Exploring the Intriguing Intersection of Gaming, Startups, and Simulated Worlds Riz Virk, Author of The Simulation Hypothesis

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Riz, the author of The Simulation Hypothesis and Startup Myths and Models. We discuss the parallels between video games and a simulated world, startup advice that you won't learn in business school, and a preview of his upcoming book, The Simulated Multiverse. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) All right, because we've got a lot of ground to cover. Because you're the author of Simulation Hypothesis and Startup Myths, and you're an indie film producer, and you're a brilliant MIT person. Tell me about your background.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:00:52) Sure. So I started off studying computer science back at MIT way back in the day and ended up in the software industry. Did a couple of startups in enterprise software, so really got to learn about how big companies view technology. And then after selling my last enterprise software company to a division of EMC Documentum, I moved out to Silicon Valley.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:01:17) And before that, I was in Boston and decided to get involved with video games. And so this was in 2007, when Facebook had just introduced their gaming platform and Apple had yet to introduce its App Store. And so I got involved with a couple of Facebook gaming companies. And then when Apple introduced its App Store, I co-created a game called Tapfish, which was one of the top grossing games back in the day. I think it was 2010 now, quite a few years ago.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:01:47) And that was when in-app purchases were relatively new. People weren't really used to spending money on virtual items. Today, of course, it's a multibillion, tens of billions, hundreds of billion dollar industry. So I was in kind of at the beginning of that whole wave. And after that, I ended up becoming an investor in both independent films as well as more startups.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:02:12) I went back to MIT and did a little program called Playlabs, which was for playful technology startups, which could be video games, virtual reality, augmented reality. That was fun. I did that for a few years. And then the last few years, I've been focused a little more on my writing. I wrote Startup Myths partly because of the MIT program.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:02:31) I wanted a way to encapsulate some of the lessons I'd learned in my twenty-five years of working with startups. And then I wrote The Simulation Hypothesis just because it encapsulated a lot of what I had been thinking about in terms of video games, but also reality and consciousness and religion and how it relates to how our technology as a society is going to develop over the next not years, but decades, really, and if not centuries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) So your days right now, you're waking up, you're writing these books, you're enjoying life.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:03:02) Yeah. For the most part. You know, I'm still doing calls with entrepreneurs who are looking to raise money. So I still work with a few VC firms, still do some angel investing myself. But yeah, for the most part, I try to do as much writing as I can.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:03:17) Although, you know, it became difficult when the coffee shops here shut down because that was my office, basically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) What you have to do is build a mock coffee shop in your house.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:03:29) Yeah. Well, I started to get used to working in the house again, which annoyed my girlfriend. It's just her office is here, and I usually work out either at an office or in coffee shops.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:42) She's like, I'm going to boot you out of the simulation. You can go to the coffee shop and get some work done.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:03:45) Exactly. Go to a virtual office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:51) When did you—we'll talk about the work. Which one do you want to talk about first? Do you care, or can we just talk about either of them?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:03:57) Either of them is fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) Okay. So I'm really interested in the simulation hypothesis. When they said you've got this new book coming out about the work in the Silicon Valley and startups. And I was like, how can you expect, when you do media interviews, everybody must want to talk about the simulation hypothesis?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:04:16) That's true, actually. When I came out with Startup Myths last year, it was right in the middle of the pandemic and most of the interviews ended up veering at some point towards the idea of the simulation just because it's an idea whose time has come. And I think people are writing about it in mainstream media. People are writing op-eds in the New York Times about simulation and whether we should find out if we're living in one. And so yeah, it tends to be a very popular topic.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:04:41) Plus, video games has become one of the biggest industries on Earth, bigger than really Hollywood box office in any given year. And so that's kind of where the overlap is between the two books, is that a lot of my experience in the past decade in startups has been in video games. And that kind of laid the foundation for the way that I was thinking about the simulation hypothesis, which is not necessarily exactly how other people think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:05) You could maybe combine them, like how to do a startup inside the simulation.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:05:10) That's right. You can earn virtual currency with a virtual job. It's funny. A few years ago, we had—there was this game called Second Life, which I don't know if you've heard of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) Oh, yeah.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:05:21) But people used to go in and they used to actually have jobs, and they'd earn these called Linden Dollars, which were virtual bucks. And again, that was relatively new back then, this idea that you could actually earn virtual currency, you could own virtual land. There were people that were the first virtual real estate millionaires. That isn't nearly as popular now as it was for a couple years then, but now there's Roblox and Fortnite, and there's a lot of different environments, virtual environments, which we generally, at least here in Silicon Valley, refer to as the budding metaverse.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:05:52) Right? And so that was a term coined by Neal Stephenson back in his book Snow Crash way back. I don't know when that was—like late eighties maybe, or early nineties. But it was this idea of a decentralized virtual world where you could log in from anywhere. And kind of an updated version of it was shown in Ready Player One, where you put on virtual reality headsets and people used it for school.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:06:19) That's how they went to school. That's how they went to work. That's how they socialized. And I think it's taken on a whole new level of meaning since the pandemic, since people have been socializing on Zoom and getting Zoom fatigue. And so gaming has become a fun place for people to hang out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:36) That's one of my favorite movies, Ready Player One. That's a good one.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:06:39) Oh, yeah. Have you read Ready Player Two?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) No. I'm learning about it right now.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:06:45) Oh, yeah. So Ernest Cline, when he wrote Ready Player One, he came out with it in I think 2010. And back then, there were no virtual reality headsets. So he set it in like 2046, I think, or something, thinking, yeah, maybe we'll have them by then. Well, just a couple years later, the VR headsets started to come out.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:07:03) Oculus and HTC and all these other different companies have introduced their headsets. So the technology kind of caught up to what he was saying, even though VR isn't nearly as popular as it was in Ready Player One, where everyone used it. And so in his second book, he decided to make sure the technology jump forward so that it won't catch up within a couple of years. And so in the first few pages, the main character, Wade—Wade Watts, I think—realizes that the guy who created the OASIS, the virtual environment, had also created a brain-computer interface, which we call BCIs.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:07:40) And so you just put the little things on your head, and it's as if you can be in the environment. You can feel everything that's in there. And then they have—this is quite interesting—they have something called the ONI, which is the OASIS Neural Interface, which is this thing that connects in. But you can do what are called ONI recordings. So people can record any experience, whether it's skiing in the Himalayas or strange sexual encounters. You can record them, and anybody else can replay them, and they'll feel them as if they were actually there. And so the book starts with that in the first few pages, and there's a big moral dilemma around should we release this or not. Because if you can experience going to India, let's say, or Mexico without having some of the travel-related issues, then why actually go there anymore?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:08:28) Right? So this is—you know, I'm spending time on this because it's interesting. The way that I started to write The Simulation Hypothesis was in I think 2016, when VR was just becoming a little more mainstream. I was playing a virtual reality ping-pong game. And when I started to play the game, it felt so real that at the end of the game, I decided to put the paddle down on the table and lean against the table. Of course, there was no table. It was all in virtual reality.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:08:55) And so I realized, oh, the responsiveness that we've already gotten with the physics engine—it wasn't even the graphics. Right? I mean, a lot is said about making the graphics really good and lifelike, but they weren't even that lifelike. It just felt so real that my brain forgot for a second that I was in a virtual reality environment. And so I started to think, well, what would it take for us to build something like The Matrix?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:09:18) You know, where if you remember in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves's character Neo and everybody else had these wires plugged in so that we wouldn't be able to distinguish between physical reality and virtual reality. And that was really the genesis of the book, and I came up with these ten stages of technology that we would need to get to. And so that was the starting point for the book, even though it went in many different directions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:43) I'm excited. I'm very excited. Right when you said Ready Player Two, I was hoping that they put a Neuralink inside of them.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:09:50) And they did. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and they did. Right? Yeah. And so more and more, we're starting to see these ideas in science fiction become commonplace. In 1999, there were actually three simulation-related movies.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:10:03) And so there was The Matrix, there was The Thirteenth Floor, and then there was eXistenZ as well, which, you know, I think the other two are not as well known as The Matrix. But turns out this year, there's actually four simulation-related films being released. So this is sort of the biggest year of simulation movies since '99. There was a documentary called A Glitch in the Matrix, which just came out about people that believed we're living in a simulation. There was a movie called Bliss with Salma Hayek and Owen Wilson that Amazon just put out.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:10:34) Then there's a Ryan Reynolds movie called Free Guy, I think, where he's an NPC, a non-player character inside this video game. And then there's obviously The Matrix 4, which is coming out later this year. So it's become kind of a resurgent theme in science fiction, but also in academia and other places also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) One of the things that I think a lot about is how, as humans, if we imagine that we're the single giant organism that's distributed, right? So we look at humanity and we have this property of we imagine and then we do. And we imagine through our films, and then certain things come about, which is almost like that's a purpose. It's a part. It's like our imagination is the film industry making this content, and then we look at it and we filter it and we discuss these ideas, and they're playing potential scenarios out through these storylines, and we sort of pick and choose what we want to build, and then they start to grow faster, and the thoughts sort of take off. Like, as you said, it's progressing, we're getting more of these simulation movies, at the same time our technology is advancing forward. And then I see that you're into filmmaking and you've got these great ideas. And I guess my big question here is, when you saw this simulation hypothesis emerging from the ethos as this idea or this concept, what caused you to actually want to dedicate time to write a book on it?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:12:02) Well, you know, touching on that first thing you said, where we come up with ideas and we can use those scenarios and filter them. There was actually a paper written I think a couple years ago about the threat simulation hypothesis. And they said people who watch horror movies, for example, have an easier time adjusting to situations like the pandemic. Or people that—dreams may be ways that we rehearse for bad situations, nightmares in particular, and that we're better able to cope with bad situations. And that was a really interesting little finding about how we think about things. And actually, you know, my own investigations—

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:12:43) So first, I started off on this technology thread and said, okay, what do we need to build in our virtual reality and our augmented reality to get to the what I call the simulation point? We can talk about that in a minute. But I also have spent a lot of time investigating other areas of human consciousness, whether it's through meditation, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences. So there's this kind of cool area of different states of consciousness, shamanic journeying—whether you do it with drugs, which I haven't really tried, but or you do it with drumming and rhythmic breathing, which gets you into a different state of mind.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:13:18) And so what I found was when I laid out all the ten stages that would make it so that we would get to the point where we couldn't distinguish if we were living in a simulation or not, turns out a lot of that technology already exists. It's in biological form, and it happens to us every night when we dream. Right? So when we dream, we feel like we're inside the dream. We've created this kind of simulated world.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:13:40) It looks real to us. Right? We can't really tell. But turns out there are people that are able, through a practice called lucid dreaming, to remember that there's a part of them that's actually lying in the bed and that what they're experiencing now is not real. Right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:13:56) So you kind of forget, and there's this kind of level of consciousness that you cross over between waking and dreaming where you forget the other side. Just like in the morning, you might remember the dream clearly when you wake up, but by 2 p.m. in the afternoon, unless it was a really important or vivid dream, you probably just forgotten about it. It was just a jumbled mess of stuff that you remember. And so we don't remember what's on the other side of this wall of consciousness. And so as I thought about that, I realized that the Tibetan yogis in particular had this whole practice called Tibetan dream yoga.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:14:29) It was one of the six yogas of Naropa. And it was kind of a lucid dreaming type of thing where they trained you to recognize that you're moving into the state and that what you're seeing in the dream world is actually an illusion. And now there's a spiritual reason for that. They wanted you to recognize that just like when you're dreaming, there's another part of you that's asleep. In the same way, when we're awake, there's another part of you that's asleep somewhere while you think this is the real world and you think this is not an illusion.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:14:56) And so, you know, the fact that I had spent so much time in Silicon Valley and building games and investing in game companies and exploring consciousness was really part of the motivation that made me want to dedicate time to writing this book because I felt that it was a way to bridge the gap between people who thought one way and people who thought another way. Right? I spent a lot of time with academics and scientists and engineers who were very left-brained and the material world is all there is. And then spent a lot of time with people that were exploring these states of consciousness, and, you know, these areas rarely intersect. And so I thought the simulation hypothesis was a way that I could talk to both and they could talk to each other.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:15:39) And it turns out it's a pretty powerful metaphor for that reason because pretty much all the religions have been telling us that the world around us isn't real. And so this provides a more technological and at least partially scientific framework for thinking about what that could be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Have you ever had a lucid dream?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:15:56) Yeah, I used to practice it reasonably often. And so there's what you call a lucidity test that you can do. So there's a couple ways to recognize you're in a dream. One is when you see something absurd and you realize that it's absurd, or you see someone that's died and you realize, hey, that person is supposed to be dead. So you notice something that's odd and off about the dream. That can lead to lucidity. And then there's this idea of a lucidity test where there's something you can do inside a dream that you can't do in physical life. And in my case, I don't do it that much anymore, but I used to do it a lot where I try to fly.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:16:34) Because in a dream, I can fly, and in physical reality, I can't theoretically. Right? And so there have been many times when I said, I'm not going to do my lucidity test because this is obviously real life. It's not a dream. Duh. And then I did it, and I would float up into the air and realize, oh, holy crap. This is actually a dream. This is not physical reality when I was absolutely convinced before that it was physical reality. And so, you know, it becomes an interesting metaphor for what we're talking about with simulation. You know, people are convinced that this is the real world.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:17:10) And, you know, there was this philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, after whom the town and university Berkeley is named, who talked about idealism, which was the idea that the world doesn't really exist. And there was a scientist, Doctor Johnson, I think. When Berkeley said, you know, how do you refute this? He goes, I refute it thus, and he kicked a rock. And he said, there. That's real. Right? Problem is that's not really a refutation because in a dream, you would think that everything is real when you're in there because everything seems that way, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) I have had one lucid dream. I got into it. I was reading about it several years ago, probably five, six years ago. And I was like, people are having these things. This is unbelievable to me. And so I started reading about them, and the trick that worked for me, it took me three weeks and I did it once successfully. But the trick that worked for me was looking at clocks and looking away and then there was something about the clock. Oh, yeah. If you look at it and look back, it's a vastly different time in your dream. So in my dream, I'd look at it, be like 11:00 AM, and I'd look at it again, it'd be 3:57 PM.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:18:20) Right. So, yeah. That's another technique that works. Or looking at writing or a book, and you look away and you look back, and it looks different. There was a gentleman named Carlos Castaneda who wrote a bunch of books back in the seventies. And, you know, his mentor gave him the task of finding his hands in the dream. Well, with all these techniques, the problem is remembering to do them. And so one way to remember to do them is if you remind yourself to do it during the day. So, like, here, I'm talking to you. Am I really in a dream or not? Am I—look at a clock and look back and look at it again. And if you do it enough times during the day, then perhaps you will remember at some point during your dream, which is probably what happened with you. It took you three weeks. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) That's exactly what I did. I left that part out. The instructions were to do it several times throughout the day, and then you kind of—I just did it in the dream.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:19:10) Right. Yeah. That makes sense. So that's another technique. And so, you know, the Tibetans took this to a whole other level because it wasn't just about recognizing the dream. And the other thing that's hard with lucid dreaming is you might recognize you're in a dream, but pretty soon, what usually happens is either you wake up because you become too lucid or you just go back to a non-lucid dream. And so, you know, they've developed techniques for trying to keep that state of lucidity to what they call a state of clarity. And, theoretically, then you can see what goes on beyond all of that. The way that I say it is beyond the simulation, of course. They say, you know, beyond Maya or illusion, which is the term that's used in the Buddhist and the Hindu traditions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) That's exactly what happened to me. I was in a cafe. I stood up. I realized I saw a clock in the cafe. I realized that I was in a dream. I said, this is great. I think I said something like, everybody take your clothes off. And everybody just got naked. And then—

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:20:02) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) But before they actually got naked, I just saw everyone start to take their clothes off. And then I got this thought. I ran outside. I was in the street. And I'm like, I bet you I can fly. And I just flew, and then I got so excited I woke up. I was like, I'm flying. I'm flying. And then I woke up, and I was like, oh, man. Three weeks of trying, and I get it, and it's gone in like ten seconds.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:20:26) Yeah. That's great. I don't think I've heard anyone use that particular command before, everyone to take off their clothes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) Well, it was the only way I could prove to myself that I was legitimately there. It made sense at the time. Things don't always make sense in the dream.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:20:43) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I've used it to create things to say, okay, if I can create a flower or something, then this must be a dream. Right? So there's all kinds of techniques. The trick is, like you said, you know, it lasted ten seconds, and then you either wake up or you forget about it. And that's, you know, part of the forgetfulness that we have in the dream state, which many of the ancient traditions say is what happens here. Like, the Greeks talked about crossing the river of forgetfulness, right, as we incarnate into this life. And in the Chinese traditions, there's Meng Po, who's the goddess of forgetfulness, and she brews the tea of forgetfulness. And we drink that, you know, when we're born and after we die so that we forget what happened before or in the case of, you know, when you die, you forget some of the tough things that might happen to you in your life before you move on to the next stage. And so all of those are metaphors. Right? I mean, Shakespeare used the metaphor of life being like a stage play. The Hindus talked about the lila, which means the play, the grand play of the gods.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:21:40) I would like to think that, you know, if they were alive today—and the Buddhists talk about the dream—that they would use a different metaphor. And it turns out that the video game metaphor is actually, you know, pretty appropriate because we all are playing the game. And so one of the things that I really like to talk about with simulation is the distinction between the NPC version and the RPG version. And so NPC means non-playable character in video games. RPG stands for role-playing game. So NPCs are the AIs that we encounter within the game. I guess if you're using the Matrix analogy, those would be the Agent Smiths. Right? The code, the AI. And RPGs would be Neo, Morpheus, and everybody who exists outside the game, just in the same way that I might have an avatar in World of Warcraft or in Fortnite. We become the avatar. There's a part of us outside that's playing the game today. And so when a lot of people in the scientific and academic world talk about simulation, they're talking about the NPC version. We're all just a bunch of AIs running on a computer, and that's it. But, you know, I like to say, well, there's also this RPG version where we exist outside the simulation.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:22:48) We have chosen certain storylines and certain challenges and certain quests. And it's a multiplayer game, so different people can make decisions. Right? And so I'd like to think today that if the ancients were around, like the ancient Rishis, they would say, life is like an interactive video game. Right? Because we all have choices that we make and we're all sort of playing it together. But there might be certain timelines and things that are scripted, but everything else you can make decisions on and that will determine how the game plays out for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:20) Yeah. It's like an airplane or a Tesla. It has autopilot mode, but you can take control. I feel like it's a blurred line. It's a mix. I feel like sometimes it's NPC autopilot. Sometimes you're making decisions. I don't feel like it's fixed in one way or the other. I know some people, whether they even understand simulation hypothesis or not, I can tell when people are AFK, right? Like, they are not on their keyboard. They are just going through life, you know?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:23:48) That's right. Yeah. As if they have a little AFK here above their heads. Right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:23:54) Well, and those two, by the way, aren't mutually exclusive. Like, when I play a game like World of Warcraft, there are the NPCs, and there are other players and clearly other PCs or player characters. And so you can have both within the same environment. And I think that's, you know, probably a better metaphor for how we think about this simulation idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) It is. And then I believe we have choice to toggle between them.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:24:20) Right. That makes a lot of sense. You know? Just like when you choose a character in a game, you know, you might choose what guild or clan you're with, and you might choose what achievements or quests you have, but then you still have to go through those quests. And so, you know, it's up to you whether you accept a particular quest or you decide not to do it. And so I believe we have storylines that perhaps put us on autopilot, like you were saying. I like that analogy. And we also can take control and change that. And sometimes we veer off track. And so it becomes a way to think about, you know, some of the challenges that might happen to us in life, whether it's, you know, bad health or death of friends or loved ones, etc.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:25:00) You know, some people say to me, well, if I was going to create a simulation, I would make it like this. I would make it where, you know, I'm a trillionaire and I have all the things that I want, etc. And, well, if you remember in The Matrix, in the Matrix sequels, they revealed that the first version of the Matrix was kind of this idyllic peaceful place, and the human mind didn't accept it. Right? And in the same way that there's no point in making a movie about people that are just happy all the time and just sitting around enjoying life, you know, that's not the same as an Indiana Jones film where he has to go out and find the clues and has challenges and has opponents. It wouldn't be that interesting for us to play this game if there were no challenges. The challenges here are different than in Grand Theft Auto or in World of Warcraft. Right? But they're still there. And so, you know, that gives us a framework to think about things.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:25:53) And so, you know, that's why I find when people say, well, what relevance does this have for me and my life? You know? You can view it as a metaphor for how you go through life, and I think it helps put things into perspective that you may have chosen some of these challenges for yourself, just in the same way that, you know, I became an entrepreneur. I mean, if you had talked to me in high school, I'd say, oh, yeah. I'm going to become a software entrepreneur, and then I'm going to become a writer. Right? How did I know that back then? I mean, I hadn't even been to college or had a computer science degree at that point, and I hadn't written anything longer than a couple page story at that point. Right? But yet, it was just the sense of knowing because I believe that was part of the storyline that I had already selected, you know, within this, what I call, the great simulation, our simulation game.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) Now when you hear people talk about it in public, I heard one guy on the Joe Rogan podcast and, like, Joe Rogan could not get over this concept of probability that we are most likely in the simulation. And I was like, for all the places for him to get hung up, I was like, I love this guy, but, like, what are you doing? Like, let him go. Like, let him continue on past. Like, get over the fact it's just statistically probable and let's move on. And the whole interview, the whole two hours was this guy explaining statistical probability to Rogan.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:27:12) Yeah. So it was Nick Bostrom. So, you know, back when The Matrix came out in '99, this idea was considered science fiction. And, you know, he's an Oxford professor now. He used to be a philosopher, and he wrote this paper in 2003. You know, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? And I'd say more than most other things, that was, you know, his efforts were what brought this up into a serious discussion as opposed to just a science fiction discussion. And it wasn't that hard of a probability. You know? He basically said that if somebody creates a simulation anywhere, at any point in time, they're going to create lots of them. There's only one base reality. There's lots of simulated realities. So what are the odds that you're in base reality versus simulated reality? Just use simple probability to say there's more of these than these. It's one out of X. If X is large, then you're more likely in that than that. You know? That was basically the probability argument. But I think Joe Rogan got caught up because he was saying, well, we're not there yet. Right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:28:08) So how can we be talking about probabilities in the future? And that's interesting because the first third of my book is about how we get there as a civilization with BCIs, with AI, with augmented reality, photorealistic AR/VR. And then the argument is, okay. If we can get there in, let's say, you know, people always ask me how long will it take us? I say probably a hundred years or so. We'll get to the simulation point, what I call Stage 10. And if we can get there in a hundred years, that's not that big of a deal in galactic time frames. Right? If you think of a civilization that's a thousand years ahead of us or maybe a million years ahead of us. Right? So what are the chances that they get there? Well, they're pretty high. So, you know, Bostrom also said it's possible no one ever gets there. But I think the fact that we've gotten so far—I mean, Elon Musk, you know, made a famous statement about this where he said, forty years ago, we had Pong, which was two squares and a dot. And today, we have MMORPGs. We have AR/VR. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, right, forget my fifty to a hundred years. Let's say it takes us five hundred years. Right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:29:10) I mean, computers haven't even been around for five hundred years, right? So where will they be five hundred years from now? Probably be quantum computing simulations that are going on. So it's pretty likely that we can get there.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:29:22) And if we can get there, who's to say that people haven't already gotten there? In fact, it's pretty likely, I'd say, that somebody's already gotten there and they've created lots of simulations. And it could be that we are in one now. That's the basic argument.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) I love it. I think you should write a book, do a story that's kind of Ender's Game, where it's like a young kid, right? And this hero of the story ends up becoming responsible for, like, think very far out into the future where we have these millions of simulations, and then at some point the end of that storyline is that someone hits reset, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) And like resets everything. And then he's responsible for like having to live through these things, and then he gets to decide if he hits that reset button.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:30:02) That's great. Yeah, I have thought about doing a science fiction novel on this topic. But, you know, right now, my next book is actually called The Simulated Multiverse, and it's coming out later this year, and it's kind of a follow-up to The Simulation Hypothesis.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:30:17) So, you know, most of The Simulation Hypothesis is discussing this idea that we live in a simulation. But, you know, one of the interviews that I did when I wrote the book was with the wife of Philip K. Dick. You know, he passed away in '82, just before Blade Runner came out. And of course, he got really famous after that. And so he gave a speech in 1977 in Metz, France, at a sci-fi convention, where there was a famous line that I quoted in the book and that many people have heard of, where he said, "We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have is when some variable is changed."

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:30:51) And so, you know, when I was talking to his wife, turns out this wasn't just a random thing he said. He had this whole philosophy in that speech. And if you go back and listen to the speech—and I found the full text and I saw the video—and realized that what he was talking about was actually multiple timelines in the simulation. So he said the variables have changed. We would have a feeling of déjà vu.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:31:13) Like, we are reliving the same moment but with something different. And it turns out that he believed that had happened to him in a small way, like when he went in the bathroom and looked for the light that he thought was a chain light. This is back in like the seventies. But in fact, it was a light switch, and he knew for sure he remembered it being a chain. And he said, okay, somebody has changed something, right? And so he wrote this story called The Adjustment Team based on this, which became the movie The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt a few years back. And so that was a small thing. But then in a big way, there's this recent adaptation of his works on Amazon called The Man in the High Castle.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:31:54) And The Man in the High Castle is about an alternate timeline where Germany and Japan won World War II, and they basically took over the US and divided it between them. And so Philip K. Dick came to believe that he remembered that as an actual timeline, not just as something he made up. And so, you know, he came up with this whole philosophy that someone or something is running the simulations, rewinding them, not liking the outcome, and letting it run again, and trying different outcomes. Kind of getting back to what you were saying earlier about we try out different scenarios, and we were talking about dreams being simulations. He was taking it to a whole other level.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:32:35) And so, you know, it occurred to me after that conversation that, well, if you can simulate one timeline, what do we do when we run simulations today? Like the weather—we run dozens of simulations and we figure out what the most likely outcome is. So we rewind and we run forward, and I call that the core loop. And it turns out, you know, in quantum mechanics—so about a third of both books is dedicated to physics and quantum mechanics—in quantum mechanics, there's this weirdness about the wave and the particle duality.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:33:03) You may have heard of it. The idea is that the particle is not really a particle. It's a set of probabilities. It could be in many different places, but when you measure it, it's in one place. You know, kind of like Schrödinger's cat. And the other popular interpretation is, okay, it's not probabilities. It's a multiverse, right? That every single probability exists in some different parallel universe. So every time a quantum measurement is made, the world splits in two.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:33:30) And if you think of like a graph where everything is splitting, we have many different multiverses. And so, you know, this book is about that idea. It's called The Simulated Multiverse. That that is happening, but, you know, if you think about it, there's nothing in nature that you can just clone like that. Like, I can't clone a human being. I can clone a sheep as an embryo and I can grow it. You know, trees will drop acorns and they will slowly grow. So you have to grow things. You can't just take a planet and clone it.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:33:58) You know, the only thing you can clone is information. And it turns out in computer science, we do this all the time. In fact, we have the ability to take, really, at a very low level, an instruction that says copy all these bits, right? So if everything is bits, you can copy very easily.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:34:14) You can create multiple universes in a split second in the same way that quantum mechanics is telling us that we either collapse the probabilities or—many scientists believe—we're creating these new universes as we go. And so if we're able to simulate one timeline, there's no reason we can't simulate many timelines. And it turns out that some of the mysteries of physics, which don't make a lot of sense when you think about them from a common sense point of view, like this observer effect that I talked about, like this multiverse thing, start to make much more sense when you think about it using Philip K. Dick's framework—that we are branching off different realities, and then we may be choosing the one that is the most optimum. And so, you know, with The Man in the High Castle, I talked about that. He also came to believe that these beings, whoever they were—he called them the programmer and the counter-programmer, which could have religious overtones, but he didn't really know who they were.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:35:10) He said that they tried to prevent the assassination of JFK in Dallas. And when they did, he got assassinated in Orlando or in some other city, or it led to a really bad outcome of nuclear war. So they rewound and let that original assassination attempt be successful. And I found that just an intriguing idea. So my next book is really taking the simulation idea one step further to say, what if we actually live in the simulation and there are multiple simulated timelines?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:35:36) And some people might even remember that. There's an effect called the Mandela Effect, which I don't know if you've heard of that, where some people remember—a large number of people remember—Nelson Mandela dying in the eighties in prison. Of course, in our timeline, he didn't die in the eighties in prison. In the nineteen nineties, he was released and became president of South Africa and died in 2013. So what happened was right near the time of his death, around 2010, you know, a lot of people said, "Wait, I thought he was already dead. I remember watching his funeral on TV. I remember." Right? And so, you know, some people say, "Well, that's just misremembering. They confused him with this other activist in South Africa." Turns out some of the people that remembered this were people that had gone to South Africa to interview him in the eighties. So what are the chances that they would mistake him for somebody else? And so there was this blogger—her name is Fiona Broome. She termed it the Mandela Effect at a—she was at a Star Trek convention in Atlanta, I think, at the time.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:36:36) And people were talking about a Star Trek episode that never existed but they remembered watching, you know, as a kid. And so the Mandela Effect became a catchall for people who remember an alternate timeline and something being different, whether it's as simple as, you know, Jiffy peanut butter, which doesn't exist because there was only Jif peanut butter, or, you know, the Bernstein Bears, which are really the Berenstain Bears. They're not really spelled S-T-E-I-N. Or certain logos, or you get into these bigger events like Nelson Mandela's death. So it could be small things or big things, getting back to Philip K. Dick's ideas about small things or big things.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:37:13) And so, you know, I came up with a computer science-based explanation for the Mandela Effect, which is that we are running these multiple simulated timelines, and the memories are getting crossed because we merge and we select. We prune the tree to pick the most optimum, but some people still remember the other timeline.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) I love this type of stuff, man. You get to live the dream getting to think about this and spend all day writing this and talking to smart people about these topics.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:37:40) Yeah, it's a lot of fun, you know. It's certainly more fun than, you know, day to day having a job. Even though, you know, I had startups, video game startups, they're still a grind because you have to like build every little thing and test every little thing, and, you know, customers calling you saying, "Hey, I didn't get my virtual currency." This is more fun than that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:00) Right? So you went and you're kind of like up here, right, like in the big thought world, and then you're like, "You know what? I should go write this book to help people build their startups and their models inside of this multiverse." And so you wrote this startup book.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:38:17) Yeah. So I've been thinking about the startup book for many years. And so it's been percolating ever since my very first startup, which I did back in the nineties. And, you know, even then, I would have sort of these misconceptions about, you know, what it meant to do a startup and how I should go about it. And so, you know, I call those startup myths, which are really, you know, kind of rules of thumb that people say, but they turn out not to necessarily always be true.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:38:47) So, for example, today in Silicon Valley, everyone says, you know, you have to start a billion-dollar company, right? No venture capitalist wants to invest in you unless you get a unicorn, which is the term that they use for a private company that's valued over a billion dollars. Incidentally, that was a term coined by one of my classmates from MIT many years ago, Aileen Lee, who became a famous venture capitalist over at Kleiner Perkins and runs her own fund now. And I actually ran against her for class president, but she won back then. But so, you know, that's one of the myths—is you have to start a billion-dollar company. Now it turns out that's not necessarily untrue. I mean, there's a kernel of truth to that. Investors want to invest, particularly venture capitalists, in a business that will have enough scale. The problem is you don't know at the beginning whether something could be a billion-dollar company or not.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:39:33) Let's look at Slack, right? I mean, you've heard of Slack? Everybody has used it at work. Well, Slack started off as a game company, a video game company, and the game didn't work. And they abandoned it and created this communication tool, which became Slack. So now if you said at the beginning, you know, "Do these guys have a billion-dollar company potentially?" I mean, there weren't that many billion-dollar game companies back then.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:40:01) This is back in like around when I was doing this game, Tap Fish. You know, if you had made a million dollars from your game, that was considered, you know, pretty good for a mobile game. And, you know, speaking of when I was in college, one of my—we had this program where we'd go to Japan every summer and do an internship. And one of my cofounders in the video game company, back then we were classmates. He went to Japan and he met this guy named Jerry from Stanford who was creating this little podunk thing. It was like a little directory of, like, a list of things called websites. I remember him—and, you know, even my cofounder, you know, who's a very successful entrepreneur now, said, "What is this little thing? Like, nobody's ever going to use it. It's never going to amount to anything." And turns out that was Yahoo, right? It was Jerry Yang who was the founder of Yahoo. So, you know, oftentimes the best way to build a billion-dollar company is not to go around saying, "Oh, I'm going to build the next billion-dollar company." It's to work on something that intrigues you and to follow that thread, which could take you to something that's high growth, and then you will end up with a multibillion-dollar company. So that's one of the myths that, you know, I found is very common.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:41:11) And turns out there's a whole bunch of these, whether it's in raising financing, starting a company, hiring people, et cetera. And so I wanted to put that together, you know, into a book to try to teach some of the lessons. So the myths aren't untrue. They're just a good way to get into the complexity of the startup world. And that's another thing that I found, you know, was that there are rules. People are like, "I just want to know what to do." And the problem is you can't just take the rules and apply them blindly, right? You will end up with not the results that you want. You have to apply the rules differently in different situations.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:41:48) So it turns out building a successful startup is a complex thing. If it wasn't, then 90% of startups would be successful, because all you would have to do is pull out the rule book and you could just follow it. I remember one reviewer of my book, Startup Myths, said, "Well, you know, this guy will tell us a story about, you know, one thing, and then he'll tell us the story about the opposite. You know, and how am I supposed to know what to do?" Well, that's the whole point—is you have to apply the context. So another rule that's very, very popular here is "fail fast, pivot quickly," right? Which says that if the thing you're doing, it looks like it's not going to work, you need to fail and get rid of it and go do something else that's likely to be more successful. And so turns out there are good examples of companies that started doing something that didn't work and they went on to do something else. But there's also examples of companies that started to do something, it didn't work, and they stuck with it. And eventually it did work. So a good exam—so I mentioned Slack, where they pivoted and they found a niche that worked. There's a company called Life360. I don't know if you ever heard of it, but they're actually one of the most downloaded apps of all time.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:42:53) And it's an app that lets you communicate with your family members. So I remember talking to the founder, Alex Arro, and he said, "Well, the most common text message in the world was, back then, 'Where are you?'" Right? Especially between family members, right? Now, you know, maybe not, but back then smartphones were a new thing. And so they built this little mobile app that will let you keep track of where your family members were, and it wasn't very successful initially. And they got a little bit of funding in 2008, 2009. And so they decided, well, you know, people told them, "Don't do this. Go do Facebook for families or go do something else that can be successful."

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:43:28) And they just said, no. You know, we think this is the right thing. So they just stuck with it. And it turns out in 2011, 2012, when families actually had more than one smartphone, right? Because that didn't happen until probably 2012, suddenly, you know, they had exponential growth. And so that was the case where you didn't want to fail fast and pivot quickly. You wanted to stick with it. So what's the answer? You know, should you fail fast and pivot quickly, or should you stick with it? Well, you have to look at the circumstances of the market. You have to look at the specifics of the product. And if there's one thing that I've learned over the years in startups, and people, you know, consider me an expert now, is that I don't actually know that much. Right? Because you have to keep kind of a Zen-like beginner's mind, and because every situation is a little bit different. You will see patterns. So there's lots of patterns I've seen. So if you can recognize the patterns, they tend to work for a while, but then what happens is circumstances change.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:44:21) And so in the book, I have one of the models. It's called "Startup Myths and Models." Models are different ways to think about how the markets are changing. So when I did Tapfish, which was one of the most successful games at the time, you know, we spent like $25,000 to build a game, and we spent $25,000 in marketing, and it shot up to the top of the charts. And then because it was a good game, people told their friends, and so it stayed there. So, you know, we learned a certain set of things to do in the mobile gaming industry, and the mobile gaming industry was pretty new, pretty small. Today, it's actually a $70 billion industry, just mobile games, not counting, you know, PC games or console games or anything else. And you can't spend $25,000 to market a game. It will get you nowhere. It'll get you like 10 users. I mean, not exactly, but you know what I'm saying. And we had millions of downloads. I think we eventually got like 30 or 50 million downloads. Right? If most games when they launch today, you have to spend millions of dollars per month on advertising, and you have to spend like $1, $2, $3 per user. And so we spent 25 cents per user. So with $25,000, we got our first 100,000 users, and those 100,000 users got another 500,000 users, and those 500,000 got another million, and then we had enough money that we could spend more at that point. But what happens over time is startup markets evolve. The costs go up, and the way that you approach the market changes. So actually, I call this the startup market lifecycle, and this is, you know, kind of one of the main models in the book, is that startup markets go through these phases.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:46:00) And they start off as this nascent stage where it's hobbyist, kind of like my story about Jerry Yang and Yahoo, right? Then it goes to what I call the recognized or growing phase, which is a good time to get in because everything is growing. That's when we did Tapfish. We weren't the first guys to build a game. That was in 2008. We did it in 2010. It was starting to be considered the next big thing, but it still wasn't huge yet, right? Then we get to the super hot phase where everybody and their mother is trying to jump in, right? And we see that today with crypto and Bitcoin. And in fact, Bitcoin has gone through this phase several times, the same phases. And usually, that's not the best time to jump in because valuations are super high. It's actually a good time to sell because you can sell for a very high multiple on revenues. Then you go to the maturing phase where things start to become more expensive, leaders are established. And finally, you get to the mature stage. And in the mature stage, companies are public, and they are valued based on profits, right? Today, you know, some game companies are valued based on profits. And actually, gaming is going through kind of another one of these phases now. But if you look at mobile gaming from where it started to where it ended up, there were several multimillion dollar companies by 2016. It was really expensive. It was very difficult for a new person to get in. So I mentioned we spent 25K and 25K to get Tapfish off the ground. In 2016, Niantic came out with Pokémon Go, which became the most popular game on the planet at the time. So guess how much money they had raised before they released that game? It was a lot more than our 25K. It was $30 million, right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:47:40) Wow. So, you know, it was just a whole different scale. And this is true. You know, I grew up in Detroit, and the big companies were like GM, Ford, and I'd see things like Oldsmobile and Buick. I'm like, why do we have these different names? Why don't they just call them GM cars? Well, it turns out Oldsmobile and Buick and Dodge, these were all garage entrepreneurs, right? They all got in when the market was young, and you could literally in a garage, you could literally build an automobile, which, you know, a quadricycle is what Henry Ford first called it with his very first startup. And then over time, today, for Tesla to create a new car, Elon Musk had to put in $180 million of his own money, not to mention probably $500 million of government money. So the amount of investment you need to put into a mature industry is very different than in a garage-type industry. And so learning to recognize, you know, that the markets evolve in phases is another aspect of the book. And so those are the myths, and those are the models that I talk about in the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:43) I love it. Fantastic. As you're sitting here, it's like the last 20 years of my life. The whole time I was like, yep, yep. As an entrepreneur, yeah, you described it perfectly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:54) I think I'm super excited about the book. I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I'm really excited to do it.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:49:01) Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so the subtitle is called "What You Won't Learn in Business School." And it was supposed to be called "What You Won't Learn at Stanford Business School" because that's where I went to business school. But it was published by Columbia Business School, and so they were like, well, we can't really, you know, put Stanford in the title. It sounds like we're dinging them. But the point was, you know, when I was in business school, we used to build these spreadsheets and these models. In fact, we had a class called Modeling, and the professor literally wrote the book. It was an actual textbook on how to use Microsoft Excel for building these complicated spreadsheets. And we would build these decision models, and you would have, you know, scenario A, this is the output. Scenario B, this is the output. Scenario C, this is the output. And you just choose the one that has the best value. And I remember raising my hand and saying, well, what if you just change the number on the left, like the inputs, right? He goes, well, then you end up with different results. And I said, well, how do you know what numbers to put in there? He goes, well, you know, either one, history, or two, that's where you, the manager, you know, get paid the big bucks, and it came down to your intuition. Well, if there's one thing that's true about startups, is that the past does not equal the future, right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:50:07) This is my whole point with stages of market changing. Now, if there's one thing that's true in big companies, they model based upon the past, right? GM, ExxonMobil. Yeah, they'll do scenarios, but mostly, they'll look at, you know, past scenarios and they'll try to model. And so it turns out these spreadsheets are mostly bullshit when it comes to startups. Because if the past was the future, well, yeah, then you could do that. You could make assumptions. Otherwise, your assumptions are mostly wrong unless you have intuition, unless you kind of are sensing what might happen in the future.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:50:38) So, you know, this is where we tie back to quantum mechanics and we tie to intuition. I wrote a book a few years ago called "Treasure Hunt," which was about tapping into these ideas of funny feelings and déjà vu. And there was a physicist from Berkeley named Fred Alan Wolf who, you know, his interpretation of quantum mechanics was there are these different future selves, and they are sending information back to us. And we are choosing one of those possible futures. And the equations of quantum mechanics don't rule that out. In fact, the whole multiverse theory kind of assumes there are these different universes branching off, and they're sending back. So, you know, sometimes it comes down to your gut, and so, you know, that's part of why I wanted to have this book be about what you don't learn in business school, because you could learn the specifics. You can learn what a term sheet is. You know, you can learn about valuation, how to issue shares. You can learn kind of the mechanical part, what I call the science of startups.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:51:34) But the thing that's very difficult to learn is the art of startups, and a lot of that comes down to judgment, personal preference, personal belief, your personal conviction, sticking to it, and most importantly, adapting to change in the market. So I said the past does not equal the future. Well, the big thing in startups is that the present doesn't equal the future either, right? So if you think of why Newton invented calculus, it was because, you know, you have these continuous curves. You have to kind of add up things, but the point is that you have the velocity changing over time. And so you may only be at one moment at a time, but every moment is different. How do you calculate that? Well, it turns out, you know, whatever's happening today is not what's going to be happening tomorrow, right? I mean, you don't know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, but you can be pretty sure it's not going to be exactly what it is today. And by tomorrow, I mean a year from now, six months from now. Yeah, literally tomorrow, it may be the same, but within a year, within the startup world, the market will have changed significantly. And this is true of virtual reality, right? I talked about virtual reality and the simulation. In 2016, when I first thought about this, virtual reality was considered the next big thing. And then within a couple of years, you know, VCs have stopped funding consumer virtual reality because people just didn't like putting on the headsets as much, right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:52:53) Now that changed a little bit where enterprises started to use virtual reality headsets for training. Turns out there was a real business case, and that's actually a booming industry right now. So virtual reality training is a booming industry today. And as the headsets become lighter and AR headsets and VR headsets, it's changing again. And so, you know, if there's one truism, it's that things will change over time. And learning how to adapt to that change is a key part, I think, of being an entrepreneur or even an investor, you know, within the world of modern startups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:25) Yeah. There's no free lunch. There's no systematizing it and it working forever. I mean, the base nature of our universe is entropic anyways, so things are always going and coming, right?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:53:37) That's right. Yeah. So change is pretty constant. And so, you know, that's why there's a lot of books out there on startups, but most of them try to give you a bunch of rules to follow. I give you a bunch of rules that you may or may not want to follow. And in some cases, you know, there are meant to be rules you've heard that you may not want to follow. Another one is, you know, hire the best people you can find, right, which seems like a good idea. Or hire the most experienced people you can find, right? I certainly believed it. And so my first startup, you know, I tried to hire the most experienced marketing person, the most experienced VP Sales, most experienced VP Development. Then I found out these guys weren't working together at all. You know, guys and gals weren't working together very effectively because, you know, it's not about optimizing every individual position. It's about having a team that works well together to be able to implement the vision that you have. And sometimes the best people were people who didn't have that much experience. And the worst employees in a startup are the people who had a lot of experience and were inflexible and were unwilling to do it any other way than the way that they've done it in the past.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:54:45) And so this is where, you know... Now, that's true again in phases. In the early days of a startup, that's very true. When you get to the later stages, when you're at $50 million, $100 million, or more, then you want to hire the people that have experience doing exactly what needs to be done because by then, you've defined the business model, right? One of the guys who I have a little section quoting him is a guy named Jeff Bussgang, who's a VC in Boston, and he's at Harvard Business School. And he talks about product-market fit where, you know, at the beginning, it's like a jungle, right? You need a machete to get through. Then you have a dirt road when you've kind of found a little bit of product-market fit, but you're still kind of making things up a little bit as you go. And then finally, there's a paved highway because that's when you figured out the product-market fit, and now you need to be able to optimize and send the most number of cars, you know, down that path, because it's already been defined for you. And that's true within startups as well. And so, you know, that's another area that I think entrepreneurs get confused is how to become a good manager, right? Because usually, most entrepreneurs are doing it themselves or, you know, managing one person, maybe, or two people at the very beginning.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:55:53) How do you then transition into somebody who can actually manage a bigger organization? And so there's another myth with engineers anyway. So I started off as an engineer, which is, you know, management is a waste of time, right? It's kind of like that old movie, what was it? Office Space. Where the manager shows up with his coffee cup and says, yeah, that's great. Would you fill out these performance reports? Exactly. And so I certainly had that impression. And so when I became a manager, I was like, yeah, management's bullshit. I'll just do some work. But the problem was every time I was doing real work, I wouldn't get to the management stuff. It turns out management was work. You needed to spend enough time making sure people, you know, were getting over the obstacles and they were moving in the same direction. What started to happen, because everybody was going in different directions because I wasn't spending enough time managing them, and that can be pretty disastrous, you know, for the startup as well.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:56:44) And so there's like this balance. It's kind of like the waiter. And so what happens is many entrepreneurs become bad managers. Either they become like I did, which is an absent manager where, let them do whatever. I'm just going to do some more real work, not this management stuff. Or they become micromanagers when they're there like all the time, and they're like, no, don't do it this way. Do it my way because this is the way I know how to do it. It's successful. It's kind of like the waiter in a restaurant, and, you know, there's a waiter who never shows up, and you're like, damn it, I need some more water, and they're never coming. And then there's the waiter who shows up in the middle of your conversation all the time and keeps interrupting you. And it's like, you need to find a balance between the two. And so there's an art, I think, for an entrepreneur in particular to become an effective manager. You have to balance the two. And so, you know, those are some of the myths that I get into when it comes to that side of starting a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:33) I fully agree. It's something that I'm constantly learning and getting better at. And you can go, you can look at the past four years of our revenue, and it goes up, which looks good. But I mean, it goes up and down, but then ultimately it's on a steep curve up. But I can sit there and look at the dates and tell you big key lessons I learned quarters, like by quarters, and when I did the micromanaging or when I didn't manage enough or when I didn't let people go quick enough or when I had the wrong person in this place when they should have been over here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:05) Like, there's so many different scenarios. And then it's interesting because we'll put out to our newsletter or on social media, people asking questions, you know, what do you want to know from this guest or whatever it may be. And it really is, like, part of me, I know we need to do that. We know the community. We get the questions. We get them answered. But part of me is like, there's just no matter how much you prepare for this, the raw experience of just going through it and then keeping your eyes open while you're going through it, like, you can't get around that. Like, no amount of planning, no amount of book reading, no amount of conversations or one-on-ones with entrepreneurs asking it, but nothing's going to get you over this hump of you are going to have to do some very difficult things for a very long period of time and stretch yourself beyond belief and grow. And it's going to be painful, but it's going to be fun and rewarding and it's going to suck, but ultimately it's going to be awesome.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 00:59:02) Yeah. Well, I think that's a great summary. And you really have to go through it, and you have to make the decisions based upon what's happening to you at the time. And I agree that no amount of book reading is going to be definitive for you. And that's part of what I try to get across in this book is that the decisions have to be made in context depending on where you are and where the market is and where your team is. And you may end up deploying completely different rules at different stages of the game.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:31) Well, that's why I'm pumped by your book, because the way I use books is for inspiration. Right? So I don't look to them for concrete answers. Right? I look to them for people that are exploring ideas. So there's a hundred books about startups. I've read many books about startups, but the reason why we were excited to have you on the show and invite you is because they sent me the summary and I read through it and I was like, this guy knows what he's doing. It was just the content of the book. I like to take my job here is to take the best ideas and amplify them. Like, I build a platform. Right? Build a stage and I invite guests onto the stage because putting these ideas out there into the world is just something that I'm really passionate about and it keeps me excited. You know, one of my favorite quotes is some people can stay excited for a few days, some people can stay excited for a few months, but winners stay excited for however long it takes. Right? Talking to people like you and hearing these amazing ideas, this is what I will die doing this. Like, this is the best possible scenario in life for me. I love this.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:00:39) Yeah. That's great. And so you found your passion, and it's matching with something that you can actually do practically. Right? And you're very good at it. And so I often tell people with startups as well as in life, you know, you have to find an intersection of these three things. And if you find them, you're in good shape. And the intersection is what do you like or want to do, what are you good at, and what does the market need? Right? So if—and sometimes startups fail because they're missing one of these. Right? Maybe they really like to do something, but the market doesn't need it. Or they're not very good at—you know, for example, we had a startup once. We were pretty good at enterprise software. We decided to release a consumer product. Turns out we weren't very good at a consumer product. And, you know, the amount of support requests we got overwhelmed our little team, and it just didn't work because our product wasn't built for consumers. We just kind of repackaged it. And so what you're good at is just as important as what you think you want to do. But if you can find the intersection of those three things in your startup and in your life, that's a good winning formula for success. I think it sounds like you have found that for yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:41) I'm working at it. It's only been twenty years.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:01:45) So I've been doing the same thing for twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:50) No, no. I mean, I've been programming for seventeen years. But I mean, twenty years since I've been trying to create businesses and I've had some success, I had some false starts, right, where I was building technology and then selling it off and then I was watching them turn it into a business and make ten times more money. And I was like, uh-oh. So I did that once or twice before I realized I shouldn't be selling this off and I'm going to have to figure out how to develop skills to run sales orgs and, or find the right people. And, you know, at the same time, you were getting older. So, you know, you mentioned those three circles, right? And there's always context to it. Like, if you're eighteen and you hear those three circles, I mean, you're going to grow a little bit between eighteen and twenty-eight, you're going to get a little more life experience, you're going to find out more things that you're passionate about. So it'll just become, yeah, you get more experience.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:02:40) Yeah. Makes sense. And, you know, a lot of it is personality dependent too. Like, you know, I'm currently spending time writing books. Many of my cofounders from my previous companies went on to create even bigger, more successful companies that are worth billions of dollars or hundreds of millions. And it's like, well, yeah, I could do that too. But I've kind of done enough in that arena. And so I think we all have different attributes. Right? Kind of like getting back to the video game scenario. Right? You know, you have people—one of the guys I interviewed for StartupMits was a venture capitalist named Brad Feld, who's really—

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:15) I know Brad. Oh, yeah. Great. Sorry. Yeah. And then, by the way, do you know if he's connected to Feld Entertainment?

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:03:20) Do you know them?

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:20) I think so.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:03:20) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:21) They do, like, Disney on Ice and Monster Jam. They actually happen to be world headquartered in my town.

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:03:27) Oh, really? I don't think it's the same Feld, but, you never know. Brad has his fingers in so many things. And so I met him back when he sold his first startup in Boston back in the nineties when I was doing my first startup as an adviser. You know, and he's been in Colorado for a long time now. And so one of the things that came out in his interviews, he said venture capital firms are like a team of Dungeons and Dragons players because some are like a barbarian, some are like a wizard, and you have to look at the individuals and the partners and their personality. You know? And the same is true with entrepreneurs. Right? And so I go through some of the different motivations. Some people just want to build things. Some people want to be masters of the universe. They're super competitive. Right? Some people are really committed to a particular technology, or some people are very passionate about a particular market. And so each of us has different personalities. And usually, you know, when you have a team of people together, it kind of works if they're slightly different. So when you think of some of the famous entrepreneurial teams like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple or Microsoft with Paul Allen and Bill Gates, right, they had very different motivations. They were very different personalities, and you kind of needed a bit of both in order to get there. And so I think as we choose our characters in this simulation, you know, we choose an avatar just like in Dungeons and Dragons. We used to have intelligence, charisma, strength, dexterity, whatever those were, kind of like in Westworld. I don't know if you've seen Westworld.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:05) I look at myself like a—I've been thinking about writing a whole book about programming yourself or the analogies, the infinite analogies you can use about how we're like computers. But, yes, I look at myself like a video game character, and I have these traits. I'm like, where am I going to put my next—where am I going to spend my next coin? Where am I going to get that next—

(Riz (Rizwan Virk) at 01:05:23) Because then you upgrade. You're upgrading specific attributes that you're working on. Right? And so I think that's a great way to think about startups and business as well as just life in general, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:37) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.