You're Living In A Video Game - The Paranormal Podcast 893

The Paranormal Podcast

Jim Harold

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is our reality real—or are we living in a video game? In this mind-expanding episode of The Paranormal Podcast, Jim talks with Rizwan Virk, MIT grad, tech entrepreneur, and author of The Simulation Hypothesis. Virk shares why he believes we may be players inside a sophisticated simulation, guided by code and driven by quests, karma, and possibly even a cosmic “game master.” Drawing connections between video games, ancient scriptures, quantum physics, and near-death experiences, Rizwan lays out a compelling case that our world may not be what it seems. They explore the metaphysical and philosophical implications of the theory, from reincarnation and life planning to déjà vu and the Mandela Effect. Can synchronicity, glitches in the matrix, and the structure of time and space point to a simulated multiverse? What role does AI play in this unfolding digital landscape? And if we are in a simulation, what does that mean for our purpose and free will? Strap in for a conversation that bends the rules of science, spirituality, and reality itself. You can find Rizwan’s book at Amazon here: https://amzn.to/4lI4GIC Thanks Rizwan! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the paranormal podcast. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you again.
0:20.2	One thing that I think that I have kind of learned over the years of doing
0:24.7	this show, 20 years, is that reality is far stranger than we understand. All the anomalous things that we
0:32.1	run into, there seems to be an X factor, something that we're not understanding, something that we're not getting.
0:39.0	Maybe that man right there has the answer.
0:41.1	We're talking about Rizwan Verk.
0:42.7	He is the author of the book, The Simulation Hypothesis, and he thinks that we very well may be living in a video game.
0:53.8	Rizwan is extremely accomplished.
0:56.4	He's a graduate of MIT and Stanford.
0:59.2	A successful entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist,
1:04.8	and best-selling author, his video games have been played by millions.
1:09.6	And he currently runs Play Labs at MIT, a video game
1:13.3	accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No small institution. Rizwan Verk, good to talk to you.
1:21.9	Again, thank you for taking time to be on the program. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.
1:27.1	Great to be here.
1:28.4	So let me ask you this. When did this, and this is the second edition of the book
1:33.9	just out by the time this is released, when did this start becoming apparent to you that,
1:41.6	wait a minute, are we in a video game? Are we in a simulation?
1:46.0	Well, for me, it happened a few years back. I think it was like 2016. I had just sold my last
1:52.9	video game company, and I was visiting a startup in Marin County just across the bay from San Francisco,
1:58.7	and they were developing a virtual reality
2:01.0	sports game. And I put on the VR headset. These were big and bulky headsets at the time.
	...

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