#364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries

“All these things you’re sure are true — what if they weren’t?” — Safi Bahcall Safi Bahcall (@SafiBahcall https://twitter.com/SafiBahcall) is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries https://www.amazon.com/Loonshots-Nurture-Diseases-Transform-Industries/dp/1250185963?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Loonshots describes what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. It has been selected for The Washington Post‘s 10 Leadership Books to Watch for in 2019 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/01/leadership-books-watch/, Inc.‘s 10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019 https://www.inc.com/leigh-buchanan/2019-most-anticipated-business-books.html, and Business Insider‘s 14 Books Everyone Will Be Reading in 2019 https://www.businessinsider.com/business-books-new-2019-1. Safi received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, Safi was named Ernst and Young’s New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year http://ir.madrigalpharma.com/news-releases/news-release-details/synta-pharmaceuticals-corps-ceo-safi-bahcall-named-ernst-young. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreports on the future of national research. Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/03/15/safi-bahcall-loonshots/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This podcast is brought to you by Uber https://www.uber.com/rewards/. Uber makes getting around town easier than ever before, and now Uber is introducing Uber Rewards https://www.uber.com/rewards/, a new rewards program that helps keep modern life going. With Uber Rewards, you can earn points on Rides and Uber Eats and unlock rewards such as Uber Cash for your next Uber ride or your next Uber Eats order. You can unlock new benefits at every membership level, such as flexible cancellations with Gold, price protection with Platinum, complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, and more. For terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber Rewards, go to Uber.com/Rewards https://www.uber.com/rewards/. This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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 http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Uber, which I use pretty much every day. Uber makes getting around town, and the world for that matter, easier than ever before. And now Uber is introducing Uber Rewards, a new rewards program that helps keep modern life going. Some of you know this already, but I've used Uber thousands upon thousands of times since 2008 or 2009, when I first became an advisor and it was even just in prototype stage. I've since used it to save my skin in many countries where I don't even speak the language, to help transport my dog around, to save on delivery fees from big box retailers. The list is really countless for the number and types of ways that I've made my life easier with Uber.

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

  As a company, Uber's been doing a ton of really interesting, great things in the past year. Uber Rewards is going to make you love Uber even more. It's a brilliant idea, and you can earn points on rides and Uber Eats. So you earn points whether you're staying in or going out, and the more you use it, the more you get, and you unlock rewards such as Uber Cash, which you can apply to rides or food orders. There's a lot more, though. You unlock all sorts of new benefits at each membership level, such as flexible cancellations with Gold. This means you get your cancellation fees refunded when you rebook within 15 minutes for a limited number of uses. You get price protection with Platinum. This means you get price protection on Uber X between your two favorite places.

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  So you choose the two places, you ride between the most, and during busy hours when prices might be higher, you'll be protected above a certain amount in either direction. You might get complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, for instance. This means that at no extra cost, you request Uber X and you can get Upgraded to premium rides like Black. And there's a lot more priority support, priority pickup at airports, getting access to highly rated drivers, all at different levels, and it goes on and on and on. So you should check it out. Go to uber.com/rewards for all sorts of examples. The more you ride, the more you eat, the more you get. So for the terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber rewards, go to uber.com/rewards. That's uber.com/rewards.

• 2:36Tim Ferriss?

  Check out the program terms, the details, examples at uber.com/rewards. Chances are you're already using Uber, so you might as well opt into this and get more out of it. And if you're not, these are all the more reason to install, download, and try it today.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule, or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 3:41Tim Ferriss?

  on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say, low-impact versus high-intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real time metrics that you can

• 4:24Tim Ferriss?

  use to track your performance over time and that will help, I would say catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings a studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners

• 5:05Tim Ferriss?

  of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com and enter the code TIM, all caps at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.

• 5:33Tim Ferriss?

  Safi, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Glad to be here. And I'm going to read your bio here. This is, this is one of the, one of the several, I would say, interviews that I've done where it's not going to be a challenge, as I said to one of my employees earlier, to find things to talk about. It's going to be a matter of trying to ask you all the things I would like to ask you, but I'll give people some context first. So by way of bio, Safi Bakal, you can find him on Twitter at Safi Bakal, that's S-A-F-I-B-A-H-C-A-L-L. Received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded

• 6:16Tim Ferriss?

  a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, Safi was named Ernst & Young's New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the Future of National Research. Safi, you are most recently author of Loon Shots, that is the title. Subtitle, How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, which has some of the best cover blurbs I've ever seen on any book. We might talk about that. Daniel Kahneman does not give a lot of blurbs for books. Loon Shots describes what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better.

• 7:01Tim Ferriss?

  It has been selected for Washington Post's 10 Leadership Books to Watch for 2019, Inc.'s 10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019, and Business Insider's 14 Books Everyone Will Be Reading in 2019. That would be good for you if that's ends up being the case. And we go back a ways. So I've been really excited to catch up because our lives have changed quite a lot since we last were spending a lot of time together. And I thought we could just start at the very beginning. So could you describe for people how we first met? And a little bit of the context?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  All right, sure. So we were at, this was maybe 10 years or so ago, and we were at a Sundance in, where is Sundance?

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  Sundance is in Utah.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Sundance in Utah, and there's a conference organized every year by Peter Thiel and Orin Hoffman, and Orin's a good friend of mine for many years. And I was sitting at a lunch table, and I had just taken up as sort of a hobby triathlon, long-distance triathlon, and I had just learned for the first time real swimming, not just sort of splashing around in a pool, but how to, you know, how can you, because splashing around in a pool, you can swim a couple laps and you get tired, but that's not going to help you if you want to swim 1.2 miles in the ocean. So I had found this course called Total Immersion and I was just having such a blast like because it takes you from you know a two out of 10 to like a five to a seven really,

• 8:37Speaker 02

  really quickly. So you go, you can like knock out 1.2 miles, no problem. So I was sitting at lunch and somehow there was this guy, kinda quiet but happy guy next to me and he had also just taken up total immersion swimming. And then we just totally connected on how amazing it was and like how it can transform your swimming and how it's a metaphor for life. And I started using that as a metaphor for learning. Breaking down everything you know about life, about like a swim stroke and all the bad habits that you learn and replacing them and how interesting it is that just small little tweaks can take you so rapidly from a two out of 10 to a six

• 9:18Speaker 02

  out of 10 or a seven or an eight and what kind of a joy that is and how that can apply in so many areas of life. And this other guy sitting next to me was like, "Yes, yes, absolutely. And I just did total immersion too and I feel exactly the same way." And then since then, we've been friends.

• 9:35Tim Ferriss?

  And Total Immersion in a way is such a perfect introduction and metaphor for a lot of what you do in life and what impresses me about you. And as you mentioned, a great example of learning something in a atypical way, right? Because it's not just looking at the small things that have a disproportionate output or testing them, but also it is fundamentally about testing assumptions, right? And for those people who don't know, we won't spend the entire interview on Total Immersion, but it's a great lead in because speaking of someone who's born and

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  raised on Long Island, surrounded by water, had a few near drowning experiences when I was very young, I did not learn how to swim, meaning I could not do to and fro in a decent sized pool until my 30s and had a really acute fear of water. And after about a week of

• 10:36Tim Ferriss?

  immersion by myself with a book, keep in mind, not even video at that point, was doing twenty, thirty laps at a time and finding it relaxing, which is just bonkers to think about. And I'd failed up to that point, even though another friend, Chris Saka, had, actually, no, it wasn't Chris Saka at that point. Before that, another friend, Chris Ashenden, had assigned me a New Year's resolution. We realized we're more likely to actually fulfill our New Year's resolutions if we assign each other resolutions with rewards and punishments. And mine was to do a one kilometer open water swim, and his was to drink nothing stronger than green tea for a year because he liked double espressos. But I had failed up to that point, in part because every lesson started the same way,

• 11:18Tim Ferriss?

  which was, here's a kickboard, and go do ten laps in the pool. And after a lap and a half, I'm like, I can't even feel my legs. I'm so tired.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:27Tim Ferriss?

  And the lesson was as good as done. And then you take total immersion, and one of the first things Terry Lachlan encourages you to think about is minimizing the legs and minimizing drag.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  And it's just a rethinking of the entire, of the entire approach to swimming. So you, more than almost anyone I've met-

• 11:49Speaker 02

  I feel like ten years, we're like having the same conversation again, ten years ago. And you know, the really cool thing about it, the way it applies to so many areas of life that I've found is, it starts by a counterintuitive take on something that everybody does or believes is true. And that is, well, if you're swimming forward, you want to see where you're going, so you raise your head. And so that's exactly what's wrong with swimming, with most casual swimming, because then you're kicking your feet to maintain horizontal balance. And by kicking your feet, you're using, you know, eighty or ninety percent of your energy is just going to correct bad position. That's why you're tired. And so, in so many areas of life, when you learn this kind of bad habit,

• 12:33Speaker 02

  that's this very natural, that every human does, once you become self-aware of that, it's really not hard to just put your head down.

• 12:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  And don't kick. That's it. That's basically the magic. Put your head down and don't kick. And that's it. And then so many different areas of life, it turns out there are these bad habits, these things that you think you should be doing, or you're programmed to do, or everybody tells you to do, and they create drag in going through life. And then someday, somebody, maybe it's Tim Ferriss, says, you know, here's this really counterintuitive weird trick. Don't do that. Do this. And all of a sudden, the drag goes away and you can swim a mile. And, you know, I actually think it reminds me, you mentioned, we were talking a little bit about Donny Kahneman and how he transformed economics. It's very

• 13:22Speaker 02

  similar, right? Because what he said, you know, for economists for 200 years had said, oh, there's one way to think about, you know, incentives and how they influence behavior. Everybody calculates, you know, net present expected value of my financial return doing X and doing Y, and if X is greater than Y, I do X.

• 13:42Tim Ferriss?

  The rational actors.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Right. And Kahneman just said, you know, I'm a psychologist, and that's like bullshit. That's just not what happens. That's not what people do. People operate on these little rules of thumb, and sometimes X may rationally be greater than Y, but they do Y anyway for these reasons. And it was, it's not rocket, it was a very simple adjustment, like, hold your head flat and don't kick.

• 14:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  It was basically saying, hey, humans are humans. They're not calculators. That's it.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  And that transformed economics. So there you see just like the same total immersion swimming trick, which changes swimming, is what Kahneman did for economics. He changed economics with this one idea. A, actually, humans are humans. They operate on some heuristics, not NPV calculations. And economists were like, that's not possible. They operate on NPV. Like, I don't think so. I kind of know humans, and they don't do that. Which is, in retrospect, sounds sort of obvious, but it was a big, big change.

• 14:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, you know, you know more, well, you've forgotten more probably in the last week than I'll ever know about physics, but it, as a layman who's interested in science, but by no means a, a real scientist, it makes me think of Richard Feynman, and I'm gonna, I'm going to butcher this, I'm sure, but something along the lines of it doesn't matter how pretty your theory is, if it doesn't fit with experiment, it's wrong.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 15:12Tim Ferriss?

  And there's a lot of Disregarding perhaps the obvious in favor of this, these legacy theories that just do not fit, that the reality that is, that is right in front of you. Funny, well, maybe not funny, but little known fact, I was actually a subject in some of Kahneman's studies when I was an undergrad.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  I didn't know.

• 15:38Tim Ferriss?

  For my $4 an hour or whatever, hitting a space bar with various psychological studies in Green Hall.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  That's right. People, he was at Princeton and you were at Princeton. And actually, that's sort of the connection. Like, I think he was a neighbor of my mom and dad, who, because I grew up in Princeton.

• 15:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's right. I didn't, that's, well, we'll talk about, we'll talk about growing up in towns like Princeton another time. I didn't grow up in Princeton, but I grew up in the end of Long Island, which has some similar dynamics. Let's, let's zoom out a bit, and we're going to do this quite a bit in this conversation, I think, because I want to talk about Safi, the individual, and your personal practices and your thinking, because I think there's a lot, I don't think, there is a lot to explore there. You are one of the most systematic people I know. But I also want to give people the context on your career and some of what you've done and your past, because I think it's helpful.

• 16:34Tim Ferriss?

  And we were just talking about Terry Lachlan, who passed away not all too long ago. And he was hospitalized short, shortly after, just before and then shortly after my, my interview with him, which was the last long form interview he ever did. And he had cancer and then a stroke that was a complication and a number of things following, then he passed away, which was very sad. What is your history with cancer? In the sense that why did you get involved with anything related to cancer?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Well, I was, uh, I started in academic science and theoretical physics and, um, after a few years, and this may be a personality flaw, but I, um, and it's taken me many years to appreciate this, but I really get excited, all right, I'll explain this in physics geek language and then I'll try to, there's this saying, the way I think about it is I couple to the derivative, and I'll break that down. So the derivative is a slope. So, you know, zero derivative means no slope and big derivative means a very high slope. And in physics, when

• 17:54Speaker 02

  you say you couple to something, it, you know, an electron is traveling along and has some coupling constant to the photon and that's how it interacts with light and that's always the case. And so, when I say I couple to derivative, it means that I derive energy from the slope, from the slope of learning. And so, when I started in theoretical physics, I was learning an enormous amount. And then after I, I was in one area of theoretical physics called particle physics, it's the science of the very small, what happens inside a proton or a neutron, quarks. And after a few years, I sort of felt like I had, you know, gotten very deep in that tunnel and I wasn't learning as much and it, the, I mean, there were, you

• 18:36Speaker 02

  know, I'm not going to exaggerate, there was a ton still out there to learn, but it wasn't like drinking from a fire hose, like starting off feeling like an imposter, or starting off being barely able to swim one lap and then going to swimming a kilometer, no problem. And, uh, you know, physics has got, particle physics has gotten a little stuck in the last 20 or 30 years in some sense, which we can talk about some other time. So I switched to a totally different area after about five years. And then I got into the business world. I realize I'm kind of far from your cancer question. That's okay. But it's, um...

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I switched out of academic science because after about five years, you know, in each of these areas, I felt like I'd sort of learned and I wanted to learn something new. So I went into the business world, went into McKinsey, didn't know anything about, I didn't, I didn't even own a suit. Actually, I remember, can I take a digression for a weird little story?

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  I love digressions for weird stories. So yes, I'll remember, I'll, if, if need be, and I don't think that you

• 19:38Speaker 02

  I'm getting kind of far from your cancer question, I realize now, but like, sort of a funny story. So, uh, it's kind of how I got, ended up in cancer and I started off in this weird physics place. So I, I'd only, I basically hadn't set foot off of university until I was 30. Because I, you know, my parents are academic scientists, we just mentioned Princeton. And so I spent a lot of time around there and then, uh, college, grad school, postdoc. And then I was sort of getting a little like, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Just, you know, write papers and grants and referee and this thing, conferences? So I started exploring and some friend had been to this company called McKinsey, which

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I'd never heard of. And they said, well, they're sort of interesting problem solving. It's sort of like, all right, I'll do that. Sign, you know, sent an application, interview comes and, uh, my friend told me, you need to wear a suit. And I'm like, wow, I, I haven't had a suit since my bar mitzvah, you know, like 18 years ago, whatever. So, uh, I asked like, where do you buy a suit? And he's, and, uh, so I got the name of a place and I went in and it was just like incredible place with these super expensive clothes and like, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. It was called the men's warehouse. And so I bought a suit and I felt like a million, I paid like a hundred and $20 or something. And I was like, this is like 10x more than I've ever paid for any clothing item. And

• 21:07Speaker 02

  I, uh, and I, and I felt like a million bucks and I, I fly to New York for this interview with this firm. And, uh, I, you know, I, I remember coming into the city and like getting off and going, walking up Park Avenue. And I'm wearing like this old beat up ski jacket because, you know, I used, I would go skiing and I didn't realize that people also have some fancy jacket.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  It's like everybody around me is wearing this like, you know, blue, now I know.

• 21:34Tim Ferriss?

  Like the overcoat.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I got this like, I feel like a million bucks because I have this hundred and twenty dollar men's warehouse suit and like, you know, I probably spent eighteen dollars on the men's warehouse tie and I'm feeling really extravagant. And then I'm like walking down the street and I have this beat up old ski jacket with like still the ski tags hanging off of it.

• 21:54Tim Ferriss?

  On top of your men's warehouse.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  My men's warehouse suit. I'm like, why am I the only one wearing this on this whole street? I'm like, huh, that's weird. And so then I get to my interview and I like, I hide the jacket in the coat closet before I get in there. But anyway, I did that and that was drinking from a fire hose because I'd like never set up foot off of university and all of a sudden I'm wearing a suit and I hadn't worn a suit in, well, like since my bar mitzvah. And then they throw you, I mean, they educate, they take time to sort of educate you a little bit online. And that was super fun, all these, you know, professors fly in to just educate you. And I'm like, this is the best thing ever. They're paying me. And all these professors have been flying into like this four week course to this, on this resort

• 22:41Speaker 02

  with, you know, thirty people from all over the world who are really interesting people my age. And people are flying in just to teach us like all day long. I'm like, this is like, this is awesome. And I'm learning all this new stuff. And I was drinking from a fire hose and it was sort of going from, you know, well, in this case it was a zero out of ten. I never even balanced it checkbook. Like if I had six dollars to buy a burrito in San Francisco, I was happy. Like, that's awesome. And, um, but after a couple of years, you're like, oh, okay, now I got like what people do for a living and how it works and the business stuff. And then I was like, how do I combine?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think I just want to be a guy who sort of whispers to people, here's what you might want to do if you want to build your business. I wanted to sort of do something, but I wanted to do something back in the science world and also something that was more about either, uh, you know, let's make more money, which is, you know, what big companies are trying to do and what you're, as a consultant, you're trying to help them.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  And in academia, it's about the search for truth. So I wanted to do something different that would feel like, it may be a little corny or cliche, but you're helping people who are suffering and there's something, you could be very selfish about it. There's something just very satisfying. Even if you just think at the local level, like there's a kid in a hospital bed and family's gonna lose that kid and if something you can do could help save that kid and so that family and that kid have decades of life together, even if that's just one kid, that feels so much more satisfying than

• 24:29Speaker 02

  you know, having X or Y or Z in the bank or even publishing another original research paper. So that's on your if you can see a family experiencing life together for decades and they might not have, that's incredibly satisfying. And so I sort of stumbled into cancer to get back to your question because that was a really hot researcher. This was eighteen, nineteen years ago. That was a really exciting area and there was really very little progress made in that area and I'd spent about six months or a year kind of talking to scientists at different universities who had, might have some promising ideas and didn't want to work with venture capitalists.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  And thought that physics was sort of like this exotic weird bird. And so I was sort of,

• 25:18Speaker 02

  they were just like, who is this guy who's coming to talk to us about biology and chemistry and medicine and oncology and he's a physicist? So it was a mutual interest there. And eventually started a company and just got more and more into it, into it and interested in seeing these individual lives and how little progress had been made and how many good ideas were floating around and if I could make a difference, bridging some of those ideas. Into into the real world, into the commercial world, into the business world, into the industry where they could become drugs that could save lives. Even if you just save one kid, help one family, that would feel incredibly satisfying,

• 26:01Speaker 02

  more satisfying than writing a paper, making money. So that's kind of how I got into cancer and oncology.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to thank you for that. I had never heard of the Men's Wearhouse story either. This is, this is, I think, something I wanted to establish early on because it gives an indication of where you were pointed, right? And then when we get into the, the habits and the routines and the frameworks and so on that you use personally or within organizations, it, it shows some of the how, but I wanted to at least get to some of the why first.

• 26:47Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's take a bit of a 90-degree turn, and this is going to seem strange, but I, I thought this would be a good illustration of not, not just Safi, the sort of scientific innovator, but you, you the person, because they go together. So I'm gonna, gonna read what I think is a, what I think is a quote. This is in, in doing research for having this conversation, which is always a little strange when I'm doing research on my close friends, and it feels like I'm doing something illicit. In any case, I want you to, I'm gonna read something and then you can give us context for what this, what this is and why, why you have this habit or had it. "I would get so excited when I stumbled across a perfect passage and its beautiful music.

• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

  I would preserve it in an Evernote file, whip out my phone at dinner, and read that passage to whoever my poor dinner companion happened to be pounding the table to the rhythm, pointing out the beauty in the choices. See how he did X here and not Y? That's why it works. Silence. No one cared, but I enjoyed it." What is this about?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I don't know how you find this stuff, but, so that had to do with another, so I was with this company that I started for 13 or so years, and then through a weird series of coincidences and stumbles and different things, ended up.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Writing and writing. And so first I wrote a kind of a long form essay and then, you know, it was 15,000 words. I edited a lot and people seemed to like it. And then some much more experienced author friends and journalist friends were like, nobody publishes 15,000 word essays anymore. That's a book. Also, you have a lot of ideas in here and that needs to be fleshed out. It's too. So that turned into a book. And as I started with writing, I kind of broke it down, a little like swimming, like what are the, you think you know, people tell you a bunch of stuff. And the more you get into it, the more you

• 28:53Speaker 02

  realize a lot of stuff that people tell you is really not very helpful or often wrong.

• 28:58Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give any examples?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Oh, just like, don't use passive voice. There are actually some great reasons you do want to use passive voice. But if you, I get this picture of like this old school mama like hitting you with a ruler from the 19, don't use passive voice, never use passive voice, always use active voice. And then you read some of these like phenomenally beautiful passages and you look in them and they're using passive voice left and right. And like, really? Because these guys are pretty, like, some of these guys have won the, you know, Nobel Prize, for example, or Pulitzer Prize, and they're using, so why? And

• 29:31Tim Ferriss?

  Just for people who are, could you give an example of of active and passive voice for people who may not be familiar with

• 29:38Speaker 02

  The, you know, active voice is Johnny flew the helicopter to go put out, to go, you know, videotape the fire. And then, it's so funny, I don't like do these things. A helicopter was brought in to go, you know, view the fire from high above and film it for video. And so when the helicopter was brought in, it's kind of passive. Johnny flew the helicopter. Now, in this case, for example, why would you want to use the passive voice? Well, if you're telling a story, You're telling the story of the fire. Do you really need to know that Johnny flew

• 30:21Speaker 02

  that helicopter to put out that fire? I think this is an example and something I've seen about a specific helicopter. Do you really? It's actually kind of distracting because Johnny is kind of irrelevant to the story. So what you're doing is you're inserting something in the reader's mind that's an irrelevant distraction that you'll never come back to. That just is a glitch in the storytelling. Right. So that's one example of why you want to use that. There are many examples of why you want to use. But anyways, as part of, I found that I, people had sort of said, "Oh, you're a pretty good writer." I think that's meaning for like a physicist. So that's a really low bar. And, or even a, you know, a CEO or a public company, you're like, "That's

• 31:04Speaker 02

  a really low bar." You're pretty good for a public company executive. I'm like, "Thanks." It's like, I'm a 1.5 out of, rather than a 1. But I just started to find it fun to try to break down writing, like you break down swimming or break down other things. And then how do you train to get better? And so I read a lot and eventually I came up with a kind of a training. And I would write, you know, I'd drop my daughter off at school in the morning and come back and I'd lock myself in this little eight by eight

• 31:44Speaker 02

  cave, shut down everything and just do one of the three sort of modes of writing, whether you're reading, you're writing, or editing. And, you know, five, six o'clock, pick my daughter up from school, from daycare, bring her back, dinner. And then my wife would check out at like 7:30. She gets up really early and she was just done. So from eight o'clock on, every day for almost two years.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  I would bring out one of, actually just a couple of books. And often I would just go, we were living on Mass Ave in Cambridge, and so there are a lot of great bars and little restaurants. I'd go to the bar counter, get a burger, pizza or something and a beer. I would spend the next two hours usually just on two paragraphs. Were these the same books or different books each time? Were they consistently the same? Almost always the same. Actually, I would focus on probably two books. And I would just dissect a paragraph or two from those two books for almost a year. And that was one of the other things, like with swimming, you know, everybody says keep

• 32:57Speaker 02

  your head up, or it's natural to keep your head up. There's this natural inclination to try to read a ton, read widely, read all these authors, and you get all these lists of, here's my favorite 20 authors. And like, oh, I should read those 20. There's somebody else's favorite 20. Oh, I should read those 20. And so I kind of threw all that out and said, I'm gonna actually focus, I don't know much about literature. I never, you know, I did sports and I did like math and science, and that's it. I really didn't read. So I didn't, so I have like a big gap in the, but I picked two books that really resonated for me. What did you pick?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Nabokov, short stories, and I'll explain why, and Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty. And this is for, just to develop an ear for writing. And I just read a paragraph or two or three from those books each night, and then I would break it down, like, why did this guy use, I wasn't reading for content, I was just reading for ear. So Nabokov, I had read a little bit of this and a little bit of that and reading here, and then I picked, some friend I think had sent me Point of Meaning and Nabokov's short stories. And by the way, I should say, I don't think I've read anything

• 34:18Speaker 02

  else of his, I just that one. And when I opened it up at random, Nabokov's short stories, and I started reading his sentences, like my jaw dropped.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  I didn't know the English language could do that.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  How is this guy doing that? It's probably sort of like your sports thing, like, you know, with athletes, like, how the freaking hell is this guy doing it? And it's just so different at such a higher level than any... So that's why I would take two paragraphs at a time, or three paragraphs, and I'd say, "Why did he put this word here in this sentence and not there?" Because the natural thing would be, let's say, to make it active voice. Or the natural thing would be, "Why did he use this transition from this sentence, the end of this one to the beginning or the end of this paragraph?" Suppose I do it differently. It just sounds worse. Why? Why does it sound worse when I move this word? And he could have picked any word, there are like six words you could imagine that mean this thing. Why did he pick this one? "Let me try a different one."

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And then, "Oh, it just sounds worse." And I would just do that repeatedly. And Nabokov I picked because his sentences and rhythm and musicality of his writing were just like jaw-dropping in every one. Like, every one is a 10 out of 10. It's not like, "Oh, there's a great sentence or a great passage." Not a one-hit wonder. It's... yeah, it's just like, "How the freaking hell does this guy do this?" And again, I have to say, I'm not a literature guy or an English guy, and there's 99% of like famous authors I've not read. I just couldn't believe this. And so I was, "How does this guy do this?" But it was all... and once I'd... After doing this sort of over and over, and then there were a few other beautiful passages I've done,

• 36:04Speaker 02

  and I would capture them in my Evernote, and then I would highlight the word. Like, "Why this word in yellow?" And then sometimes I would bold, like he did a lot of... He uses a lot of alliterations, and I would highlight the first letters just to see his alliterations. And then I would highlight the transitions, and then I would break down the transitions between paragraphs into like, "Well, there's seven different types of transitions. Here's an example of one, here's..." "Oh, this is the pivot transition." And so I started to get a sense of that. And I started having this weird experience after doing this for a year or so, which was, I would read passages and I would hear music. And I would hear them, uh, um...

• 36:47Speaker 02

  I would hear them in my head, but as music and as harmony. So when I would read, for example, in the book, if I would hear. This is a little weird to say all this stuff because it's like private internal mind. I don't really talk about it out loud.

• 37:00Tim Ferriss?

  This is the podcast without.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Nobody listens to it, right?

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's just you, me and a handful of our best friends.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  It's just you and me, right? It's all private stuff. I would just hear this thing like music and it was in perfect harmony. And then I'd pick up the newspaper or I'd pick up some other stuff or some random book. And I couldn't read more than two sentences because it just sounded like clashing. Well, the transitioning and the use of passive and it didn't need this word could have been that word. And I'm like, I can't even read more than three sentences because it's just, it's grating. And then I go back to, you know, this other thing where there was perfect harmony. And it was just musical. It was just, I wouldn't even, at some point, I just, I wouldn't even know why. But one thing would just grate and I'd get like these. It's like somebody rubbing fingers on chalkboard and you're like, and the other one, it's just like.

• 37:51Tim Ferriss?

  So can we, can we talk about decisions a bit more?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 37:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Because you are examining in that case. Decisions of a writer. So you're, you're, you're doing a forensic analysis of why certain things happen, why certain choices were made. And this, this may be a natural place, maybe not. You can, you can tell me. To talk a little bit about a totally different field, although similar sounding last name, Gary Kasparov.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Oh, Gary Kasparov.

• 38:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So, yeah. Could you describe to me why you find Kasparov interesting? And who, and who he is for people who don't know.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Okay. Another book that I really enjoyed was his book, Life Imitates Chess. I love that book. And a little bit for a lot of reasons. I, I have a real admiration of like excellent chess players. Because it's, it's something that takes incredible focus, incredible commitment. And people who do it really well do something I could never do. And it's just, it's so impressive. So I've always found it fascinating to follow.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Learn about great chess players. And I actually, I listened to some podcasts you did with a guy named Josh.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  Waitzkin.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Waitzkin, which was fascinating. I actually loved his book too. And then because of that, I went and got, I didn't know who he was before, got his book, which was awesome about.

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the art of learning.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Love of learning.

• 39:23Tim Ferriss?

  The art of learning.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  The art of learning, right.

• 39:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You guys would love each other. At some point you should meet.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, it came, because he, he did chess and then did martial arts, and I did martial arts for a long time, and then physics.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  So Kasparov, as you mean, was the, is the longest reigning chess champion in history. And he wrote this book about how life imitates chess, where he kind of breaks down what he did. And it's, it's so fascinating, but one particular lesson really resonated for me

• 40:00Speaker 02

  as a mindset shift for how to think about making decisions, or analyzing decisions, both in business life and in personal life. So

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Kasparov said kind of that one of, if not the key to his success in chess was

• 40:22Speaker 02

  after a game, whether he won or lost,

• 40:26Speaker 02

  rather than say, analyze the game by saying, oh, I moved pawn to bishop, you know, pawn takes bishop here, and that was a bad move, and that lost the game, so next time I shouldn't do pawn takes bishop.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Rather than analyze the move and the outcome, which is what most chess players do, and you can call that kind of an outcome mindset, he analyzed, how did I arrive at the decision to make that move? Not just so much the move itself, but what was I think, what was my decision making process? Which series of moves did I go through? How long did I go through them? What did I consider? In what order? How did I prepare for the match? And how did that affect my, all these sort of meta level? Not the outcome itself, but one step above, which is what was my process that I used to arrive at that decision? And given that it was a bad decision, where did that process break down in my decision?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  And therefore, how should I tweak my decision-making process? And he said, that one ingredient, that one lesson, keep asking why? Keep asking, why did you make that decision? And call that sort of a system mindset. Let's analyze the system rather than the outcome. That's one higher level. And that has enormous power and leverage. Because once you tweak your process, if you can identify a weakness in your process and adjust that process, now, not only next time won't you do pawn takes bishop, which is you might do pawn does something else, but you've now improved your process, which can help you in 500 other situations, rather than helping in one situation, that can help you in 500.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  And so I took that, and I call that sort of system versus outcome mindset. And that can help you enormously in personal life or in business life. And so that's the Cast Prof story.

• 42:21Tim Ferriss?

  And this has extremely, as you're saying, wide-ranging implications and applications, right? So this outcome versus process distinction is also something that comes up if you talk to any really, really high-level poker player, right? Because you can have a great outcome that is just dumb luck, right?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 42:45Tim Ferriss?

  You made it, you had a terrible decision-making process, or you threw caution to the wind and really just, you know, flipped a coin and hoped that you would get heads, and you did. And so you're like, oh, wow, let me reward that decision-making process, which might have not been a process at all. Or you can, you can make the right decision, you can have a good process, and the deck is just stacked against you.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 43:11Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't mean that you should stop making decisions that way.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 43:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right? So you really have to zoom out. And, you know, this is, makes me also think of many, many other things, right? It's, and on some level, all of life is investing, right? You have finite time, finite energy, finite capital, and...

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  Even if the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, which is part of the reason why really good poker players who are thinking systematically also understand the importance of having a bankroll, right?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Because if they have a string of bad luck, even with really, really good strategy and decision making, they need to be able to weather a series of bad hands, for instance. This is such a critical distinction, and I don't want to belabor it, but I think it's something that I'd love to hear a little more about if you could personalize it.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:13Tim Ferriss?

  So, how do you implement this yourself, or how have you, in terms of doing post-game analysis on decisions?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Right. I think, you know, at the business level, the poker analogy is perfect, because people don't realize how much is luck in real life, whether it's an invention, or an innovation, or launching a new product. So, at the business level, and I'll take kind of a totally different angle, personal level, but at the business level, you know, there are some pretty good teams or companies that will try to do a post-mortem after some product launches, and they'll analyze, but they're still at that level-one of outcome mindset of, "We did pawn takes bishop, and it didn't work, so let's not do pawn." So, they say, "We launched the product, and it didn't have this feature, and customers liked this feature, and that's why it didn't go as well, so let's make sure we have this feature." So, you're still on kind of level-one.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  The really, really great teams and companies, and not that many of them, say, "How did we arrive at that decision to launch that product at that time? How did we make that decision? Who was involved in the decision? What information did they have? Is that the right people to be making? Are we making the decisions in the right way? Are we presenting the people who are making the decisions with the right information at the right time, analyzed in the right way?" And you see the difference. In one case, you just learn, "Let's not put feature X on product Y." In the other case, you learn something that can apply to 500 different products. "Let's think about how we tweak our decision-making process in the future."

• 45:51Speaker 02

  So, that's sort of system versus outcome mindset on the... You know, I should, on the business side.

• 45:57Tim Ferriss?

  If I could pause for one second. So on the business side, and this might apply elsewhere, are there other questions you could ask when trying to decipher what your decision-making process was? Why did we think it was a good idea? What were we missing, right? What information didn't we have until too later? I don't know what the right selection of questions would be.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, so there's so many. Like, what are people's individual incentives? The people who are involved in the decision. So few people ask that question. Are they really incentivized by the project launch? Or do they have some other thing? Like, are they really focused on promotion? So how does being focused on promotion, how did that affect the decision? And if we altered their incentives, might they have arrived at a different decision? So people rarely ask, let's just think about the X number of people who are involved in the decision. Let's walk through one by one, what are their incentives? Let's just think about, let's just have even a 20-minute conversation. Do we really think the incentives are the right incentives that are giving us the decision,

• 47:01Speaker 02

  that are aligning people with the outcome? Or not? How are people communicating? How are people exchanging, you know, are they meeting the day of? Whose set of analyses are they looking at? Somebody who really knows what they're doing or not? And did they get presented the right data at the right time to make the most informed? Now, the real key is, as you sort of said with luck and cards, you want to do this for, not just for failures, that's the wrong, you want to do it as much, if not more, for successes. You might have just gotten lucky. Those are the most dangerous traps.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Let's say you like, you kick, you know, you kick a soccer ball into the goal, and you made, you were five feet in front of the goalkeeper, and you kicked right at the goalkeeper. It just happens that the goalkeeper slipped on the mud or whatever, it was raining, but you kicked right at the goalkeeper and you got to go, does that mean you should keep kicking right at the goalkeeper? That's the right strategy? No, you just got lucky. Yeah, you won the game and maybe the world championship, but you got lucky. Do you want to do that again next time? No. You bet on some dumb internet stock and it quadrupled or something. And you had no idea what you were doing and you were drunk when you made the investment. But you made quadruple your money. So does that tell you want to be drunk before every investment and not look at any due diligence? No, you got lucky.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  So it's more important to actually look at the successes and think about how do I make that decision? Than it is the failure, because everybody thinks hard about a failure. People rarely think about, did I get lucky? They like to say, oh, I was my genius, blah, blah, blah. They got. So it's more important as a team to say, alright, this worked. Where did we get lucky? Where do we actually had flaws in our process? That we need to adjust next time in how we made the. We were uninformed and we simply got lucky. Our competitors stumbled. We just got lucky. So we really shouldn't. The reason that's more important is because it cements bad habits. Yeah. This is what we did last time.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  You know, we got drunk before we made an investment and it was a great investment. Let's get drunk again and make another investment. It cements bad habits because you confuse good outcome with good decision making. So that's on the. On the business side.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  So it can have a pretty big effect on the personal side as well. Like, you know, one example is. I'll give one example for married people, one example for single people. So, a single one, I actually did use. A little personal, but whatever. Again, it's just you and me, right? It's just us. Okay, good. Like, and maybe, you know, you, let's say you get into an argument with your significant other and you find yourself getting into an argument. You say something about, I don't know, whatever, the dishes or you say something about the driving or you say something. And, you know, it leads into an argument and then the outcome mindset is like, well, I said something about the dishes. Don't say something about the dishes in the future.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  So guess what's going to happen? You're going to have the same kind of argument about 57 other subjects because you're not getting at the. What were you thinking when you said that thing about the dishes? Why were you thinking it? What state of mind were you in? Maybe you're frustrated about something at work as an example. And you're mentioning some nagging comment. Right. Was the problem really about the problem? Right. And then.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  You say, "Now I have a flaw in my system where I'm frustrated at work and then it comes out as a comment about something that just is a bad idea, is a bad out." So maybe rather than just say, "Don't ask about the dishes next time," and it comes out, say, "If I'm frustrated at work, what else can I do other than make comments about the dishes?" Like, can I set up a punching bag, you know, and just start hitting the punching bag and take a shower and then I'm in a better mood and I don't give a shit about dishes or whatever? So you find, what were you thinking at the time when you made that comment?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Is there a tweak to your decision-making process so that you don't make not just that comment, not pawn takes bishop, but many other similar things? So that's, um, married life, for example, personal example. Single life, actually, when you and I knew each other, both were single. I take, you're still, you haven't caught up in a couple of years.

• 51:40Tim Ferriss?

  We haven't. I actually have a wonderful girlfriend I've been with for a while now and things are going extremely well, so we can talk more about that.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll talk more about that later. But, um, so I was in, um, living in Manhattan, uh, as a single guy, uh, and the company that I was running was in Boston. So I was just commuting back and forth and I didn't have almost any social life because there's so much time in the plane and then dealing with running a business. So I would set up these, um, gatherings, some of which you came to, I remember, in my apartment. And, um, uh, I called them SWE, scientists, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs. And then eventually I added, mostly because I was trying to exclude them, and eventually I just became explicit, no BLC, no bankers, lawyers, or consultants.

• 52:35Tim Ferriss?

  Which which one should note you used to be at McKinsey, which is great.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:40Tim Ferriss?

  No bankers, lawyers or consultants.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Self-hating consultant.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  So I call them Sway No B L C also because I just don't remember stuff unless I have it like an silly acronym or something.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  And so I call them Sway No B L C and as soon as I said, especially when I added the no B L C, like interest skyrocketed. Especially from the B L C crowd. Like my banker lawyer or consultant friends were like, can I come? I'm like, wait, what part of like no B L C? I just said no B L C and like, yeah, yeah, but can I come? Can you make an example? And like, that's weird. And then single women in Manhattan, like really interesting, intelligent, attractive women friends that would be like, I am so there. I am, I so want to come. And then I realized, you know, I was sort of out of it. But I realized like, there was such frustration among really intelligent women, professional women, they were so tired of like, the same old, because New York is full of these, you

• 53:36Speaker 02

  know, really ambitious bankers who are just focused on banking. And they were so curious to meet scientists. So for me, I see scientists all day long and writers I was sort of curious about and entrepreneur. But anyway, it ended up becoming this really fun thing. And I went out on a series of dates, but I, for probably 10 years, I never really had, we're coming to the like, system outcome versus in dating.

• 54:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not in any rush.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 54:06Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I'm loving this. So take your time.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  So, you know, you, Tim, I remember coming to these sort of Sway No B L C events. Orin Hoffman, my friend, used to come to these things. And, uh, they were awesome. And so I, and you know, I ended up having some decent dating life because I would do these things mostly just because I was not around very often. I would just pick a day and then everybody would be there. And five years, sort of ten years, I was sort of a single guy in Manhattan. And a friend liked to describe it as, you know, you have junk eating with you just move from car-- it was sort of like junk dating. Like, there's a high on the first date, and then that high is still sort of there on

• 54:51Speaker 02

  the second date, and then it fades on the third date. And so then you go to the next one, because there's a high. And so Manhattan life is full of this sort of junk dating, like you have the junk eating thing, you go from one to another, and then you never-- it's really a bad, bad place for dating, I think, because you never-- there's so many carbs around. So, yeah, everyone's looking for the next shiny penny, and you don't actually take the time to really relish and savor and get past a couple little speed bumps to find what's really valuable underneath.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Anyway, I'd been dating five or-- five years, six years, seven years, and at that point, my father had gotten ill and then passed away from cancer, from a rare type of leukemia. And that, I think, gave me a mind shift, like, what am I doing here? And I had been doing this sort of mindless, kind of like the Gary Kasparov pawn takes bishop, well, that didn't work out with that dating thing, so let me not date, you know, some woman who looks like this or is in the profession, why or has this characteristic. So, okay, so that solves, you know, that's one pawn takes bishop, don't do this move, don't do that move. But I'd never stepped back and said, like, what am I systematically? Like, what's wrong here?

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Like, why have I, you know, not dated anyone for more than two months or three months in a bunch of years? And I took a weekend and I just said, all right, let me be really-- try to be really honest with myself. Like, you know, I do want something more serious, I want a life partner. Let me just think through, you know, the last ten or twenty, you know, dates that I've gone-- or women that I've gone on some kind of date with. Like, why did it not develop?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Is there any pattern here? What was I thinking when I? Again, what was your decision making process that you wanna? And then when I was pretty honest about it and stepped back and looked at it from view above, you know, there was a pattern that came out and I was like, this is stupid. I'm doing this same pattern over and over and I need to be thinking in a completely different way and I need to be making my decisions about who I date and why I date them in a totally different way.

• 57:08Tim Ferriss?

  I know we're, we're getting into like a therapy session here or, or a lot of personal details, but are you open to sharing what the pattern was?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Uh, it was getting a little, this is just between you and me, right?

• 57:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's just between you and me.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Okay, got it. I, you know, I, um, I, you know, I think one of the lessons there is that no matter how self-aware you think you are, you're really influenced by your surroundings a lot more, or at least I was, really influenced by who I was surrounded with more than I appreciated. I thought, oh, I'm my own person, it doesn't matter. But at the time, I had a number of friends who were in the film and fashion world and uh, so I, I didn't have a lot of time to arrange social life stuff because I was flying all over. And so I would go to social events with them and they were really interested in other film and fashion.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  So a lot of my dates were like film and fashion or occasionally I would, uh, um, you know, meet some other variants and they were really especially interested in kind of some of the more superficial qualities and sort of fast dating based on like superficial stuff and how people look or how people talk. And as much as I thought I was a good guy, I sort of fell into that trap and of dating based on much more superficial and I, because I was able to make conversation reasonably well and have a good time, I could have a fun first or second with them and then kind of fool myself into thinking, oh, I really connect with this person because look at

• 58:46Speaker 02

  these really interesting conversations. You mentioned Richard Feynman, one of the great Feynman quotes is,

• 58:52Speaker 02

  The most important thing is not to fool yourself and you need to remember that you're the easiest person to fool. And I was fooling myself. I was saying, "Oh, I'm really into that person because they're a great people person and we have all these great people insights." You know, meanwhile, the person wants to go to clubs at, you know, midnight or 1 a.m. and like, that's the last thing I have any interest in doing. And, um, so when I said, "I'm really being influenced, I need to just step out of this. I need to actually break up with some of my guy friends." Which is a weird thing to think, but, uh, you know, you get kind of reliant and then you just sort of follow.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  I need to break up because this is influencing me and I need to make different decisions about who I want to go out on dates with because that stuff is not really me. It's not deeply who I, it's not who I am at my core and I'm making the first few conversations fun, but then I'm getting bored. Uh, and I had an old friend who told me there was sort of two criteria for, um, finding the right life partner. He was a New York guy and he was a very, he's an older guy and, you know, he was a mentor for, and he, very successful, also very good-looking, very sort of classic Midwest gentleman and been very successful in dating. And I'd learned a lot because he was on his third wife.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  This is a footnote, but very happily married and I think you learn more by, from failure, obviously, than success. So he'd learned a lot and he said, "Just two criteria. One, mental health because, and especially in Manhattan, that's a really, that's a pretty high bar. And two, find somebody you like having dinner with. Because you're gonna be having a lot of dinners together. And if that's not appealing to you, it's gonna be a tough marriage." And the, the physical stuff takes care of itself because, you know, you won't, you won't be there. But the, that was just a great-

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Physical stuff, meaning it's either there or it isn't.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know that within the first few, and you, you're just not gonna go there. And it's so overrated, it's so overemphasized anyway, that's not something you need to think about. What's underemphasized is-

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  Stuff you're more likely to miss.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  And it's just a really great, straightforward, let-miss test. How much do you like having dinner together? And what I realized is like when I went back and looked, I wouldn't rank high, you know, how much I like to have dinner with, you know, the people I've been dating. And so that's what I started looking for. People who were more just an intellectual mind fit for me and less worried about any of the other stuff, less worried what any friend would think or anybody would think or anyone around me. I've, I've- So you're smiling.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  I'm smiling because I, I, I want to ask just a few follow up questions. And I know that I'm jumping in a lot, but this is what I do anyway. Like if we were having drinks, I'd be doing exactly-

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:45Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be doing exactly the same thing. You mentioned peer group and there's two, at least two components of, I would imagine, making a shift. One is breaking up with some of your friends and then the other is gathering the people you hope to be positively influenced by.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:03Tim Ferriss?

  And I think for a lot of people listening, the latter part is the easier part. And like adding more people-

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  Is the easier part. Did you break up with your friends by doing the slow drift? Where it's like by the time you were gone, they don't, didn't really notice because it was very gradual or did you do it more directly? How did you break up with people?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Well firstly, we're guys, so we don't talk about-

• 1:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Guys don't really, I, I think women have a much more communicative thing and guys are just like, oh, whatever. Like you didn't answer a couple texts, so you know, whatever. It's also Manhattan.

• 1:02:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  So, you know, the social life is like, let's text, you know, 10 friends at 5pm and see what's going on at 7pm and you know, whichever two you find me. And so after a while, you don't answer some of those texts. It's like, yeah. So breaking up with some guy friends turns out, you know-

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  Not to be a heavy lift.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Not to be a heavy lift. Um, but of course it depends on the guy, you know, and, but yeah, it is breaking up and then finding people who you think are more resonant. They really kind of excite you and you really enjoy and are more the way you want to be aspirationally, how you want to live your life. Um, and, uh-

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  You know, through that process, I mean, not long after I did that system mindset as opposed to outcome mindset on dating. Uh, you know, I went out on a couple of days and they were just totally different level. I enjoyed them at a much different level because I was really, you know, how much am I genuinely enjoying dinner? As opposed, how much am I, you know, telling stories, trying to be funny and it was funny and she laughed and that's great. Let's go to bed or whatever. This thing's not on, right? The mics are off. Okay, good, that's great. So, um, that never happened, by the way, honey? You're the first, really.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna be in trouble. We have, we have magic in post-production if needed. Anyway, so, uh, no, it just started and, and very shortly thereafter, I, um, I, uh, was sort of set up on a introductory, I call it a date. My wife calls it a business meeting. So there's a slightly different perspective here. I, um, I don't know if you know this story. I don't. Cause you were at the wedding. I was at the wedding, but I don't know this part. Okay, so, uh,

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  I was at a cocktail event at, uh, uh, uh, there was a theater group. Actually Catherine was at the wedding too, who was responsible for all this. There was a theater production group, uh, in New York and, uh, they had their annual gala and I, you know, went to, to raise the flag and support and it was full of kind of artists and, you know, theater people that I, I didn't, you know, know the first thing about theater or all this stuff. So I would just like went to line to, went online to, for a drink, just to like hide out and have an excuse not to talk to people. And, um, there was a guy, uh, standing next to me.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Who said, oh, hey, you know, you know, my name is so, so what is your name and what do you do? And I said, oh, I, I do medical research because in, in New York, nobody knows what, or at the time, nobody knew what biotech was. And he said, oh, that's interesting. My ex-girlfriend does cancer research in Boston. And I'm all of a sudden, like, my, my ears perk up, my antenna goes up, like ding ding ding ding ding. Really? Because this was, this was a pretty good-looking dude. He was kind of this tall and, you know, nice-looking guy, and he was clearly well-adjusted and kind of a likable guy. And I thought, A, cancer research in Boston, that's what I do, that's what I do. B, if this guy's pretty good-looking, his ex-girlfriend is probably pretty hot. C, she's probably pretty well-adjusted

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  because if, you know, most science, women in science are, there's so few that they just, the, the guys are like sharks. But if she can interest a guy who doesn't know any science, who's pure arts, she must be kind of a well-rounded personality. So A, B, C. I'm like ding ding ding ding ding. And, uh, because I was already on the lookout because of this system mindset, like whom I'm, whom I'm dating. And so within about the first thirty milliseconds, I'm like, how can I stalk this guy electronically tomorrow, figure out who his ex-girlfriend is, and then somehow accidentally arrange to bump into her? And this was all like within the first, you know, few seconds. And then-

• 1:06:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right. He's just talking, you're not hearing any of it.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  He's just talking. I'm just like mentally, you know, like-

• 1:06:49Tim Ferriss?

  Planning the next day.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Planning like tomorrow, I'm going to figure out, like, does he know the woman who's hosting? And then can I find out, like, who, what his last name is? And can I, anyway, I'm doing all these calculations in my head. And then, so he says, you know, that's when he, he asked, you know, like, how do, you know, what's your connection? I explain, oh, I run a, a biotech, I said, you know, I run a biotech company in Boston and cancer research, who's her advisor. Oh, I know that guy, da, da, da, da. And he says, um, oh, do you mind if I introduce you? Because she might be interested in a job in industry. And I'm thinking like ding ding ding ding ding. But I'm sort of kind of like, sure, well, I'll see if I can make the time for that meeting. And so I go home and the next morning I'm thinking, all right, what are the odds?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  It's Saturday night in New York, some guy in line for a drink tells you something about his ex-girlfriend, that he's actually going to follow through. This is less than 10% chance, right? So I'm already thinking like, how do I figure out who this guy was? And then I get this email and it, you know, he's like, oh, Safi and Magda, I want to introduce you. You know, Magda's interested in so and so and Safi does, you know, such and such. And later I found out he Googled me and there's, you know, there was this kind of profile written about me online and there was a little video and so he forwarded all that stuff. I didn't know that at the time. But anyways, so I get this email and then so 10 milliseconds later I Google her and

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  out comes this like model pose, like this, like, and I'm like, what the freaking hell? That's a cancer biology PhD who's a postdoc at Harvard? Oh my God, I am so taking this meeting. And so then I arranged to meet her and then we meet up one week later and it was supposed to be like just a coffee afterward. It's the least romantic. I was down at the Dana Farber Cancer Center for some meetings and she was working right near us. We met at the like Longwood Medical Gallery, the least, you know, doctors and scrubs everywhere and it's just like fast food court and like there's some cheesy little hotel there with a cheesy little restaurant. I forgot the name. And, you know, I sit down, five o'clock, it's supposed to be a 30 minute coffee and

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  it turns into five hours. And like neither, I don't even notice the time. And for the first time, I feel like.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  I'm not trying.

• 1:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  I'm not like trying to be entertaining or tell a story or blah, blah, blah. It's just like, this is the actual me. And she's like a female version of me. Not, not really, but like female version minus 14 years and, you know, I'm very attractive and all sorts of other, from the Czech Republic, not from Israel and New Jersey, but other than that.

• 1:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Other than that, very similar.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Other than those little things, very, you know, but she just, she really cared about science and the search for truth and family. Really didn't care for anything else, like all this stuff of the glitz or, you know, financial or material stuff and, you know, that's, this is really sadly pretty common in Manhattan. She just had no interest. She just liked the science she was doing and figuring out good science and she cared deeply about family. And that was it. And she knew what she cared about and she clearly just had fantastic values and I was like, this woman is awesome.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  How did, how did it work out?

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  And I would say eight months later, you got the wedding invitation.

• 1:10:19Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful wedding.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:10:22Tim Ferriss?

  Also.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, so this, this is, uh, I, I like the, the weaving that we're doing from sort of personal to business because it's same, same, same, but different, right? Like the, a lot of the thought processes behind them and and one thing I was hoping to do today also, which you're doing a great job of doing yourself, but is humanizing you in the sense that if I, I read a very simple bio of you, but if, if we got into a lot of the details, uh, you, you can be very intellectually intimidating, I think. You could be. Uh, you're a very smart guy and there's, there's no doubt some

• 1:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  hardwiring that helps with that, but you also use systems. And you, you enable yourself with tools. And so you mentioned no BLC, right? And you said very quickly in passing, well, I can't remember anything unless I use acronyms. So.

• 1:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about acronyms just for a second, because this type of shorthand can be really helpful. What other acronyms have you used? And there are a whole bunch that pop up. I mean, literally, many, many, many acronyms that you use. So, you know, I'm looking at one here, but you can start with anyone you like. One, FBR. Write FBR. What the hell does that mean? But what are some other, whether it's sort of heuristics or acronyms that you use to help perform better, make better decisions, anything?

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  All right. Write FBR. Okay, so that's one of the writing rules of thumb that I learned that was one of the most important writing. After a year or two or three, I kind of broke out writing for myself into style, story, and process.

• 1:12:19Tim Ferriss?

  Style, story, and process.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  So I had kind of five rules on style that I worked on and iterated. I had kind of five rules on story that I worked on and iterated. I have five rules on just writing process, which is sort of writing routine. But probably one of the most important ones on the routine and process was Write FBR. So that stands for Write Fast Bad and Wrong. And the reason that that's so important is that especially if you have any kind of perfectionistic tendencies. And I know a lot of people write about this, but FBR is what resonated for me and how I remember it. It just means when you're starting to write, let's say you found

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  the idea and the narrative thread and the thing that you're, the wheels are turning and you think you can see, you know, the fog. It's like driving, you know, and you're in a, you can only see a few feet ahead because you're in a fog. And it's sort of the mist clearing, like, oh, I see. I see where I'm going with this thing. Let's just go. The inclination is, when you write a sentence or a paragraph or the first couple of paragraphs, is to stop and backtrack either for style or for facts. Like, I'm doing nonfiction, right? So I'm not doing fiction. So, you know, in such and such date, this guy did this thing and then he did that thing. Like, was it really that date? Then let's go check the internet.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  So you wanna write F, so that is a disaster. You'll never get anything done if you do that. So the trick is to go exactly 180, especially if you haven't, write FBR, write F, write fast, bad, and wrong. Put the wrong date. You don't get the style, the sentence doesn't sound good? Great. Write fast, write bad, and write wrong. Terrible style, terrible grammar, terrible word choice, wrong facts, and that liberates you. That liberates you to like, follow the narrative thread. Just keep going and going with it. And not stop and backtrack. Cause every time you stop, maybe it's like a car going down the highway, it's easy to

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  stop, but then you have to spend all this fuel to get back up to speed and you might not get there. So once you're finally going, what you often discover, you write a lot too, is like, once you start writing and start pulling on that narrative thread, like, it's just really surprising where it goes. But only if you go fast.

• 1:14:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Not if you go slow. Not if you say, oh, was it 1941 he did this? Or was it 1939? Was he with this person or was he with that person? Am I spelling his name correctly? Let's go check on the internet. Then you've lost the thread. And what, it hurts on many levels. Not only do you get less done, but you lose the creativity. Cause it's only when you're at high speed to like, and the wheels are turning, you're like, oh, wait, wait a minute, oh, I could go here, and oh, I could go there, and oh, I could go here. Like, when you're driving fast, you can make a left turn and has a big impact.

• 1:15:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  But not when you're driving slow.

• 1:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was just thinking, you know, creativity, and there are many different types of creativity, but it's, it's in some ways, a lot like riding a bike, right? It's easier at slightly higher speeds.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:15:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right? You try to ride a bicycle really, really slowly and you're twisting and turning and trying to keep your balance and it's herky-jerky and the stopping and starting, that task switching is really expensive.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Funny you're saying that because the physics of that is the angular momentum of the wheels. And once you have high angular momentum, you're much more stable than at low angular momentum.

• 1:15:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna digress into motorcycles for a second, but of course, you know, part of the fun of having our conversations is that the, it's just a beautiful medley of digressions. But trying to maintain some semblance of professional podcasting protocol.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  We could go on a motorcycle digression too. I got motorcycle stuff, but that's another. You're in charge.

• 1:16:18Tim Ferriss?

  We'll come back to motorcycles.

• 1:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  We will, we're gonna segue to other subject areas, but what other, we're not gonna go through all of the rules for style, story and process, but I'm curious particularly about process. But it could be any. Are there any other rules that you have found to be particularly valuable for writing? The, the jump to mind?

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  It's the, it's the hats. It's, for me, I realize, and again, a lot of this stuff took a long time. There are two hats you wear on reading and there are two, there are three hats you wear on writing. And you just wanna be very clear about what hat you're wearing when, so you don't confuse them. And then you're much more efficient. So, and you asked about acronyms. I have some really silly, I don't think I've ever said these out loud. It's more like inner, inner voice acronyms, but since you're an old friend.

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I want.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  And this, like, this thing is definitely not on. So in reading, there are two modes, two hats you wear, or at least for me. And the first one I call RICLs and the second one I call RICs.

• 1:17:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  You're laughing. I could tell. It's like silly and stupid, but that's how I think about it. RICLs is Reading for Information Content Lessons. R I C.

• 1:17:47Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever it is.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  Whatever it is, Rickles, reading for information, content, lessons, and stories. Rickles. And so that's for the raw, if you're writing nonfiction, that's for like the raw meat of the facts or the ideas of the story. And you're really reading for information, for content, and for lessons.

• 1:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say reading, are you meaning, are you referring to research that you're doing?

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Research.

• 1:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  So that's the research here. Let's say you're writing about World War II, then that's in Rickles. You're reading very fast, if you, you know, as fast as you can and as deeply as you can, and chasing different threads and different footnotes and different archival. And that is the Rickles hat. You're reading for the information, for the content, or for the lessons you want to use, or for the stories you want to tell. Rickles. Totally different hat is Rees, reading for ear, art, and skill. R-E-A-S. So when I was reading.

• 1:18:42Tim Ferriss?

  Nabokov.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Nabokov, for example, I was reading for kind of the musical rhythm, and the pacing, and the tricks that he uses on transitions, and, or others. He wasn't the only one who did that. Donald Hall, whose book Essays After Eight, he was a, again, I'm kind of ignorant when it comes to literature. A lot of people knew this idea. He was a poet, Laura, he's a poet.

• 1:19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the first, first time I'm hearing his name.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  I remember talking to like some English friends, and they laughed at me that I didn't know who he was. But anyway, some friend had sent me this Essays, and I picked that up. And as a poet, he also has incredible word choice, and rhythm, and pacing, and it's very different than Nabokov. Nabokov is fun, but it's completely eccentric, and a completely unique style that only applies if you're a Russian emigre who plays with the dictionary for fun. So it's not relevant for copying, it's just interesting to develop ear. And, but Nabokov is cold. He's clearly, as he's writing, for entertaining himself with language. He doesn't have any, he was the first to say, I don't have any messages, I don't have any

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  morals. And you can sort of tell he doesn't really care about his characters. He's just playing. He's playing with language.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Hall is warm. He wrote, wrote, he just passed away sadly. He wrote so movingly and sparingly about incredibly deep emotional, personal things. You know, his love affair with his, how he fell in love with his, you know, wife and how he thought he would, she would outlive him and how they made all these plans. And then she came down at an early age with leukemia and he just couldn't believe that he was outbearing her and she was just, but he writes it in not a maudlin way at all. And he writes it so beautifully and so powerfully and so tightly. So I read Hall for how do

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  you write about emotion, which I had zero experience, especially as a scientist, emotion was not like a top skill of mine and communicating emotion was not something I had any skill in doing. So I, I read him not only for the beautiful, but very different writing style, but also for how do you write about emotion? How do you write about people? How do you write about characters in a kind of a poetic way? Not over telling, but using as few words as possible. Anyway, that's Reese.

• 1:21:14Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to pause for one second because I've been able to see the output of that in Loon Shots, for instance, in the very beginning, in some of the stories that you tell patients. It's a great example of like the output of training that ability that you did not consider yourself as that faculty that you didn't consider yourself as having had developed, right?

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:21:39Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to, I'm not going to, well, I am going to interrupt, but not for very long because I do want to get to the, the writing side. But I want to underscore for folks who are like, why are we talking about writing with a physicist, biotech entrepreneur? And the, the reason we're talking about it is because it's, it's, it's same, same, but different. What, what I'm really fascinated by is how you structure your thinking and question and stress test your thinking. So just for people who are like, why are we talking about writing? That's why. So please continue.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Okay. So you asked about Ankrin or the, the other writing lesson was these, these multiple hats. So in, in.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Reading, it was Rickles. Now I'm gonna put on my hat. It has nothing to do with style, so just shut off that part of the brain. You're reading really fast for a story or a content. And then Reese, I'm reading for ear art and skill. So it's just pure writing skill. And so, the way I trained for it is to think strategically about where am I weak? So, I can explain a technical idea pretty well. That's what I've been doing my whole life, whether in academic science, running a biotech company, trying to explain technical stuff about how a drug works or the biology or chemistry to people who are not as technical. So explaining an idea, I can do, even in plain English.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  But books that just explain ideas are boring. I don't even like reading them. People don't really connect to ideas. People connect to people. If you can tell a story, tell a story about people through which an idea is revealed, that's the best of all worlds. So just talking about ideas is eh, so-so. Just talking about people, then you're sort of a fairy tale. But if you can combine the two, tell stories of people through which an underlying idea is revealed and through which is connected by an underlying idea, which is what I tried to do in this book, that's, for me, the grander challenge. That was really kind of a big challenge.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  How do you not do A and not do B, but do the combination of A and B? And so, I was not good at telling stories of people. You don't really do that in academic science. You write a paper, you're not gonna write a paper saying, "Well, let me tell you about the day I first had this idea, and then I was wrong about this, and then Joe..." That's not how you write an academic paper. And when you run a biotech company, you know, you're at a, you know, you do your earnings call if you're public, or you're at an investment meeting, and you do your 25-minute roadshow. You're not, "You know, let me tell you a story about how, you know, failures and the characters and the drug..." No, they're like, "What's your, you know, what's your, what was your R&D spend?" Just the facts, man. Just the facts.

• 1:24:30Tim Ferriss?

  All right, Sophie, so we've talked about the two hats of reading. What are the three hats of writing?

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  The three hats of writing, there's hunting, or the way I think about it is, there's hunting, there's drafting, and there's editing. So in hunting, you're looking for the narrative thread that's going to hold your story together, or if you're doing nonfiction, you're, you're, the, the, the series of stories and the series of anecdotes and the lesson you're going to draw. So that's the hunting. The drafting is where you're writing FBR, Fast, Bad, and Wrong, just as fast as you can. And then the editing is where it all comes together and you try to make it, you know, you get rid of all the glitches and make it shine. And, you know, as we're talking, I was thinking about this, uh, movie you took me to see, this premiere you took me to see, uh, yesterday by Robert Rodriguez, where he made this kind of amazing movie for $7,000.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  And before that, he was talking about a masterclass, he was doing his masterclass in film, and, which was just really a masterclass in creativity. And he was talking about how in film, he thinks of making a film as also in three stages, like cooking, where you write your recipe, then you go grocery shopping, and then you do the editing at the end, it's like you're cooking. And I think it's, it's very similar in writing. The hunting, the finding that the narrative thread is like your recipe. The drafting, Fast, Bad, and Wrong, the FBR, writing as fast as you can, is like going to a supermarket and just filling your cart as fast as you can with all this stuff. And then it all comes together in the editing. So it's, it's actually very interesting, um, hearing that from Robert Rodriguez, because

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  it just reminded me of the, um, kind of the three hats that I wear when I'm writing.

• 1:26:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it maps almost perfectly to it. And he used index cards, like a pack of index cards you can get for probably a dollar, $2, and he's like, this could change your life. Like, one pack of index cards, and he'll lay it on the floor, and then rearrange the order and so on. Uh, so like you said, that's the hunting for the structure, right? Or the arc. And then, same as you, you know, Fast, Bad, and Wrong, in quick drafting, and then assembling it, and in some respects with film, I know it's slightly different, but improvising on the fly when things go wrong, or other opportunities present themselves in, on the actual, say, set or day of shooting. When you are doing the hunting...

• 1:26:56Tim Ferriss?

  Did you have, for instance, a

• 1:27:01Tim Ferriss?

  a within-chapter structure that you tried to stick to? Were there, were there common ingredients with a chapter? Where you would try to say, start with a story, then add facts, then close with a story? Or did you look at it as more of a, an arc? And a build over the course of the book? Or perhaps both? How did you, how did you, how did you approach the, the hunting portion?

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  You know, I'd love to say I had a system or method, but I absolutely not. I literally started with a blank page and almost panicked. I actually had to learn, I added, one of, one of my rules is patience over panic. Because you start with a blank page. And I just had absolutely no idea what was gonna happen. Where it was gonna go, what story. You know, I end up with all these kinda crazy stories. In fact, actually probably the nicest thing somebody said to me about the book. It was this guy, um, named Bob Sutton, who wrote this book called The No Asshole Rule.

• 1:28:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Bob's a good guy.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  Very funny guy. We were having, uh, beers at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park, which I, I used to go to 20 years ago. And he's been like a lifelong customer since he was like 12. And, um, we're in like the second or third beer and there's, there's another author friend of ours there. And, uh, at some point he turns to me and he goes, uh, your book? And I go, yeah. I said, man, that was some wacky shit.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  And I take, I feel like that's some, cause you know, I did Pan Am and, and Einstein and Kepler and Steve Jobs and U-boats. And, uh, I feel like in some ways that was like the nicest thing anybody said to me.

• 1:28:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I think, I think wacky shit is, is a strong endorsement.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, I, you know, when you ask like, what did I do to get these like wacky stories in each chapter? They're, all of them are so different, like, you know, comparing Juan Trip at Pan Am with Bob Conan in American or, or, uh, Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin versus Isaac Newton and...

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Robert Hooke, you know, comparing across two centuries. I have absolutely no clue where they. I would just lock myself in my little cave, shut the blinds, and I would just. I would disappear into some zone and then I would reemerge at 5:30 to pick up my daughter from daycare and I'd look at what, where the hell did that come from? I have no idea. So to answer your question, I have no, I would just look at a blank page and then I'd, look up at 5:30 and this weird, weird, what did he call it? Wacky shit was just all over. And that's the grocery shopping. You know, we were, we were talking about the Robert Rodriguez film and it's, once you start, that's the advantage of writing FBR, writing fast but wrong. You said, once you start going at high speed, just like all this stuff.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, the speed is really important. Yeah, and I, I've always thought, since I sort of have three rules for everything, creativity for me is about speed, attention and courage. You want to go as fast as you can. Like for me, getting the stories is about speed reading. So I read through, you know, I had so many sources and some, I think I have like about 5,000 files. I mean, I scanned almost all the books, so I have everything electronic and I could search in the database electronically. I was just reading as fast as I could because eventually something, that's number two. First is speed, second is attention, because you want to be reading as fast as you can.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, there's a tiny little thing like, whoa, wait, what? And that's where you go. The visual I have, because I have sort of a visual for everything, is that you're, there's this dense forest of stuff, which is all the facts and data and stories. And there's this beautiful clearing on the inside, which is like a central core idea. And you're looking for the path in. And so you're running around the circle of, as fast as you can, and you're looking for like a path in or something to go. Maybe you're looking for like a little red sparrow that's like hiding, that's going to peek out behind a little leaf or tree. And you're running and you're looking, looking and running as fast as you can. And then all of a sudden, you see that. So you need speed, you need attention to keep your eye out for that tiny little, you

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  know, red sparrow to say, I'm over here, this is the path. And then you need courage, because it may look like a really wacky sparrow. You need to have some balls to really follow that idea, because your first thought is there's just no way. Now, there's no way I could compare Steve Jobs and Isaac Newton, that's absurd. Well, let me pull on that a little bit more. Oh, it turns out Steve Jobs didn't really develop the Macintosh. He had this assistant named, no, he didn't have an assistant. There was a guy working at Apple who had been working on this project that he called the Macintosh project for, you know, a year or two before Jobs, and he tried to interest Jobs in it, and Jobs dismissed it.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  And eventually, just because of, by default, after Jobs had kind of messed up the Lisa and Apple III, that was the only project they could, you know, find. And history got rewritten, that like, oh, he invented it. That's not really what happened. But that's kind of what happened with Isaac Newton. Oh, he just came up with the idea of gravity. Well, actually, there was a guy who was much less charismatic, much less good communicator, named Robert Hook, who came up with a couple of the central ideas of gravity. And he sort of fed them to Isaac Newton. And then Isaac Newton ran with it, just like Jeff Raskin kind of fed the ideas of a graphical user interface and a small computer called the Macintosh. It already had the name. To Steve Jobs.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Now, Steve Jobs was a much more charismatic, much better communicator, in some ways, much more ambitious, and shoved him aside, just like Isaac Newton was, had a lot of skills that the other guy didn't have. I mean, Steve Jobs was a great synthesizer. He could bring in marketing and motivate people the way that Jeff Raskin couldn't. I realize we're going on a really long tangent here.

• 1:32:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's okay.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  But Isaac Newton also, you know, had some better skills, but he was really fed the early ideas by a guy named Robert Hook. So, for creativity, what I found is like, speed, attention, and courage, because you have to say, the idea of comparing Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin with Isaac Newton and Robert Hook, sounds nuts. Who would ever do that? But you have to have some balls to go after it.

• 1:33:20Tim Ferriss?

  It strikes me also that it's, one could look at it not just as a... Potential sequence, but also as a hierarchy in the sense that if you don't have speed, you're not going to be able to develop the 360 degree view to have the attention yield any fruit. So you need to have that as almost a precursor to the attention, then the attention is precursor to the courage, which is sort of the execution on what you find, that little red sparrow.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. It's in order. Speed, attention, courage. And that's kind of what I found for me was the secret of creating wacky shit.

• 1:34:05Tim Ferriss?

  And if we, if we, if we come out again to look at the world of, of business and not fooling yourself or not confusing process and outcome and trying to really have, to read something correctly. And I should note also that these different hats and these different heuristics for being clear on your purpose before, say, reading a book or selecting a book in the first place is, is really, really, really important. And I give it, give an

• 1:34:48Tim Ferriss?

  example that illustrates this in a very different context. So Tony Robbins does an exercise at some of his events where he'll ask people to scan the room and he'll say, before you scan the room, I want you to note anything red, of reddish hue remotely close. And they do that for 60 seconds. And then he says, all right, run through the list of all the things that you saw that were red. And then he asks people, now note without looking around the room, what you saw that was blue.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

  And people can't do it.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, it's to have that search function sort of set in place before reading a book, before editing.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  Is really, really, really, really critical.

• 1:35:36Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about, and I think the term that you use is false failures?

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  False failure, right.

• 1:35:45Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about that for a second because it also might tie into someone, we mentioned at the very beginning of the conversation, who is Peter Thiel. But can you talk about what a false fail or false failure is?

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  So a false fail is the idea, let's say you're nurturing some crazy idea that everybody thinks is nuts, which I call, for lack of a better word, I call that a loonshot rather than a moonshot. In a moonshot, everybody knows that is a big goal and an exciting destination, but you know, the big ideas that really make, that transform, whether it's an industry or science or even world history, almost never arrive dazzling everybody with their brilliance. They tend to be the ones that are floating around for years or sometimes decades and that people championing them are written off as nuts. In the revisionist history, looking back, it's like, oh, it's obvious that it was right.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  It's sort of a natural tendency, you assume that, and that guy was obviously a genius. But most people don't talk about the fact that everyone said he was an idiot for 20 years, including some of the most famous people and famous discoveries we know of. But what you see with loonshots, with these crazy ideas, is very often people give up on them because of what you might call a false fail. Because, and by a false fail, I mean it was a flaw in the experiment rather than the idea. The outcome is the same, you know, the experiment gave a negative result and everybody walks away. In science, that's the case, experiment gave a negative result, everybody walks away. But the problem is not with the idea, it's with the experiment.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  So the example, you mentioned Peter Thiel. So the example I use is, I think I

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  I might have first heard about this from Ken Howery, probably another mutual friend. Yeah. So, I think Ken was telling me this one time over drinks, this was like many years ago. Yeah, Ken who was at PayPal with Peter, part of the PayPal mafia. That's right. I think they knew each other from Stanford days or something like that. And then later Founder's Fund and so on. So, Ken had started working with Peter on his private investments. This was just a few months or a year before it turned into Founder's Fund. And so he was kind of helping him out. And he mentioned that this guy Zuckerberg had come by, Mark Zuckerberg, with this idea for a social network.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And everybody had been, social networks had been around for, you know, a decade at that point, and they'd all gone nowhere. There was a dozen of them, like, and you and I can remember all these crazy names of all these things, you know, Small World, whatever, all these things that went and flamed out. And at the time, there was another one that was rising, was sort of the popular one at the time called Friendster, which some people may remember. And that was just starting to flame out, and people were leaving Friendster for the new thing at the time, which was called MySpace. So when Zuckerberg was going around, Ken was telling me this story, everybody had kind

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  of passed, passed on investing because everybody said, "Well, look at, look at all the social network." Yeah, Bishop takes part. They said, "All these guys fail, you know, and you know why they fail? We know why they fail because you can see that all these users are hopping from network to network, and that's the outcome, right? That's the Bishop take part, it lost the game. All these social networks are going nowhere, there's no money in them. So, no, we're not giving our money to this Zuckerberg kid or whatever his name is." And Ken and Peter said, "Is that really why they're failing? Let's take a look." And so they had friends behind the scenes at Friendster, I don't remember if they were

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  investors or not or whatever, but, you know, it's a small community. And they said, "Let's ask for the data, for the user retention data." Like, people are clearly fleeing, and we know that they were using Friendster, and like, the website was kind of glitchy and it was sort of crashing. So they got the data on the user retention and Friendster and they found, holy crap, like, people are staying on this site for hours. Now, this is a site that's crappy. No offense to whoever's listening who is part of that team, but like, this site is crashing all the time. And they happened to know that they'd been given advice on like, listen, you need to build, you know, you've scaled from a few users to like a few million, you need to improve

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  your systems because your site is glitchy. And what they realized is that people were staying on for hours, even though it was a crappy glitchy website. And that the MySpace just had a better website. So they realized, it wasn't that it was a bad business model, like clothing fads and that everybody, that's what people thought it was like, you know, you just switch, everybody will switch en masse every, every season. They were actually great, but people were staying forever on these sites. These guys just had a bad website. They had a software glitch. So it was a false fail. It was a false fail of Friendster. They, it was a flaw in the experiment, in the, in the, in the process by which people

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  were making their judgment, not a flaw in the underlying idea, the loonshot, the crazy idea that social networks had some value. So the, Teal wrote Zuckerberg a check for 500,000.

• 1:41:16Tim Ferriss?

  First, I think it was the first outside money in the Facebook, or yeah, non-family and friends in the Facebook.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  That's right. I think in eight years later, he sold it for a billion dollars. And that's how paying attention to a false fail can be very lucrative.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  So, uh, let's see here, there's another name I wanted to bring up, who I am blanking here, it begins with Sir James Blake, uh, Black, excuse me, James Black. So, uh, who is Sir James Black and what did he say to you at one point that, that sticks in memory? Because this, this, this may relate in some way.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Oh, um, so he was, uh, uh, and he passed away, you know, a few years ago as well. He was a Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist, chemist, biochemist, well, not biochemist, chemist. From Scotland and he in some ways revolutionized drug discovery. He's one of the first legendary, what people call now drug hunters. He just had a nose for identifying great new drugs. And so when I met him, I think he was already in his eighties. But we got him interested in what we were doing. There were things that he liked about, you know, our little team or a little band of biologists

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  and chemists and we had a sort of a little, you know, we went against the grain of what people said you should be doing and that kind of appealed to him. So he would fly over periodically from Scotland and advise our team. And I remember when, one night, he had flown over, remember this is like an 80 year old guy and he had flown over, you know, some transatlantic flight, landed in the morning and he probably had like a 12 or 14, he just went through the whole day of like research, research, you know, stories and he'd been talking the whole day and standing on his feet and we're at, you know, some, the end of like some dinner and I am like dropping

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  dead of exhaustion and I'm probably in my mid 30s or whatever, early 40s at the time. And I'm just like, I just want to go home to bed, right? Cause this was a long day and he's like, and so I'm getting up to like going, no Sophie, stay, standing like past me on this, sit down, sit down, come have a whiskey with me. I can't do a Scottish, but that's what you know what I'm saying. And he's like, come have a whiskey with you. Like everybody else leaves and I'm like, oh my God, I can, how is this 80 year old guy just like full of it? So he gets some whiskies and then he's like, you know, he tells us like why he loves what we're doing and this and that. And then, you know, he starts with, well, let me tell you when I was, and then he like starts with like the Korean War. I'm like, oh my God, like. This is gonna be a long night.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  I'm gonna need a shot of adrenaline or something just to stay alive. But I mean, they're fascinating stories of like this guy really developed two phenomenal drug categories that saved millions of lives. So I'm, and so we start talking, he tells me this stuff and at some point I tell him about how there's this project in the lab that I'm feeling kind of depressed about because I was really excited about and it's not, you know, it hit this negative result. And he, he pats me on the knee again and he goes, oh my boy, it's not a good drug unless it's been killed three times.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  And I, I took away from that is, I really, it kind of gave me pause and made me rethink. And then as I ended up, I started going through more histories and stories, the revisionist histories that you read about like great discoveries, "Oh, I had this idea on a Monday and then I showed it to people on Tuesday and we were all excited on Wednesday and it worked on Thursday and the drug was approved on Friday." That is not what happens. These people with these great ideas, they get killed. Like, really, the project gets terminated, everybody hates it, it's pull the plug. People say, "Oh, it's tough to kill a project. Let me be a big man and kill a project." It's really easy to kill a project. You just say, if you're in charge, you just say, "No funding, you're done." And it never comes back. No one's gonna work on a dead project.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  So no one can prove you wrong. You seem like a big man. It's really easy. It's actually hard to keep a project going. Why? Because any good crazy idea stumbles and fails. Like, like Jim said, it gets killed three times. It has these terrible failures. It seems like a really bad idea. It doesn't work. It looks like it's not gonna work out. And then if you have a really great champion or you get really lucky, you survive that failure. And all of his projects that he won the Nobel Prize for, there are two drug categories, a beta blockers and a histamine antagonist, failed like that multiple times. And so that's what he meant. And then when you look back in history, like the statin drugs, I tell a little bit of that story, probably the, you know, have saved millions of lives, prevented

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  millions of heart attacks, they were killed multiple times and they almost died and disappeared and never happened. And that's, I, I've come to think of that as the three deaths of the loon shot. The truly important breakthroughs are killed several times. And it, it does go against the grain of the stuff that you hear in Silicon Valley all the time of like, "Fast fail, you know, fail fast and pivot, fail fast and pivot." Well, okay, but like, if you fail fast and pivot, that's probably what everybody else did when they hit the exact same stumble. And sometimes, it's the opposite. Like, everybody will fail fast and pivot when they hit that same stumble, but if it's, there's something really important underlying there.

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  I mean, often that is the reason why there's something really important is because everybody is turned away from the first stumble. And you need to make it past that first stumble, past the second stumble, past the third stumble, and then you have the gold. And that's why it's gold. Because everybody gives up on the first or second, because everybody's following fail, fast, and pivot. So everybody's given up. If you've persisted through those failures, that's where the really, really big breakthroughs are.

• 1:47:22Tim Ferriss?

  So let's do a sort of a little retrospective on looking at some historical examples and maybe by way of example, describing what loon shots are, right? And I believe there are two types, and we could talk about Juan and Bob, which is not a country music duo. Give us some examples of loon shots and maybe the different species of loon shots.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  The two types. So there is the one type I think of as a product or a technology that everybody says won't work. So you go way back, the telephone, people said, "This is a pointless, you know, toy." Or the transistor, "There's no way you could make a switch out of some solid-state device." Or personal computer, "That's not going to be important." Or digital cameras, or even jet engines, that's the Juan and Bob story. Jet engines, you know, there's no way you could ever make a commercial plane with a jet engine. So those are products or technologies that everybody says won't work. Let's call those P-type.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  The other thing is much less great, those are kind of glamorous, because you can put a picture of a product on a P for product? P for product, P-type. You can put that on the cover of a magazine, and people get really excited, and there's this, there is, we're at a South by Southwest, so there is this obsession with product, product, product, product. But what people often miss, and is sometimes much more important, and is a dangerous trap if you miss it, is the other kind, is a small change in strategy that involves no new technology. It's a small change in strategy, let's call it S-type, that everyone says is crazy or won't work. So what's an example of that?

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Well, let's take the story of a young kid who wanted to go into retail and wants to open a shop in, you know, where all the customers are, which is big cities. And then his wife happens to say, "Well, honey, you know, I'm happy to support you in this dream of yours, but I just hate big cities. I'm only willing to live where the town is smaller than 10,000 people." So he says, "Okay," and he decides he likes being married, he also likes quail hunting. So he knows there's this region in the middle of America where the four states come together in a corner, and there are four different quail hunting seasons. So he puts his store there, and he moves to a little town called Bentonville, Arkansas,

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  and he opens a store. And he makes it a little bit bigger, and he sells stuff a little bit cheaper, and he gives the store a name. It's called Walmart. Okay, now that ends up absolutely dominating the retail industry and wiping out everybody else. Now, was he thinking about, "Let me go disrupt the retail industry?" No, he had a wife that didn't want to live in a big town, and he liked quail hunting, and he made stuff a little cheaper. So he had small changes in strategy, where he put his store, how big he made his store, and, you know, made prices a little bit lower. Were there any new technologies? No. He just sold stuff a little bit. Did he invent retail? No. Did he invent selling stuff a little cheaper? No. These were small shifts in strategy that ended up being incredibly important.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  So those things are much harder, and they're much less glamorous, because they're harder to write about, and harder to prove. than the P-type things which are easier to prove. So those are the two types.

• 1:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. And just so people aren't left hanging with Juan and Bob, Juan Tripp, Pan Am, and Bob Crandall, American Airlines. But the example that really, I had actually not had any familiarity with, which I think I'd love you to describe briefly, is Robert Goddard and the rocket flight in space. Because people credit

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:43Tim Ferriss?

  other people, namely, I guess it would have been JFK. But could you describe a little bit of the backdrop for that story?

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  Sure. So in fact, that gets right to the moonshot, moonshot. So in 1961, Kennedy announced in a speech to Congress, his ambition of putting a man on the moon. And of course, that was widely applauded. And that's actually where the term moonshot comes from. But as we mentioned, those breakthroughs that get us there are rarely recognized and widely applauded at the time. So in fact, how did we actually get to the moon? Well, we got to the moon on a rocket. Rockets work through liquid, you know, liquid fueled jet propulsion.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  So the principles that got us to the moon were invented by a guy named Robert Goddard four decades earlier. And he had written it up, he had demonstrated, he'd been working on experiments, he had proved it to pretty good certainty. But he was ridiculed. And I remember I found this in the New York Times, in the archives, this was pretty hilarious. In 1920, I think it was, after Goddard had suggested his idea that we could get to space with these liquid fueled rockets, in 1920, the Times came out with an editorial and said, oh, this guy, you know, Professor Goddard with his quote chair. They literally put quotes

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  around the word chair in physics. Like, that's a bad thing. You know, air quotes, his quote chair in physics at some university like Clark, like making fun that he wasn't an Ivy League guy and he was a quote chair. And he says, this guy, you know, this professor doesn't understand the basic laws of physics that we teach our children every day.

• 1:53:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, quote, "Seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

• 1:53:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. Namely, that Newton's laws of action and reaction make rocket flight in space impossible. End of story. So the funny part of that is that, like, fast forward, I think it was July 11th, 1969, if I remember, it was the day of the, the day after the Apollo, the successful launch of the Apollo 11 rocket to the moon. The Times issues a retraction, and it says, "Apparently, rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics," and quote, "The Times regrets the error."

• 1:54:20Tim Ferriss?

  And even when you've really, really put these seemingly miraculous successes or iconic structures, for instance, Eiffel Tower, under a fine sort of forensic lens, you realize that, I'm not going to say all of them, but it's certainly a very high percentage, not only encountered resistance, but, I mean, exceptionally violent and heavy-handed, sort of ad hominem attacks. I mean, the Eiffel Tower, which everyone knows at this point, and it's in every brochure

• 1:55:01Tim Ferriss?

  and every sales pitch for Paris and France, was opposed by just about everyone. I mean, it was, it was all uphill. And I want to talk at some point about how, you know, smaller teams or entrepreneurs who are maybe solo, maybe with a handful of folks can, can think about embracing or structured thinking around moonshots, but I wanted to jump back to your personal experience for a second. And again, feel free to fact check this because you can't believe everything you read on the internet, or in, certainly not in every book.

• 1:55:41Tim Ferriss?

  But I have here a quote from Michelle Wie, the golfer's coach, who instructed her, and this is from a book, The Net and the Butterfly.

• 1:55:56Tim Ferriss?

  She was given a quote by her coach to repeat to herself whenever she missed a putt, quote, "I've gotten that out of the way. Now I'm one step closer to becoming the best putter in the history of golf," end quote. And the segue is that it's, you were then mentioned afterwards and the quote is, "I often think of that quote when I screw up." A, is that true? B, are there, how do you use such a quote or other quotes as a, as a, as a practice or a reminder? It's a lot, a lot of question at once.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. That's good research. So that, that's from my, a very good friend, Olivia Fox, who was also at the wedding. You made a better there. But she sent me an early draft and I, I gave her that quote and it's a mental reminder of, you know, whenever you screw up and anyone who's gotten anywhere is because you've been through those three deaths, you've been called a failure, an idiot, including in drafting this book when like every, you had the same experience.

• 1:57:01Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  Like every publisher is like, "Oh yeah, there's like, no, it, books on, who try to mix physics and business never work." And I'm thinking like, really? Like what book that makes physics? I haven't read any books.

• 1:57:12Tim Ferriss?

  There's so many nevers, just to like, books on physical fitness, cookbooks don't travel internationally. I mean, there's so many nevers and you're like, really? Like where's the data on that?

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, you know, Olivia, who's a good friend, asked me for that quote and I thought about that at the time and the, the inspiration a little bit is also tennis. So I, I, I played in the juniors as a kid and grew up playing tennis and I, at the time it was, it was probably, you know, shows how old I am. Pete Sampras versus Andre Agassi was, and so both were, you know, I admired both. Agassi developed this tic or trick, which is at the end of a bad point, if I remember correctly, at the end of a bad point, he would slap his thigh.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  And that was like a mental little hook to forget about the point. He just associated with slapping his thigh, with forgetting the bad point that he just fucked up and focusing on the current. And that was a little trick for his brain, just to stop wallowing in the bad and focus on now. And just the bad just went away. And it's the same thing with, uh, Michelle.

• 1:58:26Tim Ferriss?

  Michelle Wee.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, Michelle Wee. And it's, you screw up, you do something stupid. Even in business life, you had a bad board meeting, you said stupid things, or you had a bad investor meeting, or you did something dumb with an employee that you regret doing. You need to slap your thigh, or think of the Michelle Wee example. Like, I screwed that up, and that's one step along the way of me getting better and whatever I'm gonna do now. Slap the thigh and let's focus on, you know, set that behind you and then move forward. And so that's the, uh, that's the kind of golfer chord, or the Andre Agassi slap your thigh trick.

• 1:58:59Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, related, because you, you use, and not to, not to belabor this, but you have, you use systems and reminders a lot.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:12Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you have a post-it note? And you may, you may no longer have it, but a post-it note that says, "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller."

• 1:59:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It's still up on my wall.

• 1:59:23Tim Ferriss?

  What on earth is that?

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  So I did a lot of, uh, one of the stories I tell, I, I tell a bunch of film stories. I have some, uh, one of my really close friends is, uh, in film, and we've been friends for many, many years. And so I've, he and I have traded stories. Um, and, and part of the inspiration was like, it was so fascinating to me how many of my stories from biotech were so similar to the stories from film, and how what a biotech CEO does is so similar to what a film producer does, and how the markets are structured, the hundreds of biotech companies and the hundreds of film, and the few film majors are so similar to the hundreds of small production shops. And the few, sorry, the few film majors at the top, the few pharma majors at the top,

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  and the hundreds of production sops and the hundreds of biotech companies. The film industry structure, the financing of it, the dynamics of it, the focus of it, was so similar, developing a film was so similar to developing a drug. I just found that connection fascinating. So I tell a fair amount of film stories in the, I realize my answers are kind of long-winded to you. Like, I tell a lot of stories to get there. My wife hates that, by the way. See, I'm doing that again? Am I going off on a tangent story of a tangent? This is a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. That's why I do long for them. All right. That's why there's a delete button on those videos, I'm sure. Anyways, the, I tell a fair number of film stories.

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  I tell the kind of James Bond story, which was a loon shot. Like, Ian Fleming had written these Bond novels, and he really, you know, he didn't have as much money as some of the, as the lifestyle he aspired to, which you can see in these Bond movies. And so he was really trying to sell the film, and everybody had just written this off. Like, all the studios, they just weren't buying, and there were a bunch of false fails. They made some TV show, which was a disaster, so that was a false film. Yeah, there's just, and the American studios were like, there's just no way Americans want to see a British dude with an accent, or they're gonna believe that. You know, it's like some heroic spy, saving the world, like, the stories are junk, and

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  he's kind of a metrosexual, like, who wants to watch that? He's kind of prissy about his stuff, like, who wants to see that? And actually, even the first, when he finally got it, he gave up after eight or nine years trying to do it, and got these, like, random producers who, you know, wanted, just bankrupted his business, and...

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  They were trying to sell the movie. They just sold it to some studio and they'd cast this guy who was thirty-two years old, who had been in a movie like Tarzan and the Little People, or whatever it was. I forgot what the name was, and like, two movies. And he'd been a milk truck driver. And Americans, they made it for a million bucks. And this, the American studios, you know what, this is like, this is absurd. No one's gonna wanna see. Literally, the quote was, "No one's gonna watch a limey truck driver." You know, fighting spies. Of course, that guy was Sean Connery. And, but they really were so sure it wouldn't work. They opened it in drive-in studios. I think it was like in Kentucky and Texas. And they, "Let's just put in a couple of drive-in studios and then

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  write it off as a lot." And then the reaction, the crowd reaction was like, "Wait, what?" And then, of course, it became one of the greatest film franchises of all times. And the other, the second, the two top film franchises of all time are James Bond and Star Wars. So I ended up going way back, tracing like, minute by minute, what happened with Star Wars. And if you search, you can actually find the early drafts. There are four early drafts of the script, and you can actually get, find them. And I've read the drafts. They were freaking horrific. Like, it was terrible. The writing was terrible. The storytelling was terrible. The characters were nothing like the characters that you have at the

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  end. The plot was incomprehensible. It sounded absurd. Which is, you know, you could see why people, studios rejected it at first. And one of the titles of one of the drafts, actually, this was the shooting version of the script, the first title was "The Adventures of Luke Starkiller." And it was such a stupid name. The hero was called Mace Windy. Mace Windy. Mace Windy, which sounds like, you know, a superhero that farts. Yeah. And it just like, it was so bad. Yet it became one of the greatest movies of all time. And so, I keep that to help me write FBR, right? Fast, Bad and Wrong. You just realize that all first drafts are shit. Yeah. Everything when it starts off is shit. And if Star Wars, one of the greatest movies

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  of all time, was just such horrific shit in the beginning, then you're probably okay. It's all right to have your stuff sound terrible. And that's okay. Just keep going. You fix it up in the editing, which is what they did.

• 2:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  I knew every line to that film as a kid when it came out. And I would drive audiences nuts because it's, I think, the only film, maybe that and E.T. where I insisted my mom take me to the movies repeatedly. And it was, it was, for my family, it was, it was quite an indulgence to go to the movies to begin with. But I knew the entire movie by heart. And a split second before any character would say a line, I would say the line in the theater, which understandably drove the people around me batshit crazy. But stuck with me, had a huge impact. So now I know that Mace Windy is to thank for it.

• 2:05:01Tim Ferriss?

  How can smaller teams, and we have so much to chat about. I mean, hopefully, we can do a part two, a round two with this. I'm because I would love to. And it's so fun to spend time together. But maybe just with, with some of the time that we have left, you could talk about how individual entrepreneurs or small, small teams can think about loon shots. Like, what is the significance for a, a single person or a small group?

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  Right. So, you know, kind of the moral of the story is you want to nurture these loon shots. So forget about, you know, moon shots or big goals or even the word disruptive innovation is a terrible word. It should be crossed out of every dictionary and taken off of every website because it's, it's misleading. Because anybody who's been an entrepreneur knows that

• 2:05:56Speaker 02

  the great idea, the ideas that end up becoming incredibly important that actually in retrospect disrupt the market. Nobody knows at the time, like Sam Walton had no clue. He just liked quail hunting. That's why he went to Bentonville. Had no clue, he wasn't thinking, let me disrupt the retail industry by locating stores in the, you know, rural America and then building them somewhat. No. He was just like, his wife said he didn't want to live in a, in a, in a big city. And as he pointed out later, we had no idea what the demand would be. So, real innovations are about, are less about market projections and some guru waving a PowerPoint about you're going to disrupt this market. That's crap.

• 2:06:41Speaker 02

  A, a real innovation that ends up doing something is like a leaf in a tornado. You just never know where it's going to end up. Anybody tells you it's going to end up there, it's going to disrupt, has not been a real entrepreneur. Most of the great, like the transistor. They were working on building better switches for telecom. And when they came up with Bell Labs, and when they invented the solid-state device, it turned out it was, it wasn't good enough to use in telecom. So, they really had no idea what to do with it. It was five years before the first application, which ended up being in hearing aids. So, were the scientists working on the transistor, going to their bosses and saying, "Let's disrupt the hearing aid market.

• 2:07:26Speaker 02

  I have an idea for you." No, they were just trying to build better switches and. So, the reason you want to nurture loon shots is to challenge beliefs. It's not, you want to use disruptive innovation if you're a history professor and you're writing about what happened in hindsight. Otherwise, don't use it. Yeah, Walton disrupted the retail industry, transistor disrupted everything, but that's in hindsight. When you're really there at the time, you nurture loon shots to challenge beliefs, to challenge accepted wisdoms. Some things that you think are absolutely true, maybe you're right, but suppose you're wrong.

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  Do you want to read about it in a press release from your competitor? Or would you rather be nurturing it in your own lab or trying it on yourself and seeing how it plays out? That's why you nurture loon shots. So, what can small teams or groups do? Well,

• 2:08:24Speaker 02

  To succeed with anything, just the idea is a small fraction of it. If you think about a football field, the idea is getting you from your own goal, maybe to your own five yard line, or your own 10 line. There's a lot of ideas in the world. You want to be able to take an idea into a real product, you need people who understand the markets, who understand how to segment the market, who understand audiences, who understand how to build, who understand how to manufacture, who understand how to release, how to understand timelines and getting things done on time, on budget, on spec. And that's the other 90 yards. So you need both. And you can think of one as sort of the artist and one as sort of the soldier. You have artists that work on their crazy ideas,

• 2:09:05Speaker 02

  and you have the soldiers that get the ball down the other 90 yards. And so you need both. And so that's some kind of one of the things that I get into is why companies often fail is that they don't wear those two. They don't understand the separation that you need for both, that you need to be motivated by two completely different things. And you need to tailor the way you interact, the systems you design, the incentives, the metrics. Totally different, almost exactly opposite for artists and soldiers. For artists, you want a high failure rate. If you're not trying stuff and failing stuff. For soldiers, you want a low failure rate.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  Like, let's go to military, for aviation. The guys who are coming up with crazy ideas for new technology, if you want them to try lots of stuff and crazy things that nobody's had could work, but the guys who are assembling planes, you don't want them to launch 10 planes in the sky and say, "Well, let's see which eight fall and crash." No. So it's the exact opposite things you want to reward. So you need to separate your artists and your soldiers, and design different tools, and manage the balance between the two. So that's if you're a larger company. Now, you asked about what if you're a smaller company or a solo? So you want to separate your artists and soldiers. You can, if you're a larger company, you can separate that by role.

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  If you're a smaller company, you want to think about separating that by time. You want to be very mindful. This is sort of comes back to the wearing different hats. You want to be very mindful. We're going to go into a zone where all we're going to do is the artist create, and we want to maximize failure.

• 2:10:51Speaker 02

  And then we're gonna step out of that zone and we've, you know, listed the hundred different ideas and picked the five that, and we're gonna minimize failure. We wanna get this, these five ideas done on time, on budget, on spec, to customers. So you need to be very self-aware of what zone are you in? And the confusing thing is, when you're running a small team, because you don't have different people. You don't have an artist and a soul. Sometimes you do. But you want, you don't wanna tell your artists, "All right, I need you to have a 98% success rate on your ideas." Like, that's, "I need you to have two ideas on Monday, two ideas on Tuesday, three ideas on Wed-" you know, you can't schedule creative.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  The converse is, when you're dealing with your soldiers, you don't, you want to create those metrics. So in a small team or small group, if you can't separate that by role, you wanna separate that. We're all gonna put off our execution hat, our operational excellence hat, and we're gonna put on our crazy artist, wacky, what ideas could kill our business? What are the things that are floating out there that we're sure are not right? The loon shots. But if they were right, they would kill us. What are those things? What are our embedded assumptions or beliefs about our customers? Right. Our competitors, our substitutes, the nature of our market, or regulatory, whatever?

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  We know that these are right. We know that our beliefs are true. But what's the opposite? Suppose they're wrong. What could somebody be doing to kill us? Let's just take a week, or whatever it is, and think of all the things that we know we're sure is true. What's the opposite? And now let's suspend disbelief, like a movie. Let's suspend disbelief. How might somebody, here's all these reasons to dismiss it and why it could never be true, all the reasons people use to dismiss a loon shot, that's why it's a loon shot. Like, they made fun of Goddard, rockets could never fly in space, it's against the laws of physics. All these things that you're sure are true, like the New York Times was sure Newton's laws of physics applied and ruled out, you know, rocketry. All these things you're sure are true.

• 2:13:06Speaker 02

  What if they weren't? Or how might a really creative person get away around that? And how might that kill us? Let's just take a week and walk through all the looming shots that are out there on our customers or our markets or our products or whatever it is, whatever we're doing. How might they kill us? And then if we identify those things, how can we flip that around? And use that to knock out our competitors? So that's like taking, separating the artists and soldiers, but not by role, but by time.

• 2:13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:40Speaker 02

  And then, now that we've done that, let's take off that hat. And now, let's focus on operational excellence, on time, on budget, on spec. Okay? This is not a moment for like, innovative, dreamy. This is like deliver on time, on budget, on spec. And there you separate by time rather than by role, if you're a small company.

• 2:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, uh, this is, uh, and we're gonna wrap up in just a few minutes, but I, I want to highlight for people listening, how tied together everything is that we've talked about throughout this session one of hopefully at least, at least two, because I love hanging out with you and catching up. In the sense that whether it's fast, bad and wrong.

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Spitting out your two shitty pages a day or whatever it might be. Uh, in other words, on an individual level, being clear on the hat that you're wearing and segmenting by time, or within an extremely large organization, segmenting by role between artists and soldiers and so on. Uh, there are ways to systematize your generation of ideas, vetting of ideas, execution of ideas. And, uh, you know, one of the reasons I enjoy, whether it's having drinks, hanging out at your wedding, or simply batting around ideas with you, is that you're very good at

• 2:15:17Tim Ferriss?

  asking questions that help with clear thinking, which helps with clear action or more effective action.

• 2:15:26Tim Ferriss?

  Would you be willing, not right now, but some other time, to do a round two where we talk about how to bring a gun to a knife fight, which we kind of alluded to, right? Right. Incentives, how to apply incentives to other people, to yourself, to teams, etc. Because this is really, really, really underappreciated, and a whole bunch of other things that I'd love to talk to you about. Would you be willing to do that? Let's do it. Okay, awesome. Now, for those people who are only going to perhaps get this episode, I highly, highly recommend, and for those of you who listen to this show a lot, I don't say that lightly, that you grab a copy of Loon Shots. It is incredibly pragmatic, it

• 2:16:09Tim Ferriss?

  is very well-written. I was really impressed, because with all the time we've spent together, it's like I haven't, the identity that I have sort of painted on top of this avatar in my head called Safi is like scientist, entrepreneur, etc. And I get sent a lot of books, and I get sent a lot of books by friends, too, and every time I get one, I'm like, "Oh, God, I hope this isn't garbage," because it's just gonna be so uncomfortable to try to like dance around this somehow. And it's a damn good book. Thanks. It really is. So I encourage people, loonshots.com, take a look at the book. And if you're like, "I still need to be sold," okay, go read up on Safi, and you'll be

• 2:16:52Tim Ferriss?

  like, "Okay, there are probably additional things that I could learn from Safi," and from the historical examples that you weave together, right? It's really the way that I like to learn personally, and I think it's the way a lot of humans learn, as you pointed out, is through stories that illustrate points. And it's tempting, I think, and this is another thing that impresses me about you, is to, from the influence of, in some cases, academics, to speak in abstractions and conceptual frameworks without the real-life sort of human glue that makes it memorable, and the...

• 2:17:35Tim Ferriss?

  Memorable component is really important because if you don't have the acronyms, the stickiness of these concepts, how the hell are you going to apply them when the time comes that they're actually important to implement? So, check out Loon Shots, @SafiBachal on Twitter, S-A-F-I-B-A-H-C-A-L-L. We will be continuing the conversation somehow, some way. Is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this round one? Any questions, comments, suggestions to the audience? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up this first portion?

• 2:18:13Speaker 02

  This was just, it was ton of fun to see you again and just catch up. So, yeah, looking forward to part two and looking forward to having drinks together one of these days and catching up some more.

• 2:18:25Tim Ferriss?

  All right, awesome. There's so much more to explore. So folks, keep an eye out for round two. I'm gonna twist some arms if necessary, bribe with alcohol if it's called for. And for links to everything that we've discussed in this episode, all the names mentioned, books, etc., authors, and so on, you can go to the show notes, so tim.blog/podcast and just search Safi, S-A-F-I, or Loon Shots, and he will come right up and you'll have all of it. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday.

• 2:19:09Tim Ferriss?

  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? 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

• 2:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:20:04Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 2:20:48Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was, and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So... Check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited

• 2:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N dot com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So, get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Uber, which I use pretty much every day. Uber makes getting around town, in the world for that matter, easier than ever before. And now Uber is introducing Uber Rewards, a new rewards program that helps keep modern life going. Some of you know this already, but I've used Uber thousands

• 2:22:58Tim Ferriss?

  upon thousands of times since 2008 or 2009, when I first became an advisor and it was even just a prototype stage. I've since used it to save my skin in many countries where I don't even speak the language, to help transport my dog around, to save on delivery fees from big box retailers. The list is really countless for the number and types of ways that I've made my life easier with Uber. As a company, Uber's been doing a ton of really interesting, great things in the past year. Uber Rewards is going to make you love Uber even more. It's a brilliant idea, and you can earn points on rides and Uber eats. So you earn points whether you're staying in or going out, and the more you

• 2:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  use it, the more you get, and you unlock rewards such as Uber Cash, which you can apply to rides or food orders. There's a lot more, though. You unlock all sorts of new benefits at each membership level, such as flexible cancellations with Gold. This means you get your cancellation fees refunded when you revoke within 15 minutes for a limited number of uses. You get price protection with Platinum. This means you get price protection on Uber X between your two favorite places. So you choose the two places, you ride between the most, and during busy hours when prices might be higher, you'll be protected above a certain amount in either direction. You might get complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, for instance.

• 2:24:20Tim Ferriss?

  This means that at no extra cost, you request Uber X and you can get upgraded to premium rides like Black. And there's a lot more priority support, priority pickup at airports, getting access to highly rated drivers, all at different levels, and it goes on and on and on. So you should check it out. Go to uber.com/rewards for all sorts of examples. The more you ride, the more you eat, the more you get. So for the terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber rewards, go to uber.com/rewards. That's uber.com/rewards. Check out the program terms, the details, examples at uber.com/rewards. Chances are you're already using Uber, so you might as well opt into this and get more out of it.

• 2:25:01Tim Ferriss?

  And if you're not, these are all the more reason to install, download, and try it today.