got back, they remember hearing that he died. If you actually went there to interview Nelson Mandela, how likely is it that you mistook him dying in prison in the ’80s versus somebody who’s just a random person at home? And so there’s a lot of these types of things.
Rizwan Virk:
And so what I do in the next book, The Simulated Multiverse, is I say, well, could this be the result of what Phillip K Dick calls changes in variables and rerunning the simulation? And that’s pretty much how we run things. If we want to simulate the weather, we’ll go back, we’ll change some variable, we’ll look at the different results, and we’ll come up with a statistical model that shows what the most likely outcomes. And could it be that people are remembering different runs of the timeline? So that’s where that topic ends up intersecting with simulation theory and with quantum physics, which tells us that there might be multiple realities, or what they call the quantum multiverse, that every choice that could be made actually results in a branching of different universes.
Rizwan Virk:
So you can think of it as a large network of timelines really, is what each of these parallel universe has become based upon different quantum decisions. But Steven Hawking made the point that, “Well, that can’t be infinite because there are only so many particles in the universe. There’s only so many configurations.” It’s two to the 10 to the 80. If these are bits, and I’m a computers guy, so I always think in terms of bits and information, which means that some of those realities will be discarded and some of them will be merged back to other realities. So it’s not quite infinite. So you get this branching and merging, and that creates this idea of a multiverse map, which is where all this stuff intersects with the Mandela Effect. And you almost don’t need to believe in the Mandela Effect, but it’s a great way to talk about this idea that there might be multiple timelines because it gives a colorful way of talking about it.
Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, It is interesting. And for listeners who’ve not looked into the Mandela effect, definitely have a Google of that because there’s a number of instances in The Berenstain Bears, as of course, one of the other examples as well. You probably showed the difference between where you are at with your thinking on this and our listeners. When you were talking about false memories and so forth, and you said, we are probably… And I was thinking you were going to say 100 years or something, and you said, “We’re probably a decade away from that.” It does give us a sense that we are charging towards a pretty impressive future. And Mandela Effect is one example, this concept of how can we prove out this concept of we are living in a simulation?
Nick Abrahams:
How do we know? How do we prove it? So one of the things is obviously Mandela Effect. So maybe that shows there’s multiple timelines. And then there’s also the concept of the glitch and searching for the glitch in the matrix, a la Keanu and the multiple cat sightings in The Matrix. Can you talk a little bit about, how do we prove out this model? Being a scientist, I’m sure you’re all about rigor. How do we know? What do we look for?
Rizwan Virk:
Well, right. So at the moment, just to be clear, we can’t prove that we’re in a simulation. We also can’t prove that we’re not in a simulation. So it does become an interesting philosophical conversation. It also becomes an interesting model for reality. And this causes some scientists to dismiss the whole idea and say, “Well, if it’s non-falsifiable, if you cannot prove that it’s not true, should consider whether it’s true or not.” Now, I say, “Well, that’s not quite right, because can’t necessarily prove that certain things never happened.” You’d have to wait forever to prove that that thing would never happen. But that doesn’t mean those things don’t sometimes happen. So all you need to do is find evidence that that thing is happening and then you’ve proven the opposite, not that it’s not true, but that it is true.
Rizwan Virk:
And so with the simulation hypothesis, is we can look for evidence, and that’s what we find within some of the strange worlds of physics. So I mentioned quantum physics before. There’s this idea of the observer effect. Probably the easiest way to explain it is Schrödinger’s cat , which is a cat in a box with radioactivity who’s either 50% chance of the cat being alive… Yep. There you go. Wanted dead or alive, dead and alive, Schrödinger’s cat, or a 50% chance of being dead. But what quantum physics tells us is that the cat is in superposition, which is this idea that it has both values at the same time until somebody observes it. Now, this is one of the biggest mysteries in quantum physics. It just doesn’t make sense if we live in a material world. And so the question is under what circumstances would it possibly make sense?
Rizwan Virk:
Well, it turns out in video games, we do that all the time. The reason we can render full 3D worlds in video games is that we only render the part that your avatar is observing within that world. So if you go back to the 1980s, when games were like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, like when I for or started playing video games, we could not consider that we would be able to create these realistic 3D worlds with so many pixels, as there just wasn’t enough memory to keep track of all those pixels. Now, memory and processing speed has gotten better, but what’s more important is video game development, like much of computer science, is actually about optimization. And so one conjecture that’s been made and that I agree with is that conditional rendering, render only which you can see, is actually a good explanation for quantum physics. And so that’s one of the areas that’s worth exploring. There was a professor, a physicist named Sylvester Gates who found that within the equations of string theory, he found what are called [inaudible 00:16:20] codes or compression codes, right? This is when you take multiple bits and you compress them. And so the more we look into what is matter, the more we find matter doesn’t exist. So there was a famous physicist named John Wheeler, who was one of the last who worked with Einstein and Niels Bohr and all these guys, and towards the end of his life, he came up with the phrase, “It from bit.” He said that everything that is an it, an object, actually comes from bits, which is information.
Rizwan Virk:
So what we think of as the physical world doesn’t really exist, it’s just based on a whole bunch of information. And slowly, information science is starting to gobble up the other sciences. And so we can look for evidence of information processing and compression techniques in nature. And there are various groups that are working on ways to look for this type of evidence as well.
Douglas Nicol:
So if we look at the technology and we’re saying certainly in a hundred years time, technically this will be possible, it begs the question as to who is running any one simulation? You’re saying there’s multiple simulations potentially going on at the same time. Is that a teenager in a bedroom or is it a godlike figure? Or what? Do you have a view on that?
Rizwan Virk:
Well that question is what’s outside the simulation? And another big question I get asked a lot is what is the purpose of the simulation? And so I like to say, “Well what is the purpose for us to run simulations or play video games?” And it really depends on a key distinction within simulation theory that I like to talk about as the NPC versus RPG distinction. And so NPC stands for non-playable character, which is a character inside a video game that’s just AI, right? It’s like the bartender at the Guild House, or the orks that you slay. They’re characters that don’t exist, but they have some intelligence. They’re characters that exist, but they’re not players. Then there’s the RPG version, which is role playing game version, where we exist outside of the game and we have avatars inside the game, like in a World of Warcraft.
Rizwan Virk:
Now, those two are not mutually exclusive by the way. You can have both. In fact, every good video game has both. We get inside the game as player characters, and then there are NPCs that help us fill out the world. And so depending on where on that spectrum you fall, you come up with very different answers, right? So on the NPC or just AI that somebody is using for the same reason we might run simulations of fruit fly populations to see how many fruit flies they’re going to be, or to see if this civilization ever gets to the point where it destroys itself, or does it ever get off world getting across what we call the great filter of leaving the planet for another solar system, for example. So it could be that there’s a specific purpose in watching us and simulating us and that’s why you’d run multiple simulation.
Rizwan Virk:
Or it could be for the same reason we play video games. Why? Well I can’t fly on a dragon to Australia from San Francisco, even though I’d like to, but I can do it in a video game, right? So we do it to have experiences that we cannot have outside of the virtual world. So that becomes another possible motivation. Then the people outside the game are us, right? I’m playing the Riz avatar, you’re playing the Doug avatar and you’re playing the Nick avatar. And so in that case, we start to really border on areas of philosophy and religion as well as technology. So we may be going far afield here. But those are the big questions that come up when you start to think about the fact that the world around us may not be the real world so to speak.
Douglas Nicol:
I wonder if perhaps there’s a neural implant in the future where I can plug in a simulation I bought, and I go off for a week into this other world and not being conscious of that other world. I wonder, is that the way it works to your point that maybe I’m in control of my simulation?
Rizwan Virk:
It could be. And so getting back to the NPC versus RPG continuum that I talked about, it really gets back to how many players? Is it a zero player game? Is it a one player game where it’s just one person controlling the simulation? Or is it an MMO RPG, which is many players each with their own quests and their own individual achievements? I think it’s more on the MMO RPG side. But as we look at our technology and how it develops, there’s a very famous novel that was turned into a movie called Ready Player One. The movie was made by Steven Spielberg. And Ernest Cline, the author, just came out with Ready Player Two. And his first book consisted of virtual reality with headsets. And actually, the technology has already gotten there even if the adoption hasn’t. But his second book in the first few pages they have what’s called ONI, OASIS Neural Interface.
Rizwan Virk:
And the idea is that you can record any experience that somebody else has had and you can replay it in your own mind and experience the feelings and the physical sensations that that person had. And so it’s this big moral dilemma. Will people ever leave their home if they can just put this on and they can pretty much have any experience and actually have it feel like they were actually there having the real experience? Why would they ever leave home at all? And so it becomes this big question of are we sleeping somewhere on a couch dreaming this game, or this multiplayer game, or this single player game? And those are big questions that I don’t have the answers to, but those are questions that come up when you talk about reaching the simulation.
Douglas Nicol:
It’s interesting because why would I choose to have a bad life? Some people have lives with tragedy and unhappiness and illness. So if I was in control of this and I dipped into this world, why would I do an unhappy story in my simulation?
Rizwan Virk:
Yeah. And that’s probably the third most common question that I get. And so the flip side of that is if I were doing this, why wouldn’t [inaudible 00:22:05] and have all these houses and have everything great that’s happened to me? And so it gets back to what is the nature of the game? Is it The Lord of the Rings? Is it World War II, a World War II game where people are going to die and get shot? And so this was actually explored in the Matrix movies, not in the first one, but in one of the later movies they talked about the first version of the Matrix was everyone was living an ideal life. And [inaudible 00:22:29] the human brain was accepting that as a real experience. And so they needed to make it much more challenging.
Rizwan Virk:
And so I would say the same way that if you see an Indiana Jones film, like Raiders of the Lost Arc, Indiana Jones could just find the arc of the covenant at the beginning with a map, there’s no film, right? Then it’s pretty much done. And so the film has to have these challenges. And so there are different ways of looking at it. One way of looking at it is well that proves we’re not in a simulation. Another way of looking at it is different characters have different difficulty levels, right? And so I might choose to ramp up the difficulty level based upon some experiences that I’m having, because that may be the nature of the game. Without knowing that, it’s hard to say.
Nick Abrahams:
Riz, that’s fantastic. And you’ve touched on it there, which is the concept that it gets down to a philosophical discussion and basis of religions. I think there’s an old Buddhist story about there were some gods playing and then one God got knocked over and then was born as a human, had an entire life and family and so forth, and then woke up immediately and was back in the other reality. So these concepts I guess have been around since the beginning of man as we try to ponder the notions of our reality. It’s become real. We can create it now, so it feels like it’s within reach. But I’m interested because you’re very public about this, and what’s the reaction of people when you talk about this? And maybe because you’re in the valley, you’ve got some like-minded folks around you and the valley not necessarily representative of the rest of the world, but how do people respond to you about that? Are you like, “Oh no, Riz is coming to the dinner party, you don’t want to get stuck next to him. He’ll talk your ear off about simulation theory, all that. He’s crazy.” Or are they interested? Are they-
Rizwan Virk:
Well, yeah. I think, in the circles that I tend to run in, they’re quite interested in these topics. Because it’s all about technology and AI and where we might end up, but it also intersects with religious topics. So even when I’m sort of with different circles of friends, there is an overlap there, whether it’s with Buddhist thought, for example, where the dream metaphor is used pretty heavily. The Hindus have the idea of the Lila, so it intersects with philosophy. Shakespeare said, “And all the world’s a stage.” And the men and women are merely players. But if Shakespeare were alive today or the Buddha were alive today, I would like to think that they would use an updated metaphor and they would say, “Life interact video games,” you know, that you play and you make choices along the way. And so, because this topic tends to intersect with a lot of other topics, I think people are much more open to it than they might be if it was a topic that didn’t also touch these other areas.
Nick Abrahams:
Do you see people outside of the technology community coming into it? Are there other groups of people that are showing interest in this topic? It’s interesting. We’ve done an analysis on LinkedIn. We put a questionnaire out there and was surprising the number of people who do believe that we live in a simulation. Just wondering, do you feel it’s sort of getting broader or it’s still early days?
Rizwan Virk:
Yeah. I feel like it’s getting broader. I released a book, the first book, Simulation Hypothesis, in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of The Matrix. And if you think back to March 31st, 1999, this was considered pure science fiction. And if you think of March teen, when I released the book, it was actually something that many people were considering. And part of the reason why is video games have become such an important part of our lives. Kids today spend more time playing video games than do watching television. And so that’s a difference, I think, in the culture. We played a lot of games when I was a kid, but it’s nothing compared to how much time people spend online. And now with the pandemic, it’s even been heightened because people are spending all their time talking… Like, I’m not really talking to you guys, right?
Rizwan Virk:
We were joking about this before the show, but I’m speaking, and these bits, my voice is converted to bits, which are being sent across the wire, across many wires, to where you are and it’s being rendered on your device. And so I think people are so used to interacting with one another virtually now that this idea that we may actually be doing that all the time anyway, is one that’s getting a lot more attention. So I found that people are much more open to it than even a couple years ago when the book came out and certainly 5, 10 years ago.
Douglas Nicol:
Final question from me, we’ve been reading some recent academic papers that put the likelihood of the hypothesis that we’re living in a sim to be true at 50-50. What’s your personal view? Because you really looked in depth at the science of this. What’s your view of the likelihood?
Rizwan Virk:
Sure. And so, there’s a lot of opinions out there about what is the likelihood and the likelihood was based on David Kipping, I think, a scientist at Columbia who did an analysis using Bayesian logic on Nick Bostrom’s original simulation theory paper, which Nick came up with the basic idea that if any civilization, anywhere ever reaches what isolation point, then they’ll create lots and lots of simulations with lots and lots of beings. Therefore, if you are a being in a world, you are more likely to be in a simulated world than in base reality or physical reality. But even he, Nick Bostrom, only put the percentage at 20% or so, because it was one of three possibilities that he had laid out in the paper.
Rizwan Virk:
And so this particular scientist actually said it was slightly less than 50-50 when he did his analysis. Of course, it depends on what assumptions you use. My personal opinion is that it’s more likely than not, that one, we live in a world based on information and two, that that world is rendered for us as we go through that world, which means, I think that the chances are greater than 50% that we actually do live in some kind of simulation.
Nick Abrahams:
The final one for me is, what does that mean for our daily life? Let’s say we are living a simulation, at the end of the day, which color pills should we be taking? What is the [crosstalk 00:28:21] back if we are living in a sim or should we just sort of just keep moving on?
Rizwan Virk:
Yeah. For some people it won’t make any difference at all. It just means I’d still need to live my life. But for me personally, the way I look at it is that when I do have difficulties, getting back to, I think it was Doug’s question earlier about why isn’t everything great in this simulation, it’s when things happen, I can think of it as a series of quests and achievements, which is how we build video games. We ramp up the difficulty and the only way you’re able to level up is by going through more difficult tasks. And so it gives a different perspective, I think.
Rizwan Virk:
Just in the same way that when we create a character in say Dungeons and Dragons. We have different characters of different attributes, like strength, intelligence, charisma, et cetera. The same is true in real life. Each of us has different strength and weaknesses. We can choose to work on the weaknesses or we can choose to concentrate on the strengths. And we’re drawn to certain professions let’s say, and certain places just in the same way that I might choose storyline or an arc in a video game. And so if we think that I’ve chosen these for myself, perhaps makes it a little less difficult to bear when things don’t go exactly as we expect, when we lost an achievement, I can keep working on it until I get it.
Nick Abrahams:
That’s a fantastic way of thinking about it, that we are leveling up and I guess in some respects, it’s sort of art imitating life and then art sort of giving us a guide to how to live. It’s fascinating. Thank you. Thanks very much, Riz. That’s been amazing.
Rizwan Virk:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on, and I’ll leave you with a quote from a British intellectual named Ellis, who said, “When we are in the middle of a dream, we think it’s real. Can we say any more of life?”
Nick Abrahams:
It’s true. And I’d also recommend, if you haven’t looked out for it, then do. It’s The Simulation Hypothesis was Riz’s first book on the topic and then The Simulated Multiverse will be coming out soon, I think. So Riz Virk, thank you very much for joining us here on SmartDust today.
Rizwan Virk:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Douglas Nicol:
In the next and final episode of this three part series, we’ll meet Lawrence Crumpton from Microsoft HoloLens and a renowned XR expert to examine whether the shared virtual world of the metaverse, the much discussed metaverse, is the first step towards the evolution of a simulated reality.
Nick Abrahams:
And it is of course, the big finale, because it’s the third and final episode where Douglas and I will discuss the conclusions of our investigations as to whether or not we are living in a sim. You may recall there was the question as to whether you are a red pill, reality person or a blue pill, ignorance person. And so Douglas and I will show our true colors at the end and determine who takes the red pill and who takes the blue pill. So please don’t miss our third and final episode. And so for me, Nick Abrahams…
Douglas Nicol:
And me, Douglas Nicol, goodbye.
Nick Abrahams:
Goodbye.