#380: Ed Zschau — The Polymath Professor Who Changed My Life

"Entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life." — Ed Zschau Ed Zschau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Zschau is the Interim President of Sierra Nevada College https://www.sierranevada.edu/, and he brings to the college 17 years of leading technology companies. He founded System Industries https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/1794Q:US in Palo Alto, California in 1969, and as its CEO led it to a successful IPO in 1980. In the 1990s, he was the General Manager of the IBM https://www.ibm.com/ Storage Systems Division headquartered in San Jose, California. Ed has a total of 10 years of teaching experience as a professor in the graduate business schools at Stanford University https://www.stanford.edu/ and Harvard University https://www.harvard.edu/, and he has taught high tech entrepreneurship courses for a total of 22 years in the engineering schools at Princeton University https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course-details?courseid=002518&term=1114, Caltech https://www.caltech.edu/, and University of Nevada, Reno https://www.unr.edu/. In addition to serving on the boards of major public companies such as Reader's Digest https://www.rd.com/ and StarTek http://www.startek.com/, Ed has helped to start and build several technology companies during the past 20 years, some of which were founded and led by his former students. In the 1980s, Ed represented the Silicon Valley area of California for two terms in the US House of Representatives http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=Z000014, serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Also, during the 1980s, he was a General Partner of Brentwood Associates http://www.brentwood.com/, a venture capital firm, and he was the Founding Chairman of The Tech Interactive https://www.thetech.org/, (formerly The Tech Museum of Innovation), a non-profit educational institution in San Jose, California. Ed holds an A. B. degree (cum laude) in Philosophy (bridging with Physics) from Princeton University, as well as M. B. A., M. S. (Statistics), and Ph. D. degrees from Stanford University and a Doctor of Laws degree (Honoris Causa) from the University of San Francisco https://www.usfca.edu/. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology https://ccst.us/. Please enjoy! 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, I would assume appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton. I love Peloton. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. You don't have to worry about fitting classes into your schedule, making it to the studio, or dealing with some commute to the gym. I have a Peloton bike in my master bedroom at home, and it is one of the first things that I do in the morning. I wake up, meditate for 20 minutes, and then I knock out a short 20-minute ride. Usually, high-intensity interval training or HIIT. Then I take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's beautifully convenient and has become something that I actually look forward to. And I was skeptical in the beginning. I didn't think I would dig it, and I really do. So, you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other Peloton riders from across the country

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  on the interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. I tend to use a lot of the classes on demand and have four to six of them that I've bookmarked and use over and over again. There are up to 14 new classes every day with thousands of classes on demand, and there are a variety of workouts to choose from. 45-minute classes, 20-minute burns, hip-hop, rock and roll, low-impact, or high-intensity. Pick the class structure and style that works for you. Peloton has an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City. They really do have great instructors of every possible personality and style. And you can find one that you love, no matter what you're in the mood for. Personally, I use Matt Wilpers a lot, but I use a bunch of them. I'm promiscuous and enjoy classes from a lot of their instructors.

• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

  With real-time metrics, you can track your performance over time and continue to beat your personal best. I did not think the gamification would work for me, and they really hit the nail on the head. It does work, at least for me, tremendously well to keep me pushing consistently. So, discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio Experience to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's spelled O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com. Enter the code TIMPODCAST, all one word, at checkout and get $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. Get a great workout at home anytime you want.

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIMPODCAST to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer and create designs you'll love. From logos to branding to packaging to books, you name it, they have it. And I've used them for just about everything. 99designs is the go-to creative resource for any budget. I've used them for years now for book covers, for instance, mockups of The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for the multi-volume Tao of Seneca, including the cover, and many other creative projects. I've been very impressed by the quality of their work.

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook. The illustrations worked out great. I loved working with the designer we selected, and I plan to work with him on more projects in the future. And that's something you can do. You don't have to start from scratch every time. And right now, my listeners can get $20 off plus a free $99 upgrade on their first design contest. Simply submit a brief on the site describing what you need, and designers who are interested in your project, often from around the world, will submit concepts for you to choose from. You refine as you go, give feedback, and once you're ready, you choose one to finalize. It's a great way to get started and find the right match. A great designer and a great design at a great price. So head to 99designs.com/tim to learn more or get started today.

• 4:01Tim Ferriss?

  You can also see examples of some of the work that I have done with designers on 99designs. So check it out. 99designs.com/tim.

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very, very excited for this episode and my guest because he's had such a tremendous impact in my life and I haven't seen him in quite a long time. So, let's just jump right into the bio, which does not quite do you justice. We're going to dig into some things that have been artfully omitted here. Ed Shau, Shau spelled Z-S-C-H-A-U, who is currently, among many other things, interim president of Sierra Nevada College, which is a pro bono assignment he's accepted. Much, much earlier, he founded System Industries in Palo Alto, California in 1969, and as its

• 4:58Tim Ferriss?

  CEO, led it to a successful IPO in 1980. In the 1990s, he was the general manager of the IBM Storage Systems Division headquartered in San Jose, California. I believe that was, what, a $6 billion business, something along those lines? And we'll come back to that. Ed has a total of 10 years of teaching experience as a professor in the graduate business schools at Stanford University and Harvard University, and he has taught high-tech entrepreneurship courses for a total of 22 years in the engineering schools at Princeton University, Caltech, and the University of Nevada Reno. In addition to serving on the boards of major public companies such as Reader's Digest and StarTech, Ed has helped to start and build several technology companies during the past 20 years, some of which were founded and led by his former students.

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  And I've met many, many of Ed's former students who have started and built tremendous companies. In the 1980s, Ed represented the Silicon Valley area of California for two terms in the US House of Representatives, serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Also during the 1980s, he was a general partner of Brentwood Associates, a venture capital firm, and he was the founding chairman of the Tech Interactive, which I lived very close to back when I was in California, formerly known as the Tech Museum of Innovation, a nonprofit educational institution in San Jose, California. Ed holds an AB degree, cum laude, in philosophy, bridging with physics from Princeton University, as well as an MBA, MS, statistics, and PhD degrees from Stanford University and a Doctor

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  of Law's degree, Honors Causa, I hope I'm getting my Latin correctly, from the University of San Francisco. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology.

• 6:32Tim Ferriss?

  You have three children, nine grandchildren, and I'm going to leave out your exact resident specificity just because of the size of the audience. Ed, welcome to the show.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  It's great to be here with you, Tim. I think back to the spring semester of 2000, when you contacted me after all of the other students had registered for my course and made such an impressive plea to be able to enroll in the course, committing if you were enrolled that you would clean the blackboards, clean the erasers, do whatever it took to make

• 7:18Speaker 03

  my life easier. And I almost cried when I heard those words and you took the course and I'm so proud of what you've done over the past 19 years. I don't blame the course for your success, but I do blame your enrolling in the course for our friendship.

• 7:47Tim Ferriss?

  And you've taught me so much from the very beginning. And I wanted to take the course for many, many reasons. This was ELE 491, High Tech Entrepreneurship, which was in the Electrical Engineering Department and the ORF Department, which I can never remember the actual full name for, operations and research.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Operations, research, and financial engineering.

• 8:10Tim Ferriss?

  There we go. Now, I have, I have no business whatsoever being in any engineering school, but at the time, the Princeton courses, undergraduate courses, were only very recently being voted on by students. This was a very new thing. This was before Yelp and so on. And one of the standouts was this new course, High Tech Entrepreneurship, taught by Professor Shao. And I really wanted, like many people, to be part of this course. And when I finally was accepted to the course and began learning, I remember at one point, I was cleaning the

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  blackboard and cleaning the erasers. And you said to me, I don't know if you remember this, you said, "Tim, don't get too good at cleaning the erasers."

• 9:01Tim Ferriss?

  And there's a lot of direct teaching and a lot of indirect teaching, just observing you as you interact with your students and the world. And there are certain things that, when I describe you to my friends, and I do that very often, and a lot of your students, I mean, you were just telling me before we began recording, "Stay in touch with you." And these are people from 40, 50 years ago. It's remarkable. And one of the things I throw in that was not in the bio I read was figure skating. Could you please tell us about your background with figure skating?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and we were fortunate to have an indoor skating rink where a professional ice hockey team played. The Omaha Knights, they were probably a farm team for one of the NHL hockey teams. And my mother took me to that ice rink when I was about seven years old, and I really enjoyed the challenge. And I remember coming back from one session when I was just beginning to skate, and I said, "Mom, I really had a good day today."

• 10:24Speaker 03

  And she said, "What was so special about it?" And I said, "I only fell 40 times this time." And from what you might call small beginnings, I began to get more proficient and more interested. And in those days, figure skating was really figure skating, where there were precise patterns on clean ice with turns and loops that you had to perform in order to pass certain tests. And I passed the pre-test, and then I passed the first test and the second test.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And at that point, I was kind of on my way, but ice was only... Available during the winter, so I, when I was thirteen, I began spending summers away from Omaha where there were ice rinks and continued to train and continue to pass tests. And when I was sixteen years old, I had passed the sixth test and I qualified for the national championships in men's singles in a lower group, not the world class group, but a lower group. And I was also ice dancing with a partner.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  And in nineteen fifty-six, we won the Silver Dance Championship in the midwestern sections. There were three sections in the country, went to the national championships. And then my senior year in high school, nineteen fifty-seven, again, I skated in the national championships in Berkeley, California. I never was a winner, but it was a special experience to meet a lot of people throughout the country going to these championships. And I still stay in touch with my dance partner and a gentleman who I competed against in the singles championships.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  It was a big part of my life, Tim, and as I think about it, the hours that I spent training, getting up at six AM, or actually five thirty AM, being on the ice in Omaha at six AM in a cold winter, Nebraska winter, and then skating in the evening too, fitting in homework, school, to prepare for one competition where if you did well enough, you could go to the national championships. It taught me a, the power, the value of practice, of dedication, of.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Persistence and determination, those are valuable life lessons and character building lessons. So, when people ask me, "Well, how do I prepare to be a leader or to change the world?" It's through learning those values. You don't get a quick return creating value for the world. You get a quick return doing something that doesn't matter. But if you're going to make a difference in the society, changing the world for the better, you better be prepared for a long journey.

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  You, to me, as one of your standout characteristics, have preparation. You have very meticulous preparation. I remember this because, keep in mind, people listening, as we said, I was showing up to potentially do my chalkboard duty and my eraser duty and so on. So I would arrive to ELE 491 early and you'd be arranging the name cards. So you had placards for the students, which is not common at Princeton. So you'd have the name cards, you'd be arranging chairs and reviewing potentially the case study materials.

• 14:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I don't remember any TAs, any teaching assistants for that class. So could you talk about how you thought about preparation outside of, say, figure skating? And did that come from your parents? Where did that attention to detail before the competition? Whether that's a competition in business, sports, or otherwise, or just getting up in front of a class of students? Could you talk to where that comes from and how you think about preparation?

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Well, I was a strong believer in Murphy's Law.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Yeah. And so, um, I would come to the classroom typically forty-five minutes early. Make sure that the projector was working, uh, I didn't want, and, and sometimes it wasn't. Yeah. And so I had time then to call the, uh, audio visual people and they'd come over and, uh, get it fixed, rather than showing up right at the time the class starts and then finding that there are problems that disrupted the flow of the, of, of the class.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote, "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." And, and so it, it, it's, it's very important to me not to be surprised by things that go wrong. And the way that you prevent that is through preparation and making sure everything is the way that it needs to be for success. As far as the class is concerned, even though I had taught, uh, the lessons, the sessions many, many times, I usually spent two to three hours prior to each class preparing again.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Um, I, I viewed my classes, which were taught by the case method of teaching and learning, where, uh, students would read about an actual company situation and put themselves in the position of the, uh, CEO or the founder, the technical person and describe what to do. I would ask questions and they would, uh, give the answers. And, um, I felt that, that that approach to, um, teaching and learning, putting someone in the, the, the position of the, of the founder, the person who had to achieve the

• 17:23Speaker 03

  results, rather than just listening and learning and reading from a book, would, uh, not only help to, to learn, but also build the confidence that, uh, they could do that, uh, kind of job. Well, in order to make that experience, that classroom experience.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Work the best. It was like a performance.

• 17:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  I would, I would come in and I didn't know exactly how the discussion would evolve. But I knew the lessons that would come out of it. And I'd find a way regardless of what the students would say to convey those lessons through their words.

• 18:13Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the case method is, is something I'd love to talk a little bit more about because my first exposure to the case method was in your class. And it's a method that, uh, as, as I understand it is, is used at Harvard Business School, uh, also at Stanford Graduate School of Business. What I also found so appealing about the case method is you'd, as a student, have these, these short modules, these case studies. And they would often be a part one with a cliffhanger, right? So the, so the module one would end with some type of dilemma or disaster or a big decision. And you didn't have the conclusion.

• 18:57Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't, you didn't have the answer, meaning what actually happened in that particular case. And it allowed you to think for yourself, but it also gave you an opportunity to speak to the class, to speak to you and to be assertive also. Right? Because you would have, I remember at least in my, in my class, many differing opinions, some of which were polar opposites. And, uh, it's, it, it really struck me as a, as a pragmatic way to allow people to be active in the way that they're going to have to be active if they're ultimately going to be entrepreneurs.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. When, uh, you're teaching and learning about starting enterprises or creating something new, uh, you learn by doing. And so it, the case method helps in that. Projects that are real help it, uh, do that. Uh.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  One of the Princeton graduates, three, no, it's now four years ago, wrote her senior thesis on can entrepreneurship be taught? Or is it something you're born with? And there are articles that have been written that college courses in entrepreneurship are a waste of time. They don't matter. So in 2015, when she was working on this, I created an online survey instrument,

• 20:40Speaker 03

  which I sent out to all 1,600 Princeton students that I had had in my classes over 31 semesters. And we had to cut off the responses in order for her to meet her thesis deadline after 400 responses of the 1,600. But of those first 1,600 responses, 160 had been founders of companies. And among the survey questions was the question, what Princeton experiences have helped you

• 21:21Speaker 03

  in choosing your life path and succeeding in what you pursued? And of the 160 founders, 95% said it was the course that made the difference. And I think what it was, it's not so much what they learned in detail, but rather pointing out to the students that this is a possible life path, that you can create something from scratch and create value. And what great satisfaction you get from that.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  It also, and I attribute this to the case method, gave students the confidence they could do it. They'd read the case and say, "I'm as smart as that person. I know, I could do that too." And I tried to choose the cases with youthful founders rather than old people like me. And then there were some tools, techniques that they learned from it. But I believe that everyone is born with the desire to do something beyond themselves.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  And as an entrepreneur, starting something from scratch, making it real, impacting the world in that way, it fulfills that desire to do something meaningful beyond themselves.

• 22:59Tim Ferriss?

  Is that what an entrepreneur is to you? I mean, if you were to define entrepreneur, is that someone who builds something from scratch, whatever that might be? How do you think about the term entrepreneur?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Well, you probably remember this, Tim, from the course, but I assert that entrepreneurship isn't about starting companies. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life. And you can be an entrepreneur in anything. It's about starting something from scratch. It's about making good things happen that hadn't been done before. It's a combination of innovation, a lot of people get ideas, and implementation. And that second part, implementation, is the most important.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  A lot of people say, "Wouldn't it be neat if we could do this?" And that's as far as it goes. But entrepreneurs say, "Wouldn't it be neat if we could do this?" And then they do it.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  I want to say a few things and underscore a couple of things. The first is that there are only two courses I still have all the notes from, meaning courses, classes I took as an undergrad that I still have three ring binders, which contain all the notes from. One was the Literature Fact with John McPhee and the other was ELE491. So I still have all of those notes. And it strikes me that, first, from a, just from a tool perspective, if people want to find case studies that are used at places like Harvard Business School

• 24:50Tim Ferriss?

  or Stanford Business School, you can actually find quite a few online and order them. So I would encourage people to look into that. The reason that I have notes from those two classes is, I think, in large part because I had, and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, a very, very difficult and dark period in my life, junior year, and took some time off of school. It was a very, very hard time for me. And what I found in the Literature Fact and also particularly in High Tech Entrepreneurship was a teaching and reinforcing of optimism, right?

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very different from giving all of your students rose-colored glasses. You were showing that, and I found this to be really personally very helpful. In these case studies, a lot of things go wrong. But you were able to show how people figured it out and how they learned to navigate around those things. How do you think about, if you do, the role of optimism in any of this?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Well, I'm a chronic optimist. And...

• 26:04Speaker 03

  I believe that that is important to doing things that haven't been done before. You can imagine all of the things that can go wrong. And I guess there's some value in being a realist. But I don't think you do things that haven't been done before and succeed in that by being negative and focusing on all of the things that need to be done. Rather, it's having a vision and then committing to making it real. And I would bless that way.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  I just look at the world, I don't think through rose colored glasses.

• 26:53Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  But I, when, when people say that's gonna be hard, I say it's gonna be more fun then. Cause doing something that's hard is a lot more fun than doing something that's easy.

• 27:08Tim Ferriss?

  How did you, well, I'll ask two questions. So I'll start with the, the one that I should probably ask first, which is when you were, say, 20 years old, 15 or 20, somewhere in that range, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Oh, I knew exactly what I was gonna be.

• 27:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  At that, I was gonna be a physicist. And I came to Princeton in 1957 with a plan to major in physics. And then in my sophomore year, I discovered philosophy. And I thought, this is way cool stuff.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  And I decided that I would major in philosophy with, in those days, what was called a bridge program with physics. So I took all of the required courses in physics, uh, and, but my department was the philosophy department. My independent work, both as a junior and senior, were on subjects that combined philosophy and, and physics. Uh, my senior thesis was, um, describing what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of space and time would have been, had he been born fifty years later and had

• 28:38Speaker 03

  known Einstein's general theory of relativity. And I described in my thesis, this is what Kant's theory of space and time would have been. Unfortunately, uh, he, he didn't know general relativity, based it on Newtonian physics. But as a, um, presumptuous twenty-one-year-old, I figured I knew what was inside Kant's head. And if he'd just known about Einstein and, and his theories, uh, he would have had a different philosophy of space and time. That and, uh, two dollars and forty cents will get you a cup of coffee at your favorite coffee shop.

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  And you mentioned Einstein. I mean, Princeton certainly has a storied history in some respects with, with physics. Uh, I mean, Einstein spent time not, not too far away from where we're sitting right now, and, uh, Richard Feynman and others, certainly. Is that how you ended up focusing on, on Princeton and physics? Was, was the, was the, the history, I guess at that point, uh, I'm not sure what specifically would have drawn you here, but is that what drew you to Princeton?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Well, starting from the time that I was about twelve, I was, uh, an Einstein, uh, lover, I guess you'd say. I began reading about his theories and biographies and so forth. And so I applied to various colleges in the physics department, engineering physics in one case, and physics in all the others. And I was accepted to all of those schools, and all of them provided me with a rather attractive scholarship, except Princeton.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Princeton wrote to me and said, "You can work in the dining hall as a busboy, and I think I could make with 12 to 15 hours a week, $400 a semester." And I chose Princeton because I concluded, "That must be the toughest school. They're not making a big deal out of me." And I want to go where it's most challenging. I've never looked back. Did you end up finding Princeton challenging? Oh, way too challenging. And that ended my figure skating career.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I did not have the time to continue to practice. I tried to compete in my freshman year in the Eastern Championships and didn't do that well, and I began to realize that I wasn't going to make it. And looking back, I don't know whether I would have ever made the world team, but in 1961, many of the skaters that I had either competed with, trained with, my skating coach, all perished in a plane crash. The world team on their way to the world championships in Brussels, Belgium in 1961.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  And we lost a whole generation of world-class figure skaters. And I don't know whether I would have ever got gotten to that point, but I'm glad I made the choice that I did to go to Princeton, to give up figure skating and to focus on what's led me to be here talking to you.

• 32:27Tim Ferriss?

  When did teaching enter the picture? What what did you what happened after? If you could just paint a picture for us after your your undergraduate experience?

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Well, I knew what I was gonna do after I graduated from Princeton. I had applied for and was accepted to the U.S. Navy Officers Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island to begin my training in September of 1961. I went back home to Omaha, Nebraska, worked in manual labor on the night shift in a can factory, and in late August was called to Fort Omaha to be inducted into the U.S. Navy. During that pre-induction interview, I was asked if anything had happened to me health-wise

• 33:17Speaker 03

  since I'd applied in February and had a physical then. I said, Well, I broke my leg in a rugby game at Princeton in April, but it's fine now. They didn't take my word for it. They ordered an X-ray and concluded it wasn't up to Navy standards. So I was unable to enter OCS in September of 1961. Very disappointed. I did have an alternative. I had applied to Stanford Business School for the MBA program.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  I only applied to Stanford because it only had one essay in the application and all the others had three. So I focused on Stanford for that reason. I had been accepted and I never sent in the postcard that indicated that I was not coming. So I retrieved the postcard, sent it in, and within, I'd say, six days, my whole life changed from going into the Navy to going to California and entering the MBA program. I did not know.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  In that split second in April, when I heard a crack, when I fell in the rugby game, that that would change my life so dramatically. And that's why I tell people who ask me about career planning, that career planning is overrated. You asked me the question, though, how did you get into teaching? Well, I was in the MBA program at Stanford University, and there, just like philosophy at Princeton, I discovered operations research, applying mathematics to real operating business

• 35:23Speaker 03

  problems, but operating problems in general. And I said, this is way cool. And so rather than looking for a job, as I was approaching my MBA degree, I applied for the PhD program to pursue operations research. And after my first year in the PhD program, the professor who had taught the most popular second-year MBA course, electronic data processing, it was the only course at Stanford Business

• 36:02Speaker 03

  School at that time that had anything to do with computers, he left unexpectedly. And I went to the dean of the business school, and I said, Mr. Dean, you have a problem. You've got 100 second-year MBA students signed up to take Business 366, Electronic Data Processing, this September, and you don't have anybody to teach it. I am the solution to your problem. I can teach that course. And they said something like, don't call us, we'll call you.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  And in late August, about four, three weeks before the course was to begin, I get a call. Ed?

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Can you teach that course? I said, you bet. And that's how I began my teaching career. Again, there's a life lesson here. Opportunities unexpectedly happen. And many people say, gee, that's an interesting opportunity. But it only matters in life if you seize the moment. If you take advantage of that opportunity. And commit yourself to do something that you've never done before. I find that I learn the most the fastest when I don't know what I'm doing.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  And, and so I'd never taught a university course. And all of a sudden, I'm in front of a hundred second year MBA students, 24 years old, teaching a course. But I did okay. And then Stanford Graduate School of Business said, would you teach another course? I taught different courses. And that's how my teaching career began.

• 38:01Tim Ferriss?

  How did you become good at teaching or study teaching, refine your teaching? How did you, how did you work on that? Because you're an excellent teacher. There are plenty of bad teachers out there. Plenty of passable teachers, even at incredible institutions. But I would consider you a, a very, very adept teacher. How did you, how did you learn to teach?

• 38:27Speaker 03

  I think I became a better teacher by not being smart. And here's what I mean by it. People who are really super smart, learning comes too easy.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  I believe you can be a better teacher when it's more difficult for you to learn so that you can explain to somebody else how to master some lesson.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  I was, I also had the chance as a high school senior to take a course in debate. It was a full year course in debating and that helped me with public speaking. But more importantly, the high school teacher who taught debate also taught the various individual events like oratory and extemporaneous speaking. And I wanted to compete in extemporaneous speaking.

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  What is, could you just define what that, what that means in this context?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, well, this is the way it was in, when I was in high school. An extemporaneous speaking contest, a, each participant individually would be given a topic on which to speak for 10 minutes. And they were, each contestant would have one hour to prepare the 10-minute speech. So, my high school teacher said, "Well, come in after school's over every afternoon and I'll give you a topic, I'll give you an hour, and then you come back and give your 10-minute speech on that topic."

• 40:33Speaker 03

  So, the first time I did that, he gave me a topic, I spent the hour preparing, I gave my talk, and when I ran out of words, I said, "Is the 10 minutes up yet?" And he says, "It's only been three minutes."

• 40:52Speaker 03

  And, but every afternoon, he would do that. And by the end of the...

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Public speaking events that year, the contest that year, I'd become a state champion in extemporaneous speaking. You asked earlier, Tim, about preparation. This is just another example. I wasn't born to be a speaker. I wasn't born to be a teacher, but I learned to do both.

• 41:29Tim Ferriss?

  And there are tools also, as you mentioned in your own teaching, there are tools that you can give people and strategies, which is certainly part, was part of ELE 491 in my case and in the cases of your students. With the extemporaneous speaking, what were some of the, what were some of the keys to getting better? Were there any techniques or strategies or ways of thinking about the topics you were given that were particularly helpful?

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, in that final event,

• 42:10Speaker 03

  I remember the topic. It was what was the significance of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton? And I had an hour to prepare that one.

• 42:26Tim Ferriss?

  Before Google, before Google.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  And, and so the style of presentation, it wasn't a sort of matter of fact. It was to prepare what might be called a 10-minute oration with drama, with stories, with life lessons, and sort of end on a crescendo. And let's go back to teaching. I view teaching more about nurturing, about personal values, about inspiration.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  About recognizing that you can have fun doing great things. And it's not so much the lessons or the facts, but rather it's building, maybe even contagion, this optimistic attitude and understanding that if you can change the world for the better, that's as good as it gets.

• 43:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I do think the, in retrospect, it's maybe easier, well, of course, it's easier to see in retrospect, but how these various chance opportunities and encounters with philosophy, with the teaching, with the extemporaneous speaking, not necessarily in that order, but how they've combined into this alchemy that has enabled you to transmit and infuse these beliefs to your students in a way that is very, very memorable, right? It's not just the text in the book. What do you remember, I mean, you remember the topic, Aaron Burr, and so on.

• 44:26Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember any of the choices that you made in how you competed with that competition?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Oh, in speaking?

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  No, I remember my debate partner in high school and then at Princeton. He was one year behind me. We had started kindergarten together and then I skipped first grade, so I was one year ahead of him. But when he was a junior and I was a senior, we were debate partners. In a debate team, there were two on each side and one, you were assigned whether you were the affirmative speakers behind and supporting the resolution or the negative speakers against the resolution.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  And I remember he was the first affirmative speaker and I was sitting near while he was standing and he got confused and he gave the negative case.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  And I'm sort of making hand signals to him as he's giving the negative case against the resolution he's supposed to be speaking for, and I was gonna have to follow up on this. And he finally realized what was happening, and he was so smooth. He said, "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what our opponents would lead you to believe." However... And then he quickly switched to the affirmative case.

• 46:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  But there's also a lesson in this, that things sometimes don't work out exactly the way you plan, but you've gotta adapt and figure out how to segue into what will work.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  See, you strike me as very, very adaptable in so many ways. I mean, you've, you've spent time in so many different worlds, and you're very good at seizing opportunities. But you've also done certain things for periods of time. You've, you've run companies for extended periods of time. You were in politics for, for, for extended period of time. How do you, this is actually some phrasing that I heard from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the UK, he said, you know, "How do you differentiate between opportunities to be seized and temptations to be resisted?" So when, because there's a, you've, you've, you focused for extended periods of time

• 47:19Tim Ferriss?

  on single things when no doubt there were other opportunities being thrown at you. How do you think about focusing for extended periods or opening yourself to opportunities?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  This is really a simple question, and it's answered with one word: commitment.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  I had situations where I had opportunities to leave companies that I was running. I would not leave until it was appropriate to leave, where there was a successor, there was success. When you're an entrepreneur and people are investing in you, when you're an entrepreneur and a CEO and employees and customers and suppliers are counting on you, you've got to have a commitment to do the job until you're no longer necessary.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  When I took the company public, my first company public, and it was about a 10-year period, and there were times during that 10 years where we almost went under. But when we had gone public and I could, and then did a secondary financing so there was sufficient capital, and then did a search for a successor, I felt that then I could leave to run for the Congress. Perfect segue. Why did you decide to run for Congress? I thought I could be good at it.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  And here's why, it wasn't just, gee, that's way cool, like philosophy and operations research. In 1977, I was on the board of directors of the American Electronics Association. And electronics companies during the 70s were unable to raise sufficient amounts of risk capital. The amount of capital committed to professionally managed venture capital funds during the 1970s, funds that would be investing in tech companies, was only 50 million a year. Wow.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  50 million a year. And I was asked to chair a task force for the American Electronics Association on capital formation to figure out what to do. And I assembled a group of entrepreneurs and investors and we concluded the single inhibitor to sufficient quantities of risk capital investment was the high rate of the capital gains tax at the federal level at that time, which was 50%. And looking at it, if an investor invested and lost money, they lost all the money.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  If they invested and made money, they gave half of it to the federal government, forgetting about what they'd have to give to the state government. So, we felt that lowering the tax on capital gains was essential to stimulating the environment for risk capital investment, not just for electronics companies, but all kinds of job-creating ventures. And the task force put together a white paper, and usually that's the end of the story. Well, we proposed the lowering the capital gains tax, but keep in mind, Tim, that this

• 51:10Speaker 03

  was a group of entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs don't just talk about it, they make stuff happen. And so, the first thing we did is we did a survey of our, the electronics industry, and documented the importance of more risk capital investment for job creation and for the ability of these companies to get started and grow. Then, I went to Washington and testified before Congress, and there was a young congressman from Wisconsin, Bill Steiger, who was on the House Ways and Means Committee.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  And he became intrigued with this idea of lowering the tax on capital gains, and so, he introduced a bill. To do so, and I worked with him and my, the whole electronics association worked in lobbying the Ways and Means Committee, worked with the Senate. And by November of 1978, about a year after we'd started this process with our survey, the federal tax on capital gains was lowered from 50% to 28%.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  And within about 18 months, $1 billion of capital flowed into professionally managed venture capital funds compared to the 50 million a year that had been happening during the 70s. And anybody who studies the 1980s, that number on an annual basis, four or five billion a year flowing into funds that were supporting new enterprises and job-creating enterprises. So, that experience, particularly because Bill Steiger died of a heart attack within

• 53:17Speaker 03

  a month after this bill was passed. He passed away in early December of 1978. The bill was passed in November of 78. His example inspired me to, for public service. He had changed the nature of the debate in Washington on tax policy from who pays and who doesn't, to what will be the economic impact. And I felt, gosh, somebody who has built a company, somebody's had the experience that

• 53:58Speaker 03

  I had with working with Bill Steiger to get the tax rate on capital gains reduced, perhaps I had a contribution to make in public service.

• 54:10Tim Ferriss?

  It also strikes me, and I think you may have even said this in an interview that I read in preparing for this conversation, that in a very real sense, you had an advantage in the sense that...

• 54:28Tim Ferriss?

  You could always go back to building companies, right? Which means you weren't necessarily dedicated to being a politician as a career indefinitely from that point forward. You had very, you had some attractive Plan Bs or Plan Cs if it didn't work out. Did that enable you to think more aggressively or differently?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Well, I had a personal principle that I was only going to stay in the House of Representatives at most three terms, six years. And that gave me two advantages. One, a sense of urgency. I couldn't just kind of wait around and learn the ropes. I had to start making a difference as quickly as I was able. And secondly, it gave me the freedom to do what I thought was right.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  The worst could happen is I get retired, or maybe it's the best that could happen. I get retired after one term or two terms. Certainly, I wasn't going to serve more than three. As it turned out, I only served two terms in the House because as a congressman from California, I think there were at that time 48 or 50 California members of the House of Representatives. And we were a dime a dozen. And it was very difficult for a single California congressman or Congresswoman to get the message

• 56:17Speaker 03

  out. So I felt that if I have ideas, I not only need a message, I need a megaphone. And I decided that I could get a megaphone if I became a US Senator from California. I ran for the US Senate. And nineteen, I started in eighty six, eighty five for the nineteen eighty six campaign. I won the Republican nomination, but I was defeated in a very close election. About a percentage point, percentage point and a half by the three-term incumbent, Alan

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Cranston. And looking back, I was disappointed at the time because I felt I wasn't as good enough candidate, I had lots of support and I'd let people down. But looking back, I dodged a bullet with that very close loss because since then, I feel through leading companies and through, at least my view, changing lives for the better, my students over many, many years, that I may have through, not just their lives,

• 57:43Speaker 03

  but how they've changed in a positive way the lives of others, that I may have made more of a contribution to a better future than I would have as a US senator.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  I believe that. I definitely believe that. And, or I shouldn't say and, but at the time, you were disappointed and I would be very interested to hear because we've been talking about a lot of your successes and you've had a lot of successes, but at that time, when you got the news that you had lost, what did the next few days or weeks look like for you? What did you, what do you say to yourself when you, when, when you have, when you experience a loss like that?

• 58:29Speaker 03

  What do I do next to make a difference? And

• 58:36Speaker 03

  I'd never been out of a job.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  I mean, when you think about it, it was from teaching to starting a company to running for Congress and now I was, I didn't have a next, what am I gonna do next? And I had the opportunity to join the venture capital firm that was the lead investor in my first company and I accepted that assignment as a general partner of the firm. It was Brentwood Associates at that time was a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm and I established the Silicon Valley office of that firm.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  I think they, my partners would agree that I wasn't really very good at being a venture capital investor. I'm too much of an optimist. Every deal I looked at, oh gee, that's really interesting. I can see how to make that happen and as a venture capitalist, you really have to be more realistic and maybe even super critical. But also at that time in my life, I viewed being an investor as kinda like a football coach. You walk the sidelines, you send in plays, you make substitutions, you rant and rave

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  at halftime, but you never put any points on the board. And I was still in, at that time in my life, wanting to put points on the board, meaning running a company, not being the better in the stands, but the jockey on the horse. And so when I had an opportunity to become CEO of one of the companies Brentwood had helped to start, I took that opportunity in a company in the magnetic recording components business called Sense Store.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  How do you make, what is your decision process like for something like that? Because you mentioned with the venture capital general partner position, perhaps you are too optimistic. Everything sounded interesting. But when you make a decision to say, become the CEO of a startup in the portfolio, you're saying no to other things, presumably. So what was the decision process like in evaluating that and saying yes to it?

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's again, commitment. I mean, I was part of a firm, general partner of a firm, that had made a significant investment in this company, and they felt that there was a need for a new CEO. And so when they talked to me about it, it started out as, well, can you go in there and help out and be on the board? And it evolved into, can you go in there and run it? And I wasn't going to say no to my partners.

• 1:01:55Tim Ferriss?

  Did you, in your mind, or explicitly with them, set expectations in the way that you did for yourself with the three-term limit as a congressman? Did you go in to it saying, I'm committing to this for X period of time and then we'll reevaluate? Or was it left totally open-ended?

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Well, it was left open-ended. The goal is success, rather than how long. And I think you're getting to an issue where I may not be like a lot of other people. I don't do things for me. I do things for others. So if you want to get down to what motivates you, finding something that I think is meaningful that needs to be done and recognizing I can help do it. And it's not about the money. That's why I do things pro bono.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Um, my wife is not particularly thrilled with that approach. But on the other hand, uh, I, uh, it's, I focus on where can I make a difference for the benefit of others rather than what's in it for me. And, um, I don't know whether that's unusual, uh, but, um, it's served me well.

• 1:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  How do you differentiate between the things that will have the greatest impact for others? And feeling peer pressured to commit to something? If that question makes any sense, because it seems like, uh, it seems like people pleasing and committing to things that will help the greatest number of other people or deeply help other people are two different things. And I guess I'm, I'm just wondering if, if there are times when you commit to say, doing certain things because the general partners to whom you've made a commitment, ask you

• 1:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  to do it, may not always be the same thing that will have the greatest impact. Uh, maybe it's not a good question. I'm just wondering if you've ever run into a position where people want you to do one thing and you could be very good at it, but you feel like your, your abilities are better put in a different place.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Usually the, the decisions that I make about how I'm going to spend my time and my life are, are, uh, made by me rather than responding to requests. Uh, when I, uh, came to offer my course here at Princeton, I hadn't gotten a phone call saying, "Hey Ed, would you please come and teach a high-tech entrepreneurship course at Princeton?" Rather in June of 1997, I asked for a meeting.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  With the then dean of the engineering school, James Wei. And in that meeting, I proposed that the engineering school would benefit from having a rather comprehensive program in entrepreneurship. It just made perfect sense to me that engineers innovate, but in order to make a difference in the world, that innovation has to then become real and commercialized and often in a startup venture. So exposing engineering students to that process and that opportunity seemed to make sense.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  And that was the origin of the first offering of ELA 491 in the fall semester of 1997. Again, an instance where I decided that there might be some value that I could create. And now Princeton, entrepreneurship, the Princeton way is pervasive across this campus with many courses, with many co-curricular and extracurricular programs for the benefit of student entrepreneurs.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  And the survey that I mentioned before, out of 400 of the students that took my course, forgetting about or not including the courses, the many other courses that are now offered to have 160 founders of companies from that cadre, it would suggest to me that out of the total of 1,600, that there may be 300, 400 founders. And I still, see, I'm touched. When I got emails from students, I may have had a dozen years ago, saying, Ed, you planted

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  the seed 12 years ago and it's finally sprouting. I have just founded my first company. It took me this long, but you gave me the confidence to do it.

• 1:07:23Tim Ferriss?

  How have you thought about parenting and your own kids? Because you've... You're so deliberate in how you teach and you've prepared so extensively, not just for the courses, but for each individual class. How have you thought about parenting?

• 1:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  Or how would you describe your parenting style?

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  It's it's almost the same.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  That um. It's just that the students start a lot younger.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  I believe that um. The best way to help people find their way. Nurture them is through encouragement rather than direction. But when I was um. When our children were young, we have three children. I coached thirteen soccer teams.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  With um. All three of them played soccer at one time or another. Uh, I was a Cub Scout leader and a Boy Scout leader. And um, the. We're really proud of the way our kids turned out.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  We were lucky. Uh, they were growing up in a good place at a good time. Probably not a lot of the challenges that all parents face today. With the world more complicated, uh, with communications technology more advanced.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  But um. Loving them, uh, caring and letting them know that you love them. And you care is is kind of the secret of parenting.

• 1:09:26Tim Ferriss?

  Could you speak to the encouragement instead of, rather than direction, a bit more? Does that mean that you're exposing them to a lot and whatever they gravitate towards naturally is what you then try to foster? What does that mean when you say encouragement instead of direction?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Well, they've got to live their lives. You can't live their lives. And I think I benefited a lot from my own parents. They were proud of me whether I did well or not. I learned, when I was maybe five, six, seven years old, how to build radios and build motors in the basement workshop from my father, who had a degree in electrical engineering. But sadly, during the depression, he lost his engineering job and got into an assignment

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  that really didn't have anything to do with engineering, but he stayed in it in order to provide for his family. One thing that I remember from my parents, I was, as we talked about earlier, a competitive figure skater. And sometimes I didn't do well in a competition. I may have fallen, I may have not done a school figure very well, not up to my ability. They never criticized me in those situations. They never put pressure on me.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  They were always supportive and proud, regardless of how well I did relative to what I could have done.

• 1:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  What might they say? Let's just say on the car ride back after you've had, for you, a disappointing performance? What are the types of things they might say to you?

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Great job.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Great job. And having been a soccer coach, I know that not all parents act that way. Yeah. Sometimes, parents are the problem. The players are just fine. Parents are a problem. But both of my parents weren't raised by their parents. My mother was raised by her grandmother. My father was raised by his mother's sister. His mother died when he was about 12 years old.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  His father was in the German newspaper business in Montana, but he and his sister grew up in Omaha, raised by his deceased mother's sister. And I think as a result of their not having parents, they wanted to be the best parents. And so, my sister, we never had a whole lot of money, but my sister had ballet lessons and she was an exquisite ballerina. I had piano lessons and figure skating lessons.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  And they just wanted to be the best parents ever. And I think they felt blessed to have two children who wanted to succeed. We both studied hard. We were both good students. We went to college. We did other things besides that. And we wanted, both wanted our parents to be proud.

• 1:13:20Tim Ferriss?

  Where do you think that desire came from? Was it watching their example and the, perhaps the diligence with which your father showed you how to disassemble and reassemble these radios? Where did the desire to please them come from if what you most received was continuous positive feedback?

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  I'm not, I'm not sure it was, the focus of my life was to please them.

• 1:13:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  But I've, I've had from the time I was in grade school, maybe even in kindergarten or first grade, an overarching goal. And, and that is to live a life that matters. To make a lasting positive difference in the world. I call it leaving footprints. And that's what drives me. So some people might say, well, my overarching goal is to be the richest person around.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Or my overarching goal is to have a whole lot of adulation and be a celebrity. My goal, maybe even in a quiet way, is to leave footprints on the world.

• 1:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Have there ever been times in your life where you've felt like you've wandered or been pushed away from that and then have corrected course?

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  I don't recall. I don't recall. I've always sort of marched to my own drum.

• 1:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  You know, that's another thing. And maybe this is important for your audience. I always wanted to be different. There are... People, particularly with social media these days, that wanna be accepted, that wanna be like others, if someone has a new kind of shoe or shirt, you know, others wanna have the same thing. And so I've always had a desire to be different from others. And maybe that enables

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  me not only to venture where others may not venture, but also to be satisfied doing something that nobody else is doing.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any books that have had a particularly large impact on your life, or that you've given the most to other people, or recommended?

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  Well, The Four Hour Work Week, or The Four Hour Body.

• 1:16:16Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I've heard they're fine books. I've heard they're...

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Those are very fine books, and everyone should read them.

• 1:16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Besides those, of course, on the top shelf, are there, are there any, any, any books that come to mind that have impacted you strongly, or that you've recommended to students or other people?

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  When I was little, when I'm talking about little, like six, eight, 10 years old, there was a whole series of biographies written for children my age. Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin. And I would read those books over and over, because they, their lives and what they accomplished were what I hoped to do. So it was that set

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  of experiences. There was a book on the right... Brothers, uh, and these were written for somebody my age. Now you can, uh, read Walder Isaacson's book on Benjamin Franklin, or on Steve Jobs, or Walder Isaacson's book on Einstein. And, uh, but it's the same thing.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, or David McCullough's on the Wright Brothers.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  A fabulous book.

• 1:17:51Tim Ferriss?

  Do you still read biographies? Do you, is that?

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  That's kind of all I care about. And, uh, uh, it's the stories, the stories that are inspirational. And it gets back to what we were talking about before with the case method where when I'm reading a biography, just like I'm hoping the students, when they read a case, that they think of themselves in that situation and what would I do? And reading, uh, uh, biographies, well, that is the wonderful McCullough book on the Wright

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  Brothers, um, amazing lessons of, they didn't just go out, build a plane and fly it. A lot of setbacks and disappointments and struggles in order to do what they did. The same with, I mean, all of those, the, the, it gets to what we were talking about before, the preparation, the commitment to excellence. Uh, it doesn't happen overnight. People who achieve great things, even though it may look like, uh, it happened, uh, quickly and easily and everybody can do it.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Um, most of those stories have a lot of sacrifice and difficulty and disappointments and setbacks in them.

• 1:19:25Tim Ferriss?

  For entrepreneurs, uh, whether students in your classes or people listening, are there any particular biographies or books that you would recommend in particular? Any, any standouts or like, or just particular figures?

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  Well, again, don't buy the books because they have lessons in them. Buy the books because they have stories in them. And there are a bunch of them. My colleague at Princeton, Derek Liddell, has written a couple of books and his most recent is Built on Bedrock. And it's, a lot of the book is about Walmart and Sam Walton and how it started.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  And he went to the Walmart archives and based his stories about Walmart on those facts. But it's filled with stories about companies that were built by people on solid foundations, built on bedrock.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  I had a chance, the stories are so important, I think also, for many reasons, of course, but also because it's really the glue that we as humans are programmed to use to remember any of the lessons that might come out of those stories. And that's something that struck me when, a few months ago, I was invited to go to Bentonville, Arkansas, and interview Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, for this podcast. But it was my first time in northwest Arkansas, my first time in Bentonville, and I went to the, I was able to see Sam Walton's pickup truck and the keys and the stories are what

• 1:21:26Tim Ferriss?

  stick. And it was a fascinating, fascinating experience. What are you most excited about these days? I mean, you seem to be moving as quickly, doing as many things as ever. You certainly don't strike me as someone who's ever idle. What are you personally most excited about these days?

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  Well, I'm focusing now on education.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  And my years of teaching are just part of it. But you look at higher education today, very expensive. Lot of students with debt. Uh, may not be prepared for first jobs.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  May not be prepared for a lifetime of contributions. And so, just in the last couple of weeks, I volunteered to be the interim president of a wonderful, small college, Sierra Nevada College, located in Incline Village, Nevada, right on the shores of Lake Tahoe, in the midst of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And, um, this is a college that has, uh, a dedicated faculty with real-life experience in the areas they teach.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Uh, they're not just teachers, they've done what they teach. Uh, it is a college in which entrepreneurship is pervasive. Uh, it has some real focused capabilities in environmental science. Well, right there, on the shores of Lake Tahoe, Keep Tahoe Blue. Environmental science is critical, uh, in that area. What a wonderful place to learn about that. It has, uh, a, a strong, um,

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  entrepreneurial-based business, um, program at the undergraduate level. And then it has a marvelous, fine arts and creative writing, uh, program. Um, you don't go there to major in neuroscience. You don't go there to major in philosophy. But if you wanna go to a, a small- Small college with small classes with dedicated teachers. And to be an entrepreneurial leader, both in your first job and for a lifetime of

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  contributions in establishing and building enterprises or being a leading environmental scientist with entrepreneurial approaches to that scientific work. Or if you want to be like a writer, you know, Tim, better than anybody, writers aren't just writers, they're entrepreneurs. Yeah. To creating content, but then getting their content read.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  And podcasting, that's a way of communicating with people. I have friends who are photographers. They became photographers, they didn't born photographers, but they became photographers, but they're entrepreneurs. So here's a small college that I've volunteered to lead until a successor with entrepreneurial leadership capabilities is identified and takes office and continue to promote this higher education approach.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  One of the challenges these days, as I just mentioned, was how do we do this less expensively? And I believe that there are ways in which education can use technology to reduce the costs. I'm not advocating, well, there will never be any more classrooms, but a combination of that classroom experience with online learning can reduce the cost of providing a top rated. Educational institution.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  I'm also attracted to income sharing agreements. Perhaps your audience is not familiar with them, but rather than taking out student loans, there are sources of financing where the student signs an agreement that to repay based on their income above certain levels. And if they never make that much, they don't repay, but if they make more than that threshold level, then they pay and may pay more than the amount of the debt.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  But having students graduating with huge amounts of debt reduces their choices. And you asked me earlier, well, how do you choose what you want to do? Well, I want to change the world. I want to do things that will benefit others. Well, if you have a lot of debt, you may not be able to make those choices that are in that direction. You have to focus first on, well, how do I make enough money to pay off my debt? So, and I don't know whether any of the people who are listening to this podcast are thinking

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  about enrolling in a unique educational institution, but we do have a few openings left for entering freshmen, this even this fall in late August. So if there are people who are interested in coming to get a uniquely valuable educational experience in a beautiful setting, look up sierra nevada.edu.

• 1:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll link to that in the show notes for everyone as well. So you'll be able to find those links really easily. The income sharing is very, very interesting to me. I don't have much exposure to it, but there are some programming schools, for instance. I believe one is called Lambda School, which has this exact model and has proven very, very successful. It also puts a very

• 1:28:42Tim Ferriss?

  Productive onus on the educators to really think through the practicalities of what they're teaching and how effective they are, how effectively they're imparting these skills to their students. Ed, do you have any particular quotes or mantras, anything that you live your life by or remind yourself of often? Are there any particular? I mean, you mentioned, say, one earlier, if you're failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail. Do you have any other quotes that have really stuck with you?

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Do what you enjoy doing. Do it the best you know how, good things will happen.

• 1:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  I love it.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  But I may be unusual, well, I don't know whether I'm this unusual. I like to get out of my comfort zone, do things I haven't done before. I believe that doing so enables me to learn, but the more I learn, the more I'm able to contribute to others. So, doing the same thing and being able to be the best at that, that's laudable, but my mother had a problem with me when she was alive. So, I started out with this teaching.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  I mentioned how I got into it, the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And after I'd done that for a while, I said, "Mom, I'm gonna start a company." And she said, "Buzzy," that was my nickname, and my sister still calls me Buzzy, and my high school friends call me Buzzy. "Buzzy, you were just getting good at teaching, and now you're gonna start a company. You don't know anything about that." And then, the company did okay, and we took it public, and I said, "Mother, I'm gonna run for Congress." "Buzzy, you were just getting good at running a company.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  You don't know anything about politics."

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  And she lived long enough so that she saw me sworn in to the US House of Representatives in January of 1983, and then she passed away that April.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:31:22Tim Ferriss?

  How did she, how did she respond to seeing you sworn in?

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Uh, well, she, she was not, um, she didn't express her emotions and her feelings a lot, but I believe she was proud.

• 1:31:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure she was. How could she not be? Yeah. You have a, an incredible tradition that I think is, is so soothing to you, and it's so memorable for so many of your students, and it has to do with singing, and it seems like there have been a few different versions of this, but, uh, where did the singing enter the picture with your, your teaching?

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Well, it started way before that.

• 1:32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Started way before that?

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Uh, when I was probably in grade school, I would write poems about things like, "The busy bee is lively, all he does is buzz, but yesterday he stung me, and now he is a was."

• 1:32:49Tim Ferriss?

  I said, that's, is that something you wrote?

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Going way back, and then, uh, I started, um, composing, uh, or using music that already existed.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  Then, um, when I was, um, in first teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, there, there was a tradition there where in the spring, in May, uh, they held a, a joint faculty-student event called the Spring Fling. And, uh, the faculty would prepare a skit. And, um, it had perhaps, uh, acting, it had perhaps some songs.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  And I became the writer for the, uh, faculty skits. And then there were student skits as well. And, uh, my most famous song, I wrote many in, for those skits about various courses and, uh, well, primarily about courses. Uh, but then I'd also write the words and we had a takeoff on Batman and Robin and we had, uh, um, a Mission Impossible skit and with, where I'd write the songs and the music.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  And even after I left, uh, the faculty, they, uh, as a teacher, they kept, and I'd started my company, they kept me on the Stanford Business School faculty from the time I left, which was 1970, to 1981, so I could continue to be the writer of the faculty skits. Well, the most famous song I wrote was, uh, about the linear programming algorithm. How to, it was called the simplex method, where, uh, poor students in 1966, when I was

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  teaching the quantitative methods course, had to learn how to do this. And linear programming was, uh, abbreviated LP.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  Linear programming. And so I wrote a song about the algorithm that was mathematically correct. That if you listen to the words, you could do the simplex algorithm to achieve an optimal solution to a linear programming problem. But I wrote it in the form of a dance. And it went something like this. Come on, gang, now gather round, see what your math prof's putting down. Get in close and listen to me, I'm gonna show you how to do the LP. It's a new dance, but it's easily done. In fact, you learned it in 261.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Just to make sure that you can do it, listen close while I review it. Do the LP. Come on, baby, do the LP with me. We're gonna pivot step, day and night, and optimize it out of sight. And then it went through a series of verses with the details of the simplex algorithm. First of all, form a big, strong line. Ah, that's it, you're looking fine. Fine, behind that line, form one more. Come on, everybody, get out on the floor. Keep forming lines one after one. When you're out of cats, then you're done. Now you see how I get my kicks. I've got y'all in a big matrix.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Do the LP. Come on, baby, do the LP with me. We're gonna pivot step, day and night, and optimize it out of sight.

• 1:36:56Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible.

• 1:37:00Tim Ferriss?

  So you, you use stories, you use music. I, I feel like, I feel like, uh, these, these are communication skills that sort of transci- transcend the era in which you were born. I mean, you could've gone back a thousand years and used these. You could probably go forward a thousand years and use these. And your students remember these things. They really remember these things. And I'd love for you to talk about another song that I certainly was exposed to, and that is "My Way," and why you chose that song.

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  Well, again, I was teaching at Harvard Business School in 1996, a course called Entrepreneurial Finance. And for the last class of the course, I wanted to end with a number of stories and share with students my philosophies. It was a captive audience. Attendance was mandatory.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  And I thought, what would be an appropriate message to convey? And that message, we've talked about it earlier, parenting, teaching. The message is, just do it your way.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  And so then I thought of the song "My Way", and I put some words to that song. This course's end is here, but I have in this final session a thought for your career. It is a most important lesson. As you go down life's path, whether slow or in a hurry, recall the Nike ad, just do it your way.

• 1:39:19Tim Ferriss?

  It brings back the memories. And it not only brings back the memories, but it just refreshes the mark that you had on me and continue to have. And I really just want to thank you, Ed, for...

• 1:39:43Tim Ferriss?

  Doing things your way. It's really had such an incredible impact on so many people and I'm not going to mention him by name, but he's a mutual friend of ours. You introduced us because we were both, we were both students of yours, but I will, he's a very, very, very successful entrepreneur and we were going back and forth emailing in preparation for this, this interview with you. And he, in closing, says, "Please give my best to Ed. Any success I've had in business was due to him." That is an incredible sentence. And it's incredible also because he is not the only student who would write that. I've met students of yours from China.

• 1:40:27Tim Ferriss?

  I've met students of yours from countries around the world who have some version of that sentiment. And it's so incredible and it's been such a privilege and such a great stroke of luck that I ended up in your class. And I just want to say that to you because it's had such a significant impact on the trajectory of my life. And certainly for me, that's a big deal. That's a really, really big deal. So I just want to thank you.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  You, thank you, Tim. And now you know why I do what I do. I've, I concluded a long time ago, "I'm not going to be able to change the world alone." I said, "My goal in life is to live a life that matters. I call it leaving footprints." But I can better achieve my goal leaving footprints with your feet.

• 1:41:27Tim Ferriss?

  [laughing]

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  And so that's why I do what I do.

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Ed, I hope this is certainly, I mean, I can't wait to have dinner. We're gonna have dinner after this and continue to catch up. I can't wait to see what you do next. And I'm so, so happy to have a chance to spend time together today. And this has been a real pleasure for me to do this.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  Well, I'm proud of you, Tim. And I'm proud of so many people who you refer to, who have

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  taken my course. They've taken many other courses. They've had other experiences. But they go out and do great stuff. And deep down, I say to myself, I'm really glad I lost that Senate race.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  Because otherwise, I may not have been able to do what I've been doing.

• 1:42:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, I, it sounds strange to say, but I'm also glad, I'm really glad, for my sake and for the sake of many people, that you lost that Senate race. And you've just done so much, so much good. And you're going to continue to do so much good. It's really inspiring. And I think this is a great place to, to wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to say or close with? Anything you'd like to recommend to people? Anything at all that you'd like to, to say before we wrap up?

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Well, I've told you my story. And with, you know, some detail that, based on Tim's questions. But most important thing for you to do, you speaking to the audience, is to do it your way. Don't just follow what is recommended. Don't just pursue what others are pursuing. But do what you enjoy doing. Do it the best you know how. Good things

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  will happen. And if you're thinking more about doing something different than you're currently doing, it's time for a change.

• 1:44:05Tim Ferriss?

  Ken, I could not imagine a better place to close. Ed, to be continued. We're gonna go grab some food and continue the conversation, but thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Oh, this is a real treat, Tim. And, oh, I noticed that there's a blackboard that's dirty and erasers that need cleaning.

• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

  There is.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  So, get to it.

• 1:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there is literally a whiteboard right behind me, so I'm gonna get back to my other task, cleaning up for Ed. And, to be continued. And to everybody listening, I will include everything we've talked about in the show notes, which you can find, as always, at tim.blog/podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this even half as much as I did. And thank you so much for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend?

• 1:45:16Tim Ferriss?

  And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:46:01Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for you to find an amazing designer and create designs you'll love. From logos, to branding, to packaging, to books, you name it, they have it. And I've used them for just about everything. 99designs is the go-to creative resource for any budget. I've used them for years now, for book covers, for instance, mockups of The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for the multi-volume Tao of Seneca, including the cover, and many other creative projects. I've been very impressed by the quality of their work. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook. The illustrations worked out great.

• 1:46:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:47:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:12Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:48:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:49:38Tim Ferriss?

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