MIT scientist: Elon Musk was right, we are almost certainly in a simulation

All right, Sam is away today, and, uh, you know, when the cat's away, the mice will play. So I get to indulge in some of my favorite rabbit holes I go down.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh, I put my all in it like no days off. On a roll, let's travel, never looking back.

Our guest today is both an entrepreneur. You've built and sold multiple companies in the, in the video gaming space, which kind of led you down the, the, the pathway of trying to think through are we living in a simulation? So let's start there. What is the theory, and then how you kind of stumbled into believing this.

Yeah. So simulation theory is the idea that, uh, the world that we're living in, the physical world, is not really physical at all, that, in fact, we are inside of some type of virtual reality or a computer program. I, I like to say we're inside a massively multiplayer video game. The most popular pop culture reference really, uh, is The Matrix. Neo, Keanu Reeves, starts off at the beginning going to, uh, work at a computer software company called MetaCortex, and he thinks it's a real world, and he thinks he has a real job. And it turns out the whole thing was an elaborate, you know, virtual reality of the year 1999, which is, of course, when The Matrix came out. So that's kind of a, a very quick overview.

Yeah. And I know it sounds, you know, obviously a little bit off the wall. I remember the first time I heard about it, I think Elon Musk was talking about it, uh, like a decade ago, and he says it in the very Elon matter-of-fact way where he's like, um, you know, "If you look at the plot of video games, we go from Pong, which is, like, two lines and a dot on a screen, to where we have com- you know, video games today. That's like a 30, 40-year period, which is, like, the blink of an eye in, uh, the timescale of Earth. So 30, 40 years, we go from two lines and a dot to, like, you know, Grand Theft Auto type of, type of stuff." And then he said, um, you know, obviously any sufficiently technologically advanced civilization would want to create a simulation 'cause it's way cheaper to find out how things are gonna go in a simulation than it is to go test things in the real world, so there's a huge incentive. Clearly, if you could, you would build it. And so then there's a question of, like, is this the real one, and we're gonna make a simulation later, or did some... You know, was there a real one, and this is the simulation? And he, his conclusion was more than likely this is the simulation. And he just sort of said it matter of fact, and then, you know, they, they changed topics. And my mind was blown, and, you know-

[laughs]

... my brain is scattered on the wall, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about. I started thinking about it, and, you know, at the time I would say, this was p- pre-AI when he was talking about this, it sounded like, you know, kind of just n- nerd dream. I don't know. It didn't, it didn't... Uh, you know, it s- it was hard to really wrap your head around. There wasn't, there wasn't a lot where you could sort of, like, squint your eyes and see it. Then, now let's fast-forward, we