The Tim Ferriss Show - #139: Meet "Scorpion," The Real-Life Santa Claus with an IQ of 197

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Starting point is 00:02:57 that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, folks. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, tease out the routines, habits, favorite books, breakfasts, whatever it might be that you can apply to your daily life. This episode is crazy. Might make your head explode, but in the best way possible. Of course, we have already explored the worlds of sports, chess, military strategy, politics, entertainment, etc. But we have not

Starting point is 00:03:32 yet quite had a guest like the guests that I have for this episode. Walter O'Brien, aka Scorpion, is the founder of Scorpion Computer Services and conciergeup.com, a for hire global think tank that provides intelligence on demand as a concierge service. What the hell does that mean? I'm about to explain it. The tagline for the latter is quote for any funded need for any funded need. So do you need to defend against chemical warfare, move an entire manufacturing operation over a weekend so nobody even notices, save a loved one from a deceitful spouse, thread the needle on a thorny legal issue, or maybe become a pop star in a foreign country and dominate the charts. Well, these are the types of things that Walter and his team of 2,000 plus distributed geniuses

Starting point is 00:04:19 address. And when they say any funded need, they mean it very literally. Born in Ireland, Walter was diagnosed as a child prodigy with an IQ of 197. I believe at the time it was the fourth highest ever recorded. He became an Irish national coding champion and competed in the Olympics in informatics. Fast forward to these days, today, he and Scorpion get paid to fix every imaginable problem for billionaires, startups, governments, Fortune 500 companies, and people like me or you, for that matter. On the large side, they could tackle things ranging from, and they have, mitigating risk on $1.9 trillion, that's with a T, dollars of investments to inventing artificial intelligence engines to protect United States warfighters in Afghanistan. Walter is also the executive producer of the hit CBS TV show Scorpion, which is where maybe you have heard the name, which is inspired by his life, which has also reached more than 26 million television viewers.

Starting point is 00:05:17 And I was introduced to Walter well before the show. We go very deep in this conversation with lots of amazing and hilarious examples of problem solving, tons of thought provoking and tactical philosophies as well. So without further ado, please enjoy my very, very wide ranging conversation with Walter O'Brien. Walter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you. It is good to see you. And I have to, as context for people, just explain the origin story. So how we came to connect. A close friend of mine involved in the world of finance numbers sat me down and we were having lunch. I remember I was drinking iced tea and having a pozole stew.

Starting point is 00:06:06 I remember very specifically because this is a memorable guy. And he said, I'm going to give you the greatest gift I could possibly give you. And this is before the TV show came out. And then he made the introduction. But we will get to why he felt so strongly about that. But I thought we could roll back the clock a little bit. And since you've done a lot with NASA, how did that relationship start? Well, I was a curious kid from a dairy farm in Ireland.

Starting point is 00:06:34 Didn't fit in at home or at school and didn't know why. And the teachers complained I asked too many questions. And around the age of nine, I tested out at 197 on an IQ test. And that qualified me to join a gifted children's group. And that way I got access to computers and started learning and teaching myself computers. And I was very left brain. So it was very intuitive for me. I kind of came very naturally, much more naturally than sports or other events like that. And I was a curious kid, so I managed to get enough computers together to jump on the ARPANET via a CompuServe server back then using a Commodore PC. Now, most people know the Commodore home computer, but they did make early PCs as well that didn't have much juice, but they worked.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And I came across a.dwg file, which is a drawing file from AutoCAD, and it was very large in size. Probably back then, large was like two megabytes, but when you're on a 400 baud rate modem that's that's pretty uh pretty large and i thought well if it's you know that larger file it must be a pretty cool drawing and there weren't many cool graphics or drawings on computers back then so i tried to download it and uh got stopped by some other computers and i thought that was very rude and if you ever try and tell a 13 year old they can't have something, they usually try to work other ways around it. So long story short, four days later, I had invented a denial of service attack

Starting point is 00:08:12 and reverse torrent and pieced together bits of binaries and concatenated it and got it all down and loaded it up. And I was very disappointed. All I saw was a circle. And I was like, how the hell did a circle be a two megabyte file? And I started zooming out and I realized I was looking at the center

Starting point is 00:08:30 of the wheel of the landing gear of the space shuttle. It was just, had saved the zoom in position. So I thought it was pretty cool. I printed it on the biggest plotter I could find for those that remember plotters and stuck it on my bedroom wall. And, yeah, about 30 days later, I got to meet some of the folks from the NSA in Interpol at my house. My mom was crying. My dad was angry. I wasn't sure why, but he was angry. And they proceeded to yell at me.

Starting point is 00:09:06 And then I presented them with an extradition waiver. And I had done my homework with some of the other hackers at the time. And that's how the relationship started. Now, what is a – could you explain to people what an extradition waiver accomplishes or what it is? Well, usually if someone breaks the law, but they're outside your jurisdiction or in another country, I was in Ireland at the time, you have to get that country to extradite you

Starting point is 00:09:30 or give you up back to the country that's requesting it in order for them to prosecute you. So if they waive the right to extradite, they can't prosecute you. And I had figured this out and got the documents and written them up and put them in my school bag to their surprise. Now, the setting, this is still at that age, I guess, 13, a dairy

Starting point is 00:09:56 farm? Yes. And were both your parents involved with the farming? Yes. I mean, my mom did everything she could to avoid it, but yeah, we were all involved. I think they worked out how many kids per acre they needed to work the farm. And were your parents surprised by the, the one 97 IQ score and that testing result? I mean, did they, did they assume they had, they already assumed that you were very, very smart? Did you come from a lineage of people who might have had similar test scores? It's a little tricky. They knew I was different. They knew I was hyperactive. They knew I wasn't as quiet as the other kids, and I drive kids nuts sometimes.

Starting point is 00:10:38 They knew if they gave me a Rubik's Cube or something else, I'd be fascinated for a while until I figure it out. And then I immediately bored. My mom used to bring me books that were mazes and then join the dots and spot the difference in those kinds of puzzle books from when I was a very young age. And they would keep me quiet for a month, then for a week, then for a couple of days. Then she started getting those 300 page books that started looking like telephone books and I'd rip through them faster and faster and faster. So I had this insatiable appetite. But I don't think they knew what it was other than I was the kid who would take apart the TV or radio if they left the room. Couldn't put it back together, but I would take it apart. It sounds like for people who are wondering where we are, we're sitting at my kitchen table at an Airbnb that I'm renting, and my puppy is to the side.

Starting point is 00:11:20 And someone told me yesterday, they said, if you don't give your puppy a task, your puppy will find a task. So it sounds very significant. Couldn't leave Walter alone with TV sets. Fortunately, Molly doesn't have thumbs, so somewhat limited in the damage she can do. Now, how did Scorpion come to be? The company itself. Yeah. Well, what happened is I didn't have any money back then.

Starting point is 00:11:43 I was on 75 cents a week pocket money. And which part of Ireland was this? I was born in Wexford, but this was all happened in Kilkenny. Good hurling teams in both spots. Yes. I was painfully aware of that growing up. And so what happened was people started asking me for help with basic things fix it kind of like geek squad does today from best buy i was running around fixing printers and installing dos 2.0 using xt gold and norton commander and fixing bad floppy disks and sectors on disks and installing

Starting point is 00:12:20 stacker to make the hard drive look like it was twice as big as it was using and using a compression and all that basic stuff where i was basically dealing with people that were just stacker to make the hard drive look like it was twice as big as it was using compression. And all that basic stuff where I was basically dealing with people that were just coming off typewriters. Literally, I had classes where I taught secretaries how to get off typewriters and use word processors. We helped the first shop start putting barcoding systems in for their inventory and tracking so the shop could scale up and and this was this was uh the initial incarnation of scorpion or this is uh predated it yeah no this was the initial

Starting point is 00:12:51 incarnation of scorpion scorpion computer services correct hence the name sounds like we fix photocopiers but um scorpion was my nickname it's at school and my hacker name so we just used that for it was walter helping people scorpion computer services and as i got busier i hired my friends but my friends were generally the smarter geeks folks and that's where i started learning about the eq versus iq phenomenon can you elaborate on what you mean by that the so emotional quotient versus intellectual quotient. Correct. In general, not always, but the higher the IQ, the lower the EQ. The further apart you are from everybody else intellectually, the harder it is for you to relate to people. academically brilliant are not the best party throwers, club promoters, or salespeople because the emotional quotient isn't as well developed.

Starting point is 00:13:54 Street smarts, bedside manner, whatever you want to call it, common sense in some cases. And McKenna, I think it was not McKenzie, it'll occur to me, but one of the universities came out with a report that said 85%, having surveyed a lot of successful people, 85% of their success is due to their EQ. 15% is due to their IQ. So very quickly it became clear I'd be screwed if I didn't fix myself. So I've spent at least 20 years, if not since then, figuring out what was wrong with me by figuring out what was wrong with them and trying to come up with therapy courses to repair the EQ

Starting point is 00:14:38 and geniuses, which is why I call my company a home for the mentally enabled or an orphanage for smart people. And if we look at, say, the nickname Scorpion, how did that come to be? So I was a quiet kid at school, but I got bullied a lot. And I was built like a football player, so I could take my beatings from the jocks and then take the beatings of the smaller kids that I was friends with who were smart, but just physically smaller. And I took a lot of bullying all the way through elementary school and high school. And, um, there was a couple of times where I did lose my temper and fight back and I'd been doing martial arts, uh arts regularly since I was seven years old. So after one spectacular ass kicking of one of the bullies, they dubbed me the name Scorpion

Starting point is 00:15:33 because it's a very docile creature till pushed too far. And it's also very loyal to its cyclone, which is other scorpions. And the name kind of stuck as a cool name and as a company. We're not a warm and fuzzy company. We're very blunt and black and white, but definitely you want us on your side. And describe the current version of Scorpion. What does it look like? Well, when we're talking about the IQ versus EQ, we deem the EQ so important that I went out and hired people specifically with high EQ. So these were elementary school teachers, psychologists, et cetera, usually with PMP certifications. So there were project management professionals

Starting point is 00:16:13 and they would babysit the geniuses and the customers. So now I'd fuse together the best thinkers with the best communicators. The super nannies. Super nannies. And on the TV show, Catherine McPheeators. The super nannies. Super nannies. And on the TV show, Catherine McPhee plays the first super nanny, teaching them common sense and helping them speak human. And it makes sense in some ways to hire from both ends of the bell curve because if you're a typical consulting firm, you have to hire people that are just half IQ and half EQ.

Starting point is 00:16:45 It's better to have people who are extreme in both and fuse them together. That's why we can solve problems that other companies can't. So the company today is over 2,500 geniuses, about 500 super nannies, all working in a consortium as consultants with us. We pull them in as needed on the projects. Uh, we have hundreds of projects, uh, that we work on, uh, over a billion, three in revenue. And we've been around nearly 30 years now. So, um, up to a third of our business is government, everything from cybersecurity to, uh, missile defense. Then we have a third is traditional kind of Fortune 1000 companies

Starting point is 00:17:28 that need enterprise software work, whether it's deployment of systems, quality assurance, config management, kind of the plumbing behind the scenes that makes sure those systems never go down. And then the last area, which is growing the fastest, is our concierge up business. And so the tagline for that is any funded need, right? Correct. Okay.

Starting point is 00:17:50 So to give people an idea of the breadth and variety of tasks that you guys get, since any is very broad, right? All-encompassing. So what is the largest government uh project that you can discuss because i know a lot of them are confidential uh what is the largest just to talk about one end of the spectrum what is the largest project you've worked on today well i did yeah most of it i can't talk about but it did come out in the press a while ago that we're we were confirmed as on Aegis. That's a $10 billion project at least. And it lasts about 40 years. And that's our ballistic missile defense of the U.S.

Starting point is 00:18:33 And what are some examples on the micro kind of personal level? And I know there's one that has come up before. The gold digger. Can you? I'll use that. We'll get to that. But we can cover some other ones. So, yeah, I mean, I've taken 30 years of technology

Starting point is 00:18:54 and I've dumbed it down to three words, any funded need. And nobody understands the meaning of the word any, which kills me. Paradox of choice, I guess. Exactly. But literally, for 20 20 years we had all technical people my degrees are artificial intelligence and computer science and we had technical people solving any technical problem and some of our clients then came to us and started asking us to solve non-technical problems my mom has throat cancer can you research all non-technical problems. My mom has throat cancer. Can you research all non-FTA approved solutions

Starting point is 00:19:26 outside the US? Can you retire my parents and shut down their business and break them out of their lease and move them to Florida? My CTO just quit and took all his passwords with him. Can you please hack back into my business, lock him out and hire a new CTO like the whole thing never happened? My business is growing like crazy. Can you find 20,000 square foot, deal with the real estate folks, work out the logistics and move my factory in one weekend where it's ready to open as business as usual on Monday? I wrote a book. Can you make a New York Times bestseller? Not that you need that help, but it's all kinds of questions like that. And the trick is really we just apply the same discipline that we would as engineers that NASA or the CIA would if you said, let's land on the moon.

Starting point is 00:20:15 You know, let's assume the customer's always wrong. Let's break out the requirements. Let's set the goals, define the budget, lay out Gantt chart projects, make a two-week sprint, and then report back on Friday and pivot as needed. And that discipline that people in the technical world take for granted, other folks who are not in our world have never seen any kind of, to them, kind of military-style discipline like that applied to any kind of planning. So we could plan your wedding and your divorce. Using agile software methods and ticket tracking and everything else. And you laugh, but it works shockingly well. Oh, I'm not surprised.

Starting point is 00:20:54 Because if you think about it, what you do in the software world with all these methodologies they've had since the 60s is really just trying to convert ambiguity into absolute. I'm trying to take some fuzzy requirements you have in your head and convert them into a set of ones and zeros. And that's a useful thing for life as well as systems. Now, you asked about the gold digger story. I'll come back to that. One of the questions we got asked one time by the billionaire was,

Starting point is 00:21:23 he said his son fell in love with a Ukrainian gold digger. Could we break them up and not let them know we interfered? So I can go through that story. Oh, yeah. Let's see. Why stop there? The names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Or the guilty.

Starting point is 00:21:42 Exactly. innocent but uh or the guilty exactly so what happened in this case was um once we got the request we found another billionaire client of ours that had a son around the same age and we had him work with us as a scorpion spy think of it like a James Bond double agent. And rented him a mansion down the street and figured out where the first son likes to party and what he likes to drive and what he likes to wear and so on. And this other person emulated most of that. And they quickly became friends and ran into each other at the clubs and hung out and lived just down the street from each other. At the same time, we took his Ukrainian model girlfriend and followed her and found she goes to the same Starbucks every morning after the gym. And so the first time we had another Ukrainian girl

Starting point is 00:22:38 who was one of our Bond spies who stood in front of her in line wearing similar shoes and designer jeans and so on, talking loudly in her native tongue on her cell phone. They never talked. Second day, same thing happened. He stood behind her in line talking on his cell phone and they never talked. The third day, we had rented out the whole Starbucks with extras so that the whole place was full except for one seat beside our girl. So they sat together and they started talking. Our girl was wearing a wire.

Starting point is 00:23:13 She eventually starts telling gold digging stories. The other girl didn't say much. And then eventually the other girl said, well, I've got this billionaire son on the hook right now. I think we'll be married next few months. I've got my green card ready to go to be applied for. And then when it's all over, I'll apply for a divorce and use the money to bring my real boyfriend over from the Ukraine. Now that, because our girl's wearing a wire, was recorded, but it's inadmissible in court. The dad already knows she's a gold digger and we can't play it for the son because he'll know we interfered. So that recording was really just for us. So we knew we were doing the right thing and we knew she wasn't really in love because then we wouldn't interfere.

Starting point is 00:23:54 And we'll come say to the son. And then we had an acting coach teach the father how to deliver the speech convincingly. And then we sent him a signal via text on a Thursday night. He picked a fight with the son, delivered his whole speech, pissed the son off. The son grabbed the bag, left, went down the street to his new friend's house, told his friend all about what the father had said. The friend empathized and said, I can't believe it. You should get revenge on him. I have no idea what you could do to hurt his feelings, but that's ridiculous. Then he said, unfortunately, I can't help. I have a private jet going in the morning to the Dominican Republic for a wedding. So the son said, that's it. I will take my girlfriend, go on the jet with you and get married with no prenup right after the first

Starting point is 00:24:58 wedding. So that's what they did. They jumped on the jet, they went, they had the first wedding, and then he had the second wedding with the same priest and married the Ukrainian girl. And we monitored them and saw that she sent in her visa application the next day, and I got her form back saying that it had been received and her green card was in processing. A little while later, then after their honeymoon, she came back and she wrote him a letter to request that they get divorced. And what she wanted is a settlement if he didn't want to have any trouble. So we then told the, it was arranged so that the son told her that the divorce settlement was ready and she could just come to our offices downtown. So she did. And it was the first time she was ever on time for a meeting. She didn't know who I was, and I gave her the letter, and she read through it.

Starting point is 00:25:55 She said, this is a contract. This is an acting contract. I said, I know. Do you recognize the name? She looks at the back page, and she turns white. She says, this is the priest who married us. So the first wedding was fake. The second wedding was fake.

Starting point is 00:26:08 And everyone involved in the wedding itself were actors. The second letter I gave her was banning her for 10 years from the U.S. because she had violated immigration law by applying for a marriage visa when she wasn't really married. And her Uber was then waiting outside to take her on a one-way trip back to the Ukraine, never to return to the U.S. And we had her under a gag order. And then we had a Dear John letter back to the son that was carefully written in her handwriting.

Starting point is 00:26:40 And she signed it. And then the son was relieved that he was off the hook. And he's bonding with his father because his father never interfered. So that's the funded need solved. Six-month movie with no cameras. And I'd love to hear you elaborate on the, you said, moral judgments. So are there cases that you turn down? Yes.

Starting point is 00:27:08 I mean, in general, we want to take cases that are either good for the planet or good for society in general or neutral. That way, at least, the money we make off of it, we can use for philanthropic purposes. But if it's negative, we had one gentleman asked us to help him do a lot of SEO work to make his website the number one site on Google. And we're like, okay, well, we can one gentleman asked us to help him do a lot of SEO work to make his

Starting point is 00:27:25 website the number one site on Google. And we're like, okay, well, we can help with that. And then we took a look at the website, and it was a website dedicated to all the factual reasons why he believed his neighbor was Satan. So I'm not sure that would have made the world a better place. So we bowed out of helping out with that one. Now, one of the things I enjoy about our conversations is I always learn something new and walk away with a bunch of things to investigate or questions to ask myself. And so in one of our recent conversations, I learned that there's such a thing outside of old horror movies as head transplants.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Could you please just explain for people what is the current state of head transplants? And why should that be of interest to people potentially? Well, the current state is experimental to say the least, but it has come across and come of interest as part of a much bigger project of trying to understand ourselves and trying to replace the only organ in the human body we haven't really figured out how to replace yet, which is the brain. And if it's possible to move the brain into a new body. Now, the more advanced way of doing that and technology for doing that is to treat the electrical activity in the brain as software. And just like you'd back up your iPhone from an iPhone 4 and then restore it to an iPhone 6, our bodies would be the iPhone and the software would be our memories and our unconsciousness. And if we could do that, there's a whole bunch of side effects such as you can avoid or could

Starting point is 00:29:14 call it the cure for cancer, ALS, MS, or HIV in that if you can switch bodies, then you can throw away the body with the disease instead of trying to reverse engineer the disease. But in the short term, if we don't get to that in our lifetime, the more crude version is, is it possible to cut a cross section of the neck and reattach it to a new body? Now, I'm not a doctor, but I consider death mandatory right now, and I'd prefer if it was optional. So I'm highly interested in anything that would allow me to get away from any horrible disease and still live on at least long enough to buy myself enough time until they can back up my brain and move it to a new body. and you know it'd be crazy if we said this thing could happen tomorrow but the smartest men on the planet have endorsed that this is likely to happen eventually maybe as early as 30 years from now so the head transplant currently uh my understanding of it is you take a body

Starting point is 00:30:19 and put it in a in a room at freezing temperatures so that the blood doesn't bleed out too easily. You would put the bodies in traction and connect the blood vessels at the neck from one head across to the other body. And that way the head doesn't bleed out immediately from the major arteries. So you don't have to rush the whole process. Right. So you don't have to rush the whole process. You don't have six minutes to complete it. Wake up with your head on backwards um the second thing then is obviously the tricky part of reattaching the head is the spine and for the one of a better way of describing it the spine is basically like dried spaghetti with a million strands and if you cut those strands and then electrically stimulate them from both ends,

Starting point is 00:31:08 like most of the body that tries to repair itself, the spine will actually grow back together, but only over a space of three nanometers. However, we do have lasers now to get down to as low as one nanometer. So if we could put you in traction, freeze the body, cut with a one nanometer laser, move you over to a new spine, put it in traction, and then electrically stimulate both ends of it, potentially you would not only live, but you wouldn't be paralyzed. Now, the spine would probably not grow back in exactly the same way as it was and wouldn't be wired the same way because we are organic. So whatever movement we have,

Starting point is 00:31:48 we probably have to relearn through physical therapy because your left leg might now move your right leg. Still better option than being dead since our body is basically just a life support system for our head anyway. So if you were a betting man, when would you, when do you think the first successful human head transplant could happen? What would be the, what would be the earliest and latest success defined as you can do everything

Starting point is 00:32:18 you can do now? Uh, no, not even you can, you can, you can write with a dominant hand and you can walk. Okay. Fair enough.

Starting point is 00:32:27 Um, I think there'll be versions of it that we can't reproduce very well. That can happen in as now from now to, you know, five, 10 years from now for it to be somewhat reliable, let's say an 80% success rate. I think it would take about 15 years and if we look at the the more elegant version of that the uh the taking

Starting point is 00:32:57 of your bits and bytes the electrical activity in your brain and in effect you know exporting it uploading it what what would be a what would be if you were in charge of that project, which I know you're not. But if you were in charge of that project, what would be your kind of target prototype date for something like that? I'll go with Ray Kurzweil on this one. 2045. 2045. So 30 years from now, or 29. Gee, I guess we're rushed now.

Starting point is 00:33:28 It's 2016. I think the brain is, as best we can guess, two and a half petabytes of storage and about a trillion neurons. Hard drives, thanks to Moore's Law, should have that amount of storage in about eight years. Intel chips should have a trillion transistors in about 12 years. So we're about a decade out from the hardware being capable of me holding a prosthetic brain in my hand. Uploading the brain is probably not even the hard part. You know, we have folks like Professor Theodore Berger at USC who've managed to take humanized mice and download their memories onto a chip and then read it off the chip back into the brain.

Starting point is 00:34:11 And then if you plug out the chip, the mouse forgets what to do and you plug it in, it remembers what to do. That's the cure for Alzheimer's right there. That's amazing. The trick is there's two hard parts to this. Well, it's all hard, but bits that I'm more worried about than anything else. Part of it is if you stem cell clone a human and then adjust its telomere rate, can you grow a 20-year-old twin sister or brother in four years? And if you can, it's not like you're flashing a ROM or formatting a hard drive. How do you take what you uploaded from your brain and put it into that body and still have it make sense, even if it's your DNA? Because right now, if we took the electrical stimulants to come from my visual cortex, when I look at a triangle in another room and then send those stimulants into your brain, you won't see a triangle.

Starting point is 00:35:02 It's like your Mac and MPC. It's just not compatible. So there is the human decoder project, which is, is there a common denominator here that would allow us to translate any memory, any visual visualization, any imaginative element between humans so that it makes sense to all of us? And does that even exist? Is that possible? Are we all of us. And does that even exist? Is that possible? Are we all so organic that we're all unique?

Starting point is 00:35:29 So those are the bits I worry about. Other people worry about where's your soul and your spirit now after a head transplant. Why do you not worry about that? Well, A, I'd be just glad I'm still alive, whether I'm zombified or not. Secondly, unfortunately, I'm a scientist, so there's a definition to me of what's real. Anything I can do 32 times in a row on demand is a scientific proof that's real, that's beyond a reasonable doubt, that it won't happen a 33rd time. Everything else that the general public tends to believe in that they've seen themselves one time or they can't even explain it to others. They just know they believe in it.

Starting point is 00:36:12 I can respect that, but I can't depend on it. That's a good way to put it. I like believing in stuff I can depend on because the people who hire me to solve their problems need to depend on me. So I can't have Lego bricks that may or may not work. So speaking of Lego blocks that may or may not work, mine mostly don't work. And it's not related to what I'm about to ask, which is I only recently realized that you do not drink alcohol. Has that always been the case?

Starting point is 00:36:42 Yes, I've never tried alcohol. Why not? Well, the humorous version of it is there's an old saying in Ireland that God invented alcohol to stop the Irish taking over the world. So since I don't drink, so far so good. More realistically, I tend to do everything in my life to the extreme or not at all. I have a habit of going all the way down the rabbit holes. So if I took a sip of wine, I might own a vineyard next week. And, um, that may be a distraction from my work. So all my friends drink and I'm their designated driver. But, uh, for me, I think it's too easy, whether it's drinking drugs or smoking, it's because I'm scared. I'd like it. So I've never tried any, I've never smoked anything,

Starting point is 00:37:25 never taken any form of drugs because if I liked it, there's nothing stopping me going all the way. Do you drink tea or coffee? Any caffeine? Tea, coffee, energy drinks. Sure. Absolutely. Yep. And, um, I want to roll. It's harder to overdose on. Harder. Well, there's a, there's an inbuilt, uh, sort of puke factor with a lot of that, right? In the sense that like, before you kill yourself with energy drinks, you're probably going to be unable to hold the can, uh, among other things, the, the comment you made

Starting point is 00:37:55 earlier about EQ and IQ and teaching people and fixing yourself, for instance, adding enough EQ that you can function and manage and so on. Can you do it the other way around? In other words, can you take someone who has an IQ, can people become smarter? And I know this is a dicey question for a million reasons, but how would you answer that question? If someone says, well, can I become smarter? And if so, how? Okay. Well, it is a tricky question. So let me try to give you as clear an answer as I can. First of all, let's understand IQ. IQ is, to me, the amount of glucose you absorb and the speed your brain cycles and how fast you fire neurons. So intellect, it specifically measures what we call intellect quotient, which is very different from smart.

Starting point is 00:38:43 Smart can mean many, many things. For sure. And just because someone meets a certain intellect quotient doesn't mean they have photographic memory, doesn't mean they're great at sports, doesn't mean they can do all kinds of stuff. They're generally worse than everyone else at general tasks. So it's a very, very specific thing. And the way I've looked at it over the years is it's kind of like if you're born with a Kia car and you have a 500 horsepower engine and that horsepower

Starting point is 00:39:14 amount is fixed. Now, the first time you come to a corner in the road, you're going to wipe out because you have no brakes, no handling, no aerodynamics, no finesse, no control over that horsepower. And what you want to do with EQ and connecting with people and the ability to bite your lip and choose your battles and all the other soft skills that we learn, that turns that Kia into a Formula One race car, where now you have the horsepower that you can harness and control and direct in ways that are beneficial for where you're trying to get to.

Starting point is 00:39:51 And that's why, for most people, if they're in a well-rounded BMW, they can beat almost everybody else because everybody else is either too much horsepower or they're well-rounded but not enough horsepower. All show, no go. So that's where the phrase is like the problem with the world is that the dumb people are overconfident and the smart people are not confident enough. And so that's just trying to understand intellect. Now, technically, intellect is fixed. It doesn't go up in general.

Starting point is 00:40:29 Marijuana and so on can slow it down. And it also is hereditary. So because of those factors, you can't fix your IQ as easily as you can fix your EQ. However, being smart is a different thing. I think people can learn to be smart, critical thinking skills, thinking outside the box, being well-read, being efficient, being organized, prioritizing well. These are all habits that are teachable. And I've mentored and taught many, many groups on these subjects and they've changed their entire life just by getting their calendar organized

Starting point is 00:41:05 and sticking with it. And now they come across as a very smart person. So I think it was Gladwell who said that some of the most successful people in the world had 120 IQ. So they were smart enough, and then they were very well-rounded and organized in all the other areas.

Starting point is 00:41:23 100 being right at the top of the bell curve? 100 being average, yeah. Got it. So they were very well-rounded and organized in all the other areas. 100 being right at the top of the bell curve? 100 being average, yeah. Got it. So they were a little smart. But once you go much beyond 120, it's almost more of a disability you have to overcome than an ability. How did you acquire EQ? How did you fix yourself? What were some of the things that worked best for you?

Starting point is 00:41:46 The first thing that I think affects most people, and I realize this more and more as I get fan mail now from gentlemen who are 60, 70-year-old scientists that write me letters going, I wish someone had told me I was missing an EQ my whole life, because nobody talks about it. It's 85% of your success, and they don't teach it in schools, and they don't talk about it, and nobody explains what it is. It's this elusive thing that you either have since kindergarten in the playground or you don't. And so for me, first step was being self-aware enough to know I was missing something and kind of like a deaf person who sees better. Now that I knew I didn't have it, I was oversensitive to applying it. Like an actor, I had to watch other people do it. I had to watch how salespeople work, how politicians work, how teachers work, and when they apply EQ. And being technically correct

Starting point is 00:42:33 doesn't matter in those cases. What matters is connecting with that person and having an impact on them. So in the company, I've been a mentor myself and worked with mentors who helped me by bluntly pointing out EQ examples. So they'd call me after a phone call and say, at the beginning, you said this sentence that could be seen as antagonistic or challenging. Later on, you use this word that can isolate some of the people in the room. You don't want to use that word. Here you are wearing your feelings on your sleeve. You can have those feelings.

Starting point is 00:43:11 Just don't let other people know you're having those feelings. Make eye contact with everyone. Don't just focus on the folks you deem are the real players in the room. Don't write off everyone else who now knows you think they're an idiot. These kind of things that other people may consider common sense, but they weren't common for me. Is, uh, if, if someone wants to become more of a rational thinker, a critical problem solver, uh, someone who doesn't fool themselves. And I mean, I guess it was Richard Feynman,

Starting point is 00:43:44 the physicist who said, uh, you must not fool yourself and you're the most, you're the easiest person to fool something along those lines. Like that was rule number one. And, uh, if,

Starting point is 00:43:54 if they don't want to trick themselves into experiencing something once and then, uh, mistakenly believing that it's dependable, right? How, what would your advice to them be? I'd read the book Fooled by Randomness.

Starting point is 00:44:08 Yeah, that's a good one. That's a great reminder of how not to, just because you got lucky a couple of times doesn't mean you're right all the time or you can depend on it. Yeah. So I'm pretty good at drawing a line in the sand on what things I have in my life that

Starting point is 00:44:25 were under my control that i made happen and which things were just dumb luck you know i graduated high school the same year the computers first became available i was in a country where i had no competition because nobody else was doing computers these are things beyond my control that dramatically helped my career um i'm terrible at natural languages. Thank God I was born in a country that spoke English and that the world superpower at the time also spoke English. These are all things that are not skill, they're luck. I think it's very important to know that you're always flawed and you're always humble and you can always learn. And to have your ego in check, but not so in check that you're doing yourself an injustice as well. A healthy ego, to me, should be able to justify its claims.

Starting point is 00:45:22 So it's very important that you don't put yourself below or above anyone else by default. Only by their behavior can you apply that judgment. I remember getting, well, two things, just to build on what you said.

Starting point is 00:45:39 So the first is another book that I thought was spectacular. It's called Bad Science, which teaches people not to fool themselves when it comes to, say, sensationalized headlines in media or different scientific claims that are misinterpreted. I think that's a really good companion to Fooled by Randomness. The second is related to your last comment, which I remember I was told when my first book hit the New York Times bestseller list, someone said to me, just remember, and at the time it didn't make a lot of sense to me, but now it makes a lot of sense. They said, you're never as bad as they say you are, and you're never as good as they say you

Starting point is 00:46:15 are. I was like, okay, that seems to be good advice. Now, your resume is just not even your resume, just a sampling, a smattering of your accomplishments. It's the stuff of, if I were to put this into a character in a book, and we're doing it in undergraduate, my professor would say, you need to tone this down because it would be so unbelievable. But it's an incredibly impressive list of accomplishments. I wanted to go back to early competition. So at 16, high-speed computer problem-solving competitions, or we could talk about the World Olympics in informatics. Can you describe what, because people who compete in these competitions, I would have to imagine, are all smart.

Starting point is 00:47:03 I mean, they're to varying degrees, but certainly more so than average Joe or Jane walking around. What separates a world-class competitor or a champion in these from the also-rans? Oh, that's a great question. It's not something that's heavily televised. Not many people have watched high-speed problem solving in action. Just a guy at a keyboard sweating profusely. So let's see. Like any sport, there's a whole bunch of factors to it.

Starting point is 00:47:40 First of all, let's talk about the format of it. At the national level, you're basically given five problems to solve in three hours. So you've got about 40 minutes of problem. And you're given a blank computer with no pre-libraries or books or manuals or help on there. So you're not assembling bits of code that already exist. And they'll lay out problems for you, and you have to think them through, code up the solution from scratch, test it, make sure it works. And for the input samples they gave, it's giving all the right output samples. And then move on to the next thing.

Starting point is 00:48:18 And sometimes these projects for university students could be given a semester or a couple of weeks to do. And you have 40 minutes. Now, the also-rans will do that and get most of the problems working. What separates people and when you start getting to the Olympic level is you, A, I had to learn meditation to be able to focus like a laser beam on what the problem was. I also learned to type 90 words a minute. And I became fluent in, I overdid it a little bit, but 79 programming languages. That's a lot. And the reason is, like ice skating, you can get the routine perfect and get 50% of the marks. The other 50% will be based on style and elegance and performance and so on.

Starting point is 00:48:59 And it's the same with code. So they actually have judges who understand code and ex-contestants judging the elegance of your solution. Part of the decision-making of how elegant you can be depends on which language you chose. Every language has strengths and weaknesses. So if you memorize all the languages, look at the problem, the amateurs will start banging out code on keyboards right away. The professionals will sit there almost in a meditative state for up to 30 of those 40 minutes and not do anything, which is pretty nerve wracking. That's got to be nerve wracking.

Starting point is 00:49:35 But they're basically understanding the problem, figuring out how they would solve it, applying the right language to solving it, writing the code in their head, dry reading it in their head to make sure it works, and then the last 10 minutes, typing it out at 90 words a minute. And if they get all that right, they will have the most elegant, correct solution. Wow. That sounds incredibly stressful. I'm going to come back to the meditative practice in a second, but it reminds me of

Starting point is 00:50:03 a quote, which, and of course, almost every quote on the internet is attributed attributed to abraham lincoln so this could be from someone else but i think this one is roughly accurate it's paraphrased but uh it goes along the lines of if if i were given six hours to chop down a tree i would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe exactly and uh in a case like that what type of meditation or meditative practice or practices helped you the most? And just because one thing I didn't point out is at the national level, you got the five problems in three hours. At the Olympic level, you got the same thing. But then on the second day, you got one problem in three hours. But the problem they gave us was, can you build a system that would reroute all planes to all different airports in Canada, including refueling stops?

Starting point is 00:50:49 Which would be like a four-year government project, and you had three hours. Three hours. Wow. Do those – just to – I'll hit pause on my previous question for a second. Do the answers get utilized in some way? I mean, that seems like a very practical – No. No.

Starting point is 00:51:06 They don't. I'm not sure I want an air traffic control system that was built in three hours by one guy under pressure. Fair enough. Fair enough. Could be a starting point, though. Could be a starting point. So the meditative practice. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:20 And you'll know far more about this than I do. But for me, it was basically my brain is very susceptible to multitasking. I can be completely engaged in this conversation with you while reorganizing my to-do list, while thinking of a project plan I have to develop for next week, while writing an email to my attorney and be completely present in doing all those things. Trying to get them all to shut down at night when they want to sleep or get them all to focus on a single problem is very difficult because most of living life and wandering around and driving and making phone calls is not a big enough problem to require my brain to fully focus on it. So only under extreme conditions like this would a problem be big enough

Starting point is 00:52:07 to require entire focus. So I tried guided meditation, transcendental meditation, etc. And I went into deprivation tanks. I also did trying to achieve clear space. First time a deprivation tank was interesting for me. I went in. I was really trying to give it a good go.

Starting point is 00:52:33 I knew it would be dark in there, so I hung my watch on the little chair outside. I got in the tank. I lay there, closed my eyes, and forced myself to meditate. So I was like, okay, well, what do I need to think about? So I go through all the checklist of what's my self-actualization according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. How do I feel about family? Where are my priorities at?

Starting point is 00:52:57 Are my finances in order? So I went through every aspect of my life and kind of came to a conclusion on each one and said I was happy where I was at. And then I i opened my eyes and i was still floating in the tank and um i know no concept of time because when you're in the tank it deprives you of all relativity so i turned around i peeked the door open a bit so i could look at my watch because i was supposed to be in the tank for two hours and i'd been in there three minutes got a long way to go i spent the rest of the time trying to trying not to drown by falling asleep in the salty water so what of all those

Starting point is 00:53:34 things you tried what did you find what was what gave you the biggest bang for the buck for you personally um actually i started i've been researching virtual reality since 1991 the first round and there's methods we used for working on kids with dyslexia and adhd that are mazes and things that force the exercise of your largest neural connection between short-term and long-term memory, which is your spatial locality. And I found that very therapeutic. So doing the same exercises? Doing the same exercise when I'm fully immersed, and then I'm just exercising spatial locality and nothing else.

Starting point is 00:54:22 So would you do that before competition? Yes, I did that before competitions and also when I'd hit the equivalent of writer's block for scientists, where I'm banging my head against the wall on some problem where I'm going back to the drawing board multiple times. And several times I've tried to invent stuff that's basically impossible to write, so hence it was very discouraging to try and work on something that everyone thinks is impossible winlocks was my first invention and you've read a bit about senjen being the second one which is now very very government popular we're gonna we're gonna i want to talk about uh both of those the exercises where if

Starting point is 00:55:02 somebody wanted to experience or learn more about the exercises that you just described where could they find them they can't right now because it's not really open to the public i think as oculus rift now is commercially available or becomes commercially available shortly and vr gets in everyone's home like a playstation does these options of effectively you know if you think about it, to some extent, meditating is creating your own world and living in it. Whether that world is clear space, whether that world is an open field you're running through,

Starting point is 00:55:33 whether that world is a set of mattresses you're lying on and falling asleep. And I think VR will simply be you create that world more tangibly and then you go live in it i had my i was a virtual reality skeptic i still am in some respects but uh pessimist maybe in some respects for a long time because of the prototypes that i'd seen and experienced and then i had my first htc vive running valve software experience in Seattle. And I remember coming out of it being blown away by,

Starting point is 00:56:11 even though there were flaws, of course, it wasn't perfect, but very little lag time. And I came out of the experience and I asked how long, this is the opposite of your sensory deprivation tank, how long I had been in the experience because it felt like five or six minutes to me it was about 25 minutes and that is when i was like okay and sort of metaphorically in my mind pushed all my chips onto the table i was like okay yeah vr is going to be

Starting point is 00:56:35 very very interesting yeah it's still i went to vr la recently to see all the latest vr stuff it's pure amateur hour right now what's out there and i don't understand why other than lack of funding because the just gaming technology in 2d is there already we have the helmets we don't need the lag time but a lot of what i saw demoed and produced is stuff i'd seen better versions in the 90s so i think it's just not enough juice and money has gone into this yet and as soon as it will this is going to go from cartoons to to reality tv really quick yeah it's it makes me think of uh for those people who are science fiction nerds a little bit uh diamond age by neil stevenson one of my favorite writers ne8l for people who want to read any of his stuff i suggest snow crash as a start. But what do you think the future of VR could look like?

Starting point is 00:57:26 I mean, in 10 years' time, what is a plausible? Well, there's a great book called Visions of Heaven, Glimpses of Hell about VR, written in the 90s. But literally every page of it is a different application from virtual surgery to virtual tourism. So, I mean. Visions of Heaven, Glimpses of Hell? Yeah. What a great title. Well, funny story on that.

Starting point is 00:57:49 I was a kid reading. I was, what, 16 back then? I was a kid with my feet up on the window reading this on a train because I couldn't afford a car yet, going up to Dublin. And I realized I was sitting opposite a group of nuns that were reading the title. Makes me think, yeah, you know that you were talking about your difficulty with natural languages. Natural languages can cause a lot of misunderstandings. I was in an Uber recently, and I said, have you ever been to Swingers? And it's a diner that I'd heard of, but the guy wasn't

Starting point is 00:58:18 familiar with it. And he turned out to be very conservative. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, this could get awkward very, very quickly. So you had asked about VR. Yes. Well, let's take one thing at a time. Video games, first of all. We already are falling off our chair playing them when you have a kid up close with a PlayStation controller. That means there's an immersion where they believe their body is somewhat in the game. So that happening with these new Tesla suits that have come out to give you full tactile feedback where you can hold an iPad in front of you, run your fingers down your spine on the iPad, and it gives yourself a back massage.

Starting point is 00:58:56 Tesla from the company Tesla that we think of? Nope. Same name Tesla, but these guys are out of the UK, and I think there's no relation. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But tactile feedback suits where you can actually feel VR. That's, yeah.

Starting point is 00:59:10 So you see it, hear it, smell it, and feel it. That's true immersion. Movies. We're already seeing VR promos for some of the popular movies that are coming out. VR movies is tricky and difficult, but there's ILM and others are spending oodles of money now trying to figure out how to tell stories in VR. Just like in the old days when we had pantomime and then we invented a black and white camera, all we did is put the camera in the front row of the theater and then carry on our pantomime until we learned how to use it. And if you watch a modern version of Scorpion where you're doing put the camera in the front row of the theater, and then carry on our pantomime.

Starting point is 00:59:46 Until we learn how to use it, and if you watch a modern version of Scorpion where you're doing point of view and you're panning around in people's faces and blurring out backgrounds and you're using the latest techniques in cinematography, that's how far we've come. VR to film is like film was to pantomime in that it'll totally change the game.

Starting point is 01:00:05 And we don't even know how to use it yet. Firstly, cinematography goes away. Point of view goes away. The fourth wall goes away. You're carrying out a movie and you have no idea where your audience is standing. It's like you're filming the movie and they're wandering around on set.

Starting point is 01:00:19 Secondly, they can affect the outcome of the movie and the actors in the movie can look straight at them. So they feel like they're in the movie and part of it. And just like the old choose-your-own-adventure books, their actions may indicate what outcome you have. Now, depending on how many branches you can have and how interactive it is, where do you draw the line between that being a movie and that being a video game? You know, if you put on a helmet and start playing Grand Theft Auto, it's the greatest movie ever told because you're going to die in a fatabulous different way every time.

Starting point is 01:00:50 So no two movies are the same. In Diamond Age, they call these interactive VR experiences Ractives. There's a short for Interactives. And there are companies that exist which will say buy a skyscraper and just house thousands of actors in these tactile feedback suits to interact with people who are paying to be part of this like gta in a vr world i mean it seems imminently plausible to me but well theme parks right now theme parks take up to disneyland or universal or whatever take up acres and acres of expensive prime real estate there's no need for that if you go into a

Starting point is 01:01:30 warehouse pop on a helmet and you're in the theme park except there's no lines for any ride ever yeah um you know virtual tourism just properly scan the eiffel tower and surrounding area and boom now you can jack in and walk around Paris. No flight necessary. Teleconferencing, you know, forget GoToMeeting or Skype. Now you can look at the beads of sweat and high definition that are coming down the brow of the guy you're negotiating with. Virtual sex, of course, is a favorite one people jump to for long-distance relationships.

Starting point is 01:02:00 With tactile feedback suits, that starts becoming a little more feasible. Training, simulators, driving, flying, all of these areas where we feel we need to build a physical structure and have physical danger all goes away. What, now I know we mentioned, is it ZenGen? Yes, ZenGen. Zenjin yes earlier and i promised we would come back to it can you explain to people what senjin is sure um it's probably my last masterpiece that nearly made me want to jump out the window of developing it because it was just so difficult, but it's send gen, the name stands for scenario generator. And it was born out of the, out of a need. I was working on systems that were critical to life and death or lose a million dollars a minute if they go down. And I was trying to develop processes and systems around these systems to make sure they would never have a flaw. But humans,

Starting point is 01:03:05 a working professional, make mistakes about 3% of the time on average. So I can't have a flawless system operated by three percenters. So I had to go beyond human. And the only way I know to do that is artificial intelligence. So at college, we used to have to write a chess computer and then the boys in the lab would be competitive. So they'd turn the chess computers on each other. And they would rapidly and exhaustively start playing every possible game of chess, every move on the board. And I thought that was interesting behavior. So, I built a double-headed chess engine, abstracted from it the rules of chess into a modeling language, where I can now build a model of anything and it'll play out every possible outcome. Hence the name SendGen. And I did it in a language that was, again, choosing

Starting point is 01:03:52 the language like I learned to do in the Olympics to choose an extremely efficient, fast language that people don't usually use these days. What is that? It was raw NCC with no Microsoft libraries. So that makes it multi-platform and allows it to scale to 22 billion scenarios on the laptop. So it didn't need massive cloud architectures or supercomputers to run. So what the system does is, let's say you have a legal contract as a partnership. And most partnership contracts will have, you know, what if you die? What if I die?

Starting point is 01:04:27 What if you get married? What if I get married? What if I get divorced? What if you sell your shares, et cetera, et cetera. And you're hoping that the lawyers thought of everything that could happen. When you put that in send gen, it comes up with what if she's widowed and you realize that that wasn't accounted for. You had married, divorced or died, but not got married. And then you died and she didn't accounted for. You had married, divorced, or died, but not got married and then

Starting point is 01:04:45 you died and she didn't get divorced. If you took software and you're trying to test a piece of software for every possible outcome, this system will think of everything a user can do with every good and bad piece of data. Well, that's hugely valuable when that software is software used to launch missiles or land airplanes or something where you can't afford to have it jam up because you went down a path that nobody thought of testing. Humans are terrible at thinking of all the possibilities to test something. If you're trying to hack into a system, it's the ultimate skeleton key because it'll try every possibility until it either guesses the password or finds a bug. Either way, it'll eventually get in. And I mean, this is one example of process, right? So you have a problem, any funded need,

Starting point is 01:05:38 you could get any set of issues thrown at you by an individual or a government or a technologist uh there's there's one that i'd love to chat about and maybe you could walk through how you guys tackled it like it comes in the door and uh and then what you know what happens and that's the and i'm pretty sure you can talk about the uh the uh in afghanistan so chemical warfare i'm pretty sure you can talk about it, in Afghanistan. So chemical warfare. I'm not sure if you... Sure. Yeah, it's one of the examples that is not classified. There's a thing called the Afghan briefing that lays out,

Starting point is 01:06:16 if you were being deployed tomorrow, you'd get this white paper that says, here's the weather conditions, the lay of the land, the locations, here's the good guys and the bad guys. And some people, like lay of the land, the locations, here's the good guys and the bad guys. And some people like the local civil authorities could be good guys or bad guys, depending on who bribed them last. The transportation we use, the transportation they use, the actions we use, whether it's defending or patrolling, et cetera, and the actions they use, which can be range from biological contamination to raids to ambushes.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And we laid all this out as a big chess game for CENGEN. And actually recently, about six months ago, we were selected by SOCOM, that runs the Navy SEALs, to demonstrate this running the Afghanistan war games. And we did 10 demonstrations that day, each one being 59,000 war games in under two seconds live. And then when it generates everyone attacking everyone every way using every vehicle, you can then sort or weight the outcomes to say, okay, which I don't want to read 59,000 of them, which things create the most devastating impact on human life. So the one that bubbled to the top was a scenario where a drone is doing surveillance, running off of a local IP network on an aircraft carrier. A terrorist insurgent cell goes in and does a denial of service attack on the network.

Starting point is 01:07:39 The drone loses navigation and crashes into a poppy field. That's classified equipment. So the guys are sent out in Humvees to retrieve the drone and they follow standard operating procedure, which is they find a poppy field, burn it down because that is the source of revenue for opium for the enemy. So they did burn it down. The local drug lord wasn't too happy to find out his poppy fields were burned down. So he put arsenic in the water supply to the local base.

Starting point is 01:08:09 Now, what we did in this case is we went to the rear admiral, who was working with us on another project, and said, we discovered this. Have your mission planning folks come up with a contingency plan for this? And they were like, no, we never think of something like that happening. And he agreed it could happen. So he asked us to recommend a solution. So he said, very simple, have a spare water reservoir on base with tested water on it, put an arsenic detector in the water supply on a valve and be able to switch over if you see excess amounts of arsenic. So we put all

Starting point is 01:08:42 that in place. And because we're into the internet of things, we put a little web receiver on the valve so we knew if we would switch and we forgot all about it. And three months later, that's what happened and it switched over. There was 400 guys on the base at that time. So wild. And later I spoke to one of the guys who was there and they were also trying to put arsenic in the popcorn supply to the movie house. So, so Cengen though, isn't limited to military applications. I mean, you could apply this to financial markets. You could apply it to. Exactly. Hedge funds, financial markets, algorithmic trading scenarios, anything where you really have a human sitting there scratching her head going, have I thought of everything for LA Metro? We applied this to the doorways because remember after 9-11 in the airplanes, they had to have electronic locks on the doorways so you can't get through to the cockpit.

Starting point is 01:09:30 The same regulation applied later to trains. So we used Sengen to generate all the possibilities of testing ways of opening that door. Instead of a human testing it seven different ways, we came up with 156 ways of testing it. How do you manage the inputs? What do you give Sanjen to allow it to generate these scenarios? It's a certain model and set of rules. So it's kind of like if I went down to the store and bought a game of chess, it comes with a four-page pamphlet explaining the rules. If I tried to write out every game of chess, I'd fill the building with paperwork.

Starting point is 01:10:05 So we have to put the pamphlet into it. We don't have to write out all the rules. If I tried to write out every game of chess, I'd fill the building with paperwork. So we have to put the pamphlet into it. We don't have to write out all the games. So we have to say, these are all the pieces. The pieces generally move and interact in this way. And you can't move piece number three till piece number two is in this position, any dependencies. And then the system will read that, a structure uh internal tree structure that's multi-dimensional and then start going down every branch of the tree in every order what's called depth first regression from left to right to prove that it's gone from root to tip in every possible way i can get through the tree structure this is this is going to seem like a left turn and it is but do you find as i have observed with friends of mine probably 32 times it doesn't make it totally dependable but it's a

Starting point is 01:10:54 pattern that the the people with the highest intellectual horsepower have more emotional ups and downs or uh are at a greater risk of something like depression or suicide? No, absolutely. It's well proven that high IQ individuals are much more likely to commit suicide, mostly by 16. It's one of the reasons we want the TV show to reach out to those folks and let them know there is a place for people who never fit in like me and that they're not the only ones out there. And being smart is cool and every problem does have a solution. But yeah, I mean, ignorance is bliss. If a couple met in a village in the middle of nowhere and a village of 300 people and they fall in love in high school and they graduate, stay in the village and run the local grocery store slash gas station together,

Starting point is 01:11:45 they'll probably be blissfully happier than people who fly around the world and meet everyone and live in LA and have a hard time now connecting with people on 200 different levels of compatibility, whereas the other folks only had 10 things going on anyway, and they're totally compatible with that. Do you think with the, and I do want to talk quite a bit about the tv show the so we'll come back to that the uh the people that you source and if you look at the highest iq folks you've interacted with uh or or just this you know smart people there goes that word again high iq people we'll leave it at that you've interacted with, do they tend to suffer for similar reasons? For instance, like when I look at people who have reached a certain point on Maslow's hierarchy of

Starting point is 01:12:31 needs, and they fly around, and they have kind of infinite options on the table at any given moment, if they, whenever they choose something, they have in mind sort of the opportunity cost of the decision they just made, right? Like if you can be with anyone doing anything at any given time, that sometimes leads in people I've met to a high degree of dissatisfaction or just general discontent, even though they seem to have the world in the palm of their hand. So I've seen that with wealthy people, for instance. Do you find there are, is there a similar sort of cognitive issue or a pattern that you've spotted in people with high IQ? Yes, mostly there are similar patterns.

Starting point is 01:13:17 Many of them as kids, if they were only kids, they were very confused. If they had siblings, they didn't get along. By the time they hit 12, 13, they started realizing they were smarter than their parents, which is a scary thing for a kid to go through in most cases. They were misunderstood at school. The confident teachers made them teacher's pet, which made them not popular with the kids. And the teachers who were just surviving on tenure and trying to stay one page ahead, they would embarrass them with their questions.

Starting point is 01:13:51 So either way, they couldn't make friends there. And the people who don't necessarily, they never reached the self-actualization part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs financially at a young age. But they did reach it intellectually where they're like, what's it all for? What's the point? Why am I here? Why don't I just end all the pain now?

Starting point is 01:14:15 Isn't it easier? The world's going to hell in a handbasket anyway. World War III is coming. The economy is going to collapse. They can see all the things that the people who are blissfully unaware don't see. And to them, it's as tangible and real as if it had already happened. They're certain it's going to collapse. They can see all the things that the people who are blissfully unaware don't see. And to them, it's as tangible and real as if it had already happened.

Starting point is 01:14:28 They're certain it's going to happen and they don't want to be around to see it. And until you can reach those people and show that they can be part of the solution and they can actually do the greater good

Starting point is 01:14:38 and that there's, if they're 1 in 10,000 people with an IQ of 150, they're robbing those other 10,000 people of what they could do for them by killing themselves. And how did the TV show come to be? Because, of course, I mean, I know that that was one of the factors, but what's the genesis story of the TV show,

Starting point is 01:15:01 which now reaches, what is it, 26 million people? 26 million viewed the pilot, yeah. And we have numbers up to that every week watching it, depending on what other football games are going on at that time of the week and what the after views are. But it's going strong. It's the number one rated show on TV. And should any day now get approved for season three.

Starting point is 01:15:24 So it's going strong. TV and we're should any day now get approved for season three. So it's going strong. So the genesis of it was we solve any funded problem. The problem was just getting people to hear about us, the branding and marketing side of it. And again, as engineers, we suck at branding and marketing. We're not salespeople.

Starting point is 01:15:45 So we, most of our business was word of mouth from the people we did a fantastic job for. They told their brothers and uncles and cousins and those people then came. Like our mutual friend. Yeah. So we wanted to solve the problem of how do I make sure everyone's heard of us? I also was running out of geniuses. They're really hard to find. So how do I get the geniuses to come find me?

Starting point is 01:16:07 And then we're in a country that's worshipping Jersey Shore and the Kardashians. So unless I want to learn how to speak Chinese, I better try to do something for the educational system in this country and turn that around a little bit. So we don't keep testing out mathematically as a third world country. So I got together to geniuses with my funded problem saying, how do I find more of you guys? And they said, if we write a book, the millennials will probably not read it due to massive doses of ADHD. Secondly, if I made a movie, they'll forget my name in six months. But if we replace CSI as the number one show on the air for the next 10 years, not only would the geniuses come find us, but the 12-year-old boys and girls will grow up wanting to be us,

Starting point is 01:16:53 wanting to be the next high-tech James Bond. And everyone will have heard of us and will be top of mind every Monday night at 9. So we're like, okay, let's do that. Because we didn't know that was hard. And in fairness, you're no stranger to things perceived as hard also. Correct. Hard doesn't really bother me anymore. Impossible doesn't really bother us anymore.

Starting point is 01:17:18 So we realized we know nothing about Hollywood so we've got to get some people who do. So we got the producers of Transformers, Spider-Man, Star Trek, director of Fast and the Furious, the writers of Sopranos, Prison Break, and Hostages. And we did a lot of that working through contacts we had at Scooter Braun's productions. Who represents – I mean, also, I guess, rode from the very beginning with Justin Bieber and many others. People who don't recognize them. Grande and a side of Gangnam Style and at one point, I think, also, I mean, I guess, rode from the very beginning with Justin Bieber and many others, people who don't recognize him. Grande and a side of Gangnam Style and at one point, I think, top 13 acts on YouTube.

Starting point is 01:17:50 So they had 400 million eyeballs. They knew something about marketing. And so we brought all that together, took it to CBS Studios, we took it to CBS Network, and with an all-star team like that, they were like, how could they not make it? So they made the show,

Starting point is 01:18:04 and I sat with the writers and told them the stories i could tell them about the company but particularly the characters that i work with every day who are friends of mine and they found that fascinating and and the writer the showrunner nick santora of the show has done an amazing job with working with nick wooten he's basically his tagline for the whole show was, so genius is not all it's cracked up to be. You know, everybody wants to be a genius, but when you really think about it, there's a lot of downsides. So these genius people who can't see the forest for the trees and have no common sense means

Starting point is 01:18:39 you end up with a show about a dysfunctional family of geniuses you can actually root for because they're all underdogs and they all got issues from germophobia to to uh ocd and then katherine mcphee was brought in as the the super nanny to begin mentoring them on the path of eq and doing it because her own son who she thought was autistic was actually a genius so there's a great scene by the way i won't spoil it for people there's a great scene at the very end where they say you know if you help translate the world for us we'll help translate your son for you and and that was it the whole family structure was born and um i think all of us can relate to the people and the flaws in that show because we all have those insecurities and those issues.

Starting point is 01:19:28 It's just with Prodigies, it's a little more exaggerated. the tentative goal, right, or definitive goal of the TV show, how long did it take to the point that the pilot was done being edited? I don't know the exact months, but it was something like eight months. That's extremely fast. Because, you know, all of us are busy, so we're all doers. We're not talkers. We got together. We're like, are we doing this or not? Because I got a day job I got to run to.

Starting point is 01:20:04 And the other part that helped was when i sat with the writers and just talked to them about the characters and the background and how it started they were like well you know that's the whole story right there we just write that down um and then we come to them every every um every quarter that's my finance side every every season and give them a whole list of stories that have really happened that we can talk about and adventures and things we've solved for customers. And then we'd also give them the gadgets. I feel like Q and James Bond saying, you know, here's the watch that cuts lasers and here's the thing that allows you to breathe underwater and here's a device that will allow you to fly. And they'll work in those things into

Starting point is 01:20:45 the episodes. So let's, let's take the second because this is another thing that I hadn't heard of. So how do you breathe underwater in this particular example? So, yeah, I think this is episode 10 of season one that brought, that were the episodes around this.

Starting point is 01:21:02 And this had started as research that the navy seals got into most of us i think by now i've heard about slow release medicine where you have platelets in the blood that'll release you can take an injection but it'll release the medicine in controlled doses over the next six weeks or whatever so it's a version of that that's platelets that you put into the bloodstream that release oxygen but over like 20 minutes instead of uh over six weeks now the reason you breathe at all is so that your lungs can oxygenate your blood so if your blood's already oxygenated you don't need to breathe now that's kind of something you've been doing a long time subconsciously. So the toughest part of this is teaching someone to not breathe if they don't have to. But yeah, you can put a Navy SEAL underwater for up to

Starting point is 01:21:52 22 minutes if he's properly dosed up with platelets without having to breathe, if he can not breathe. You just have to make sure he doesn't reflexively swallow a bunch of water. Right. They also apply the same thing to Boston Children's Hospital when they're operating on kids where their lungs have collapsed. And it gives them an extra eight minutes of the kid being alive where they can actually save the kid because the blood's oxygenated. Now, there's a machine that'll actually oxygenate your blood live for you

Starting point is 01:22:21 instead of the platelets. So I believe on the show what they did is that a kid who was trapped under rocks with the tide coming in, and they effectively gave him a blood transfusion up to the machine and back down into him, where the ABAP or something the machine's called, but it oxygenated his blood for him indefinitely so he didn't have to breathe. What are your biggest challenges? I mean, you seem to have such good hardware, obviously, mentally speaking.

Starting point is 01:22:47 You have good software. You've trained yourself with various approaches to improve your EQ. What do you find hardest? Oh, tolerance is still very, very difficult to look at the world and the stupidity of people fighting over religions and borders and 2,000-year-old scripts written by people they don't know and war in general and politicians and egos fighting over territories that aren't rightfully theirs anyway.

Starting point is 01:23:30 And just sitting back and watching all that, knowing that that's darn human nature. There's not much you can do about it. I do believe that peace means one person's got the biggest stick, and I build those sticks on the weapons side. And that's the only way I can justify that because relatively you could argue that we've had 40 years plus of peace because the US has had the biggest stick and not used it.

Starting point is 01:23:53 And if we took all countries and all leaders right now and equalized them all and gave them all the same level of weapons and army, we'd be fighting all the time for stupid reasons over stupid things. So if it's a choice between one person has the biggest stick or we're fighting all the time,

Starting point is 01:24:09 I'll build a big stick. I can relate to people in all kinds of industries. I have a best friend who's a carpenter, a friend who's a doctor, et cetera, et cetera. One is a race car driver because they're far superior to me in their field and what they do. And I love learning. So I assume everyone's better than me at something that they've spent their 10,000 hours to become an expert at.

Starting point is 01:24:39 Apathy kills me completely. People who are just living on this planet have all the abilities in the world, but don't apply any of it. Apathy and laziness. They have no sense of the greater good. Don't want to contribute anything back to society. And if anything, they're a negative. And the hardest part is just walking around and not being pissed off at those people. When I've come from what was classified as a third world country at the time and gone, I fought like hell to get a green card to get here and do what I've done and have someone else who's already here just wasting their life away.

Starting point is 01:25:15 Why come to the US? Well, a few reasons. At the time, I first came over to San Francisco area because it was Silicon Valley and I was tired that everything, by the time technology was developed in Silicon Valley, started being sold, people across the US using it, and the company was so saturated in the US that they started going global. And in Europe and England, we get a hold of it. And then eventually to Ireland, everything I got my hands on was four years old. So I wanted to get to the source of where everything was starting. And then I realized that LA was a better fit for me because a lot, we actually have very few customers in Silicon Valley

Starting point is 01:25:53 now. And the reason is they don't think they need help. They don't. Sorry. As someone who's spent 15 years there, yeah, it's not hard for me to imagine. They don't believe or want to admit that they should rent IQ or rent more brain capacity. Whereas in LA, I break LA down as a city that has the best and worst people in the world in it. And there's two kinds of people here. There's a certain group of folks that have made money, large quantities of money, obscenely easily. They wrote one script or became an actor one time, and now they're sitting on many, many millions of dollars that they didn't really put blood, sweat, and tears into making. And then you've got a lot of people here who are

Starting point is 01:26:33 crazy, who believe every single thing they've ever seen in a movie is real. And they grew up on that in Hollywood. Every now and then, those two people run into each other, the person with the idea and the person with the money to fund it. Neither of them have any discipline or ability to run a business or a willingness to do the homework, the contracts, the business plan, the performance, or any of that work. I'm the third leg on that stool. Some of those people get sent to me like being sent to the principal's office saying, go get some adult supervision for your startup. And they sit down with me and I'm like, okay, my guys will do all the boring homework for you. It's kind of like the geeks back in high school. You pay me to do your homework for you

Starting point is 01:27:14 because if you don't do it, you're just going to end up with no product, no company and suing each other in court, wondering where your millions went. So we give those companies a third leg on their stool and a chance to actually be a real company and be successful, which makes both parties much happier. So I'm in LA because I have no competition here. If you couldn't live in LA, where would you live, do you think?

Starting point is 01:27:38 I was happy in England when I was in England. I went to university for three years down in Sussex. I worked in London for a while. And I liked England a lot. Again, I'm limited in terms of my language abilities. I've had a lot of offers from Dubai and China and so on that would love me to go there. And if I was being selfish in terms of the amount of money I could make or the impact on the country, I would go there. But I also want some quality of life that I have over here. Well, there's also a certain point you reach where there's sort of the marginal utility of each additional dollar is worth less than other ideals or goals.

Starting point is 01:28:16 There's also the question of who do you believe should carry the biggest stick? Correct. Yeah, which is a big question. The next question I'll ask, I'd like to ask just a couple of short questions answers don't need to be short when you think of the word successful who is the first person who comes to mind and why to some extent i'd have to say Bill Gates. I believe very much that people should be selfish in the first half of their life so they can be effectively unselfish in the second half.

Starting point is 01:28:54 Being a charity your whole life or trying to be charitable your whole life while you're still a charity yourself makes a negligible difference. Mother Teresa hugged 100,000 people and some of which died of malnutrition later because she had nothing to give them. Gates wrote a single check that wiped out malaria for 7 million and then set up the largest charity in saint. So there's, I believe in evolution and I believe whatever you are doing on this planet, you want to have a positive impact on society

Starting point is 01:29:34 before you die. And whoever has the biggest positive impact is the one who has done the best and achieved the most. And successful to me is when you've reached self-actualization, you've figured out what your goal is and you're fulfilling it. You're on the path of fulfilling it. That's happiness too. You know, you're, you're, you're very Zen at that point. I figured out what my purpose on the planet is. I came up with an evil master plan to get

Starting point is 01:30:02 there and now it's all playing out and actually happening. So, um, I'm a pretty happy guy at this point. If I had a better idea, I'd be doing it. But the best idea I could think of, I'm executing and it's actually happening. When, when you have bad days, if you have bad days where you're not happy, what do you say to yourself or what do you do to get out of that funk well luckily i'm extremely left-brained so i don't in any way go through the depressions or funks the people who are very right-brained do um but when i do i i i run to logic logic saves me you know and has done throughout my whole life.

Starting point is 01:30:45 But I will rationalize and logic my way out of any issues that I'm stuck in. So I look at the big picture. I take a step back and go, I've got a good life. I've got no money worries. I'm influencing millions and millions of kids every week with a good message. I've invented things. I've won awards for saving people's lives. And so, you know,

Starting point is 01:31:08 how compared to everybody else on the planet, I don't have a right to be in a funk. Got it. Yeah, there's an expression, what was it? Meditate on the immensity, something like that. But I mean,

Starting point is 01:31:22 a lot of these meditative traditions, very similar process plays itself out. Do you, have you gifted any particular books to many people? I have a list of my top 10 favorite books, yours being one of them, The 4-Hour Workweek. And I generally just, for most people, because books are so cheap and easy to get now, and I don't know whether they want audio books or Kindle books or whatever. I just send them a list of, you know,

Starting point is 01:31:51 here's the top 10 I recommend. And 48 laws of power being one of the first ones. Or even if you're not, I mean, manipulative, manipulative person yourself, you should know that it's being used against you. That's the,

Starting point is 01:32:03 the Robert Greene, right? Which has been banned. It was at a period at least banned from a lot of prisons in the United States. Very, very popular book. So, yeah, and that and Fooled by Randomness and Gladwell stuff and Black Swan. And, you know, there'd be nothing on my list that would surprise you. And they're all bestsellers, just good wake-up calls and good discipline for how you apply your brain.

Starting point is 01:32:30 And yeah, if anyone I sent them to couldn't afford them, I would buy the books for them. But in general, that's not been an issue. Although it does seem weird that my own library at home is constantly missing those books. My friends come over and they leave and three of my books are missing. Grow legs and wander off. Can you think of any relatively inexpensive purchases, let's arbitrarily say $100 or less, that have dramatically impacted your quality of life or that you're particularly enjoying in recent memory? Well, I, um, I guess I'm a paranoid soul. So I, I hate when things have single points of failure. So I made a list somewhere of my, my top tips that I could

Starting point is 01:33:14 probably run by you, but take the a hundred dollars and put it in the trunk of your car for when you need it in that cold night and you lost your wallet and your purse was stolen or whatever. Cut spare keys to everything. Spend $60 of that $100 on AAA. So when you're stuck on a rainy night with a flat tire on the freeway, it's the best feeling ever to not have to get out of your car. So a lot of it is around I like my life running smoothly, and it runs smoothly because crashing losing your wallet having a flat tire

Starting point is 01:33:45 all things you can expect to happen to you about once every 10 years so it's going to happen you can make it a five minute problem or or ruin your whole day it's up to you um and uh what is that with the the list that you put together this is related to single points of failure or yeah they're just life tips in general take everything out of your purse or your wallet lay it on a photocopier and photocopy both sides of it put it somewhere safe and give it to a friend so when you do lose your purse or wallet a you'll remember everything that was in it all the numbers you need to call are on the back of the cards and all the account numbers you need to cancel are on the front of the cards um you know the other asked keeping off offsite backups of everything,

Starting point is 01:34:26 using Dropbox for everything, et cetera. It still blows my mind that 93% of people out there haven't backed up their stuff and they've lost everything twice and they still don't back up their stuff. It's not that hard folks. Uh, so the, uh, you know, other, uh, other little widgets and things that are helpful. I put a little sign that says return for reward with my cell number on everything I care about. I was in San Francisco airport taking one of those buses out to the rental cars that takes forever. And I was jet lagged and I got out and left my camera on the bus. Five minutes later, the bus driver called me because my number was on the side of the camera. I went back and got my camera back and gave him 20 bucks.

Starting point is 01:35:08 And that's worked a few times when you forget keys or basic things. It's really nice when that works. It would have been a really sucky time if it didn't. So it's just those little things. When's the last time you checked your spare tire pressure level? We never do until we need it. There's an expression. I think I got it from Jocko Willink, who's a Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL, who was a commander, actually, who was on this podcast.

Starting point is 01:35:38 This is a common expression I want to say in Navy SEALs, but it might be the Marine Corps, which uh two is one and one is none meaning of course always have a backup uh how old are you now walter 40 40 what advice would you give your 30 year old self and try to place where you were what you were doing yeah i i had a crazy mentor growing up where he told me, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. Which is probably why I haven't slept in about a decade. But it basically means every opportunity came my way. Every person I met, every business card I got, every job offer I had, I took both every time and did both and stayed up late if I had to. Which makes it really good when I hit birthdays and I look back on, you know, do I regret something? Well, I did both all the time.

Starting point is 01:36:30 So there was no, what would have happened if I'd gone the other way? So I don't have a great answer to this one other than you're right and keep going because constantly people around me were trying to tell me to relax and enjoy my money and retire more and you don't need to do this. And you know, the future won't come as quick as you think and blah, blah, blah. Um, and every time society were heading one direction and I was heading the other

Starting point is 01:36:56 direction, I was right all the time. So it's, you know, there's probably a few more stock purchases I would have made between then and now, but basically, um, probably a few more stock purchases I would have made between then and now. But basically, I wouldn't have changed a thing. I've had a great life and everything happened at the right times.

Starting point is 01:37:11 The company got big when I was about ready to handle it. The TV show came out when it was about the right time to do so. So a lot of those things, if they'd happened earlier, it wouldn't have been successful or I wouldn't have been as mature enough to let go and let it scale. If I made the TV show technically correct and completely accurate, it would be a documentary on Discovery Channel that nobody would watch. Right. But if I can let go and let Hollywood have a little fun with it, now it'll be on the air hopefully for 10 years.

Starting point is 01:37:40 Do you still have trouble sleeping? You mentioned before that you sometimes have trouble shutting off all the multitasking and problem-solving in your head. Absolutely. I mean, if my brain seizes or grabs onto a problem, it gets addicted to it. So during the writing of Senjen, I wasn't able to sleep for a long time. It was really, really bad. So actually, I still remember the day I cracked it, the day I got it working. My first feeling was not eureka or pleasure

Starting point is 01:38:06 that I've done it. It was a fear that anything like this would ever pop in my head again. I was just relieved to be back with dealing with normal life problems. I don't want a problem that difficult to jump inside my brain and hold on ever again. What do you do? Have you found anything in particular other than solving the big problem helps you sleep? Any kind of evening routines or habits that you've found assist you with sleeping?

Starting point is 01:38:39 The usual things. I wind down. I surf in the web a little bit or watching TV shows that I don't need to think about too much. It's often a good time to talk to friends. I tend to be a night owl and so are my friends. I have great conversations at 2 a.m. in the morning with them about whatever was putting them in a funk that day. And that often is a nice way to kind of wind down. But yeah, I don't have any particular, I'm the last person to ask about healthy habits

Starting point is 01:39:08 or nutrition habits or anything like that. I do find at night I can concentrate and work between the hours of like 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. and get, you know, days of work done because nobody's calling me, nobody's distracting me. So the smartest thing I ever did was never take a meeting before 10 a.m in the morning and just sleep in yeah i've i've written all of my best writing in any of my books between those hours between 11 p.m and four or five if

Starting point is 01:39:37 i'm riding the wave and i actually seem to be doing a good job then i'll just go until i flame out uh do you have any particular morning? Well, morning routines, meaning sound like Mike had a morning like 10 AM or so. What do you do when you first wake up? I mean, aside from the obvious stuff, bathroom brushing of teeth and whatnot. Um, I'm straight into work. Um, I have a home office that's pretty well equipped. No two days are really the same for me. Anything that's repetitive, either a computer does it by now or I have staff to do it. So every day is unique for me. It's government calls.

Starting point is 01:40:12 It's dealing with stuff that happened in London, maybe closing in a stock exchange or opening in Asia in the evenings. I will, on any given day, the board meetings or the people I meet with or the customers I go to all have very different problems I'm hearing about for the first time. So there's almost nothing routine in my life, which is really nice because I can't get bored. Do you have New Year's resolutions or anything approaching that? Or a bucket list, anything that's like, you know, someday I really want to X or is it just already been done? I've done most of what I wanted to do and I've collected all the toys I wanted to get,

Starting point is 01:40:52 but I do have, um, I've had the same new year's resolution for two years now, which is I've had a to do list since it was like 12. I've never completed it. It's always a massive backlog of stuff to do. So, you know, I started in 2015 saying I would love a day when I have nothing to do. Maybe I have a meeting scheduled tomorrow, but right now there's no backlog, there's no to-do list,

Starting point is 01:41:17 there's nothing to be done. Now, the only realistic way of getting there is not to do everything on my list, but to get brutal about deleting it, either complete it or delete it, one or the other, or delegate it. And just trying to get time to go through that list and throw off, consciously throw off what I'm not going to do and spring clean it is difficult to get time to even do that. There's just so much going on. So I'm very comfortable with the ability to prioritize that I am focused on the right things that I'm doing, but there,

Starting point is 01:41:48 there's an avalanche there of people waiting on me to call them back and get back to them for months that I just can't get to because I'm brutally prioritizing. Uh, are there any historical figures that you identify with or aspire to emulate in any way? I think Winston Churchill had a lot of wisdom. And I like a lot of his attitude towards things,

Starting point is 01:42:13 especially his quote that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. I think that's true of a lot of the things we do now. It's the worst form except for all the others. There's scientists like Frank Rose that people won't know, but these were scientists who, he wrote a book called Into the Heart of the Mind. And these were guys in the 60s that were working on artificial intelligence

Starting point is 01:42:40 and designing Turing engines and so on. They were kind of personal heroes of mine. And to have that kind of foresight, to be able to look easily 50 years into the future and think through those problems in great detail, those are things that inspire me to try and do now and wonder what do I do after 2045 if you could have

Starting point is 01:43:10 a billboard anywhere put anything on it what would you put on it aside for a call to action related to Scorpion or concierge up any funded need

Starting point is 01:43:24 concierge up any funded need so um i guess i've seen that um the culmination of all the things i learn and read and do and learn and come across are it all comes together in good judgment and And my friends now kind of borrow my judgment. I'll get a call three times a day from people going, I have two choices. Do I do A or B? And my judgment is pretty finely tuned after all the deals I've done and companies I've seen and books I've read, et cetera, et cetera. So I think for people to be aware of improving and applying good judgment and teaching that to their kids, which the flip side of that is critical thinking skills, is probably one of the most important things. I'd love to see a life university started with the rule that it teaches you what everyone is going to need. Everyone needs a mortgage.

Starting point is 01:44:25 Everyone needs to understand credit cards, how bank accounts work, sex education, et cetera, EQ, all things not taught in school. And, um,

Starting point is 01:44:35 so I had a billboard. It would probably be for a life university that teaches good judgment and teaches you everything school doesn't that you actually need. Is, uh, are there any particular sins of bad judgment that you think people should be aware of or ways to improve judgment? I think being affected by peer pressure is the main thing that drives bad judgment.

Starting point is 01:44:57 I'm an Irishman who doesn't drink, so clearly I'm not affected by peer pressure. But yeah, I mean, in general, people did stuff because everyone else was doing it and they thought that meant it was okay. And I'm kind of programmed to believe if everyone else is doing it, chances are they're all wrong. I think that's a good place to wrap up. It reminds me of a quote from Mark Twain

Starting point is 01:45:21 that I start a lot of my presentations with, which is, when you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. Uh, where can people find you online? Learn more about a scorpion concierge up and everything else. So yeah, the way we put it is if you want to search something, type it in Google. If you want it to happen, type it in concierge up. So concierge up.com, you can just type in a one liner on whatever your funded wishes over five grand, and we'll get in touch with you and start working through it. Um, scorpioncomputerservices.com is the holding company.

Starting point is 01:45:57 And if you go in there and click press or recent press, you'll see all the stuff we've been doing and all the things we've been up to and all of our practice areas etc there's lots of history on there of who we are and what we believe in and um there's a button on there says learn about scorpion it'll give you the speeches on how we solve these crazy problems that we get requested to solve do you have any any last words, requests, asks for the people listening? Well, I guess I talked about that. My, my pet peeve is apathy.

Starting point is 01:46:32 It's people listening to this. We're going to listen to this and go, well, hopefully that was an interesting interview. And then we'll go on about their day and forget that. Wait a minute. I'm talking to you. This applies to you.

Starting point is 01:46:42 There's things on your to do list that have been there for two years that you're never going to get around to. Why not outsource it to someone at least as capable as you with the same lawyers and accountants and Rolodex and common sense? So this allows you to buy time at 150 bucks an hour. And that's the one thing you can't buy more of. So yeah, I'd encourage people to actually go to Concierge Up and actually type in their Christmas list because they just met Santa Claus. So what do they want? I love it. Well, always enjoy hanging out with you, Santa Claus. So Walter, thank you so much for all the time.

Starting point is 01:47:19 This is great fun. And to everybody listening, you will be able to find all of the links to everything that we've discussed in the show notes. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Thanks for having me. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

Starting point is 01:47:44 Number one, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

Starting point is 01:48:22 And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #139: Meet "Scorpion," The Real-Life Santa Claus with an IQ of 197

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #139: Meet "Scorpion," The Real-Life Santa Claus with an IQ of 197

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.