Rizwan Virk

I was at MIT running a startup program called Play Labs for video game companies.

And then I ended up having heart issues.

And I ended up having to get heart surgery, which if anybody's seen that, you can see it's pretty much the biggest cut, one of the biggest cuts you can make.

And they kept saying, oh, yeah, a few months, you'll be fine.

And what happened was after the heart surgery, I couldn't do anything for a while.

I had this long recovery.

It was probably the most difficult period ever.

in my life.

And during that time, I would start to get better and I would try to jump back in the business world, back into Silicon Valley.

I was going to raise this big VC fund and do all this stuff.

And my health would deteriorate again.

You know, it's a good question, right?

Yeah.

It could be that, right?

But what I found was that I did have enough energy.

Because every time I tried to do that, I'd end up back in the hospital for another procedure, right?

It's no fun having hard procedures, let me tell you.

But when I did have enough energy...

to do this other thing that I'd been wanting to do my whole life, which was to write more books.

And so I had just enough energy to go to Starbucks and work for an hour or two on the simulation hypothesis, which for me was a way to bring together all the threads