#225: John Crowley -- The Real-Life Captain America and Bruce Banner (Seriously)

John F. Crowley https://www.facebook.com/John-F-Crowley-187975810642/ is the Chairman and CEO of Amicus Therapeutics http://www.amicusrx.com/, a publicly traded biotechnology company, which he helped to found in 2005 and is now a 300+ person company in 22 countries. John's involvement with biotechnology stems from the 1998 diagnosis of two of his children with Pompe disease https://www.pompe.com/ -- a severe and often fatal neuromuscular disorder. In his drive to find a cure for them, he left his job and became an entrepreneur as the Co-founder, President, and CEO of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals http://catalysthealthventures.com/portfolio/detail/novazyme-pharmaceuticals-2/ in 2000, a biotech start-up conducting research on a new experimental treatment for Pompe disease (which he credits as ultimately saving his children's lives). In 2001, Novazyme was acquired by Genzyme Corporation https://sanofigenzyme.com/ for nearly $200 million. John and his family have been profiled on the front page of The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-dads-14-year-quest-for-childrens-cure-1419639957 and are the subjects of a book by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million -- and Bucked the Medical Establishment -- in a Quest to Save His Children http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073440X/offsitoftimfe-20. The major motion picture Extraordinary Measures http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003L7PKCW/offsitoftimfe-20, starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, is inspired by the Crowley family journey. John is the author of a personal memoir: Chasing Miracles: The Crowley Family Journey of Strength, Hope, and Joy http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557049106/offsitoftimfe-20. John also served as a commissioned intelligence officer in the U. S. Navy Reserve from 2005-2016. He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and is a veteran of the global war on terrorism, with service in Afghanistan. He graduated with a B. S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and earned a J. D. from the University of Notre Dame Law School and an M. B. A. from Harvard. He previously served (2014-2016) as the National Chairman of the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America http://wish.org/ and is a founding board member of the Global Genes https://globalgenes.org/ Project. John is a Henry Crown Fellow at The Aspen Institute https://www.aspeninstitute.org/. This is an incredibly powerful episode. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by iD Commerce + Logistics http://tim.blog/scale/. I'm asked all the time about how to scale businesses quickly. Rule number one: remove unnecessary bottlenecks. Many businesses can do so by outsourcing inventory management and fulfillment to a company that makes this its primary focus. iD Commerce + Logistics http://tim.blog/scale/ is just such a company. It helps online retailers and entrepreneurs outgrow their competition by handling all types of details -- from inventory to packing and shipping. I depended on iD to handle these types of details when I launched The 4-Hour Chef so I could focus on promoting the book. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off your start-up fees and costs waived by visiting tim.blog/scale http://tim.blog/scale/ or idcomlog.com/tim http://idcomlog.com/tim/. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you -- for free -- exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're just seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ID Commerce and Logistics. I'm asked all the time about how to scale businesses quickly. Rule number one is removing unnecessary bottlenecks that are a headache and also an emergency brake on growth. For many companies, one of the first things they should outsource is inventory management and fulfillment. There are companies that do this all day long perfectly for fast-growing companies. ID Commerce and Logistics is one such company. They focus on helping online retailers and entrepreneurs outgrow the competition by handling all types of logistics for you. They manage your inventory, pick, pack, and ship, and handle everything you can imagine so that you can focus on the things you are best at instead of all of these details under the hood.

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  I partnered with them myself during the launch of The 4-Hour Chef so that I could focus on promoting the book, which is what I'm good at, and they ensured that things I'm not good at got done perfectly. In other words, that readers were happy with dozens of different products we needed shipped out during holiday crunch season. ID Commerce and Logistics works with many different types of businesses, including e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, subscription boxes, and dozens more. They're also integrated with top e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, my personal favorite, Magento, BigCommerce, and others, which makes the startup integration and partnership seamless. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 of your startup fees and costs waived. That is a big discount.

• 1:48Tim Ferriss?

  Just visit tim.blog/scale. That's tim.blog/scale. Or you can go to idcomlog, that's I-D-C-O-M-L-O-G.com/tim. You can go to either one. The easier one to remember is probably tim.blog/scale.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. They've become incredibly popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because they provide the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra-wealthy, but for any account size and at a fraction of the cost. For instance, they monitor your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset classes to look for opportunities to rebalance or harvest tax losses. Now, would you do the same? Are you doing the same? Probably not. And the power is in the software. Wealthfront now manages more than $4 billion in assets, which is up from around $2.5 billion when they started advertising on this podcast. They're growing incredibly quickly.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  Unlike old-fashioned private wealth managers, Wealthfront is powered by innovative technology, making it the most tax-efficient, low-cost, hassle-free way to invest. They don't have bloated sales teams or retail locations, so they can deliver all of this sophisticated financial advice and these services at a fraction of the cost of a traditional financial advisor. So at the very least, go to wealthfront.com/tim and take their free risk assessment survey. It only takes a couple of minutes, and Wealthfront will recommend a personalized portfolio of investments. In other words, they'll tell you exactly where they would put your money. So even if you don't use their service, you have a huge leg up, and you have additional information for making good decisions. They use investment theory to automate good financial behavior and decisions that people

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  typically don't make but should. So go to wealthfront.com/tim to get your first 15K managed for free or just to get more details. Check it out, wealthfront.com/tim.

• 3:53Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello, boys and girls. You frisky little squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And yes, I've had a little bit of caffeine this morning, and I'm feeling great, thank you for asking. This show is about deconstructing world-class performers of all different types, and that can range from entertainment to chess, to military, to entrepreneurship, billionaires, the Big B Club, those guys, pretty interesting cats. And all over the show, as they say, across the pond, athletes, you name it. And the guest today is, I would say, a combination of almost all of that. John Crowley. And you will have to listen to his story to believe it.

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  And we're going to get really deep into a lot of the details. It is moving. It is incredible. It is hard to believe. It is miraculous. It is all of the above. And I call John, who's been a friend for a long time now, the real life Captain America. That's not just a label that I use. So the real life Captain America, but he's also the real life Bruce Banner. So allow me to explain. John Crowley, what does his bio sound like? He is the chairman and CEO of Amicus Therapeutics, a publicly traded biotechnology company, which he helped to found in 2005 and which is now a 300-plus person company in 22 countries. Okay, that is the current day. But his involvement with biotech stems from the 1998 diagnosis of two of his children with Pompe disease.

• 5:20Tim Ferriss?

  So he was surprised with this unexpected diagnosis of a severe and often fatal neuromuscular disorder. In his drive to find a cure for them, he left his job at the time, became an entrepreneur, then became the co-founder and president and CEO of Novazyme Pharmaceuticals in 2000? 2000? I was going to add something to that, but that was in 2000. A startup conducting research on a new experimental treatment for Pompe disease, which he credits as ultimately saving his children's lives. In 2001, Novazyme was acquired by Genzyme Corporation for nearly $200 million. John and his family have been profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and are the subjects of a book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Geeta Anand.

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  The title is The Cure: How A Father Raised $100 Million And Bucked The Medical Establishment In A Quest To Save His Children, which he did. A major motion picture is made out of that, or based on that, the story, called Extraordinary Measures, starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford. John is the author also of a memoir called Chasing Miracles: The Crowley Family Journey Of Strength, Hope, and Joy. But that's not all. That is, that is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. John also served as A commissioned intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve from 2005 to 2016. He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC. For those of you who have listened to my episode with retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal, you'll be familiar with JSOC.

• 6:45Tim Ferriss?

  And he is the veteran of the global war on terrorism with service in Afghanistan. Graduated with a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown and earned a JD from the University of Notre Dame Law School and an MBA from Harvard. He previously served for two years, 2014 to 2016, as the National Chairman of the Make a Wish Foundation of America and is a founding board member of the Global Genes Project. John is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, which is where I met him. I was also a Henry Crown Fellow and ended up in his class. This guy is amazing. I am constantly impressed. He is jacked, ripped, intelligent, effective, has perfect hair, which I'm of course very jealous of, we'll get into that.

• 7:28Tim Ferriss?

  So please enjoy my very moving, very powerful, and very wide-ranging conversation with the one and only John Crowley.

• 7:39Tim Ferriss?

  John, welcome to the show.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Tim, great to be here.

• 7:41Tim Ferriss?

  It is so great to see you.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Yes, my friend.

• 7:44Tim Ferriss?

  And every time I see you, I think your shoulders have grown larger. You're bursting out of-

• 7:50Speaker 03

  At 49-year-old, 49-years-old, I assure you, it's an illusion now.

• 7:55Tim Ferriss?

  Just, you just have to start shopping at Gap Kids. And I guess that's, that's what I do whenever I want to look huge. I thought we could start, we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about, you were educating me on fast roping drills and making my hands sweat. Could you please explain? And I said, you know what, actually pause, let's talk about this when we record. Could you retell what you were describing to me, please?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you remember, this came up in the context of describing kind of fears of heights.

• 8:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And I said, you know, despite having served in the military and worked with some amazing people and done some things that I probably shouldn't have ever been doing, at least at that age, talked about fast roping. So with a fear of heights, yeah, I was being trained of that, was a Navy intelligence officer working with a SEAL team. So I had the Navy SEALs teaching me- Had a fast rope, so, okay, great, and give you the basics and then you go up in this tower. So, we end up going up, you climb up these ladders 40 feet, and then there's a plank, and there's a real salty-looking SEAL, Chief Petty Officer, handing the rope, and it's a really uneasy feeling to step out on a plank and grab a rope, even though you think you're strong enough to hold it and you know the basics and can kind of slide

• 9:01Speaker 03

  your way down. Just that thought of, my life is now literally in my hands, literally.

• 9:07Tim Ferriss?

  You're untethered.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  You are untethered, you step out on a rope, off away from the platform, you grab the rope, and you slide down fast, and it better be fast, because the next guy is above you, and if you go too slow, he's going to come crashing down on you. So, you're terrified, you do it, so I do it.

• 9:23Tim Ferriss?

  And 40 feet, I mean, if you fall, and I'm sure people do fall. I was talking to a friend of mine, I won't mention by name, but he was practicing with the West Coast SEALs, and he was telling me about accidents on ropes courses.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 9:35Tim Ferriss?

  And how people fall. So, all right, so you do the 40 feet.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  So, we do that. You do it once, then you do it three times, so, and it's a quick evolution. You finish, they check the box, training certified at 40 feet, okay? So, you think you've accomplished something, and then Chief Petty Officer, Chief says, "All right, we're going up." So, then you climb up to 90 feet. That's a long way up, and now you're looking at a plank, and they're just handing you rope, and I'm hesitating, and I'm thinking, I can't hesitate, or it's, you know, you, this isn't what you do in the special operations world, of course, and I don't want this, this Chief Petty Officer SEAL getting all, all angry with me. So, he hands it to me, so I'm thinking, I gotta come up with something to say to, to, to try to defer this at least a few moments. So, I said, "Chief, quick question," I said,

• 10:20Speaker 03

  "any difference between up here versus down there, 90 feet versus 40 feet?" And of course, I meant difference in technique, and I was just trying to make conversation at that point. And he says, "Oh, yes, sir, yes, sir." I said, "Chief, what is it?" With all of his wisdom, he said, "If you fall down there, you get an open casket."

• 10:40Speaker 03

  And he hands it to me and he goes, "Go!"

• 10:44Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks, Coach.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. And thankfully, of course, I survived. So I had great teachers.

• 10:51Tim Ferriss?

  Good God. I mean, I, we were discussing a number of things. Everything is fine. It's safe as long as you remain calm.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Like most things in life.

• 11:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I said, "That's how a lot of dangerous things can be presented." And we started talking about man on wire, which is how this came up. And I mean, you can look at my hands. I don't know what it says about me. Maybe I'm bad at thermal regulation, but I'm just pouring sweat. I'm very sensitive to heights. And it's part of the reason that I took up bouldering and belay rock climbing sometime ago. Just try to therapeutically fix that. I haven't yet succeeded.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, how did that work?

• 11:26Tim Ferriss?

  It actually helped quite a bit. I just had to use copious amounts of chalk. It addressed my perception of danger. It did not affect the hand sweating. So I just used disgusting amounts of chalk, which is true when I deadlift too. Maybe I just sweat a lot in general. Let's start way back in the beginning. And I love speaking with my friends in this somewhat unnatural interview format because I get to do the 20 questions that would seem so odd if I did it at dinner or something like that.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. Or that I wouldn't answer.

• 11:59Tim Ferriss?

  Or that you wouldn't answer, right. So now compelled by the recorder in front of us. What was your childhood like? Could you describe your family and upbringing?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Sure. So I grew up in northern New Jersey. And my mom's family was from Italy. My dad's family was from Ireland. They were both first generation. They met when they were young. And I was born in 1967. My dad had served in the Marines and was a cop in northern New Jersey. We lived in Englewood, New Jersey, just kind of right by the George Washington Bridge. And, you know, from when I remember the early years, it was pretty nice, fun. We lived in small, little garden apartments. And in these garden apartments, my dad's brother lived, who was also a cop. My grandfather, the Italian from Naples, was the superintendent to the apartments. All my cousins lived there. It was, you know, it was kind of like a commune

• 12:51Speaker 03

  if you were for the family. And things were good, but I, you know, there was an, I think there are those things in life that change you or have an impact. And for me, it was... In January nineteen seventy-five, when I woke up one morning and learned that my dad, who was a cop, my hero, had died on duty the night before, was killed in a tragic car accident. It was Super Bowl Sunday. And life changes a lot. You know, by that point, we very quickly moved in with my grandparents, who lived the next town over. They had a nine-hundred-square-foot home that my grandfather built after World War II, two-bedroom, one

• 13:34Speaker 03

  bath. Grandma, grandpa, and my then-twenty-or-so-year-old aunt in one bedroom. And me, mom, and my then-four-year-old brother, I was seven. A four-year-old brother in the other bedroom, right after dad died. So, things change, yeah. And, and you, I think in those, you know, was surrounded by lots of love. And, you know, I think what my mom did to keep us together, what my grandparents did, everybody, what the police community did for us, was, was really remarkable. And those are things you never forget.

• 14:09Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so ashamed that I somehow didn't know that. I feel like I should have known that, and I didn't. How is that, if it has, I can't imagine that it hasn't affected the person you are today. I mean, how, how did that change you?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  You know, obviously, you know, you, you miss your dad a lot. But I think it forces you to grow up really fast, Tim. And for me, it really, I think, was probably two lessons. One, that a lot of people, you know, may rely on you in life. You know, for me, it was my then-four-year-old brother, even my mom, in, in a way. She had to go to work. And she went to work, you know, she'd been a professional administrative assistant earlier in life, then was raising us, and then had to be a, become a waitress at the, you know, in, in northern New Jersey. So, a lot of people, I realized at an early age, you know, may, may rely on me for whatever that may be. That was one really, really important lesson.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  And number two is it's okay to rely on others. It's okay to ask for help. And we did, I did, a lot. And you know, those things change and you move on and it stiffens you, realize you gotta be independent. You know, the world is full of setbacks. I had a friend years ago, whose dad once told me, "Life is a series of challenges and your happiness in life is directly related to how well you deal with those challenges." And that was one really big challenge really early on.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  So we, I think this is gonna be a recurring theme that we'll come back to quite a bit in this conversation. But before we go down that route, what were your strengths and weaknesses as a kid? Or quirks? What's, I wanna, I have this picture of like a mini Captain America.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Really mini.

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  That's how I think of that.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Never got past five foot six, right?

• 16:06Tim Ferriss?

  But what were you like at, let's say, 10 years of age? What were your strengths, weaknesses, or any defining behaviors, characteristics? Good student, bad student?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was a good student. I worked hard. I learned early on in life, you know, to study is a road to success. My grandfather didn't finish the seventh grade. And I, even before my dad died, would spend a lot of time with him. You ever been in Fort Lee, New Jersey? And you see those big apartment buildings that rise across the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey? When I was a little kid, they weren't there. That was an amusement park, Palisades Amusement Park. So one of the first buildings that went up, my grandfather was a superintendent. He was a handyman, he can fix anything. But my mom was working and somebody had to watch me. So I was, I don't know, four or five years old and I used to go to those apartment buildings with my grandpa. And he'd show up with his toolbox. And I said, "Grandpa, I want a toolbox too."

• 17:01Speaker 03

  He said, "Oh, absolutely." And he gave me a toolbox with a couple of real tools in it. And I'd go around with them all day long and he'd be fixing dishwashers or door jams or whatever. And I'd bang a hammer, try to help. Because, boy, this is grandpa, I wanna either do this or I wanna be a cop like that. And what grandpa did, and I didn't realize it till many years after, was over the course of that year, he would slowly take the tools out of the toolbox and put books in.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  And after I got bored with swinging a hammer, and when I realized even at four or five years old, I wasn't very good at swinging a hammer. I'd just start reading the books. So, you know, I tried to be, tried to be a good student. I think I was a pretty decent student. A lot of, again, a lot of good teachers along the way. Tried to be an athlete, and I was a perfectly mediocre athlete. Good enough usually to make the team and never nearly good enough to stand out on that team.

• 17:58Tim Ferriss?

  What were your sports?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  I played baseball and by high school wrestled as well. So, you know, sports that a guy who's five foot six and 155 pounds as an adult could play as a kid. Football I played. I was, you know, I think in fourth grade I went out and made the football team. I started as a lineman. I was about average size maybe in fourth grade. And then everybody kept growing. And I, I wasn't growing quite as fast as everybody. So by, you know, fifth, sixth grade, I was a linebacker. Then I was a running back. Then I was a free safety. And by ninth grade, I went to Bergen Catholic High School in New Jersey. Football powerhouse. My sophomore year in high school, they were ranked number two in the nation. So freshman year, I'm going out for the football team.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  That lasted about five days. I realized this, I love football. This is not a sport in which I should participate safely. No matter how calm I tried to be, I should not participate. So, you look, a decent student and, you know, mediocre athlete. You know, always tried to, you know, my friends always made fun of me. I always seemed to have the hair kind of parted and combed right.

• 19:06Tim Ferriss?

  You still do?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's funny. My daughter Megan pointed that out over Christmas. And we were talking about something or other, and it was really windy. I came in and she goes, "Oh, my God, it can move." I said, "What?" She goes, "Your hair." She said, "I was told it hadn't moved since 1968." I said, "Thanks, Meg. That's very, very, very thoughtful."

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  I only wish I could have perfectly parted hair. Alas, my options are limited these days. Jason Statham or bust is sort of my, my motto for styling, but.

• 19:41Tim Ferriss?

  What did you think you were going to be when you were in high school, when you grew up? What did you, what did you think you were going to be? Or hope to be?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  For, yeah, you know, I, I always had been focused on, on the military. I think with my dad being in the Marines and, and my uncle in the Navy and, and there being police officers, there was always that sense of, um, you know, patriotism and responsibility and wanting to serve the country. So I spent a fair amount of time thinking about, you know, going in the military in high school and also thought about being a lawyer even in high school.

• 20:16Tim Ferriss?

  And how did you decide on college? And actually, before I get to college, did you have any particular, I'll ask the same question for college, so if you want to just skip ahead, you can do that. Did you have any particularly impactful mentors or people who left a mark on you in those high school years?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know what? So I went to Bergen Catholic High School. It's taught by the Christian Brothers or, you know, they were founded in Ireland, the Irish Christian Brothers.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  They were, they were a good order. You know, I think they taught us well. I really can't point to any one particular person in high school. I think, you know, in terms of a mentor, somebody who taught me about life, um, for a male role model, it would certainly be my grandfather.

• 21:02Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose where to attend college or how did you end up attending the school you did?

• 21:08Speaker 03

  So I actually spent the first couple of years of, of college at the Naval Academy. Got an appointment from our senators and that kind of took me on the course in the military. And then again, you know, we make our plans and, and God laughs. So I got to our, my second year at the Naval Academy. And after the first year, you go through the physical and they actually checked the box. Uh, I couldn't, my eyes weren't 2020, checked the box, not qualified to fly because by then at 18, 19 years old, I was going to be the world's greatest F-14 pilot. And then, boy, that was a real setback. It's been thinking, you know, I, I was going to do this, now I can't do it. Well, maybe I'll be a Marine out of the Naval Academy or something else. And then just started to think about, you know, was that the right fit for me and the

• 21:53Speaker 03

  19 year old struggling and finally made the decision that, um, I was going to voluntarily resign from the Naval Academy. Took me months to come to that decision. By that point, I'd been accepted to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and loved the academics, the curriculum. Eileen was also then in college. It was my high school girlfriend and now wife. So the thought of living in Washington was attractive and I did, with a good degree of hesitation, sign that letter of resignation. I did put in that letter that someday I would like to wear a uniform again and someday if I would like the honor to serve our country.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  And I left it at that in whatever that was, 1987 or so, and went to Georgetown, finished Georgetown.

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

  What did you study at Georgetown?

• 22:43Speaker 03

  So I was in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.

• 22:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I'm going to plead ignorance here. I should know what that entails and I just don't.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  So, so-

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  What's the curriculum?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:55Tim Ferriss?

  What is done at such a place?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  So it's one of the four or so colleges at Georgetown. Bill Clinton graduated from the School of Foreign Service many years before me. So SFS. It stands for School of Foreign Service. We used to say it stood for Safe From Science. It had no math and no science requirements. Years back, it was a school set up to train diplomats. It's since become a liberal arts college with a strong emphasis on international relations. I majored in international economics. Excellent program. I had phenomenal teachers, people like Madeleine Albright, Jean Kirkpatrick, William Colby, who had been director of the CIA. I mean, remarkable people. Great, great school. And then from there, thought, well, okay, maybe I will be a lawyer after all, and applied

• 23:41Speaker 03

  to law schools. Was accepted to a couple, one of which was the University of Notre Dame. Now, I'd thought about Notre Dame as a college, but Naval Academy trumped it and then Georgetown, for a whole bunch of reasons, made sense. And I'll share this with you. So I talked about my dad passing away. So the first time I ever watched it, so people think Notre Dame, they think, ah, college football or sports. And yeah, we have great sports and athletics programs at Notre Dame and certainly great academics. I didn't know anything about Notre Dame beyond that. So as a little kid, the first time I ever watched a football game, I was seven years old. My dad said, oh, we gotta watch a football. I said, Dad, I don't want to watch a football game. He goes, no, no, it's Notre Dame. I'm like, what is that? He's like, watch.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  And my dad was one of the subway alums, meaning he never went to Notre Dame, never went to college, never even went to South Bend, Indiana. But he just loved the school, loved the spirit, tradition, all of that. So, all right. So I kind of whined and complained and I watched it. It was the Sugar Bowl, 1975, Notre Dame versus Alabama. So we're watching this game and all of a sudden I'm cheering, but by the end of it, I'm totally taken in with the mystique of Notre Dame and the gold helmets. I just love these gold helmets. Notre Dame wins the game 13 to 11 over Bama. So I said to my dad, I said, Dad, this is great. And he smiled. I said, yeah, I'll never forget this. I said, Dad, I want one of those gold helmets. He said, tomorrow we're going to Sears in Hackensack, New Jersey, and we're gonna get the gold helmet. I said, great. So we go the next day, go to the football

• 25:10Speaker 03

  helmet section, the athletic department there. And I'm looking, I'm like, Dad, there's no gold helmet. He said, no, no, this is how you do it. So he takes a generic helmet off the shelf, goes to the hardware section, gets a can of gold spray paint. And he says, we're gonna spray paint it. That's how you make a Notre Dame helmet. So we go home, we spray painted together, and I had my Notre Dame helmet. That was January 2nd, 1975. My dad died 10 days later. Oh, my God. And I still have that helmet, Tim, and that memory and the affection, affinity, respect for a place like Notre Dame carried with me. But I came down to, you know, I had a couple of schools to choose from. Notre Dame was one of them. I'd never been to South Bend.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  I didn't have the money to go visit by the end of college, literally. So I said, well, it's now or never. So I checked the box, sent in a hundred dollar deposit and said, well, I'm going to Notre Dame Law School. And, and I did.

• 26:08Tim Ferriss?

  And I should point out also that your fondness for Notre Dame extends to our selection of, of cable colors for today's interview.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  I have a, I have, I have a blue shirt on. You asked, do I want green, orange or yellow? I said, well, yellow looks like gold. I'll take blue and gold. It's right now, I really gotta love Notre Dame. My daughter Megan's a sophomore there. So we'll talk more about Megan a little bit, but so it was great. And then I, you know, practiced law for a few years after that at a great firm in Indianapolis. I get bored sometimes real easily with things.

• 26:43Tim Ferriss?

  What type of law were you practicing?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  I was a litigator, was a trial attorney. So I did that for a couple of years. Great people, great firm. I was just kinda itching for something else. And on a lark, I applied to business school and the people up at Harvard, I still think it was a clerical error. But they were, you know, accepted us. We were married, Eileen and I. We had a one year old, a nice house, nice life in Indianapolis and picked it all up to move to Boston. And it was one of the best decisions we ever made.

• 27:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why was it such a good decision?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  We made some of the greatest friends that we still have today. And what was neat about the business school up there, what's, I think, very different about business versus law in terms of the education. We, we spent a lot of time on understanding through the case study method, of course, in business school. How do businesses really work? At least as best as you can in a case study method.

• 27:39Tim Ferriss?

  Can you describe that? Because I had a professor at Princeton, Ed Shaw, who had a huge impact.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Oh, Ed's great, wonderful.

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Ed, so for those people who don't know the names, he is just a phenomenal human being and and a very eclectic character, which I love. So former competitive figure skater, former congressman, took at least one company, I think a few companies public. Was the first computer science professor at Stanford, I believe, because somebody didn't show up to teach it. And he said, sure, I'll figure out how to teach that course. And he taught a class at Princeton in high-tech entrepreneurship after leaving Harvard Business School. And he used the case study method, or yeah, it was a case study. Am I saying that correctly? Could you describe what that looks like in practice?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Right. So you show up at most colleges, most schools. What do you do? You go get all your textbooks, right? At HBS, our first year at the business school, we didn't have any textbooks. You instead go to the case distribution office. And I don't know how they do it now, but 20 years ago, every class was one case. In your course of two-year study, you will do 800 case studies. So I'll give you an example. So first day, first class, it was technology and operations management, kind of a tech ops manufacturing type course. Now, having been a lawyer and spent most of my life avoiding math and science, I get this case, I'm like, alright, I gotta do this. I gotta get it together. So it was a case called Donner Drilling. Never forget about it.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Company, they're manufacturing widgets or whatever they're making. And we had to calculate the optimum throughput for manufacturing for the most cost-effective and efficient manufacturing process. So I'm excited, I'm like, this is real business. This is what I came here for. And I'm looking at it, and the first thing I look, oh my God, I'm looking at the math that I gotta do on this. So you study this, and it's real life, it's an actual case study that a professor, usually with a research assistant, has gone out and interviewed the businessperson entrepreneur and taken the issue that they had and distilled it down to a case study for students. So now you prepare, you go into the class. Eighty of Us, first-year section, Steve Wheelwright, never forget the name, great guy, professor

• 29:51Speaker 03

  out there, the dean of the MBA program is teaching it. Just a legend at HBS. Brilliant, brilliant man. Now what they do is they begin with a cold call. So you don't know, somebody's gonna get called on. But unlike in law school, it's not a quick give and take and multiple cold calls. Every class, one person is selected randomly to begin the case and for a good 20 minutes, lay it out before the class then participates. So one of the great things about business school, and especially how they taught it up at HBS, is the students are, in many ways, teaching each other. And it's a discussion. So I get, of course, first class, first case.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Why don't we have, start us off, John Crowley. John, are you here? And I'm in the top deck and like, oh, God. Professor, yes, I'm here. I'm like, he's like, John, what do you think Donner Drilling should do? So I started laying out a strategy, a plan. And he's up there and I, now I gotta get to the math. So the equation, he's putting it all up there on the board and he's laying it out. And it, when I'm, it just makes no sense. And he's a nice guy, very patient. He starts looking back at me in the class. Uh, okay. And whenever a professor says, uh, okay, you're probably not going down the right path.

• 31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Not okay.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  So then finally, he starts writing the equations I'm giving him down. Then he just puts the chalk down and turns around and just looks at me. And then I just looked at him and it was this kind of awkward moment. And he just smiles in kind of a fatherly way. And I just said, well, Professor, when I applied, I was told there would be no math. And there's this awkward moment. I'm like, nobody's laughing. And then everybody burst out. And it really diffused the tension. But it's a great way to learn. And oftentimes, you know, we'd have the real executives or entrepreneurs in the class to teach us. A couple of years after I graduated, they actually wrote an HBS case study about our journey in life. So it's called, it's called A Father's Love.

• 31:52Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's jump into that. We can fill in gaps if and as needed. What does that case study cover? Why did they do a case study?

• 32:05Speaker 03

  So we graduated business school then in 1997. By that point, our son, John, was, John, about three years old. Our daughter, Megan, John was actually, Tim, two and a half. Megan was six months old. So we had Megan when we were in business school.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  About six months after we graduated, we realized by a year of age, Meghan, we had moved out here to the Bay Area in California. You know, life was great. I had a lot of student loans, but we had a great job. We had a life and this is, you know, starting the American dream, if you will. What were you doing for work at the time? I was, I worked with a consulting firm out here in the Bay Area doing, you know, business strategy consulting, a lot, a lot of hours, but, but great people and, you know, it's kind of what I signed up for. What we didn't sign up for is, you know, by a year of age, we realized our daughter, Meghan, who was born seemingly very perfectly healthy, born in Boston at the Brigham, wasn't doing the things that a kid typically should do by nine or 12 months of age.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  She wasn't pulling up in the crib. She wasn't taking her first steps. So from pediatrician to neurologist to next neurologist to blood work to biopsies. And by this point, early 1998, Eileen is pregnant with our third child, Patrick. Patrick is born March 6, 1998. Seven days later, we're asked to come to the neurologist office at Oakland Children's Hospital across the bay here. And we're told all the tests came back on Meghan, who was then 15 months old, and that she had a rare neuromuscular disease called Pompe disease. I'd never heard of it. There's no history of it in the family.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Eileen and I were silent carriers. You know, any person is a carrier generally for maybe a dozen or so serious genetic diseases, but you don't, it doesn't manifest until you happen to make a baby with somebody else who has that. And even then, oftentimes, just a one in four chance. So no health history in our families. And then we, you know, I asked the doctor, is it serious? He says, yes, it's very serious.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  And his hands are shaking and he's reading it, basically reading a textbook to us describing the disease and he tells us Meghan has a genetic defect where she can't make a certain enzyme. And without that enzyme, she can't break down glycogen stored in the muscle, which as you know, is stored until it's converted to glucose and used as muscle energy. Because of that, it's ravaging her muscles. And now we're just, you know, we're just in shock. And then I said, Doc, how serious? He said, I don't think she'll live another year. And then he said, we had Patrick with us. He was seven days old. He was in the car carrier. He said,

• 35:09Speaker 03

  and, and your son Patrick should be tested too. There's a 25% chance he may have the disease as well. And I gotta tell you, we went through that car ride, Tim, home back, we were living in Walnut Creek, near Oakland at the time, just in stunned silence. You know, we then, even just that night, we went through, I got walking through the door at the house, seeing Meghan sitting there in her high chair. I couldn't even look at her. We went through that night, the shock, the grief, the denial, a lot of tears. And then Eileen went to bed and I kind of stayed up late. You know, Google wasn't even around,

• 35:53Speaker 03

  but I did some internet searching. And I found that there was, there was a doctor at Duke University, there's a little bit of research being done. In fact, he had just published a month earlier, a paper showing that he could correct the disease in, in some animal models of the disease. And I was so excited and I woke Eileen up and I'm explaining, I'm rattling off this science. I know anything about science. And she looked at me like, what are you even talking about? What does it mean? I said, I think, Eileen, it means there may be some hope.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  So that was a long day. It was a Friday the 13th. Never forget.

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  Cannot even imagine. That is, sounds like the longest of days.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  It was the start of many long days, but it was a long day.

• 36:36Tim Ferriss?

  So, I don't want to interrupt, but why don't you tell us the story in a way that makes sense to you to tell it. And of course, this is something that would follow as well that as well has been turned into a book. It has been turned into a movie. But for those people who don't know the context, what happened after that?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  So, you know, Tim, right at that day after that Friday the 13th, after Meghan was diagnosed, I took the next couple of weeks and really dug deep into, you know, what was this disease? This Pompe disease that we had never heard of. It is one of 50 or so muscular dystrophies. Started to figure out who are the leading scientists working in it. There were very few. Couple here in the States, principally one at Duke University and a team over in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. And I began to reach out to them, began to take Meghan to see them. And that was hard too, because we had a newborn at home, we had a three-year-old at home, and I had a job a year out of business school that was expecting me to work 100 hours a week,

• 37:43Speaker 03

  you know, on an easy week. But this, you know, had to take priority. This was the most urgent matter as you can think about that you could imagine. So, you know, look, I'll give you the somewhat brief version of it. We go through all of this. We find some of the doctors. We help raise money for some not-for-profit foundations to bring some more research money and raise about a million dollars in not-for-profit money in about a year. In the course of that year though, from Meghan and then Patrick's diagnosis, which came about a month later, confirmed that he had the disease, even though there was only a one in four chance that he would.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  You know, we were just determined. I had mentioned that we went through the shock, the grief, the denial, all of that very quickly. We very quickly settled on determination. We didn't know that we could ever change the course of their disease, but I didn't want to have to live the rest of our lives wishing that we had tried. So we said we would try. And we tried through the not-for-profit world. We raised money, eventually found a researcher with some very exciting science at the University of Oklahoma, a medical research center out there. He couldn't get any traction raising money, wanted to start a small company. I tried to introduce him to entrepreneurs, funders, nothing. By that point, we had already moved

• 39:00Speaker 03

  back to New Jersey. I was working for a big pharmaceutical company, Bristol-Myers Squibb, position in marketing, good health insurance. I had some great mentors there. I did not go to Bristol-Myers to learn kind of a boot camp of how do you run a biotech or biopharma company. I did it because it was in New Jersey. It was a good job, good health insurance, good people. But at nights and on the weekends, kept raising money for the not-for-profit, raising awareness of the disease, and in the midst of that, struggling to keep Meghan and Patrick alive. Meghan first, and then Patrick. Her ability to eat went away within a few months. She had to be tube-fed. Her ability to breathe went away by the fall

• 39:44Speaker 03

  of 98. She had small pneumonia. She almost died in the hospital, had to be ventilated. And six months later, we went through all the same thing with Patrick, and he had to be ventilated. So within a year, we went from kids that were perfectly healthy, normal, to two little kids who were ventilator-dependent and wheelchair-bound. Science was beginning to show some promise, but we realized early on that it was going to be a race against time, as much as it was going to be against nature. So after two years of doing that, by 2000, and then working at Bristol-Myers, I had a choice. Either we could do this full-time, or we could, you know, let nature run its course. And again, we were so determined.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  So I quit my job at Bristol Myers, joined forces with that scientist in Oklahoma. We started a tiny little biotech company. I still had all the student loans, but we had had a house, had a little bit of equity. Real estate market in New Jersey was doing well at the time. So of course, what do you do? Took a home equity loan. So the first money into the company, we took a hundred thousand dollar home equity loan, all the equity in our house. Thought that would last a long time. It didn't. Then met payroll with a Visa and a MasterCard, very prestigious venture firms, a Visa and MasterCard.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Tier one.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, tier one. Oh, yeah, top tier. NEA came in right after them. So what ended up happening, we started this little company and we started that in March of 2000. Within a year, we had some early success. Yes, I put the early money in. We then raised angel money, raised 1.2 million dollars from 37 individuals. I mean, literally knocking on doors of people who I thought might be qualified investors. In Oklahoma, in New Jersey, it was family, it was friends. We did that, probably the toughest money I've ever raised, but it gave us breathing room, gave us room to do some research. We began discovering a treatment.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  What we had to do was to make an enzyme therapy to basically replace the enzyme that Meghan and Patrick and people living with Pompe couldn't make. That company ended up becoming very successful, attracting, within a year, the attention of a lot of people. And I think it was successful, Tim, because we literally did not know what we were doing. I was 30, 32 years old. Yeah, I had some good degrees and an education, but I had no idea how to be an entrepreneur. Certainly had no idea what you do as a biotech CEO. So I made it up. And because of that, we broke so many of the conventional rules. I think that's why we were able to beat time as well as nature.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  So by the fall of 01, we said, I need more money and I need more manufacturing capabilities to actually make this drug. It was starting to show some promise and some early science results in the labs. And so made the decision that we would sell the company. We sold it to Genzyme, at the time, the largest rare disease biotech company in the world, founded by Henry Tremere, a magnificent entrepreneur with a real passion for people living with these diseases. But still, it was a big company and it was our competitor. That is what the case study was about. So the HBS case study, Novazyme, a father's love, was the choice that I had, presented to our venture investors one year into that business.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Do we sell the company to Genzyme? Or do I do a large partnership with a deal that we had negotiated with Genentech, which would have brought them into the rare diseases? Decided to sell the company to Genzyme. Because I knew at Genzyme, as much as I respect Genentech, at Genzyme, this program had to succeed. So what we ended up doing is... Because for them, rare diseases were their business. They knew this would become, and it did become, their most expensive development program ever. Hundreds of millions of dollars. A very difficult program. Very difficult drug to make, medicine to make. Lots of challenges when I was at... I stayed at Genzyme. I was Senior Vice President of Therapeutics at Genzyme.

• 43:52Tim Ferriss?

  Can I interject for a second?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  By all means.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  At this point, were your children already... Were they already being treated?

• 43:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 44:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  So by the time we came to Genzyme, Genzyme had other Pompe drugs in development. We brought our technologies in. We had a choice of drugs and technologies. We ran a series of experiments and we backed one. It was one that came from the Genzyme Science Labs. Children began to be treated. We saw some remarkable results early on. So in Pompe disease, not only are the skeletal muscles weak, the cardiac muscle is very weak. By that point, Meghan and Patrick, who were four and two or so years old, not only were their muscles weakening, not only did they need ventilators to breathe, their hearts were so enlarged that that was the most life-threatening aspect of the disease.

• 44:43Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick question. So glycogen's also stored in the liver, if I'm thinking correctly.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  It is. Glycogen's stored in many places in the body.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  So does it also cause problems in organs like the liver?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yes. So what you see in the livers, their livers became enormously enlarged. That wasn't actually a life... immediate life-threatening aspect.

• 45:02Tim Ferriss?

  The cardiac.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  It was the cardiac and then the pulmonary, the breathing. And then, obviously, quality of life with the loss of skeletal muscle strength. So when we were at Genzyme, we were moving full steam. We had lots of resources, great people. We had manufacturing facilities, all the ingredients for success, beginning to treat kids, seeing that their cardiac disease was reversed, in some cases even seeing strengthening of muscles. But I couldn't get my own kids treated. The protocols that the teams had developed were for younger children. I gotta tell you, one of my toughest days, Tim, was August of 2002. We were doing a family vacation down at the Jersey Shore, still working away like many people do on vacation.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  The day before, we took the kids to the doctor. They did echocardiograms. The doctors told us that, at that point, Meghan had about a year to live, Patrick maybe six months. We had a drug. It was in kids. It was reversing their heart damage. But my kids weren't yet on that drug. The next day, I got a call from a colleague at Genzyme, who said that a decision was made. The next study with the next material would be in Pompeii infants. And that he knew my kids wouldn't qualify. That was a really, really tough day.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Thankfully, a lot of good doctors, good people at Genzyme, and eventually a small Catholic hospital in New Jersey agreed, St. Peter's University Hospital in New Brunswick, agreed that they would treat our kids. But that was months and months of back and forth discussion, negotiation. It makes for some very dramatic scenes in the movie. Geeta Anand captures it in her book very well. And then by January of 2003, January 9th, what would have been my dad's birthday, my kids were treated. They became the 27th and 28th patients in the clinical study. And that was a great day.

• 47:06Tim Ferriss?

  So much, so many things I'd like to ask. So let's start with what comes to mind, which is during that period that you just reflected on, just described, that makes for some very dramatic scenes in the movie and certainly compelling reading.

• 47:26Tim Ferriss?

  And you can, you can answer this however you'd like. Were there any particular negotiations or conversations that were critically important in that period? And how did you handle them?

• 47:40Speaker 03

  There were many, and I handled them poorly. So, look, by that, that was the most desperate I ever have been in my life, Tim. Literally, our kids' lives were on the line. At that point, I could care less about our career. We were blessed to have actually made some money so that we had a financial future that was secure for the kids, and that was wonderful. But obviously, the focus was on how do we get the kids treated? I was so frustrated that at one point, by September or so, I reached out to doctors who I knew who were going to be at a, going to be a clinical site for the study, asked them to treat my kids, to set up a protocol for them.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  I went down, I did it, it was at the University of Florida, and it made great sense, scientific sense, but it didn't follow the protocols within the company. And I thought at that point, you know what? Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Let's just get it, set it up, take the heat, heck, they could, heck, they could fire me. I don't care. When people found out, it was a very, very difficult day, and made for a lot of tension. Any trust that was there was then broken. For me, I felt it was worth the risk. I took the risk, and I lost. We weren't allowed to do it.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  There was a lot of conversations in the company, and ultimately, I fought it for a week or so, and then realized at that point, I've taken this as far as I can. Now it's out of my hands.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  And so I stepped back. They went to a hospital. That hospital then actually said, okay, I'm not going to run this. We'll let others run it. Then the FDA was comfortable. Genzyme, the company, was comfortable. This large academic teaching institution, their institutional review board that approves clinical studies would not approve it because the study included executives, children of an executive of the company whose drug was being studied. So now I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. That was then became not only a hard day for me and Eileen and the family, now it was a hard day for my colleagues at Genzyme because they were fighting very hard to get our kids treated at that point.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  And by that point, I had really just, I don't want to say given up, but prayed a lot, thought a lot, spent a lot of time with the kids. And then right around Thanksgiving, we learned that they were able to meet with an expert who knew the disease, who was at St. Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and that they were going to present it to their institutional review board for approval. I learned about it, was thankful, hopeful, prayerful, but just to make sure, I resigned. I quit. So that I did that the day before the hospital review board met. I didn't think it would be an issue.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  It wasn't an issue, but I don't want anybody to make an issue out of it. So I quit and I waited to hear. We got a card, a letter, first a phone call, and then a letter came Christmas Eve. And it was a Christmas card, a beautiful picture of the Blessed Mother on the cover with a copy of the hospital letter approving the study for Pompe disease at their center that would include our kids. That was the best Christmas present we've ever gotten. How did you respond to that? How does one? I can't even fathom. So I got the mail that day. It was Christmas Eve. And I looked at it and I read it. I cried.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  And I wanted to run in and share it with Eileen. I wanted to share it with Meghan, with Patrick. And I said, you know, I'm gonna wait a little bit. We had family, we had Eileen's family, her mom and dad, my mom coming over for Christmas Eve dinner. So they came over and, you know, we had a glass of wine and celebrating and nice Christmas. And Poppy, the kid's grandfather, read "Twas the Night Before Christmas." And I was just dying to share this. I was in really good mood. Eileen didn't know why I was in such a good mood, because it was the Cabernet, maybe. And then we sat down at dinner. We said grace, and I said, I have something else to share. And I read the card and the letter. So it was a good, it was a good Christmas Eve.

• 52:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good night.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  That was a good night.

• 52:12Tim Ferriss?

  That is a good night.

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna backtrack for a second. And you mentioned something I'd love to get just a few examples of. You said, we broke a lot of conventional rules because in a sense, you didn't, you didn't know any better.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 52:28Tim Ferriss?

  What were, what were some of the conventions that you broke or the things you did differently?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  So when you're developing a drug, one of the things you need to do is you kind of go through these rigorous series of experiments to show in, in animal models of the disease that it's safe and that it's actually working. You know, is it getting to the, the muscles in this disease? Is it breaking down the glycogen? Do the animals get stronger? Typically, you'll do that at, you know, outsourced companies that these are the experts, takes quite a bit of time and done again in a very rigorous fashion. Once we had made a little bit of that enzyme in the lab, I was just dying to see, is this gonna work? So, you know, we had genetically, actually, the NIH had genetically engineered mice to express or not express the protein to give them the Pompe disease, which my daughter

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Meghan still thinks is the meanest thing imaginable. And, you know, it's done very ethically and we had these animals, I had the enzyme. So I was with one of my colleagues, who is a senior vice president in my then 11-person company, because you're either a VP or you weren't in the company. And he said, well, I used to be a hospital tech. He said, I could do this. I said, well, yeah, let's try it. So when you do this, you've actually got to hit a really narrow vein in the tail of these animals to give it the injection. That's a really tough stick. So my buddy who hasn't drawn blood in about 10 years, he's there, we put, we do put gloves on in the lab, and he puts a little bit of the enzyme. Into the mouse. And I look at him and he looks at me, he goes, I think I got it in.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Okay. So we do that once a week for four weeks and then our scientists sacrifice, grind up the tissues. That's not how you do animal experiments. And I can assure you that that study failed. And I can give you a whole bunch of reasons why it failed. So those are, those are the hard lessons of things you shouldn't do. There were things though, that we did that were successful. So one of the things we did, I knew I had to make this drug in a way that we can deliver to humans. So it's known as a GMP facility, good manufacturing practice. Exactly. So you're familiar. So we actually invested and made a plant. I couldn't build a greenfield plant. Costs too much, takes forever. I met some entrepreneurs who had just begun to develop a system of basically building

• 54:47Speaker 03

  a building within a building, a clean room. And we could do it for a couple of million dollars and we had raised about 27 million at that point. So we did that and we did it at risk. We didn't have the definitive proof of concept in animals. But we did it very smart, very fast and very effectively. And although we'd never made the enzyme in that plant, because by that point, I realized I probably need a bigger plant, given the scale of what we needed to manufacture. Had we done it, it could have gotten us in the clinic. And where that was successful is it gave me a fallback if any of these partnerships at the acquisition didn't work. And when I negotiated the deal, instead of the big company on the other side saying, well, you need us because you can't make it, I could take them nice up.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Yes, I can make this. Look at this. And that was pretty unusual. People usually don't make those levels of investments and do it in a very unconventional way. So that was a good decision. Lots of bad decisions, but that was a good one. And now your children are healthy? So Megan and Patrick began receiving that enzyme therapy. It's an every other week IV administered therapy designed to replace the enzyme that they're missing. So they started that in January of '03 and then we waited. We got the first results back in early April.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  And the doctor came in with a smile and Meghan was sitting up in bed. And before she even got to the echocardiogram reports, she turned on the x-ray, you know, the light box had two x-rays, one of Meghan of her upper body. And you saw this, you didn't need to be a cardiologist, you saw this enormously enlarged heart. That was before her treatment 12 weeks ago. Then she put up the one that was taken earlier that day. And it was night and day, her heart had shrunk and back to normal. And I took it and I pointed, you know, took it to Meghan's bedside, showed her, explained, and she was all of, you know, what, six, six, five, six years old at the time, explained to her, she's a kindergartner.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  And I said, Meghan, this means you're going to live to be an old lady. And she looked at me and put her arm around me and gave me a big hug and a kiss and, and just said, thank you. Biotech is a really tough business, Tim. And almost everything we try, it doesn't work. But when it does work, it really is the best job you can have. So the medicine fixed the kids' hearts. For a while, it made them stronger, particularly Meghan. But after about a year or so, the strength improvements plateaued and then slowly began to regress.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  So a year into treatment, they were much better. Their lives were saved. We realized it was an effective first generation treatment, but it wasn't a cure. So what I realized then at that point, okay, I think we just bought a lot of time and some quality of life for the kids. They're still on ventilators, still in wheelchairs, but it helped them enormously. So I realized then, okay, I think we have to go do this again. We need to find next generation therapies, newer, potentially better medicines. And that's what led me to found this company, Amicus, in 2005. Do it again.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And how are your kids today? So the kids today, Meghan just turned 20. Patrick is 19 in March. They're 15, 15 months apart. Patrick is a senior in high school and Meghan is a sophomore at Notre Dame. Have many people like her gone through Notre Dame before? So, you know, with Notre Dame's mission, it's certainly welcoming of, of people who are intellectually capable of the rigorous academics, but who have disabilities. So we've at Notre Dame, we've had kids go through, we've had blind students, deaf students. There was a young man, Matt Swinton, who graduated with spinal muscular atrophy a number of years ago, Duchenne boys. So people with severe difficulties.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Meghan is the most physically challenged student ever to go through Notre Dame. She's the only student to have to live in a wheelchair on a ventilator with 24/7 nursing. So after she was admitted and she was hesitant to go so far away to school. I said, Meghan, if that's where you think you want to go, we will make this happen. So then I called folks at Notre Dame, well, I know, I said, okay, Meghan's coming. What are we going to do? And they said, don't worry, we'll do whatever we need to do. And I got to tell you, Tim, they stepped up. The ladies dorm that she lives in, Ryan Hall, was designed to be handicapped accessible. It had handicapped accessible suites. They combined suites for Meghan.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  They made every door of every building that she needs access to across campus accessible on her key fob. They've adjusted her class schedule. They've provided aides and tutors. It was still a big show getting her out to South Bend. Where I was most proud, you know, I told Meghan, I said, Meghan, if you get in, we'll get you there and we'll make sure with the university's help that we get you through. When we showed up, lots of getting used to, the nurses who came out to help, you know, they were all going to college again and, and, you know, they were excited, but, but apprehensive. We had planned for almost everything we could. And we had the nursing schedule, the hospital supply, they had the hospital bed moved in. Meghan wanted to live a full, wants to live a full college life.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  So she wants to be in, in the dorms. So she was in the dorms. One thing we hadn't thought about is Meghan's, you know, 20 year old young lady now weighs about 100 pounds. While you only need one nurse there to care for her, it takes two people to transfer her in and out of her wheelchair. I hadn't thought about who that second person is going to be. When I was in her dorm that second weekend, I was looking, I didn't even think about it. I saw the nursing schedule on the board, and then I saw a schedule next to it. It was students who had signed up in her dorm to be there seven times a day, at specific times, to get Meghan in and out of her wheelchair.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that gives me some hope for humanity.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  There are some great kids, indeed.

• 1:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  How have you raised your kids? Specifically, you can make it more generic if you'd like, but what do you think the principles of good parenting are?

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  So, I would say that we raised our kids, and my daughter Meghan would say that she raised us, and somewhere in between lies the truth. I, you know, some of the basic rules in life, if you want to teach them. So, you know, you try to teach them about hard work, about independence. One thing that's remarkable, though, I've learned with kids with special needs, and I've seen it not just with our kids, with lots of kids we've met over the years, is, and different from adults I've known who suffer with some awful diseases, these kids who live with these rare diseases, kids who live with cancers, they never feel sorry for themselves.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  And that's something I, you know, Eileen and I as parents could never teach them. That just has to be part of who they are. And I've seen that measure of resilience in these kids. I've seen it in our kids in spades, and I've certainly seen it in many, many other children with a lot of rare and devastating diseases. And because of that, you know, I kind of kid around, you know, Meghan says she raised us, but I have to tell you, for the things that we've tried to teach our kids about working hard and independence, and, you know, one of the lessons I try to teach our kids is that it's bigger than you. Whatever it may be, whatever you're working on, it's bigger than you.

• 1:02:32Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give me an example where that might apply? Or just describe what you mean by that?

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, we often kind of get enveloped in our own little universes. And even when we think we're helping others, sometimes we think a little bit too much about ourselves in the process. I try to teach our kids that, you know, there's a bigger purpose to life. I give an example. We took my son, John. Now, John does not have Pompeii disease, but John has Asperger's. John has his own challenges. We tried to raise him with a spirit of, you know, that sense of faith and community and a bit of giving back to others. Many, many, most parents do that. I took him down, when he was little, every year to Washington DC. We do a father-son trip. And I'd take him to the memorials and the monuments.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  And every year, I'd always take him to Arlington National Cemetery. We were there one year, and they were doing a special service, and it was to recognize wounded warriors. And it was right at the start of the Iraq War. It was 2003. And there was a young man there who had lost both his legs, a 19-year-old corporal in the Marine Corps. And they were giving a speech, and people going on. And I looked at John, and his eyes were wandering. He's got ADHD, and I'm just wondering, is he getting it? And I just looked at him. I said, "John, do you know what they're talking about?" He said, "Yes, Daddy." "What are they talking about?" He said, "That young man fought for our country.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  He lost his legs, and all these people in the cemetery lost their lives. He is a hero, and they are heroes." And I just thought of like, okay, he got it. In his own way, with, you know, his own special needs, he was able to articulate that it's bigger than him.

• 1:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  What would your advice be to parents? And there are almost certainly parents listening who either have kids with special needs or who will have kids with special needs. What would you say to them? What would your advice or otherwise be that you'd want to convey to them?

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  So we've, we tried really early to be a so-called normal family. And I could tell you, there was a lot of times early in life where we wanted, I wanted to have, you know, air quotes, "normal" kids. And sometimes I was mad and angry and frustrated. And sometimes I behaved very irresponsibly because I wanted a normal family, wanted to do normal things, wanted to just be able to take the kids and go to Burger King at night, go to the movies, things that, you know, all of our friends and many of our friends were doing. And then I realized that, and I tried teaching this to the kids, you know, we're all different. We're all special. You know, Meghan and Patrick, people may look at the two of them and I tell them, I said,

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  "Yes, people can look at you and realize you're different, but look, it's these differences in life that make us so special." You know, we talk about, you know, obviously racial diversity and sexual orientation, whatever it may be, that's part of the richness, the fabric of life. But it took me a while, even as a parent of actually three special needs kids, to realize that that's a gift in itself and it adds to the diversity in life. I'll tell you, so we talked about 2002, how that was a really tough year. Right after that beach trip, after the kids were diagnosed, I thought, "My God, Meghan's only going to live a few months, what do we do?" And Eileen said, "Here's what we're going to do, we're going to send her to kindergarten because that's what kids do when they're five years old."

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  And I pushed back and then finally said, "Well, okay, let's see." So we called the local school, we'd just moved to Princeton, and hi, the Crowleys were here and got to register our daughter Meghan for kindergarten and, oh, by the way, she's got this little issue you should probably know about. So they're like, "Okay." So they came and they visited the principal, the child study team, they met Meghan and they came back. The principal called me a day later, said, "John, great young lady, I just don't think our school, our public school is equipped for Meghan. We've never had a kid on a ventilator with a nurse and in a wheelchair, especially a kid, I didn't even tell them who may only live six or 12 months." And I said, "You know," I said, "Dr. Bob Ginsburg, wonderful principal," I said, "Bob," I said,

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  "I really think that she thrives around being with kids, with people, and I don't know how long she's going to live. I hope a long time, but I don't know." Would you, would you please give it a shot? And he said, okay. Thought about it, called me back, said, okay, Meghan can come to kindergarten. But John, would you do me a favor? Would you come in and talk to all the parents of the incoming kindergarteners? Dispel any myths, rumors, whatever. I did that, came in, told them what Pompe disease is, told them you kids can't catch it. And everybody kind of looked at me and shrugged and kind of half smiled. So I figured, okay, I bored them, but I did my job. So Meghan started kindergarten. Kindergarten year was great for Meghan. I mean, she loved it. She was the gym teacher, made up special routines for her in wheelchairs.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  She was going to the birthday parties. In the middle of that kindergarten year, she started getting that medicine such that by the second half of kindergarten, she was so much stronger. So then you go to kindergarten graduation. We get there and it's, you know, these kids, they get the little hats and diplomas and it's really cute. It's, it's fun for any parent and, and special for any little kid. And then Meghan was called to get hers and she got a lot of extra applause. And I was really proud. And then the principal came over to me and said, John, can I talk to you? I said, sure. He goes, um, you know, Meghan had a great year. You were right. I said, yes, thank you so much. What you did was remarkable and it really was. He said, but I want to share something with you. He said, right after you gave that talk eight months ago, he said, I got a lot of phone

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  calls and letters and emails from those parents. And the message was all the same. And it was basically, uh, look, I, beautiful young lady, we feel so sorry for her, but boy, kindergarten, such an important year and my son or my daughter just won't be able to learn in that environment. Could you please not put my child in that girl's class? And I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, first of all, you know, your feelings are hurt. And then you feel sorry for your, your kid that somebody would think that of them. And then he looks at me and says, John, and I tell you this for a reason. He said, in the last few weeks, I've gotten an awful lot of letters and calls and emails.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  And now I'm thinking, how's he going to tell me that she can't go to first grade here? And he said, the message is, is all consistent. It's all the same. And it's, um, you know, Dr. Ginsberg.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Look, we know it's difficult and this is hard to ask, but our son or our daughter learned so much and had such a great time with Meghan in kindergarten. If there's any way that they can be in her first grade class, we'd owe you the world. And I thought, and then you know, you get emotional thinking about it. And then I thought about, you know, Meghan was just trying to be a normal kindergartner. And she didn't have to teach those kids. What I found is first day kids asked, came up and said, you know, kind of looked at her funny, said, what's wrong with you? And she said, oh, I have a disease. My legs and arms don't work, but my mind does. And they'd look, they'd shrug their shoulders, say, okay, you want to go play a game? Kids got over it in like 30 seconds. The parents

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  were the ones who had the problem. So think about it. What ended up happening was Meghan, without ever knowing it, by her example and by just being a kid, taught those big people a really important lesson. And I think it was a real lesson about the importance of diversity. And what people with special needs and physical disabilities, whatever the challenge in life physically or medically may be, can bring such a richness to the life of others. And for me as a parent, that was a real lesson that, you know what, little people can teach us big people an awful lot if we just listen. So maybe it is true that everything you needed to learn in life, you needed to learn in kindergarten.

• 1:10:39Tim Ferriss?

  I was at the bad table a lot in kindergarten. Well, actually, no, I got, I got in a fight and I had to write a letter, which was apologizing for punching some other kid in the privates. My mom kept this letter. And I was put at the bad table and then I didn't do anything bad, but the teacher forgot it was the bad table. So I just sat there all year. So you can psychoanalyze that. Who knows where that has led.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, this explains a lot, can't you realize? It clears up a lot for a lot of listeners.

• 1:11:04Tim Ferriss?

  It was Dennis and myself were the two kids isolated at the bad table. The teacher forgot it was the bad table. But I wanted to ask you. About the challenge, perhaps, of trying to help kids with rare diseases. And I ask because here we are, sitting in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco right now. And the first thing many entrepreneurs do is, or one of the first things, they think about their total addressable market for a given product or service. How does one create a company that is economically viable when trying to develop drugs or treatments for rare diseases? Is it a matter of having a large portfolio of different diseases?

• 1:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  How does that work?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Sure. So there are 7,000 known rare diseases that, together, just in the United States, affect about 30 million people. So individually, by definition, rare, taken together, they're actually more prevalent than all HIV and all cancers combined. The challenge, of course, is they're all unique and they all need their own unique medicines. So what we typically do is we'll begin with, okay, is it a rare disease? If it is, how rare is it? When we first got into this, it used to be if a disease was below 5,000 or 10,000 prevalence, it was just too small. There was no economic model to sustain it. It's now come down, though.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  I think with the advancements in technology, with regulatory science just beginning to understand faster paths to approve these medicines, that now is coming down to probably around 500 or 1,000. If you have a disease with, call it 500 or 1,000 or more patients, you can build an economic model to support that. So for us, when we look at, will we work in a rare disease? Is it devastating? Do we have a technology that can apply? Can that technology make a meaningful difference for these patients? And the last thing we look at is, and how many patients have the disease? So with that model, you can get to many of these diseases, not all.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  We still have, we can't figure out yet, what do you do with these rare diseases that affect 5, 10, 100 patients? There, NIH, other areas could fill in the gap, perhaps, but we can make a big dent in it.

• 1:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  What keeps you going at this point? What are your main drivers?

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  So it's not a lot different than it was 10 or 20 years ago. So in business, you know, now that we've got Amicus and the whole notion there is that we were going to make medicines for rare diseases, devastating disorders.

• 1:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  How did you choose the name?

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  So Amicus in Latin, of course, means friend. We wanted the company to be the most patient-centered biotech company in the universe. So we thought, well, if you're going to be, you know, there are a lot of great names in biotech companies. They're all usually named after Greek gods of healing or complex science names. We thought friend biotechnologies just sounded a little too cute. But if you, if you Latinized it up a little bit, all of a sudden Amicus, it's got some weight, some gravitas.

• 1:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's very highbrow.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  But, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very sophisticated. But if you look at it, it just means friend.

• 1:14:25Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. I took you off your train of thought, though.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 1:14:29Tim Ferriss?

  And you're just describing, let me try to rewind my brain here.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  You ask what keeps me going and...

• 1:14:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And you said it hasn't changed much.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Hasn't changed much. So for me, it was a focus on, you know, how can you, as an entrepreneur, because I'm not a scientist, I've learned a lot of science over the years. Years ago, hired tutors at night to teach me science. So in being immersed in the field, you have to learn it. So for me, it's, it's how can you use, you know, the vehicle of entrepreneurship to drive medicine? And I've always believed if you make great medicines, push science as far and as fast as you can, you'll figure the business model out. You'll, you'll make great value. You look at the great biotech companies today, the Genentechs out here, the Amgens, Genzymes, they all started the same way. They started with a couple of scientists, a couple of venture capitalists, and some

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  entrepreneurs. Every bi, every great biotech company, you can't point to one that was a spin-out or a bunch of mergers. They started that way. And that's what I've tried to do, and that's what we're trying to do at Amicus now. One difference is, early in my career with the first company at Novazyme, I thought it was a sprint, and in some respects, it was. Now that the kids have a medicine, even though it's not a cure, and not, I don't think, the best, most effective treatment, it's now enabled me to change my view, Tim, that it's a marathon. So with that... Yes, we can move incredibly fast, but we can look for the best science and push it for Pompeii disease or for any disease that we're looking at. And if we do that,

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  we can do some and have done some really great things.

• 1:16:09Tim Ferriss?

  How and when did the military re-enter the picture?

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, September 11th. After 9/11, I thought, you know, maybe I have some skills and certainly have a lot of passion and two hands that I can contribute. So went through the whole process and was commissioned an officer in the Navy Reserve a couple of years after September 11th. Actually was sworn into the Navy by my Naval Academy roommate, Ed Deviney, who is a Navy commander at the time. It just so happened, I didn't realize it, but they told me the office after I went through the two-year application process and because I was becoming an intelligence officer, a year-long background check. So I miraculously passed the background check and they gave me all the top secret and other

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  clearances. And then I got this letter saying, "Report on such-and-such date for your swearing in." I called the officer in charge. I said, "Hey, would it be okay if Commander Deviney," now he's pretty high-ranking in the Navy at this point, "was there to swear me in?" And this young officer said, "Well, yeah, of course." Gave me the address, some street lower Manhattan. I didn't realize it was a Navy Reserve recruiting office overlooking the World Trade Center site.

• 1:17:20Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  And that was pretty emotional.

• 1:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I'll try to tread carefully here. I don't want to get in territory that you can't talk about, but you've had experiences with elite units, would that be a fair phrase to put it, or a fair way to put it? I'm wondering what you think the characteristics are, because if we look back to, say, baseball and so on, you're like, "Well, you know, I was 5'6", 150 pounds. I wasn't the super athlete." What are the characteristics do you think that have... Made you successful in that world as well and capable.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  You know, I was fortunate in the military in the 11 years I spent in the Navy Reserve, Tim, as an intelligence officer, I was assigned for most of that time to the Joint Special Operations Commander, JSOC. So I got to work with some of the most elite units in our military. And, you know, you talk about serving in the company of heroes. I mean, these men and women, just remarkable. And I was fortunate enough to have coworkers at Amicus as we started that and then even as a public company. There was a time I was told I was the only public company CEO who was an active duty reservist in the country. I served three periods of active duty in addition to the reserve duty, including a deployment to Afghanistan.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  There I was, I served as a deputy chief of intelligence for a counter terror task force. So I got to put a, you know, very small dent in the universe in terms of things that were important to me to contribute to. And one thing, you know, what carries over from life, from business to the military, for me, certainly in biotech, you've got to be persistent. It's that resiliency that, you know, in biotech, again, almost everything we try doesn't work. And you've got to have the stomach for that. You've got to have that sense of this has to work. In biotech, for me, it certainly had to work because our kids' lives depended on it. That was something anybody who's been in the military knows, and especially when you're

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  deployed, it has to work. You cannot fail, not just because the mission is so important, but because, you know, you've pledged your lives to the people around you. And that is a very, very sacred commitment and oath and something that I was in awe of every day. I believe that serving in the military was the greatest honor of my life. And it's something I'm proud of, but that taught me as much about life and certainly sacrifice and having done it during the course of war, wartime, and the people who I served with, what they sacrificed, many of whom who lost their lives, is something I will certainly never forget and was an honor for me.

• 1:20:07Tim Ferriss?

  In the, could be in the civilian sphere, in business, or elsewhere, but when you are feeling uncertain of what to do next, or perhaps are overwhelmed in some way, a lot of inputs or otherwise, what's your process for figuring out what to do?

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  I try to think about, okay, what's the situation and what are my options? So take it to business. When we started Novazyme, when I started Amicus, I didn't build the business plan from kind of the bottoms up. What I've always started with is, what's the vision? What do we want to look like in five years, in 10 years? And work backwards from there. So if you set the vision, then think about, okay, big vision, what are the barriers to get there? And for me, early on in Novazyme, for instance, there are a lot. It was money. It was recruiting talent. It was facilities, all of that. And just slowly think about and process, how do I break down these barriers?

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  So now you can take that from a big venture, like building a company from scratch, all the way into a situation in a combat zone. And what you're trained for, okay, this is the objective, and things will invariably go wrong in the fog of war. If and when they go wrong, what are my options? And what's the optimal path through that?

• 1:21:34Tim Ferriss?

  What books have you, besides your own, gifted to other people? Book or books?

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of history, Tim. American history, revolutionary history, living now for almost 20 years in Princeton, surrounded by revolutionary history. Even as a kid, I was. So there's a great book by an author named Benson Bobrick called Angel in the Whirlwind.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And it's a history of the American Revolution. Obviously countless histories of the American Revolution have been written. This one's pretty special in that he great storyteller. There is a great hero in the book. You want to guess who the hero of the American Revolution is? It's not a trick question.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  I don't even want to. I'm afraid to embarrass myself.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  George Washington.

• 1:22:25Tim Ferriss?

  There we go.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  All right. So George, easy answer.

• 1:22:27Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna go for the layup and I was like, I might flub it.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  And and he picks a villain and it's Benedict Arnold. Now he tells the whole story in very rich detail about the American Revolution, very character centric. And you got to realize what they did, you know, and it's told in that book is just so extraordinary and has never happened before or since in the history of the world of people coming together for that cause. And within the American Revolution, realizing, you know, they fought for this great ideal, lots of sacrifice, you know, they mutually pledged their lives, their fortune, their sacred honor. Every single person who signed the Declaration of Independence died peacefully in their own bed. Where else has that happened in the history of the world?

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  So great lessons in life. I just, I think it's a great book. It's a great way to learn history.

• 1:23:20Tim Ferriss?

  Who are some underrated or lesser known leaders you think are worth, who inspire you or are worth studying?

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  You know, we talked about the, the importance of persistence and resilience. You can go back to the founding of the biotech industry only goes back 41 years, 1976. Isn't that crazy? And it was founded here in San Francisco in the Bay Area was a young venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, Bob Swanson. He was looking at ideas, came across some papers written by University of California at San Francisco UCSF professor named Herb Boyer. And the papers talked about protein engineering and DNA sequencing and expression of proteins in animal based cells and maybe someday making medicines out of this. So Swanson took a drive up, knocked on his door, started asking questions, started putting

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  stuff on a board, literally went across the street to a bar, started putting it together on a cocktail napkin. And think about it, yeah. So you talk about in building business, the importance of vision and risk taking, all of that. But think of what those guys did. Not only did they have to take a chance on a technology with all those challenges, they had to start a company, okay, they had to start an industry that didn't even yet exist, sell it to the partners at Kleiner Perkins, Boyer had to leave the academic world, but they did that. And think of, you know, what would the world look like, what would our industry at least look like biotech without Genentech? It would be very different.

• 1:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  I've never visited Genentech, but is it true?

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  You've got to go.

• 1:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  I heard a story, and maybe you can confirm or reject this, that when they were expanding or building the headquarters and expanding the facilities, there was a donut shop, and the donut shop would not sell its real estate, so they built their campus or their buildings around the donut shop. Maybe urban legend, but I hear that this-

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  I've been to Genentech, I've not-

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  You've never seen the donut shop?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Never been to the donut store.

• 1:25:28Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I guess that would be a good one to tell Tim Ferriss, so he'd embarrass himself on a podcast, because if I haven't been there, clearly I can't know that it is an outright lie.

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  You know, you look like people, you know, outside of our industry, and probably most in biotech, have never heard of Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer. Swanson ended up dying in the 90s of a brain tumor. So, but, you know, the vision that they had, the risk taking, those are real heroes. Another one is, you go back to probably the earliest biotech entrepreneur, who never even knew he was an entrepreneur, is Jonas Salk. So, polio was the scourge of the, of, you know, the society from a healthcare standpoint in the 40s, 50s, obviously, FDR affected by it. A research, young researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center named Jonas Salk had an idea that he could develop a vaccine for it, got

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  some funding form from the Infantile Paralysis Foundation, what we now call the March of Dimes. Developing a vaccine, worked on it tirelessly, his whole lab, well-funded, put it together, tested it, I mean, tested it on himself, on his coworkers, his family, did a large series of experiments, and it didn't work.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  And there was a great interview years later that I've read. It was a magazine ironically called Wisdom. And they talked to Dr. Salk about that because of course, he then went on to invent the vaccine that saved countless lives and effectively eradicated polio from the world. They asked him though, after years of effort and a big experiment that failed, what did you do? And he said, I thought about it. I thought about how I'm going to tell my family, my coworkers, the people who put the money into this, that it didn't work. So I walked, I went to a park, he said, and I thought about what I was going to say. And I read it in this article to him. He said, and I looked out in the park and I saw dozens of children at play.

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  And I realized without a vaccine, many of them would develop polio, would suffer and may die. And he said, at that moment, I realized the enormity of my work and I went back to it with a renewed vigor. And I've always tried to think about that. What if Salk didn't go back to try it again? And that's why, and I've had plenty of failures in biotech, plenty of drugs that haven't worked, studies that were delayed, every setback you could imagine. And I try to think about that.

• 1:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to develop a training curriculum for civilians, could certainly have elements borrowed from any sphere, but if you wanted to develop a course or training of some type to make people more resilient, how would you go about doing that? I've thought a lot about this because I've wanted to, over time, make myself more resilient and thought of all sorts of different voluntary suffering, whether it's excruciating physical training, cold exposure, fasting, exercises of those types. But is there, what might you add to that? Or how would you go about it?

• 1:28:46Tim Ferriss?

  Because I think that people listening would, everyone who's listening to this episode probably

• 1:28:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wants to become more resilient and to be the one who perseveres. How can you develop that?

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  So, look, the old adage is, you know, trial adversity builds character. And I think that is true for most people. The trouble is, it's very hard to create artificial adversity. Now, we can do it, and you know, certainly in your books and your lectures, you talk about different ways that you've tried to do it, that you've taught others to do it. You could do it through rigorous physical training. You could do it through a discipline. You can do it through, you know, focused more on certain activities in life that require sacrifice. And that's all true, and I think that's all an element of it. But what I've come to realize is there is no way to substitute pure experience. Now, we will all go through adversity in life.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  So you don't have to worry about, oh, my God, I'm never going to get the experience of adversity. Believe me, you will, sometimes more than you ever, ever thought you would. And the thing that makes it better is to realize, take that step back and think about what matters in life. And to me, it comes down to time.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  We, in Gita's book, The Cure, about our family, in the epilogue to that book, after having spent two years writing it and spending a lot of time with our family and researchers, a lot of time with our kids, she, she wrote something to me. She wrote that at the end of the day, we're all just searching for time, time with the people we love. And we treasure it, we hold on to it, and we hope and pray for another, even as we continue into the unknown and the unknowable that we all call life. And that's it. To me, it's all about time. What did we do with our medicine? Why, why did we do that? We did it to buy time, time in life. And so far, Meghan and Patrick now have lived 13 years longer than they otherwise would have.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  Now, it's given them time, given us time together. It's given them better quality of life, and quality of life, of course, is so important. But again, it's given me as an entrepreneur and our scientists, time to come up with maybe the next best medicine and new technologies. So that cycle of innovation, that virtuous circle of, of healing that can happen with great medicines, gives us time.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  Somebody, I want to say it was Anna Quinlan, once wrote in one of her books that "life is a fatal illness."

• 1:31:24Tim Ferriss?

  "Life is a fatal illness?"

• 1:31:25Speaker 03

  "Life is a fatal illness." And I think about that. What if you went to the doctor tomorrow, God forbid, and he said, "I've got your test results back and you're only going to live six more months."

• 1:31:38Tim Ferriss?

  Which could happen, right?

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  It could happen. It happens every day to people. So that could happen. So what do you do? You forget about work, you focus on family, love. All of a sudden, life becomes very sharply in focus. What if you went to that doctor and he said, "Look, you've got some illness, you've only got five years to live." Still very serious. Life comes pretty sharply in focus. You may not walk away from your job that day, but take some time, maybe start to think about therapies. What if you went to the doc and you're 30 years old and had your physical and the doc goes through everything, blood work, everything looks great, you're following the Tim Ferriss regimen, you're in great physical shape. But I have to share this with you, you're going to die.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Now, somebody, they turned white, oh my God, yes, and I'm virtually certain, I can't predict exactly when, but on average, if you want time, you want to know, I think you've got 49 years left. That's it. You're going to live to be 80, right? 79.9, I think, now is the average life expectancy. So we're all going to pass away from this earth. So what do you leave and what did you do in the meantime? But also, what are you fighting for? And you're fighting for time. And what do you do with that time?

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  You are probably the perfect person to ask the following. It's something that I've grappled with and continue to grapple with, and that is the notion that you should live every day like it's your last, but in practice, that's very difficult to do. It would seem, because if it's your last day or your last month, which it could be, you never know. I mean, you take a wrong turn, not the wrong turn, you just take a left turn instead of a right turn, you get hit by a bus, anything could happen. If you do have years ahead of you, then there will be periods of...

• 1:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  Postponing certain gratifications, certain things you enjoy. There will be long-term planning. How do you balance or think about those two for yourself? Because I'll read, for instance, I'll read a bunch of Stoicism and then I'll go in one direction and I'll read a bunch of, who knows, whether it's Rumi or Zen Buddhist thinking or just, you know, maybe it's a non-philosopher, but nonetheless, someone who has a strong position and perspective on how to treat time. And I haven't resolved it for myself. How do you, how do you think about it if you do think about it?

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  It is the one thing that I struggle with most. It is finding that balance in life. And many times in life, I've gotten it wrong. And I probably still don't do it very well. So, look, you've got to work hard. Hard work is the price of success. But you've got to find those times to step back. And if you, even if it can't be the quantity of time that you want with friends, with family, treasure the moments that you have. For me, the toughest decision years ago in starting that first biotech at Novozymes was realizing that I was going to be, or every Monday morning, flying to Oklahoma City and flying around the world, and that my kids may live a very short time and I was going to miss most all of it.

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  But Eileen and I, she said, "Look, you go out and search for the cure, I'll take care of the kids." So we had a great division of labor, but I still, I felt badly for the kids. I felt badly for myself that I was going to miss that time. That was a conscious decision we made and it was a bet that paid off for us. But I still struggle with that, Tim, you know, finding the right balance. When we, I'll share a brief story with you, when we went public, Amicus went public in May of 2007. We'd only been around for a couple of years. It was a IPO with a lot of fanfare, that people were throwing money at us. You know, you go out and these investment banks, you do this road show, sounds pretty sexy, it's grueling, you know, it's like, you know, Groundhog's Day, 80 of the same meetings around the world.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  Now, the cool thing is, you know, the banks will get you a Gulfstream 5 or whatever to fly around in. I'd never been in a private plane, although it was pretty cool. So you go through, we had a great IPO, eight times oversubscribed. Wall Street on now the second company, Amicus, gave us a $300 million pre-money valuation. We raised 75 million. We go to New York, we close the deal, lots of backslapping at the board level. The next morning, we're there, we, you know, we close the stock exchange, I'm on CNBC, we're being interviewed. For an entrepreneur, that's about the height of success. You feel pretty darn good about yourself. People couldn't, what, six years, seven years before that, I was knocking on doors trying to raise money, just a little bit to pay the rent for our company.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  Now people were begging me to take tens of millions of dollars. You feel pretty good, I had the company in, we did a big celebration, a party, but I was pretty tired, it was two weeks on the road, pretty grueling. So I went home that night, and I went in like, you know, most moms and dads who travel, you go in, check on the kids. So I went in, the boys sleep pretty soundly, so John and Patrick were sleeping, gave them a kiss, they didn't stir. I went into my daughter Meghan's room. She was 10 years old at the time, you know, still hooked up to a ventilator, laying in bed, sleeping quietly, she's a pretty light sleeper, so I gave her a kiss and her eyes opened up. And she said, Daddy. I said, Meghan. She threw her arms open, give me a hug. And I gave her a hug. And she said, I missed you. I said, Meghan, I missed you too.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  She said, Daddy, how was your big business trip? I said, well, and I had my suit on and all of that, standing above her, and I said, well, Meghan, I said, the trip was good, you'd be pretty proud of the old man. And she said, I know Daddy, I saw you on TV today. I said, well, really? I said, so how'd I look? And she said, well Daddy, you looked really, really, now I'm thinking, I don't know, powerful, or whatever. She said, Daddy, you looked really, really, kinda short. And so, so I'm standing there, now there's this awkward silence. Now Meghan is also the master at how to damn with faint praise. So she looks at me, she goes, but Daddy, I have this yellow power tie on, she goes,

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  but Daddy, that tie looks really good on TV, on camera. So I'm like, oh, okay, thanks Megs. And then she said to me though, she says, Dad-

• 1:37:54Speaker 04

  She's giving you a criticism sandwich.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Oh yes, always, all day long. And she said to me, she said, are you gonna be here in the morning? I said, yeah, I'll be here. She said, would you take me to school? I said, yes, honey, I'll take you to school.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  And she said, "Good night. I love you." And I said, "Good night. I love you." And I walked out and I realized in that moment, Tim, the humility that has to come with any degree of success. Success is pretty fleeting, of course. And I realized Meghan absolutely, truly did not care that we'd raised a bunch of money, that I was on TV, that we flew around in a private plane. What she cared about was that her dad was gone for two weeks on a really long business trip and that she missed him and that he was home and was going to take her to school. And I think in that moment, I realized, you know what? That's why we're doing this. For those moments.

• 1:38:52Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned earlier your criteria for selecting a disease to potentially develop a treatment for. I may get the exact word wrong, but it was something along the lines of magnitude of impact or significant?

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Sure, or how can we have a meaningful impact on a disease?

• 1:39:13Tim Ferriss?

  What I'd love to ask, because I think about this from even a philanthropic standpoint or for anyone who's trying to give back, how do you think about doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people? If you have,

• 1:39:30Tim Ferriss?

  say, an impact of zero to 10, I know this might come out a little unformed because...

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  No, no, I hear where you're going. But go ahead.

• 1:39:38Tim Ferriss?

  Is it

• 1:39:40Tim Ferriss?

  better to go an inch wide and a mile deep? Or the opposite, in a sense, right? And hit a large number of people? And I struggle with this because there are times when I want to, for instance, and I've done, I have taught classes in a number of places like Oakland, for instance, where you're hitting 10 or 20 students and you might be able to impact them very, very deeply. And then there are other people who say, "Well, if you look at effective altruism, what you really should do is just take this amount of money and invest it in malaria nets that are going to go to Africa because dollar for dollar, you're going to save the greatest number of lives doing that." And I struggle with, and it certainly doesn't have to be...

• 1:40:24Tim Ferriss?

  A false dichotomy, right? It's not, doesn't have to necessarily be either or, but we only have so much time and energy to allocate. How do you think about that?

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  So, you know, again, so you take these 7,000 rare diseases. I mean, the essence of your question is why rare diseases? And why not put the money into much more broadly prevalent?

• 1:40:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's not even that, because it's, this is a purely selfish question.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:40:45Tim Ferriss?

  Where I'm trying to understand how you think about. I like to get advice, quite frankly, as to how I should use my own time. I'm not going to be necessarily, well, I'm almost certainly not going to be developing any biotech companies. But I think that many people listening to this want to do good in the world and they have, there are many compelling arguments for seemingly incompatible approaches. Whether it's, say, going the effective altruism route, or people who say, you know, should you, let's focus on helping the, let's say, the lowest decile of performers in a school versus the top decile of performers in, say, an economically disadvantaged location.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  How, because you've, you've done a lot of work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:41:36Tim Ferriss?

  Which is a massive understatement, obviously. But for those people listening and for me, how would you encourage them to think about giving back? Or altruism? Or creating a for-profit company that does good, for that matter? I know that's a gigantic, multifaceted question, but.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Look, I'm a big believer in going deep. Don't go wide. Have the impact, even if it's on a single individual. Because think about the ripple effects of meaningfully changing somebody's life, even one individual, Tim. So you mentioned the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It's such a great example. So Make-A-Wish, back in 1980, there's a little boy named Chris Gracious, a seven-year-old.

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  Chris had advanced leukemia, was in Phoenix, Arizona, receiving some treatments. Chris was gonna die. And some nurses, family members, and then police officers heard about it, that Chris always wanted to be a cop when he grew up. So these cops heard about it, they said, "Well, let's make, let's help this kid be a cop." They actually made him a little uniform and got the doctor's permission to take him out of the hospital for the day. And they made him a cop, they deputized him with a judge, put the uniform on him, they took him up in the police helicopter, I mean, just a true cop, police officer experience. And he went back to the hospital after that day, it was on the local news in Phoenix, it was great. And two days later, Chris gracious died.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  He was actually flown back to Illinois, where his family was from, was given a police officer funeral. That made the news as well. About a month or two later, his mom Linda got together to thank those police officers who made it happen. They started to think about, you know, "God, he didn't live long," and how tragic it was, "but, boy, he sure loved that day and that experience." And they were so happy, and they realized it made their lives better, the people who gave him that gift, that wish. And then they said, "Well, why stop? Maybe we can do this for other kids." And that's how the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to be. Because a couple of people just wanted to help one sick little boy.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Now, fast forward 36, 37 years, Make-A-Wish Foundation has granted over a quarter of a million wishes to children that have fundamentally changed their lives, brought joy to people with life-threatening illnesses, and the communities that's affected. So, you can do a lot of good by touching one life. In the rare diseases, you know, what's so rewarding about working here is that not only are you working devastating diseases, where yes, you can save people's lives, you can potentially even one day cure them, that in itself is meaningful.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  Beyond that, I really believe that by understanding human genetic medicine, understanding what's causing these diseases and how they may be treated, we're gonna unlock the secrets to treat much more prevalent disorders. You look at a disease like a Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, many of the cancers, they're really just human genetic diseases that we don't completely yet understand. So- One person with one, you know, think about it. When we started out, we wanted to help our two children. With a lot of people's help, we were able to affect everybody living with Pompe disease. Now at Amicus, we're working on multiple rare diseases. Hopefully, we'll be able to develop treatments that'll help people with all of those rare diseases.

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  And in the meantime, my big vision for the company is I want to be at the forefront of human genetic medicine, which I believe in the years ahead means that we're going to be at the forefront of human health. And that's pretty exciting.

• 1:45:15Tim Ferriss?

  It is exciting. And we were chatting before we hit record and you mentioned that it's entirely, not your, these are my words, not yours, but that it's entirely feasible that we might find ourselves living to, say, 200, something like that. And there are certainly a lot of people here in Silicon Valley who are pursuing that with all of their, all of their energy and resources. What are some of the breakthroughs or potential breakthroughs? Things you think have, say, 50% or higher likelihood of happening that most excite you in the next 10 to 20 years?

• 1:45:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I really think, Tim, that we are on the cusp of a golden age of medicine. So we've come a long way. In the last century, we've almost doubled the life expectancy here in the United States. And we did that with, you know, better hygiene, better nutrition. But the greatest single contributor to that, contributor to expanded life expectancy is medicines, medicines that are extending and enhancing life. So we've come a long way. The average life expectancy is almost 80 years now. Why are we programmed to die now at 80 when we were programmed to die at 47 a century ago? We're not. We intervened. When what we've effectively done is begun to change the slope of human evolution.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  So we now have tools that not only can we provide drugs that can cure an infection or drugs that might prevent or treat heart disease or rare diseases or cancers. We're now to the point where you look at the gene therapies that are being developed. You look at a new technology of gene editing, actually being able to go in and manipulate the human genome in an individual and fundamentally change their health course.

• 1:47:09Tim Ferriss?

  And do so very inexpensively in some cases.

• 1:47:11Speaker 03

  In fact, and do so in a way that you've now permanently changed the human germline so that that genetic change is inheritable to their children. Obviously profound ethical consequences, but I really believe that if we keep pursuing these technologies, some of which are already in, many of which are already in clinical development, that 10, 20 years from now, we can alleviate an enormous amount of human suffering. Now, can we unlock the secrets of aging? Is the aging process itself a disease? In many ways, it really is more, what happens in aging is more and more of these little mistakes in our DNA happen and over time they accumulate and over time they lead to

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  cellular inefficiencies, they lead to a lot of misfolded proteins in our body. What if we were able to change that course and do so where you have good quality of life? Are we getting to this concept of a singularity of combining, you know, man and machine becoming as one? You know, obviously many books and some movies written about this and it can be scary, but to me it's actually unbelievably exciting. You know, if we can do it for the right reasons, in the right way to extend and enhance human life, I mean, that's, that's what it's all about, kind of gets us back to time, time and quality of life and that's, that's pretty darned exciting.

• 1:48:33Tim Ferriss?

  On the quality of life front, and just a few more questions, but on the quality of life front, what is, what does a, I could pick a single day of the week, but I, what does a, and I'm not in any rush at all, I just, I just want to be cognizant of your time, that an ideal day, this is a weekday, so ostensibly there's some business to be done, but what is, what does your schedule look like for that day? And what I'm, what I'm very curious about is...

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  Routines, things that you do habitually. So I try to get up early, usually not early enough. I'll try to get up by 6 o'clock in the morning. And with that, I've always got a plan, things I'm gonna do, you know, maybe I'll try to exercise or do that. I don't always have a set plan every morning. What I find inevitably is that I'm rushing out the door, whether I get up at 5, 6, or 7 o'clock. So it's a little bit different now, too, with the kids, John and Megan in college, and Patrick a senior in high school. I've got a little bit more time in the morning. It used to be just a flurry of activity, getting kids ready, nurses coming and going. In between it all, we decided it would be great to get two Jack Russell puppies, because

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  we didn't have enough activity in the house. I'd say a typical day, though, for me, Tim, is, you know, wake up at 6, shower, get ready, catch up, maybe 30 minutes on the elliptical, read the headlines of the news, what happened the night before. I've got now seven offices in Europe, so catch up on the emails coming in from Europe. You do this on the elliptical? I'll do it on the elliptical. Do you use a phone, iPad, what are you using? I use my iPad, prop it up and just flip through, you know, download the Wall Street Journal, look at the Journal, look at the New York Times, flip through emails, get through that, and then get ready and head off to work. What time is that, roughly?

• 1:50:25Speaker 03

  I'll try to leave the house around 7:15 or so. So 7:15, try to beat the school traffic of all the schools in Princeton. I'll do that, get in the office, try to have about an hour of downtime. I try to not run the company by email. I think it's too easy to get in and say, okay, what emails hit since I got off my elliptical? Let me respond to those. I try really hard to limit the email time, set a block in the morning on the elliptical, a little bit more when I get in the office, and then spend the time with the team, the people. We try really hard in our company with that patient-centric view, to bring patients in living with the disease. If you've come to our company, you'll

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  see we've got portraits and pictures and paintings of all people living with rare diseases and their stories around. We try to bring them in and just be absorbed in that. Now, we're also a public company with a billion-dollar market cap and 300 employees, so invariably there's the... Details and what I'll call the grind of the business that you've got to get through. And there's the invariable demands on your time. I do try and I don't succeed more than 50% of the time, but I try. And it's on my calendar every day. One hour of thinking time.

• 1:51:41Tim Ferriss?

  When is that usually scheduled?

• 1:51:42Speaker 03

  Usually early afternoon.

• 1:51:44Tim Ferriss?

  So post lunch?

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  Post lunch, one, two o'clock. It'll have to vary by certain other commitments, but it's always on there. And I do try to take it as a time to step back and to think, where are we? What have I learned halfway through my day? What do I need to complete by the end of the day? And what happened unexpectedly that I have to pivot around? What I also find though is about 50% of the time, there is such demands on my time that I've got to use it for something else. There's, John, you got to get on the call with this clinical site or John, these investors need to talk to you. Do you have time? And that's okay because rather than every day pivoting things around, at least I know I've always got a little bit of flexibility built in.

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  So if the kids are home, I try to get home at a decent hour, spend time with them. I get a more intense workout in when I go home. Either go to CrossFit or do something in our basement, try to do more of a kind of weightlifting workout, get out the frustration of the day.

• 1:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  What might that look like specifically in your basement? What would a Crowley evening workout look like?

• 1:52:51Speaker 03

  If I've got limited time, 30 minutes, pushups, pullups, situps and dips. Lots of pushups, pullups, situps and dips because you can fly through them. Great workout and it's hard to get hurt. If I've got more time, I'll build in some of the bench press, some of the shoulder press, I'll do kettlebell swings, those types of activities, try to mimic a CrossFit workout. And if I can find the time, at least three days a week, I try to get out to CrossFit when I'm not hurting myself.

• 1:53:19Tim Ferriss?

  I was going to say, just to increase your injury potential.

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, which I find as I get older, my strength is about the same as when I was young, my endurance is about the same. I'm much slower and I get hurt way, way more easily. So then, then a little bit of dinner, time with the family, wrap up a little email. And the last thing I do before I go to bed every night, I pray.

• 1:53:41Tim Ferriss?

  What do your typical, what are your typical meals? Do you have, do you have default breakfasts and lunches that you have?

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Peanut butter, I'm sorry, almond butter and bananas. In the morning, if I can, I'll take a frozen egg white and throw it in.

• 1:53:58Tim Ferriss?

  And you blend that?

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Uh, no, no, no, they're either, either or, either or. Yeah, no, that would actually, it sounds like it'd be kinda gross.

• 1:54:04Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do with the frozen, how do you eat the frozen egg white if it's?

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  You put it in a microwave.

• 1:54:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, alright, alright, alright, good god. Thought you were just gnawing on some ice cube of egg. Sounded terrible.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  I only eat things that are frozen.

• 1:54:18Tim Ferriss?

  And then, what does lunch look like?

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Lunch, I try to eat light, you know, we, we try a salad, soup, something like that. My big meal is dinner.

• 1:54:26Tim Ferriss?

  What is, and then what is dinner?

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  So, we try to eat healthy when we stay home, you know, the chicken, fish, steaks. Eileen's been trying some of these prepared meals, the plated, the blue apron.

• 1:54:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  Those are quite good. But I love pasta, you know, my grandma was from Sicily. I love pasta, so I, I try to limit it, but probably one or two nights a week, we'll have a big pasta dinner. Always on Sundays if we can with family. Kind of a, you know, an effect of growing up in a big half Italian family and the Irish side that loved the pasta too.

• 1:55:03Tim Ferriss?

  Do you ever, have you ever struggled with, well, I'm sure everyone has at some point, but do you have troubles sleeping? Do you have any insomnia? Does your mind keep going?

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:55:13Tim Ferriss?

  Or it does? What have you found to help with that, if anything?

• 1:55:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I try to stop the email by 9pm. And sometimes you can't, but try to stop it by 9pm. Now, we do, you know, we've had operations in Asia as well, so Asia, United States, Europe, there really is no downtime anymore. But I try to stop it. And then I try not to use electronics after 10. You know, no TV, no iPad, no iPhone. Try to read, for me, reading helps. And then, as I said, I, you know, I don't meditate, but I pray.

• 1:55:47Tim Ferriss?

  Do you, is there a set prayer or a, a?

• 1:55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Go to prayer that you have, or is it different every night?

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  I always start with the Hail Mary. So for me, it's the Hail Mary and the Our Father. So having grown up in a Catholic family and many Catholic schools, that's my prayer, my peacetime. As I've gotten older, though, I've stopped praying for things. I don't mean material things, never that, but you know, help me with this, help me with that, intervene. Sometimes, yes. Pray for others, yes. What I really try to pray for is what I guess I'd call, Tim, kind of peace, grace, strength, and thanks. And to me, that's always a nice way to try to fall asleep.

• 1:56:40Tim Ferriss?

  What is grace to you?

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  I think it's the, you know, I always ask my kids, I said, I ask them, are you happy? Are you safe? Are you fulfilled? So to me, it's maybe a combination of all of that. Happy, safe, fulfilled.

• 1:56:58Tim Ferriss?

  If you had a gigantic billboard and you could put a short message on it, or image, nothing commercial, to impart to millions of people, what would you put on that?

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  It's bigger than you.

• 1:57:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's bigger than you. John, it's always so fun to hang out.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  Tim, you're awesome.

• 1:57:17Tim Ferriss?

  And we could go for, we could go for hours and hours.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  This is our longest conversation without beer, ever, ever.

• 1:57:23Tim Ferriss?

  I know. It is, it is absolutely the longest, and I think many more ahead. Is there anything, any requests you'd like to make my audience, a suggestion, a recommendation, parting thoughts or comments?

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  I think, you know, in the scope of, you know, healthcare, because it's the one thing we all deal with, always realize that you have got to be your greatest advocate. No matter how awesome your doctor is, how wonderful your healthcare system is, Nobody's going to wake up thinking, how can I make this person better, healthier, safer, happier, whatever it may be. So that importance of being your own patient advocate is just so critically important. And one thing I would ask, my daughter Megan asked for this, she's just such a remarkable kid, as my boys are too, but Megan is just a really special person. I've learned an awful lot from her. Many people have been touched, just a special human being. And I've asked if she'd share more of her life perspectives

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  with people, because she lives, you know, most people would look at Megan and think, God, this poor little kid, this pity on this young lady. And she doesn't feel that way. She feels so blessed, and she's so happy, and so inspiring, and funny as it could be.

• 1:58:38Tim Ferriss?

  She seems very good at busting your balls.

• 1:58:40Speaker 03

  She certainly does, certainly does. Every day. She started a blog just last week.

• 1:58:47Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  So it's called High Heeled Wheels.

• 1:58:50Tim Ferriss?

  High Heeled Wheels.

• 1:58:51Speaker 03

  So take a look at it. She's a remarkable young lady, and to gain some of the insights from Megan, I find valuable, and am just blessed to be able to share with others.

• 1:59:03Tim Ferriss?

  High Heeled Wheels, the way we would think it to be spelled.

• 1:59:05Speaker 03

  That's exactly right.

• 1:59:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  Megan loves high-heeled shoes, even though she's never walked a day in her life, and that says something about her. So, thank you, Tim. This is awesome.

• 1:59:14Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And so, thank you, John, first and foremost. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything we've talked about, including High Heeled Wheels, in the show notes for this episode and every other episode at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. John, we have to have more conversations and spend more time together.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure, Tim. Once we cure a few more diseases, then let's come back and talk.

• 1:59:40Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And as always, to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in, and keep experimenting, work smart, and play often.

• 1:59:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? 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.

• 2:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  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 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.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. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is the future of financial advice. They've become incredibly popular among my friends in Silicon Valley and across the country because they provide the same high-end financial advice that the best private wealth managers deliver to the ultra wealthy, but for any account size and at a fraction of the cost. For instance, they monitor your portfolio every day across more than a dozen asset

• 2:01:19Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:01:50Tim Ferriss?

  They don't have loaded sales teams or retail locations so they can deliver all of this sophisticated financial advice and these services at a fraction of the cost of a traditional financial advisor. So at the very least, go to wealthfront.com/tim and take their free risk assessment survey. It only takes a couple of minutes and Wealthfront will recommend a personalized portfolio of investments. In other words, they'll tell you exactly where they would put your money. So even if you don't use their service, you have a huge leg up and you have additional information for making good decisions. They use investment theory to automate good financial behavior and decisions that people typically don't make but should. So go to wealthfront.com/tim to get your first 15K managed for free

• 2:02:33Tim Ferriss?

  or just to get more details. Check it out, wealthfront.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by ID Commerce and Logistics. I'm asked all the time about how to scale businesses quickly. Rule number one is removing unnecessary bottlenecks that are a headache and also an emergency brake on growth. For many companies, one of the first things they should outsource is inventory management and fulfillment. There are companies that do this all day long perfectly for fast-growing companies. ID Commerce and Logistics is one such company. They focus on helping online retailers and entrepreneurs outgrow the competition by handling all types of logistics for you. They manage your inventory, pick, pack, and ship, and handle everything you could imagine so that you can focus on the things you are

• 2:03:16Tim Ferriss?

  best at instead of all of these details under the hood. I partnered with them myself during the launch of The 4-Hour Chef so that I could focus on promoting the book, which is what I'm good at, and they ensured that things I'm not good at got done perfectly. In other words, that readers were happy with dozens of different products we needed shipped out during holiday crunch season. ID Commerce and Logistics works with many different types of businesses, including e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, subscription boxes, and dozens more. They're also integrated with top e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, my personal favorite, Magento, BigCommerce, and others, which makes the startup integration and partnership seamless. As a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 of your startup fees and costs waived. That is a big discount.

• 2:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  Just visit tim.blog/Scale. That's tim.blog/Scale. Or you can go to idcomlog. That's I D C O M L O G dot com forward slash tim. You can go to either one. The easier one to remember is probably tim.blog/Scale.