#749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #427 "Michael Lewis — Inside the Mind of the Iconic Writer https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/" and episode #487 "Dr. Martine Rothblatt — A Masterclass on Asking Better Questions and Peering Into the Future https://tim.blog/2020/12/16/martine-rothblatt/." Please enjoy! Sponsors: Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period) AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D [and 5 free AG1 travel packs] with your first subscription purchase.) Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [04:13] Notes about this supercombo format. [05:16] Enter Michael Lewis. [05:54] Why Michael quit his well-paid job to become a full-time author. [12:58] Liar’s Poker is a cautionary tale, not a how-to book. [15:16] On ambition and the metrics of success. [18:31] Maximizing self-satisfaction, optimizing the writing process, and learning to sing. [20:51] The value of having an impolite editor on your side. [23:52] On the merits of productive laziness. [28:13] How Michael determines if a project should proceed. [29:51] Michael's billboard. [32:45] Enter Martine Rothblatt. [33:14] Martine's appreciation for Alan Watts' book on human identity. [35:34] Martine's thoughts on AI-human coexistence in the movie Her. [36:31] BINA48 and realistic human simulations in media. [39:53] Martine's role models and inspirations. [41:20] When Martine started a biotech company to save her daughter's life. [52:44] Glaxo Wellcome's misconceptions about Martine's successful drug. [56:17] Martine's interest in satellite communication systems. [1:00:33] Promoting scientific literacy and curiosity. [1:05:20] Questioning authority and Martine's transgender journey. [1:10:28] Martine's non-binary gender identity. [1:12:34] Key decisions in Martine's transition. [1:13:28] The need for genetic information protection laws. [1:16:00] South American population and organ transplant research. [1:21:42] Vagus nerve manipulation for various therapies. [1:31:25] Martine's Alzheimer's cognitive enabler patent. [1:38:17] The Rothblatt family's "love nights" tradition. [1:43:54] The possibility of machines experiencing love. [1:49:20] Ethical considerations for future technology. [1:52:44] Current practices future generations might view as barbaric. [1:57:42] United Therapeutics' zero-carbon-footprint headquarters. [2:00:32] Refurbishing unusable lungs to save lives. [2:04:45] United Therapeutics' focus on long-term COVID-19 effects. [2:07:26] Martine's billboard. [2:08:27] Advice for finding positivity in life. [2:11:48] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep Pod Cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod and I'm excited to test it out, Pod4Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod4Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  Pod4Ultra also introduces an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. And for those snore-heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from snoring. Plus, with the Pod4Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won't need them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod4Ultra itself. They have imperceptible sensors which track your sleep time, sleep phases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking is just one example, is at 99% accuracy. So, get your best night's sleep. Head to eightsleep.com/tim and use code TIM

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  to get $350 off of the Pod4Ultra. That's Eight Sleep, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and code TIM, T-I-M, to get $350 off the Pod4Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

• 1:44Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in the Four Hour Work Week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009, and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO,

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way.

• 3:11Tim Ferriss?

  If you have questions, this is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to Give you these super combo episodes and internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household

• 4:42Tim Ferriss?

  names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  First up, Michael Lewis, the number one New York Times bestselling author of more than 15 books, including Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short, which were made into major motion pictures, and his latest, Going Infinite, which delves into the rise and fall of FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, a topic Michael also explores in depth in his critically acclaimed podcast, Against the Rules. You can learn more about Michael at MichaelLewisWrites.com.

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  I'm looking at a paragraph from BrainPickings.org, which is run by Maria Popova, who I'm very fond of. And there's a piece on your writing process. She may have been quoting a different source, but I just want to read something quickly and then we can discuss. These are your words. "Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer over four years of freelancing was about $3,000. So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Solomon Brothers, where I'd been working for a couple of years and where I'd just gotten a bonus of $225,000, which they'd promised they'd double the following year to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write." Was that a hard decision or was it something

• 6:38Tim Ferriss?

  you'd just been biding your time for?

• 6:40Speaker 04

  You put it very well. It was something I'd been biding my When I went into Solomon Brothers, I knew that this was a temp gig, I'd be there for a few years, and I was there more out of curiosity about how this world worked than I was to advance a career. In fact, aside from the money, which I liked, I didn't think really much about the career at Solomon Brothers because I knew I could only hang up, my interest would only last for so long. And I was intensely interested in it as I was learning about it. But when I kind of figured it all out and got a sense of how it all worked and there weren't any more questions I had that needed to be answered, I really started to get bored. But the whole time I was there, I was writing. I got myself

• 7:23Speaker 04

  in trouble because I naturally tend to write kind of about what's around me. And so I started to write things about this great boom that was happening on Wall Street was really the beginning of what we still live with, this notion of 22 or 23 year olds rolling on and making a fortune. The sums of money being made on Wall Street and the share of the economy it occupied was expanding rapidly, and no one quite understood why. So there was a natural market for me to sort of try to explain it. And I mentioned the Wall Street Journal asked me to write op-eds for them. I wrote an op-ed arguing that investment bankers were overpaid. And in the bottom of the op-ed, it said Michael Lewis is an associate with Solomon Brothers in London. Oh, God.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Well, but you know, I tell you, I must have like a blind streak, right? Because my reaction was, wow, great piece. You know, when they sent me the galleys or whatever it was, I thought, this is fabulous. And I didn't even think, what are the people at Solomon Brothers going to think? Except maybe they're going to be thinking it's so cool that I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal. I got to work the next day, and there's a fellow who was, who ran all of Solomon Brothers International, delightful guy, he was the guy who had hired me in the first place. And he was ash and face sitting at my desk with this little newspaper on his lap. And he said, Michael, I mean, it was really not anger, it was more in sadness. He said, Michael, you have no idea of the damage you've done. And I was kind of like, what do you mean? He said, this thing is being

• 8:51Speaker 04

  picked up all over the United States, and we've had a crisis meeting overnight of the Solomon Brothers Board, what to do about it. They couldn't or wouldn't have fired me because I had just flukily started to generate a whole lot of money for them, like a whole lot of money. I was essentially a salesperson, and I had at that point the second Biggest money generating account in the entire firm. And the person would speak only to me, even though I'd only been there a year and a half. It was basically the most sophisticated hedge fund sort of manager in Europe. And so they didn't want to fire me because they didn't want to lose him. He said to me, my boss said, what are we going to do about this? And I said, I don't really want to do anything about this.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And he said, well, we need you to stop writing. And I said, I'm not going to stop writing. It's what I love to do. And he had the right idea. He said, could you write under a different name? And I said, no problem. I can do that. And he said, what name are you going to use? Actually, it just popped into my head, I'll use my mother's maiden name. So I wrote under the name Diana Bleeker for maybe the next nine months or year. And maybe not quite that long, but I wrote half a dozen pieces. They got better and better. I was getting better and better because I had better and better editing. So Michael Kinsley, who was then editing The New Republic, had walked into my life. And he was teach giving me writing lessons, basically, in the way he edited the pieces.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  But the pieces Diana Bleeker was writing, I mean, I really felt off the leash because nobody could trace it back to me. I was almost describing the trading floor around me in pieces. And people were circulating, it was really great. I was sitting in London at my desk doing my business. And I would watch people Xeroxing articles I'd written in The New Republic under Diana Bleeker and pass them out on the trading floor. And so I had a sense that like, God, people are hungry for this. People are laughing, people were, it was just working. Now, the money part of it, what happened was, I came home one night to my house in London, picked up a phone call, and it was a man named Ned Chase, who happens to be Chevy Chase's dad, who was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  And he said, I figured out who Diana Bleeker was and I got your number. I never found out how he did that. We think you should write a book. And at that point, I thought, I'm out. If someone will publish a book by me, I'm not hanging around the Wall Street firm any longer. I did hang around an extra three months to get my bonus, but the minute I saw the money hit the bank account and I knew they couldn't take it back, I left. And not because I disliked them. It was just, I loved a lot of the guys there. Mostly, it was almost all guys. I really liked my bosses, generally. I just was bored with the work and I had this other thing I loved to do. You know, I had two conversations in which people tried to say, oh, don't do that. Don't walk away from a sure fortune

• 11:42Speaker 04

  to go take a flyer on writing a book. One was my bosses, who took me into a room, and this tells you just how innocent an age it was. I mean, these days, you'd be in a room with lawyers, right? And you'd be told, you signed this non-disclosure agreement and you're writing anything about anything. They didn't care about it. They were worried about my sanity. They were actually worried about my career. They couldn't believe that I was going to walk away from this really cushy situation and go and do that other thing. So they were trying to help me. And I just said, you know, I got this feeling, I gotta do this. My father said, you know, you really could just wait. You really could just collect some millions of dollars and then write your books. But the problem was, I was, what,

• 12:27Speaker 04

  27 at the time? I looked ahead of me, and I looked at people who were 35 or 37, and they seemed ancient. And they seemed completely stuck. Like, they made so much money, and their lives had adapted to the making of money. They depended on the making of money. I just thought, there's no way I'd spend a lot of time here and still even want to do this. I'd be trapped. And I don't want to do that. So I ignored all that advice, and just went and did it. And it worked out, you know? That was Liar's Poker.

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Liar's Poker, at least I've read, was intended to be a cautionary tale of sorts. It's not how everybody took it. I mean, it's a very exciting book.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  The thing is, it's like a funny book. It was a funny story.

• 13:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very, very funny book.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  And it's also an incredible story, because you're seeing this transformation.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Of this industry and the effect on all these young people. But I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it. Because I really just thought my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were education of Henry Adams and Rousseau's confessions. The model was just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it. And that's enough. You don't need to layer on an interpretation of what happened. What happens good enough. And the extent I wanted kind of to push the reader in any direction. It was just really young readers, like people in college, that I hoped would read it and would say, yeah, I now know what this is.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's money there, but a lot of it's kind of silly. And I have these other things I want to do with my life and I'm going to go do them. So I'm not going to be seduced by Goldman Sachs or have Goldman Sachs prey on my anxiety about my future when I'm walking out of my college. I'm going to go do what I'm meant to do. And I felt that way because I had watched classmates at Princeton just naturally drift into the arms of the investment banks because they really couldn't, they felt they couldn't resist the money and they were anxious about not being successes. Then what happens is the book comes out and the book makes it seem, because it was, as business goes, incredibly colorful and entertaining and lucrative.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  And I had dozens of letters a day from young readers saying, Dear Mr. Lewis, I really loved your how to book about Wall Street, about how to make money on Wall Street. And I'm hoping that there's some tips in there that you didn't put in there that you could let me know so I have an edge. It just fueled the desire of young people to want to do it more. And I didn't see that coming. And that's something, I don't know, anybody who writes books, I think, learns that you write a book, but the reader reads a book. And the reader may read a book that's entirely different from what you thought you wrote. And you can't really do that much about it.

• 15:16Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about, if you do, ambition? And this may not be a good question, but it seems like, from what I've read, the overt ambition that kind of people wear on their shirt sleeves in certainly many parts of Wall Street, you find off-putting or maybe in bad taste, but you certainly don't shy away from ambitious projects, right? How do you personally think about ambitious? And I don't want to put words in your mouth either.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  No, no, it's an interesting way to frame the question. How do I think about ambition? Well, I could tell you, I thought it was so comical that I was going to be in this ambitious money-making world. That the week before I went to Solomon Brothers, I went into Paul Stewart, this men's store, because I saw it through their window. I saw they had red suspenders with little gold dollar signs on them. And I thought, this is like a way to make fun of the whole thing. And nobody thought it was funny. Nobody thought, it was like, you can't wear that shit around here. Until you're, you can't wear that shit until you are a big enough deal to wear that shit. I've always been enormously ambitious in a way. I've always wanted my life to be great, like, really great. I'm competitive, like, very competitive.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  And I love competitive sports. I love winning. I don't particularly like losing. I guess, number one, I don't accept money as an accurate measure, or any kind of real measure, of whether you're winning or losing. So money doesn't hold that, doesn't have that hold on me. Fame, a bit more. I mean, I would say, a lust for attention and fame is probably closer to a vice of mine than a lust for money and fortune. But even that, I find I get tired of, and it just doesn't interest me that much. I don't think I'm a maximizer, in that I'm not trying to get a lot of a thing.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  It's more, if I'm trying to maximize anything, it's a feeling. And it's a feeling that, that was a kick-ass book. I could look at something and just say, that is a great piece of work. That feeling is what I, I'm kind of always gunning for, and it's a pretty private feeling. And I think, over time, I mean, you must have found this too, that the response that I have to external validation...

• 17:34Speaker 04

  Has become muted and numbed. And when I got a glowing review for Liar's Poker and it went to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, it's like dancing all over my kitchen. I mean, I was just happy as a clam. I couldn't believe that it was like I just won the Super Bowl. And now I don't read the reviews. I sometimes forget whether a book is on the New York Times Bestseller list or not. I'm not paying as much attention to it. It doesn't gratify me in the same way. But the gratification I get from looking at something that I think I've done that's really good is at least as great as it was back then. I think I'm tapping into that. I think I'm tapping into like the pleasure I got when I was just all by myself in a room laughing at my own jokes.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  It's sort of like maximizing self satisfaction, which is maybe not the most attractive trait that my ambition is to maximize my self satisfaction. Maybe that's my ambition.

• 18:31Tim Ferriss?

  Let's jump into the process associated with the maximizing the self satisfaction. You mentioned laughing at your own jokes. I have read that you sometimes write late at night, say midnight. You put on a headset and play the same soundtrack of, say, 20 songs over and over again. Is that something that you still do?

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Yes, in fact, I did it yesterday. Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm. My natural rhythm would be to kind of start about four in the afternoon and write till three in the morning and sleep until noon, but you can't do that with kids. So I now, I'm not as likely to be found late at night at my desk, though it happens sometimes. But whenever I'm writing, I have headphones on and I have a soundtrack I write to. And the soundtrack changes. It changes book to book. And it's got to the point where both my wife and my kids will recommend songs for the soundtrack for whatever the next project is. And I'll build a soundtrack intentionally. And the music is, you know, it's all over the map.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  It tends to be very up, but it tends to be music that, that I just stop hearing. And I noticed something really funny just the last couple of weeks because. I'm working on something now, the second season of my podcast, where I have a different relation to music. The podcast is about coaching and the last episode, which I have still not written, it's the only episode I haven't written, is me getting coached in something I'm incredibly uncomfortable doing, and it's singing. I've been doing voice lessons an hour every day for the last three months. And there's a song I sing, and I might not tell you which one it is, that I'm gonna have to sing, that I've been practicing, that happens to be on my soundtrack.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  And now I realize I have to remove it because it kicks my brain into a different space. All of a sudden, I hear it and it's like Pavlovian. I've got to belt out the tune, I've got to worry about hitting a high note, and it screws up my writing. And so, I've just been hitting skip because I've been reluctant to change it, but I have to, just gonna have to remove it. So, it puts me, the music puts me in, the purpose of it is to shut out the possibility of interruption. I can't hear knocks on the door, phones, people dropping packages on the front porch, anything. I'm just in my own space. And I kind of cease to hear the sound.

• 20:51Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned Michael, was it Kinsley? Is that right?

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:55Tim Ferriss?

  The editor?

• 20:56Speaker 04

  The editor of The New Republic.

• 20:57Tim Ferriss?

  What made him a good editor, or what did you learn from him? Can you remember anything that he helped tighten or improve?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  So, Michael Kinsley had a gift for creating writers. There are dozens of people who were young writers then, who he had profound influence on, and careers that he just launched. And it's an odd assortment, and I was one of those people. I think what happens with writers who come up in a conventional way, like through creative writing programs, or by writing for their circle of friends, is they get treated too politely. Their work gets treated too politely. So, they don't hear... A really withering critique of their work. And Michael Kinsley could not help himself. He delivered the most withering critiques of your work.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  The kind of throat-clearing, phony first paragraph, which was totally unnecessary. It would come back, it'd be just a big ax throat. Why'd you even write that? Start here. It would be, I can remember, I had learned a word that was just a completely obscure word, and I even remember the word, but I don't know how to pronounce it. It's Chthonian, it starts C-H. I think it means of the underworld. And I remember, I remember working it into the piece, and like, a big circle around it, saying, "You fucking phony." You know, what do you do? You know, what'd you do? Go into the thesaurus? It was just like making merciless fun of me. My byline, at the very beginning, I thought it sounded good. It was for it to be Michael M. Lewis, my middle name is Monroe.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  I thought a middle initial kind of fancied it up. He put a big circle around it and said, "Don't do that." You know, "Don't be one of those people. You're not Michael M. Lewis, you're Michael Lewis." He was, all the preposterous things that you naturally tend to do when you're putting, you know, words on paper, he identified all of them as vices and stopped you from them. And so, in addition, he was unbelievably gifted at seeing what a good story was. You started to learn what was interesting and what wasn't, just talking to him, just by how he responded to what you said. It was a kind of feedback that everybody should get, but that most people are too tender and sensitive to deliver. It's a funny thing, I think that this happens in speech, too.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  I think that there's lots of inefficiency in human conversation, that people do all kinds of things they really shouldn't do, and that other people make fun of them for doing. People are endlessly telling stories about what some other person said, making fun of them. And it shouldn't be that way. We should be very efficient conversationalists, because we do it all the time, but we aren't, because we don't get feedback. Because people are too polite. And I think people are too polite with other people's writing. And what Michael Kinsley, his great gift in addition to be a kind of genius, was he just couldn't be polite. He was just so blunt. I'm Michael Lewis on my books instead of Michael M. Lewis because of Michael Kinsley.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  I have a question for you about, maybe this isn't the right word, but productive laziness. I was looking at an article that talked about a speaking gig from 2017 Qualtrics. You might know where this is going, but the quote that stuck out to me was attributed to you. People waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. And I don't know if that prompts any memories, but is that something you could elaborate on?

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Sure, that wasn't a quote for me. It was a quote from one of my characters, Amos Tversky. He's one of the main characters in The Undoing Project. And it resonated with me. What he meant was that the people don't back away from their work. And especially the need to always seem busy or be busy stops people from finding things that are really worth doing and sifting the ones that are worth doing from the ones that aren't worth doing. So it resonates with me because I am not a person who always has to be doing something. And in fact, my natural state is probably inert, that I can really just lay around and screw off and procrastinate with the best of them.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  And it's partly because of how I grew up. I mean, I grew up in New Orleans and there was not a whole lot of value attached to either ambition or career achievement. You were who you were because of how you were and who your family was and what neighborhood you grew up in, where you went to school. You were always so well-defined by your environment that trying to change it by doing stuff didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. And my father used to tell me, and it was, and I believed this until I was about 20, on our family coat of arms, there was a motto in Latin, and the motto was, "Do as little as possible, and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than

• 25:42Speaker 04

  to perform an arduous task." And he would just say that, like, just keep that in mind. We live by these words. And so that's my kind of where I was coming from just generally. And I found this thing that didn't feel like work. So it didn't feel like an attempt at achievement. Not that achievement was bad, it just that's not why I was doing it. But having said that, you know, I do find that being able to back away and get yourself, myself, in a state of mind in which I can say, it's okay if I never write anything else. It's okay if I never write another book. It's okay if I don't do anything for six months. And I can afford that now. And that's nice to be, it's a luxury to be able to afford it.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  But I think a lot of people who can afford it don't actually take advantage of the luxury. Because I think that doing that, putting yourself in a state of mind where I'm, I've got to make an argument about why I need to write another book, because I don't have to, changes your relationship to potential stories and potential material. It requires the material to rise to the level of interest where you feel obliged to engage with it. So you're not doing it just because you got to write another book. You're doing it because how can I not write this? And it serves my own sloth and indolence, serves as a kind of filter. And the filter is, no, I don't have to do that. So I'm not gonna do that. I don't particularly want to do that, so I'm just not gonna do that.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  And even if you tell me that, oh, it's got big bestseller written all over it, I'm not interested, because it keeps me off that path. I think it's been very useful because it does two things at once. One, is it raises the level of the bar that the material has to jump over to get to me. So the material's gonna have to be really good if I'm gonna engage with it. And two, it stops me from doing the same thing over and over again, just to be successful. It enables me to, almost encourages me, to move around and do surprising things. And I think readers and audiences really appreciate and will engage with the writer who's willing to take risks.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  That, yeah, they like their writers, some of their writers do just keep doing the same things over and over again, but they'll follow you if you take a brave risk. Since I'm not doing it, I'm not trying to create the next surefire bestseller. I'm led to other and sometimes unlikely material. So the books end up being about a lot of different things.

• 28:13Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the questions or thresholds that indicate the material has risen above the necessary hurdles? I found one question, I don't know if this is you or not, so feel free to confirm or deny, but would I be sad if this story didn't get told?

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's funny. That is one. It's a really good question because there's not a clear-cut rule that I follow, except feeling. And there are a couple of feelings that I associate with the desire to write a book. One is a feeling that if I don't do it, it won't properly get done because I have some privileged access to the story. And there are lots of different ways you can have privileged access to the story, but the sense that, yeah, this book really should be written and someone needs to do it and that someone is clearly me. The second and related feeling is I have an obligation to the material. It isn't the material has an obligation to me as a writer. It's I have an obligation to this material.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  And once I have that feeling, I have a motive. I have a motive, and whether I'm fooling myself or not, it's a motive that's a deeper and more inspiring motive than, oh, I gotta make a living, or, oh, I gotta get a book on the bestseller list, or, oh, I gotta have something to tell my friends when they ask me, what are you doing? It's the highest motive. It's I have an obligation. I have a duty. And I've had that feeling with every book I've written. How it gets to that point, I mean, they're different paths to that point, but it obviously is some feeling in myself that this is an important story.

• 29:51Tim Ferriss?

  If you could put a message, a quote, a question, anything at all, on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, that would reach billions of people, does anything come to mind, non-commercial, that you might put on a billboard? A saying, a mantra, something you remind yourself of, anything at all?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  It's gonna sound trite, whatever I say. And let me just say that I live in the world's capital of bumper stickers. At Berkeley, California, there are more bumper stickers per automobile. Then anywhere else in the world, it's been scientifically proven. You can walk down the street and it's mostly political stuff, but it's just like people getting their point across in bumper stickers. And I have never had a bumper sticker on my car because there's not one thing I've ever wanted to say over and over forever. I'm not a bumper sticker or quote guy. However, if you say I gotta put it up on a billboard, I would take the mantra of my high school baseball coach, one of the greatest men I've ever known, who is actually the subject of one of the podcast episodes.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  And he would just say it routinely and he just kind of became part of you. He would say, don't be good, be great. And he'd say to you, as he handed you the ball to go out to pitch a game, he'd say it to you when you were working out and you just, having that in mind, it's the kind of thing I try to keep in mind when I'm working on something. Good is not okay. If you're gonna do it, be great. Push yourself. And it's hard and you know, don't just stop when it's good enough. That's what I would stick on a billboard. It's the sort of on the, it's one of those things that's in the billboard of my mind. Don't be good, be great.

• 31:34Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. That's Billy Fitzgerald.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Billy Fitzgerald.

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today.

• 32:19Tim Ferriss?

  You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  And now, Dr. Martine Rothblatt, an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur, and the chairperson and CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she founded in 1996 to save the life of one of her daughters. You can learn more about Dr. Rothblatt and the work of United Therapeutics at U-N-I-T-H-E-R.com.

• 33:14Tim Ferriss?

  Martine, or Dr. Rothblatt, both, welcome to the show. Thank you for making the time.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Tim. Just Martine's fine.

• 33:22Tim Ferriss?

  All right. And this interview, as my listeners might imagine, was challenging in the best way to prepare for, because there are a million and one directions that we can go with just this bio alone, which is of course, a snapshot, a distillation of much more that you have done. And I thought we could start in perhaps an unlikely place, and that is Alan Watts. I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts, and specifically the book subtitle, "On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are." Could you please explain, if that is true, why that is the case?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yes, thanks, Tim. Alan Watts has a really unique ability to see the dialectic aspect of everything in nature. By that, I mean that there's a kind of a yin-yang aspect to everything in nature. And he points out that, for example, you can't have a crest of a wave without the bottom of a wave. And it has helped me, whenever I see things in life that seem negative, to be able to look at it in another way and see the positive in it.

• 34:34Tim Ferriss?

  When were you first introduced to his work? How did that come about?

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy called transhumanism, sort of the idea that people can transcend some biological human limitations. A friend of mine, Frank Szaznowski, who is the head of the National Organization on Rare Diseases,

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits. He himself is a both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer. But he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits, such as Tejar Duchardon from France, and other individuals here in the US. And then from those Jesuits, they referred to Alan Watts. I'm not sure if he was actually a Jesuit, but he undertook some religious training, both in China, I think, and in the US. He was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco, I think during the 70s or 80s. I don't know if you remember, Tim, the film of a few years ago, Her, in which like a computer-

• 35:40Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yep. So I was watching that movie, which kind of is interesting to me because it epitomized or it visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient. And in the middle of that movie, there's a scene in which Alan Watts appears. And I stood up in the movie theater and I said, "Oh, my God, Alan Watts."

• 36:04Tim Ferriss?

  Did you ultimately find the presentation in that movie to be compelling as it relates to sort of sentient intelligence?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I did. I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way that sentients would begin to arise in our society, basically by being very, very useful to people, cleaning up their inboxes, stuff like that.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  This may be a good place, and we're going to be all over the place in nonlinear fashion. Bina48. Who or what is Bina48, if I'm pronouncing that correctly?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Yep, you've got it perfectly. So Bina is the name of my partner, and we've been married for about 40 years. And when she was 48, we undertook a joint project to try to create a digital simulacra or a digital copy of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts. And we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art and to encourage young people, get them more excited about computer science, and women in particular, girls in particular. So we contracted with a couple of companies who were experts in both the software engineering side and in the physical modeling of a face

• 37:21Speaker 02

  that moves exactly like a human face does. You might imagine- There's this exhibit at Disney World, Disneyland of like Lincoln and whatnot, something like that, but more realistic. We built this project and since that time, Bina 48 has thrilled audiences all around the world. I'm sure she has inspired hundreds, if not thousands of girls to go into computer science. And she continues to get better and better, more and more advanced software.

• 37:50Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know if you have watched the series Black Mirror before, but I find some of their episodes to be very strong. And in one of them, a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts. So pulling from the cloud and feeding into this simulacrum or model of someone who used to be, or in this case, still is. How far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yes, Tim. So I am a fan of the Black Mirror series and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now, Upload and whatnot. So it's an idea that's catching on. And even at a very basic level, social media firms like Twitter, for example, and probably Facebook as well, offer an opportunity that after a person passes away, their account can remain active. And I believe in the case of Twitter, can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted. So I think this general idea is it's a trend. It's only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job

• 39:14Speaker 02

  of copying the human personality. Sometime in this century for sure, and maybe in just like two or three decades, I think that there will be a digital copy of a person. Another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person who will claim to be the original person. And they may make that claim before or after the person died. And then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with, is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album? Or is this actually some form of digital sentience?

• 39:53Tim Ferriss?

  When you were growing up, who were your role models or inspirations? Was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school? Or at the very beginning, let's just call it freshman year of your undergrad as icons worth emulating, or lesser known role models worth emulating? Did anyone really stick out for you?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I think that in terms of authors, I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author.

• 40:25Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah, Stranger in a Strange Land and so on.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely, it was so brilliant. And then a few years ago, when his widow released the uncensored, unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land, it's like three times larger and like no holds barred. I just savored, you know, every page of that. My favorite book of all of his is Time Enough for Love, in which he covers almost every topic under the sun. So Heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me, like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books. In the public sphere, I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  His positive, progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him. So I looked up to him. Those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time.

• 41:20Tim Ferriss?

  You seem to be good at many things, of course, just based on the bio alone. But what strikes me is how quickly you were able to develop expertise in new fields. I'd like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio, and that is United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company. She started to save the life of one of her daughters. I'd love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story, just because people will want to hear it. And then the follow up, just to plant the seed for it, is how you learned biology?

• 42:05Tim Ferriss?

  Because my understanding is you didn't have much in terms of background in biology. That's a huge mouthful of a question, but if you could give us a bit of the background, that would be extremely helpful and we can use that as a jumping off point.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Sure. So it's kind of funny that, you know, you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course. But that was the case. So the last biology class I had was in high school. And here, suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running Sirius XM, that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness. She can't even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door. And there are no medicines approved for it. I finally got her to the best doctor one could find,

• 43:02Speaker 02

  the head of pediatric cardiology at Children's National Medical Center in the middle of Washington DC. And the doctor said, you know, this is an extremely rare disease. No one knows why it arises. All the patients die within two to three years. He had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died. And all you can do is hope for a lung transplant. So Tim, I was completely crushed. I just saw black. I didn't know what to do. And the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward, night after night, and myself and Bina would tag team staying there with her, was once she fell asleep to go down into the library

• 43:47Speaker 02

  and to just begin, you know, learning about what was this illness she had, which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension. And why were there no treatments available for it? So I just began reading and reading and reading. Most of the time I read things, I didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words that I never learned in law school, or we never had to deal with in electrical engineering. But of course, there were dictionaries and I looked up the words in a dictionary and they had college-level anatomy textbooks. So what I didn't know, I just kept going backwards in academia,

• 44:32Speaker 02

  I guess you would say backwards in learning or pedagia, until I would even get to like a high school level textbook that would explain something. And I said, okay, I get that. And I kept taking notes and just educated myself night after night until I learned everything I needed to know.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  How did you, and I know this is a story you've told before, but ultimately in searching for possible solutions, and as we were chatting about before recording, there's a lot of luck involved and it doesn't mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation similar to what you experienced. But nonetheless, you were able to ultimately track down, I suppose it's fair to say, a molecule, a drug of some type. Would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion this drug or to license it? If you could

• 45:35Tim Ferriss?

  describe that, I have a number of questions that'll stem off of it.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  There are a gazillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine. I mean, it's just a bottomless well. There are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals. Each of those journals have, you know, every year, thousands of articles published across them. So it's difficult to find the information that you need. But in law school, we learn a very useful skill. This skill goes by the name of jeopardizing, after this type of index that they have in law school called shepherds. So what jeopardizing involves is when a judge writes a decision, like the Supreme Court

• 46:23Speaker 02

  issues a decision, they drop a lot of footnotes. And of course, one thing lawyers love to do is, you know, make footnotes and references. And then what you're supposed to do as a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to. And then the jeopardizing process is after you get all of those references, to then look up all of the references in those other articles. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves. So I applied that jeopardizing process to these medical articles.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people's research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those. And then I would follow up on all of the references in those. Finally, I read about a molecule that a researcher at GlaxoWellcome had written, in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure. And it failed in its test of congestive heart failure. It did not work. But in the article, they had charts of what the molecule did. And the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention

• 47:51Speaker 02

  was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart, which is called the pulmonary artery. It reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine. Well, that's exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension, the people who have this disease. I'll make a quick footnote.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  That when my daughter was diagnosed, 2,000 people in the US had the disease. Because medicines have become so much better and because we've been able to, like you mentioned in the introduction, get all of these approvals, there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it. So it's likely that people listening To your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension. And I read this article and I said, wow, just what I need this tiny stretch of artery, just between the heart and the lungs. This molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone. That was the holy grail that I was looking for.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  So I looked at where the author of the article was from. He was from Glaxo Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And I made a beeline down to him and asked him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found for my daughter's disease.

• 49:18Tim Ferriss?

  Was it an immediate handing over of the keys to the kingdom? A big all caps, yes?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  No, it was actually a big all caps, no.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, the individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier. And the person that I ended up meeting with, who is in charge of research and development, said that this was just one article. It was a incidental finding. In any event, this disease afflicted so few people. It was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo Wellcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease. And I asked him, his name's Bob Bell. He's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman. I asked Dr. Bell, I said, what would it take for you to develop this medicine?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  He said, well, it probably would take, you couldn't do it. We only develop medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year in revenue potential. He said, but it's possible you could buy it from us. If you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise, I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo Wellcome. So over the course of the next several months, I created a brand new biotechnology company. I was able to have a Nobel laureate. Who was formerly associated with GlaxoWellcome, become head of a scientific advisory board. And I reapproached GlaxoWellcome and I said, I have all the things that you asked for.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Can you sell me this drug and we'll develop it ourselves? Well, Tim, it turns out that everybody I asked said, well, you have to get somebody else in the company to agree. And that's how it is in a big bureaucracy. It turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper to agree to license this drug to me. Finally, it happened and all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money that I would ever get from this molecule. I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them. I was in their face all the time.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell's sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension from the time I first met him toward the end of this process. And he became a product champion for me within GlaxoWellcome. I mean, that was just purest, you know, luck or serendipity, whatever you want to say. And then they really didn't think this molecule had any chance at all. And they were really just doing it to get rid of me, I think. But still, all 15 people had to sign it. After we successfully developed this molecule, we have over time paid more than a billion dollars

• 52:15Speaker 02

  just in royalties to GlaxoWellcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people's lives. It has produced, you know, a billion dollars a year in revenue, year after year after year for us. And Bob Bell, when I invited him to our 15th anniversary, and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine. And he said, this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo Wellcome had ever done.

• 52:44Tim Ferriss?

  So in hindsight, what did they miss? What accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet? Or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely?

• 52:58Speaker 02

  I think there were probably like maybe three main ones. The first one, and I can say this kind of from firsthand knowledge, since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company, the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than 1 in 100. I mean, the human body is so complicated. It's like a massive set of very precisely keyed locks. And every molecule is like a random key. And the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock that fixed some dysfunction in the body, rather than causing some harm to the body is it's less than 1 in 100. So first of all, they figured the chance of this thing

• 53:41Speaker 02

  working just in general was less than 1 in 100. Secondly, they thought to themselves, even if it worked a little bit, there's only 2,000 people in the whole country with this disease. They didn't really think that if it worked really well, the number of people would keep accumulating.

• 53:59Tim Ferriss?

  I see what you're saying. If you have these people who would have died otherwise not dying, then that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow. Is that what you mean?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. I thought about it like, like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM. You know, people said to me, oh, Martine, you'll be lucky to have 100,000 subscribers. I said, well, if I keep them, I get another 100,000 the next year, then I'll be up to 200,000. And then I will, you know, maybe 400, 800,000. Now we have 30 million. They didn't think in that subscriber mindset. That was the second problem.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  The third problem is that they didn't really imagine that the healthcare system would pay something like $100,000 per year for this medicine. And at the time, this was in the early two, about 20 years ago, early 2000s. I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year for a patient, or $10,000 for a course of treatment. Because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy, there are many, many medicines now that cost over $100,000 a year, mostly for rare diseases.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  And the healthcare system pays for them because so few people have these diseases that even though the medicines are expensive, it's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like hypertension or common illnesses, asthma, that afflict tens of millions of people. So the healthcare system doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease. And the people at GlaxoWellcome were clueless about this. They were actually looking for the big billion-dollar blockbusters, not for the rare diseases. So those were their three omissions. They failed to be Alan Wattsian. They failed to see that because something is big, underneath that means that there's something else that's small.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  And that was what Alan Watts would always say. He says, "Something is good only because something else is bad."

• 56:03Tim Ferriss?

  At the very least, I mean, it's a valuable thought exercise when you're looking at the assumptions that you're making. And what an incredible story. You mentioned Sirius. We haven't spent any time on Sirius just yet. When did you first fall in love or become intoxicated or enchanted by satellite systems? Or electrical engineering, I suppose, but you can take whichever one is more interesting to tackle.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  You're absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications. It seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space and that machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet. My first real moment of first love, if you will, was at a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian Ocean. And I had left UCLA to travel around the world, really hitchhike around the world. And I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles. And on these islands, at the top of the mountain, in the middle of the main island,

• 57:15Speaker 02

  there was a NASA tracking station. And I went up into it and I was probably a, you know, a pretty grungy 19-year-old at that point in time. But the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me. And they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites in all different orbits around the Earth and even all the way out to Jupiter. And I asked them, I said, would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there and have it broadcast information back to the entire Earth? And they said, if you made a powerful enough satellite, then the receiving equipment on Earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  And I could have kissed the guy. I mean, I just said, wow, that's the purpose of my life. And I made a beeline back to UCLA. I changed my major to Communication Studies. I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites. I did a joint JDMBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications. I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company, which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then, and helped design a satellite to cover South America. And then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal, which was Sirius XM.

• 58:38Tim Ferriss?

  What did it feel like, if you can remember, to have that answer given to you, or that direction, rather, given to you, the purpose given to you? Did it feel a certain way, that type of conviction or that type of belief? What do you recall?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tim, it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. And actually, I don't think it really has anything to do with age. I felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Teslas and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output. And there's a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power, between kilowatts and horsepower. It's almost one to one, not exactly. And I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horsepower. So right away I said, wow, this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  I had that same kind of, this is the purpose of my life is to make an electric helicopter. So you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life. I think probably the best way to describe it, Tim, would be like a lightning bolt to your soul.

• 59:56Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was asking about biology earlier, but I would be very curious, since you mentioned also that there were no, well, the requirements as such in undergrad did require you to take any additional biology classes. If you were trying to teach, let's just say, a class, and you could pick the age, or it could be a set of classes, scientific literacy, being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those lightning bolts, if that makes any sense, right? When you're looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer or reading a scientific study. Do you have any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy, if that's the right phrase to use?

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, that's a great phrase to use. I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives. And one of the greatest people at doing this, and to go back to the beginning of the interview, when you asked me, who was a role model for me? I should have said Carl Sagan was like an amazing, amazing role model to me. I watched the Cosmos series over and over again. And Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts and relate them to people's everyday life. And if you remember, for watching those series, the iconic

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy. Those type of step-by-step instructions, ladders, to get from one place to another, is the way, I think, to build scientific literacy. And I would ask my students to think about anything that's important in their life, whatever it might be. And from whatever they said was important to their life, I would then begin wrapping that in kind of layers and layers of basic scientific concepts that pertain to what was important to them.

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any, not science fiction authors per se, but science authors or elucidators of science who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience? If someone is listening and they see their blind spots, which I know by definition is kind of impossible, but if they recognize they don't have enough scientific fluency or as much as they would like, but they want to try to cultivate that, do you have any recommendations for them?

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  There's a lot of books like that. One of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn. He was one of the most famous historians of science, and his book is perennially in print. It's called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this book, he goes through about 10 different revolutions in science, where everybody thought the world was one way, and then kind of like a crazy person would say, no, I think it's like a different way. And gradually set about proving it's a different way and created a revolution

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  in science. And he explains this in very lay terms. He takes you through the science of gravity, for example, with Isaac Newton, science of relativity with Einstein, electricity with Maxwell and so on, in a very step-by-step fashion to make the science accessible. And in the way, his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking, to teach people to question authority. Ultimately, all science is about is just saying, why? Why? Like every two, three, four-year-old kid knows how to do that, right? Why? Why? Why? And I think Thomas Kuhn does a great job of that in his book.

• 1:04:00Tim Ferriss?

  I should also point out, and please feel free to correct me if I'm oversimplifying, but the why, why, why is not just for four-year-olds. It's not just for scientists in lab coats or whatever people envision scientists to be. It's also extremely helpful in situations like those you found yourself in with GlaxoWellcome and attempting to license, I mean, constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes to go to the footnotes to go to the footnotes to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around.

• 1:04:40Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like it's also not just an intensely interesting and academically rewarding approach to thought, but an immensely practical approach to life. At least that's how it seems from reading so many of your stories.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  You know, when you discover something, what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain. And it's lighting up the pleasure centers, too.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  So I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something, coming to an inspiration about something, which is why books and reading are so magical. Another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of explaining concepts that can inspire people is Octavia Butler. She wrote a lot of books. One of them, very well known, is Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents. And in these books, she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority. So I'm not sure what it was that my parents did. I don't really remember them specifically encouraging

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  my questioning of them. In fact, I do remember my father discouraging it. But nevertheless, what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture. And the American culture is a culture of questioning authority. I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci, when he was, people were asking him, why is it that Americans won't do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic? And he said, you know, American culture does not like to be told what to do. American culture is dyed-in-the-wool

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  question authority. You'd be hard pressed to find another country where it would be more difficult to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States. So it's that American cultural ethic of questioning authority that I know is like, deep in my mental DNA.

• 1:06:52Tim Ferriss?

  So we were chatting just a few minutes ago about realizations, inspiration. I'd like to ask if we flashback to, well, we could flashback to any point in time that you choose, really. How did you relate to or think about gender in your youth? And you can choose what youth means. And I guess I'm wondering if there were any flashes of realization, or if you came sort of pre-installed with a certain orientation or way of thinking about it or feeling about it. Whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger, I would love to hear it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  Sure. So it is related to this questioning of authority, Tim. Around teenage years,

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  I had a, you know, constant vision of myself, not as a male, but as a female. And of course I said to myself, WTF, why am I thinking like this? I can't imagine anybody else is thinking like this. But nevertheless, the thoughts were real and the feelings were real and the feelings were visceral.

• 1:07:59Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe the feelings? Because I think I'm certainly very interested in what form that takes. Is it a discomfort of some type? Is it a longing? How did it feel for you?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  So first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for every single transgender person. And talking about my feelings, I don't want to give the impression that these are going to be the feelings of other transgendered people because as a community, we're as heterogeneous as anybody else. So for me, it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form. And there was not any dislike of my male form. Again, it was kind of very Alan Wattsian in that I saw myself as male only because the opposite of male was female. So I could also see myself as female.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  And this was the way my mind was working. And when I say I saw myself, it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment. Obviously I knew like boys and girls and men and women's bodies were different. So I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman, wherein I was very much trapped in a male body. It was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be. So the authority was no, this is not possible. People are only male or female and, you know, never the twain shall meet.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  So again, this, you know, American Paul Revere-ish question, authority mindset got me reading. And I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism, transsexualism, Native American people who were two-spirited, communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female. So even though this was never something I learned in junior high or high school or elementary school, or really anywhere in American culture in, say, the 1990s, I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male or strictly female.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  And as I began to question authority, I began to say to myself, why can't I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female?

• 1:10:28Tim Ferriss?

  When I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female, they think of the physiological differences that you might put side by side, looking at physical characteristics. When you say not totally male or female, or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories, do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits are what we would often find labeled as such? Or do you mean something else?

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  I mean predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you referred to. Now, oftentimes, those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hop, skip, and a jump from masculine and feminine apparel.

• 1:11:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  Depending on how people dress. They're a short hop, skip, and a jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles in an age, you know, that was the time of Prince and Boy George and whatnot. And then you get to, you know, masculine and feminine manicures, like, why can't a guy paint his nails? And then you get to next questions of, you know, secondary and primary sex organs, and some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology, and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology. And I found that there was actually like a vast literature, following, again, footnotes to footnotes, references

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  to references. I was like, oh, my God, it is possible to, in fact, alter your physiology to match your psychology. What appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area. Are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do for people who feel that they are kind of quote unquote trapped in the wrong body.

• 1:12:22Tim Ferriss?

  From say zero to 100%, how well do you feel you have your physiology matching your own psychology at the moment?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:34Tim Ferriss?

  What were the biggest or the most important decisions, actions that you took? Did any surprise you to have a disproportionate effect on increasing that percentage?

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Nope, I think that, you know, every part of the transition process kind of fell in place. It was not something that happens on a, on a day. It's kind of, you get to a point of diminishing returns. So over a period of years, I gradually transitioned. And I think even to this point, I'm still in a transition process. I kind of went from a pure male to a more, I would say not pure, but I would say, you know, knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as trans binary, meaning that I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely.

• 1:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Looking at the introduction, which I read at the top of the show, so to speak, there is a line about leading efforts of the transgender community to establish their own health loss standards and of the International Bar Association to protect, and this is the part I want to ask you to elaborate on, autonomy, rights and genetic information via an international treaty. What are autonomy, rights and genetic information?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Sure. So autonomy is just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own mind, that people should have the power, the authority, the freedom. To decide what to do with their own body. And genetic rights, of course, refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have. Now, there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there. There are people who, because of their DNA, they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers. Whereas other people, because of their DNA, it's very likely that they'll get those type of cancers. There are some people, because of their DNA, they almost cannot feel pain.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  They have an extremely high tolerance for pain. There are other people, because of their DNA, that the slightest pinprick, you know, will send them screaming. So, once Craig Venter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome, and about the year 2000, all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers began scouring the world to engage in what's called genetic mining, or genome mining, meaning going to different populations of people around the world, often that have been intermarried for quite a while. So their genomes are kind of concentrated and trying to learn something from those communities' DNA

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  that can then be translated into useful pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations. What I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities, that they, in fact, do so only with the consent of those communities or with the consent of the elected representatives of those communities so that they can have some fair financial return for their natural endowment.

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I see. So it's similar, in a sense, to preventing, say, biopiracy from the Amazon, where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information, but are, say, acting as a wellspring of ethnobotany and providing source materials for creating pharmaceuticals. And you would want there to be some recompense to those groups translating that into... Your own sort of endogenous genetics would be what you're referring to. That's fascinating. Never even thought about that. Are there any examples you could give of these sort of tightly knit clusters? Maybe the clusters is too small a word of people who are being studied for this reason?

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  For medicinal purposes?

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  There are actually many, many dozens and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area. The population that comes top of mind to me, Tim, right now, because it's such a fascinating story and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing, is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru, very close knit, intermarried, that are all a kind of dwarfism. And these individuals, they rarely grow taller than four feet tall. And it was discovered over the, just over the past 15, 20 years, that they are descendants

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  of Jews from 2,000 years ago, who were forced into diaspora across the Mediterranean after the Roman occupation of Palestine. And in that ancient time, these people were a very small stature, but it was just part of the human diversity. They ended up as a group, mostly ending up in Spain. And then when the Inquisition took hold, their descendants, who were still very small, they left Spain, they went to the New World. And because the Inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of what's now Peru and Ecuador, they went out into the rural areas and there they lived for several hundred years.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  And it turns out that this population, they have one gene that makes their body not receptive to growth hormone. All of us naturally, we produce a growth hormone and the cells of our bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone. And when the growth hormone locks into the receptor, we begin growing. This population of people in Peru and Ecuador, they lack the growth hormone. That gene fell off like 2,000 years ago and they kept passing it on and on, not much growth hormone receptor. So they're perfectly intelligent, they live normal lives, they just don't grow very

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  large. So I found this population fascinating because in my company, United Therapeutics, we're trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. And one of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig. And it's kind of like a fluke of nature, Tim, that the pig's organs, their heart, their kidneys, their lungs are very much the same size and functionality as human kidneys, hearts, and lungs. The only problem is that if you leave a pig on its own, they'll actually grow extremely large. And when these first transplants were done, they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the transplants

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  because the organs from the pig had grown too large. So what we did is we took a page from this population of people in Peru and Ecuador, the Western medicine gives them a disease name. It's called Laron's disease, L-A-R-O-N, after this Israeli scientist who discovered what was going on here. So we said, well, why don't we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout, just like the Laron's population has into these pigs. So when we transplant the kidneys of these pigs into people, the kidneys won't keep growing and growing as a normal pig can be many hundreds of pounds. Instead, the kidney will just stop

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  growing at the same size as when we transplanted it. And that's working out really well.

• 1:20:19Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk more about organ manufacturing. What are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply of organs to meet whatever demands there are in the US or in the world today?

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  The demands, whether it's in the US or outside the US, are huge and are way, way in excess of the supply. I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs. It's a beautiful thing that, you know, before people like Tom Starzl questioned authority and said it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents' teenage years and adult years, that would have just been like crazy stuff. Like you take an organ from a dead person, you put it in a alive person who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health? That's about as crazy as it gets. But they did it. You know, they did it.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  And now, standing on their shoulders, we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs, yet each year, there are only about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant, only around 3,000 hearts, only around 2,000 lungs. And so the gap between the need for these organs and the supply is humongous.

• 1:21:42Tim Ferriss?

  Are you still, or I should say, therapeutics currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve? Is that in process?

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Yes, that is in process and it's a fascinating area. Tim, we are very fortunate to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine, Dr. Kevin Tracy. He's the chief medical officer at the Northwell Medical Complex up in the New York area. And by the way, that reminds me, speaking of how can laypeople get access to scientific knowledge easily? Subscribe to Scientific American. I'm sorry to put an advertisement in here.

• 1:22:22Tim Ferriss?

  Scientific American.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  But I find Scientific American and National Geographic, two of like, you know, the greatest ways for laypeople, which I do consider myself a layperson, to learn about all different types of science that they might not know anything about. So one day, I got my Scientific American in the mail and on the cover, it was "Using Electronics to Cure Diseases."

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Well, here I am. Like, my whole career has just been like electronic engineering, building satellites. And now, because of my daughter, I'm like in this medical field. So I'm like so excited. It was one of those lightning bolts to the soul. Now I have a chance to bring my male and female side together, to bring my satellite and my biology side together and merge them. So I got very excited and I had a chance to meet and now work with and support the work of Dr. Tracy. And he taught me a very simple sentence, Tim, which I've subsequently found to be absolutely true in all the research I've read. It is that the nervous system touches every single cell in your body. The nervous

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  system touches every single cell in our body. The largest nerve in the body, there's one nerve that is way, way larger than all the rest of them. It's the vagus nerve. It starts in our mind, it wraps around our heart, our lungs, our gut. It's an immense nerve. And by stimulating this vagus nerve, it's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body. By a fluke of nature, a positive fluke, the vagus nerve comes out to the skin in two and only two places, around the left and right ears. You know, there are like a couple of different ridges in your ear lobe, or your ear, I guess how you would

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  say it. And one of them called the simba conchi is the place where the vagus nerve comes out. And if you electrically stimulate the simba conchi on either the left or the right ear, it's been proven now, again, in lots of published literature, to have positive therapeutic effects on the body.

• 1:24:33Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of those positive therapeutic effects?

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  One which has been documented quite extensively is the ability to control Crohn's disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which are two gastrointestinal problems, as well as very high-priced and I would say tinged with some potential side effect biologic medicines that are approved by the FDA to treat Crohn's disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Another illness that has been shown to mediate against is rheumatoid arthritis. And the common factor here is that we have two types of nervous systems.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  We have a fight or flight nervous system, which is the sympathetic nervous system, and we have a rest and digest nervous system, which is called the parasympathetic nervous system. When diseases occur, it's because one of those two nervous systems, the sympathetic one, the fight or flight, takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or overactivation. And by stimulating the vagus nerve, you can ramp up the power of the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down this kind of over-stress state that leads to an Irritable Bowel Syndrome or to the inflammation of arthritis.

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  This is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation, one of those things that really woke me up and maybe pay attention for a bunch of reasons. One is relevance to my current life because I've been working with a doctor for about 10 weeks doing heart rate variability training. And there are some researchers with claims, I want to say out of Rutgers and elsewhere, that certain types of HRV training affect vagal tone and via affecting that vagal tone have a host of cascading therapeutic benefits. Whether or not that holds up to scrutiny or not, I don't know. But the second, and I'm embarrassed to even...

• 1:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  Give voice to this. So hopefully this won't just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might have as I mention it. But I lived in China for a period of time in college, went to universities there in Beijing as effectively an exchange student, but it was a one-way exchange. I don't think we had any students in return from China. And the ears are very much utilized in the world of acupuncture. And I'm curious to know if you think that whether by trial and error or otherwise, it's possible that acupuncture

• 1:27:20Tim Ferriss?

  stumbled upon the effects without knowing the mechanism of stimulating or affecting the ears to then in turn affect the vagus nerve. I know it's quite a stretch, but when I first read about this access via the ears, that is one thing that jumped to mind because I always kind of poo-pooed and if I'm being honest ridiculed the idea of using the ears to access these deep inner points. But here we are. So I don't know if you have any thoughts.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Tim, first, your credibility is immense. So don't, you would have to actually say something crazy to Denton, or what you said is the opposite of crazy. What you said is extremely insightful and prescient. So as convinced as I was that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals, as convinced as I was that we could have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people's disease, that's exactly how convinced I am that the acupuncturists of traditional Chinese medicine did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible from the ear lobe.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  And one of the first things that Dr. Tracy showed to me was a very medically accurate from a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner map of the ear lobe in terms of exactly where you put, I'm sorry, I don't know what the official name is of the pins or needles that they put in your ear lobe and how they mapped to different parts of the body. And then he showed me on an anatomy map, how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve. That's wild. Wow. Yeah, it is totally true. And why really would it not be true? I mean, you know, thousands of years of Chinese civilization, they have had a chance to do so much trial

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  and error. And they were a literate civilization for so long. So the results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on. So I do think it's entirely rational that they would have figured this out. And what I'm hoping for now, and what I'm trying to support is there is an opportunity to what I call in my own words, crack the human neuron. So what that means is that there are unique pattern of amplitudes and signal lengths and signal voltages that will activate some different part of the vagus nerve than others. And each

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a different part of the human body. We don't know what those are. Right now, we are just kind of, in a way, I would say we're dumber than than the acupuncturists, because almost all of the work that the FDA has allowed to go forward on Vagus nerve stimulation, they all use the same pulse width, the same pulse power, and it works. So that's great, you know. But I think it could work even better if we decoded the human neuron. And I believe in the future.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  People will be able to put on a pair of like beat headsets and those beat headsets will have gel-less, meaning like you don't need like the EKG kind of gel, gel-less electrodes will rest across your synbiconkey and your trachea and the different parts of your earlobe and will provide you a stimulation that matches the particular ailment that you have, eliminate the ailment without taking any pills, without paying any money to anybody.

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  This is an area I want to keep digging in because it's rare, well, it's pretty much nonexistent, that I have the opportunity to speak with someone with so much electrical engineering background about the possible applications or implications of technology like this. I'd love to just throw out another group of devices to see if you have any opinions on them, one way or the other, but potential applications of, let's just say, TDCS or TMS, so transcranial direct current stimulation, or other means of stimulating the brain,

• 1:31:50Tim Ferriss?

  typically using some type of conducive gel, but not always in the case of a TMS paddle. Have you looked at these technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them?

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  A little bit. I'm aware of, a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for treating a particular form of brain cancer with this type of technology. So there's this very solid scientific benefit that's been documented. After many years of working through the FDA, I have a world of respect for the rigor that they put into any decision to approve something. So when they approved it, it meant that it was scientifically proven to work. Something that is quite different from that, but at the same time related to it, Tim, is on the last day of 2019, which was like the last day of the decade, it turned

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  out to be a weekday, I forget if it was a Tuesday or whatever, but the US Patent Office only issues patents on one day of a week. And it was like the one day of a week that they issue them on, was it Tuesday or whatever? And it was a patent that I received for a device that I call a Alzheimer's cognitive enabler.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  And this device is worn over the cranium, as you mentioned, and it senses nerve impulses inside the brain. It is connected to a computer with a visual recognition and a speech comprehension system, so that if a patient with Alzheimer's is not able to adequately communicate and appear to recognize the people who are coming into their room, the computer vision recognition system and sound recognition system will talk on behalf of the Alzheimer's patient, saying, "Hello, son. Thank you for coming to see me."

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  And it is actually being triggered by recognitions that are deep in the Alzheimer's patient's mind, so that more people will come to visit the patient, the patient's stress levels may be lower. So I believe this kind of bridging of electronics and the mind is really right around the corner.

• 1:34:02Tim Ferriss?

  What inspired putting the work into that research and filing that patent?

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  I think part of it was seeing my mother-in-law suffer pretty badly from somewhere on the spectrum between dementia and Alzheimer's. Was never really completely clear where she was at that. And she would recognize us coming in, but she couldn't communicate. And it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate. My own mother is more or less at that point right now as well. Secondly, the work on the Bina48 computer showed me that it was really possible for people to strike up meaningful relationships with the digital version of Bina, the Bina48

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  robot. And so it was just like, you know, a very short step from, instead of putting all of Bina's, or even a good portion of her memories and her personality into this computer. Why not actually have the computer's interaction capability, input-output capability, triggered by something like a NeuroSky type of EEG brain interface? And the last piece of it was I was given a Christmas present by a friend of mine, which was one of these NeuroSky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with your thoughts by controlling your EEG signals. So that's a consumer product anybody can buy, and it really works.

• 1:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  This conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have Alzheimer's disease, is very prevalent on both sides of my family, and observed both sets of my grandparents deteriorate to the point where at least some of them couldn't recognize immediate family members. And was recently re-watching segments of a documentary I saw called Alive Inside, and the subtitle is A Story of Music and Memory. And what struck me most about this documentary is that, not that they could play music from someone's youth to them through headsets and watch them come alive in some really spectacular

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  ways, both physically, right, in terms of kinesiology moving around, but also psychologically. The most impressive part to me is that they would play music for, say, a handful of minutes, five to 10 minutes, from someone's youth, and then turn off the music, and that person could have a perfectly coherent, reasonably fast-speed conversation, whereas prior to the administration of the music, they were, from the outside, catatonic, basically. And it makes me wonder what music is doing, I'm sure there are people who study this and probably have a better mechanistic explanation, and how it could be incorporated into therapies

• 1:36:58Tim Ferriss?

  intended to counter dementia or advance to Alzheimer's disease, things of this type.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  Tim, you see, like, just in this conversation, we are uncovering, like, so many, you know, vast new oceans of opportunity for people to learn and study about. To me, music is the foundational...

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Human technology, because the first thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mothers' hearts while we were still in utero. And that beat, that's a rhythm, okay? And after we're born, you know, people may have better or worse rhythm, but there's nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move to it. And then all the different types of melodies and chords that build upon rhythm, it's just fancier and fancier forms of music. So I believe that there's tremendous therapeutic properties to music. It's just been scratched, not even scratched, it's been kind of like blown on, like.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  And it's, it's there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up, grown up with more music than ever before, to begin to apply this great human cultural technology of music to the biggest mystery in the entire universe, which is the human mind.

• 1:38:17Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to the mind, or more accurately, consciousness in a moment. But first, this will seem like a left turn, and it is. I was reading a piece in the Washington Post that covered quite a lot of your life, and there was a segment on Love Night. I don't know if that's enough of a prompt, but can you tell us what Love Night is?

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  So when Dina, my partner, and I got married, we each had one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of. And then we had two children together. And we were kind of trying to build a blended family that would feel like nobody was a stepmom or a stepdad, that everybody was just like in one family. And in fact, we cross adopted each other's kids from our previous marriages. So I was taking the kids to music classes. All of the kids were in the Yamaha music program, where they learn piano and violin instruments like that. And we would practice songs.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  And I was brought up Jewish, where every Friday night was something that was special. It was the Sabbath, and the family sat down together and had dinner. And said a couple of prayers. So Bina and I tried to think, how can we like merge all these things together? The Jewish tradition, the need to create a blended family, the music that we were all enjoying from watching the kids learn to play piano and violin. And we decided to, every Friday night, have a special family ceremony, which we would call Love Night. And we sang a song, which the melody was actually based on one of the kids' songs

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  that they had learned in the Yamaha Music Program. The words were, you know, very simple and affirming. And at Love Night, the core of Love Night was that each person around the table would have an opportunity to say what love meant to them during the past week, during the week from the previous Friday to this Friday. What does love mean to you? And, you know, Bina and I, as the adults, we would say something either sophisticated or simple, like, I love Bina, I love Martine, I love the kids. The kids started off just saying like, what love means to me is like our dogs or our

• 1:40:51Speaker 02

  cat, you know, very basic things. But as they grew older, they came into more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love, until after a couple of decades of this, all of us have heard thousands of different things that love can mean to a person. Now, I'd like to fast forward, and sorry to be in a little riff here, but I want to fast forward to the current COVID pandemic. Our kids are all adults now, they've flown the coop, they have their own kids. And suddenly, we are in a situation where we can't all gather together in any one house for Love Night. You don't want to travel, you don't want to like endanger people, so on and so forth.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  So we decided to continue the Love Night tradition, but on Zoom, or to be fair, Google Meet. So every Friday night, from my son, who's a captain in the army in Iraq, to his wife, who's on a base in El Paso, to my other son with four grandchildren in Florida, to my daughter in Brooklyn and her kid and her husband. And Bina and I, we all get together on Zoom, plus friends of all of ours. The kids were not embarrassed by Love Night. In fact, they wanted to share it with their friends. And their friends were saying like, whoa, this is crazy. This is beautiful. And so we get together every Friday night. We sing our Love Night song. And now there's about 20 of us.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  You know, we go around virtually what love meant to us during that previous week. And I would say Love Night is one of the most beautiful parts of my life.

• 1:42:28Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I'm so glad that I asked that question. And Love Night, could you give a few more examples of possible answers? Just to give people a flavor for how people might answer this question? Because I, for instance, would love to try this with my girlfriend, with some of our friends, family, et cetera. But I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have the ability to kick things off effectively.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  So every morning, Bina, my partner, goes out for, takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends, who lives a few houses away. And that best friend now joins our Love Nights. And last Friday, she said, what love means to me is every morning going out for a walk with Bina and the dogs. Last week, our youngest grandson, Saturn, he's, you know, was born in 2010, so he's 10 years old. He said, what love means to me is this. And he pulled a piece of paper. He said, I got a 95 on my math test. And he was just so proud of himself and shared it with us.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  So those are typical examples of, I think I last time said, what love means to me is sitting down at the piano and playing different songs from memory.

• 1:43:55Tim Ferriss?

  So to use this as a... Skipping, I was gonna say skipping stone, but I think I'm getting my metaphors mixed up. I say a launchpad, a lily pad, pick your, pick your choice. To consciousness, do you think that we will be able to, as I've heard you put it once, recapitulate or recreate consciousness synthetically? And does that mean we'll have machines that can love? For instance, in the not too distant future, what would it mean to have created consciousness?

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  Sure, I do believe it's possible. And a great book that I would recommend that goes into this subject in beautiful detail is called The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. And Marvin Minsky is often thought of as the father of artificial intelligence. He was a professor at MIT for a great many years. So in the Emotion Machine book, he really describes exactly how you would go about creating a computer and the type of software that it would take in order for the machine to feel what we feel when we say that we love somebody.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  And I think it's likely to occur, Tim, because it's hard for me to think of any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had sufficiently advanced technology. One of my favorite sayings from another role model, Arthur C. Clarke, is that magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. So I think just like we have been able to create an artificial hip, artificial knees, artificial hearts, in my own company, we are building lungs and kidneys.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  People are creating artificial nerves. People like Elon Musk has formed a whole company, Neuralink, where he's working on downloading a whole human brain. I have little doubt that humans will end up being able to replicate a human mind. Now, whether or not the rest of society accepts it as a human mind or not, I think is going to be a long pitched battle. And that's what is the subject of my book, Virtually Human. That whole book is, talks about how and when will society accept digital consciousness as being as conscious as a human? But even if that digital consciousness is not yet at human level,

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  what happens when it's at, say, primate level? Or at canine level? Or even at a rodent level? If you can get to any of these levels, you could kind of see how it's the same old human effort of keep making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level. Where I think that the individual alive today that has the best understanding of this topic is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil. He's a director of engineering at Google. And what I love about Ray is he never tires of pointing out that this digital human consciousness, it's human. Human consciousness is a human phenomena.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  So when we create a digital analog, or doppelganger, or simulacra, whatever you want to call it, when we create a her, that her is human. It's not us versus them. It's one. It's we will have been able to move our mind into a digital substrate. Just like if our knees give out, you move it to a mechanical substrate. Or if an organ gives out, you transplant it with another organ.

• 1:47:50Tim Ferriss?

  Where would you, if you had to, kind of Price is Right style, put a timeline on this? When do you think we'll have rodent or canine level consciousness plus intelligence?

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty hard to say, Tim, because one thing I am not is I'm not a soothsayer, I'm not a prophet, I'm not a visionary, any of those things. I'm just a humble technologist and all the projects I work on, they have five-year time horizons because I have difficulty really seeing beyond five years. So every technology I'm working on, it's like, I want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years. Also, I am totally a believer in this adage that futurists usually overpromise in the near term and underpromise in the long term. So what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of futurists

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  saying, "Oh, we'll have digital rats, or digital dogs, or digital people in 10, 20, or 30 years." They have probably overpromised in the near term. What they have underpromised in the long term is in not 10, 20, 30 years, but in, say, 80, 90, or 100 years, there won't be just digital rats, digital dogs, and digital people, but most people will be digital.

• 1:49:16Tim Ferriss?

  Exciting, and I suppose for some people, very terrifying at the same time. What are some of the most important ethical questions or considerations related to technology as we move into future decades, in your mind?

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  In my mind, the biggest problem with technology is that people only think about the rights to implement a technology, and they don't think about the obligations they have as somebody creating a technology. And by what I mean by that is, you know, there was this great philosopher of the 20th century, Isaac Berlin, I believe he was German, and he had a real simple message. His message was that for every right, there is an obligation. It's, again, it's a very Alan Wattsian, sorry to keep coming back to Alan Watts, but it's a very Alan Wattsian point of view that a right only means something in the context

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  of its obligation. So, for example, if I have a right to be a parent...

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  Which we think everybody has a right to be a parent. You only have that right to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation to be at least not a horrible parent. If you're a horrible parent, you will have your children taken away from you and you'll no longer in that sense be a parent. So with regard to technology, I think there is a point of view that anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology. But I dispute the ethics of that perspective. I think that every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation to have the consent of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  So for example, my right to build an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant someplace, I don't just have that right. That right is coupled to an obligation that I have to have the consent of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation of that technology. And it comes into this domain of, in my own field, say, the transplantation of genetically modified pig organs into people. For me to have a right to do that technology, I have to have the consent of the larger community that that's a safe thing to do.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  In a democratic country, that consent is issued on behalf of the country by the government. And in the field of health, it's issued by the FDA. So before the FDA permits us to transplant these genetically modified pig organs into people, they want us to demonstrate to them that there is no risk, not a small risk, but no risk of any kind of animal virus seeping into the human population as a result of these animal transplants. So in summary, I believe like an amazing field for the future, a field that will probably in the future have almost as many people with this career as are web designers today

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  is the field of technoethics. Everybody who wants to create a technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of consent.

• 1:52:44Tim Ferriss?

  If we look at, you know, science over, well, we could look at it over the last few thousand years, but let's just say the last few hundred years, you mentioned earlier that I think you were discussing the structure of scientific revolutions, how these breakthroughs, these massive scientific leaps forward seem like complete madness at the time to the vast majority. And we don't have to go that far back to find, say, surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants. I mean, this is not the Dark Ages. This is less than 100 years ago. You see some really appalling things that were taken

• 1:53:25Tim Ferriss?

  as best practices or common practice. And one of my friends, who's an outstanding doctor, likes to repeat this, I suppose, adage that you hear among good doctors, which is 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%. And that seems to always be true. So if we flash forward 10 or 20 years, and I know you're not a prophet or a suss there, but I'm curious, or it could be five years as a technologist, what do you think are any of the things we're doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd or viewed as barbaric or crazy or naive in the near future?

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Probably a lot of things, since a lot of, you know, what we look back in the past that seems to be barbaric, building on top of your example of the tortuous procedures put onto neonates. People forget that the founder of the American Medical Association, the first doctor who created the American Medical Association, his name was Dr. Gross. He lived in Philadelphia and he did not believe in asepsis at all. And so he would do all of his procedures right in his street clothes.

• 1:54:47Speaker 02

  Infecting everybody and countless women lost their lives because of having those type of quote unquote doctors helping with the delivery of the children and ending up creating a septic condition in the mothers. And one of the most famous painters in American history, Thomas Aikens, painted this picture of the Gross Clinic where Dr. Gross was teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure and you see dirt in his shoes and scuffy hands. Then he was followed. The second president of the American Medical Association was a Dr. Agnew, who was the student of Gross. And he had read about the research of Lister

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  in England and became a believer that even though we can't see these things, germs, they're real. And we need to practice, you know, strict septic procedures before we do an operation. A few years later, Thomas Aikens painted the Agnew Clinic. And you see that the doctors in white smocks and everybody is, you know, looking super sterile and clean. So these type of revolutions can occur just like one generation to the next. It's not something that takes a long time. I think that, you know, looking at what's going on today in our world, I think the fact that we burn our own house will look to be absolutely

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  bonkers. People would say, well, let me get this right. You've got like, you know, a super thin atmosphere. I mean, you guys saw that from space since the 60s at least. This atmosphere around your planet is super thin. You have an undeniable record of measurements of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere going up year after year after year. And you continue to just spew without limit greenhouse gases into this atmosphere, despite the fact that, you know, people are dying on the shorelines, dying of diseases, et cetera, et cetera. I think they will think we are as stupid as somebody who would light a fire in the middle

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  of their house to try to keep warm and not bother with the smoke that they were choking on. And then, if I could add an addendum to that, did you guys know that the Earth receives 10,000 times the amount of solar energy falls right on the Earth each day, then it uses 10,000 times the amount of energy it flows, and that's not to talk about the wind, and that's not to talk about the waves, and that's not to talk about the nuclear energy. I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid to be so scared of nuclear energy, which has killed a few dozens of people, that we went ahead and just, you know, stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people. That will seem ludicrous to them.

• 1:57:42Tim Ferriss?

  I think this is, and I won't keep you too much longer, but I think this, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to comment on or describe your own engineering projects with carbon neutrality or zero emissions as, as an objective, because this is not just idle hand-waving for you, this is something that you've taken a keen engineering mind to, and, and I think that was not mentioned in your bio, even though it's yet another one of these examples of extreme curiosity and capability. Could you just describe what you've done in that arena, please?

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  So, this is another area that gives me immense enjoyment. Again, another kind of like lightning bolt to my soul, is to try to create infrastructure, buildings and cars and planes and things that have a zero-carbon footprint. And I look at it as an intellectual challenge. When I've read that people said, "Well, we cannot have a zero-carbon footprint society until 2050." That's what the authorities say. You know already, Tim, I'm going to say, "Why? Why not? Why not? Why not?" I'm going to question that authority. So, about three years ago, we undertook to build a new headquarters for our company in Silver Spring,

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  Maryland, that would have a zero-carbon footprint, not in the best climate, Maryland. It's got its good seasons and its bad seasons, right in the middle of a city. Silver Spring, Maryland is a built-up suburb of Washington DC, and for the manufacture of medicines and stuff, which is a somewhat of an energy-intensive activity. So we built a 150,000 square foot zero-carbon footprint building, which turned out to be the largest zero-carbon footprint building in the entire world. And we inaugurated it a couple of years ago. It turns out we produce more energy than we use each year now, two years running.

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  We did this by just thinking carefully about energy and how to manage it. So for example, we have underneath the building 50 wells, each of which go down 500 feet. And they exchange heat from the building with the coolness of the earth in the summer, bring the coolness back up. And in the winter, they exchange coolness of the building with the steady temperature of the earth in the winter to keep the building warm. The sides of the building are clouded with solar panels. The entire building has a brain that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow natural ventilation.

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  It's a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and engineers have come over there. Another example is in the delivery of our organs. When we, right now, we refurbish organs, lungs in particular, that a decedent has donated or the decedent's family has agreed to the donation. But when the transplant surgeons look at that lung, they say it's too much full of fluid and mucus. We can't use it, throw it away. So what United Therapeutics says is, give us your lonely, unwanted, unloved lungs. Fly them to Silver Spring, Maryland. We will refurbish them. We'll show through a high-speed digital network to the transplant surgeons all across the country that the organ is good as new through this digital network and bronchoscope

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  and X-ray and all that stuff. And then we fly the lungs back out to them. And we've saved over 150 lives this way, Tim. How do you refurbish a lung? First, you have to remove it from the dying body. A dying body is a terrible place to be. So we remove it from the decedent. We cool it down. So we kind of give it a, I won't say we freeze it, but we cool it down very low temperature. We fly it to Maryland and we put it in a glass dome. And in this glass dome, we have tubes. We have a kind of artificial blood and air pumping. So we've made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung. And we have expert technicians who work these, sorry, I don't know the exact name of the equipment,

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  but it sucks out mucus and they operate on the lungs like it was a person. But it's just an isolated pair of lungs. And the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida, wherever, they tell us through the digital screen and the voice, "Put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side or go further." Give me, they, they see this and they know what they want. So our technicians know how to do this. And within four hours, in almost two thirds of the time, we were able to take what was a non-compliant, dead piece of tissue and turn it into a nicely breathing lung. It's so beautiful to watch, Tim, the lungs go in and out like a butterfly's wings going up and down.

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  In fact, you could see a video of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning. And then we cool the lungs back down and we fly it to the transplant surgeon. And 100% of the time that they have accepted these lungs, they have had successful lung transplants with, like I mentioned, over 150 people walking out of the hospital. But I mention this because this is a lot of flying around, flying here, flying there, you know, helicopters going back and forth, planes. And if I'm going to make an unlimited supply of organs, and you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning of the call, the hundreds of thousands of people who needs these organs, that is going to be a humongous carbon footprint. We could have said to ourselves, "Well, we're doing such a good thing.

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  We're saving all these lives. We could be permitted to foul our atmosphere because it's balanced by the good." Things we're doing, but instead we like to ask ourselves like the challenging question, how can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time? How can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint? And the solution came from the technology of electric helicopters, which are powered by renewable energy that can fly these organs from one place to the other without adding any carbon footprint at all. And I will be a little bit of a soothsayer here. I am absolutely convinced that in this decade, the 2020s,

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  we will be delivering manufactured organs by electric helicopter.

• 2:04:13Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. I have, I will say one, I may cheat and sneak in one or two more, but.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  I love talking with you.

• 2:04:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, likewise, this is just endlessly, endlessly interesting. So many, so many different pathways into the labyrinth. But I need to make sure, I suppose, since my job is supposedly interviewer, that I can find my way back out. I have read that.

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  Alan Watts will show you the way.

• 2:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  Alan Watts will show me the way. He does have a most seductive and hypnotic voice. For those who haven't heard, I recommend. I've read that a favorite saying of yours is, quote, identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them, end quote. Can you please speak to that? Or explain what that means for you?

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them. Means to try to find a, I'll put it in business terms, a market area that is ignored, a unmet need. But it doesn't really have to just apply to medicine. It can apply to any area of life. And the way I would phrase it, Tim, and just like, you know, a very natural, almost folklorish way, is that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. In a business school back at UCLA, we, one person we studied a lot was the experience of General Electric under Jack Welch.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  And he had an adage, which from a business sense was, I think, very, very smart. He said, "If you can't be number one or number two in a market, don't even try, because you will have to spend an amount of money equal to the revenues of the number one or number two in that market to become the number one or number two in the market. If you're not the number one or number two, you will always struggle to be profitable. But if you are the number one or number two, your profitability is assured." So what that means, translated to all of our activities, is if there's an area, like, for example, a number of people have said, you know, "We should get involved, we," when

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  I say "we," my company, Knight Therapeutics, "should get involved in creating a vaccine for COVID." And to me, "Well, you know, it's not a corridor of indifference. There are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for COVID. So that's not what we would want to do. It's very unlikely we'd ever be successful on that." Somebody else said, "Well, how about these people, the COVID long haulers? The people who have survived from a very difficult course of COVID, and they've got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and likely years after the effect?" I said, "Yes, that's a corridor of indifference. Nobody is thinking about the long haulers, the people who now have, you know, chronic

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  lung problems because of the havoc that COVID racked in their lungs. Let's develop some medicines for these chronic long haulers."

• 2:07:17Tim Ferriss?

  Makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. On a related, maybe a related note, in some respects, this is a question that doesn't always work, so I'll take the blame if it doesn't. But if you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a word, an image, a question, anything, out to billions of people, let's just assume they all speak English for the sake of argument, what might you put on that billboard?

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  I think Apple Computer and Steve Jobs got there before me. Think different, think different.

• 2:07:52Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that important?

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  Because the solutions, you know, Albert Einstein said, you can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to solve it on a different level. If we all think the exact same way, we will never get out of the ruts that we're in. The only way to get out of the problems that we face is to think differently, to go down the corridor of indifference, to question authority, to be diverse. Thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist today.

• 2:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  Looking back at everything we've talked about and looking at all of the copious pages of notes for prep in front of me, it strikes me that you've forged many paths for yourself and helped others to do the same by thinking different, but also thinking brightly, coming back to Alan Watts yet again, the yin and the yang and seeing the positive, looking for the positive in different circumstances, different situations. Do you have any advice or recommendations for people who struggle to do that, who are maybe mired in a sense of hopelessness might be too strong a word, but those who tend

• 2:09:10Tim Ferriss?

  to see the glass as half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see half the spectrum of options or solutions?

• 2:09:18Speaker 02

  It's a really difficult question to answer, Tim, because everybody's situation is so unique and so different. And I do not doubt that for many, many people, it is just a bad life, whether it started that way or ended up the way, and it's almost impossible to see a way out. The perspective that I take Is that I try to stay in touch with my ancestors. I think about the great grandmothers who had to bear children in the worst of possible circumstances. I think about all of the, like my partner Bina's great grandmothers, who were picking

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  cotton as slaves and had to work all day, being bitten up by bugs, burning in the sun, feet deep in mud, and then bear a child at the last moment. So whether it's like, you know, my great grandparents from Eastern Europe or hers from the African diaspora, they had nothing to look forward to, other than just the hope that they were going to have some children and that maybe those children might have a little bit of a better life than they did. And if not their children, their children's children. So their only purpose in life, their only hope in life, their only joy in life was to make a generation and that maybe that generation would be better.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  Now, here we are in America, or really most any other country in the world. We're at a point now where like eight out of 10 people have a smartphone with access to all the world's knowledge and information, with access to countless amounts of music and training through YouTube. There are many people in the world still in dire circumstances, but the vast majority of people are doing better than people have ever done before in history. So I say to myself, and I would ask, you know, somebody else looking through the world darkly right now, looking at the glass half full, I would say, how much worse it must have been in the past?

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  What do I owe to my grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents who suffered and toiled, who barely managed to survive to produce another generation? What do I owe to them? I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life, and that's what I'm going to do.

• 2:11:45Tim Ferriss?

  Hot damn, Martine, I'm ready to get out there and get amongst it. I have so enjoyed this conversation. There are 79 more hours we could do just in round one. I won't subject you to that. And I'm so grateful that you were willing to make the time to have this conversation. Thank you so much.

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  My pleasure being with you, Tim.

• 2:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  And is there anything else you would like to say, to suggest, or ask of those listening before we bring this to a close?

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  Two of my best friends and people who I think are the smartest, most creative, most happy-loving people I know, Paul Mann and DA Wallach, both said to me that your podcast is the best. And Martine, if Tim Ferriss invites you on your, on his podcast, you have to go on it. So, thank you, DA, and thank you, Paul.

• 2:12:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thanks to them also, from me. I have, for many months, my whole team knows this, been hoping to have you on. I had high hopes coming into it. You exceeded all of those high hopes, which seems to be a pattern for you. And I'm just very grateful and happy that we had a chance to connect. So, thank you again. And for everyone listening, you can find Martine on Instagram, at TransBinary, Twitter, at Sky Biome. We will link to everything in the show notes that have mentioned in this conversation, the books and everything you

• 2:13:21Tim Ferriss?

  can imagine that we discussed will be available in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be kind, practice love night, think different, think brightly, and thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's

• 2:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of Podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies and

• 2:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own ecommerce business. I tell that story in the Four Hour Work Week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best ecommerce platforms around 2009 and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle.

• 2:15:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:16:17Tim Ferriss?

  it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify, that's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y, Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim.

• 2:16:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep Pod cover for years now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod, and I'm excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, and now it elevates automatically. More on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool even in a heatwave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows, trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that.

• 2:17:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:18:03Tim Ferriss?

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