There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanA regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.
In general, 90% of people are overmedicating themselves with either drinking, smoking weed, whatever it is. People do not want to be uncomfortable, they cannot stand discomfort.
Legacy is not for us to decide, it's not for us to chase, it's not for us to get, it's not for us to enjoy. I don't think about it much.
Growing up in Pakistan, I saw so many people with heart disease and having heart attacks – it felt almost biblical – it was catastrophic. Unlike a lot of diseases, there wasn't much a cultural footprint for heart disease – it's not something you hear about on news or TV shows.
There is a biological force within your body that wants you to live to old age… you could call it your immune system, or your biological soul!
Just think; our bodies are not just one single individual…. We're collections of 30-40 trillion cells that work collaboratively to create you or me. Life began 4 billion years ago on this planet as very simple prokaryotic life forms evolved into more complex individual eukaryotic life forms, multicellular life and then eventually tissues and organs.
The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement.
These new regulations should (in theory, although there is no research to test it) prevent this psychological risk aversion by ensuring that all counterparties know that at a wholesale and institutional level, they are safe.
To me, writing a song is like a ball game. You bounce the ball back and forth until someone doesn't want to play anymore. When you make music, you want to make someone feel something. So if you write in collaboration, you can have a good reality check if you can make each other feel something with every new word, every new melody.
I'm a school drop-out that is now teaching professors and doctors around the world; all because of a naïve woman's wish for her child to live.
Since we started really living these tools, we are now better at uncertainty than we were even two years ago. You can't go back to believing that it's too risky, you've got to keep going.
Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.