The Tim Ferriss Show - #364: Safi Bahcall — On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

“All these things you’re sure are true — what if they weren’t?”— Safi BahcallSafi Bahcall (@SafiBahcall) is the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. Loonshots describes what an idea from physics tells us about the behavior of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. It has been selected for The Washington Post‘s 10 Leadership Books to Watch for in 2019, Inc.‘s 10 Business Books You Need to Read in 2019, and Business Insider‘s 14 Books Everyone Will Be Reading in 2019.Safi received his PhD in physics from Stanford and his undergrad degree from Harvard. After working as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company specializing in developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, Safi was named Ernst and Young’s New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on the future of national research.Click here for the show notes for this episode.This podcast is brought to you by Uber. Uber makes getting around town easier than ever before, and now Uber is introducing Uber Rewards, a new rewards program that helps keep modern life going. With Uber Rewards, you can earn points on Rides and Uber Eats and unlock rewards such as Uber Cash for your next Uber ride or your next Uber Eats order. You can unlock new benefits at every membership level, such as flexible cancellations with Gold, price protection with Platinum, complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, and more. For terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber Rewards, go to Uber.com/Rewards.This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Uber, which I use pretty much every day. Uber makes getting around town, and the world for that matter, easier than ever before.

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

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

This means that at no extra cost, you request UberX and you can get upgraded to premium rides like Black. And there's a lot more. Priority support, priority pickup at airports, getting access to highly rated drivers, all the different levels, and it goes on and on and on. So you should check it out. Go to uber.com slash rewards for all sorts of examples. The more you ride, the more you eat, the more you get. So for the terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber rewards, go to uber.com slash rewards. That's uber.com slash rewards. Check out the program terms, the details, examples at uber.com slash rewards. Chances are you're already using Uber, so you might as well opt into this and get more out of it. And if you're not, these are all the more reason

to install, download, and try it today. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym.

Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. You have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you.

And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the

nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E, Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code Tim to get started.

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

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

of groups and how teams, companies, and nations can use that to innovate faster and better. It has been selected for Washington Post's 10 leadership books to watch for 2019, Inc.'s 10 business books you need to read in 2019, and Business Insider's 14 books everyone will be reading in 2019. That would be good for you if that ends up being the case. And we go back a ways. So I've been really excited to catch up

because our lives have changed quite a lot. Oh, yeah. Since we last were spending a lot of time together. And I thought we could just start at the very beginning. So could you describe for people how we first met? And a little bit of the context. All right, sure. So we were at, this was maybe 10 years or so ago, and we were at the Sundance in, where is Sundance? Sundance is in Utah. It's Sundance in Utah, and there's a conference organized every year by Peter Thiel and Oren Hoffman, and Oren's a good friend of mine for many years.

And I was sitting at a lunch table, and I had just taken up as sort of a hobby triathlon, long distance triathlon. And I had just learned for the first time, real swimming, not just sort of splashing around in a pool, but how to, you know, how can you, because splashing around in a pool, you can swim, you know, a couple laps and you get tired, but that's not going to help you if you want to swim 1.2 miles in the ocean. So I had found this course called Total Immersion, and I was just having such a blast because it takes you from a 2 out of 10 to a 5 to a 7 really quickly. So you can knock out 1.2 miles, no problem. So I was sitting sitting at lunch and somehow there was this guy kind of quiet but happy guy next to me and he had also just taken up total immersion swimming and then

we just totally connected on how amazing it was and like how it can transform your swimming and how it's a metaphor for life and i started using that as a metaphor for learning and breaking down everything you know about life about like a swim stroke and all the bad habits that you learn and replacing them and how interesting it is that just small little tweaks can take you so rapidly from a two out of ten to a six out of ten or a seven or an eight and what kind of a joy that is and how that can apply in so many areas of life. And this other guy sitting next to me was like, yes, yes, absolutely. And I just did total immersion too. And I feel exactly the same way. And then since then we've been friends.

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

had a few near-drowning experiences when I was very young, I did not learn how to swim, meaning I could not do to and fro in a decent sized pool until my 30s and had a really acute fear of water. And after about a week of total immersion by myself with a book, keep in mind, not even video at that point, was doing 20, 30 laps at a time and finding it relaxing, which is just bonkers to think about. And I'd failed up to that point, even though another friend, Chris Saka, had... Actually, no, it wasn't Chris Saka at that point. Before that, another friend, Chris Ashenden, had assigned me a New Year's resolution. We realized we're more likely to actually fulfill our New Year's

resolutions if we assign each other resolutions with sort of rewards and punishments. And mine was to do a one kilometer open water swim. And his was to drink nothing stronger than green tea for a year because he liked double espressos. But I had failed up to that point in part because every lesson started the same way, which was here's a kickboard

and go do 10 laps in the pool. And after a lap and a half, I'm like, I can't even feel my legs, I'm so tired. And the lesson was as good as done. And then you take total immersion, and one of the first things Terry Laughlin encourages you to think about is minimizing the legs and minimizing drag. And it's just a rethinking of the entire approach to swimming.

So you, more than almost anyone I've met... I feel like 10 years ago. We're like having the same conversation again 10 years ago. And the really cool thing about it, the way it applies to so many areas of life that I found is it starts by a counterintuitive take on something that everybody does or believes is true. And that is, well, if you're swimming forward, you want to see where you're going, so you raise your head.

And so that's exactly what's wrong with swimming, with most casual swimming, because then you're kicking your feet to maintain horizontal balance. And by kicking your feet, you're using know 80 or 90 percent of your energy is just going to correct bad position that's why you're tired and so in so many areas of life when you learn this kind of bad habit that's this very natural that every human does once you become self-aware of that it's really not hard to just put your head down yeah and don't kick that's it that's basically the magic put your head down and don't kick and that's it and then so many different areas of life it turns out they're these bad habits these things that you think you should be doing or you're programmed to

do or everybody tells you to do and they create drag in going through life and then someday somebody maybe it's tim feriss, says, you know, here's this really counterintuitive, weird trick. Don't do that. Do this. And all of a sudden, the drag goes away

and you can swim a mile. And, you know, I actually think it reminds me, you mentioned, we were talking a little bit about Donnie Kahneman and how he transformed economics. It's very similar, right?

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

The rational actors. Right, and Kahneman just said, you know, I'm a psychologist, and that's like bullshit. That's just not what happens. That's not what people do. People operate on these little rules of thumb, and sometimes X may rationally be greater than Y,

but they do Y anyway for these reasons. And it was a very simple adjustment, like hold your head flat and don't kick. It was basically saying, hey, humans are humans. They're not calculators. That's it. And that transformed economics. So there you see just like the same

total immersion swimming trick, which changes swimming, is what Kahneman did for economics it changed economics with this one idea a actually humans are humans they operate on some heuristics not NPV calculations and economists were like that's not possible they operate on NPV like I don't think so I kind of know humans and they don't do that which is in retrospect sounds sort of obvious but it was a big big change yeah it's you know you know more well you've forgotten more probably in the last week than i'll ever know about physics but it uh as a layman who's interested in science but by no means

a a real scientist uh it makes me think of uh richard feinman and i'm gonna I'm going to butcher this, I'm sure, but something along the lines of it doesn't matter how pretty your theory is, if it doesn't fit with experiment, it's wrong. That's right. And there's a lot of disregarding perhaps the obvious in favor of these legacy theories that just do not fit the reality that is right in front of this these legacy theories uh that just do not fit that sort of the the reality

that is that is right in front of you funny uh well maybe not funny but little known fact i was actually a subject in some of some of uh kahneman's studies when i was an undergrad for my four dollars an hour or whatever hitting a space bar with various psychological studies in green hall that's right. He was at Princeton, and you were at Princeton. Actually, that's sort of the connection. I think he was a neighbor of my mom and dad, because I grew up in Princeton. Oh, that's right.

We'll talk about growing up in towns like Princeton another time. I didn't grow up in Princeton, but I grew up in the end of Long Island, which has some similar dynamics. Let's zoom out a bit, and we're going to do this quite a bit in this conversation, I think, because I want to talk about Safi, the individual and your personal practices and your thinking, because I think there's a lot, I don't think, there is a lot to explore there. You are one of the most systematic people I know. But I also want to give people the context on your career and some of what you've done and your past, because I think it's helpful. And we were just talking about Terry Laughlin, who passed away not all too long ago. And he was hospitalized shortly after, just before and then shortly

after my interview with him, which was the last long-form interview he ever did. And he had cancer and then a stroke that was a complication and a number of things following, then he passed away, which was very sad. What is your history with cancer in the sense that why did you get involved with anything related to cancer? I started in academic science and theoretical physics, and after a few years, and this may be a personality flaw but i um uh and it's taken me many years to appreciate this but i really get excited all right i'll explain this in physics geek language and then i'll try to try there's a saying the way i think about it is i couple to the derivative

and i'll break that down so So the derivative is a slope. So zero derivative means no slope, and big derivative means a very high slope. And in physics, when you say you couple to something, an electron is traveling along and has some coupling constant to the photon, and that's how it interacts with light, and that's always the case.

And so when I say I couple to derivative, it means that I derive energy from the slope, from the slope of learning. And so when I started in theoretical physics, I was learning an enormous amount. And then after I was in one area of theoretical physics called particle physics, it's a science of the very small, what happens inside a proton or a neutron, quarks.

And after a few years, I sort of felt like I had, you know, gotten very deep in that tunnel and I wasn't learning as much. And the, I mean, you know, I'm not going to exaggerate. There was a ton still out there to learn. But it wasn't like drinking from a fire hose, like starting off feeling like an imposter or starting off being barely able to swim one lap and then going to swimming a kilometer, no problem. And, you know, particle physics has gotten a little stuck in the last 20 or 30 years in some sense, which we can talk about some other time.

So I switched to a totally different area after about five years. And then I got into the business world. I realize I'm kind of far from your cancer question. That's okay. But I switched out of academic science because after about five years, in each of these areas, I felt like I'd sort of learned and I wanted to learn something new. So I went into the business world, went into McKinsey, didn't know anything about, I didn't

even own a suit. Actually, I remember, can I take a digression for a weird little story? I love digressions for weird stories. So he says, I'll remember if need be, and I don't think that you do. I'm getting kind of far from your cancer question. No. But like, sort of a funny story. So it's kind of how I got, ended up in cancer when I started off in this weird physics place.

So I basically hadn't set foot off a university until I was 30. Because my parents are academic scientists. We just went to Princeton. And so I spent a lot of time around there. And then college, grad school, postdoc. And then I was sort of getting a little like, is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Just write papers and grants and referee and this thing, conferences.

So I started exploring. And some friend had been to this company called McKinsey, which I'd never heard of. And they said, look, sort of interesting problem solving. It's sort of like, all right, I'll do that. I sent an application,

interview comes and my friend told me, you need to wear a suit. And I'm like, wow, I haven't had a suit since my bar mitzvah 18 years ago or whatever.

So I asked like, where do you buy a suit? And so I got the name of a place and i went in and was just like incredible place with these super expensive clothes and like it was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen it was called the men's warehouse and so i bought a suit and i felt like a million i paid like 120 or something i like, this is like 10x more than I've ever paid for any clothing item. And I felt like a million bucks. And I fly to New York for this interview with this firm.

And I remember coming into the city and getting off and walking up Park Avenue. And I'm wearing this old beat-up ski jacket because I would go skiing, and I didn't realize that people also have some fancy jacket. It's like everybody around me is wearing this blue. Like the overcoat. Exactly. So I got this, I feel like a million bucks because I have this $120 men's warehouse suit,

and I probably spent $18 on the men's warehouse tie. And I'm feeling really extravagant. And then I'm walking down the street. And I have this beat up old ski jacket with still the ski tags hanging off of it. On top of your men's warehouse suit. My men's warehouse suit. And I'm like, why am I the only one wearing this on this whole street? I'm like, huh, that's weird.

And so then I get to my interview and I hide the jacket in the coat closet before I get in there. But anyway, I did that. And that was drinking from a fire hose because I'd never set foot off a university. And all of a sudden, I'm wearing a suit. And I hadn't worn a suit since my bar mitzvah.

And then they throw you. I mean, they take time to educate you a littlevah. And then they throw you, I mean, they educate, they take time to sort of educate you a little bit online. And that was super fun. All these professors fly in to just educate you. And I'm like, this is the best thing ever. They're paying me. And all these professors have been flying

into like this four week course on this resort with 30 people from all over the world who are really interesting people my age. And people are flying in just to teach us all day long. I'm like, this is awesome. And I'm learning all this new stuff. And I was drinking from a fire hose.

And it was sort of going from, well, in this case, it was a zero out of 10. I never even balanced a checkbook. If I had $6 to buy a burrito in San Francisco, I was happy. Like, that's awesome. And, um, but after a couple of years, you're like, oh, okay, now I got like what people do for a living and how it works and the business stuff. And then I was like, how do I combine, you know, I don't think I just want to be a guy who sort of whispers to people, here's what you might want to do if you want to build your business.

I wanted to sort of do something, but I wanted to do something back in the science world and also something that was more about either let's make more money, which is what big companies are trying to do and what you're, as a consultant, you're trying to help them. And in academia, it's about the search for truth. So I wanted to do something different

that would feel like, it may be a little corny or cliche, but you're helping people who are suffering. And there's something, you could be very selfish about it, there's something just very satisfying. Even if you just think at the local level, like there's a kid in a hospital bed

and family's going to lose that kid, and if something you can do could help save that kid and so that family and that kid have decades of life together, even if that's just one kid, that feels so much more satisfying than having X or Y or Z in the bank or even publishing another original research paper. If you can see a family experiencing life together for decades and they might not have, that's incredibly satisfying. And so I sort of stumbled into cancer to get back to your question, because that was a really hot research

area. This was 18, 19 years ago. That was a really exciting area. And there was really very little progress made in that area. And I'd spent about six months or a year kind of talking to scientists at different universities who might have some promising ideas and didn't want to work with made in that area and i had spent about six months or a year kind of talking to scientists at different universities who had might have some promising ideas and didn't want to work with venture capitalists and thought that physics was sort of like this exotic weird bird and so i was sort of um they were just like who is this guy who's coming to talk to us about biology and chemistry and medicine and oncology needs a. So it was a mutual interest there. And eventually started a company

and just got more and more into it and interested in seeing these individual lives and how little progress had been made and how many good ideas were floating around. And if I could make a difference bridging some of those ideas into the commercial world, into the business world, into the industry where they could become drugs that could save lives. Even if you just save one kid, help one family, that would feel incredibly satisfying, more satisfying than writing a paper or making money. So that's kind of how I got into cancer and oncology.

And I want to thank you for that. I had never heard the menswear house story either. This is, I think, something I wanted to establish early on because it gives an indication of where you were pointed, right? And then when we get into the habits and the routines and the frameworks and so on that you use personally or within organizations, it shows some of the how, but I wanted to at least get to some of the why first. Let's take a bit of a 90-degree turn. And this is going to seem strange,

but I thought this would be a good illustration of not just Safi, the sort of scientific innovator, but you, the person,, because they go together. So I'm going to read what I think is a quote. This is in doing research for having this conversation, which is always a little strange when I'm doing research on my close friends. I don't know, it feels like I'm doing something illicit. In any case, I want you to, I'm going to read something and then you can give us context for what this is and why you have this habit or had it. I would get so excited when I stumbled across a perfect passage and its beautiful music. I would preserve it in an Evernote file, whip out my phone at dinner and read that passage to whoever my poor dinner companion happened to be pounding the table to the rhythm, pointing out the beauty and the choices. See how he did X here and not Y.

That's why it works. Silence. No one cared, but I enjoyed it. What is this about? Oh, man. I don't know how you find this stuff. So that had to do with another detail. So I was with this company that I started for 13 or so years,

and then through a weird series of coincidences and stumbles and different things ended up um writing and writing and so first i wrote a kind of a long form essay and then you know it was 15 000 words i edited a lot and people seemed to like it and then some much more experienced author friends and journalist friends were like nobody publishes 15 000 word essays anymore that's a book also you have a lot of ideas in here and that needs to be fleshed out it's too so that turned into a book and as i started uh with writing uh i kind of broke it down a little like swimming. Like what are the, you think you know, people tell you a bunch of stuff. And the more you get into it, the more you realize a lot of

stuff that people tell you is really not very helpful or often wrong. Could you give any examples? Oh, just like don't use passive voice. There are actually some great reasons you do want to use passive voice, but if you, I get this picture of like this old school mom at like hitting you with a ruler from the 19th. Don't use passive voice.

Never use passive voice. Always use active voice. And then you read some of these like phenomenally beautiful passages and you look in them and they're using passive voice left and right. And like, really? Because these guys are pretty, like some of these guys have won the you know nobel prize for

example or peltzer prize and they're using so why and um just for people who are could you give an example of of active and passive voice for people who may not be familiar with uh the um you know The active voice is Johnny flew the helicopter To go put out To go videotape the fire And then It's so funny I don't do these things A helicopter was brought in

To go view the fire from high above And film it for video And so when the helicopter was brought in to go, you know, view the fire from high above and film it for video. And so when the helicopter was brought in, it's kind of passive. Johnny flew the helicopter. Now, in this case, for example, why would you want to use the passive voice? Well, if you're telling a story, you're telling the story of the fire, do you really need to know that Johnny flew that helicopter to put out that fire? I think this is an example and something I seem like that specific helicopter. Do you really, it's actually kind of distracting because Johnny is kind of irrelevant to the story. So what you're doing is you're inserting something in the reader's mind that's an irrelevant destruction that you'll never come back to. That just is a glitch in the storytelling. So that's one example of why you want to use,

there are many examples of why you want to use. But anyways, as part of, I found that I, people had sort of said, oh, you're a pretty good writer. I think that's meaning for like a physicist. So that's a really low bar. And, or even a, you know, a CEO or a public company, like that's a really low bar. You're pretty good for a public company. That's a really low bar. You're pretty good for a public company executive.

I'm like, thanks. It's like I'm a 1.5 rather than a 1. But I just started to find it fun to try to break down writing, like you break down swimming or break down other things, and then how do you train to get better? And so I read a lot. And eventually I came up with kind of a training. And I would write. I'd drop my daughter off at school in the morning

and come back, kind of lock myself in this little eight-by-eight cave, shut down everything and just do one of the three sort of modes of writing, whether you're reading, you're writing or editing. And, you know, five, six o'clock, pick my daughter up from school, daycare, bring her back, dinner. And then my wife would check out at like 7.38. She gets up really early and she was just done.

So from eight o'clock on, every day for almost two years, I would bring out one of, actually just a couple books. And often I would just go, we were living on Mass Ave in Cambridge and so there are a lot of great bars and a little restaurant.

I would go to the bar counter, get a burger or pizza or something and a beer. I would spend the next two hours usually just on two paragraphs. Were these the same books or different books each time? Were they consistently the same? Almost always the same. Actually, I would focus on probably two books, and I would just dissect a paragraph or two from those two books for almost a year and um and that was one of the other things like with swimming you

know everybody says keep your head up or it's natural to keep your head up there's this natural inclination to try to read a ton read widely read all these authors and you get all these lists of here's my favorite 20 authors like oh i should read those 20 there's somebody else's favorite 20 oh i should read those 20 and so i kind of threw all that out and said i'm gonna actually focus on i don't know much about literature i never you know i did sports and i did like math and science and that's it i really didn't read it so i didn't so i have like a big gap in the but i picked uh two books that really resonated for me what did you pick uh nabokov short stories uh and i'll explain why and donald hall uh essays after 80 Donald Hall, Essays After 80. And this is for just to develop an ear for writing.

And I just read a paragraph or two or three from those books each night, and then I would break it down. Like, why did this guy use... I wasn't reading for content. I was just reading for ears. So Nabokov, I had read a little bit of this and a little bit of that and reading here.

And then I picked some friend, I think, and sent me, pointed me to Nabokov's short stories. And by the way, I should say, I don't think I've read anything else because I just, that one. And when I opened it up at random, Nabokov's short stories, and I started reading his sentences,

like my jaw dropped. I didn't know the English language could do that. How is this guy doing that? It's probably sort of like your sports thing, like with athletes, like how the freaking hell is this guy doing it? And it's just so different at such a higher level than any. So that's why I would take two paragraphs at a time

or three paragraphs, and I'd say, why did he put this word here in this sentence and not there? Because the natural thing would be, let's say, to make it active voice, or the natural thing would be, why did he use this transition from this sentence, the end of this one to the beginning, or the end of this paragraph? Suppose I do it differently.

It just sounds worse. Why? Why does it sound worse when I move this word? And he could have picked any word. There are like six words you could imagine that mean this thing. Why did he pick this one? Let me try a different one.

And then, oh, it just sounds worse. And I would just do that repeatedly. And Nabokov I picked because his sentences and rhythm and musicality of his writing was just jaw-dropping in every one. Like, every one is a 10 out of 10. It's not like, oh, there's a great sentence or a great passage. Not a one-hit wonder. Yeah, it's just like, how the freaking hell does this guy do this um and again i have to say i'm not a literature guy or an english guy and there's 99 percent of

like famous authors i've not read i just couldn't believe this and so i was how does this guy do this but it was and once i'd after doing this sort of over and over and then really there were a few other beautiful passages i've done i would capture them in my Evernote, and then I would highlight the word, like why this word in yellow, and then sometimes I would bold, like he did a lot of, he uses a lot of alliterations,

and I would highlight the first letters just to see his alliterations, and then I would highlight the transitions, and then I would break down the transitions between paragraphs into like, well, there's seven different types of transitions. Here's an example of one. Here's, you know, oh, this is the pivot transition. And so I started to get a sense of that. And I started having this weird experience after doing this for a year or so, which was I would read passages and I would hear music. And I would hear them in my head, but as music and as harmony.

So when I would read, for example, in the book, if I would hear... This is a little weird to say all this stuff, because it's like private, internal mind thing that I'm doing. I don't really talk about it that loud to anybody. This is the podcast for that. Oh, yeah. Nobody listens to it, right? No, it's just you, me, and a handful of our best friends. It's just you and me, right? It's just all private

stuff. I would just hear this thing like music, and it was in perfect harmony. And then I'd pick up the newspaper, or I'd pick up some other stuff, or some random book, and I couldn't read more than two sentences. Because it just sounded like clashing. Well, the transition, and

the use of passive, and it didn't, this word could have been that word. And I'm like, I can't even read more than three sentences, because it just sounded like clashing. Well, the transition and the use of passive, and this word could have been that word. And I'm like, I can't even read more than three sentences because it's grating. And then I go back to this other thing where there was perfect harmony. And it was just musical. At some point, I wouldn't even know why.

But one thing would just grate, and I'd get these. It's like somebody rubbing fingers on chalkboard like and the other one is just like so can we can we talk about decisions a bit more sure okay uh because you are examining in that case decisions of a writer so you're you're doing a forensic analysis of why certain things happen, why certain choices were made. And this may be a natural place, maybe not.

You can tell me. To talk a little bit about a totally different field, although similar sounding last name, Garry Kasparov. Oh, Garry Kasparov. Yeah. Yeah. Could you describe to me

why you find Kasparov interesting? And who he is for people who don't know. Okay. Another book that I really enjoyed was his book, Life Imitates Chess. I love that book. And a little bit for a lot of reasons. I have a real admiration of excellent chess players

because it's something that takes incredible focus, incredible commitment, and people who do it really well do something I could never do. And it's just so impressive. So I've always found it fascinating to follow, learn about great chess players. And I listened to some podcasts you did with a guy named Josh. Waitzkin.

Waitzkin, which was fascinating. I actually loved his book, too. And then because of that, I went and got, I didn't know who he was before, got his book, which was awesome about. Yeah, The Art of Learning. Love of Learning. The Art of Learning. The Art of Learning, right. You guys would love each other at some point you should be yeah and i it can because he he did chess and then did martial arts and i did martial arts for a long time and and then physics

um so um kasparov uh as you mean it was the is the longest reigning chess champion in history and he wrote this book about how life imitates chess, where he kind of breaks down what he did. And it's so fascinating, but one particular lesson really resonated for me as a mindset shift for how to think about making decisions or analyzing decisions,

both in business life and in personal life. So Kasparov said one of, if not the key, to his success in chess was after a game, whether he won or lost, rather than analyze the game by saying, oh, I moved pawn to bishop, pawn takes bishop here, and that was a bad move, and that lost the game,

so next time I shouldn't do pawn takes bishop. Rather than analyze the move and the outcome, which is what most chess players do, and you can call that kind of an outcome mindset, he analyzed how did I arrive at the decision to make that move? Not just so much the move itself, but what was my decision-making process? Which series of moves did I go through?

How long did I go through them? What did I consider? In what order? How long did I go through them? What did I consider? In what order? How did I prepare for the match and how did that affect my... All these sort of meta level, not the outcome itself, but one step above, which is what was my process that I used to arrive at that decision? And given that it was a bad decision, where did that process break down in my decision, and therefore, how should I tweak my decision-making process? And he said, that one lesson, keep asking why, keep asking why did you make that decision, and call that sort of a system mindset. Let's analyze the system rather than the outcome.

That's one higher level. And that has enormous power and leverage because once you tweak your process, if you can identify a weakness in your process and adjust that process, now not only next time won't you do pawn takes bishop, which is you might do pawn does something else, but you've now improved your process

which can help you in 500 other situations. Rather than helping your process, which can help you in 500 other situations. Rather than helping in one situation, that can help you in 500. And so I took that, and I call that sort of system versus outcome mindset. And that can help you enormously in personal life or in business life. And so that's the Kasparov story. the cast prof story and this has uh extremely as you're saying wide-ranging implications and applications right so this outcome versus process distinction is also something that comes up if you talk to any really really high level poker player right because you can have a great outcome that is just dumb luck right you made it you had a terrible decision making process where you threw caution to the wind and really just you know flipped

a coin and hoped that you would get heads and you did and so you're like oh wow let me reward that decision making process which might have not been a process at all or you can you can make the right decision. You can have a good process, and the deck is just stacked against you. Exactly. It doesn't mean that you should stop making decisions that way. Exactly. So you really have to zoom out.

And this makes me also think of many, many other things. And on some level, all of life is investing, right? You have finite time, finite energy, finite capital, and even if the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, which is part of the reason why really good poker players who are thinking systematically also understand the importance of having a bankroll right right because if they have a string

of bad luck even with really really good strategy and decision making they need to be able to weather a series of um bad hands for instance uh this is this is uh just such a critical distinction, and I don't want to belabor it, but I think it's something that I'd love to hear a little more about if you could personalize it. So how do you implement this yourself, or how have you, in terms of doing post-game analysis on decisions? Right. I think at the business level,

the poker analogy is perfect because people don't realize how much is luck in real life, whether it's an invention or an innovation or launching a new product. So in the business level, and I'll tell you kind of a totally different angle, personal level, but at the business level, there are some pretty good teams or companies

that will try to do a post-mortem after some product launches, and they'll analyze. But they're still at that level one of outcome mindset of, we did pawn takes Bishop, and it didn't work, so let's not do pawn. So they say, we launched the product, and it didn't have this feature, and customers liked this feature, and that's why it didn't go as well. So let's make sure we have this feature. So you're still on kind of level one. The really, really great teams and companies, and not that many of them, say, how did we arrive at that decision

to launch that product at that time? How did we make that decision? Who was involved in the decision? What information did they have? Is that the right people to be making? Are we making the decisions in the right way? Are we presenting the people who are making the decisions with the right information at the right time, analyzed in the right way? And you see the difference. In one case, you just learn, let's not put feature X on product Y. In the other case, you learn something that can apply to 500 different

products. Let's think about how we tweak our decision-making process in the future. So that's sort of system versus outcome mindset on the business side. If I could pause for one second. So on the business side, and this might apply elsewhere, are there other questions you could ask when trying to decipher what your decision-making process was? Why did we think it was a good idea? What were we missing? What information didn't we have until two later?

I don't know what the right selection of questions would be. Oh, yeah, so there's so many. What are people's individual incentives? The people who are involved in the decision, so few people ask that question. Are they really incentivized by the project launch or do they have some other thing?

Like are they really focused on promotion? So how does being focused on promotion, how did that affect the decision? And if we altered their incentives, might they have arrived at a different decision? So people rarely ask, let's just think about the X number of people who are involved in the decision. Let's walk through one by one, what are their incentives? Let's just think about, let's just have even a 20-minute conversation.

Do we really think the incentives are the right incentives that are giving us the decision, that are aligning people with the outcome or not? How are people communicating? How are people exchanging ideas? Are they meeting the day of? Whose set of analyses are they looking at? Somebody who really knows what they're doing or not? And did they get presented the right data at the right time to make the most informed? Now, the real key is, as you sort of said with luck and cards, you want to do this for not just for failures. That's the wrong. You want to do it as much, if not more, for successes. You might have just gotten lucky. Those are the most dangerous traps. Let's say you kick a soccer ball into the goal,

and you were five feet in front of the goalkeeper, and you kicked right at the goalkeeper. It just happens that the goalkeeper slipped in the mud or whatever. It was raining. But you kicked right at the goalkeeper. Does that mean you should keep kicking right at the goalkeeper? That's the right strategy? No, you just got lucky. Yeah, you won the game and maybe the world championship, but you got lucky. Do you want to do that again next time? No. You bet on

some dumb internet stock and it quadrupled or something and you had no idea what you were doing and you were drunk when you made the investment, but you made quadruple your money. So does that tell you want to be drunk before every investment and not look at any due diligence? No, you got lucky. So it's more important to actually look at the successes and think about how do I make that decision than it is the failure because everybody thinks hard about a failure.

People rarely think about did I get lucky. They like to say, oh, I was my genius, blah, blah, blah. So it's more important as a team to say, all right, this worked. Where did we get lucky? Where do we actually have flaws in our process that we need to adjust next time in how we made this? We were uninformed, and we simply got lucky.

Our competitor stumbled. We just got lucky. So we really shouldn't. The reason that's more important is because it cements bad habits yeah this is what we did last time you know we got drunk before we made an investment and it was a great investment let's get drunk again and make another it cements bad habits because you confuse good outcome with good decision making so that's on the business side. So it can have a pretty big effect on the personal side as well. Like, you know, one example is, I'll give one example for married people,

one example for single people. So a single one I actually did use. A little personal, but whatever. Again, it's just you and me, right? It's just us. Okay, good. Let's say you get into an argument with your significant other

and you find yourself getting into an argument. You say something about, I don't know, whatever, the dishes or you say something about the driving and it leads into an argument. And then the outcome mindset is like, well, I said something about the dishes. Don't say something about the dishes in the future. So guess what's going to happen?

You're going to have the same kind of argument about 57 other subjects because you're not getting at the root. What were you thinking when you said that thing about the dishes? Why were you thinking it? What state of mind were you in maybe you're frustrated about something at work as an example and you're mentioning some nagging comment right what's

the problem really about the problem right and then uh you say now i have a flaw in my system where i'm frustrated at work and then it comes out as a comment about something that just is a bad idea, is a bad out. So maybe rather than just say, don't ask about the dishes next time, and it comes out, say, if I'm frustrated at work, what else can I do other than make comments about the dishes? Like, can I set up a punching bag, and just start hitting the punching bag, and take a shower, and then I'm in a better mood, and I don't give a shit about dishes,

or whatever. So you find, what were you thinking at the time when you made that comment? Is there a tweak to your decision-making process so that you don't make not just that comment, not Pontaig's Bishop, but many other similar things.

So that's married life, for example, personal example. Single life. Actually, when you and I knew each other, both were single. I take, you're still, you haven't caught up in a couple years. We haven't.

I actually have a wonderful girlfriend I've been with for a while now, and things are going extremely well, So we can talk more about that. Okay, I'll talk more about that later. that I was running was in Boston. So I was just commuting back and forth and I didn't have almost any social life because there's so much time in the plane and dealing with running a business. So I would set up these gatherings, some of which you came to, I remember,

in my apartment. And I called them Sway, scientists, writers, artists, and entrepreneurs. And then eventually I added, mostly because I was trying to exclude them, and eventually I just became explicit, no BLC, no bankers, lawyers, or consultants. Which one should note you used to be at McKinsey, which is great. No bankers, lawyers, or consultants. Self-hating consultant.

So I called them Sway No BLC Also because I just don't remember stuff Unless I have it like a silly acronym or something And so I call them Sway No BLC And as soon as I said Especially when I added the No BLC Like interest skyrocketed Especially from the BLC crowd

Like my banker, lawyer, or consultant friends were like Can I come? I'm like, wait a minute What part of like No BLC? I just said the BLC crowd. Like my banker, lawyer, or consultant friends were like, can I come? I'm like, wait a minute, what part of like no BLC? I just said no BLC. And like, yeah, yeah, but can I come? Can you make an exception? I'm like, that's weird. And then single women in Manhattan, like really interesting, intelligent, attractive women

friends that would be like, I am so there. I so want to come. And then I realized, you know, I was sort of out of but i realized like there was such frustration among really intelligent women professional women they were so tired of like the same old because new york is full of these you know really ambitious bankers who are just focused on banking and they were so curious to meet scientists. So for me, I see scientists all day long and writers I was sort of curious about and entrepreneurs. But anyway, it ended up becoming this really fun thing.

And I went out on a series of dates. But for probably 10 years, I never really had, we're coming to the system outcome in dating. I'm not in any rush Okay No no I'm loving this

So take your time So You know You Tim I remember coming to these Sort of sway You know BLC events

Or in Hoffman My friend used to come To these things And They were awesome And so I You know I ended up having some

Decent dating life Because I would do these things, mostly just because I was not around very often. I would just pick a day, and then everybody would be there. And five years, sort of 10 years, I was sort of a single guy in Manhattan. And a friend liked to describe it as, you know, you have junk eating,

whether you just move from car, it was sort of like junk dating. Like like there's a high on the first date and then that high is still sort of there on the second date and then it fades on the third day and so then you go the next one because there's a high and so manhattan life is full of this sort of junk dating like you have the junk eating thing you go from one to another and then you never it's really a bad bad place for dating, I think, because there's so many carbs around. Everyone's looking for the next shiny penny and you don't actually take the time to really relish and savor and get past a couple little speed bumps to

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

Like, what's wrong here? Like, why have I not dated anyone for more than two months or three months in a bunch of years? And I took a weekend and I just said, all right, let me be really, try to be really honest with myself. Like, you know, I do want something more serious. I want a life partner. Let me just think through, you know, the last 10 or 20, you know, dates that I've gone or women that I've gone on some kind of date with, like, why did it not develop?

Is there any pattern here? What was I thinking when I, again, what was your decision-making process that you want to, and then when I was pretty honest about it and stepped back and looked at it from view above, there was a pattern that came out, and I was like, this is stupid. I'm doing this same pattern over and over, and I need to be thinking in a completely different way,

and I need to be making my decisions about who I date and why I date them in a totally different way. I know we're getting into a therapy session here or a lot of personal details, but are you open to sharing what the pattern was? This is just between you and me, right? It's just between you and me. Okay, got it.

I think one of the lessons there is that no matter how self-aware you think you are you're really influenced by your surroundings a lot more or at least i was really influenced by who i was surrounded with more than i appreciated i thought oh i'm my own person. It doesn't matter. But at the time, I had a number of friends who were in the film and fashion world. And so I didn't have a lot of time

to arrange social life stuff because I was flying all over. And so I would go to social events with them and they were really interested in other film and fashion. So a lot of my dates were like film and fashion or occasionally I would meet some other variants and they were really especially interested in kind of some of the more superficial qualities

and sort of fast dating based on like superficial stuff and how people look or how people talk. And as much as I thought I was a good guy, I sort of fell into that trap of dating based on much more superficial. And because I was able to make conversation reasonably well and have a good time, I could have a fun first or second and then kind of fool myself into thinking,

oh, I really connect with this person because look at these really interesting conversations. You mentioned Richard Feynman. One of the great Feynman quotes is, the most important thing is not to fool yourself, and you need to remember that you're the easiest person to fool. And I was fooling myself. I was saying, oh, I'm really into that person

because they're a great people person, and we have all these great people insights. Meanwhile, the person wants to go to clubs at midnight or 1 a.m., and that's the last thing I have any interest in doing. So when I said I'm really being influenced, I need to just step out of this. I need to actually break up with some of my guy friends, which is a weird thing to think, but you get kind of reliant and then you just sort of follow. I need to break up

because this is influencing me and I need to make different decisions about who I want to go out on dates with because that stuff is not really me. It's not deeply who I, it's not who i am at my core and i'm making the first few conversations fun but then i'm getting bored and i had an old friend who told me there was sort of two criteria for um finding the right life partner he was a

new york guy and he was a very he's an older guy and you know he was a mentor for and he very successful also very good looking very sort of was a mentor for and he very successful also very good looking very sort of classic midwest gentleman and been very successful in dating and i'd learned a lot because he was on his third wife this is a footnote but very happily married and i think you learn more by from failure obviously than success so he'd learned a lot and he said just two criteria. One, mental health and especially in Manhattan that's a pretty high bar.

And two, find somebody you like having dinner with because you're going to be having a lot of dinners together and if that's not appealing to you it's going to be a tough marriage. And the physical stuff takes care of itself

because you won't be there. But that was just a great physical stuff meaning it's either there or it isn't yeah and you know that within the first few and you're just not going to go there

and it's so overrated it's so overemphasized anyway that's not something you need to think about what's underemphasized is stuff you're more likely

to miss and it's just a really great straightforward litmus test how much do you like having dinner together and what I realized you're more likely to miss. And it's just a really great, straightforward litmus test. How much do you like having dinner together? And what I realized is like when I went back and looked, I wouldn't rank high, you know,

how much I like to have dinner with, you know, the people I've been dating. And so that's what I started looking for. People who were more just an intellectual mind fit for me and less worried about any of the other stuff, less worried what any friend would think or anybody would think or anyone around me. So you're smiling. I'm smiling because I want to ask just a few follow-up questions. And I know that I'm jumping in a lot, but this is what I do anyway. Like if we were having drinks, I'd be doing exactly the same thing. You mentioned peer group and there's

at least two components of, I would imagine, making a shift. One is breaking up with some of your friends and then the other is gathering the people you hope to be positively influenced by. And I think for a lot of people listening, the latter part is the easier part. And like adding more people is the easier part. Did you break up with your friends by doing the slow drift where it's like by the time you were gone,

they didn't really notice because it was very gradual? Or did you do it more directly? How did you break up with people? Well, firstly, we're guys, so we don't talk about, you know, guys don't really, I think women have a much more communicative thing,

and guys are just like, oh, whatever. Like, he didn't answer a couple texts, so, you know, whatever. It's also Manhattan. Yeah. So, you know, the social life is like, let's text, you know,

10 friends at 5 p.m. and see what's going on at 7 p.m. And, you know, whichever two you find me. And so after a while, you don't answer some of those texts. It's like, eh. So breaking out in Manhattan with some guy friends turns out not to be a heavy lift.

But of course, it depends on the guy. But yeah, it is breaking out. And then finding people who you think are more resonant, really kind of excite you and you really enjoy and are more the way you want to be aspirationally, how you want to live your life. And through that process, I mean, not long after I did that system mindset, as opposed to outcome mindset on dating, uh, you know, I went out on a couple of days and

they were just totally different level. I enjoyed them at a much different level because I was really, you know, how much am I genuinely enjoying dinner as opposed to how much am I telling stories trying to be funny and it was funny and she laughed and that's great. Let's go to bed or whatever. This thing's not on, right? No, the mics are on. Okay, good. That's great. So that never happened, by the way, honey. You're the first, really. I'm going to be in trouble.

Anywho. We have magic in post-production if needed. Anyway, so no, it just started. And very shortly thereafter, I was sort of set up on an introduction. I call it a date. My wife calls it a business meeting. So there's a slightly different perspective here. I don't know if you know this story do you know because you were at the wedding i was at the wedding but i don't know this part okay so uh i was at a cocktail event at uh there was a theater

group actually katherine was at the wedding too who was responsible for all this um there was a theater production group uh in new york and uh they had their annual gala and i you know went to to raise the flag and support and but it's full of kind of artists and you know theater people that i i didn't you know know the first thing about theater or all this stuff. So I just went online for a drink just to hide out and have an excuse not to talk to people. And there was a guy standing next to me who said, Oh, hey, my name is so-and-so. What is your name?

What do you do? And I said, Oh, I do medical research. Because in New York, nobody knows what, or at the time, nobody knew what biotech was. And he said, oh, that's interesting. My ex-girlfriend does cancer research in Boston. And I'm all of a sudden like, my ears perk up, my antenna goes up like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Really? Because this was a pretty good looking dude. He was kind of this tall and nice looking guy and he was clearly well adjusted and kind of a likable guy. And I thought, A, cancer research in Boston, that's what I do. B, if this guy's pretty good looking,

his ex-girlfriend is probably pretty hot. C, she's probably pretty well adjusted because most women in science, there's so few that the guys are like sharks. she's probably pretty well adjusted because if, you know, most science, women in science are, there's so few that they just, the guys are like sharks. But if she can interest a guy who doesn't know any science, who's pure arts, she must be kind of a well-rounded personality. So A, B, C. I'm like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And because I was already on the lookout because of this system mindset, like whom I'm dating. And so within about the first 30 milliseconds, I'm like, how can I stalk this guy electronically tomorrow,

figure out who his ex-girlfriend is, and then somehow accidentally arrange to pump into her? And this was all like within the first, you know, a few seconds. And then... Right, he's just talking, you're not hearing any of it. He's just talking, I'm just like mentally, you know, planning the next day. Planning like tomorrow I'm going to figure out,

like does he know the woman who's hosting and then can I find out like what his last name is and can I, anyway, I'm doing all these calculations in my head. And then so he says, you know, that's when he asked, you know, like how do you, you know, what's your connection? I explained, oh, I run a biotech, I said, you know, I run a biotech company in Boston and cancer research, who's our advisor. Oh, I know that guy. And he says, oh, do you mind if I introduce you? Because she might be interested in a job in industry. And I'm thinking like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm sort of calm. I'm like, sure.

Well, I'll see if I can make the time for that meeting. And so then I go home. And the next morning, I'm thinking, all right, what are the odds? It's Saturday night in New York. Some guy in line for a drink tells you something about his ex-girlfriend that he's actually going to follow through. So there's less than 10% chance. So I'm already thinking, how do I

figure out who this guy was? And then I get this email. And he's like, oh, Safi and Magda, I want to introduce you. Magda's interested in so-and-so. And Safi does

such-and-such. And later I found out he Googled me, and there was this kind of profile written about me online and there was a little video and so he forwarded all that stuff to her. I didn't know that at the time. But anyways, so I get this email and then so 10 milliseconds later I Google her

and out comes this model pose. And I'm like, what the freaking hell? That's a cancer biology PhD who's a postdoc at Harvard? Oh my God, I am so taking this meeting. And so then I arranged to meet her. And then we meet up one week later, and it was supposed to be just a coffee. It's the least romantic.

I was down at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center for some meetings, and she was working right in your bus. We met at the Longwood Medical Gallery, the least, you know, doctors and scrubs everywhere, and it's just like fast food court. And there's some cheesy little hotel there with a cheesy little restaurant. I forgot the name.

And I sit down, 5 o'clock. It's supposed to be a 30-minute coffee, and it turns into five hours. And I don't even notice the time and for the first time i feel like i'm not trying yeah i'm not like trying to be entertaining or tell a story or blah blah blah it's just like this is the actual me and she's like a female version of me not not really but like female version minus 14 years, and very attractive,

and all sorts of other, and from the Czech Republic, not from Israel, and New Jersey, but other than that. Other than that, very similar. Other than those little things. She really cared about science, and the search for truth, and family, and really didn't care for anything else.

Like, all this stuff of the glitz, or, you know, financial or material stuff, and, you know, that is really, sadly, pretty common in Manhattan. She just had no interest. She just liked the science she was doing and figuring out good science, and she cared deeply about family,

and that was it. And she knew what she cared about, and she clearly just about family. And that was it. And she knew what she cared about. And she clearly just had fantastic values. And I was like, this woman is awesome. How'd it work out? And I would say eight months later, you got the wedding invitation. Amazing.

Yeah. Beautiful wedding. Thank you. Also. Thank you. Also. Thank you. And, uh, so this, this is, uh,

I, I like the, the weaving that we're doing from sort of personal to business because it's same, same, same, but different, right?

Like the, a lot of the thought processes behind them. And one thing I was hoping to do today also, which you're doing a great job of doing yourself, but is humanizing you in the sense that if I read a very simple bio of you, but if we got into a lot of the details, you can be very intellectually intimidating. I think you could be. You're a very smart guy.

And there's no doubt some hardwiring that helps with that. But you also use systems. And you enable yourself with tools. And so you mentioned no BLC, right? And you said very quickly in passing, well, I can't remember anything unless I use acronyms. So let's talk about acronyms just for a second. Because this type of shorthand can be really helpful. What other acronyms have you used? And there are a whole bunch

that pop up. I mean, literally many, many, many acronyms that you use. So I'm looking at one here, but you can start with anyone you like. One, FBR, write FBR. What the hell does that mean? But what are some other, whether it's sort of heuristics or acronyms that you use to help perform better, make better decisions, anything? All right. Write FBR. Okay. So that's one of the writing rules of thumb that I learned that was one of the most important writing rules. After a year or two or three, I kind of broke out writing for myself into style, story, and process.

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

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

So you want to write F. So that is a disaster. You'll never get anything done if you do that. So the trick is to go exactly 180, especially if you haven't FBR, write fast, bad, and wrong. Put the wrong date. You don't get the style right, the sentence

doesn't sound good. Great. Write fast, write bad, and write wrong. Terrible style, terrible grammar, terrible word choice, wrong facts. And that liberates you. That liberates you to follow the narrative thread. Just keep going and going with it and not stop and backtrack because every time you stop but maybe it's like a car going down the highway it's easy to stop but then you have to spend all this fuel to get back up to speed and you might not get there so once you're finally going what you often discover you write a lot too is like once you start writing and start pulling on that narrative thread like it's just really surprising where it goes. But only if you go fast.

Not if you go slow. Not if you say, oh, was it 1941 he did this or was it 1939? Was he with this person or was he with that person? Am I spelling his name correctly? Let's go check on the internet. Then you've lost the thread. And it hurts on many levels. Not only do you get less done but you lose the

creativity because it's only when you're at high speed to like and the wheels are turning you're like oh wait wait a minute oh oh i could go here and oh i could go there and oh i could go here like when you're driving fast you can make a left turn it has a big impact yeah and then you're driving slow you know i was just thinking, creativity, and there are many different types of creativity, but it's in some ways a lot like riding a bike. It's easier at slightly higher speeds. Exactly. You try to ride a bicycle really, really slowly,

and you're twisting and turning and trying to keep your balance, and it's herky-jerky, and the stopping and starting, that task switching is really expensive. It's funny you're saying that because the physics of that is the angular momentum of the wheels. And once you have high angular momentum, you're much more stable than at low angular momentum. Yeah.

So I was going to digress into motorcycles for a second, but of course, part of the fun of having our conversations is that it's just a beautiful medley of digressions uh but trying to maintain some semblance of professional podcasting protocol oh we could go on a motorcycle digression too i got motorcycles stuck but that's another i like you're in charge you go wherever you want to come back to motorcycles uh we will we're going to segue to other subject areas, but what other, we're not going to go through all of the rules

for style, story, and process, but I'm curious particularly about process. But it could be any. Are there any other rules that you have found to be particularly valuable for writing that jump to mind? It's the hats. For me, I realized, and again, a lot of this stuff took a long time. There are two hats you wear on reading and there are three hats you wear on writing. And you just want to be very clear about what hat you're wearing when,

so you don't confuse them. And then you're much more efficient. So you asked about acronyms. I have some really silly. I don't think I've ever said these out loud. It's more like inner voice acronyms. But since you're an old friend. That's what I want.

And this thing is definitely not on. So in reading there are two modes two hats you wear or at least for me and the first one i call rickles and the second one i call reese okay you're laughing i could tell it's like silly and stupid but that's how i think about it rickles is reading for information, content, lessons. R-I-C. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Rickles. Reading for information, content, lessons, and stories. Rickles. And so that's for the raw, if you're writing nonfiction, that's for like the raw meat of the facts or the ideas or the story. And you're really reading for information, for content, and for lessons. And when you say reading, are you referring to research that you're doing?

Got it. So that's the research. Let's say you're writing about World War II. That's in Rickles. You're reading very fast, as fast as you can and as deeply as you can and chasing different threads and different footnotes and different archival. And that is the Rickles hat. You're reading for the information, for the content, or for the lessons you want to use

or for the stories you want to tell. Rickles. Totally different hat is Reese. Reading for ear, art, and skill. R-E-A-S. So when I was reading... Nabokov. Nabokov, for example,

I was reading for kind of the musical rhythm and the pacing and the tricks that he uses on transitions or others. He wasn't the only one. I did that. Donald Hall, whose book essays after... He was a...

Again, I'm kind of ignorant when it comes to literature. A lot of people knew this. He was a poet. He's a poet. The first time I'm hearing his name. I remember talking to some English friends and they laughed at me that I didn't know who he was.

But anyway, some friend had sent me this essays and I picked that up. And as a poet, he also has incredible word choice and rhythm and pacing. And it's very different than Nabokov. Nabokov is fun, but it's completely eccentric and a completely unique style that only applies if you're a Russian émigré who plays with the dictionary for fun.

So it's not relevant for copying. It's just interesting to develop ear. But Nabokov is cold. He's clearly, as he's writing for entertaining himself with language. He doesn't have any, he was the first to say, I don't have any messages.

I don't have any morals. And you can sort of tell he doesn't really care about his characters. He's just playing. He's playing with language. Hall is warm. He wrote, he just passed away, sadly. He wrote so movingly and sparingly about incredibly deep emotional, personal things.

You know, his love affair with his, how he fell in love with his, you know, wife and how he fell in love with his wife and how he thought she would outlive him and how they made all these plans. And then she came down at an early age with leukemia and he just couldn't believe that he was out burying her. But he writes it in not a maudlin way at all. And he writes it so beautifully and so powerfully and so tightly. So I read Hall for how do you write about emotion, which I had zero experience, especially as a scientist.

Emotion was not like a top skill of mine, and communicating emotion was not something I had any skill in doing. So I read him not only for the beautiful but very different writing style, but also for how do you write about emotion, how do you write about people, how do you write about people, how do you write about characters, in kind of a poetic way, not overtelling,

but using as few words as possible. Anyway, that's Reese. So I want to pause for one second because I've been able to see the output of that in loonshots, for instance, in the very beginning, in some of the stories that you tell with patients. Oh, yeah. It's a great example of like the output of training,

that ability that you did not consider yourself as that faculty that you didn't consider yourself as having had developed. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, and I want to, I'm not going to,

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

multi these multiple hats so in in um reading it was Rickles. Now I'm going to put on my hat. It has nothing to do with style, so just shut off that part of the brain. You're reading really fast for a story or a content. And then Reese, I'm reading for ear art and skill. So it's just pure writing skill. And so the way I train for it is to think strategically about where am I weak? So I can explain a technical idea pretty well. That's what I've been doing my whole life,

whether in academic science or running a biotech company, trying to explain technical stuff about how a drug works or the biology or chemistry to people who are not as technical. So explaining an idea, I can do, even in plain English. But books that just explain ideas are boring. I don't even like reading them. People don't really connect to ideas. People connect to people. If you can tell a story, tell a story about people through which an idea is revealed, that's the best of all worlds.

So just talking about ideas is eh, so-so. Just talking about people, then you're sort of a fairy tale. But if you can combine the two, tell stories of people through which an underlying idea is revealed and through which is connected by an underlying idea, which is what I tried to do in this book. That's, for me, the grander challenge. That was really kind of a big challenge. How do you not do A and not do B, but do the combination of A and B? And so I was not good at telling stories of people. You don't really do that in academic science. You write a paper, you're not going to write a paper saying, well, let me tell you about the day I first had this idea and then I was wrong about this and then joke. That's not how you write an academic science. You write a paper, you're not going to write a paper saying, well, let me tell you about the day I first had this idea and then I was wrong about this

and then joke. That's not how you write an academic paper. And when you run a biotech company, you know, you're at a, you know, you do your earnings call if you're public or you're at a, you know, an investment meeting

and you do your 25-minute roadshow. You know, let me tell you a story about how, you know, the failures and the characters and the, no, they're like, what's your, you know, what's your, what was your R&D span? Just the failures and the characters and the no they're like what's your you know what's your what was your r&d span just the facts ma'am just the facts all right safi so we've talked about the two hats of reading what are the three hats of writing

the three hats of writing there's hunting or the way i think about it is there's hunting there's drafting and there's drafting, and there's editing. So in hunting, you're looking for the narrative thread that's going to hold your story together. Or if you're doing nonfiction, the series of stories and the series of anecdotes and the lesson you're going to draw. So that's the hunting. The drafting is where you're writing FBR, fast, bad, and wrong, just as fast as you can. Then the editing is where it all comes together. You try to make it, you know, you get rid of all the glitches and make it shine.

And, you know, as we're talking, I was thinking about this movie you took me to see, this premiere you took me to see yesterday by Robert Rodriguez, where he made this kind of amazing movie for $7,000. And before that, he was talking about a master class. He was doing his master class in film, which was just really a master class in creativity. And he was talking about how in film, he thinks of making a film as also in three stages, like cooking, where you write your recipe, then you go grocery shopping, and then you do the editing at the end, just like you're cooking.

And I think it's very similar in writing. The hunting, the finding the narrative thread is like your recipe. The drafting fast, bad, and wrong, the FBR, running as fast as you can, is like going to a supermarket and just filling your cart as fast as you can with all this stuff. And then it all comes together in the editing. So it's actually very interesting hearing that from Robert Rodriguez because it just reminded me of the, kind of the three hats that I wear when I'm writing.

Well, it maps almost perfectly to it. And he used index cards, like a pack of index cards you can get for probably a dollar or $2. And he's like, this could change your life. Like one pack of index cards and he'll lay it on the floor and then rearrange the order and so on so like you said that's the hunting for the structure right or the arc and then same as you

fast bad and wrong in quick drafting and then assembling it and in some respects with film i know it's slightly different but improvising on the fly when things go wrong or other opportunities present themselves in on the actual say set or day of shooting. When you are doing the hunting, did you have, for instance, a a within chapter structure that you tried to stick to? Were there common ingredients with a chapter where you would try to, say, start with a story, then add facts, then close with a story? Or did you look at it as more of an arc

and a build over the course of the book? Or perhaps both? How did you approach how did you, how did you approach the hunting portion? You know, I'd love to say I had a system or method, but I, absolutely not. I literally started with a blank page and almost panic. I actually had to learn, I added one of my rules is patience over panic, because you start with a blank page, and I just had absolutely no idea what was going to happen where it was going to go what story you know i end up with all these kind

of crazy stories in fact actually probably the nicest thing somebody said to me about the book it was this guy um named bob sutton who wrote this book called the no asshole rule yeah very funny guy's a good guy very funny guy we were having uh beers at the dutch goose in menlo park which i i used to go to 20 years ago and he's been like a lifelong customer since he was like 12 and uh we're in like the second or third beer and there's there's another author friend of ours there and uh at some point he turns to me and he goes uh your book and i go yeah i said man that was some wacky shit. And I feel like that's some,

because I did Pan Am and Einstein and Kepler and Steve Jobs and U-Boats. And I feel like in some ways, that was the nicest thing anybody said to me. Oh, yeah. I think wacky shit is a strong endorsement. Yeah, and when you ask, what did I do to get these wacky stories in each chapter?ment. Yeah, and I, you know, when you ask, like, what did I do to get these, like, wacky stories in each chapter, all of them are so different, like,

you know, comparing Juan Tripp at Pan Am with Bob Gunn in American, or Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin versus Isaac Newton and Robert Hook, you know, comparing across two centuries. I have absolutely no clue where they,

I would just lock myself in my little cave, shut the blinds, and I would just, I would disappear into some zone, and then I would reemerge at 5.30 to pick up my daughter from daycare, and I'd look at what, where the hell did that come from? I have no idea. So to answer your question, I have no,

I would just look at a blank page, and then I'd look up at 5.30, and this weird, what did he call it? Wacky shit was just all over. And that's the grocery shopping. You know, we were talking about the Robert Rodriguez film. And once you start, that's the advantage of writing FBR, writing Fast, Bad, Wrong. You said once you start going at high speed, just like all this stuff.

The speed is really important yeah and i've always thought since i sort of have three rules for everything creativity for me is about speed attention and courage you want to go as fast as you can like for me getting the stories is about speed reading so i read through you know i had so many sources and think I have about 5,000 files I mean I scanned almost all the books So I have everything electronic And I could search in the database electronically I was just reading as fast as I could

Because eventually something That's number two First is speed Second is attention Because you want to be reading as fast as you can And all of a sudden there's a tiny little thing like whoa wait what and that's where you go right the visual i have because i've sort of a visual for everything is that you're there's this dense forest of stuff which is all

the facts and data and stories and there's this beautiful clearing on the inside which is like a central core idea and you're looking for the path in. And so you're running around the circle as fast as you can, and you're looking for like a path in or something to guide. Maybe you're looking for like a little red sparrow that's like hiding, that's going to peek out behind a little leaf or a tree. And you're running and you're looking, looking and running as fast as you can. And then all of a sudden you see that.

So you need speed. You need attention to keep your eye out for that tiny little red sparrow to say, I'm over here. This is the path. And then you need courage because it may look like a really wacky sparrow. You need to have some balls to really follow that idea because your first thought is there's just no way. There's no way I could compare Steve Jobs and Isaac Newton. That's absurd. Well, let me pull on that a little bit more.

Oh, it turns out Steve Jobs didn't really develop the Macintosh. He had this assistant named, no, he didn't have an assistant. There was a guy working at Apple who had been working on this project that he called the Macintosh Project for a year or two before Jobs, and he tried to interest Jobs in it, and Jobs dismissed it. And eventually, just because of, by default, after Jobs had kind of messed up the Lisa and Apple III, it was the only project they could find, and history got rewritten. Like, oh, he invented it.

That's not really what happened. But that's kind of what happened with Isaac Newton. Oh, he, he invented it. That's not really what happened. But that's kind of what happened with Isaac Newton. Oh, he just came up with the idea of gravity. Well, actually, there was a guy who was much less charismatic, much less good communicator named Robert Hooke, who came up with a couple of the central ideas of gravity. And he sort of fed them to Isaac Newton. And then Isaac Newton ran with it. Just like Jeff Raskin kind of fed the ideas of a graphical user interface and a small computer called the Macintosh. It already had the name to Steve Jobs. Now, Steve Jobs was a much more charismatic, much better communicator,

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

by a guy named Robert Hooke. So for creativity, what I found was speed, attention, and courage. Because you have to say, the idea of comparing Steve Jobs and Jeff Raskin with Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke sounds nuts. Who would ever do that? But you have to have some balls to go after that. It strikes me also that one could look at it not just as a potential sequence, but also as a hierarchy in the sense that if you don't have speed, you're not going to be able to develop the 360 degree view to have the attention yield any fruit. So you need to have that as almost a precursor to the attention.

Then the attention is precursor to the, to the courage, which is sort of the execution on what you find that little red sparrow. Yeah, that's exactly right there. It's in order, speed, attention,

courage. And that's kind of what I found for me was the secret of creating wacky shit. And if we come out again to look at the world of business and not fooling yourself or not confusing process and outcome and trying to really have, uh, to read something correctly. And I should note also that these different hats and these different heuristics for being clear on your purpose before say reading a book or selecting a book in the first place is really, really, really important. And I'll give an example that illustrates this in a very different context. So Tony Robbins does an

exercise at some of his events where he'll ask people to scan the room and he'll say, before you scan the room, I want you to note anything red, a reddish hue, remotely close. And they do that for 60 seconds. And then he says, all right, run through the list of all the things that you saw that were red. And then he asks people, now note without looking around the room what you saw that was blue. Right. And people can't do it. Right. And it's to have that search function sort of set in place before reading a book, before editing, is really, really, really, really critical.

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

So false fail is the idea, let's say you're nurturing some crazy idea that everybody thinks is nuts, which I call, for lack of a better word, I call that a loonshot rather than a moonshot. In a moonshot, everybody knows what is a big goal and an exciting destination. But the big ideas that really make,

that transform, whether it's an industry or science or even world history, almost never arrive dazzling everybody with their brilliance. They tend to be the ones that are floating around for years or sometimes decades, and the people championing them are written off as nuts. In the revisionist history, looking back, it's like, oh, it's obvious that it was right. It's sort of a natural tendency to assume that, and that guy was obviously a genius. But most people don't

talk about the fact that everyone said he was an idiot for 20 years, including some of the most famous people and famous discoveries we know of. But what you see with loonshots, with these crazy ideas, is very often people give up on them because of what you might call a false fail. Because by a false fail, I mean it was a flaw in the experiment rather than the idea. The outcome is the same. The experiment gave a negative result and everybody walks away. In science, that's the case. The experiment gave a negative result and everybody walks away.

But the problem is not with the idea. It's with the experiment. So the example, you mentioned Peter Thiel. So the example I use is, I think I might have first heard about this from Ken Howery. It's probably another mutual friend. So I think Ken was telling me this one time over drinks. This was like many years ago.

Yeah, Ken, who was at PayPal with Peter, part of the PayPal mafia. That's right. I think they knew each other from Stanford days or something like that. Yeah, and then later Founders Fund and so on. So, Ken had started working with Peter on his private investments. This was just a few months or a year before it turned into Founders Fund. And so, he was kind of helping him out. And he mentioned that this guy Zuckerberg

had come by, Mark Zuckerberg, with this idea for a social network. And social networks had been around for a decade at that point. And they'd all gone nowhere there was a dozen of them like and you and i can remember all these crazy names of all these things you know a small world try whatever all these things that went and flamed out and at the time there was another one that was rising was sort of the popular one at the time called friendster

which some people may remember and that was just starting to flame out, and people were leaving Friendster for the new thing at the time, which was called MySpace. So, when Zuckerberg was going around, Ken was telling me this story, everybody had kind of passed on investing because everybody said, well, look at all the social network. Yeah, Bishop takes pawn. They said, all these guys fail. And you know why they fail? We know why they fail because you can see that all these users

are hopping from network to network, and that's the outcome. That's the bishop take pawn. It lost the game. All these social networks are going nowhere. There's no money in them. So no, we're not giving our money to this Zuckerberg kid or whatever his name is. And Ken and Peter said, is that really why they're failing? Let's take a look. And so they had friends behind the scenes at Friendster. I don't remember if they were investors or not or whatever, but it's a small community. And they said, let's ask for the data,

for the user retention data. People are clearly fleeing. And we know that they were using Friendster and the website was kind of glitchy and it was sort of crashing. So they got the data on the user retention in Friendster and they found, holy crap, people are staying on this site for hours.

Now this is a site that's crappy. No offense to whoever's listening who is part of that team, but like this site is crashing all the time and they happen to know that they'd been given advice on like, listen, you need to build, you know, you've scaled from a few users to like a few million,

you need to improve your systems because your site is glitchy. And what they realized is that people were staying on for hours, even though it was a crappy, glitchy website. And that the MySpace just had a better website. So they realized it wasn't that it was a bad business model, like clothing fads and everybody,

that's what people thought. It was like, you know, you just switch, everybody will switch en masse every season. They were actually great, but people were staying forever on these sites. These guys just had a bad website. They had a software glitch. So it was a false fail.

It was a false fail of Friendster. It was a flaw in the experiment, in the process by which people were making their judgment, not a flaw in the underlying idea, the loonshot, the crazy idea that social networks had some value. So Thiel wrote Zuckerberg a check for 500,000. I think it was the first outside money into Facebook.

Or non-family and friends into Facebook. That's right. I think eight years later, he sold it for a billion dollars. And that's how paying attention to a false fail can be very lucrative. So let's see here. There's another name I wanted to bring up who I am blanking here. It begins with Sir James Blake. Black, excuse me james black so uh who is sir james

black and what did he say to you at one point that uh that sticks in memory because this this this may relate in some way oh um so he was uh uh and he passed away you know a few years ago as well. He was a Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist, chemist, biochemist, well, not biochemist, chemist from Scotland. And he, in some ways, revolutionized drug discovery. He's one of the first legendary, what people call now, drug hunters. He just had a nose for identifying great new drugs. And so when I met him, I think he was already in his 80s, but we got him interested in what we were doing.

There were things that he liked about our little team, our little band of biologists and chemists, and we had a sort of a little, you know, we went against the grain of what people said you should be doing and that kind of appealed to him. So he would fly over periodically from Scotland and advise our team. And I remember one night, he'd flown over, remember this is like an 80-year-old guy. And he had flown over some transatlantic flight. And they ended in the morning. And he probably had like a 12 or 14.

He just went through the whole day of research, research, stories. And he'd been talking the whole day and standing on his feet. And we're at the end of some dinner. And I am like dropping dead of exhaustion and i'm probably in my mid-30s or whatever early 40s at the time and um i'm just like i just want to go home to bed right because this was a long day and he's like and so i'm getting up to like going no sophie stay stay like pass me on this sit down sit down come have a whiskey with me i can't do a scottish yet but that's what you know and it's like come have a whiskey with you like everybody else leaves and i'm like oh my god i can how is this 80 year old guy just like full of it so he

gets some whiskeys and then he's like i you know he tells us like why he loves what we're doing and this and that and then you know he starts with well let me tell you when i was and he like starts with like the korean war oh my god like was, and then he starts with the Korean War. Oh, my God. This is going to be a long night. I'm going to need a shot of adrenaline or something just to stay alive. But I mean, they're fascinating stories of this guy really developed two phenomenal drug categories and saved millions of lives.

And so we start talking. He tells me this stuff. And at some point, I tell him about how there's this project in the lab that I'm feeling kind of depressed about because I was really excited about it, and tells me this stuff, and at some point I tell him about how there's this project in the lab that I'm feeling kind of depressed about, because I was really excited about, and it's not, you know, it hit this negative result. And he pats me on the knee again, and he goes, oh, my boy, it's not a good drug unless it's been killed three times. And I took away from that as, I really, it kind of gave me pause and made me rethink. And then as I started going through more histories and stories, the revisionist histories that you read about great discoveries,

oh, I had this idea on a Monday, and then I showed it to people on Tuesday, and we were all excited on Wednesday, and it worked on Thursday, and the drug was approved on Friday. That is not what happens. These people with these great ideas, they get killed. Really, the project gets terminated. Everybody hates it. People say, oh, it's tough to kill a project. Let me be a big man and kill a project. It's really easy to kill a project. If you're in charge, you just say, no funding, you're done. And it never comes back. No one's going to work on a dead project. So no one can prove you wrong. You seem like a big man.

It's really easy. It's actually hard to keep a project going. Why? Because any good, crazy idea stumbles and fails. Like Jim said, it gets killed three times. It has these terrible failures. It seems like a really bad idea. It doesn't work.

It looks like it's not going to work out. And then if you have a really great champion or you get really lucky, you survive that failure. And all of his projects that he won the Nobel Prize for, there are two drug categories, the beta blockers and the histamine antagonists, failed like that multiple times. And so that's what he meant. And then when you look back in history, like the statin drugs, I tell a little bit of that story, probably that, you know, saved millions of lives, prevented millions of heart attacks. They were killed multiple times, and they almost died and disappeared and never happened. And that's, I've come to think of that as the three deaths of the loon shot. The truly important breakthroughs are killed several times. And it does go against the grain of the stuff

that you hear in Silicon Valley all the time of like fail fast and pivot, fail fast and pivot. Well, okay, but like if you fail fast and pivot, that's probably what everybody else did when they hit the exact same stumble. And sometimes it's the opposite. Like everybody will fail fast and pivot when they hit that same stumble,

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

on looking at some historical examples and maybe by way of example, describing what loon shots are. And I believe there are two types and we could talk about Juan and Bob, which is not a country music duo. Give us some examples of loon shots and maybe the different species of loon shots. The two types so there is uh the one type i think of as a technology a product or a

technology that everybody says won't work so you go way back the telephone people said this is a pointless you know toy or um the transistor There's no way you could make a switch out of some solid-state device or personal computer. That's not going to be important. Or digital cameras or even jet engines. That's the Juan and Bob story. Jet engines, you know, there's no way you could ever make a commercial plane with a jet engine.

So those are products or technologies that everybody says won't work. Let's call those P-type. The other thing is much less, those are kind of glamorous because you can put a picture of a product on a- P for product, product. P for product. P-type.

You can put that on the cover of a magazine and people get really excited. There is, we're at South by Southwest, so there is this obsession with product, product, product, product. But what people often miss, and is sometimes much more important, and is a dangerous trap if you miss it, is the other kind, is a small change in strategy that involves no new technology. It's a small change in strategy, let's call it S-type,

that everyone says is crazy or won't work. So what's an example of that? Well, let's take a story of a young kid who wanted to go into retail and to support you in this dream of yours, but I just hate big cities. I'm only willing to America where the four states come together in a corner and there are four different quail hunting seasons. So he puts his store there and he moves to a little town called Bentonville, Arkansas. And he opens a store. And he makes it a little bit bigger and he sells stuff a little bit cheaper and he gives the store a name. It's called Walmart. Now that ends up absolutely dominating the retail industry and wiping out everybody else. Now, was he thinking about, let me go disrupt the retail industry?

No, he had a wife that didn't want to live in a big town and he liked quail hunting and he made stuff a little cheaper. So he had small changes in strategy, where he put his store, how big he made his store, and made prices a little bit lower. Were there any new technologies? No. He just sold stuff a little bit. Did he invent retail? No. Did he invent selling stuff a little cheaper?

No. These were small shifts in strategy that ended up being incredibly important. So those things are much harder and they're much less glamorous because they're harder to write about and harder to prove than the P-type things, which are easier to prove. So those are the two types. And just so people aren't left hanging with Juan and Bob, Juan Tripp, Pan Am, and Bob Crandall, American Airlines. But the example that really I had actually not had any familiarity with,

which I think I'd love you to describe briefly, is Robert Goddard and the rocket flight in space. Because people credit other people, namely, I guess it would have been JFK. But could you describe a little bit of the backdrop for that story? Sure. So, in fact, that gets right to the moonshot, moonshot. So, in 1961, Kennedy announced in a speech to Congress his ambition of putting a man on the moon. And, of course, that was widely applauded, and that's actually where the term moonshot comes from. But, as we mentioned, those breakthroughs that get us there are rarely recognized and widely applauded at the time.

So in fact, how did we actually get to the moon? Well, we got to the moon on a rocket. And how do rockets work? Through a liquid-fueled jet propulsion. So the principles that got us to the moon were invented by a guy named Robert Goddard four decades earlier. And he had written it up, he had demonstrated, he'd been working on experiments, he had proved it to pretty good

certainty, but he was ridiculed. And I remember I found this in the New York Times, in the archives, this was pretty hilarious. In 1920, I think it was, after Goddard had suggested his idea that we could get to space with these liquid-fueled rockets, in 1920, the Times came out with an editorial and said, oh, this guy, you know, Professor Goddard with his, quote, chair. They literally put quotes around the word chair in physics, like that's a bad thing. You know, air quotes his, quote, chair in physics. Like, that's a bad thing. You know, air quotes his, quote, chair in physics at some university, like Clark, like making fun that he wasn't an Ivy League guy and he was a, quote, chair. And he says, this guy, you know, this professor doesn't understand the basic laws of physics that we teach our children every day in schools.

Yeah, quote, seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. Exactly. Namely, that Newton's laws of action and reaction make rocket flight in space impossible. End of story. So the funny part of that is that, like, fast forward, I think it was July 11th, 1969, if I remember, it was the day after the Apollo, the successful launch of the Apollo 11 rocket to the moon.

The Times issues a retraction, and it says, apparently, rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics, and quote, the Times regrets the error. And when you really, really put these seemingly miraculous successes or iconic structures, for instance, Eiffel Tower, under a fine sort of forensic lens, you realize that, I'm not going to say all of them, but it's certainly a very high percentage, not only encountered resistance, but exceptionally violent and heavy-handed ad hominem attacks.

I mean, the Eiffel Tower, which everyone knows at this point, and it's in every brochure, and every sales pitch for Paris and France, was opposed by just about everyone. I mean, it was all uphill. And I want to talk at some point about how smaller teams or entrepreneurs who are maybe solo, maybe with a handful of folks, can think about embracing or structured thinking around loon shots. But I wanted to jump back to your personal experience for a second. And again,

feel free to fact check this because you can't believe everything you read on the internet, or in certainly not in every book. But I have here a quote from Michelle Wee, the golfer's coach, who instructed her, and this is from a book, The Net and the Butterfly. She was given a quote by her coach to repeat to herself whenever she missed a putt, quote, I've gotten that out of the way. Now I'm one step closer to becoming the best putter in the history of golf, end quote. And the segue is that it's, you were then mentioned afterwards. And the quote is, I often think of that quote when I screw up. A, is that true? B, are there, how do you use such a quote or other quotes as a practice or a reminder? It's a lot of question at once. Sure. That's good research. So that's from my very good friend, Olivia Fox,

who was also at the wedding. You may have met her there. But she sent me an early draft, and I gave her that quote. And it's a mental reminder of, you know, whenever you screw up, and anyone who's gotten anywhere, it's because you've been through those three deaths. You've been called a failure or an idiot, including in drafting this book. You had the same experience.

I did. Every publisher's like, oh, yeah, there's like no way. Books who try to mix physics and business never work. you had the same experience every publisher is like oh yeah there's like no books on who try to mix physics and business never work and I'm thinking like really like what book that makes physics

I haven't read any books there's so many nevers just like books on physical fitness cookbooks don't travel internationally I mean there's so many

nevers and you're like really? like where's the data on that? yeah and so you know Olivia who's a good friend asked data on that yeah and so um uh you know olivia was a good friend asked me for that and i thought about that at the time and the um

the inspiration a little bit is also tennis so i i uh i played in the juniors as a kid and i grew up playing tennis and i uh at the time it was probably, you know, shows how old I am, Pete Sambras versus Andre Agassi. And so both were, you know, I admired both. Agassi developed this tick or trick, which is at the end of a bad point, if I remember correctly, at the end of a bad point, he would slap his thigh. And that was like a mental little hook to forget about the point.

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

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

and then move forward. And so that's the kind of golfer court or the Andre Agassi slap your thigh trick. Okay, related. Because you use, and not to belabor this, but you use systems and reminders a lot. Why do you have a Post-it note? And you may no longer have it, but a Post-it note that says,

The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. Oh, yeah. It's still up on my wall. What on earth is that? So I did a lot of, one of the stories I tell, I tell a bunch of film stories. I have some,

one of my really close friends is in film, and we've been friends for many, many years. And so I've, he and I have traded stories. And part of the inspiration was like, it was so fascinating to me how many of my stories from biotech were so similar to the stories from film and how what a biotech ceo does is so similar to what a film producer does and how the markets are structured the hundreds of biotech companies and the hundreds

of film and the few film majors are so similar to the hundreds of small production shops and the the few uh sorry the few film majors at the, the few pharma majors at the top, and the hundreds of production shops and the hundreds of biotech companies. The film industry structure, the financing of it, the dynamics of it, the focus of it was so similar. Developing a film was so similar to developing a drug. I just found that connection fascinating. So I tell a fair amount of film stories.

I realize my answers are kind of long-winded to you. Like, I tell a lot of stories to get there. My wife hates that, by the way. See, I'm doing that again. I'm, like, going off on a tangent story of a tangent. This is a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. That's why I do long form. All right.

That's why there's a delete button on those videos i'm sure anyways uh the um tell a fair number of film stories they tell the kind of james bond story which was a loon shot like uh ian fleming had written these bond novels and he really you know he he didn't have as much money as some of the as the lifestyle he aspired to, which you can see in these Bond movies. And so he was really trying to sell the film. And everybody had just written this off. Like, all the studios

that just weren't buying. There were a bunch of false fails. They made some TV show, which was a disaster, so that was a false fail. And the American studios were like, there's just no way Americans want to see a British dude with an accent or they're going to believe that.

It's like some heroic spy saving the world. The stories are junk. And he's kind of a metrosexual. Who wants to watch that? He's kind of prissy about his stuff. Who wants to see that? And actually, even the first, when he finally gave up after eight or nine years trying to do it

and got these random producers who, you know, one had just bankrupted his business. They were trying to sell the movie. They had just sold it to some studio, and they'd cast this guy who was 32 years old who had been in a movie like Tarzan and the Little People or whatever it was. I forgot what the name was.

And like two movies. And he'd been a milk truck driver. And they made it for a million bucks. And the American studio said, you know what? This is absurd. No one's going to want to see. Literally, the quote was, no one's going to watch a limey truck driver fighting spies.

Of course, that guy was Sean Connery. But they really were so sure it wouldn't work, they opened it in drive-in studios. I think it was like in Kentucky and Texas. Let's just put in a couple drive-in studios and then write it off as a lot. And then the crowd reaction was like, wait, what? And then, of course, it became

one of the greatest film franchises of all times and the other the second the two top film franchises of all time were james bond and star wars so i ended up going way back tracing like minute by minute what happened with star wars and if you search you can actually find the early drafts there are four early drafts of the script and you can actually get find them and I've read the drafts they were freaking horrific like it was terror the writing was terrible the storytelling was terrible the characters were nothing like the characters that you have at the end the plot was incomprehensible it sounded absurd which is you know, you could see why studios rejected it at first. And one of the titles of one of the drafts,

actually this was the shooting version of the script, the first title was The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. And it was such a stupid name. The hero was called Mace Windy. Mace Windy. Mace Windy, which sounds like, you know, a superhero that farts. And it was so bad, yet it became one of the greatest movies of all time.

And so I keep that to help me write FBR, right? Fast, Bad, and Wrong. You just realize that all first drafts are shit. Everything when it starts off is shit. And if Star Wars, one of the greatest movies of all time, was just such horrific shit in the beginning, then you're probably okay. It's all right to have your stuff sound terrible,

and that's okay. Just keep going. You fix it up in the editing, which is what they did. I knew every line to that film as a kid when I came out, and I would drive audiences nuts because it's, I think,

the only film, maybe that and E.T., where I insisted my mom take me to the movies repeatedly. And it was, for my family, it was quite an indulgence to go to the movies to begin with, but I knew the entire movie by heart. And a split second before any character would say a line, I would say the line in the theater, which understandably drove the people around me batshit crazy. But it stuck with me. It had a huge impact. So now I know that Mace Windy is to thank for it.

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

What is the significance for a single person or a small group? Right. So the moral of the story is you want to nurture these moonshots. So forget about moonshots or big goals. Even the word disruptive innovation is a terrible word. It should be crossed out of every dictionary and taken off of every website because it's it's misleading because anybody who's been an entrepreneur knows that um the great idea the ideas that end up becoming incredibly important that actually in retrospect disruptive market nobody knows at the time. Like Sam Walton had no clue.

He just liked quail hunting. That's why he went to Bentonville. He had no clue. He wasn't thinking, let me disrupt the retail industry by locating stores in rural America and then building them somewhat. No.

He was just like, his wife said he didn't want to live in a big city. And as he pointed out later, we had no idea what the demand would be. So real innovations are less about market projections and some guru waving a PowerPoint about you're going to disrupt this market. That's crap. A real innovation that ends up doing something is like a leaf in a tornado you just never know where it's going to end up anybody tells you it's going to end up there it's going

to just has not been a real entrepreneur most of the great like the transistor they were working on building better switches for telecom and when they came up with bell labs and when they came up with Bell Labs, and when they invented the solid-state device, it turned out it wasn't good enough to use in telecom. So they really had no idea what to do with it. It was five years before the first application, which ended up being in hearing aids. So were the scientists working on the transistor, going to their bosses and saying,

let's disrupt the hearing aid market. I have an idea for you. No, they were just trying to build better switches. So the reason you want to nurture loonshots is to challenge beliefs. You want to use disruptive innovation if you're a history professor and you're writing about what happened in hindsight. Otherwise, don't use it. Yeah, Walton disrupted the retail industry, transistor disrupted everything, but that's in hindsight. When you're really there at the time, you nurture loonshots to challenge beliefs,

to challenge accepted wisdoms. Some things that you think are absolutely true, maybe you're right. But suppose you're wrong. Do you want to read about it in a press release from your competitor? Or would you rather be nurturing it in your own lab or trying it in yourself and seeing how it plays out? So that's why you nurture a learning shot. So what can small teams or groups do? Well, to succeed with anything, just the idea is a small fraction of it. If you think about a football field, the idea is getting you from your own goal maybe to your own five-yard line or your own 10-line. There's a lot of ideas in the world. You want to be able to take an idea into a real product, you need people who understand the markets, who understand how to segment the market, who understand audiences, who understand how to build, who

understand how to manufacture, understand how to release, how to understand timelines and getting things done on time, on budget, on spec. And that's the other 90 yards. So you need both. And you can think of one as sort of the artist and one as sort of the soldier. You have artists that work on the crazy ideas and you have the soldiers that get the ball down the other 90 yards and so you need both and so that's some kind of one of the things that i get into is why companies often fail is that they don't wear those two they don't understand the separation that you need for both that you need they're motivated by two completely different things and you need to tailor the way you interact with systems you design the incentives the metrics totally different almost exactly opposite for artists and soldiers

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

if you're a larger company you can separate that by role if you're a smaller company you want to think about separating that by time you want to be very mindful this is sort of comes back to the wearing different hats you want to be very mindful we're going to go into a zone where all we're going to do is the artist create and we want to maximize failure. And then we're going to step out of that zone when we've

listed the hundred different ideas and picked the five. And we're going to minimize failure. We want to get these five ideas done on time, on budget, on spec, two customers. So you need to be very self-aware of what zone are you in. And the confusing thing is when you're running a small team, because you don't have different people.

You don't have an artist and a solo. Sometimes you do. But you don't want to tell your artists, all right, I need you to have a 98% success rate on your ideas. I need you to have two ideas on Monday, two ideas on Tuesday, three ideas on Wednesday. You can't schedule. The converse is when you're dealing with your soldiers, you want to create those metrics. So in a small team or small group, if you can't separate that by role, you want to separate that. We're all going to put off our execution hat, our operational excellence hat, and we're going to put on our crazy artist, wacky, what ideas could kill our business?

What are the things that are floating out there that we're sure are not right? Balloon shots. But if they were right, they would kill us. What are those things? What are our embedded assumptions or beliefs about our customers, our competitors, our substitutes, the nature of our market, or regulatory, whatever?

We know that these are right. We know that our beliefs are true. But what's the opposite? Suppose they're wrong. What could somebody be doing to kill us? Let's just take a week or whatever it is and think of all the things that we know we're sure is true. What's the opposite? And now let's suspend disbelief like a movie. Let's suspend disbelief. How might somebody, here's all these reasons to dismiss it and why it could never be true,

all the reasons people use to dismiss a loon shot, that's why it's a loon shot, like they made fun of Goddard, rockets could never fly in space, it's against the laws of physics. All these things that you're sure are true, like the New York Times was sure Newton's laws of physics applied

and ruled out rocketry. All these things you're sure are true, what if they weren't? Or how might a really creative person get away around that? And how might that kill us? Let's just take a week and walk through all the looming shots that are out there on our customers or our markets or our products or whatever it is, whatever we're doing. How might they kill us?

And then if we identify those things, how can we flip that around and use that to knock out our competitors? So that's like separating the artists and soldiers, but not by role, but by time. And then now that we've done that, let's take off that hat, and now let's focus on operational excellence,

on time, on budget, on spec. This is not a moment for innovative, dreamy. This is like deliver on time, on budget, on spec. And there you separate by time rather than by role if you're a small company. So this is, and we're going to wrap up in just a few minutes. Um, but I, I want to highlight for people listening how tied together everything is that we've talked about throughout this session one of hopefully at least at least two because i love hanging out with you and catching up

in the sense that whether it's fast bad and wrong right right spitting out your two shitty pages a day or whatever it might be uh in other words on an individual level being clear on the hat that you're wearing and segmenting by time or within an extremely large organization, segmenting by role between artists and soldiers and so on, there are ways to systematize your generation of ideas, vetting of ideas, execution of ideas. And, you know, one of the reasons I enjoy, whether it's having drinks, hanging out at your wedding, or simply batting around ideas with you, is that you're very good at asking questions that help with clear thinking, which helps with clear action or more effective action. Would you be willing,

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

It is very well written. I was really impressed because with all the time we've spent together, it's like I haven't, the identity that I have sort of painted on top of this avatar in my head called Safi is like scientist, entrepreneur, et cetera. And I get sent a lot

of books and I get sent a lot of books by my friends too. And every time I get one, I'm like, oh God, I hope this isn't garbage because it's just going to be so uncomfortable to try to like dance around this somehow. And it's a damn good book. It really is. So I encourage people, loonshots.com, take a look at the book. And if you're like, I still need to be sold. Okay, go read up on Safi. And you'll be like, okay, there are probably additional things that I could learn from Safi. And from the historical examples that you weave together, right? It's really the way that I like to learn personally and I think

it's the way a lot of humans learn as you pointed out is through stories that illustrate points and it's it's tempting I think and this is another thing that impresses me about you is to from the influence of, in some cases, academics, to speak in abstractions and conceptual frameworks without the real-life sort of human glue that makes it memorable. And the memorable component is really important because if you don't have the acronyms, the stickiness of these concepts,

how the hell are you going to apply them when the time comes that they're actually important to implement? So check out Loonshots at Safi Bakal on Twitter, S-A-F-I-B-A-H-C-A-L-L. We will be continuing the conversation somehow, some way. Is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this round one? Any questions, comments, suggestions to the audience, anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up this, this first portion? This was just, it was kind of fun to see you again and just catch up. So, um, um, yeah, looking forward to part two and looking forward to having drinks together

one of these days and catching up some more. All right. all right awesome there's there's so much more to explore so folks keep an eye out for round two i'm gonna i'm gonna twist some arms if necessary bribe with alcohol if if it's called for and uh for links to everything that we've discussed in this episode all the names mentioned books etc authors and so on you can go to the show notes. So tim.blog forward slash podcast and just search Safi, S-A-F-I or loonshot, loonshots, and he will come right up and you'll have all of it. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting

a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that,

check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at

the gym. Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of

the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time. And that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can

get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com. That's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home. Anytime you want, check it out, go to one Peloton.com and use the code Tim to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss show is brought to you by Uber,

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

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

You get price protection with platinum. This means you get price protection on UberX between your two favorite places. So you choose the two places you ride between the most, and during busy hours when prices might be higher, you'll be protected above a certain amount in either direction. You might get complimentary surprise upgrades with Diamond, for instance. This means that at no extra cost, you request UberX, and you can get upgraded to

premium rides like Black. And there's a lot more. Priority support, priority pickup at airports, getting access to highly rated drivers, all the different levels, and it goes on and on and on. So you should check it out. Go to uber.com slash rewards for all sorts of examples. The more you ride, the more you eat, the more you get. So for the terms and to learn more about all the ways you can earn Uber rewards, go to uber.com slash rewards. That's uber.com slash rewards. Check out the program terms, the details, examples at uber.com slash rewards. Chances are you're already using Uber,

so you might as well opt into this and get more out of it. And if you're not, these are all the more reason to install, download, and try it today.