Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

The Matrix and Max Hodak

23 Mar 2025 · 0 min

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In this brief monologue, the speaker recounts watching the film The Matrix in fifth grade, which sparked a curiosity about whether reality might be a simulation and, more importantly, inspired the idea of creating one. He contrasts the physical world’s inherent scarcity—limited resources, contested land, high costs, and the speed-of-light constraint—with the virtually limitless nature of simulated environments, where scarcity and physical constraints disappear. This contrast forms the core motivation for pursuing the development of large‑scale simulations as an alternative to the costly, conflict‑prone physical world.

I was in 5th grade and literally I saw The Matrix and I was like, I don't know if we're living in a simulation, but we should build one. Earth is small, resources are intensely contested. Space is big, the speed of light is low. There are real limits to building with atoms and doing things in the physical world where there's these conflicts, like a piece of land can only be used by one person at a time. Get off my lawn. Building buildings is super expensive and complicated. Like in the simulation, none of those limits are true. In the simulation, there's no scarcity.