#749: Michael Lewis and Martine Rothblatt

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Can I ask you a personal question? Now I just sit in the perfect time. What if I did the out of it? I'm a cybernetic organism living this show where metal and the skulls. Lead to Paris show. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads to celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes.

Enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one we went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo.

And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Michael Lewis, the number one New York Times bestselling author of more than 15 books including Moneyball, the Blindside and the Big Short, which were made into major motion pictures and his latest going infinite, which delves into the rise and fall of FTX and its founder Sam Bankman freed.

A topic Michael also explores in depth in his critically acclaimed podcast against the rules. You can learn more about Michael at Michael Lewis writes dot com. I'm looking at a paragraph from brainpickings dot org, which is run by Maria Popova, who I'm very fond of.

And there's a piece on your writing process she may have been quoting a different source, but I just want to read something quickly and then we can discuss these are your words before I wrote my first book in 1989 the sum total of my earnings is right over four years of freelancing was about 3000 bucks.

So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Solomon Brothers, red been working for a couple of years and where I just got in a bonus of $225,000, which they promised they double the following year to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write was that a hard decision or was it something you just been biting your time for.

You put it very well. It was something I've been body my time for when I went into Solomon Brothers, I knew that this was a temp gig. I'd be there for a few years and I was there more out of curiosity about how this world work. Then I was to advance a career. In fact, aside from the money, which I liked, I didn't think really much about the career at Solomon Brothers because I knew I could only hang out my interest would only last for so long.

I was intensely interested in it as I was learning about it, but when I figured it all out and got a sense of how it all worked and there weren't any more questions I had that needed to be answered, I really started to get bored. But the whole time I was there, I was writing. I got myself in trouble because I naturally tend to write kind of about what's around me.

So I started to write things about this great boom that was happening on Wall Street, was really the beginning of what we still live with. This notion of 22 or 23 year olds rolling on and making a fortune. The sums of money being made on Wall Street and the share of the economy that occupied was expanding rapidly and no one quite understood why.

So there was a natural market for me to sort of try to explain it. And I mentioned the Wall Street Journal asked me to write op-eds for them. I wrote an op-ed arguing that investment bankers were overpaid. And in the bottom of the op-ed, it said Michael Lewis is an associate with Solomon Brothers in London. But I must have a blind streak, right? Because my reaction was, wow, great piece. When they sent me the galleys or whatever it was, this is fabulous.

And I didn't even think, what are the people at Solomon Brothers going to think? Except maybe they're going to be thinking it's so cool that I wrote an article on the Wall Street Journal. I got to work the next day. And there's a fellow who ran all of Solomon Brothers International, delightful guy who's the guy who would hired me in the first place. And he was ash-and-face sitting at my desk with this little newspaper on his lap.

And he said, Michael, I mean, it was really not an anger. And it was more in sadness. He said, Michael, you have no idea of the damage you've done. And I was kind of like, what do you mean? He said, this thing is being picked up all over the United States. And we've had a crisis meeting overnight of the Solomon Brothers board, what to do about it. They couldn't have wouldn't have fired me because I had just flukely started to generate a whole lot of money for them, like a whole lot of money.

And he was essentially a salesperson. And I had at that point the second biggest money generating account in the entire firm. And the person would speak only to me. Even though I'd only been there a year and a half, it was basically the most sophisticated hedge fund sort of manager in Europe. And so they didn't want to fire me because they didn't want to lose him.

He said to me, my boss said, what are we going to do about this? And I said, I don't really want to do anything about this. And he said, well, we need you to stop writing. And I said, I'm not going to stop writing. It's what I love to do. And he had the bright idea. He said, could you write under a different name? And I said, no problem. I can do that. And he said, what name are you going to use? Actually, just popped into my head. I'll use my mother's maiden name.

So I wrote under the name Diana Blyquer for maybe the next nine months or year. Maybe not quite that long. But I wrote half a dozen pieces. They got better and better. I was getting better and better because I had better and better editing. So Michael Kinsley, who was then editing the new republic, I had walked into my life. And he was teaching giving me writing lessons basically in the way he edited the pieces.

But the pieces Diana Blyquer was writing. I mean, I really felt off the leash because nobody could trace it back to me. I was almost describing the trading floor around me in pieces. And people were circulating, it was really great. I was sitting in London at my desk doing my business. And I would watch people zero-oxing articles I'd written in the new republic under Diana Blyquer and pass them out on the trading floor.

And so I had a sense that like God, people are hungry for this. People are laughing. People were, it was just working. Now the money part of it, what happened was I came home one night to my house in London, picked up a phone call. And it was a man named Ned Chase, who happens to be Chevy Chase's dad, who was a senior editor at Simon and Schuster. And he said, I figured out who Diana Blyquer was. And I got your number. And I never found out how he did that. We think you should write a book.

And at that point, I thought, I'm out. If someone will publish a book by me, I'm not hanging around the Wall Street firm any longer. I did hang around an extra three months to get my bonus. But the minute I saw the money hit the bank account and I knew they couldn't take it back, I left. And not because I just liked them.

And I loved a lot of the guys there, mostly it was almost all guys. I really liked my bosses. Generally, I just was bored with the work and I had this other thing I love to do. You know, I had two conversations in which people tried to say, oh, don't do that.

Don't walk away from a sure fortune to go take a flyer on writing a book. One was my bosses who took me into a room. And this tells you just how innocent and age it was. I mean, these days you'd be in a room with lawyers, right? And you'd be told you signed this nine disclosure agreement and you're writing anything about anything.

They didn't care about it. They were worried about my sanity. They were actually worried about my career. They couldn't believe that I was going to walk away from this really cushy situation. And go and do that other thing. So they were trying to help me. And I just said, you know, I got this feeling I got to do this. My father said, you know, you really could just wait. You really could just collect some millions of dollars and then write your books.

But the problem was, I was what, 27 at the time. I looked ahead of me and I looked at people who were 35 or 37 and they seemed ancient. And they seemed completely stuck. Like they made so much money and their lives had adapted to the making of money. They depended on the making of money. I just thought, there's no way I'd spend a lot of time here and still even want to do this. I'd be trapped. And I don't want to do that.

So I ignored all that advice and just went and did it and it worked out. You know, it was like that was Lyra's poker. Lyra's poker, at least I've read, was intended to be cautionary tale of sorts. It's not how everybody took it. I mean, it's a very exciting book. What the thing is, it's like a funny book. It was a funny story. It's a very, very funny book. And it's also an incredible story because you're seeing this transformation of this industry and the effect on all these young people.

But I had only one kind of moralistic thought in mind when I wrote it. Because I really just thought my models that I had in my head when I wrote it were education of Henry Adams and Rousseau's confessions. The model was just tell the world what happened exactly as you remember it and that's enough. You don't need to layer on an interpretation of what happened.

What happens? Good enough. And the extent I wanted kind of to push the reader in any direction. It was just really young readers like people in college that I hoped would read it and would say, yeah, I now know what this is. Yeah, there's money there, but a lot of it's kind of silly. And I have these other things I want to do with my life and I'm going to go do them.

So I'm not going to be seduced by Goldman Sachs or have Goldman Sachs prey on my anxiety about my future when I'm walking out of my college. I'm going to go do what I'm meant to do. And I felt that way because I had watched classmates at Princeton just naturally drift into the arms of the investment banks because they really couldn't, they felt they couldn't resist the money and they were anxious about not being successes.

Then what happens is the book comes out and the book makes it seem because it was as business goes incredibly colorful and entertaining and lucrative. And I had dozens of letters a day from young readers saying, dear Mr. Lewis, I really loved your how to book about Wall Street about how to make money on Wall Street.

And I'm hoping that there's some tips in there that you didn't put in there that you could let me know so I have an edge. It just fueled the desire of young people to want to do it more. And I didn't see that coming. And that's something I don't know anybody writes books. I think learns that you write a book, but the reader reads a book and the reader may read a book that's entirely different from what you thought you wrote. And you can't really do that much about it.

How do you think about if you do ambition and this may not be a good question, but it seems like from what I've read the over ambition that kind of people wear on their shirts sleeves in certainly many parts of Wall Street, you find off putting or maybe in bad taste, but you certainly don't shy away from ambitious projects.

Right. How do you personally think about ambitious and I don't want to put words in your mouth either? No, no, it's an interesting way to frame the question. How do I think about ambition? Well, I could tell you I thought it was so comical that I was going to be in this ambitious money making world that the week before I went to Solomon Brothers, I went into Paul Stewart, this men's store because I saw it through their window.

I saw they had red suspenders with little gold dollar signs on them. And I thought this is like a way to make fun of the whole thing and nobody thought it was funny. Nobody thought it was like you can't wear that shit around here until you you can't wear that shit until you are a big enough deal to wear that shit.

I've always been enormously ambitious in a way. I've always wanted my life to be great like really great. I'm competitive like very competitive and I love competitive sports. I love winning. I don't particularly like losing. I guess number one, I don't accept money as an accurate measure or any kind of real measure of whether you're winning a losing.

Money doesn't hold that, doesn't have that hold on me. Fame a bit more. I would say a lust for attention and fame is probably closer to a vice of mine than a lust for money and fortune. But even that, I find I get tired of and it doesn't interest me that much. I don't think I'm a maximizer in that I try to get a lot of a thing. It's more if I'm trying to maximize anything, it's a feeling.

It's a feeling that that was a kick-ass book. Look at something and just say that is a great piece of work. That feeling is what I'm kind of always gunning for and it's a pretty private feeling. I think over time, you must have found this too, that the response that I have to external validation has become muted and numbed.

When I got a glowing review for Liars Poker and it went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, it was like dancing all over my kitchen. I was just happy as a clam. I couldn't believe that it was like I just won the Super Bowl.

Now I don't read the reviews. I keep some of forget whether a book is on the New York Times bestseller list or not. I'm not paying as much attention to it. It doesn't gratify me in the same way. But the gratification I get from looking at something that I think I've done that's really good is at least as great as it was back then. I think I'm tapping into that.

The pleasure I got when I was just all by myself in a room laughing at my own jokes, it's sort of like maximizing self-satisfaction, which is maybe not the most attractive trait that my ambition is to maximize my self-satisfaction. Maybe that's my ambition.

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

Yes, in fact, I did it yesterday. Kids screwed up my natural writing rhythm. My natural rhythm would be to kind of start about four in the afternoon and write till three in the morning and sleep until noon, but you can't do that with kids. I know I'm not as likely to be found late at night at my desk, though it happens sometimes. But whenever I'm writing, I have headphones on and I have a soundtrack I write to. The soundtrack changes book to book.

It's got to the point where both my wife and my kids will recommend songs for the soundtrack for whatever the next project is and I'll build a soundtrack intentionally. The music is, you know, it's all over the map. It tends to be very up, but it tends to be music that I just stop hearing.

And I noticed something really funny just the last couple of weeks because I'm working on something now, the second season of my podcast where I have a different relation to music. The podcast is about coaching and the last episode, which I have still not written. It's the only episode I haven't written is me getting coached in something I'm incredibly uncomfortable doing and it's singing. I've been doing voice lessons an hour every day for the last three months.

And there's a song I sing and I'm like, I tell you which one it is that I'm going to have to sing that I've been practicing that happens to be on my soundtrack. And now I realize I have to remove it because it kicks my brain into a different space. All of a sudden I hear it and it's like Pavlovian. I've got to belt out the tune. I've got to worry about hitting a high note and it screws up my writing.

And so I've just been hitting skip because I've been reluctant to change the but I have to just going to have to remove it. So it puts me the music puts me in the purpose of it is to shut out the possibility of interruption. I can't hear knocks on the door phones, people dropping packages on the front porch, anything. I'm just in my own space. And I kind of cease to hear the sound.

I mentioned Michael was it Kinsley? Is that right? The editor? The editor of the New Republic. What made him a good editor or what did you learn from him? Can you remember anything that he helped tighten or improve? So Michael Kinsley had a gift for creating writers. There are dozens of people who were young writers then who he had profound influence on and careers that he just launched.

And it's an odd assortment and I was one of those people. I think what happens with writers who come up in a conventional way like through creative writing programs or by writing for their circle of friends is they get treated too politely their work gets treated too politely. So they don't hear a really withering critique of their work.

And Michael Kinsley could not help himself. He delivered the most withering critiques of your work. They kind of throat clearing phony first paragraph, which is totally unnecessary. It would come back. It would be just a big ax throat. Why did you even write that start here? I can remember I learned a word that was just a completely obscure word. And I even remember the word, but I don't know how to pronounce it. It's Cth. I think it means of the underworld.

And I remember I remember working it into the piece and like a big circle around it saying you fucking phony. You know, you would you would you do go into the Thessaurous it was just like making merciless fun of me my byline at the very beginning. I thought it sounded good. It was for it to be Michael M Lewis.

My middle name is Monroe. I thought a middle initial kind of fancy it up. He put a big circle around it and said, don't do that. You know, don't be one of those people. You're not Michael M. Lou your Michael Lou. It was all the preposterous things that you naturally tend to do when you're putting, you know, words on paper. He identified all of them as vices and stopped you from them.

And so in addition, he was unbelievably gifted at saying what a good story was. You just started to learn what was interesting and what wasn't just talking to him just by how he responded to what you said.

It was a kind of feedback that everybody should get, but that most people are too tender and sensitive to deliver. It's a funny thing. I think that this happens in speech too. I think that there's lots of inefficiency in human conversation that people do all kinds of things they really shouldn't do and that other people make fun of them for doing.

People are endlessly telling stories about what some other person said making fun of them and it shouldn't be that way. We should be very efficient conversationalist because we do it all the time, but we aren't because we don't get feedback because people are too polite. And I think people are too polite with other people's writing. And what Michael Kinsley is great gift in addition to be a kind of genius was he just couldn't be polite. He was just so blunt.

I'm Michael Lewis on my books instead of Michael M. Lewis because of Michael Kinsley. I have a question for you about maybe this isn't the right word but productive laziness. I was looking at an article that talked about a speaking gig from 2017.

It wasn't 2017. Qualtrics you might know where this is going but the quote that stuck out to me was attributed to you people waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. And I don't know if that prompts any memories but is that something you can elaborate on? Sure. That wasn't a quote from me was a quote from one of my characters, Amos Tversky. He's one of the main characters in the undoing project.

And it resonated with me what he meant was that the people don't back away from their work and especially the need to always seem busy or be busy stops people from finding things that are really worth doing and sifting the ones that are worth doing from the ones that aren't worth doing.

So it resonates with me because I am not a person who always has to be doing something and in fact my natural state is probably inert that I can really just lay around and screw off and procrastinate with the best of them.

And it's partly because I grew up I mean I grew up in New Orleans and there was not a whole lot of value attached to either ambition or career achievement you were who you were because of how you were and who your family was and what neighborhood you grew up in a way went to school.

You were always so well defined by your environment that trying to change it by doing stuff didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense and my father used to tell me and it was and I believe this until I was about 20 on our family code of arms there was a motto in Latin and the motto was do as little as possible and that unwillingly for it is better to receive a slight reprimand and to perform an arduous task. And he would just say that like just keep that mind we live by these words.

So that's my kind of where I was coming from just generally and I found this thing that didn't feel like work so it didn't feel like an attempt at achievement nothing achievement was bad it just that's not why I was doing it.

But having said that you know I do find that being able to back away and get yourself myself in a state of mind in which I can say it's okay if I never write anything else it's okay if I never write another book it's okay if I don't do anything for six months and I can afford that now and that's nice to be it's a luxury be able afforded but I think a lot of people who can afford it don't actually take advantage of the luxury because I think that doing that putting yourself in a state of mind where I'm I've got to make an argument about why I'm not doing it.

And I can't argue about why I need to write another book because I don't have to changes your relationship to potential stories and potential material it requires the material to rise to the level of interest where you feel obliged to engage with it. So you're not doing it just because you got to write it another book you're doing it because how can I not write this and it serves my own sloth and indolence serves as a kind of filter.

And the filter is no I don't have to do that so I'm not going to do that I don't particularly want to do that so I just not going to do that and even if you tell me that oh it's got big best seller written all over it I'm not interested because it keeps me off that path I think it's been very useful because it does two things at once one is it raises the level of the bar that the material has to jump over to get to me.

So the materials going to have to be really good if I'm going to engage with it and two it stops me from doing the same thing over and over again just to be successful it enables me to almost encourages me to move around and do surprising things and I think readers and audiences really appreciate and will engage with the writer who's willing to take risks that yeah they like their writer somewhere

their writers to just keep doing the same things over and over again but they'll follow you if you take a brave risk since I'm not doing it I'm not trying to create the next sure fired best seller I'm led to other and sometimes unlikely material. So the books end up being about a lot of different things.

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

Yeah that's funny that is one it's a really good question because there's not a clear cut rule that I follow except feeling and there are a couple of feelings that I associate with the desire to write a book one is a feeling that if I don't do it it won't properly get done because I have some privileged access to the story

but the sense that yeah this book really should be written and someone needs to do it and that someone is clearly me the second and related feeling is I I have an obligation to the material it isn't the material has an obligation to me as a writer it's I have an obligation to this material and once I have that feeling I have a motive I have a motive and whether I'm fooling myself or not it's a motive that's a deeper and more inspiring motive than oh I'm not going to do it.

Oh I got to make a living or I got to get a book on the best seller list or I got to have something to tell my friends when they ask me what are you doing it's the highest motive it's I have an obligation I have a duty and I've had that feeling with every book I've written how it gets to that point I mean they take their different paths to that point but it obviously is some feeling in myself that this is an important story.

You could put a message a quote a question anything at all on a billboard metaphorically speaking that would reach billions of people does anything come to mind non commercial that you might put on a billboard saying mantra something you remind yourself of anything at all it's going to sound trite whatever I say and let me just let me just say that I live in the world's capital of bumper stickers it Berkeley California

there are more bumper stickers per automobile than anywhere else in the world it's been scientifically proven you can walk down the street and it's mostly political stuff but it's just like people getting their point across in bumper stickers and I have never had a bumper sticker on my car because it's not one thing I've ever wanted to say over and over forever I'm not a bumper sticker or quote guy however if you say I got to put it up on a billboard I would take the mantra of my high school baseball coach

one of the greatest men I've ever known who is actually the subject of one of the podcast episodes and he would just say it routinely and he just kind of became part of you he would say don't be good be great and it's said to you as he handed you the ball to go out to pitch a game he'd say to you when you're working out and you just having that

mind it's the kind of thing I try to keep in mind when I'm working on something good is not okay if you're going to do it be great push yourself and it's hard and you know don't just stop when it's good enough that's what I would stick on a billboard it's a sort of on that it's one of those things that send the billboard of my mind don't be good be great I love it that's Billy Fitzgerald Billy Fitzgerald just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show

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that's drink a G one the number one drink a G one dot com slash Tim last time drink a G one dot com slash Tim check it out and now Dr. Martin Rothblatt an American lawyer author and entrepreneur and the chairperson and CEO of United Therapeutics a biotechnology company she founded in 1996 to save the life of one of her daughters you can learn more about Dr.

Rothblatt and the work of United Therapeutics at you and I THER dot com martin or Dr. Rothblatt both welcome to the show thank you for making the time thanks so much Tim just martin's fine alright and this interview as my listeners might imagine was challenging in the best way to prepare for because there are a million in one directions that we can go with

just this bio alone which is of course a snapshot at a distillation of of much more that you have done and I thought we could start and perhaps an unlikely place and that is Alan Watts I have read that you are a fan of Alan Watts and specifically the book subtitle on the taboo against knowing who you really are could you please explain if that is true why that is the case

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

when were you first introduced to his work how did that come about I was first introduced to it through the literature of this philosophy called transhumanism sort of the idea that people can transcend some biological human limitations a friend of mine Frank Sazanowski who was the head of the national organization on rare diseases pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits

he himself is a both a Jesuit and an FDA lawyer but he pointed me in the direction of some Jesuits such as on Teardou Shardon from France and other individuals here in the US and then from those Jesuits they referred to Alan Watts I'm not sure if he was actually a Jesuit but he undertook some religious training both in China I think and in the US

he was a radio announcer for many years in San Francisco I think during the 70s or 80s I don't know if you remember him the film of a few years ago her in which like a computer yep so I was watching that movie which kind of is interesting to me because it epitomized or visualized the concept of computers becoming sentient and in the middle of that movie there's a scene in which Alan Watts appears and I stood up in the movie and I said oh my god Alan Watts

did you ultimately find the presentation in that movie to be compelling as it relates to sort of sentient intelligence I did I thought it was an accurate depiction of a likely way that sentience would begin to arise in our society basically by being very very useful to people cleaning up their inboxes stuff like that this may be a good place and we're going to be all over the place in non-linear fashion

be in a 48 who or what is be in a 48 if I'm pronouncing that correctly yep you've got it perfectly so be as the name of my partner we've been married for about 40 years and when she was 48 we undertook a joint project to try to create a digital simulcra or a digital copy of her basic personality with a lot of her memories and thoughts

and we thought this would be a very nice project as a combination of science and art and to encourage young people get them more excited about computer science and women in particular girls in particular so we I'm contracted with a couple of companies who were experts in both the software engineering side and in the physical modeling of a face that moves exactly like a human face does you might imagine

there's this exhibit at Disney world Disneyland of like Lincoln and whatnot something like that but more realistic we built this project and since that time being a 48 has thrilled audiences all around the world I'm sure she has inspired hundreds of not thousands of girls to go into computer science

and she continues to get better and better more and more advanced software I don't know if you have watched the series black mirror before but I find some of their episodes to be very strong and in one of them a significant other is effectively resurrected by pulling data and patterns and therefore mannerisms and so on from effectively social media accounts

so pulling from the cloud and feeding into this similar or model of someone who used to be or in this case still is how far away do you think we are from being able to do something along those lines convincingly yes Tim so I am a fan of the black mirror series and there are a few other somewhat similar series that are streaming now upload and whatnot so it's an idea that's catching on and even at a very basic level social media firms like Twitter for example and probably Facebook as well

and also an opportunity that after a person passes away their account can remain active and I believe in the case of Twitter can even continue tweeting in the way that you once tweeted so I think this general idea is it's a trend it's only going to grow more and more prevalent as software does a better and better job of copying the human personality

sometime in this century for sure and maybe in just like two or three decades I think that there will be a digital copy of a person and another word is like a digital doppelganger of a person who will claim to be the original person and they may make that claim before after the person died and then psychologists and lawyers and theologians and philosophers will have to grapple with is this just like a really super fancy digital photo album or is this actually some form of digital sentence

when you were growing up who were your role models or inspirations was there anyone in particular who stood out to you when you were in high school or at the very beginning let's just call it freshman year of your undergrad as icons worth emulating or lesser known role models worth emulating didn't anyone really stick out for you

I think that in terms of authors I was very influenced by Robert Heinlein the science fiction of your stranger in a strange land and so on absolutely it was so brilliant and then a few years ago when his widow released the uncensored unedited version of stranger in a strange land like three times larger and like no holds bar I just savored you know every page of that my favorite book of all of his is time enough for love in which he covers almost every topic under the sun

so Heinlein's characters were somewhat of role models for me like Lazarus Long is a common character in some Heinlein books in the public sphere I was very much enamored with Robert Kennedy his positive progressive approach to the world was something that endeared me to him so I looked up to him those are a couple of the role models that I had at that time you seem to be good at many things of course just based on the bio alone but what strikes me is how quickly you are able to develop

develop expertise in new fields I'd like to use this as an opportunity to bring up what was mentioned at the very beginning of your bio and that is United therapeutic comma a biotechnology company she started to save the life of one of her daughters I'd love for you to provide some context for this and tell a bit of the story just because people will want to hear it

and then the follow up just to plant the seed for it is how you learned biology because my understanding is you didn't have much in terms of background in biology that's a huge mouthful of a question but if you could give us a bit of the background that would be extremely helpful and we can use that as a jumping off point

sure so it's kind of funny that you know you can go all the way through undergraduate at a great place like UCLA and never be required to take a life science course but that was the case so the last biology class I had was in high school and here suddenly I was faced with a situation as an adult while running serious exam that our youngest daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness she can't even walk up a couple of stairs to the front door and there are no medicines approved for it

I finally got her to the best doctor one could find the head of pediatric cardiology at children's national medical center in the middle of Washington DC and the doctor said you know this is an extremely rare disease no one knows why it arises all the patients die within two to three years

he had only seen two or three other kids with it and they both died and all you can do is hope for a lung transplant so Tim I was completely crushed I just saw black I didn't know what to do and the only thing I could think of doing while she was in the intensive care ward

night after night and myself and being a wood tag team staying there with her was once she fell asleep to go down into the library and to just begin you know learning about what was this illness she had which they told me was called pulmonary arterial hypertension

and why were there no treatments available for it so I just began reading and reading and reading most of the time I read things I didn't understand what they were talking about because there were these long medical words and chemical words

that I never learned in law school or we never had to deal with an electrical engineering but of course there were dictionaries and I looked up the words in a dictionary and they had college level anatomy textbooks so what I didn't know I just kept going backwards in academia

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

how did you and I know this is a story you've told before but ultimately in searching for possible solutions and as we were chatting about before recording there's a lot of luck involved and it doesn't mean that your path is replicable by any set of parents who are caught in a tragic situation similar to what you experienced but nonetheless you were able to ultimately track down

I suppose it's fair to say a molecule a drug of some type would you mind describing for listeners the process then of attempting to secure the ability to utilize in any fashion this drug or to license it if you could describe that I have a number of questions that will stem off of it

there are a gazillion articles published on every type of medical research you could imagine I mean it's just a bottomless well there are literally hundreds of different types of medical journals each of those journals have you know every year thousands of articles published across them

so it's difficult to find the information that you need but in law school we learn a very useful skill this skill goes by the name of shepherdizing after this type of index that they have a law school called shepherds so what shepherdizing involves is when a judge writes a decision like the Supreme Court issues a decision they drop a lot of footnotes and of course one thing lawyers love to do is you know make footnotes and references

and then what you're supposed to do is a good lawyer is to look up all of the footnotes and the references that that Supreme Court or lower court case referred to and then the shepherdizing process is after you get all of those references to then look up all of the references in those other articles

and ultimately you get to a point of diminishing returns where three four five levels down the references are all circling back around on themselves so I applied that shepherdizing process to these medical articles and somewhat like doctors whenever a researcher publishes an article they make footnotes and citations to other people's research who they relied upon so I would get all of those articles and read those and then I would follow up on all of the references in those

finally I read about a molecule that a researcher at Glaxo welcome had written in which they described testing this molecule for congestive heart failure and it failed in its test of congestive heart failure it did not work but in the article they had charts of what the molecule did

and the one thing that the molecule did that grabbed my attention was that it reduced the pressure between the lung and the heart which is called the pulmonary artery it reduced the pulmonary artery pressure while leaving the pressures in all of the rest of the body perfectly fine well that's exactly the problem with pulmonary arterial hypertension the people who have this disease I'll make a quick footnote

when my daughter was diagnosed 2,000 people in the US had the disease because medicines have become so much better and because we've been able to have like you mentioned in the introduction get all these approvals there are now 50,000 people in America alone living with it so it's likely that people listening to your podcast will know somebody or another who has pulmonary arterial hypertension

and I read this article and I said wow just when I need this tiny stretch of artery just between the heart and the lungs this molecule somehow talks to that tiny stretch of artery and leaves the whole rest of the body alone that was the holy grail that I was looking for

so I looked at where the author of the article was from he was from Glaxo welcome in research triangle park North Carolina and I made a beeline down to him and ask him if he could develop this molecule that he'd found from my daughter's disease

and immediate handing over the keys to the kingdom a big all caps yes no it was actually a big all caps note unfortunately the individual who had written the article had actually retired a few months earlier and the person that I ended up meeting with who is in charge of research and development

said that this was just one article it was a incidental finding in any event this disease afflicted so few people it was completely unrealistic to expect Glaxo welcome to develop this molecule for my daughter and other people with that disease

and I asked him names Bob Bell he's now a venture capitalist and very successful gentleman I asked Dr. Bell I said what would it take for you to develop this medicine he said well it probably would take you couldn't do it we only developed medicines if they have more than a billion dollars a year and revenue potential

he said but it's possible you could buy it from us if you had a real pharmaceutical company with real pharmaceutical expertise I could then introduce you to the business development people at Glaxo welcome so over the course of the next several months I created a brand new biotechnology company I was able to have a Nobel laureate who was formally associated with Glaxo welcome become head of a scientific advisory board

and I re-approach Glaxo welcome and I said I have all the things that you ask for can you sell me this drug and we'll develop it ourselves well Tim it turns out that everybody asked said well you have to get somebody else in the company to agree and that's how it is in a big bureaucracy it turned out that we had to have 15 different executives sign the same piece of paper

to agree to license this drug to me finally it happened and all they wanted really was $25,000 and a promise of 10% of any money that I would ever get from this molecule I think they agreed to that only because I kept bugging them I was in their face all the time also because I believe a serendipitous factor was that Dr. Bell's sister had contracted a form of pulmonary hypertension

from the time I first met him toward the end of this process and he became a product champion for me within Glaxo welcome I mean that was just pure luck or serendipity whatever you want to say and then they really didn't think this molecule had any chance at all and they were really just doing it to get rid of me I think

but still all 15 people had to sign it after we successfully developed this molecule we have over time paid more than a billion dollars just in royalties to Glaxo welcome because that molecule has saved thousands of people's lives

it has produced a billion dollars a year in revenue year after year after year for us and Bob Bell when I invited them to our 15th anniversary and he came with his sister who was still alive and on our medicine and he said this was the absolute best transaction that Glaxo welcome had ever done so in hindsight what did they miss what accidentally got deleted from the spreadsheet or what assumption or assumptions were incorrect that they missed this opportunity so completely

I think there were probably like maybe three main ones the first one and I can say this kind of from first had knowledge since I am now the head of a pharmaceutical company the odds of any molecule actually working in the human body are less than one and a hundred when the human body is so complicated it's like a massive set of very precisely

keyed locks and every molecule is like a random key and the chance that you would have a molecule that opened a lock that fixed some dysfunction in the body rather than causing some harm to the body is it's less than one and a hundred so first of all they figured the chance of this thing working just in general was less than one and a hundred secondly they thought to themselves even if it worked a little bit there's only 2,000 people in the whole country with this disease

they didn't really think that if it worked really well the number of people would keep accumulating I see you're saying if you have these people who would have died otherwise not dying then that treatment cohort is just going to grow and grow and grow is that what you mean exactly I thought about it like I was getting subscribers at Sirius XM you know people said to me oh martin you'll be lucky to have a hundred thousand subscribers

I said well if I keep them again another hundred thousand the next year then I'll be up to 200,000 and then maybe 400 and 800,000 now we have 30 million they didn't think in that subscriber mindset that was a second problem the third problem is that they didn't really imagine that the health care system

would pay something like a hundred thousand dollars per year for this medicine and at the time this was in the early to about 20 years ago early 2000s I think like the average price for an expensive medicine was perhaps $10,000 a year for a patient or $10,000 for a course of treatment because of advances in things like precision medicine and gene therapy there are many many medicines now that cost over a hundred thousand dollars a year

mostly for rare diseases and the health care system pays for them because so few people have these diseases that even though the medicines are expensive it's a drop in the bucket compared to diseases like hypertension or common illnesses asthma that afflict tens of millions of people

the health care system doesn't really mind paying a lot of money if it's a rare disease and the people at blacks are welcome were clueless about this they were actually looking for the big billion dollar blockbusters not for the rare diseases

so those were their three omissions they failed to be Alan Watson they failed to see that because something is big underneath that means that there's something else that's small but Alan Watson always say he says something is good only because something else is bad at the very least I mean it's a valuable thought exercise when you're looking at the assumptions that you're making and what an incredible story you mentioned serious we haven't spent any time on serious just yet

when did you first fall in love or become intoxicated or enchanted by satellite systems or electrical engineering I suppose but you can take whichever one is more interesting to tackle you're absolutely right that I fell in love and I was intoxicated by satellite communications it seemed to me kind of magical that we can put a machine way out in space

and that machine can do amazing things across the whole face of the planet my first real moment of first love if you will was that a remote NASA tracking station in the Indian ocean and I had left UCLA to travel around the world really hitchhike around the world and I found myself in the Indian Ocean on a set of islands called the Seychelles and on these islands at the top of the mountain in the middle of the main island there was a NASA tracking station

and I went up into it and I was probably a pretty grungy 19 year old at that point in time but the engineers inside there were kind and patient with me and they explained to me how their satellite antennas were communicating with satellites

in all different orbits around the earth and even all the way out to Jupiter and I asked them I said would it be possible for somebody to put a satellite up there and have it broadcast information back to the entire earth and they said if you made a powerful enough satellite then the receiving equipment on earth could be so small that you could hold it in the palm of your hand and I could have kissed the guy I said wow that's the purpose of my life and I made a B line back to UCLA

I changed my major to communication studies I did an undergraduate thesis on direct broadcast satellites I did a joint JD MBA degree where I published multiple articles on satellite communications I worked at Hughes Aircraft Company which was a big manufacturer of satellites back then and helped design a satellite to cover South America and then ultimately went out on my own with my dream goal which was serious XM

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

Yeah Tim it's the best feeling it's the best feeling and actually I don't think it really has anything to do with age I felt like the same kind of feeling when I was driving one of the first Tesla's and I was looking at the manual and I saw how much electrical power it output

and there's a very simple correlation between horsepower and electrical power between kilowatts and horse power it's almost one to one not exactly and I was already a helicopter pilot and helicopter engines are always quoted in terms of their horse power so right away I said wow this car has enough power to actually lift a helicopter I had that same kind of this is the purpose of my life is to make an electric helicopter so you can get this kind of excitement at any point in life

I think probably the best way to describe it then would be like a lightning bolt to your soul You know I was asking about biology earlier but I would be very curious since you mentioned also that there were no there were no other requirements as such an undergranted require you to take any additional biology classes if you were trying to teach let's just say a class and you could pick the age or it could be a set of classes scientific literacy

being able to have enough basic fluency to provide more surface area for those lightning bolts if that makes any sense right when you're looking at a manual or having a conversation with an engineer or reading a scientific study do you have any thoughts on how we could cultivate more scientific literacy if that's the right phrase to use?

Yeah I think that's a great phrase to use I think what's necessary is that you have to relate science to people's everyday lives and one of the greatest people doing this and to go back to the beginning of the interview when you asked me who was the role model for me

I should have said Carl Sagan was like an amazing amazing role model to me I watched the Cosmos series over and over again and Carl Sagan was a genius at being able to take scientific concepts and relate them to people's everyday life and if you remember for watching those series the iconic image of him taking a dandelion and blowing it and describing that this is how a star spreads out its gas throughout the galaxy

those type of step-by-step instructions ladders to get from one place to another is the way I think to build scientific literacy and I would ask my students to think about anything that's important in their life whatever it might be and from whatever they said was important to their life

I would then begin wrapping that in layers and layers of basic scientific concepts that pertain to what was important to them are there any other science fiction authors per se but science authors or elucidators of science who have written anything that would be appropriate for a lay audience

if someone is listening and they see their blind spots which I know by definition is kind of impossible but if they recognize they don't have enough scientific fluency or as much as they would like but they want to try to cultivate that do you have any recommendations for them?

there's a lot of books like that one of my favorites is a book by a historian of science named Thomas Cuen he was one of the most famous historians of science and his book is perennially in print it's called the structure of scientific revolutions

in this book he goes through about ten different revolutions in science where everybody thought the world was one way and then kind of like a crazy person would say no I think it's like a different way and gradually set about proving it's a different way and created a revolution in science

and he explains this in very late terms he takes you through the science of gravity for example with Isaac Newton science of relativity with Einstein electricity with Maxwell and so on in a very step by step fashion to make the science accessible

and in the way his main point in writing this book is to teach people critical thinking to teach people to question authority ultimately all science is about is just saying why why like every two three four year old kid knows how to do that right why why why and I think Thomas Cuen does a great job of that in his book I should also point out and please feel free to correct me if I'm oversimplifying but the why why why is not just for four year olds it's not just for scientists

in lab codes or whatever people envision scientists to be it's also extremely helpful in situations like those you found yourself in with blacks or welcome and attempting to license I mean constantly pushing for explanation and clicking on those footnotes to go to the footnotes

to go to the footnotes to ultimately get to some point of leverage where you can move things around it seems like it's also not just an intensely interesting and academically rewarding approach to thought but it's an immensely practical approach to life at least that's how it seems from from reading so many of your stories you know when you discover something what's happening is that gazillions of neurons are lighting up in your brain and it's lighting up the pleasure centers too

so I really believe that there's nothing more exciting than having a realization about something coming to an inspiration about something which is why books in reading are so magical another science fiction writer who I feel does such a great job of explaining concepts

that can inspire people is Octavia Butler she wrote a lot of books one of them very well known is parable of the sower parable of the talents and in these books she gives people an appreciation of questioning authority so I'm not sure what it was that my parents did

I don't really remember them specifically encouraging my questioning of them and in fact I do remember my father discouraging it but nevertheless what happened to me was I absorbed the American culture and the American culture is a culture of questioning authority

I recently heard one of the latest interviews with Tony Fauci when he was people were asking him why is it that Americans won't do these basic public health steps to stop the pandemic and he said you know American culture does not like to be told what to do American culture is died in the wool question authority you'd be hard pressed to find another country where it would be more difficult to get people to follow a single rule for everybody than the United States

so it's that American cultural ethic of questioning authority that I know is like deep in my mental DNA because we were chatting just a few minutes ago about realizations inspiration I'd like to ask if we flash back to well we could flash back to any point in time that you choose really

how did you relate to or think about gender in your youth and you can choose what youth means and I guess I'm wondering if there were any flashes of realization or if you came to the point of pre-installed with a certain orientation or way of thinking about it or feeling about it

whatever you could say to speak to your experience of gender when you were younger I would love to hear it Sure so it is related to this questioning of authority Tim around teenage years I had a you know constant vision of myself not as a male but as a female and of course I said to myself WTF why am I thinking like this I can't imagine anybody else is thinking like this but nevertheless the thoughts were real and the feelings were real and the feelings were visceral

Could you describe the feelings because I think I'm certainly very interested in what form that takes is it a discomfort of some type is it a longing how did it feel for you So first I should say that I think the transgender feeling is different for every single transgender person

and talk about my feelings I don't want to give the impression that these are going to be the feelings of other transgendered people because as a community whereas heterogeneous as anybody else So for me it was really a matter of just visualizing myself in a female form and there was not any dislike of my male form again it was kind of very Alan Watsian in that I saw myself as male only because the opposite of male was female so I can also see myself as female

and this was the way my mind was working and when I say I saw myself it was just kind of like a physiologic embodiment obviously I knew like boys and girls and men and women's bodies were different so I was stuck with this visualization of myself as a woman

wherein I was very much trapped in a male body it was the prevailing view that this was a completely unacceptable way to be so the authority was no this is not possible people are only male or female and you know never the Twain shall meet so again this you know American Paul Revereach

question authority mindset got me reading and I found once again that there was a vast literature on transgenderism, transsexualism, Native American people who were too spirited communities in India and other parts of Asia that identified as neither male nor female

so even though this was never something I learned in junior high or high school or elementary school or really anywhere in American culture in say the 1990s I learned through books that humanity was not either strictly male or strictly female

and as I began to question authority I began to say to myself why can't I also come out as not strictly male and not strictly female when I think a lot of listeners hear the words male and female they think of the physiological differences that you might put side by side looking at physical characteristics when you say not totally male or female or not cleanly bifurcated into solely those two categories do you mean to say masculine and feminine traits or what we would often find labeled as such

or do you mean something else? I mean predominantly the masculine and feminine traits that you refer to now oftentimes those masculine and feminine traits are just a short hopskipping the jump from masculine and feminine apparel right depending on how people dress

they're a short hopskipping the jump from masculine and feminine hairstyles in an age you know that was the time of prince and boy George and whatnot and then you get to you know masculine and feminine manicures like why can't a guy paint his nails

and then you get to next questions of you know secondary and primary sex organs and some people wishing to take hormones to alter their actual physiology and ultimately go through surgery to alter their physiology and I found that there was actually like a vast literature following again

footnotes to footnotes references to references I was like oh my god it is possible to in fact alter your physiology to match your psychology what appeared to be the most intelligent researchers in this area are opining that this is a safe and healthy thing to do

for people who feel that they are kind of quote unquote trapped in the wrong body from say zero to a hundred percent how well do you feel you have your physiology matching your own psychology at the moment hundred percent hundred percent what were the biggest or the most important decisions, actions that you took did any surprise you to have a disproportionate effect on increasing that percentage?

No but I think that you know every part of the transition process kind of fell in place it was not something that happens on the day it's kind of you get to a point of diminishing returns so over a period of years I gradually transitioned and I think even to this point I'm still in a transition process I kind of went from a pure male to a more I would say not pure but I would say you know knocking on the female door to a point today where I feel very comfortable identifying as trans binary

meaning that I embrace both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself completely Looking at the introduction which I read at the top of the show so to speak there is a line about leading efforts of the transgender community to establish their own health law standards and of the International Bar Association to protect and this is the part I want to ask you to elaborate on autonomy rights and genetic information via an international treaty what are autonomy rights and genetic information?

Sure so autonomy it's just a fancy word for saying that people should be able to make up their own mind that people should have the power, the authority, the freedom to decide what to do with their own body and genetic rights of course refers to the human genome, the DNA that we all have

now there is a tremendous diversity of human genomes out there there are people who because of their DNA they are pretty much immune to some kind of cancers whereas other people because of their DNA it's very likely that they'll get those type of cancers there are some people because of their DNA they almost cannot feel pain they have an extremely high tolerance for pain there are other people because of their DNA that the slightest pinprick you know will send them screaming

so once on Craig Venter and Francis Collins led the effort to decode the human genome and about the year 2000 all types of pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers began scouring the world to engage in what's called genetic mining or genome mining meaning going to different populations of people around the world often that have been intermarried for quite a while so their genomes are kind of concentrated

and trying to learn something from those communities DNA that can then be translated into useful pharmaceuticals to help everybody else have some of the strengths or less of the weaknesses of those isolated populations what I was concerned with is that if people extract the DNA from these remote communities that they in fact do so only with the consent of those communities or with the consent of the elected representatives of those communities

so that they can have some fair financial return for their natural endowment I say so it's similar in a sense to preventing say biopiracy from the Amazon where you have these tribes who are not providing their own human genetic information but are say acting as a wellspring of ethno-botany

and providing source materials for creating pharmaceuticals and you would want there to be some recompense to those groups translating that into your own sort of endogenous genetics would be where you're referring to if that's fascinating never even thought of that. Are there any examples you could give of these sort of tightly knit clusters maybe the clusters is too small word of people who are being studied for this reason or medicinal purposes?

There are actually many many dozens and there are quite a few companies who specialize in this type of area the population that comes top of mind to me Tim right now that's such a fascinating story and it relates to my own activities in organ manufacturing is a community of people living in Ecuador and Peru very close net intermarried that are all a kind of dwarfism and these individuals they rarely grow taller than 4 feet tall

and it was discovered over the just over the past 1520 years that they are descendants of Jews from 2000 years ago who were forced into a diaspora across the Mediterranean after the Roman occupation of Palestine and in that ancient time these people were a very small stature but it was just part of the human diversity they ended up as a group mostly ending up in Spain and then when the inquisition took hold their descendants

who were still very small they left Spain they went to the new world and because the inquisition still had some type of a hand in the larger population centers of what's now Peru and Ecuador they went out into the rural areas and there they lived for several hundred years and it turns out that this population they have one gene that makes their body not receptive to growth hormone all of us naturally we produce growth hormone

and the cells of our bodies have a receptor for that growth hormone and when the growth hormone locks into the receptor we begin growing this population of people in Peru and Ecuador they lack the growth hormone that gene fell off like 2000 years ago and they kept passing it on and on

not much growth hormone receptor so they're perfectly intelligent they live normal lives they just don't grow very large so I found this population fascinating because in my company United Therapeutics we're trying to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs

and one of the ways we do this is by modifying the genome of the pig and it's kind of like a fluke of nature Tim that the pigs organs their heart their kidneys their lungs are very much the same size and functionality as human kidneys hearts and lungs

the only problem is that if you leave a pig on the zone they'll actually grow extremely large and when these first transplants were done they had to euthanize the animal recipients of the transplants because the organs from the pig had grown too large so what we did is we took a page from this population of people in Peru and Ecuador the western medicine gives them a disease name it's called larynz disease l-a-r-o-n after this Israeli scientist who discovered what was going on here

so we said well why don't we modify a growth hormone receptor knockout just like the larynz population has into these pigs so when we transplant the kidneys of these pigs into people the kidneys won't keep growing and growing as a normal pig can be many hundreds of pounds

instead the kidney will just stop growing at the same size as when we transplanted it and that's working out really well let's talk more about organ manufacturing what are some of the other precursors or requirements for having a sufficient supply of organs to meet

whatever demands there are in the us are in the world today the demands whether it's in the us are outside the us are huge and are way way in excess of the supply I would say that one of the greatest unmet medical needs today is an adequate supply of transplantable organs

it's a beautiful thing that you know before people like Tom Starsel questioned authority instead it was possible to do an organ transplant in our parents teenage years and adult years that would have just been like crazy stuff like you take an organ from a dead person you put it in a live person

who has a bad organ and the person comes back to health that's about as crazy as it gets but they did it you know they did it and now standing on their shoulders we have hundreds of thousands of people clamoring for these organs yet each year there are only about 30,000 kidneys available for transplant only around 3000 hearts only around 2000 lungs and so the gap between the need for these organs and the supply is humongous

Are you still or I say you know therapeutics currently trying to manipulate the vagus nerve is that in process?

Yes that isn't in process and it's a it's a fascinating area Tim we are very fortunate to work with the father of bioelectronic medicine Dr. Kevin Tracy he's the chief medical officer at the Northwell medical complex up in the New York area and by the way that reminds me speaking of how can lay people get access to scientific knowledge easily subscribe to scientific American I'm sorry to put an advertisement in here

scientific American I find scientific American and national geographic two of like you know the greatest ways for lay people which I do consider myself a lay person to learn about all different types of signs that they might not know anything about

so one day I got my scientific American into mail and on the cover it was using electronics to cure diseases well here I am like my whole career has just been like electronic engineering building satellites and now because of my daughter I'm like in this medical field so I'm like so excited was one of those lightning bolts to the soul now I have a chance to bring my male and female side together to bring my satellite and my biology side together and merge them

so I got very excited and on my head a chance to meet and now work with and support the work of Dr. Tracy and he taught me of a very simple sentence Tim which I've subsequently found to be absolutely true in all the research I've read it is that the nervous system touches every single cell on your body the nervous system touches every single cell in our body the largest nerve in the body there's one nerve that is way way larger than all the rest of them

it's the vagus nerve it starts in our mind it wraps around our heart our lungs are gut it's an immense nerve and by stimulating this vagus nerve it's possible to have positive therapeutic effects in the body by a fluke of nature, a positive fluke the vagus nerve comes out to the skin in two and only two places around the left and right ears you know there are like a couple of different ridges in your earlobe or your ear I guess I would say it

and one of them called the symboconkey is the place where the vagus nerve comes out and if you electrically stimulate the symboconkey on either the left or the right ear it's been proven now again lots of published literature to have positive therapeutic effects on the body what are some of those positive therapeutic effects?

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

we have a fight or flight nervous system which is the sympathetic nervous system and digest nervous system which is called the parasympathetic nervous system when diseases occur it's because one of those two nervous systems, the sympathetic one, the fight or flight takes more of a dominant position in the body and causes a state of inflammation or over activation and by stimulating the vagus nerve you can ramp up the power of the parasympathetic nervous system

and calm down this kind of overstressed state that leads to an irritable bowel syndrome or to the inflammation of arthritis this is in the course of doing all the reading for this conversation one of those things that really woke me up and maybe pay attention for a bunch of reasons

one is relevance to my current life because I've been working with a doctor for about 10 weeks doing heart rate variability training and there are some researchers with claims I want to say out of Rutgers and elsewhere that certain types of HRV training affect vagal tone and via affecting that vagal tone have a host of cascading therapeutic benefits whether or not that holds up to screw in here or not I don't know but the second and I'm embarrassed to even give voice to this

so hopefully this won't just destroy any tiny shred of credibility that I might have as I mentioned it but I lived in China for a period of time in college, went to universities there in Beijing as effectively an exchange student but it was a one way exchange

I don't think we had any students in return from China and the years are very much utilized in the world of acupuncture and I'm curious to know if you think that whether by trial and error or otherwise it's possible that acupuncture stumbled upon the effects without knowing the mechanism

of stimulating or affecting the ears to then in turn affect the vagus nerve so it's quite a stretch but when I first read about this access via the ears that is one thing that jumped to mind because I always kind of poo-pooed and if I'm being honest ridiculed the idea of using the ears to access these deep inner points but here we are so I don't know if you have any thoughts Kim, first your credibility is immense so don't...

You would have to actually say something crazy to dent into what you said is the opposite of crazy what you said is extremely insightful and prescient so as convinced as I was that putting a satellite in geostationary orbit would enable people across the planet to receive radio signals

as convinced as I was that we could have a molecule that would halt the progression of my daughter and other people's disease that's exactly how convinced I am that the acupuncturists of traditional Chinese medicine did in fact come upon the nerve patterns that are accessible from the earlobe and one of the first things that Dr. Tracy showed to me was a very medically accurate from a Chinese traditional medicine practitioner map of the earlobe

in terms of exactly where you put... I'm sorry I don't know what the official name is of the pins or needles that they put in your earlobe and how they map to different parts of the body and then he showed me on an anatomy map how that traces the lines of the vagus nerve So wow Yeah, it is totally true and why really would it not be true?

I mean, you know, thousands of years of Chinese civilization they have had a chance to do so much trial and error and they were a literate civilization for so long so that results that trial and error could be passed on and passed on

so I do think it's entirely rational that they would have figured this out and what I'm hoping for now and what I'm trying to support is there is an opportunity to what I call in my own words crack the human neurome so what that means is that there are unique patterns of amplitudes

and signal lengths and signal voltages that will activate some different part of the vagus nerve than others and each of these different voltages and wavelengths will correlate to a different part of the human body we don't know what those are

right now we are just kind of in a way I would say we're stomacher than the acupuncturist because almost all of the work that the FDA has allowed to go forward on vagal nerve stimulation they all use the same pulse with the same pulse power and it works so that's great

but I think it can work even better if we decoded the human neurome and I believe in the future people will be able to put on a pair of like beet headsets and those beet headsets will have gel less meaning like you don't need like the EKG kind of gel, gel less electrodes

will rest across your symboconky and your traga and the different parts of your air low and will provide you a stimulation that matches the particular ailment that you have, eliminate the ailment without taking any pills, without paying any money to anybody this is an area I want to keep digging

because it's rare and well it's pretty much non-existent that I have the opportunity to speak with someone with so much electrical engineering background about the possible applications or implications of technology like this I'd love to just throw out another group of devices

to see if you have any opinions on them one or the other but potential applications of let's just say TDCS or TMS so transgranular direct current stimulation or other means of stimulating the brain typically using some type of conducive gel but not always in the case of a TMS paddle have you looked at these technologies or done any reading in the literature related to them?

A little bit. I'm aware of a friend of mine has a company that obtained an FDA approval for treating a particular form of brain cancer with this type of technology so there's a very solid scientific benefit that's been documented after many years of working through the FDA

I have a world of respect for the rigor that they put into any decision to approve something so when they approved it it meant that it was scientifically proven to work something that is quite different from that but on the same time related to it Tim is on the last day

of 2019 which was like the last day of the decade it turned out to be a week day I forget if it was a Tuesday or whatever but the US patent office only issues patents on one day of a week and it was like the one day of a week that the issue was there's two's there or whatever

and it was a patent that I received for a device that I call a Alzheimer's cognitive enabler and this device is worn over the cranium as you mentioned and it senses nerve impulses inside the brain it is connected to a computer with a visual recognition and a speech comprehension system

so that if a patient with Alzheimer's is not able to adequately communicate and appear to recognize the people who are coming into their room the computer vision recognition system and sound recognition system will talk on behalf of the Alzheimer's patient say

hello son thank you for coming to see me and it is actually being triggered by the recognitions that are deep in the Alzheimer's patient's mind so that more people will come to visit the patient the patient's stress levels may be lower so I believe this kind of bridging of electronics

and the mind is really right around the corner what inspired putting the work into that research and filing that patent I think part of it was seeing my mother-in-law suffer pretty badly from somewhere on the spectrum between dementia and Alzheimer's was never really completely clear

where she was at that and she would recognize us coming in but she couldn't communicate and it would have meant a lot to everybody if she would be able to communicate my own mother is more or less at that point right now as well secondly the work on the Bina 48 computer

is really possible for people to strike up meaningful relationships with the digital version of Bina the Bina 48 robot and so it was just like you know a very short step from instead of putting all of Bina's or even a good portion of her memories and her personality into this computer

why not actually have the computer's interaction capability, input output capability triggered by something like a neuro-sky type of EEG brain interface and the last piece of it was I was I was given a Christmas present by a friend of mine

which was one of these neuro-sky headsets that lets you kind of like play a game just with your thoughts by controlling your EEG signals so that's a consumer product anybody can buy and it really works you know this conversation brings back a lot of memories for me because I have Alzheimer's disease

is very prevalent on both sides of my family and observed both sets of my grandparents deteriorate to the point where at least some of them couldn't recognize immediate family members and was recently rewatching segments of a documentary I saw called A Live Inside

and the subtitle is a story of music and memory and what struck me most about this documentary is that not that they could play music from someone's youth to them through headsets and watch them come alive in some really spectacular ways both physically in terms of kinesiology moving around but also

psychologically the most impressive part to me is that they would play music for say handful of minutes, five to ten minutes from someone's youth and then turn off the music and that person could have a perfectly coherent

reasonably fast speed conversation whereas prior to the administration of the music they were from the outside catatonic basically and it makes me wonder what music is doing I'm sure there are people who study this and probably have a better mechanistic explanation and how it could be incorporated

into therapies intended to counter dementia or advanced Alzheimer's disease things at this time Tim you see like just in this conversation we are in covering like so many vast new oceans of opportunity for people to learn and study about to me music is the foundational

human technology because the first thing that we ever could become aware of would be the beat of our mother's hearts while we were still in utero and that beat the beat of our mother's heart and it's just a bit of a different rhythm and after we're born you know people may have better or worse rhythm but there's nobody that cannot detect the sound of a beat and move to it and then all the different types of melodies and chords that build upon rhythm it's just fancier and fancier forms of music

so I believe that there's tremendous therapeutic properties to music scratch has been kind of like blown on like and it's there for like all the thousands of young people today who have come up grown up with more music than ever before to begin to apply this great human cultural technology of music

to the biggest mystery in the entire universe which is the human mind I want to come back to the mind or more accurately consciousness in a moment but first this will seem like a left turn and it is I was reading a piece in the Washington Post that covered quite a lot of your life

and there was a segment on love night I don't know if that's enough of a prompt but can you tell us what love night is so when Dean and my partner and I got married we each had one child from a previous marriage that each of us had custody of and then we had two children together

and we were kind of trying to build a blended family that would feel like nobody was a stepmom or a stepdad that everybody was just like in one family and in fact we cross adopted each other's kids from our previous marriages so I was taking the kids to music classes

all of the kids were in the Yamaha music program where they learn piano and violin instruments like that and we would practice songs and I was brought up Jewish where every Friday night was something that was special it was the Sabbath and the family sat down together and had dinner

and set a couple of prayers so Ben and I tried to think how can we like merge all these things together the Jewish tradition, the need to create a blended family, the music that we were all enjoying from watching the kids learn to play piano and violin

and we decided to every Friday night have a special family ceremony which we would call love night and we sang a song which the melody was actually based on one of the kids songs that they had learned in the Yamaha music program the words were you know very simple and affirming

and at love night the core of love night was that each person around the table would have an opportunity to say what love meant to them during the past week during the week from the previous Friday to this Friday what does love mean to you?

and you know, Ben and I as the adults we would say something either sophisticated or simple like I love Ben and I love Martine, I love the kids the kids started off just saying like what love means to me is like our dogs or our car you know very basic things but as they grew older they came into more and more sophisticated definitions and expressions of love until after a couple of decades of this all of us have heard thousands of different things that love can mean to a person

now I'd like to fast forward and sorry to be on a little riff here but I'm on a fast forward to the current COVID pandemic our kids are all adults now they've flown the coop they have their own kids and suddenly we are in a situation where we can't all gather together

in any one house for love night you don't want to travel you don't want to like endanger people so on and so forth so we decided to continue the love night tradition but on zoom or to be fair Google Meet so every Friday night from my son who's a captain in the army in Iraq

to his wife who's on a base in El Paso to my other son with four grandchildren in Florida to my daughter in Brooklyn and her kid and her husband and be the night we all get together on zoom plus friends of all of our kids were not embarrassed by love night in fact they wanted to share it with their friends and their friends were saying like whoa this is crazy this is beautiful and so we get together every Friday night we sing our love night song and now there's about 20 of us

you know we go around virtually what love meant to us during that previous week and I would say love night is one of the most beautiful parts of my life I'm so glad that I asked that question and love night could you give a few more examples of possible answers just to give people a

flavor for how people might answer this question because I for instance would love to try this with my girlfriend with some of our friends family etc but I would be nervous as the orchestrator that I might get that question and not have the ability to kick things off effectively.

So every morning being in my partner goes out for takes our two dogs out for a walk with one of her best friends who lives a few houses away and that best friend now joins our love night and last Friday she said what love means to me is every morning going out for a walk with

being in the dogs last week our youngest grandson Saturn he's you know was born in 2010 so he's 10 years old he said what love means to me is this and he pulled a piece of paper he said I got a 95 on my math test and he was just so proud of himself and shared it with us so those are

typical examples of I think I last time said what love means to me is sitting down at the piano and playing different songs from memory so to use this is a skipping I was gonna say a skipping stone but I think I'm beginning my metaphors mixed

up I say launch pad a lily pad pick your pick your choice to consciousness do you think that we will be able to as I've heard you put it once recapitulate or recreate consciousness synthetically and does that mean will have machines that can love for instance in the not too distant

future what would it mean to have created consciousness sure I do believe it's possible and a great book that I would recommend that goes into this subject in beautiful detail is called the emotion machine by Marvin mincee and Marvin mincee is often thought of as the

father of artificial intelligence he was a professor at MIT for great many years so in the emotion machine book he really describes exactly how you would go about creating a computer and the type of software that it would take in order for the machine to feel what we feel when we say that we

love somebody and I think it's likely to occur to him because it's hard for me to think of any aspect of life that cannot be replicated if one had sufficiently advanced technology one of my favorite sayings from another role model Arthur C. Clark is that magic is indistinguishable

from sufficiently advanced technology so I think just like we have been able to create an artificial hip artificial knees artificial hearts in my own company we are building lungs and kidneys people are creating artificial nerves people like Elon Musk has formed the whole company

neural link where he's working on downloading a whole human brain I have little doubt that humans will end up being able to replicate a human mind now whether or not the rest of society accepts it as a human mind or not I think is going to be a long pitch battle and that's what is

the subject of my book virtually human that whole book is talks about how and when will society accept digital consciousness as being as conscious as a human but even if that digital consciousness is not yet at human level what happens when it's at say primate level or at

K-9 level or even at a rodent level if you can get to any of these levels you could kind of see how it's the same old human effort of keeping making incremental improvements that would eventually get you to the human level where I think that the individual alive today that has the best

understanding of this topic is a guy at Google named Ray Kurzweil he's a director of engineering at Google and what I love about Ray is he never tires of pointing out that this digital human consciousness it's human human consciousness is a human phenomena so when we create a

digital analog or doppelganger or simulcra with everyone to call it when we create a her that her is human it's not us versus them it's one it's we will have been able to move our mind into a digital substrate just like if our knees give out you move it to a mechanical substrate

or if an organ gives out you transplant it with another organ where would you if you had to kind of price his right style put a timeline on this when do you think we'll have rodent or K-9 level consciousness plus intelligence it's pretty hard to say Tim because one thing I am not is I'm not a sous-sayer I'm not a prophet I'm not a visionary any of those things I'm just a humble technologist and all the projects I work on they have five-year time horizons

because I have difficulty really seeing beyond five years so every technology I'm working on it's like I want to get this thing done and out to the public within five years also I am totally a believer in this in this adage that futures usually overpromising the near term

and under promise in the long term so what that would mean in this context is you will hear a lot of future saying oh we'll have digital rats or digital dogs or digital people in 10 20 or 30 years they have probably overpromised

in the near term what they have under promise in the long term is in not 10 20 30 years but in say 80 90 or 100 years there won't be just digital rats digital dogs and digital people but most people will be digital exciting and I suppose for some people very terrifying at the same time

what are some of the most important ethical questions or considerations related to technology as we move into future decades in your mind in my mind the biggest problem with technology is that people only think about the rights to implement the technology and they don't think about the obligations

they have as somebody creating a technology and by what I mean by that is you know there was this great philosopher of the 20th century Isaac Berlin I believe he was German and he had a real simple message his message was that for every right there is an obligation

it's again it's a very Alan Watson sorry to keep coming back to Alan Watts but it's a very Alan Watson point of view that a right only means something in the context of its obligation so for example if I have a right to be a parent which we think everybody has a right to be a parent

you only have that right to be a parent so long as you comply with your obligation to be at least not a horrible parent if you're a horrible parent you will have your children taken away from you and you'll no longer in that sense be a parent so with regard to technology I think there is a point of view that anybody who can create a technology has a right to make that technology but I dispute the ethics of that perspective I think that every right to make a technology is coupled to an obligation

to have the consent of anybody who would be adversely affected by that technology so for example my right to build an atomic power plant or a nuclear power plant some place I don't just have that right that right is coupled to an obligation

that I have to have the consent of all the surrounding communities of people who could be adversely affected by the implementation of that technology and it comes into this domain of in my own field say the transplantation of genetically modified pig organs into people for me to have a right to do that technology I have to have the consent of the larger community that that's a safe thing to do in a democratic country that consent is issued on behalf of the country by the government

and in the field of health it's issued by the FDA so before the FDA permits us to transplant these genetically modified pig organs into people they want us to demonstrate to them that there is no risk not a small risk but no risk of any kind of animal virus

seeping into the human population as a result of these animal transplants so in summary I believe like an amazing field for the future a field that will probably in the future have almost as many people with this career as our web designers today is the field of techno ethics

everybody who wants to create a technology will need to wrap that technology in an ethical envelope of consent if we look at science over while we can look at it over the last few thousand years but let's just say last few hundred years you mentioned earlier that I think you were discussing the structure of scientific revolutions how these breakthroughs these massive scientific leaps forward seem like complete madness at the time to the vast majority

and we don't have to go that far back to find say surgery without or with minimal use of anesthetics on newborns and infants I mean this is not the dark ages this is a less than a hundred years ago you see some really appalling things that were taken as best practices or common practice and one of my friends who's an outstanding doctor likes to repeat this as was adage that you hear among good doctors which is 50% of what we know is wrong

we just don't know which 50% and that seems to always be true so if we flash forward ten or twenty years and I know you're not a profitor as who's there but I'm curious or it could be five years as a technologist what do you think are any of the things we're doing now or believe now that will be shown to be patently absurd or viewed as barbaric or crazy or naive in the near future

probably a lot of things yeah center a lot of you know what we look back in the past that seems to be barbaric building on top of your example of the torturous procedures put on to neonates people forget that the founder of the American Medical Association the first doctor who created the American Medical Association his name was doctor grows he lived in Philadelphia and he did not believe in a sepsis at all and so he would do all of his procedures right in his street clothes

infecting everybody and countless women lost their lives because of having those type of quote unquote doctors helping with the delivery of the children and ending up creating a septic condition in the mothers

and one of the most famous painters in American history Thomas Ackins painted this picture of the gross clinic where doctor gross was teaching all the young doctors how to do a procedure and you see dirt and his shoes and scuffly hands then he was followed the second president of the American Medical Association was a doctor

Agnew who was the student of gross and he had read about the research of Lister in England and became a believer that even though we can't see these things germs they're real and we need to practice you know strict septic procedures before we do an operation a few years later Thomas Ackins painted the Agnew clinic and you see that the doctors and white smocks and everybody is you know looking super sterile and clean

so these type of revolutions can occur just like one generation to the next it's not something that takes a long time I think that you know looking at what's going on today in our world I think the fact that we burn our own house will look to be absolutely bonkers

so let me get this right you've got like you know a super thin atmosphere I mean you guys saw that from space since the 60s at least this atmosphere on your planet is super thin you have a undeniable record of measurements of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere going up year after year after year

and you continue to just spew without limit greenhouse gases into this atmosphere despite the fact that you know people are dying on the shorelines dying of diseases etc etc I think they will think we are a stupid as somebody who would light a fire in the middle of their house to try to keep warm

and not bother with the smoke that they were choking on and then if I could add an addendum to the did you guys know that the earth receives 10,000 times the amount of solar energy falls right on the earth each day then it uses 10,000 times the amount of energy it flows and that's not to talk about the wind

and that's not to talk about the waves and that's not to talk about the nuclear energy I think the people in the future may think we were pretty stupid to be so scared of nuclear energy which has killed a few dozens of people that we went ahead and just you know stopped all the nuclear plants and began pouring ungodly amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that will kill millions of people that will seem ludicrous to them

I think this is and I won't keep you too much longer but I think this I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to comment on or describe your own engineering projects with carbon neutrality or zero emissions as an objective because this is not just idle hand waving for you this is something that you've taken a keen engineering mind to and I think that was not mentioned in your bio even though it's yet another one of the things that you can do is you know

that you're not going to be able to do that in your bio even though it's yet another one of these examples of extreme curiosity and capability could you just describe what you've done in that arena please so this is another area that gives me immense enjoyment again another kind of like lightning bolt to my soul is to try to create infrastructure buildings and cars and planes and things that have a zero carbon footprint and I look at it as an impact

intellectual challenge when I've read that people said well we cannot have a zero carbon footprint society until 2050 that's what the authorities say you know already Tim I'm going to say why why not why not why not I'm going to question that authority

so about three years ago we undertook to build a new headquarters for a company in Silver Spring Maryland that would have a zero carbon footprint not in the best climate Maryland it's got its good seasons and it's bad seasons right in the middle of a city Silver Spring Maryland is a built up suburb of Washington DC and for the manufacture of medicine and stuff which is a somewhat of an energy intensive activity

so we built on 100 and 50,000 square foot zero carbon footprint building which turned out to be the largest zero carbon footprint building in the entire world and we inaugurated it a couple years ago it turns out we produce more energy than we use each year now two years running we did this by just thinking carefully about energy and how to manage it so for example

we have underneath the building 50 wells each of which go down 500 feet and they exchange heat from the building with the coolness of the earth in the summer bring the coolness back up and in the winter they exchange coolness of the building with the steady temperature of the earth in the winter to keep the building warm

the sides of the building are clotted with solar panels the entire building has a brain that automatically opens the windows and closes the windows to allow natural ventilation it's a role model for many other buildings and lots of designers and engineers have come over there for example is in the delivery of our organs when we right now we refurbish organs lungs in particular that a decedent has donated or the decedent's family has agreed to the donation

but when the transplant surgeons look at that lung they say it's too much full of fluid and mucus we can't use it throw it away so what united therapeutics says is give us your lonely unwanted unloved lungs fly them to silver spring barrel then we will refurbish them

we'll show through a high speed digital network to the transplant surgeons all across the country that the organ is good as new through this digital network and bronchoscope and x-ray and all that stuff and then we fly the lungs back out to them and we've saved over 150 lives this way Tim

how do you refurbish a lung? you first you have to remove it from the dying body a dying body is a terrible place to be so we remove it from the decedent we cool it down so we kind of give it a I won't say we freeze it but we cool it down very low temperature

we fly it to Maryland and we put it in a glass dome and in this glass dome we have tubes we have a kind of artificial blood and an air pumping so we've made a kind of isolated artificial body just for that lung and we have expert technicians who work these sorry I don't know the exact name of the equipment but it sucks out mucus and the operate on the lungs like it was a person but it's just an isolated pair of lungs and the transplant doctors who could be in Texas or Florida

wherever they tell us through the digital screen and the voice put the bronchoscope down the left side or down the right side go further give me a they see this and they know what they want so our technicians know how to do this and within four hours in almost two-thirds of the time we're able to take what was a non-compliant dead piece of tissue into a nicely breathing lung it's so beautiful to watch him the lungs go in and out like a butterfly's wings going up and down

in fact you could see a video of it on that Washington Post article you were mentioning and then we cool the lungs back down and we fly it to the transplant surgeon and 100% of the time that they have accepted these lungs they have had successful lung transplants

like I mentioned over 150 people walking out of the hospital but I mentioned this because this is a lot of flying around flying here flying there you know helicopters going back and forth planes and if I'm going to make an unlimited supply of organs

and you remember all those numbers we talked about at the beginning of the call the hundreds of thousands of people who needs these organs that is going to be a humongous carbon footprint we could have said to ourselves well we're doing such a good thing we're saving all these lives

we could be permitted to foul our atmosphere because it's balanced by the good things we're doing but instead we like to ask ourselves like the challenging question how can we do like the good thing and the right thing at the same time

how can we manufacture all these lungs and deliver them with a zero carbon footprint and the solution came from the technology of electric helicopters which are powered by renewable energy they can fly these organs from one place to the other without adding any carbon footprint and all

and I will be a little bit of a susayer here I am absolutely convinced that in this decade the 2020s we will be delivering manufactured organs by electric helicopter I love it I have I will say one I made sheet and sneak in one or two more but I love talking to you likewise this is just endlessly endlessly interesting so many so many different pathways into the labyrinth but I need to make sure I suppose since my job is supposedly interviewer that I can find my way back out

I have read that he's out in the water you the way out in the water show either way he does have a most seductive and hypnotic voice for those who haven't heard I recommend I have read that a favorite saying of yours is quote identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them and quote can you please speak to that or explain what that means for you

yes so identify the corridors of indifference and run like hell down them means to try to find a put it in business terms a market area that is ignored a unmet need but it doesn't really have to just apply to medicine it can apply to any area of life and the way I would phrase it Tim and just like you know a very natural almost folkloreish way is that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond

in a business school back at UCLA we one person we studied a lot was the experience of general electric under Jack Welch and he had an adage which from a business sense was I think very very smart you said if you can't be number one or number two in a market don't even try because you will have to spend an amount of money equal to the revenues of the number one or number two in that market to become the number one or number two in the market if you're not the number one or number two

you will always struggle to be profitable but if you are the number one or number two your profitability is assured so what that means translated to all of our activities is if there's an area like for example a number of people have said you know we should get involved we when I say we my company knife therapeutics should get involved in creating a vaccine for COVID and to me well you know it's not a corridor of indifference there are dozens of companies working on a vaccine for COVID

so that's not what we would want to do it's very unlikely we'd ever be successful on that somebody else said well how about these people the COVID long haulers the people who have survived from a very difficult course of COVID and they've got chronic lung problems that are bothering them months and likely years after the effect

I said yes that's a corridor of indifference nobody is thinking about the long haulers the people who now have you know chronic lung problems because of the havoc that COVID racked in their lungs let's develop some medicines for these chronic long haulers

makes a lot of sense and it makes a lot of sense on a related maybe a related note in some respects this is a question doesn't always work so I'll take the blame if it doesn't but if you had a billboard metaphorically speaking to get a message a quote a word an image a question

anything out to billions of people let's just assume they all speak English for the sake of argument what might you put on that billboard I think Apple computer and Steve Jobs got there before me think different think different why is that important because the solutions you know Albert Einstein said you can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created you have to solve it on a different level if we all think the exact same way

we will never get out of the ruts that were in the only way to get out of the problems that we face is to think differently to go down the corridor of indifference to question authority to be diverse thinking different is the pathway to solving problems that exist today looking back at everything we've talked about and looking at all the copious pages of notes for prep in front of me it strikes me that you forged many paths for yourself and helped others to do the same by thinking different

but also thinking brightly coming back to Alan Watts yet again the year in the young and seeing the positive looking for the positive in different circumstances different situations do you have any advice or recommendations for people who struggle to do that who are maybe mired in a sense of hopelessness might be too strong a word but those who tend to see the glasses half full and perhaps as a result of that tend to see half the spectrum of options or solutions

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

I think about all of the like my partner Venus great grandmothers who were picking cotton as slaves and had to work all day being bitten up by bugs burning in the sun feet deep in mud and then bear a child at the last moment so whether it's like you know my great grandparents from Eastern Europe or hers from the African diaspora

they had nothing to look forward to other than just the hope that they were going to have some children and that maybe those children might have a little bit of a better life than they did and if not their children their children's children so their only purpose in life their only hope in life their only joy in life was to make a generation and that maybe that generation would be better

now here we are in America or really most any other country in the world where the point now we're like eight out of ten people have a smartphone with access to all the world's knowledge and information with access to countless amounts of music and training through YouTube there are many people in the world still in dire circumstances but the vast majority of people are doing better than people have ever done before in history

so I say to myself and I would ask you know somebody else looking through the world darkly right now looking at the glass half full I would say how much worse it must have been in the past what do I owe to my grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents who suffered and toiled who barely managed to survive to produce another generation what do I owe to them I owe to them to make the absolute most possible out of my life and that's what I'm going to do

hot damn marty and I'm ready to get out there and get amongst it I have so enjoyed this conversation there are seventy nine more hours we could do just in round one I won't subject you to that and I'm so grateful that you were willing to make the time to have this conversation thank you so much my pleasure being with you Tim and is there anything else you would like to say to just or ask of those listening before we bring this to a close

two of my best friends and people who I think are the smartest most creative most happy loving people I know Paul man and d.a. while like both said to me that your podcast is the best and martin of Tim Ferriss and vice you on your on his podcast you have to go on it so thank you d.a. and thank you Paul thanks to them also for me I have for many months my whole team knows this been hoping to have you on I had high hopes coming into it you exceeded all of those

high hopes which seems to be a pattern for you and I'm just very grateful and happy that we had a chance to connect so thank you again and for everyone listening you can find martin on instagram at trans binary twitter at sky biome we will link to everything in the show notes that have mentioned in this conversation the books and everything you can imagine that we discussed will be available in the show notes

it's a Timed up blog for such podcast and until next time be kind practice love night think different think brightly and thanks for tuning in hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two

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email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by Shopify one of my absolute favorite companies and they make some of my favorite products shop I is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009 but prior to that I wish I had personally had

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